A Guide To My Record Collection

Dig! : The Worst Movie Ever Made

2011-08-01T18:30:00.001-07:00

O.K., maybe it's only the worst rock movie ever made. But the much-praised 2004 documentary about the rise of the Dandy Warhols and the fall of the Brian Jonestown Massacre represents everything I hate about rock and roll. Watching this movie is like being trapped for two hours with people for whom drugs, ignorance, and narcissism substitute for conversation, thought, and adult relationships. The movie congratulates itself on its breathless honesty, and for all I know, Courtney Taylor, the leader of the Dandy Warhols, really is as insufferably shallow as he appears in the film. The squalor that the film presents as thrilling decadence might be endurable if the music were good, but it's not. In the case of the Dandy Warhols what you get is slick mediocrity. With the Brian Jonestown Massacre what you get is consistently unrealized ambition. Furthermore, the film's depiction of the self-destruction of Anton Newcombe, the leader of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, isn't just painful -- it's prurient. Nothing is gained by watching a mentally ill man who cannot harness his rather slender talent inflict suffering on himself and others. Dig! is worse than a bad film. It's one that shouldn't have been made.

The Feelies in Prospect Park

2011-07-25T16:47:00.000-07:00

In my grumpier moods I sometimes wonder if I even care abut rock and roll anymore. I certainly don't care about following the "scene"-- if a "scene" still exists, which -- given the splintering of rock music into thousands of mutually exclusive niches -- I tend to doubt. I do, however, care about the Feelies. On Saturday they played at the Prospect Park bandshell, and despite the more than ninety degree heat (which must have played havoc with the tunings and kept breaking Bill Million's guitar strings), they were great. They're always great, even though they sing many of the same songs and play pretty much the same guitar solos. Why shouldn't they? When the songs are that good, why screw them up? Anyway, there's enough variation to keep it interesting, and the passion and intensity -- well, that's why we're there, isn't it? A few weeks ago when they played at Maxwell's I kept bumping into Glen Mercer at the bar before the show. He wasn't drinking and neither was I. Boy, did he look serious! So did I, for that matter. We were about to embark on something profoundly moving -- a sublime rock and roll show. That takes some concentration, though Mercer had to work a little harder at it than I did. Not the least endearing thing about the Feelies is their utter indifference to show biz formalities. They just stand up there and play all those great songs. Besides, how can you not love a band who are their own roadies?

Keith Richard, auteur

2011-07-07T17:56:00.000-07:00

Keith Richard's Life weighs in at 564 pp., with scarcely any padding. To read it or not to read it, that is the question. And the answer is, Yes, read it. This is the place to find out whether or not Keith really had a complete blood transfusion to clean out his junkie veins and whether or not Charlie Watts really punched out Mick Jagger. (The answers are no and yes, respectively.) No doubt the co-author James Fox had a lot to do with this, but somehow the book seems to capture Keith's voice, his insouciance and street smarts. Most of all it captures his passion for music. There's a lot about open guitar tunings and Charlie's drumming, as there out to be. This stuff isn't merely technical. If you're listening closely, as you should be, you get the musical details and the passion. The book give you both too. Keith says it best: "People say, 'Why don't you give it up?' I can't retire until I croak. I don't think they quite understand what I get out of this. I'm not doing it just for the money or for you. I'm doing it for me."

The Feelies at Maxwells

2011-07-02T18:38:00.001-07:00

I briefly resurrect this moribund blog to report on last night's sighting (July 1, 2011) of the Feelies at Maxwells in Hoboken. Since their resurrection two years ago I've seen them three times, and by now it's pretty apparent that they never have a bad night. I'll be honest. At this stage of life, I don't much care about any rock and roll out there, but I'll go almost anywhere to see the Feelies. I wonder if I could become a groupie. Brenda Sauter (the bass player) and I are of a certain age -- hey, what do you think about a guy like me and a bass player like that? Anyway, they were great last night, and I was close enough to see Stanley Demeski's stick work (also to get my ears blown by the absurdly over-amped speakers). No wonder you can't easily tap your foot to a lot of their songs; the rhythms are going in different directions. He's got four limbs going at different times and he still looks your harmless, balding, slightly pudgy Uncle Stan. Also, Glen Mercer was a veritable torrent of warmth and effusiveness. He actually said, "You're a great audience. We love you." Glen Mercer speaks! I was stunned. I never heard the man utter a word before. Maybe one day he or Bill Million will actually smile. But I doubt it. Oh, by the way, their new album is superb. It ought to be. They're maybe the greatest rock and roll band in the world right now.

Stephen Stills, Genius

2011-02-24T17:14:00.000-08:00

Perhaps because he embodied the narcissistic, self-indulgent, cocaine-addled rock star typos more fully than just about any of his peers, Stephen Stills has been largely confined to the dustbin of rock history. It is, admittedly, a little hard to listen to his inane, semi-musical political rantings on CSNY's Four Way Street without cringing. But in addition to having the coolest sideburns in rock and roll, he happened to be a genius, and I'd like to say a few words about his greatest moment, the 1972 album Manassas. Actually, Manassas was the name of the band as well as the album. His name went above the title, naturally, but he got lots of help from ex-byrd Chris Hillman, Latin percussionist Joe Lala, steel guitarist Joe Perkins, and the other guys in the band. But Stills wrote most of the songs, sang most of the vocals, and played most of the guitar solos, and Manassas showcased his talents better than any other of his projects. To take just one example, the suite beginning with "Rock & Roll Crazies" starts off as a tough, mid-tempo rocker (with Stills apparently ignoring his own lyrics about the follies of stardom), and segues variously into a hot salsa (with Stills co-singing the lyrics in Spanish), a bone-crunching blues ("Jet Set"), a tough but bouncy pop tune ("Anyway"), and a beautiful ballad partly sung by Hillman ("Both of Us") before concluding with a coda of what the label rightly calls "Cuban bluegrass." The rest of the album is equally eclectic without making a fuss about it -- this was long before rock musicians started congratulating themselves on their discovery of "world music."

There's a poignant story in Jimmy McDonough's Shakey: Neil Young's Biography (2003) about a mid-air melt-down Stills had during a disastrous 1974 CSNY tour that required a co-pilot to wrestle him to the ground. Stills scribbled an abject apology to the pilot and signed it, "Stephen Stills, U.S. Marine Corps." How's that for tormented genius? (Stills did in fact have a military upbringing.) Though he has always been in the shadow of his loved and hated bandmate Neil Young, justice should be paid to Stephen Stills. A deeply soulful singer, an innovative composer, and a thrilling guitarist (yes, I know, he tended to go on too long), for a few years in the sixties and seventies he managed to do it all.

Green Day on Broadway

2011-01-21T16:51:00.001-08:00

Most of my friends and even my beloved son disdain me for liking Green Day, the mega punk-pop band that they consider way too pop and not nearly enough punk. Nevertheless, last weekend I finally went to see the hit Broadway production of Green Day's American Idiot. I couldn't get anyone to go with me. I loved it. The story is fleshed out a bit from the album, but it's still pretty incoherent. Three bored, stoner friends from Suburbia, USA, try to negotiate the hazards of adult life only to fall prey to heroin addiction, military enlistment, accidental fatherhood, and all the attendant horrors thereof. It's sort of like a Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney musical, but with sex, drugs, and bad language. I mean that as high praise. Like Judy and Mickey, the performers have unbelievable levels of energy and commitment. They may look like punks, but they're really old-fashioned Broadway troopers underneath. And in the spirit of Judy and Mickey's "Let's put on a show!" there's an infectious exuberance about the whole production, despite the downbeat themes. It even has a tentatively happy ending. After all their travails, the friends come back together, more or less, and the main character realizes that the chief American Idiot has been himself. And the music? It's fabulous -- ferocious rock and roll with Broadway tunefulness. Who would have guessed it? Billie Joe Armstrong saves the Broadway musical!

What's in a Name?

2010-12-25T00:47:00.000-08:00

I was thrilled to discover in the listings in yesterday's New York Times that Titus Andronicus will be playing at the Ridgewood Masonic Temple in Brooklyn on New Years Eve. I won't be going to see them. It's enough for me to know that a band named after Shakespeare's worst play exists. Ah, the names! Isn't one of the glories of rock and roll the absurd, obscene, clever, pretentious, and mystifying names of so many great, near-great, and truly terrible bands? Such poetry! Herewith a brief roll call: Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Lothar and the Hand People, Uriah Heep, the Slits, Hole, Ultimate Spinach, Strawberry Alarm Clock, Toad the Wet Sprocket, America, Japan, the The, Squirrel Nut Zippers, Anthrax, Flying Saucer Attack, Einsturzende Neubauten, the Cramps, Napalm Death, the Subhumans, the Jean-Paul Sartre Experience, My Bloody Valentine, Sneaker Pimps, Them, Was (Not Was), Bikini Kill, the Bastard Cupcakes, the Hape Tenagrs. I swear, I didn't make any of them up, except for the last one (the Happy Teenagers), which should be the name of a band and was actually the title my son gave to a drawing of his when he was about eight. Also, the Bastard Cupcakes is cheating a bit, since they consisted of some high school kids in my hometown whose only known gig was a Battle of the Bands for the ninth graders. When I can't sleep, instead of counting sheep, I invent names for rock and roll bands. I'll spare you that list -- for now.

In Praise of Mediocrity

2010-11-18T16:08:00.000-08:00

Yes, Sheryl Crow is mediocre. That's what I like about her. I've been thinking about the role of mediocrity in music as in life, and there's much to be said for it. In the first place, mediocrity is a foil to excellence. Without the ubiquity of the former we wouldn't appreciate the rarity of the latter. In fact, we could hardly form any aesthetic judgments without it. But there's more, much more. The mediocre is where we live our lives. It gives voice to the mundane, to the quotidian, to the primal human urge not to have to think too much. We can't "burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy," as Walter Pater supposed. I'm as much of an esthete as the next guy, but I don't think I've ever burned with a hard, gemlike flame. Mediocrity is the expression of our commonality, of our shared humanity. It's the cream in our coffee, the salt in our stew. And here's the thing: what I've been calling mediocrity is just another word for proficiency. Take away the proficiency and all you've got is banality, or worse. Would we were all as proficient as Sheryl Crow. A pretty girl with a guitar and a nice voice who writes catchy, accessible country-pop tunes -- that's harder than it sounds. There are times when I need a break from all that Art and authenticity. Now and then the wrenching brilliance of Lucinda Williams becomes slightly exhausting. That's why Sheryl Crow is there.

Who Is Lady Gaga?

2010-10-12T17:37:00.001-07:00

I am vaguely aware of the existence of a celebrity who calls herself "Lady Gaga." I gather that she's blonde. And that she sings. Perhaps she's British. That is all I know. That is all I want to know. I might be missing out on the most innovative pop musician since Marvin Gaye. But sometimes ignorance is bliss and my hunch is that this is one of those times. It's a curious thing about pop culture. I always felt that rock and roll anchored me to shared American life in a healthy way. A lot of that rock and roll was shit, but at least it saved me from the priggishness of an exclusive attachment to High Art. But I'm in my fifties now, and it's a bit grotesque to imagine someone my age giving a damn about the latest teen idol or, for that matter, the latest cutting edge band of angry twenty-somethings. But what will I do without pop culture -- turn into a Lady Bracknell (pictured) of prim censoriousness? If I had to choose between the Ladies, I'd take Bracknell over Gaga. Fortunately, there are things like the Bourne Ultimatum movies, for which I have a weakness, and the National Basketball Association, for which I have a passion. As long as I can watch my basketball games and the occasional mindless action movie, I'll consider myself an American in good standing. Maybe I do sound like Lady Bracknell, but the rest of the crap out there I don't even want to know about.

Rock narcissism

2010-09-12T17:12:00.000-07:00

I suppose complaining about narcissism in rock and roll would be like complaining about snow in Alaska: it's just there. Furthermore, I think "narcissistic personality disorder" is part of the job description for any frontman in rock and roll; shy, sensitive folk like me might have a little trouble commanding the attention of 20,000 rabid strangers in an arena or concert hall. Or consider rock and pop songwriting; if there's a distinction between introspection and narcissism in the songs of Tori Amos or Joni Mitchell or Eliott Smith, I haven't found it. And truly, their songs would be less powerful if they weren't so brazenly, bravely narcissistic. But sometimes narcissism in rock and roll just seems, well . . . narcissistic. I recently watched a concert film of REM from the late 80s, which was full of great material from Green, Document and other terrific albums from that period. The band was in fine form, but oh boy, Michael Stipe -- the preening! The posturing! The eye makeup! The self-love that passeth understanding! Don't get me wrong -- I think Michael Stipe is a very talented singer and songwriter. But when narcissism in rock and roll crosses a certain line (which I can't pretend to define) it becomes a barrier rather than a means to communication with the audience. Which is a fancy way of saying: ugh, give me a break! I'd rather have root canal work than have to watch any more MTV-style videos of Alanis Morissette loving herself to death in multiple incarnations.

His Master's Voice

2010-07-21T17:38:00.000-07:00

Audiophiles have long claimed that the coldness of compact discs (or their equivalent audio files) will never surpass the warmth of vinyl. And I've never known what they're talking about -- until now. I recently picked up a CD copy of the Who's Quadrophenia for the reason I'm always picking up CDs of my old records -- convenience. Which is a pretty good reason. And yet, though I wasn't really listening to the details, something seemed slightly off -- the horns too brassy, the guitars too sharp, the drums too loud. Then I got to "Drowned," a pivotal rocker towards the end (it used to be on side three) and discovered that the splendid guest piano solo by Chris Stainton was virtually gone, or mixed so far down it might as well have been. It's a different song now and by no means improved. Aside from the loss of the album-cover-as-art-object, I'm really not too nostalgic for the lost world of music on vinyl. But has something really been lost in the quality of recorded music that I was too oblivious to notice until now? I can only hope that the transfer to CD of the Who's formerly magnificent Quadrophenia was a rare botched job.

Exile on Main Street by the Rolling Stones

2010-07-15T16:56:00.000-07:00

I've been listening to the re-release of Exile on Main Street and have absolutely nothing to add to the mountains of critical appraisal that have been heaped on that record in the last several decades. But every now and then you experience something in the arts so astonishing that all response reduces to one question: How could anything be this good? Still, in the case of Exile you can't help but wonder. Maybe its brilliance has to do with the way the songs emerge from jams. You can hear many of the songs gather momentum and shape without losing the loose-limbed virtuosity of a Stones jam session. Or maybe it has to do with the intuitive way the Stones found of re-inventing the blues for their time and place. Without an ounce of piety about itself, Exile is one of the bluesiest rock and roll record ever made. Or maybe -- horrible thought -- it has to do with heroin. I hope that's not true, but the dark, nodding-out feel of so much of the music, whatever its origin, gives the album an extraordinary atmospheric unity. (Also, the famously muddy mix turns out to be one of the album's great distinctions.) From the countryish "Sweet Virginia" to the gospel inflections of "Let It Loose" (the Stones' all-time best, in my opinion), the songs are unpredictably varied yet somehow all of a piece. It's no accident that this is the only Stones album consistently great from beginning to end. So there we are, back to where we started: How could anything be this good?

Interview with Rock Snob

2010-07-10T20:13:00.000-07:00

I bet you thought "Avalon" and "More Than This," those lush romantic ballads from Roxy Music's Avalon, were pretty good songs -- maybe even beautiful and moving songs. Wrong! According to my friend Wayne -- the rock snob's rock snob -- they are only so much pablum, sadly typical of the "slick L.A. sound" that characterized the downfall of this once promising band. (Their first five albums -- and only their first five albums -- are worth listening to.) Similarly, a lot of us consider Eric Clapton a rather impressive musician, one who attained peaks of rare inspiration with the Blues Breakers, Cream and especially Derek and the Dominoes. Wrong again! The only interesting thing about Eric Clapton is the two years he spent with the Yardbirds -- a band, if I'm not mistaken, whose narrow commercial parameters Clapton fled from in order to salvage what was left of his musicianship.

The other problem with Eric Clapton, of course, is his unfortunate tendency to play guitar solos. How vulgar. Far from being one of the glories of the music, guitar solos in rock and roll are almost invariably "fatuous and bloated, like obligatory sex scenes in movies." So much for Jack White, Tom Verlaine, Richard Thompson, and Link Wray. And how about the lyrics? I was under the impression that people like Ray Davies, Aimee Mann, Smokey Robinson, and Shane MacGowan wrote smart, tough, and poignant vernacular poetry. Nope, Wayne doesn't waste his time with the lyrics and neither should you.

Well, at least there are a few bands and records we can all agree on, right? Um, maybe not. The indispensable Who album, it turns out, is not Who's Next but The Who Sell Out, the only consistently good U2 album is their very first, the last decent Stones album is not Some Girls ("atrocious -- the Stones' frat boy album") but Goat Head's Soup, and Nashville Skyline (the one where Dylan warbles some fairly undistinguished country tunes like Perry Como) far surpasses Blonde on Blonde.

So where does this leave us? With the babes, of course! Wayne's list of hot female musicians -- Ronnie Spector, Sam Phillips, Debbie Harry, Tina Turner, Bjork, Hope Sandoval, Cat Power -- commands my deepest, most respectful assent. In regard to everything else, Wayne might say that he makes no judgments. These are simply his preferences, take them or leave them. I'm not sure I quite believe that, but on the most important matter of all Wayne and I stand shoulder to shoulder, and that is that music is more than an idle pastime or an amusing backdrop to be half listened to while doing something more important like feeding the cat or having sex. Good music is created out of the passion and commitment of its practitioners and it deserves a similar passion and commitment from its listeners. I've been having a little fun at Wayne's expense, but his passionate commitment to music (as well as to literature, film, and art -- he's a snob in everything!) is an inspiration.

Projections by the Blues Project

2010-07-06T18:16:00.000-07:00

When I was twelve or thirteen I spent a certain amount of time in my local record store in suburban Connecticut contemplating the cover of Projections by the Blues Project: five proto-hippies hanging out on the corner looking slick with their polka dot shirts and sideburns. And that guy with the coolly arrogant stare with his finger hooked in his belt loop – who was that? Kooper, the most famous one, I recognized from his association with Bob Dylan, and Katz I knew from the covers of two Blood, Sweat and Tears albums, a band that had achieved far more success than the already defunct Blues Project. But the swaggering hipster who caught my eye – that was Danny.

I met Danny Kalb in 1996 at a party in Park Slope, where he had lived for many years after the breakup of the Blues Project and a spell in California that had not been good for his mental health. Danny had founded the band in 1965, making the progression form Greenwich Village folkie and resident guitar virtuoso to plugged-in rock and roller. For a while the Blues Project, with their progressive blending of blues, rock, pop, and jazz, looked like they might be the Next Big Thing, but it never panned out; as Danny once told me, he had been a minor rock star for a couple of years. Most people agree that neither Projections nor its equally underproduced predecessor Live at the Café Au Go Go really did justice to the band. Like many a cult band, they never quite got down their vibe on wax. I prefer their third and last album, Reunion in Central Park (1972), which comes closest to capturing their almost-as-tight-as-a-jazz-band-but-not-obsessed-about-it essence. The boxed set The Blues Project Anthology (1997), in the grab-bag way of the band, contains a rich miscellany of rockers, pop ballads, jazzy instrumentals, blues standards, and throwaways, but I can’t improve on the superb liner notes by John Platt and anyway what I really want to talk about is Danny, the only rock star, minor or otherwise, I’ve ever known.

Although I deeply admire Danny Kalb’s musicianship and the courage with which he has confronted the many difficulties of his life, I nevertheless belong to that sizeable secret fellowship of his ex-friends. If Danny has a genius for making friends he also has a genius for losing them, and although I was hardly guiltless in provoking our final rupture, it remains true more often than not that to know Danny is eventually to break with him. And that in turn means receiving a five-page handwritten screed in which he lays out one’s moral failings in the Jungian//Gestalt terminology he has always favored: “foundational,” “evolved,” “defended,” “moral dialogue,” “creative struggle,” “creepy,” “crippled,” and “unacceptable.” The last three terms might not have been very Jungian, but that didn’t stop him from explaining precisely how they applied to me. This was his last “service” to me, as similar diatribes had been to quite a few others. Relative to his usual ex-cathedra denunciations, which he liked to read to me before tossing off, I’d say I got off pretty easy.

If I was ever inclined to judge Danny the way he judged me, the abrupt and thorough transformation of my life into the sort of tragic blues song he understood and interpreted so well would have more than chastened me. I sometimes wish we were still getting together once a week or so and that I could tell him about my, alas, deeper understanding of the pain behind blues music, but although this life lesson in existential ass-kicking postdates our friendship, it does help to illuminate for me the nature of his struggles and his musicianship. At any rate, I now see why he used to get so impatient with my technical questions about his playing of this or that song by Ray Charles or the Reverend Gary Davis. Yes, it was a thirteen-bar blues rather than twelve and how utterly, utterly beside the point.

Danny’s greatest frustration was his inability to get his music heard. I didn’t blame him for nursing that particular grudge; sometimes I felt like screaming about it myself. As a few hundred people lucky enough to have heard him play in churches, tiny clubs, and coffee houses in and around Brooklyn could attest, he was making the best music of his career. His singing, always a bit gruff and ragged, had deepened and evened out with age, his guitar playing, now that he was providing all the solos, had become even more amazing, and his repertory of folk tunes, early rock, straight blues, and spirituals had evolved into an encyclopedia of deep, weird, and wonderful American roots music. Furthermore, his electric trio, whom he played with more regularly than with his acoustic trio or as a solo act, featured a highly compatible bassist/vocalist and a very swinging drummer. They’re still the only rock and roll band I’ve ever heard that could play a John Coltrane composition without embarrassing themselves. . . .

Who's Mahler?

2010-06-28T17:11:00.000-07:00

Years ago I read an interview with the great Argentine short story writer, poet, and critic Jorge Luis Borges, a man who read comfortably in seven or eight languages (including Hebrew and Anglo-Saxon) and who, as he sometimes said, essentially was a library. In the course of the interview the name Gustav Mahler came up, and I'll never forget Borges's judicious, pithy, and erudite response: "Who's Mahler?" I probably shouldn't say that Borges reminds me of me, but he does, if only in relation to our musical ignorance. Although I (just barely) know who Mahler is, until my middle thirties I never listened to anything -- anything -- but rock and roll. One of the great revelations of my later years is that other forms of music exist. If you already knew this, dear reader, I congratulate you, but I grew up with the hippie dream of rock and roll as the soundtrack to utopia, with other forms of commercial music regarded as False Consciousness if not The Enemy. Overcoming such stupidity (my own, principally) has been the work of a lifetime, but my discovery of grand opera, Irish folk music, delta blues, Broadway show tunes, and early jazz has been no less sweet for being belated. There are thousands of other musical forms out there that I could probably love just as much. But I'll never get around to them. I'm content knowing after all these years that Verdi is right up there with the Buzzcocks.

American Idiot by Green Day

2010-06-24T17:19:00.000-07:00

Apart from being a surprisingly good record, Green Day’s Grammy-winning American Idiot lends itself admirably to the conclusion I’ve been working toward, which is that ill-mannered young people continue to make excellent rock and roll music and that the future is safe in their hands. Clearly, nothing would have deterred me from arriving at this entirely a priori summation, and in fact I thought I might write this chapter without actually listening to the record. But I’m glad I did. Surely there are better musicians out there than the guys in Green Day (who aren’t even that young anymore), but a slick, mass-produced band of notable but hardly exceptional talent proves the point even better: Rock and roll is indestructible, and yes, I’m still cool.

I know virtually nothing about this band and am not especially eager to find out. If we passed on the street, Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt, and Tré Cool (not his real name) would probably regard me as just another boring straight, while I would try not to notice their unseemly tattoos and multiple piercings. Apparently, they’re from California and are very famous. They’ve been playing together since they were kids. For my purposes, all that matters is that in 2004 they made a record called American Idiot, which reveals little or no traces of John Coltrane and Caetano Veloso. Now, there’s nothing wrong with incorporating elements of jazz, world music, and various avant-gardisms into rock and roll songs; but there’s nothing wrong with sticking to the basics, either. The assumption that musical development entails at least a partial repudiation of rock conventions is widespread. Ambitious rock songwriters are forever complaining about the limitations of the form, and when their frustrations result in albums like Remain in Light or Graceland or OK Computer, we have every reason to be grateful. I’m somewhat less grateful when the results are pretentious crap, but the unpretentious crap on the other end of the spectrum is hardly more alluring. Green Day, a stick-to-the-basics band if ever there was, seem to find liberation in the conventions that more “advanced” bands find so constraining. That’s not the only reason that I like them, but it helps. I’ve been listening to rock and roll music for over forty years and not once have I grown tired of the same old thing. Frankly, I’m mystified when people like Elvis Costello slag rock and roll; does anyone honestly prefer The Juliet Letters (misguided attempt at writing for a string quartet) to Trust (wholly successful rock and roll album)? After all, no one seems to mind that blues music adheres to comparatively rigid formulas. If Muddy Waters could touch the heights and depths of human experience within the confines of a simplified form, there’s no reason that Green Day can’t make a very good record based on a few chords and a lot of hooks.

Ten New Songs by Leonard Cohen

2010-06-18T17:52:00.001-07:00

Having reached the age when my chief desire in life is to sit around reading great books and listening to great records and brooding majestically about the sadness of it all, I think I finally “get” Leonard Cohen, the “prince of bummers,” as Leon Wieseltier once called him. Despite his bizarre collaboration with Phil Spector (Death of a Ladies’ Man) and his huge influence on everyone from Kurt Cobain to Bono, he’s certainly not much of a rocker. Some people would say he’s not even much of a musician. For a long time I also underestimated his compositional minimalism and mistook that weary croak of his for simple ineptitude. Why do I love these things now? Does one have to be old to appreciate Leonard Cohen? No, just old at heart. I might have preferred Blue Oyster Cult for a while, yet even as a stripling I found “Suzanne,” “Chelsea Hotel,” and a few others strangely compelling, though damnably slow. Still, I seem to have grown into a greater appreciation of his records the more autumnal they (and I) get. And if autumnal electro-pop records of gravely philosophical import are your dish, you can’t do better than Ten New Songs, his collaboration of 2001 with Sharon Robinson.

Leonard Cohen used to fingerpick an acoustic guitar with maybe a snare drum or a cello or a jew’s-harp for accompaniment. Those days are over. Since the nineties at least he has been composing his songs on electronic keyboards, and the textures have grown increasingly dense and layered, which is merely to say this his musicianship has come a long way from the skeletal folk music of “Suzanne.” How disappointing. It’s not that I regret the increased sophistication of his music or the melodic and tonal discoveries that have complemented his development as a poet and lyricist; I just get a little tired of all the synthesizers. The music on Ten New Songs was composed and largely performed by Sharon Robinson, the latest in a line of female musician/muses who have provided Cohen with much needed vocal support. If he seems to have taken the easy way out by delegating the work of composition to her, she seems to have given him exactly what he wanted. Much of Cohen’s music of the last twenty years sounds like one big bossa nova/gypsy love ballad/Andalusian waltz/French chanson/gospel hymn/military march processed through modern recording technologies. Because he doesn’t really have an identifiable style and because his songs do not derive from traditional American roots sources, it’s a bit difficult to say what his music is, exactly. One thing I do know: there will never be a Leonard Cohen instrumental. The music exists to serve the lyrics, and although I sometimes yearn for a flesh and blood musician to make a mistake – somewhere, anywhere – on one of his recent records, the settings that Sharon Robinson devised for the words on Ten New Songs couldn’t underscore their nuances more effectively. Such things as the rising and falling cadence that haunts “Love Itself” or the full rests that hang between alternate lines in the first two stanzas of “Alexandra Leaving” are perfection itself. I can hardly complain if the drum machines and sampled saxophone breaks wouldn’t sound out of place on a Mariah Carey record. Ultra-smooth electro-pop is the idiom that Cohen has chosen to work in; he just does it better than everybody else. . . .

Sonata for Jukebox by Geoffrey O'Brien

2010-06-13T17:37:00.000-07:00

I was planning an annotated rock bibliography for this posting, but since most rock journalism is so dreadful and since I don't read much of it anyway, I decided to write about one book I actually have read and that I really do love: Geoffrey O'Brien's Sonata for Jukebox: Pop Music, Memory, and the Imagined Life (Counterpoint, 2004). O'Brien's way with pop music is not to describe it closely and certainly not to analyze it. Rather, he free-associates around the music, riffing on the cultural and emotional contexts surrounding the Beach Boys or Smokey Robinson or Burt Bacharach or Tin Pan Alley or surf rock. The funny thing is, by keeping a respectable distance from the music itself -- by tacitly acknowledging, so to speak, its incommensurability -- he manages to get closer to its essence than most professional music critics. How? Damned if I know. But consider this splendid passage of prose poetry from his chapter on Burt Bacharach and the revival of lounge music:

In the definitive Kennedy-era jazz crossover, Vince Guaraldi's "Cast Your Fate to the Winds" (1962), accept a belated invitation to lose your mind in the most cool and sophisticated way, preferably in a tastefully avant-garde apartment overlooking the San Francisco Bay. You can keep some reefer in the drawer -- "I like to blow a little pot now and then, it makes the music so interesting, you can really hear what they're getting at" -- and on the wall a Bernard Buffet still life of coffeepot with fruit like the Ella Fitzgerald album covers, or the inevitable bullfight poster. With any luck the apartment will also be home at least part of the time to a girl in espadrilles and toreador pants, the sort who might decorate an album by Art Pepper or George Shearing, draping herself over the divan against a soft-focus hint of summer dusk. It's time to light the candles and uncork the chianti.

XO by Elliott Smith

2010-06-08T15:39:00.001-07:00

Among the discredited forms of rock and roll music that I revere is that created by introspective singer-songwriters with acoustic guitars. For reasons unfathomable to me, Elliott Smith escaped the stigma that attached to others of his kind. It’s not that he wasn’t a wimp; he was. Furthermore, he had a frail, whispery voice, and – most damaging of all – his songs were pretty. I suppose he had the correct indie credentials – involvement in the Northwestern punk scene as a founder of the band Heatmiser, the release of two home-made records on the appropriately named Kill Rock Stars label, and the right mix of tattoos and slacker anomie. But I think Elliott Smith didn’t much care about musical fashion, and neither, to give them all the credit they deserve, did his fans. Those of us who came to his music belatedly and those who were already there probably feel much the same way: Elliott Smith was something special, and his suicide at thirty-four is a grief that will not be assuaged with irony or unfunny jokes. It still pains me at times to listen to XO (1988), the masterful album he made five years before plunging a knife into his heart.

Is there a sensitive troubadour struggling to break out of every grunge rocker? There was in Elliott Smith’s case. Frustrated playing for drugged pogo-dancers, he left Heatmiser when he realized that the music he really loved was melodic and clever and subtle. (His ambition, he said, was to be John Lennon and Paul McCartney in one person.) Playing such music, he discovered – no matter that the subject of any particular song might be and usually was some facet of his depression, maladjustment, insecurity, and self-destructive behavior patterns – made him happy. It makes me happy too, even if I’m only humming along with one of his perfect little cadences. Marrying downbeat lyrics to upbeat music is an old trick, and when done well, the effect is something like chastened euphoria. We might consider, for example, “I Didn’t Understand,” the last song on XO, which reads like a suicide note but sounds like a serenade. Maybe setting one of his most despairing lyrics to one of his most sumptuous vocal arrangements (reminiscent of a barbershop quartet or the Beach Boys, with Smith singing all the Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, and Mike Love parts), was the sort of joke that helped keep him going. I doubt there’s much distance between the man and the persona when he sings, “My feelings never change a bit, I always feel like shit,” yet apart from the sheer gorgeousness of all the ooohing and aaahing behind the words, the line elates rather than depresses partly because in its bald, inelegant phrasing it’s almost funny. More to the point, any human being who transforms his sorrows into formal structures that resonate in the heart and mind is not being depressing. It’s called art, folks. Admittedly, there are gray areas, such as the less-than-ringing endorsement of human life in King Lear, and in fact, some of Elliott Smith’s songs are depressing. But not the good ones. . . .

The Woods by Sleater-Kinney

2010-06-02T17:24:00.000-07:00

A while back, under "The Grand Elementary Principle of Pleasure," I wrote about the noise that passes for music in certain avant rock circles. I know that makes me sound like Dick Cheney or some other bugbear, but I wanted to mention this Sleater-Kinney album because it's such a frustrating example of what I was talking about. If the pretentious, noisy shit is by an inferior band like Sonic Youth, I don't much care, but since Corin Tucker, Carrie Brownstein, and their various drummers are so clearly talented, it's a shame when they waste their creativity on avant-garde posturings. "Jumpers" shows what they can do -- intricate guitar parts, thunderous but controlled drumming, and some pretty impressive vocal wailing all in the service of a coherent song with striking, elliptical lyrics about suicide. "The Fox," alas, also shows what they can do: staccato shards of abrasive rhythms and the unmodulated screaming of pretentious lyrics, as if the composition of an actual song were just too too bourgeois even to contemplate. Maybe the three musicians in Sleater-Kinney really believe in the avant-garde gospel. But they'd be a better band if they didn't.

Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea by P. J. Harvey

2010-05-26T18:12:00.000-07:00

Rock critics usually get it wrong (the present instance probably being a good example), and one of their bigger mistakes, I believe, is preferring P. J. Harvey’s early, angry, and abrasive Dry or Rid of Me to the more, uh, middle class Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. Fortunately, there are complacent middlebrows like me to uphold bourgeois standards, and I say Stories from the City is the best thing she’s ever done. Of course, there’s great stuff on her first three or four records, but some of it – like the shouted/whispered “deconstruction” of Dylan’s “Highway 61” – seems like the sort of thing that only a cultural studies militant or a furiously anti-establishment ‘zine blogger could really love. Yet good rock musicians are usually a step ahead of their critics, and after a while it must seem that struggling to remain in the good graces of journalistic ideologues just isn’t worth the candle. For example, at his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (regarded by rock snobs as the Taj Mahal of institutionalized mediocrity), the impeccably hip Elvis Costello made a point of praising three splendid musicians whose names must have induced cringes in avant circles everywhere: Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and – hooray! – Rick Danko. At any rate, Stories from the City, which some reviewers considered dangerously soft, strikes me as beautifully expressive and open to a range of experiences including but not limited to contentment and tenderness. Perhaps whether you like it or not will depend on your reaction to the photograph of Harvey on the cover: an elegant young woman in a black dress and gold lamé shoulder bag turns to the camera with a half smile as she prepares to cross a Manhattan street swirling with light and color. Life isn’t so bad, maybe, and it feels rather nice to be stepping out for the night as a mature, self-confident, fully functioning adult.

Although I like to imagine Polly Jean Harvey as a nice, friendly Dorsetshire lass, her personal happiness or unhappiness is none of my business, and the more “positive” emotions of Stories from the City hardly preclude expressions of rage, fear, and violence, without which unpleasantness no P. J. Harvey album would be complete. The difference is that this time the emotional polarities are kept in balance, though that may seem hard to believe on the evidence of the album’s first, very rough song, “Big Exit.” With fearful, childlike half-sentences shouted over a barrage of drums and guitar, “Big Exit” seems at first like the sort of transgressive, mildly headache-inducing song beloved of writers for the Village Voice. But note the weirdly lovely harmonium playing off the pounding down-strokes on the electric guitar. I guess you can be rough and beautiful, because after the clamor of the first verse, Harvey lifts her shivery soprano into its highest register, the chords shift, a bass and second keyboard enter, and the song suddenly becomes a blissed-out hymn of love. But not for long. Even while feeling “immortal” in the presence of her lover, the singer keeps shouting about guns and pistols and danger, and the back and forth between these two contrasting moods is never resolved, not even by the slow, meditative bridge with lyrics suggestive of the end of the world. This sort of disjunctive formalism can be awfully pretentious, and it may be that Harvey doesn’t always avoid that particular failing, but anyone who risks this much (and rocks this hard) gets the benefit of the doubt.

Furthermore, all that clanging, banging, and apocalyptic hollering does serve as a useful reminder that the world is a scary place. Sometimes a primal howl is an entirely appropriate response. Rock and roll tends to be better at this sort of exorcism than more rarefied forms of culture. We must “rebuild our cities, not dream of islands,” W. H. Auden cautioned, but while the tedious, necessary work of achieving a slightly more just society goes on, we need to allow ourselves every now and then a few minutes of Dionysian rage. I can think of no better outlet for the fear and the fury than the music of P. J. Harvey in its more aggressive modalities. . . .

The guitar as object

2010-05-21T16:16:00.000-07:00

In the Architecture and Design Galleries on the third floor of the Museum of Modern Art, amid all the hockey masks, cell phones, pencil sharpeners, coffee pots, and Eames Chairs, one ultra modern object of industrial design is conspicuously missing: an electric guitar. I nominate the Paul Reed Smith Custom to fill the void, though a Gibson Les Paul or a 12-string Rickenbacker might do just as well. How could the MoMA curators have missed an object at once so representative of the modern age and so classical in the purity of its design? You would think they might have taken the hint from Picasso, whose obsessive meditations on the guitar as a metaphor for the female form comprise some of the key works in the museum. In fact, MoMA's own cubist collage "Guitar" from 1913 contains maybe the best (or worst) gynecological pun in art history: next to the sound hole Picasso has placed a newspaper advertisement for a Catalonian gynecologist. The electric guitar isn't quite that graphic, but its lines are certainly womanly enough, and to hold one is a miracle of ergonomics. Holding a properly made electric guitar feels like cradling a baby or maybe caressing a woman. I just wish I could play it better.

Time Out Of Mind by Bob Dylan

2010-05-08T12:51:00.001-07:00

Some rock and roll records are hard to talk about not because their harmonic structures and tonalities require an abstruse vocabulary (which I lack anyway), but because their emotional nakedness simply cuts too close to the bone. How can I discuss Bob Dylan’s Time Out Of Mind without embarrassing myself or my readers or maybe even the composer? Faced with a music of such magnitude, I feel elevated and humbled at once, like a narcissist discovering the Other. See what I mean?

Although it’s O.K. to like Dylan again, people forget how reviled he was through most of the eighties and into the nineties. I remember a critic in the New Yorker claiming that Dylan had turned into his own “Mr. Jones,” the emblem of middle-class soullessness in “Ballad of a Thin Man,” and sneering at him for not being as hip as David Byrne. In those days, if you liked Talking Heads, you didn’t admit that you liked Dylan too. Well, we all have our ups and downs; Dylan’s were just more public. And he certainly made some awful music in that period. But even during his ghastly “born again” phase, the occasional pearl emerged: “Every Grain of Sand,” “What Was It You Wanted,” “Foot of Pride.” Not many people in rock and roll have ever written songs that good, even if the composer delivered them between rants about the faithless going down to the Pit. Although Talking Heads exceeded Dylan’s achievement for a while – in fact, the Go-Go’s exceeded Dylan’s achievement for a while -- I never gave up on him. Yet I never expected anything, especially so late in his career, as harrowing as Time Out Of Mind.

Some people can’t take Time Out Of Mind, and I don’t blame them. They find it too dirge-like, too monochromatic, too lacking in the insouciance and wit of the earlier Dylan, too much, in fact, like the old man’s death-haunted record that it is. I think Time Out Of Mind is a major work of art, but I’ll concede this much: you really don’t want to hear it if you’re not in the mood for some serious darkness.

I read somewhere that Dylan composed the songs for Time Out Of Mind under the threat of very bad medical news indeed. There’s nothing to concentrate the mind quite like the immanence of death, but whatever the immediate source of inspiration, a lifetime of “suffering like a fool” clearly stands behind this record. It’s not, as I’ve said, exactly au courant. In his rare, curmudgeonly interviews, Dylan has disparaged almost all manifestations of contemporary culture later than, say, Dorothy Dandridge, and his preferred modes of transportation, at least on the evidence of Time Out Of Mind, are horse and buggy, midnight train, and Mississippi riverboat. And yet this stupendously wealthy rock star of rock stars seems to have held onto a simple human truth: he’s as screwed up as anybody else. Indeed, it may be that Dylan’s manifest weirdness has given him access to psychological depths unavailable to most celebrities, walled off as they are from common experience. Dylan probably hasn’t gone grocery shopping in forty years, but I don’t think he would have benefited much by browsing through People magazine in the checkout line.

Time Out Of Mind is a long, meandering record, and I propose to talk about only its most doom-laden songs. My favorite of these is the third track, “Standing in the Doorway,” in which even the drumming sounds haunted. In an interview I read ages ago, Eric Clapton said that his dream was to walk out on a stage and hit a note so piercing that it would summon up all the beauty and sorrow in the world – a very sentimental dream, no doubt, except that Dylan nearly achieves it in the opening bar of “Standing in the Doorway.” It’s just one note in a simple phrase played on a low string of an electric guitar, but in the interval between that note and the next, “Music falls on the silence like a sense, / A passion that that we feel, not understand.” Perhaps it’s a measure of my desperation that I resort to Wallace Stevens to describe a Bob Dylan song, but although I’m better at feeling music than at understanding it, I do have some inkling of how “Standing in the Doorway” falls on the silence like a sense. It has something to do with Daniel Lanois. Lanois is the hotshot producer who helped turn Emmylou Harris’s Wrecking Ball (1996), so similar in so many ways to Time Out Of Mind, into a spooky, ravaged masterpiece. What the auteurist Lanois brought to Dylan, Harris, U2, and others was a hypnotic, multilayered, signature sound at several removes from any notion of the record producer as a deferential button twiddler. Sometimes it’s hard to tell where Lanois ends and Dylan begins or even which man is playing which guitar, but together they achieved a thick, gluey mix that never sounds cluttered despite the plethora of instruments on any given track – typically an acoustic guitar, two or three electric guitars, a pedal steel guitar, an organ, a piano, an accordion, a bass guitar, two sets of drums, and percussion. It can’t be easy for drummers to hold together so many instruments at such slow tempos, as Jim Keltner and Brian Blade do when they lock into “Standing in the Doorway” toward the end of the first verse, but I assume they were doing what the boss ordered. Apart from being the Voice of a Generation and all that nonsense, Dylan has always been a very, very good bandleader.

Of course, all this exquisitely doleful music wouldn’t mean so much if it weren’t married to lyrics by Bob Dylan. But here we encounter the familiar problem: what is shattering to the ear seems almost commonplace to the eye. . . .

Whip-Smart by Liz Phair

2010-05-05T17:09:00.001-07:00

"We can shock our parents by visiting the dives below the railroad tracks," wrote W. H. Auden. This motive, never to be underestimated in any consideration of rock and roll, clearly played a role in the making of Liz Phair's first album, Exile in Guyville, whose casual cynicism and spectacular obscenity seemed designed to shock, if not her parents, then at least the entire respectable adult world. Shock value tends to wear thin, though, and I think her follow-up record, Whip-Smart, is better for not trying so hard. Oh, it's still pretty filthy, but songs like "Whip-Smart," "Cinco de Mayo," and "X-Ray Man" bring out the best in Phair's wobbly vocals and cheerfully ragged guitar playing, and the gorgeous "May Queen" has a nearly Beatle-esque expansiveness. In truth, the cynicism, like the amateurishness, is probably a pose, which is only to say that in rock and roll you can have a great deal of fun being angry at the world. I'm not saying that the world doesn't suck, or that Liz Phair doesn't believe the world sucks, but writing really good songs about how the world sucks never hurt anyone's career.

"Don't forget the songs that made you cry"

2010-04-30T17:17:00.000-07:00

In place of my usual deathless prose and tightly knit arguments, in this posting I'm merely -- merely! -- going to list a few rock and roll or pop songs that I happen to like. The list is completely arbitrary except for one criterion: these are songs (suggested by the above quotation from Morrissey) that have moved me to tears or at least given me chills. Yes, that's how sensitive I am! While others merely dance or sing along with the choruses or play air guitar while listening to their favorite rock and roll songs, I weep for Beauty. Herewith a few songs, some not as well known as they should be, that you might like too.

“Sway” by the Rolling Stones, “Discovering Japan” by Graham Parker and the Rumor, “That’s Entertainment” by the Jam, “May Queen” by Liz Phair, “I Fought the Law” by the Bobby Fuller Four, “The Israelites” by Desmond Dekker, “Letter from an Occupant” by the New Pornographers, “Dirty Old Town” by the Pogues, “Thirteen” by Big Star, “Embarrassment” by Madness, “Pony Boy” by the Allman Brothers Band, “White Girl” by X, “People Get Ready” by the Chambers Brothers, “I’m Moving On” by Yoko Ono and John Lennon, “Cynical Girl” by Marshall Crenshaw, “When Heroes Go Down” by Suzanne Vega, “Bottoming Out” by Lou Reed, “Go Now” by Bessie Banks, “Gates of Steel” by Devo, “Driving Guitars” by the Ventures, “Metal Firecracker” by Lucinda Williams, “Computer Blue” by Prince, “Linden Arden Stole the Highlights” by Van Morrison, “Mandinka” by Sinead O’Connor, “Harbor Coat” by R.E.M., “You Can’t Fail Me Now” by Loudon Wainwright, “Hong Kong Garden” by Siouxsie and the Banshees, “Queen of the Highway” by the Doors, “Warakurna” by Midnight Oil, “Van Diemen’s Land” by U2, “Ghost World” by Aimee Mann, “Don’t Worry Baby” by the Beach Boys, “Suit of Lights” by Elvis Costello, “Atomic” by Blondie, “Zebra Club” by the Bongos, “Pagan Baby” by Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Life on a Chain” by Peter Yorn, “Don’t Think About Her When You’re Trying to Drive” by Little Village, “Theme from The Wild Angels” by Davie Allan and the Arrows, “The Same Situation” by Joni Mitchell, “Wrong Side of the Moon” by Squeeze, “Teenage Kicks” by the Undertones, “Can’t Hardly Wait” by the Replacements, “All of Your Loving” by Dusty Springfield, “Prove It” by Television, “Devonside” by Richard Thompson, “Somebody Got Murdered” by the Clash, “On the Radio” by Donna Summer, “Jumpers” by Sleater-Kinney, “Just Another Whistle Stop” by the Band, “Easier Said Than Done” by the Essex, “Ruby Ruby” by Dion, “Go To Sleep (Little Man Being Erased)” by Radiohead, “Take It Back” by Cream, “My Old School” by Steely Dan, “Fell in Love with a Girl” by the White Stripes, “Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Joy Division, "Let's Get It On" by Marvin Gaye, "Darkness Darkness" by the Youngbloods, "Shake Sugaree" by Danny Kalb, "Song to Bobby" by Cat Power, "Eighteen" by Alice Cooper, "O Lucky Man" by Alan Price, "Runnin' Away" by Sly and the Family Stone, "A Praise Chorus" by Jimmy Eat World, "Love Train" by the O'Jays, "Scar Tissue" by Red Hot Chili Peppers, "The Only Living Boy in New York" by Simon and Garfunkle, "Sandman" by Metallica, " "Keith Don't Go" by Nils Lofgren, "The Child's Song" by Tom Rush, "Harmony in My Head" by the Buzzcocks, "The Work Song" by Maria Muldaur, "It Doesn't Matter" by Manassas, "Impossible Germany" by Wilco, "Dead Man's Curve" by Jan and Dean, "Man of the World" by Robin Trower,"Secret Agent Man" by Johnny Rivers.

Under the Big Black Sun by X

2010-04-25T19:35:00.001-07:00

I prefer X's Under the Big Black Sun to the more critically acclaimed Wild Gift not only because it's slicker and smoother but also because it's better. The singing and playing are more fluid, the songs thicker textured and more developed. If the move from the punk margins to the rock mainstream softened up the band, it's hard to tell from such bristling rockers as "Blue Spark," "Under the Big Black Sun," and "The Hungry Wolf." But yeah, heartbreaking elegies with vibes and saxophone ("Please Come Back to Me") and poignant evocations of working class life featuring extended guitar solos ("The Have Nots") are a long way from the "fuck-the-world" mentality (to quote the tattoo on John Doe's shoulder) that originally defined X as the best of the Los Angeles punk bands. So much for fucking the world, I guess. Under the Big Black Sun is an album of considerable thematic complexity written and performed by a band with unusual skill and taste and, almost as important, really cool names: John Doe, Billy Zoom, Exene, and D. J. Bonebrake.

Nonsuch by XTC

2010-04-20T17:50:00.000-07:00

Well, here we are, nearing the end of this little screed, and now we come to a chapter on XTC’s Nonsuch (1992). I might have chosen other important albums of the time by Massive Attack or Pulp or Primal Scream. The trouble is, I haven’t heard any of them, but if my ignorance serendipitously leads me to something as delightful as Nonsuch, I figure rock and roll must have been in pretty good shape in the early nineties. Not everyone will share my exalted opinion of XTC, but for ex-English major types with an undying love for sophisticated, witty, Beatle-esque rock and roll, Nonsuch is, as it were, the shit.

So here’s the story: some teenagers from Swindon, England, form a rock and roll band. They imitate the reigning glam rockers of the day and then, for a while, try to be punks. Their first album, released in 1978, is suitably snotty but perhaps more musical than it has any right to be. By the time they make their third album, Drums and Wires, a year and a half later, they have given up all pretense to punk purity and become what they will remain for two decades and more: a marvelously inventive studio band, more or less “new wave” and revolving around the songcraft of its two principals, Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding. Some people think that by 1992, the year of Nonsuch, XTC had lost its edge, but I just think they had ambitions beyond rocking the house, which they could still do superbly whenever occasion demanded; otherwise, with my limited appreciation for musical forms not involving drums and amplified string instruments, I wouldn’t be listening.

The opening song on the album, “The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead,” begins with a slashing guitar and thunderous drumming, followed by a wailing blues harmonica. This jolting intro ought to dispel any notion that a record named after a palace of Henry VIII, featuring photos of the band in the manner of Holbein portraits, and with lyrics alluding to Edward Lear, Fox Talbot, and just possibly John Milton’s Aeropagitica, is a record for wimps. “Peter Pumpkinhead” was written and sung by Andy Partridge, the fragile genius who played Lennon/McCartney to Colin Moulding’s George Harrison. The conceit – that if a Jesus-like figure were to appear in our midst, the whole tragedy would play itself out exactly as in Palestine two thousand years ago – though perhaps a bit glib, is hard to refute, and lends itself perfectly to an unsentimental rock and roll thrashing. Also, how many arty, new wave songwriters can play harmonica like that?

The style of the next song, Moulding’s “My Bird Performs,” owes more to the Baroque than to thrash rock, and if the idea offends you of a four-piece rock and roll band playing fugue-like figures on electric guitars and allowing for flugelhorn and trumpet passages, XTC is not your band. Furthermore, the lyrics are a little pretentious. (How can Shakespeare’s Sonnets be criticized for their “high brow prose”?) But it’s a lovely tune, and there are many such moments of loveliness on Nonsuch that might appall those who remember XTC as skinny young punks. The catholicity of my taste, however, is so circumscribed that I don’t know whether some of the slow, modal songs on Nonsuch are lousy or I just don’t understand them. The record does seem to sag a bit in the middle, and the funereal tempos of songs like “Rook” and “That Wave” bring out the strain in Partridge’s never very robust vocals. But Nonsuch is the sort of eclectic, all-over-the-place album that can easily withstand a few dead spots. “Then She Appeared,” for instance, is impossible to categorize – a little psychedelia, a bit of English music hall, maybe something from the Byrds or Beatles, but who cares, really? Whatever else it may be, “Then She Appeared” is a superb pop song, and if the lyrics are almost too clever for their own good (“Old Edward leared / Then she appeared”), well, I’ll take that over lyrics that aren’t clever enough. . . .

The Grand Elementary Principle of Pleasure

2010-04-14T17:17:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about Wordsworth's "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" in relation, naturally, to Public Image's first album and similar unlistenable artifacts of post punk culture. In a key passage Wordsworth speaks of the "homage paid to the native and naked dignity of man, to the grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which he knows, and feels, and lives, and moves. We have no sympathy but what is propagated by pleasure. . . . We have no knowledge, that is, no general principles drawn from the contemplation of particular facts, but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure alone." I think we can agree with Wordsworth that pleasure is kinda important, in art as in life, and will not be denied or rationalized away. Why, then, is it so entirely absent from PiL songs like "Theme," "Fodderstompf," and "Annalisa," approvingly described by my ever handy Rock: The Rough Guide (2nd ed., Rough Guides Ltd., 1999) as "oppressive low-end sludge"? No doubt John Lydon, Keith Levene and the PiL collective would have argued (if they could have argued - not exactly Johnny Rotten's strong point) that the pleasure associated with pop music had become hopelessly corrupt and anodyne and that what they were after was provocation, not pleasure. Certainly provocation has its place, and there are times when pleasure must give way to more spartan imperatives. But was the first Public Image album such an occasion? Did it overthrow the established order or at least get people thinking about the mind-numbing effects of musical and marketing conventions in rock and roll taken too much for granted? Um, I don't think so. And what we're left with, aside from maybe one and a half incredibly powerful, more or less traditional "songs" ("Public Image" and "Low Life"), is an album full of defiantly undeveloped, abrasive non-songs that no human being, I'm sorry, could ever honestly like. A noble failure? More like arrogant, pretentious bullshit, actually. There has always been a fair amount of this kind of crap in rock and roll -- Suicide, much of Sonic Youth, the Velvet Underground, even some of Joy Division. I'm sure the people who listen to this stuff are far more high-minded than I am and disdain the plebeian concessions of melody, rhythm, and song structure. But I'm a human being, and I'm sticking with the grand elementary principle of pleasure.

Ragged Glory by Neil Young and Crazy Horse

2010-04-11T16:40:00.000-07:00

What can be said about a record that consists mostly of long, extremely unpolished electric guitar solos? Somehow I’ll think of something, because the record in question is Neil Young’s Ragged Glory (1990), not only glorious in itself but the cause of glory in others – Nirvana, Mudhoney, and many other imitators of Neil in full thrash-rock mode. In fact, there’s more than guitar soloing going on here. Young’s ear for transfixing melody is everywhere apparent on the songs of Ragged Glory, not only around the solos but in them, and although his three-piece backing band Crazy Horse sometimes fudged notes and blew chord changes, they happened to be accomplished harmony singers. Maybe the only way to describe Ragged Glory, as the title implies, is oxymoronically: harmonic cacophony, frenzied serenity, or, I don’t know, turbid limpidity. Anyway, the ten songs on Ragged Glory are defiantly loud and aggressive, but you can still hum along on the choruses. That’s where Young differed from the grunge rockers who idolized him: he didn’t mind sounding like the Eagles sometimes.

Ragged Glory was the last new LP I bought. After that, much to the displeasure of curmudgeonly Neil, CD’s permanently displaced 33’s. Young preferred the warmth of vinyl to the cold perfection of digital, but I just preferred the album covers. Ragged Glory features a fish-eye photo of the four musicians, looking like the grizzled, grubby hippies they pretty much were, playing in a barn-like rehearsal space. The back cover shows them nuzzling a horse on Young’s ranch in the California hill country; they haven’t cleaned up. Have any musicians done more for frayed tee shirts and ripped jeans than Neil Young and Crazy Horse? Certainly the Ramones come to mind, but they wore their tatters as a uniform, whereas Young and Crazy Horse really were slobs. Yet as always with rock fashion or anti-fashion, a message was being sent: a band that looked this hideous was not going to sound like the Bee Gees.

In Jimmy McDonough’s Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography (Random House, 2002), Joni Mitchell expressed a certain exasperation about Young’s preference for his long-time backing band: “If I would go into a little bar to go dancin’, I’d say, ‘What a great band.’ But presented in concert? That should not be elevated to the concert level.” David Crosby, in the same source, put it rather less tactfully: “They should’ve been shot at birth. They can’t play.” I make no claim for subsurface subtleties and nuances known only to Crazy Horse enthusiasts, nor do I maintain that rock and roll should be played the way Crazy Horse plays it: heavy, loud, and crunching. Yet in that mysterious way known to all good and great rock bands, some sort of alchemy took place whenever these particular musicians came together. “What’s special about them?” Young asked rhetorically in Shakey. “What’s special about Poncho and Billy and Ralph and me is that it’s a band.”

It takes about six seconds for Crazy Horse to deliver its trademark “boom-boom thack! Boom-boom thack!” (as David Crosby called it) on Ragged Glory. They enter on the first song, “Country Home,” after Young plays an introductory figure on his Les Paul (familiarly known as Old Black to all Shakey cultists), and neither he nor they let up from that point onward. So what is there to say about a rambling seven-minute song with a fairly rote alternation of verse-chorus-guitar solo and nothing-special lyrics about the supposed advantages of country life? Other than that it has a nice flow and that, um, Neil gets way out there, not much, really – unless we start talking about dialectics, which I fully intend to do. As absurd as it might sound, there is something dialectical about the stolidity of Crazy Horse’s rumbling undertone versus the visionary brilliance of Young’s improvisations on top. I doubt his soloing could have reached such heights without the earthy foundation of the Horse; at any rate, it hasn’t, notwithstanding all the great musicians he has played with. His greatest moments – “Like a Hurricane,” “Powderfinger,” “Cortez the Killer” – have all come with clunky, clamorous Crazy Horse. Similarly, the buzzes, blips, and squeals of the two electric guitars (Young’s and Poncho Sampedro’s) play off against the easy rolling melodies, which are sometimes submerged but never drowned. Indeed, Young’s solos are songs in themselves, not only because they’re long enough to be songs, but because they’re shaped like songs. Many rock guitarists, of course, structure their solos along a similar arc of rising and falling intensities; but compared to Young, they all seem just a little predictable. And if it’s yin and yang you want, consider the vocals. Some bands give you close, careful, countryish vocal harmonies, and some bands give you raw, bristling instrumentation, but only this band gives you both. . . .

Adventure by Television

2010-04-06T17:19:00.000-07:00

For a guy who named himself after a great French poet, Tom Verlaine (né Thomas Miller) certainly wrote some of the dumbest lyrics in rock music. ("Must have some coffee / Let's have some coffee / I die a couple times for you / For me.") Terrible singer, too -- he mostly talk/sang his hopeless lyrics in a thin, monotonic squeal. But these things didn't matter a jot, because the whole point of his band was to showcase the guitar solos around which most Television songs were built. The songs themselves were alternately dreamy and impudent, rather like the band itself or like the contrasting instrumental styles of Verlaine (dreamy) and his second guitarist Richard Lloyd (impudent). Television made only two albums in their prime. I prefer the smoother, more New Wavish Adventure to the spikier, more punkish Marquee Moon, but that may be because, if the judgments of rock critics are to be trusted, I'm a philistine. Punks were supposed to disdain any but the briefest guitar solos, but when Verlaine and Lloyd really got it going, as they did on this album's "Glory" or "The Dream's Dream," Television brilliantly restored one of rock's central values -- instrumental self-indulgence -- to the punk pantheon. But here's the best thing about Tom Verlaine: He had the balls to admit he liked Jerry Garcia.

Hating the Audience

2010-04-01T16:40:00.001-07:00

This week's New Yorker (April 5, 2010) has a "Talk of the Town" piece about the new Neil Young/Jonathan Demme concert film. In the course of the piece Neil reflects genially about his warm relationship with his fans. "Yeah, but generally we hate the fucking audience," he says. "They disturb the whole thing. . . . I remember we did a tour, and they had these cranes out in the audience, flying around, casting cones of light down on the audience, so that everyone in the audience had these halos on their heads. I walked out onstage and said to myself, 'This is fucked up. I might not even play. This is so wrong.' All night long I was thinking, Why do I have to see people? I've never seen them before. I hate looking at them." I've attended a few Neil Young concerts and I can assure you: He's not kidding. Neil, like many another mega rock star, really does hate his audience. When I saw him he scowled, sneered, played with his back to the crowd, disdained any and all requests. Now, I revere Neil Young's musicianship, and I don't mind that his sense of stage presence departs a bit from the model of, say, Judy Garland. But one of the things that's not so great about this glorious music of rock and roll is the cold contempt that so many of its leading practitioners have for the fans that, in a sense, put them there. I remember reading an interview with Truman Capote, who covered the Rolling Stones on tour circa 1972 (their Exile on Main Street prime) and who said that he was amazed at the naked contempt they habitually expressed for the all the fans at all the shows who followed them that year. Can you imagine James Brown mocking his audience like that? Or Johnny Cash? There are plenty of exceptions, of course (Bruce Springsteen, U2), but there just seems to be more of this shit in rock and roll than in other forms of vernacular music, where the practitioners tend to have less inflated notions of their genius. That's one reason that the punk and later the grunge and riot grrrl scenes, though eventually and inevitably corrupted, were important; the fans and musicians alike (and it was significant that you couldn't always tell the difference) realized that this grotesque discrepancy between the godlike stars and the groveling fans had to stop. Anyway, if you run into Neil Young or Mick Jagger on the street it would probably be a good idea to give them a wide berth: they hate you.

Land of Dreams by Randy Newman

2010-03-29T17:08:00.000-07:00

In “I’m Dead (But I Don’t Know It)” Randy Newman takes some potshots at rock stars continuing to grind it out long past their prime. The joke, of course, is that the chief target of the satire is he himself. Although the cleverness and self-awareness of the song belie the indictment, “I’m Dead” invites the suspicion that in recent years each Newman album (to paraphrase the lyric) has tended to sound like the one before – just not as good. But Randy Newman peaked much later than many of his peers from the Woodstock Nation. Never having been a hippie, he could embrace middle age without embarrassment, and in 1988, at the age of forty-five, he brought out his best collection of songs ever, the rueful, sardonic, and teasingly autobiographical Land of Dreams.

I might as well admit now that what rock snobs despise about Randy Newman is in fact true: he’s slick. Indie rockers bursting with integrity do not compose soundtracks for movies like Toy Story and Meet the Parents. Unfortunately, the facility that makes him so beloved of Hollywood producers sometimes extends to the overly finicky production of his own records. The credits alone take up more space than most bands’ lyric sheets, and if there’s a lull of about five years between albums, that’s probably because it takes that long to make each one. No doubt the background vocals (which have been known to feature members of the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac) are a little too “L.A.” sometimes, and four guitarists, two synclavier players, and five percussionists on one track may be a bit much. But if slickness means the meltingly beautiful orchestrations of “Sail Away” or “Louisiana 1927” or the mastery of American musical idioms everywhere in his work, so much the worse for roughness. Besides, anyone who has ever attended a Randy Newman concert, in which he usually performs alone, knows that his songs stand up marvelously – sometimes they’re even better – without the safety net of a large band or studio contrivance. The narrator of “My Life Is Good,” as Newman once said, sounds like even more of a jerk when he tells his horrible story through Newman’s voice and piano alone. And that voice, though its texture and diction have thickened in recent years, remains one of the most distinctive in rock or pop music. In contrast to the songs that contain them, Newman’s vocals are never pretty, but his half-spoken, grumbling delivery – “froggy,” as he might call it – makes the perfect counterpoint to the rolling euphony of the arrangements.

Reviewers like to speak of Newman’s “pianism,” which means, I think, that he’s a pretty good piano player, though he rarely makes a show of it. On occasion he has hired someone to do the job for him (again, rather like the monstrous Randy Newman alter ego in “My Life Is Good,” who pays the maid to write the song for him), but the best licks on Land of Dreams are all his. In fact, the album begins with one of the loveliest keyboard passages on any of his records, which is fitting, because the song, “Dixie Flyer,” is a reminiscence about Newman’s oddly sorted Jewish relatives in New Orleans and takes inspiration from that city’s legacy of extraordinary piano players. Probably the piano playing would have been just as elegant if the song had been set in Des Moines, but if you’re going to write a song about New Orleans, why not feature some superb New Orleans-style piano playing? Actually, the next song, “New Orleans Wins the War,” is more in the vein of traditional Dixieland swing, but both songs demonstrate Newman’s ease with styles deriving from Fats Domino to Louis Armstrong to Grandmaster Flash (though that’s a bit later on the record). “Dixie Flyer” accommodates a keening countryish guitar and a railroad shuffle on the drums, while “New Orleans Wins the War” allows for some slippery horn playing and wistful crooning. Amazingly, these musical extravagances occur in songs with a narrative content that embraces parody, comedy, nostalgia, social criticism, and family history. Neither lyric lends itself well to paraphrase or direct quotation, but how many rock and roll songs ask you to imagine (a) a Jewish family reunion in New Orleans during World War II, with the narrator’s uncles imitating but not quite achieving the relaxed boorishness of the gentiles, and (b) a postwar celebration of victory in Europe which the residents of New Orleans use as an occasion for free-form revelry and wholly misguided civic pride? . . .

Hanging with Joan Jett

2010-03-24T17:02:00.000-07:00

My first reaction to the new movie about the Runaways was, What next -- a bio-pic about the Bee Gee's discovery of disco? The behind-the-scenes drama of the making of Meatloaf's Bat Out Of Hell album? But why shouldn't the Runaways have their own movie? The fact that they were a middle-of-the-pack band, neither great nor terrible, might make the story the movie tells more interesting rather than less. I never paid much attention to the Runaways not because I disliked the music (which was pretty good trash), but because the way they were packaged -- the whole teenage jailbait "cherry bomb" thing -- was so icky. Well, since I see most rock and roll movies anyway, I'll probably see this one too and get my belated chance to leer at teenage girls. In lieu of any further musicological or cinematic analysis, I'll relate a story that my cousin and famous bass guitarist John "Rotten" Akey told me about meeting Joan Jett a few years after the Runaways:

"It was 1979 and Peter Carney and I headed over to happy hour at Lucky's Nightclub off of the main strip in Honolulu . We sat at the back bar to see the parade of girls come through ( a great vantage point in the bar). Joan Jett came in solo and sat down next to Peter and we just started talking to her. She was from Bayside or Islip out on Long Island and we commented on her NY accent. Peter told her we came down for happy hour to check out the girls and she told us that she was gay and was there for exactly the same reason. We started playing a game with her, ranking the girls 1-10 as they paraded by; it was a riot. She was really sweet and nice to hang with....."

Nice story, isn't it? But John omitted the clincher: Nobody, not even glamorous Joan, got lucky that night.

Alex Chilton

2010-03-19T18:45:00.001-07:00

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to mourn the passing of Alex Chilton, who died a few days ago of natural causes (what a relief that it wasn't another overdose) at the age of fifty nine. Roughly speaking, the rock and roll world can be divided into two camps: those who had never heard of Alex Chilton, and those who loved him because no one had ever heard of him. That might not be a good reason for appreciating him, but for those in the first camp I would say: Don't be deterred. Alex Chilton really was great, even if the Village Voice said so. Atrocious luck and a certain amount of self destruction hobbled his career; I'm familiar only with those great Box Tops singles and the first two Big Star albums, #1 Record and Radio City. Even those two wonderful albums are a bit inconsistent; on a few of the songs they rocked a little too raggedly as if too compensate for the sheer gorgeousness of the pop ballads. A quibble. I think "Thirteen," "The Ballad of El Goodo," and "September Gurls" are some of the greatest songs in the history of pop music -- simple, soulful, beautifully sung, and incredibly poignant. "Thirteen," in fact, may be the best song about adolescence I've ever heard. At any rate, I don't know of any others that summon with quite such tenderness the rapturous and simultaneous discovery of love and rock and roll in early adolescence. Alex Chilton was a wonder.

The Iron Man by Peter Townshend

2010-03-15T18:19:00.000-07:00

For a few years in the early seventies I took pride in declaring myself the most rabid Who fan in the United States, or at least southwestern Connecituct. Probably I wasn’t even close, but I liked to think that it was people exactly like me – madly sensitive late adolescent boys with a hunger for hard rock and a yearning for Meaning – for whom Peter Townshend wrote all those great songs. In the late seventies, however, the band went into a more or less permanent decline, and I had a few hundred other rock and roll bands to catch up with, not to mention some growing up to do. A decade later I had ceased to think about the Who much at all, so it was with a sense of diminished but not quite extinct curiosity that I picked up a copy of Townshend’s 1989 solo album The Iron Man. It took only the first few bars of the opening song for all my ancient Who-love to come flooding over me: the stately intro built around suspended chords, the chiming synthesizers, the drum flourishes bursting into anthemic rock with bottomlessly introspective lyrics. Ah yes, this was why I had loved that band so much!

The Iron Man is a Peter Townshend record, not a Who record, and not even the best one at that. There’s stronger material on Who Came First, Empty Glasses, and maybe even his throwaway collaboration with Ronnie Lane, Rough Mix. Although it would be fun to argue for The Iron Man as one of the forgotten masterpieces of eighties rock, it’s merely a good Pete Townshend album. Determinedly nostalgic as I am, I still think that’s a lot to say.

Although I believe The Iron Man more than holds up as a self-contained piece of music, I have further reason to be nostalgic about it. The source on which Townshend based the story – yes, it’s another Pete Townshend concept album! – was The Iron Man by Ted Hughes, which happened to be one of my son’s favorite children’s books. Hughes’s blend of horror and wonder seemed perfectly pitched to capture the imagination of a nine-year-old boy, or maybe David just got a kick out of the Iron Man gobbling all that rusting machinery. Anyway, we had fun reading it together, and although I forget the details of the plot, the sense of the Iron Man’s emblematic, stoical, patient, resilient creatureliness – much like that of the trout, foxes, and crows of Hughes’s great animal poems – has stayed with me. In the album packaging there’s a charming photo of Townshend listening respectfully to a gesticulating Hughes, still impossibly dapper in his late fifties. It’s a shame that Ted couldn’t have added a backup vocal or some secondary percussion on one or two of the songs. Both men had more than their share of anguish and despair; they deserved to rock out together.

The story, as Townshend tells it, is none too clear, but then Tommy wasn’t exactly a model of streamlined narrative either. Nonetheless, a certain thematic murkiness enhanced the mystery of that record, as it does The Iron Man. Furthermore, the credits read “Twelve Songs from the Musical” (how circumspect – it’s not an “opera” this time), which implies that the missing songs and a fully fleshed out performance would answer basic questions about character, chronology, and why the Space Dragon likes to eat babies. Has The Iron Man ever been staged? I don’t know; it would take a very clever director to pull off its matter-of-fact gigantism. Unlike other “rock” musicals, this one favors the former term over the latter; it was, after all, written by one of rock’s original tormented geniuses, a one-time drug addict and alcoholic who smashed guitars and hotel rooms, fell for an Indian guru, agonized over his responsibility to his fans, and kept turning up the volume till he went nearly deaf. These credentials, alas, cut no ice with rock snobs, for whom it all ended with The Who Sell Out, made when Townshend was all of twenty-two. Certainly The Iron Man is smoother than that record or Live at Leeds or Quadrophenia. Is that so terrible? Why shouldn’t allowances be made for children, for whom this work was in part intended? And if The Iron Man is commercially compromised (its irritating and ubiquitous synclavier programming seems a calculated sop to imagined West End or Broadway audiences), it’s a compromise that entails some of Nina Simone’s and John Lee Hooker’s most jagged vocals and a couple of really loud guitar solos.

On the record Townshend sings the role of Hogarth, the ten-year-old boy who befriends the misunderstood iron giant and in the process learns much about friendship, loyalty, compassion, and other properties of the English pastoral. The album begins, after the chiming of church bells and some lovely sound effects (The Iron Man is full of lovely sound effects) with a piercing scream from Hogarth, who wakes from a doze by the river in which he has been fishing to find himself surrounded by frightening creatures of the woods. These tutelary spirits turn out to be benign and urge him to conquer his fear, to cease crying and lying and running away. Look, it’s a children’s story – it’s not supposed to be overly subtle. Although Townshend toned down the harsher elements of Hughes’s fantasy, the record does not shy away from fear, guilt, treachery, and – in the terrifying figure of the Space Dragon (“played here by Nina Simone”), who holds the world hostage until defeated by the Iron Man – the apocalyptic. Nevertheless, the songs hit hard on the themes of courage, constancy, nature-love, and loyalty. Townshend, like Hughes, had the courage not only to risk corniness but, when necessary, to embrace it. But although these themes can never be the whole story (“A fool says / Love is foolproof,” the Woodland Creatures sadly sing), they’re a necessary part of the story, and it may be that adults require this particular tutelage even more desperately than children. Maybe that’s why I feel so transported at the finale when Townshend/Hogarth sings, “While this year is still young / You’ve got to show us that our kids are totally free / They wanna go to school, they wanna play the fool / They gotta decide on their own destiny,” and the Jay replies, “Wooooooooooh!” The large gestures and broad outlines of musical theater are perfect for the sort of expansive affirmations that Townshend wants to communicate and that make me, for a few minutes anyway, want to go out and do something nice. . . .

Musical theft

2010-03-11T18:54:00.000-08:00

I was listening to Pet Shop Boys the other day when something about "It's a Sin" (one of their very best) brought me up short. Why did this song sound so oddly familiar? Then it hit me. About half of the main melody is an almost note for note remake of Cat Stevens's "Wild World," with synthesizers, drum machines, and gay pride lyrics substituting for nylon-stringed acoustic guitars and wispy romanticism. Should I have been shocked? Actually, no. That's how things are done in pop music. Tennant and Lowe took a decent song and turned it into a terrific one through a variety of technical means, the chief of which was out and out theft. Here's another one that hit me recently: Bob Dylan's "Someday Baby," pretty nearly an exact melodic and rhythmic duplication of Muddy Waters's "Trouble No More." Anybody could make a similar list. Allusiveness is part of the point. That's why it always struck me as absurd that George Harrison lost a suit claiming that he had plagiarized the Chiffons's "He's So Fine" for the chorus of "My Sweet Lord." Of course he had! Man, who was that judge -- Antonin Scalia in his early days? Clarence Thomas before he met Anita Hill? He should have remembered something T. S. Eliot said: "The amateur poet imitates; the professional poet steals."

Only Life by the Feelies

2010-03-07T17:17:00.001-08:00

In writing this book I’ve had frequent recourse to Rock: The Rough Guide (London: Rough Guides, 1999). Apart from its great catholicity of taste (the guiding principle seems to be that if any musicians merit an entry, they merit a sympathetic one), the captions alone provide an abundance of instruction and amusement. Thus The Rough Guide on Deep Purple: “Big flares, big hair, big personalized jet. Purple shows how it was done in the 70s.” On the Eurythmics: “Dave and Annie near the end of the road, and already seeing separate hairdressers.” On the Band: “Yep – that basement.” How disappointing, then, to have my almost favorite album, The Good Earth, by my almost favorite band, the Feelies, dismissed as “indistinguishable from almost any other modest college-radio platter that year.” Nor do the last two Feelies discs – there were only four – fare much better. These nearly perfect records, according to The Rough Guide, merely “exposed the limitations of their approach.” It’s not merely that I disagree. Frankly, I’m hurt. The Rough Guide’s criticism rankles because if ever there was a band I could imagine being in, it’s the Feelies.

I choose the Feelies as my dream band because I can just barely, in my wildest fantasies, conceive of playing these chords as a second or third guitarist and adding some “oohs” and “aahs” in the harmonies. Any such fantasies about, say, Sly and the Family Stone or Radiohead lack all plausibility. I would have been kicked out of the band even before I could have become a drug addict. But the theoretical possibility that, if I had worked much harder on the guitar than I did, I could have played Horatio to Glen Mercer’s Hamlet shouldn’t be taken as backhanded criticism. Mercer, Bill Million, and their band mates might have eschewed technical complexity more out of necessity than choice, but they made fresh, luminous music out of sturdy, inexhaustible formulas – which is to say, they did what thousands of rock bands have done, but better. Unlike most of those other bands, however, they had no desire to become rock stars. And they didn’t.

I can’t regret that the Feelies broke up before they might have collaborated with the Kronos String Quartet or Wu Tan Clan. Although another reference book, All Music Guide to Rock, sounding a bit like Polonious, lists them under the categories “”College Rock, Jangle Pop, Alternative Pop/Rock, American Underground,” they were basically a drums-bass-guitar rock and roll band. They wrote catchy songs, took guitar solos, and sang about heading down the road and stuff like that. There’s a context for everything, and the Feelies’ context was the New York/New Jersey punk and new wave scene of the late seventies and early eighties. On their first album they paid obeisance to the correct forbears, but they sounded best on that record (contra every critic I’ve ever read) when they sounded less like edgy Velvet Underground disciples and more like a platonic ideal of a rock and roll band, with songs that built inexorably toward a resolution already implied in the opening bars. Not that they were generic. “Nerdy, nervous, and noisy, even decades later their droning, skittering, avant-pop remains a key touchstone of the American indie music scene,” remarks the All Music Guide to Rock (San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 2002). If we discount the adjectives “nerdy,” “nervous,” “noisy,” “droning,” and “skittering” – or, to be fair, use them advisedly – this sounds about right. Certainly the Feelies were somewhat “avant.” They needed room to experiment, and if some of their songs took too long to get going or too long to end or wasted time in the middle messing around with the percussion, Mercer and Million created moments of great beauty outside the traditional verse-chorus-bridge structure – when they weren’t creating moments of great beauty within the traditional verse-chorus-bridge structure. My favorite such example of Feelies eccentricity is the second album’s “When Company Comes,” which consists in its entirety of one chord strummed on an electric guitar to the accompaniment of a tambourine, and which I find especially moving perhaps because the only lyric I can decipher is the disconnected, mantra-like phrase, “When it’s cold outside.” Nevertheless, the Feelies evolved toward a tighter, more song-oriented approach, with less musical throat clearing and a more direct attack, which is why I prefer the last two nearly perfect albums to the first two nearly perfect albums. I’ll be talking about the third one, Only Life, partly because it seems slightly more consistent than the others but also because I like the emblematic cover photo: five Feelies standing around in New Jersey somewhere, looking like the utterly normal people they apparently were.

According to Rick Moody, who approached them about “writing a couple of sentences” for a book of his (they declined), “These were guys who happened to make really great records. Guys from the suburbs, like I was from the suburbs. They had day jobs. They were honest people. Fan worship just didn’t make sense to them.” Indeed, they were so emphatically unglamorous that I believe Million ended up working as a locksmith for Disney World in the 1990s (he needed the health benefits), and they broke up chiefly because nobody could stand the hassle of being in a rock and roll band anymore. Even in their prime the Feelies were hardly a rock and roll juggernaut. They were dormant for several years after the release of their first album, toured very sporadically, and much to the consternation of their record company, refused to release singles or allow the manufacture of Feelies Tee-shirts – which explains why I don’t have one. They can nevertheless be seen as the high school reunion band in Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild (1987), that monument to liberal piety in which all the black people are (one) earthy, trash-talking saints and (two) subservient to the whites. It can only be regarded as tragic that the Feelies documentary or semi-documentary that Demme had originally envisioned never got made. . . .

Stephen Goes Country

2010-03-01T18:45:00.001-08:00

Lately I've been listening to some country music (Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams, Roseanne Cash, Steve Earle) and though I know approximately as much about it as I do about nuclear physics, I'm nonetheless struck by how much stronger the songwriting seems to be than the songwriting in current rock and roll. Why is that? Well, it may be, or course, that I simply don't know what I'm talking about. Granted. But I also think there's a lack of self-consciousness in the country music tradition that allows its practitioners to keep honing their craft for a lifetime without having to prove how up-to-the-minute and innovative they are. Let's face it, it can't be easy to be David Byrne, endlessly seeking to outdo his previous experiments in world music. Whereas Lucinda Williams can just plug into formulas that have been used a million times before and -- because she happens to be a brilliant and intensely literate songwriter who knows how to make the formulas sound utterly personal and true -- everybody's happy. You don't hear Lucinda complaining about the limitations of the form, it's not Roseanne Cash who burdens us with concept albums scored for string quartets (though, come to think of it, Emmylou Harris's Wrecking Ball, my very favorite quasi-country album, is quite thoroughly experimental). Does the relative conservatism of country music paradoxically allow for a personal expressiveness harder to attain in the ostensibly more open-ended precincts of progressive rock and roll? I don't know. I just know that the songs that have really got to me lately -- "Metal Firecracker" or "God Is in the Roses" or "The World Unseen"-- are by people like Lucinda Williams and Roseanne Cash, not David Byrne or Peter Gabriel.

Fans by Malcolm McLaren

2010-02-26T17:21:00.001-08:00

I have no idea whether Malcolm McLaren, former manager of the Sex Pistols and occasional recording artist, is, as his protégé John Lydon has steadfastly maintained, evil. Certainly McLaren seems unctuous enough in the many interviews in which he portrays himself as the Diaghilev of punk. Yet I have reason to be grateful to Malcolm McLaren, not only for his disputed role in the formation of that extraordinary collective of musical delinquents, but for his undisputed role in awakening me to the glory of grand opera.

It happened like this. One day in the mid-eighties I was half listening to an innocuous pop ballad on the radio when there arose from the drum machines and synthesizers a surging female voice unlike any I had ever heard – or at least paid attention to – before. And as the aria, which turned out to be “Un bel di” from Madam Butterfly, floated over me, my only thought was, How can anything be so beautiful? I wish I could say that from that moment I became a passionate convert to all things operatic, but in fact I went on listening to rock and roll and even now have got around to only eight or nine works in the operatic repertory. Yet one of those works is Madam Butterfly, and if on the radio that day I hadn’t heard Malcolm McLaren’s gleefully debased six-minute version – identified by the disc jockey as the first of six reworkings of Puccini on an album by McLaren called Fans – I might never have known grand opera at all. Although I no longer need to listen to opera with the electric guitars, drum tracks, and pop vocal choruses so helpfully provided by McLaren, I occasionally go back to Fans to marvel at its audacious and bizarrely sympathetic settings of some of Puccini’s most sumptuous music.

If it seems odd that one of my favorite records was made by someone who couldn’t sing or play an instrument, that’s as nothing compared to the oddness of the music, a collage of opera, soul, hip-hop, electro pop, and spoken narrative that ought to collapse from its internal contradictions and, who knows, maybe even does. Being a concept artist, McLaren didn’t have to worry overmuch about the music; other people, mostly uncredited, could take care of that. But just because most concept art is pretentious crap (McLaren’s own forays into gallery and museum art being an excellent case in point), that doesn’t mean all of it is. Fans survives McLaren’s brazen talentlessness because the concept animating it is truly interesting and because McLaren was smart enough to hire accomplished musicians to execute the concept – even if scarcely any of those musicians, aside from the producer Robbie Kilgore (clearly the guy who made the whole thing work), were identified anywhere on the album packaging. Furthermore, McLaren already had some experience mixing radically different musical modes into high-concept bricolage. His Duck Rock (1983), which transposed hip-hop scratching over world music sampling and old-fashioned folk songs, had paved the way for the more daring juxtapositions of Fans a year earlier. Actually, some people consider Duck Rock, which my reliable Rough Guide to Rock calls “the first postmodern record,” more daring than Fans. But it doesn’t have Puccini.

“Madam Butterfly (Un Bel di Vedremo),” as the first album track is called, begins with a synthesized vocal frequency on one note followed by the industrial clacking of a drum machine. A “Japanese” theme is then introduced on another synthesizer, followed by an “American” theme played on an old-fashioned cowboy harmonica: four genres in about thirty seconds. It gets even weirder when McLaren, in his Englishman’s attempt at the flat American intonation of Lt. Col. Pinterton, starts reciting a Classics Comics version of Butterfly’s “tale of woe.” At “Take it away, Cho-Cho,” the unidentified soprano at last enters and transforms all that trash into Pucciniesque sublimity. Of course, the trash is pretty nearly sublime too – and I haven’t even mentioned the second, pop Butterly (“My white honky, I do miss him . . . . Someday soon he’ll come around / Just to stop my nervous breakdown”) or the popping bass that nearly engulfs the rhythm as the song goes on. Maybe Butterfly’s aria sounds so wonderful set against McLaren’s shameless vulgarity because Puccini, no purist himself, was hardly one to disdain crowd-pleasing effects. When years ago I first read the plot summaries in Kobbé’s Complete Opera Book, I was amazed at the sheer garishness of it all: haughty aristocrats, innocent virgins, vengeful humpbacks, gibbering madwomen. This was the lofty art form the ignorance of which was supposed to make me feel abashed? I had seen heavy metal acts with more decorum than Lucia de Lammermoor. Admittedly, the librettist rather than the composer tended to supply the necessary vulgarity, but if Mozart, Verdi, and Puccini were comfortable with accomplished hackwork, why shouldn’t Malcolm McLaren be? . . .

Remembering Bob Shatkin

2010-02-21T20:20:00.001-08:00

Most people knew Bob Shatkin, who died suddenly of an aneurysm in 2001, as a patriarch of the New York blues scene and as a legendary teacher of harmonica at the New School. I knew him as my boss. We worked together in the Language and Literature Department of the Brooklyn Public Library for four or five years in the nineties. It was a bit unusual to revise this month's or that month's book order budget with a supervisor who had played with "Muddy" and "Wolf." And who was incredibly smart, funny, streetwise, and the best raconteur I've ever known. For example: once during my twice annual service review, when Bob and a second supervisor were going over my "works well with others" thing, Bob was conscientiously describing my strengths and weaknesses as a reference librarian when he began shoveling invisible shit, as if to say: Well, yes, I take my professional responsibilities seriously but maybe not that seriously. But really he shoveled the shit just to put me at my ease. Or again, how many librarians begin their day, before the doors open to the public, with their boss pulling out a harp from his pocket and demonstrating for them a perfectly executed railroad shuffle or a little sample of Sonny Boy Williamson? For all his brilliance (and occasional gruffness), Bob was an extremely modest man. I have a tape of some of his performances, one of which is a slow blues that turns into a smoldering duet between Bob and a female singer (whose name I wish I knew) until Bob takes it away with a second overdubbed harp at the close. It's a astounding. And what did Bob have to say? "Ah, you know, it's just a jingle -- could have been a Coke commercial," or words to that effect. I can't help but feel a bit disappointed that in the end Bob turned away from performing and abandoned the history of blues harmonica that the University of Mississippi Press had contracted him to write. What a book that would have been! Emerson said of Thoreau, "I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. Wanting this, instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party." Bob could have done much more with his music and his scholarship, but I guess he just preferred to be happy, spending his last years researching paleontology (about which he was ferociously well informed) and going home each day to his lovely girlfriend Judy. Well, I miss him, the gray-beard wild man at the reference desk with his ponytail and shining earring and loud Hawaiian shirts. Once I asked him about an article in Rolling Stone I had read years before about the J. Geils Band. (He knew Magic Dick, of course, and Peter Wolf and Mike Bloomfield and Kim Wilson and seemingly everybody else.) The author quoted Muddy Waters saying of Magic Dick, "If he eat pussy like he play harp, he a motherfucker." I always wondered about the authenticity of that line, but before I could finish the sentence Bob cut me off. "Never!" he said. "Muddy never talked like that. He was kingly."

Hatful of Hollow by the Smiths

2010-02-16T16:36:00.000-08:00

Another concert: At a West Side pier in 1986 an English band called the Smiths are playing songs from their just released third album to an audience that includes large numbers of young women clamoring for the lead singer, a tall, thin, glamorous youth with 1950s sideburns and a ducktail haircut who calls himself “Morrissey.” Unlike the members of the Ramones, whom I had seen from up close on the same stage earlier that summer, Morrissey seems noticeably less interested in the girls than they in him. Although in interviews he professes to be “celibate,” his sexual orientation can’t be much of a mystery to anyone not blinded by infatuation. Morrissey’s feelings about his sexuality are, of course, no one’s business but his own, except that he has been singing about them for the millions for almost three decades. Fortunately for the millions, he has made great lyric capital out of his erotic confusions, and the appeal of his tortuously introspective and mordantly funny lyrics is not only to romantic young women who may or may not have the wrong idea about him, but to madly sensitive souls of both genders and all sexual orientations. Certainly at the concert that night there were plenty of straight men for whom a good wallow in post-adolescent angst was best experienced while pogo dancing furiously to a loud rock and roll band. I still remember Morrissey getting all of us to sing with him:

It’s so easy to laugh, it’s so easy to hate

It takes guts to be gentle and kind

The courageous banality of these sentiments didn’t stop us from angrily jostling with each other on the way to the exits when the concert was over, but to get ten thousand drunk, stoned, and horny rock and roll fans to sing in unison about the necessity of gentleness and kindness – within the context of a song that imagines the languorous, self-pitying rapture of being buried alive, combined with an unusually morbid mother fixation – was an accomplishment perhaps unprecedented within the annals of arena rock.

A year later I had a ticket to see the Smiths at Radio City Music Hall, but the concert was canceled when Morrissey contracted laryngitis, or so it was given out. I never had another chance, because the band broke up soon afterwards. The Smiths didn’t last very long: four proper albums in five years, with some post-break-up compilations issued thereafter. Morrissey has gone on to foster a sizable cult following with a series of uneven but essential solo albums, while his talented band mates – Johnny Marr, guitars, Andy Rourke, the bass guitar, Mike Joyce, the drums (to use the band’s preferred nomenclature) – have blended into various nooks and crannies of the music industry. Though I wouldn’t want to live without “Every Day Is Like Sunday,” “The National Front Disco,” “Reader Meets Author,” and other jewels from Morrissey’s solo career, I’m not alone in preferring Smiths albums to Morrissey ones. His songwriting has actually improved; but his collaborators haven’t.

There is a book called Morrissey and Marr: The Severed Alliance, the title of which seems a rather grand way of describing a typical rock and roll breakup involving the pressures of stardom and differences of musical opinion. (My God, what would the author have made of Nietzsche and Wagner?) But it remains true that Morrissey has never found a compositional partner quite so compatible as Johnny Marr. Like his guitar playing, Marr’s songwriting was notable for its ringing, lyrical clarity and absence of bombast. In fact, I dislike the Smiths’ most famous song, “How Soon Is Now,” precisely because its ponderous droning is so atypical, though the lyrics are, as usual, pretty funny (“I am the son and heir / of a shyness that is criminally vulgar”). The clean, uncluttered craftsmanship of the Smiths’ music, with its hints of rockabilly, English music hall, and the New York Dolls, distinguished it from the muddier English synth and goth rock of its era. To me, the Smiths still sound incredibly fresh – like the early Beatles, but with better song titles: “William, It Was Really Nothing,” “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” “Barbarism Begins at Home,” “Frankly, Mr. Shankley,” “Girlfriend in a Coma.”

The first two of those titles come from Hatful of Hollow, my favorite Smiths album, though not, technically, one of the four “proper” ones. Basically it consists of slightly different versions of most of the songs from the first album, The Smiths, with a few singles left off that record. I prefer it to the eponymous album mostly because of its sharper production values and bright, trebly sound – just right for a melody-based English new wave band after the Strum und Drang of punk. . . .

Hope I Die Before I Get Old

2010-02-11T17:25:00.000-08:00

It goes without saying that for rock snobs such exhibitions as the Who gave at the Super Bowl on Sunday are in exceedingly bad taste. Townshend and Daltrey gave offense not for playing badly (or well -- I didn't see the show, so I can't say) but for playing at all. Beyond a certain age rockers are supposed to stay at home nursing memories and reuniting only for their grandchildren's birthday parties. How dare they offend the purist sensibilities of the connoisseurs, for whom Quadrophenia and Exile on Main Street are canonical masterworks not to be sullied by association with the doddering senior citizens that Townshend, Daltrey, Jagger, and Richard have become? Well, look, I'm not much interested in seeing the Who or the Rolling Stones in their present incarnations, and it has been decades since either band has produced anything like a great record. But, uh, what the fuck? Why shouldn't they get out there and play? They're musicians; they have to. So they don't write good songs anymore. What's wrong with being a live act? Millions of people love seeing them perform, and they obviously love performing. Something is working for somebody. It's like Picasso saying he had never seen a bad painting. For him the mere fact that someone would put his soul out there on a canvass, however badly executed, touched him and moved him in the same way that I'm touched and moved by fat, old, bald, half-deaf rock stars playing their songs of forty years ago. They don't have to be any good anymore. It's still beautiful.

The B-52's

2010-02-08T18:48:00.001-08:00

Playing épater le bohème is easy when some of the most treasured records in your collection include Every Picture Tells a Story by Rod Stewart, Eat a Peach by the Allman Brothers Band, and the two volumes of Gordon Lightfoot’s greatest hits. But sometimes le bohème get it right: the Jam really were more interesting than Jefferson Starship. Regrettably, I must now pass over such middlebrow masterpieces of the early and mid seventies as Stage Fright by the Band, Pendulum by Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Veedon Fleece by Van Morrison to catch up with some more socially acceptable records of the punk and new wave era. Were the Sex Pistols really that good? Almost. And yet, as I’ve previously implied, you’re welcome to my Dead Boys records if you really want them. Apart from its greater musical interest, I’ve always inclined more to the quirky, art school sensibility of new wave than to the exciting but circumscribing aggression of pure punk. As much as I love the Pistols and the Clash, I guess I’ll never be tough enough, because I love Talking Heads and Devo more.

Though perhaps less powerful, subversive, and culturally significant than its forbear, new wave differed from punk in one further regard: it was more fun. Not that punk was pleasureless; it just took itself a little too seriously. (The Clash, you might remember, issued “communiqués” in the manner of totalitarian leftist regimes.) This great epiphany came to me one hot summer night in 1980 while watching the B-52’s perform at the old Wolman Rink in Central Park. A cult band on the verge of mainstream success, the B-52’s attracted a somewhat more inclusive audience than the usual bunch of ignorant young white people, like me. That night the last section of the bleachers was occupied by a great many black people – all, apparently, gay – who sang along with the band loudly enough to drown out a good part of the P.A. system. This group sing-along might have been irritating if it hadn’t been so infectious. Speaking for myself, I think I can say that I know what it feels like – at least in spirit – to be a gay African American seriously boogying with a huge crowd of friends at a B-52’s concert.

The folks in the bleachers hadn’t yet learned the songs from Wild Planet, the band’s newly released second album. Too bad; I would have loved to hear their vocal contributions to “Devil in My Car” and “Private Idaho.” However, they knew every line of every song from the band’s eponymous first album, not to mention the correct order of all the outlandish names in “52 Girls”; as do I. The B-52’s is a profoundly, almost defiantly silly record. I suppose a case can be made for it as a challenge to mainstream authority, as an affirmation of outsider identity through a camp sensibility not especially welcome within the narrowly heterosexual confines of rock and roll. Camp, which delights in turning accepted values upside down, is a rich field of critical inquiry, but in her seminal essay on the subject (“Notes on Camp”) Susan Sontag missed one important point: you can dance to it.

Perhaps I’m too intransigently heterosexual to appreciate camp fully; I’d rather have a gay friend tell me about a Joan Crawford movie than have to see one myself. And though the B-52’s version of camp has the great advantage of being set to a rock and roll beat, even they sometimes decline into the broad and winking obviousness (“Quiche Lorraine,” “Jelly Bean”) that can make camp seem so tiresome to straights like me. It’s only when the songs fail musically that they don’t seem funny. When the B-52’s hit a groove, even their dumbest lyrics sound clever; music this funky tends to undermine critical objectivity. My unobjective take on their first album is that while it may not be everyone’s cup of tea, only a very wicked person could truly dislike it. . . .

Through Being Cool

2010-02-03T18:24:00.001-08:00

Everybody wants to be cool, and in rock and roll coolness occupies a place roughly analogous to, say, the love that passeth understanding in Christian theology. But in any coherent system of ethics, coolness has to rank a bit below charity, altruism, and other Sunday-school virtues. In fact, while it's all very well to be cool when you're young and goodlooking and brimming with contempt for your elders, coolness is in fact the antithesis of everything that most matters in life, namely, love, patience, kindness, vulnerability, and stuff like that. There's a great scene in Cameron Crowe's (very uncool) Almost Famous in which Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs explains to Crowe's young alter-ego that he (Bangs) stays at home on Saturday nights writing criticism rather than hanging out with rock stars because in fact he's not cool at all. That's what makes him a good rock critic. And if that example doesn't persuade, consider the cases of Bruce Springsteen and U2. Why are they still so incredibly popular after so many years? Clearly, it's not just the music. People love them so fervently because, unlike most of their peers, Springsteen, Bono, and the Edge are sincere, honest, idealistic, and unironic -- in a word, totally uncool.

Talking Heads: 77

2010-01-31T17:44:00.000-08:00

I first saw a copy of Talking Heads: 77 on the coffee table of a fellow graduate student’s apartment in Morningside Heights in 1979. (I was living in a squalid dormitory on 110th Street, so the place must have belonged to a friend of a friend in a department with more cachet than library science.) The plain red cover was meant to be noticed, as were the book by Claude Lévi-Strauss and the copy of the New York Review of Books lying beside it. There might even have been a poster of Tuscany on the wall and maybe that Saul Steinberg print of Manhattan as the geographic epicenter of the world. Under such unpromising circumstances, one wouldn’t expect the record on the coffee table to be any good, but as all the world knows, Talking Heads: 77 is a brilliant and seminal piece of music. It would have been a great record even if the band members on the jacket photo hadn’t looked like my friends and me – politely pretentious Columbia students with moderately long hair and sensible shirts. But appearances count.

Although it was gratifying to see an image of what I wanted to look like on the back of an album cover, the group photo wouldn’t have held my attention for long if Talking Heads hadn’t been a great rock and roll band. The preppie look was significant only insofar as it implied a manner of having it both ways. Talking Heads had apparently found a way of combining art world sophistication and rock accessibility that avoided the preciousness of the former and the vulgarity of the latter. Hence the sense that the band represented something entirely new in rock and roll – they didn’t, but you could be forgiven for thinking so. In fact, Talking Heads sounded much like a thousand other bands. They had a more inventive rhythm section, scratchier guitar playing, weirder vocals, and much more interesting compositions, but their music still had a beat, you could still dance to it – which is why it made perfect sense for them to appear, unashamedly, on Dick Clark’s honorably corny TV show, American Bandstand. In those early days, two things, apart from the clarity and precision of their music, set them apart : one, they dispensed with the mythological, larger-than-life trappings of rock stardom; and, two, boy were they ironic.

Although Talking Heads had no doubt seen and perhaps contributed to their share of excess as one of the original New York punk/new wave bands, it was hard to imagine them shooting up in the bathroom at CBGB. Everyone knew that the four members had come from Harvard and the Rhode Island School of Design, and although it was hard to say what a graduate of RISDI was supposed to look like, somehow David Byrne seemed to exemplify the type. A band formed at an advanced art school was unlikely to take its image for granted. Although it began as real stage fright, the stiff, twitching stage presence that Byrne developed ended up subverting the strutting posturings of people like Mick Jagger, who were beginning to seem awfully tiresome in the late seventies. Even when they became hugely successful within a couple of years, Talking Head managed to remain anti-mythological rock stars. How they transformed themselves so rapidly into the fantastically complex, multi-instrumental, world music ensemble of Remain in Light is beyond my comprehension. I think that record is one of the most intricate and astounding pieces of experimental music ever made in America, but I’m more comfy with the four-piece, smart-ass rock and roll band of Talking Heads: 77.

Talking Heads were so famously ironic that, to use the old joke, when you looked up the word in the dictionary you half expected to see their picture. Talk about irony – this band was so ironic they made Oscar Wilde look like Rodney Dangerfield! But seriously, folks. Apart from using “words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning” (American Heritage Dictionary, def. 1.a), Talking Heads used irony to suggest realities and complexities that the language of contemporary discourse and mass media could only simplify and distort. To the extent that this sort of irony implicitly recognized a human complexity maddeningly out of reach of debased forms of communication, I was all for it. To the extent that it was just smart-ass, art-school cleverness, I kinda liked it too. . . .

In Praise of Vulgarity

2010-01-26T17:08:00.000-08:00

He dresses in flounces and furbelows of purple. He eschews a surname. He writhes in black bikini panties in a bed onstage. He writes lyrics like "I Would Die 4 U" and "I met her in a hotel lobby masturbating to a magazine." He bats his doe eyelashes in movies of unprecedented inanity. He is arguably the greatest pop musician of his era. Whatever else can be said about Prince (or The Artist Formerly Known As Prince or Formerly or TAFKAP or Glyph), he sure is vulgar. Even in his more subdued middle age, where I've tended to lose track of him, he remains as determinedly narcisisstic as ever. Does it matter? I mean, does Prince's breathtaking vulgarity -- which is not a parody of vulgarity or or an ironic "take" on vulgarity but the veritable Ding an sich -- get in the way of his musical talent, which is so enormous that I'm simply going to take it as a given? Well, a little. Speaking for myself, I think I would connect with Prince slightly more if not for the aggressive stupidity of his lyrics and the puerility of his persona. Maybe another way of putting it is that I just feel silly listening to his songs sometimes. But the music! It's not merely that his brilliant compositional and instrumental skills overshadow his vulgarity but that his brilliant compositional and instrumental skills in large part derive from his vulgarity. Vulgarity (not to mention genius and hard work) is the indispensable wellspring of his energy and creativity. Yeah, I'd feel a little more comfortable without the bikini panties and such, but it's rock and roll; you don't get to choose.

In Praise of Pretentiousness

2010-01-24T12:34:00.001-08:00

I remember reading an interview years ago in which Woody Allen whined about the "pretentiousness" of rock music, and Pauline Kael aptly retorted, "So jazz isn't?" What is pretentiousness anyway? Well, one definition of "pretention" in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is "An intention; an aspiration." And here's my definition: "failed ambition." Which is to say that there are far worse failings than pretentiousness. Furthermore, the Woody Allen school of thought, which allows for a certain pretentiousness in film, literature, and art but never ever in mere rock and roll music is simply blind bigotry. Take David Byrne, pictured in his "Big Suit" period at left. Isn't he pretentious? You bet. But it's partly his pretentiousness that gave us Remain in Light, Fear of Music, and those other amazing Talking Heads records. If those records had been wholly pretentious we'd never listen to them. But they happen to be masterpieces, in my opinion, because Byrne's art school ambitiousness, his conceptual cleverness -- in short, what people like Woody Allen would call his pretentiousness -- succeeded. When the pretentiousness failed, as it sometimes did with the Heads, you're left with a certain smugness, an unearned superiority, a sense of self-congratulation in music for a coterie. So no, I don't like that stuff either. But the idea that rock and roll is too primitive or corrupt to be anything other than pretentious when it aspires to more than rocking the house is a piece of condescending snobbery that should not be tolerated. From the Beatles to Bjork rock and roll has proved again and again that it is capable of effects and feelings quite equal to that in most contemporary art forms and far beyond that of, say, a typical Woody Allen movie.

Jonathan Sings! by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers

2010-01-20T18:03:00.000-08:00

“Any punks here?” Jonathan Richman asked the crowd one night at the Bottom Line in New York around 1982. And then the punch line, after the expected roars of affirmation: “Disappointed, aren’t you?” Apart from being disarmingly funny and slightly barbed, like many of his songs in fact, the remark resonated for me on a broader level. Didn’t punk rock ever so slightly disappoint our hopes? I still think the punk and new wave period from 1976 to about 1984 constituted a Golden Age, but I can’t believe I ever thought the Dead Boys were any good. Maybe punk was rock’s version of the God That Failed. If you strip away the social and political trappings that attach to it, you’re left in many cases with some desperately impoverished music. Perhaps I’ve seen too many documentary films in which music journalists and former punks claim once again that for a few years they and only they had the world by the balls. Jonathan Richman has spent an entire career arguing implicitly against that claim. Jonathan Sings!, the album he was promoting that night at the Bottom Line, is, by the standards he helped to establish with his first and only punk record, an abomination. In Lipstick Traces Greil Marcus makes much of the “shamanistic incantation” of “Roadrunner,” Richman’s influential proto-punk anthem of the mid-seventies. It’s hard to imagine Marcus having anything to say about “That Summer Feeling” or “You’re the One for Me” or any of the other mild, lovely, loopy songs from Jonathan Sings! Nothing very transgressive or subversive here: but the music is better.

Although I regard with some skepticism the more inflated claims for punk as a radical insurrectionary force (after all, stoned teenagers and post-adolescent musicians can carry a revolution only so far), some of the best punk is authentically disturbing. The horror and disgust summoned by the Sex Pistols in “Holiday in the Sun” and “Bodies” lodge themselves into the consciousness like a nightmarish sequence from a depraved Pasolini film, and like a Pasolini film, those songs have the ghastly authority of modern European history on their side. Punks loved Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers’ eponymous debut album for its jagged alienation and extremely unpolished performances, but even in the most naively revealing and psychologically fractured songs – “Hospital,” “She Cracked,” “Girl Friend” – cheerfulness kept breaking in. As a teenager in suburban Boston, Richman had been overwhelmed by the taboo shattering of the Velvet Underground, but writing paeans to heroin addiction and sadomasochism was not his style. The Modern Lovers is a great record, not least because of its discomfiting mix of anger and sheer need, but the punks seemed not to have noticed that Jonathan didn’t take drugs (“I’m Straight”), was passionately monogamous (“Someone I Care About”), and rather liked the world he lived in (“Modern World”). If, however, punk can be defined as a music of primal simplicity played very loudly on a few amplified instruments, The Modern Lovers was about as punk as it got.

It’s tempting to argue that the later Richman records are punk in spirit if not in form. But no, Jonathan Sings!, Jonathan Goes Country, and Jonathan, Te Vas a Emocionar! are a long way from “Anarchy in the U.K.” and “White Riot.” Richman’s outrageously off pitch, unrehearsed vocals remain the most jarring element of his style, but even the Clash got fed up with punk and needed to make a music beyond what the confines of maximum volume and three chords could give them. For many years Richman pointedly refused to perform “Roadrunner,” even when aggrieved former punks drunkenly insisted on it, as happened that night at the Bottom Line. He gave them “Here Come the Martian Martians” instead.

Some fans never forgave Richman for his infuriating comment that “music that would hurt a baby’s ears sucks.” That might have been taking the anti-punk esthetic a little too far, but I remember another comment he made in an obscure music magazine in the early eighties: “acoustic music is the rockingest music around.” He cited as an example “Loco- Motion,” which is pretty hard to argue with, but maybe an even better example is his own “Give Paris One More Chance,” from side two of Jonathan Sings! This song accomplishes the nearly impossible feat of making me almost like French cabaret music, and it does so by invoking Piaf, Aznavour, and Chevalier in a song that rocks as hard as “Brown Sugar” without the electric guitars and Charlie Watts. . . .

"How I Write My Songs" by Donald Barthelme

2010-01-15T13:01:00.000-08:00

Well, OK, maybe "Conversations with the Sea" isn't the work of genius I once thought it was. To atone for any overly indulgent estimation of my youthful talent, I hereby present a chunk of a genuinely brilliant satire on pop music, Donald Barthelme's "How I Write My Songs," most readily found in his Sixty Stories. I've always suspected that Barthelme got the idea from those inane first-person accounts of "my success" in Songwriter's Market or Writer's Market. It's a pity Barthelme isn't much read anymore. I suppose his talent was a fairly narrow one, and I myself am no longer much drawn to the sort of cerebral metafiction he practiced. But he certainly made you think twice about language and its commodifications and he was, to use a much overworked term, truly subversive. Never mind all this pomo vaporizing. I love "How I Write My Songs" because when I used to read it to my ten-year-old son he howled with laughter. Here's the part that David thought was so funny, the narrator's citation of one of his own personal favorites as an instance of how-it-should-be-done:

I'm just an ordinary mane

Da da da da da

Whomp, Whomp

Just an ordinary mane

Da da da da da

Whomp, whomp

Ain't nothin' but a mane

Da da da da da

Whomp, whomp

I'm a grizzly man

Da da da da da

Whomp, whomp

I'm a hello-goodbye mane

Da da da da da
Whomp, Whomp
I'm a ramblin'-gamblin' mane
Da da da da da
Whomp, Whomp
I'm a mane's man
Da da da da da
Whomp, Whomp
I'm a woeman's mane
Da da da da da
Whomp, Whomp
I'm an upstairs-downstairs mane
Da da da da da
Whomp, Whomp
I'm a today-and-tomorrow mane
Da da da da da
Whomp, Whomp
I'm a freeway mane
Da da da da da
Whomp, Whomp

Conversations with the Sea

2010-01-10T17:57:00.001-08:00

The following piece of juvenilia (I wrote it when I was about 32) is a satire from the 80s suggested by some of the more inflated pretensions of Prince, Sting, the Edge, Patti Smith, and their contemporaries. No doubt it's dated, and unlike some of the other satirical pieces I wrote at the time, such as a mock-solemn explication of gynecological imagery in Shakespeare, which really was funny, I make no claims for this bagatelle. And yet if even something this slight allows us momentarily to laugh not only at ourselves but -- more importantly -- at others, I'll consider myself abundantly justified.

The Sea looks out at the sea. He says: "Yes." Then: "This is the sound I want on my guitar: the waves, the gulls. I'm not a superstar, I'm not some sort of demi-God. Well, actually, I am, but I think of myself as merely a vessel. Sort of like Michelangelo, you know?" He speaks of Jung: "The idea of synchronicity: very intense, very powerful. The anima. The archetypes. I mean, what do you think 'Road Hog' is really about? It's all about the collective unconscious, man. That's what I do."

Much later, after another show, the Sea is drained. "My substance has gone out to them," he says. "And yet I get something back. We touch. There's something very primal, very sexual about being on stage. It's not the adulation, the groupies, the drugs, the money -- I can deal with those things. It's really about communion, communication. Why do they love me so much? Because I'm just like them -- only better."

Influences? The Sea mentions Rimbaud, William S. Burroughs, Paul Revere and the Raiders. "Rimbaud especially. Very heavy cat. The great thing is, I don't have to read him. He's just there, you know. Guiding me. Hey, do you think that's where Sylvester Stallone got the idea?"

The Sea settles in behind his desk at Kapital Records. "They like me," he says, gesturing to the corporate boardroom behind him. "Good facilities here: MIDI, digital sampling, all the rest. I'm directing my own videos too. 'Nuclear Parade': very surreal, very Wellesian. Girls in string bikinis and stuff but not sleazy. It's a Statement."

Behind this same desk the Sea has placed numerous phone calls to other musicians and friends to enlist their support for the 'Reachin' for a Dream' tour. The idea, he explains, is simple. "You get a dozen of the biggest acts in music, you have them play fifteen-minute sets at huge venues, you sell tee shirts, you sign petitions for peace. I headline." Ever the hard-headed visionary, the Sea drives a tough bargain to save lives. "The purpose of the 'Reachin' for a Dream' tour is to end world hunger, free all political prisoners, and stop armed conflict. Hey, we can do it. We've already raised enough to cover expenses. Nearly. The word is out."

Memories, dreams, reflections. The Sea returns to his source, the sea. It is the afternoon following another grueling show. He tosses a stone into the water. "I don't deny the past," he says. "Four years ago I was just another rock and roll kid from New Jersey. Can I help it if I've been given these astounding gifts? God just likes me. This is where he talks to me." The Sea touches his hand to a receding wave. A lyric forms at his lips:

This is the song of existence, yea

The song of you and I

This is the song of resistance, yea

Let's rock and roll tonight.

The Roches

2010-01-07T17:24:00.000-08:00

Although The Roches, the first album by the trio by that name, belongs, technically, to folk music rather than to rock and roll, it takes more from rock’s insouciance than from folk’s earnestness. Furthermore, it was produced, “in audio verité,” by Robert Fripp, legendary art rocker, hipster, and guitarist of extraordinary accomplishment and pretension. But even if the Roches had lacked the downtown trappings that made them fashionable for a little while in the late seventies and early eighties, their debut album would still be a masterpiece. My definition of rock and roll is pretty elastic, and in this case it’s going to make room for three sisters with lovely voices plucking acoustic guitars and singing about their lives.

Who were the Roches? Well, to summarize the album’s opener, “We,” they came from deepest New Jersey, lived in New York City, didn’t give out their ages or their phone numbers, and had been a singing group for ten years – an exaggeration, but Maggie and Terre had already made an album as a duo before Suzzy joined to form a trio. As “a point of interest,” they spelled their last name R-O-C-H-E, with the last sung “E” of the orthography (I think – such is the musical authority of Your Author) corresponding with the “E” of the musical scale. There were some who considered “We” and indeed the entire act too clever by half. Would they have preferred dullness? Wit of this sort, even if bordering on preciousness, is hardly ubiquitous, and when at the song’s finale the sisters repeat the verses in counterpoint at a maniacally accelerated tempo played as a bizarre polka on a lone guitar, you’d have to be Matthew Arnold (or maybe Lester Bangs – they had a lot in common) to object. The girls seem to be making a point here: You think the lyrics are clever? Check out the arrangement.

Delightfully off-kilter as “We” is (the song, not the pronoun), it hardly prepares the listener for what comes next: four minutes of overwhelming pathos and beauty known as “Hammond Song.” Jean-Luc Godard once said that the only proper way to criticize a movie is to make another one, but since I lack the talent to compose music in answer to “Hammond Song,” I will merely say that the intertwining of the three voices – from the highest soprano (Terre) to the lowest contralto (Maggie), must be heard to be believed, and that Fripp’s electric guitar solos – emerging from and echoing the swooping vocal phrases in an apotheosis of electronic legato – similarly defy ordinary comprehension. But just because I can’t understand how one song can be so beautiful, that doesn’t mean the Roches worked by happy inspiration. One of the striking things about their music is its radically unspontaneous intricacy. This is not the art that conceals art; hence the joke I observed one night at a performance in the 1980s when Suzzy absently drummed on the microphone stand during the most daunting passage of their a cappella rendition of Handel’s “The Hallelujah Chorus.” Marveling at the sheer effortfulness of the harmonies is what you’re supposed to do. . . .

It's So Hard Being Van the Man

2010-01-03T16:34:00.000-08:00

Surely one of the great songwriting catalogs in rock and roll music belongs to Van Morrison. From "Gloria" to "Linden Arden Stole the Highlights" he has composed more beautiful songs in more idioms (sometimes folksy, sometimes visionary, always Van) than all but a handful of the very greatest of his peers. And yet any appraisal of this extraordinary body of work would be incomplete without some consideration of a genre unique to him: the it's-so-hard-being-Van-the-Man song. Now, I have no doubt that being a rich and famous rock star can sometimes be a real pain in the ass. It can, in fact, be quite lethal. Think of Kurt Cobain and all those other brilliant musicians who, unlike Van, didn't grow old and fat and bald. It is entirely to Morrison's credit that he survived the fatal traps to become rock's grouchiest curmedgeon. The problem with songs like "Why Must I Always Explain," "New Biography," or "It Once Was My Life" is that instead of using the insanity of rock stardom and the music business to reflect on the illness of celebrity culture or the contagion of greed, he just bitches. "I go out and stare at the world in complete disbelief," he sings in "Why Must I Always Explain," without realizing that maybe a few people are staring at him in complete disbelief. Elsewhere in the same song he bemoans "Always telling people things they're too lazy to know," the people in this case being his fans, that is to say, you and me. Such petulance! But here's the thing: I love it! "Why Must I Always Explain" is a magnificent song, and if it doesn't cast its songwriter in the most favorable light, its passion and soulfulness and musicality are wholly persuasive. What the hell -- it's Van Morrison. He can piss and moan as much as he wants. He may not realize how silly it makes him look sometimes, but he has earned it.

Easter by the Patti Smith Group

2009-12-30T17:20:00.000-08:00

I’ve always thought that Patti Smith offered a profound test in the appreciation of rock aesthetics. On the old Saturday Night Live Gilda Radner used to mock her as a hopelessly pretentious, untalented bohemian blowhard, and she was right about the pretentiousness. Yes, Patti Smith was more than a little ridiculous – the humorlessness, the oracular posturings, the stream of consciousness rantings – but such was the price paid for the sort of Dionysian exaltation she regularly sought and sometimes attained. Much of the best rock and roll music is similarly ridiculous. Can you reasonably dismiss a musician of breathtaking talent merely because he called himself The Artist Formerly Known as Prince? A little narcissistic vulgarity never bothered me. For example: I’ll gladly take the all-over-the-place garishness of Easter, the Patti Smith Group’s third album, over any number of correct, tastefully despairing New Yorker short stories and similarly respectable cultural productions. It’s easy to laugh at Patti Smith, and I do, I do. But sometimes I wish I had a little of her ridiculousness myself.

The garishness of Easter, the third of the four records she made before her temporary retirement in 1979, starts with the cover photo: Patti with raised arms in contrapposto torsion, looking down past her hairy armpit and the tag of the exceedingly thin slip that she’s wearing inside out. Now, Patti Smith conforms to no accepted idea of conventionally beautiful womanhood, and her boast at the time that the cover would furnish irresistible masturbation material to thousands of adolescent boys might seem far fetched. (Certainly the gray-haired, matronly Patti of today would be unlikely to make a similar claim, though her appearance is remarkably unchanged.) How could this equine-faced, androgynous woman with the hairy armpits have the shamelessness to pass herself off as a sex goddess? Well, as Wallace Stevens noted, “Anything Is Beautiful If You Say It Is.” Not that I was one of those adolescent boys, but the shamelessness with which she flaunted her earthy, imperfect looks was precisely the turn-on. She looked more ethereal but equally desirable on the cover of her first album, Horses, photographed by her sometime boyfriend Robert Mapplethorpe. Part of the Patti Smith mythos requires buying into the genius of Mapplethorpe, which I can’t quite bring myself to do, but that’s an extraordinary photograph: a hauntingly severe, almost Greco-Roman image of an arrogant young bitch goddess about to turn the world of rock and roll on its ear.

Horses is undoubtedly a more influential, unified, and – O.K. – “better” album than Easter, but apart from my perennial fondness for second-best records, I prefer the latter for its more overtly commercial, radio-friendly style. Rock music is at its best in the poise between individual artistry and complete prostitution, and Easter benefits from the commercial calculations of its slick producer, Jimmy Iovine. It’s not that the half-chanted, half-sung poetic recitations have disappeared; but they’re mercifully briefer. Easter is the creation of a bizarrely talented street visionary who wanted very much to be a rock and roll star. I couldn’t ask for more. . . .

Shane MacGowan, Hibernian Bard

2009-12-24T17:08:00.000-08:00

If only as a relief from "Jingle Bell Rock," I hereby nominate The Pogues' "Fairy Tale of New York" as the best rock Christmas song of all time. Listening to that song has got me thinking about Shane MacGowan again. There's not much to be said about the tragic waste of his life and career, other than that all that stupid boozing was a caricature of the drunken Paddy and that I can't believe anyone ever thought it was amusing in the first place. On the other hand, he was a truly great lyricist, as good as any rock and roll culture has ever produced. "Fairy Tale of New York" is a good example of what made his writing so remarkable. In the first place, there's the brilliant idea of setting an Irish song --a Christmas song, no less -- in New York. Who else could have conceived of the couplet, "The boys of the NYPD choir/ Were singing 'Galway Bay'"? Think how much history -- of two cultures, of two countries, and of their endlessly complex relationship to each other -- is packed in those few words. But even more impressive is they way the lyric veers from the sentimental to the scabrous and back again while remaining perfectly consistent with the outlook of the embattled lovers. (It's almost as good as the mix of ferocity and tenderness in the work of Patrick Kavanagh, the "Hibernian bard" MacGowan most resembles. Has MacGowan ever read a word of Kavanagh, or for that matter Yeats or Heaney or Joyce? A trick question. You bet he has.) What MacGowan does better than almost any rock lyricist is to pack the empty spaces between the lines of his songs with implication; what's not said is at least as important as what is said. For instance: "I looked at him, he looked at me / All I could do was hate him." A lesser lyricist would have spelled out what motivated the singer's hatred and who exactly was hating whom. But MacGowan allows the listener to imagine more fully the particular hell "A Pair of Brown Eyes" conjures by not making the connection explicit. Furthermore, the form of the lyric vacillates between old-fashioned Irish balladry and some sort of Dantesque Inferno; this, as the great modernist poets discovered long ago, is exactly how our psychology works. So merry Christmas, Shane, who, as it happens, shares this birthday (Dec. 25, 1957) with our Saviour, or as that other Hibernian bard Samuel Beckett wrote, "Our what?"

Muswell Hillbillies by the Kinks

2009-12-20T17:56:00.000-08:00

I don't know if Muswell Hillbillies is the greatest Kinks' greatest album -- I like to shock rock snobs by nominating Everybody's in Showbiz (slick, mid-seventies pablum, in their view) -- but it does have perhaps their greatest song, “Oklahoma U.S.A,” a ballad about a British housewife dreaming the dream of romance and glamour proffered by Hollywood musicals. If there are any other songs by any other rock bands that capture as delicately as this the touching absurdity of the idealization of American consumer culture that characterized much of British working class life after World War II, I must have missed them. “She walks to work but she’s still in a daze / She’s Rita Hayworth or Doris Day”: there’s irony here but no condescension, and Ray Davies sings the lyrics with the same nearly overwhelming tenderness that he brought to “Days,” “Waterloo Sunset,” and other ballads of similarly gigantic emotional effect and minimal means. The arrangement is equally beautiful: an accordion leaking in behind the piano, some blue notes on the low strings of an acoustic guitar, Ray singing in a lower register than usual and harmonizing with himself on the higher notes.

More often, Ray Davies harmonized with Dave Davies, as he does on the next song, “Uncle Son,” yet another affecting tribute to yet another working class hero, one who “loved with his heart / [and] worked with his hands.” This time Dave – one half of the Davies brothers’ fraternal agon and one of the great harmony singers in all of rock -- plays dobro rather than electric guitar, and the arrangement recalls country blues rather than the Broadway musical evoked by “Oklahoma U.S.A.” Both songs are good examples of the Kinks’ extraordinary eclecticism; they’re one of the few rock and roll bands to have stolen at least as much from the English musical hall as from Bo Diddley. “Demon Alcohol,” with Ray camping up a story about a “sinner” who got “mixed up with a floozie,” could have been written any time around the First World War, but just as often the Kinks mixed their modes. No use splitting hairs about what’s what; there’s a little more rockabilly in “Muswell Hillbillies,” a little more New Orleans swing in “Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues,” a little more Stones-like riffing in “Here Come the People in Grey.” All that matters, really, is not that these songs are objectively great or formally inventive or lyrically astute – mere bagatelles, surely – but that I love them. . . .

Classic Albums on Netflix

2009-12-16T16:36:00.000-08:00

I've discovered a wonderful series on Netflix called "Classic Albums," which consists of hour-long documentaries on the making of certain seminal albums like the one pictured at left and Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell. Oh well, you can't please everyone. So far I've seen the ones on The Doors, John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band, Lou Reed's Transformer, and the Who's Who's Next. Even if the idea of a "classic album" seems a little too VH-1 for comfort, the documentaries themselves are exemplary. To take the Doors album alone, I leaned (1) that John Densmore took a bossa nova beat and stiffened it a bit to supply the basic rhythm for "Break On Through"; (2) that Robbie Kreiger was going for the feel of a James Brown horn section for the guitar riff on "Soul Kitchen"; (3) and that Ray Manzarek stole the basic idea of the organ solo on "Light My Fire" from John Coltrane's "My Favorite Things," changing it from 3/4 to 4/4 and fiddling around with it a bit. If these musicological revelations don't get to you (and I can't get enough), there's the sheer poignance of hearing and seeing these grizzled, late middle-aged men looking back on the music they created when they were starry-eyed hippies in their early twenties. Though Manzarek in particular has a bracing wit and intelligence, all three surviving members share an obvious pride in the creation of that astounding record, tinged with something more: a touch of awe. In the end, even they can't answer the biggest question: How the fuck did they ever do it?

Fresh by Sly and the Family Stone

2009-12-13T07:25:00.000-08:00

It’s no wonder that Miles Davis was so taken with the late work of Sly and the Family Stone. With its layered, tight polyrhythms and chromatic shadings, Fresh, Sly’s last achieved record before his tragic descent into drugged oblivion, is far too complex a piece of music for me fully to understand, let alone analyze. Fortunately, there are some exquisite songs beneath all this music going on. And though Fresh may be a little too funky for my white boy soul, I love the popping bass, the scratch guitar, the sinuous horns, and Sly’s bizarre vocals, the more mannered the better. With its slow, trancelike grooves, this is a record that may sound better on heroin; it’s a long way from Sly’s earlier party music, though not so dour or depressed as his previous record, the much acclaimed There’s a Riot Goin’ On. Needless to say, I prefer the less influential and innovative Fresh precisely because the funk is a little adulterated this time out. The sort of thing that Davis and other musicians revered about the seven- and nine-minute excursions into crypto-jazz on “Thank You for Talkin’ to Me Africa” and “Africa Talks to You” is not the sort of thing I can ever hope to appreciate. What’s worse, I don’t even care. What both albums have, however, in addition to a handful of superbly sculpted and wholly accessible songs, are some of the most poignant affirmations of common humanity in the rock and roll songbook. There’s nothing on Fresh that quite equals the pathos of “Family Affair” or “Runnin’ Away,” but a musician who could make “Que Será, Será” seem profound still had a lot to offer.

Yes, that “Que Será, Será,” the Doris Day one. It’s the only non-Sylvester Stewart composition on the record and the only one not sung principally by him. His sister Rose, the piano player and one/eighth of the band’s famously multicultural and mixed gender personnel, sings the verses with scrupulous understatement and perfect diction, making Sly’s scat singing on the choruses sound even more flamboyant. The arrangement, including a slow-motion guitar solo with a wah-wah peddle from brother Freddie, is so leisurely that you actually have time to think about the lyrics. Doris Day never made me wonder about the Zen-like mystery of it all, but Rose Stone does.

It’s hard to say from what strange region of the larynx or brain Sly’s vocals originate on Fresh, but although I love his alternately high-pitched yelps and rumbling growls, it helps that he hired a trio of female singers to provide a bedrock of harmonic support for his more outlandish vocal improvisations. All the singers come together on “If It Were Left up to Me,” the up-tempo, horn-driven boogie that follows “Que Será, Será.” Except for a few leering interpolations, Sly stays on the bottom and lets the women hit hard on the phrases that really matter: “would you try,” “makes you cry,” “I will try.” What more can be said, really? Can we ask for a more perfect song that in a minute and fifty five seconds soars effortlessly on vocals that sound as strong as brass and brass that sounds as flexible as vocals and that promises nothing more than all that can be promised: “I will try”?

Kiss rules! Talking Heads suck!

2009-12-08T17:34:00.000-08:00

Uh, not really. But my friend Brian passionately believes so, and who's to say he's wrong? Well, David Hume, actually, who said ("Of the Standard of Taste," 1757), "The general principles of taste are uniform in human nature: where men vary in their judgments, some defect or perversion in the faculties may commonly be remarked; proceeding either from prejudice, from want of practice, or want of delicacy: and there is just reason for approving one taste and condemning another." But leaving aside for the moment the always debatable universality of aesthetic norms, I think I know why Brian loves Kiss, Ozzy Ozbourne, Boston, Van Halen, and similarly appalling bands. He loves them for their passion, their immediacy, their extraordinary rapport with their fans. These things are not to be gainsaid, even if the music is, to my ears, shit. And it is the absence of these things that Brian finds so dismaying in Talking Heads or the Velvet Underground, for instance. In place of passion, irony; in place of immediacy, detachment; in place of rapport, distance. Or to put it more simply, rock and roll is the place to hear lead guitarists crank it up to ten and lead singers shout, "Are you feeling GOOD? Are you ready to PARTY?" It is not the place to reflect on the paradox of media-saturated identities to the accompaniment of guitars emphatically not turned up to ten or strange intrusions of steel drums and violas. I suppose Brian would say there is a place for such things; they just don't belong in rock and roll. Whereas I say rock and roll can do anything it feels like doing, and that there is in fact a lot of passion in bands like Talking Heads or the Velvet Underground -- it's just not on the surface. Still, there are millions of people who sincerely love bands like Kiss, and unless you believe that all those people are idiots, the reasons for that love ought to be taken seriously. After all, sometimes I -- yes, even I -- just want to rock and roll all night and party every day.

Thick as a Brick by Jethro Tull

2009-11-17T16:55:00.000-08:00

As if liking the Lovin’ Spoonful and Ten Years After weren’t scandalous enough, I now propose to like Jethro Tull, one of the most disdained bands of a disdained genre of a disdained time. And what I like most about Jethro Tull is perhaps their most disdained record, the 1972 concept album Thick as a Brick. It’s all very well to like Captain Beefheart or Björk or James Brown, but I’m holding out for Tull because, to be honest, theirs is the sort of music I listen to when I’m not trying to impress anyone.

And yet even I have standards. The disdain commonly heaped on Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Yes, the Moody Blues, and other bands associated, like Jethro Tull, with the British progressive or art-rock scene of the 1970s is not unmerited. At its worst, this was some of the most boring, bloated, emptily virtuosic, and surely the least funky music in the history of rock and roll. It’s as if a generation of whiz kids from classical conservatories were given hard drugs, told they were geniuses, and set loose upon the world to create concept albums. Needless to say, some of this music was daring and inventive (“Roundabout” by Yes, for example, certainly passes the test), and at times the level of technical accomplishment was, for good of for ill, scarcely believable. But what can I say? As Roz Chast once rephrased it for purposes of grammatical correctness in a New Yorker cartoon, It Does Not Mean a Thing If It Does Not Have That Swing.

The reasons Jethro Tull escaped the worst prog-rock snares that proved fatal to their peers were: (one) they had a sense of humor; (two) they had no interest in using music to simulate drug-induced states of higher consciousness; and (three) they had a very good songwriter – their leader, Ian Anderson, who, unencumbered by conservatory training, purportedly learned the proper fingerings for his flute only after years of rock stardom. Some people will never assent to proposition number three, but I think Anderson’s songs depended less on instrumental ostentation than on strong, conventional structures and great riffs. As it happened, writing songs with strong, conventional structures was exactly what Anderson, as a prog-rocker, did not want to do. Hence the merely impressive song collections of the first three Jethro Tull albums gave way to the thematic and grandiose sonic assault of Aqualung. But wait a minute. I love Aqualung. The fact that a generation of excitable adolescent boys loved it too does not diminish its status as a landmark of the guitar-driven, riff-heavy, anti-church/school/establishment album oriented rock of the 1970s. Though Aqualung speaks to the air guitarist in all of us, the songs stand on their own, with lovely, meandering acoustic fragments interspersed amid the thunder. Its thematic ambitions, advanced through interrelated songs about a scrofulous beggar (side one) and the failings of the Church of England (side two), could be said to mark it as a period piece, unless you believe, as I do, that screaming rock and roll songs about Man and God, featuring long guitar and flute solos, are for the ages.

The film director Ken Russell once called the Who’s Tommy the greatest work of art of the twentieth century. He didn’t mean it. Although I wouldn’t call Ian Anderson the greatest artist of the twentieth century, his multiple talents extended not only to composing and performing in simple, not-so-simple, and nearly baroque rock idioms, but to conceiving and executing (with the help of a band mate or two and an A and R man from the record company) the most elaborate and madly self-referential album packaging in all of rock and roll. Let’s face it: the album cover of Thick as a Brick – a fold-out, twelve-page, 12x18 facsimile of what purports to be the January 7, 1972 issue of a provincial British tabloid called The St. Cleve Chronicle – is almost as interesting as the music. I think of it as the Pale Fire of rock and roll. Unlike Nabokov’s novel, The St. Cleve Chronicle is full of silly, schoolboy humor and lacks anything like the architecture – not to mention the pathos, erudition, and lyricism – of Nabokov’s grand design. But it sure is intertextual. The banner headline – “THICK AS A BRICK” – covers a story about the controversy (or “LAST MINUTE RUMPUS”) surrounding a child prodigy’s poem of that title, which happens to be – you could see this coming, couldn’t you? – the text of the Jethro Tull album. I can do no better than to quote the opening paragraphs, written as a parody of shocked British provincialism circa 1972:

The Society for Literary Advancement and Gestation (SLAG), announced their decision late last night to disqualify eight year old prizewinner Gerald (Little Milton) Bostock following the hundreds of protests and threats received after the reading of his epic poem “Thick as a Brick” on B.B.C. Television last Monday night.

A hastily reconvened panel of Judges accepted the decision by four leading child psychiatrists that the boy’s mind was seriously unbalanced and that his work was a product of an “extremely unwholesome attitude towards life, his God and Country”. Bostock was recommended for psychiatric treatment following examination “without delay”. The first prize will now be presented to runner up Mary Whiteyard (aged 12) for her essay on Christian ethics entitled, “He died to save the little Children”.

A photograph of the hopelessly nerdy Gerald at the awards presentation (note visual dirty joke involving Gerald’s beautiful teenage “chum” Julia, seated behind him) accompanies the story. There is much, much more to the saga, including Gerald’s disqualifying use of the obscenity “g -- -- r,” Julia’s claim in a subsequent article to be carrying Gerald’s child, and the decision by the “major beat group” Jethro Tull to set Gerald’s poem to music. The twelve pages of local news, society notes, obituaries, sports, crossword puzzles, classified ads, television listings, and letters to the editor link up in a web of allusions and cross-allusions to images and motifs in the poem. Even if this particular album cover has furnished reading material for over thirty years, you won’t catch all the allusions; I’m still puzzling over “COUNCIL FACES WRATH OF THE TULIP GROVE DEFENDERS.” Perhaps the notable thing is not that it’s done well but that it’s done at all. . . .

Who Shot Rock & Roll

2009-11-13T17:18:00.000-08:00

The splendid, surprising photograph at left (Jimi Hendrix as a sideman! In a tux!) is one of many such revelations in a new exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum called "Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present." The show offers edification and delight on at least three levels. There is first of all aesthetics. The curators selected outstanding work from just about everyone, from Annie Leibovitz to Patti Boyd (yes, that Patti Boyd!), whose portrait in supersaturated colors of a lost-looking Eric Clapton in a faux-tropical hotel room is as beautifully composed as it is chilling. Then there's the endless fascination of sociology, as in the great shot of rabid fans at a Smiths concert ripping up a Morrissey tee-shirt: Do we love our idols or do we despise them? Finally, there's the sheer pleasure of fandom itself. Personally, I can't get enough pictures of Debbie Harry yum yum, but there are many striking images of musicians I've spent my life listening to: a somber, introspective close-up of Chuck Berry away from all the fans and the madness; the Band hanging out "in Rick and Levon's kitchen"; and Bjork masturbating. But is any of this good enough for The New York Times? Oh no. In his review of the show Ken Johnson wrote, "There are some pictures of black performers, but all have achieved crossover recognition, from Chuck Berry and Aretha Franklin to Tina Turner, Grace Jones and L. L. Cool J. This is an exhibition about what the white middle class has been listening to over the last 60 years: classic rock, as they call it on the radio." Really, how contemptible. While you and I have merely been listening to the Beatles and Radiohead, Ken Johnson presumably has been listening to artists of color without "crossover recognition." If Ken Johnson really views "the white middle class" with such lofty disdain, why the hell is he writing for The New York Times?

Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus by Spirit

2009-11-09T16:49:00.000-08:00

Apart from being one of the great American bands of the late sixties, Spirit had one of the most unusual foundation myths in all of rock and roll: the future drummer met the future guitarist when he (the drummer) was dating the guitarist’s mom. In due time, Ed Cassidy became Randy California’s stepfather, and a few years after the boy had graduated from junior high, they formed the nucleus of a rock and roll band that became Spirit. By then they had been in and out of various bands and had crossed paths with such notables as Cannonball Adderley (Cassidy) and Jimi Hendrix (California). Did Cassidy lecture his stepson on the dangers of drug abuse? From the evidence of Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus, I would guess they shared the same stash. But the psychedelic album packaging and spacey spirals on synthesizer were surface effects. The core of Dr. Sardonicus is an eclectic, disciplined musicianship married to sturdy but adventurous song craft.

Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus opens with a benediction. Over a delicately picked acoustic guitar Randy California (or maybe Jay Furgeson – they each wanted to be the lead vocalist) sings, “You have the world at your fingertips / No one can make it better than you.” Considering the year (1970), we’re lucky it wasn’t “Fuck the pigs,” and in fact some Spirit songs, such as “1984,” flirted with the radicalism then convulsing much of the world. Unfortunately, “1984” sounds like an outtake from This Is Spinal Tap, and in general Spirit did better with the softer side of hippie utopianism. I much prefer being blessed to being harangued, but what really matters about the opening song, for instance, is not its well-intentioned, unremarkable lyrics, but the way it suddenly leaps into electric life after its gentle, folky intro and sustains the energy with a staggered bass line, emphatic piano chording, and a raucous slide guitar solo. “Prelude/Nothin’To Hide,” as it’s called, divides into three parts (prelude, song proper, instrumental coda), which in turn divide into A, B, and C parts, and other songs on the record blend into each other or are deliberately fragmented. These are sophisticated compositions, mixing elements of jazz, blues, soul, and folk with the sort of rock and roll then being invented by hippie visionaries like Jimi Hendrix or Arthur Lee. If all this sounds tediously Important, like a Time magazine cover story on the trend of the day, it isn’t. Spirit managed to take themselves seriously without getting all solemn about it. Probably the band worked very hard to achieve the feeling of joyful spontaneity evoked by a song like “Street Worm”; all I can say for sure is that the speeded up guitar lines and percussive flourishes evoke a feeling of joyful spontaneity in me. . . .

The Beatles Remastered

2009-11-03T16:57:00.000-08:00

After a long wait and a lot of money, I finally received my boxed set of the newly remastered complete Beatles. I gather there is much debate among audiophiles as to the merits of the stereo versus the mono versions and the qualities of either or both relative to the 1980s remasters and to the original recordings on vinyl. Gee, all I really noticed is that the horns on "Magical Mystery Tour" seem a little fuller than I had remembered. Of more immediate concern to me is where exactly I'm going to keep the thing. On top of the fridge? On my already cluttered coffee table? Under the bed? And what do I do with the elegant but extraneous prophylactic super-cover in which it comes sheathed? These dilemmas are as nothing compared to the quandary that confronts me once I open the box, for there in two snugly fitted compartments are the twelve (thirteen if you count Yellow Submarine, which I don't) original albums, plus an additional CD of "Past Masters" (singles and non-album tracks) and a DVD of selections from The Beatles Anthology television special. There is really no way of extracting any but the top two CDs other than turning the whole box upside down and spilling the contents. Choosing any one CD without upsetting any previous arrangement -- which doesn't work anyway, because the double compartments make a hash of chronology -- is virtually impossible. Perhaps I should take a lesson from Samuel Beckett's Molloy, who rotated his sixteen sucking stones from pocket to pocket with mathematical precision. But I digress. (What tedium, as Molloy would say.) In spite of my frustrations with the packaging, I highly recommend the newly remastered Beatles set, because, as I have previously suggested, there are no better records in all of rock and roll music. If nothing else, the boxed set is worth buying just for the original liner notes included on Please Please Me, wherein the Fab Four are described as "visually and musically the most exciting and accomplished group to emerge since The Shadows!"

Ssssh by Ten Years After

2009-10-31T18:38:00.001-07:00

Any sizeable book or record collection is bound to contain some embarrassments. Only recently I purged my bookshelves of Delta of Venus by Anais Nin, and though I was tempted to clear the decks of Ssssh by Ten Years After, as dated an artifact of sixties drug culture as the peace sign on Alvin Lee’s Gibson, I’m glad I held back. Listening to it for the first time in many years, I was struck by its relative musicality. There may not be that much to say about long electric guitar solos best appreciated under the influence of hallucinogens, but those solos are, after all, an inescapable feature of rock and roll. Even apart from the drugs, some of them still sound pretty good, and the ones on Ssssh are marvels of trippy self-indulgence.

From the psychedelic double-exposure album cover, to the song titles (“Stoned Woman,” “I Don’t Know That You Don’t Know My Name”), to the gnomic liner notes by Alvin Lee (singer, songwriter, and lead guitarist), Ssssh sends a message that any fifteen-year-old, record-buying semiotician in 1969 could not possibly misinterpret: We take drugs, do you? The double-fold, inside cover spread makes the point even more clearly. Instead of song credits or photos of the band, two enormous eyes with dilated pupils stare out of a violet-tinged face in blurry close-up. Wow, man, that guy must be really high! Nonetheless, it is just barely possible to overestimate the connection between drugs and rock music (as opposed to the connection between drugs and rock culture, which can never be overestimated). I didn’t take drugs to listen to Ten Years After as a fifteen-year-old, and it’s too late to start now. Perhaps I was missing the point. And yet when the band leaps into “Bad Scene,” with Chick Churchill hammering the piano like a woodpecker and Alvin Lee throwing in growls and catlike mewings on his guitar, I don’t feel as if I’m missing anything. A good song is a good song, with our without the mediation of mind-altering substances, whether ingested by the performer or the listener or both. Whatever their personal pharmacological histories, the guys in Ten Years After had clearly studied the tradition and honed their technique. Their version of the blues departed radically from the less-is-more esthetic of the masters, and although a purist might have cringed at the vocal and instrumental excess, I don’t see how anyone could not, as it were, totally dig “Bad Scene.” In addition to its furious, in medias res opening, the song features a giddy, half-speed instrumental refrain connecting the verses, a tight, disciplined guitar solo (not so anomalous as you might think), and a bridge with Chick Churchill rolling over the keyboard like Johnnie Johnson on all those great Chuck Berry songs. Unfortunately, the piano pretty much disappears after “Bad Scene.” Churchill must have had a lot of downtime in the studio; from then to now, this formula remains close to constant in rock and roll – too much guitar, not enough piano. . . .

Iron Curtain Rock

2009-10-26T15:54:00.000-07:00

My friend and colleague Tomasz Kalata -- who really should be writing this post -- notified me about the upcoming concert and discussion honoring dissident Eastern European rock bands of the 80s and 90s (see below for details). Without having heard a note of their music, I shall nonetheless expatiate on the significance of Dezerter (pictured), Psi Vojaci, and other bands whose names I can't pronounce. What strikes me about the phenomenon of rock music of that time and place is its extraordinary cultural power and authority, so movingly attested to by Vaclav Havel, Tom Stoppard, and others. I just wrote about the Jefferson Airplane, who were essentially spoiled brats playing at revolution. Well, the Eastern European bands weren't playing at anything. At great personal risk, they defied authority for freedoms we take for granted -- and had some fun doing so. I mean, according to Tomasz, they still rocked, and I'm aware that the sheer outrageousness of the Mothers of Invention was always a big influence. Still, their example does make the rock star shenanigans of someone like Noel or Liam Gallagher seem awfully trivial. It's not that Western rock and roll lacks all political substance, but compared to Eastern Europe, the stakes haven't been nearly as high. Western rock and roll bands talked about changing the world; Eastern European rock and roll bands actually did it.

 THE PERFORMING REVOLUTION IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE FESTIVAL  opens with REBEL WALTZ: UNDERGROUND MUSIC FROM BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN featuring Poland ’s legendary punk band DEZERTER

To mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, in association with key New York City cultural organizations and academic institutions, is organizing Performing Revolution in Central and Eastern Europe . This 5-month festival focuses on the performing arts as a powerful contributing force in the fall of Communism in Europe . Spearheaded by The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, which will present an exhibition on the themes of the festival, it features 29 events throughout New York City, with a specific focus on performing arts in the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, the Slovak Republic, and Slovenia.  Launching this five-month extravaganza is Rebel Waltz, a weekend-long (November 6-7) underground music festival featuring six bands from behind the Iron Curtain. The music of these bands served as a form of political rebellion in the 1980s, carrying coded messages against oppressive regimes. Now, Rebel Waltz gives New York audiences a rare opportunity to experience the suppressed voices of a triumphant generation: Psi Vojaci ( Czech Republic ), Bez ladu a skladu ( Slovak Republic ), Timpuri Noi ( Romania ), Kontroll Csoport ( Hungary ), Dezerter ( Poland ), and Pankrti ( Slovenia ).   All the bands will be making their U.S. premieres during the festival – an historic event you won’t want to miss!  More about the bands and music clips  Dezerter was the first Polish punk to openly criticize the Communist regime. Three decades later, this legendary group is still going strong. More information   Rebel Waltz will also feature a public discussion with the bands and a screening of BEATS OF FREEDOM or how to overthrow a totalitarian regime with a simple use of home-made amplifier, a documentary on Polish music of the 80s.

Rebel Waltz is presented by the Hungarian Cultural Center in collaboration with the Czech Center NY, the Polish Cultural Institute in New York , the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York , the Consulate General of the Slovak Republic , and the Consulate General of Slovenia. Rebel Waltz is part of Extremely Hungary, a year-long festival celebrating contemporary Hungarian cultural events throughout 2009 in New York City and Washington , D.C. Additional support for Rebel Waltz is provided by Trust for Mutual Understanding. Special thanks to Marcin Filipowski for his help in presenting Dezerter. The public discussion is co-sponsored by the Jazz and Contemporary Music Program and The Transregional Center for Democratic Studies, both at The New School.

Volunteers by the Jefferson Airplane

2009-10-21T17:03:00.000-07:00

Not only do I not own a copy of the LP Volunteers, made by the Jefferson Airplane in 1969, I can’t find a copy of the CD in any record store, not that there are many of those left either. Is it possible that Baby Boomers, normally so proud of their sixties idealism, are a bit embarrassed by this call to radical sectarian violence? It’s not that the music disappoints. Volunteers is still a powerful if uneven mix of acid rock, blues, country, folk, and blue-eyed soul. Nevertheless, listening to it on Internet audio files is not quite the same thing as playing the LP with the intact cover packaging in hand, complete with images of the band mocking the American flag and liner notes sneering at every piety of God and country. Gee, I guess I am a little nostalgic.

How America (or amerika) went in two or three short years from the Lovin Spoonful’s “What a day for a daydream” to the Airplane’s “Up against the wall, motherfucker” is a riddle I do not propose to unravel, partly because formulating it in such terms already implies such gross oversimplification. Nonetheless, American life was changing very fast in the late sixties, and the Jefferson Airplane, glamorous rock stars doing their bit for the Revolution, was right there in the fray. The rhythm guitarist Paul Kanter, for example, used to leave packets of marijuana at random phone booths in the belief that unsuspecting citizens might thereby tune in, turn on, drop out, and redeem the world. I myself was a bit too young to follow the Airplane to the barricades (though not too young to have a crush on Grace Slick). Although I ultimately decided not to hate my parents, I was at least willing to consider the revolutionary implications of the songs, but only because the Jefferson Airplane was a first rate rock and roll band. Even in 1969 you still had to nail down the beat, which is why, for all the outrageous comedy of their political theater, the Fugs and the MC5 never quite got over. They were inferior musicians.

But oh, the politics! Although the members of the Jefferson Airplane never hurt a fly, the political innocence they shared with others of their generation wasn’t so harmless in the hands of such folk as the Weathermen, who did occasionally go out and kill or try to kill innocent people on the wrong side of the ideological divide. As the Airplane so chillingly put it in the previous year’s “Crown of Creation,” “In loyalty to our kind / We cannot tolerate your obstruction.” Oh dear. Perhaps it would be best to pass lightly over the politics; after all, people listened to the Jefferson Airplane because they had two distinctive lead vocalists, a sensational guitarist, and a whole crop of good songwriters. And yet ideological mindlessness is a recurring strain of rock culture that must be acknowledged. For every shining example of reasoned, tortured liberalism, such as Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” or Leonard Cohen’s “Democracy” or Bruce Springsteen’s “My Hometown,” there’s some specimen of moral idiocy like the Nazi regalia of punk or the radical chic sycophancy of John Lennon’s lamentable Some Time in New York City. The spooky thing is when unexamined militant self-righteousness joins itself to great rock and roll music, as in much of the Clash’s oeuvre and the aforementioned Jefferson Airplane songs. Would “We Can Be Together” be a better song if, instead of exhorting its listeners to violently overthrowing the established order, it proposed getting involved with the P.T.A. and attending local community board meetings? Or acknowledged the vast gray area between idealism and realism? Or phrased its imperatives more politely – how about “Up against the wall, please“?

Whatever the answers to those loaded questions, it’s hard to imagine “We Can Be Together,” the opening song of Volunteers, being improved musically. Like many Airplane compositions, it starts and stops and starts again, goes off in different directions, and changes time signatures almost willy-nilly. I do sometimes wish the band would just get on with it, but writing straight-ahead, three-minute rock and roll songs was not the way it was done in San Francisco in 1969. The riff that begins “We Can Be Together” is so colossal that even when slowed down and broken apart, as it is throughout the song, it sounds better on each repetition. By the time the chords shift from major to minor and the three-part harmony of Grace Slick, Marty Balin, and Paul Kanter comes in, I’m almost ready to believe in “a new continent of earth and fire.” Did they believe in it? Millions did. . . .

Larkin on Bechet

2009-10-16T19:23:00.000-07:00

I should have quoted this poem earlier, when various people were beating up on Philip Larkin and, more to the point, me, for our joint disdain of Charlie Parker. "For Sidney Bechet" is not one of Larkin's very best poems, but after some uncharacteristic bathos ("Oh, play that thing!") it rises to a beautiful conclusion that distills something we all can agree on: This is what music does, this is how we feel it in our bones:

On me your voice falls as they say love should,

Like an enormous yes. My Crescent City

Is where your speech alone is understood,

And greeted as the natural noise of good,

Scattering long-haired grief and scored pity.

A Charlie Brown Christmas by the Vince Guaraldi Trio

2009-10-12T18:17:00.000-07:00

What I don’t know about jazz could fill a book. Fortunately a chapter will suffice, but before considering the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) – the greatest jazz record of all time! the Sgt. Pepper’s of televised cartoon soundtracks! the Saint Matthew’s Passion of Christmas shopping! – I’d like to mention the two (and only two) other jazz records that I listen to with some regularity. These are The Köln Concert by Keith Jarrett and The Best of Django Reinhardt. Everything else – Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, A Love Supreme by John Coltrane, The Complete Legendary Carnegie Hall Concert by Benny Goodman – is so much dross, I’m afraid. (Scott Joplin, whom I revere almost above ZZ Top, doesn’t count; ragtime isn’t jazz.) Furthermore, I don’t even know why I like those records so much – something about the debonair virtuosity of the Reinhardt collection, I guess, or the oceanic moodiness of Jarrett’s improvisations. Conceivably, if I enjoy these not unrepresentative examples of jazz music, with a bit of Dave Brubeck here and a bit of Mose Allison there, I might enjoy more where these things came from. But apart from the virtual certainty that no amount of effort could ever get me to like Chick Corea, why should I scant something I know I love (rock) for something I think I might like (jazz)? A jazz lover might object that jazz is a highly evolved musical from that I owe it to myself as a thinking, feeling human being to experience in all its aesthetic and emotional richness. And that I’m being awfully pigheaded. My reply would be (and always has been) the same: I don’t tell jazz snobs that they haven’t lived until they’ve head Tyranny & Mutation by Blue Öyster Cult, so why can’t they leave me alone? Why must they continually harass me with condescending lectures about the superiority of “their” music? The partial exceptions they typically make to the barbarism of rock and roll (Frank Zappa, Steely Dan, etc.) hardly persuade. Yep, a lot of complicated chords in there, but the music is pretty sterile.

Though less sententious than they used to be, jazz lovers can still be awfully high and mighty. Apparently, not all of them would agree that A Charlie Brown Christmas is the greatest jazz record of all time. In their Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings (Penguin, 8^th ed., 2008) Richard Cook and Brian Morton dismiss Vince Guaraldi as “a harmless pop-jazz pianist,” “the lightest of the lightweights.” A few more phrases might suggest their tone: “about as hot-blooded as a game of dominos,” “relentless triviality of the material,” “mild unambitious variations,” and, most damning of all, “If this kind of music appeals . . .” Well, this kind of music does appeal, and if it makes you (or me) feel any better, Wynton Marsalis and some other heavyweights greatly admire Guaraldi too. I probably wouldn’t understand what Marsalis likes about A Charlie Brown Christmas, but I like the relaxed brushing of the snare drum, the creaking of the fretboard on the upright bass, the ripple-in-water effect of the spreading piano chords, all those things I almost never hear in rock and roll. Despite the shocking absence of electric guitar solos, the music feels embracing, partly because the songs remain songs, not intimations of A Love Supreme and other things that I will never understand. “O Tannenbaum,” for instance, which leads off the album, is still “O Tannenbaum” even when Guaraldi breaks into a “mild unambitious variation” after a mock solemn introduction. Personally, I think it takes a lot of gall to play a beloved, corny Christmas carol as a beloved, corny Christmas carol. Would Thelonious Monk have dared? Maybe. Anyway, what distinguishes Guarlaldi from his superiors is his respect for the tried and the true. If “O Tannenbaum” has worked for a few hundred years, maybe it’s worth kicking around the block a time or two. I like to think that it’s sensitive middle-brows like me who provide the grounds of fulfillment for artists yearning to express themselves within the register of everything already known; as Ezra Pound might have said, “Don’t make it new.” Ninety-nine percent of the time the result of such traditionalism is crap, but then ninety-nine percent of the time the result of a parallel experimentalism is also crap. If John Coltrane found his maximal self-expression by composing in a difficult, pathbreaking idiom, Vince Guaraldi found his by composing songs for a gang of cartoon children and their cartoon beagle. I sometimes think Guaraldi had the harder task. . . .

Charlie Parker Killed Jazz

2009-10-05T16:55:00.000-07:00

He didn't really kill jazz; I just like to say so to annoy jazz snobs, who tend, as a rule, to be even more insufferable than their rock counterparts. In fact, I don't know enough about"Bird" to say whether he killed jazz or revived it; I know only that the jazz I like -- Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet -- sounds nothing like Charlie Parker. Yes, yes, I'm a philistine. But consider: Is it not possible that in the development of jazz from King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band to Miles Davis something might have been lost as well as gained? And that what was lost was something big -- something like the ordinary human pleasure in song that helps bind us together? Well, if you don't believe me, maybe you'll believe a rather more impressive philistine, Philip Larkin, who had this to say in the introduction to his collection All What Jazz (St. Martin's, 1970):

"And yet again, there was something about the books I was now reading that seemed oddly familiar. This development, this progress, this new language was more difficult, more complex, that required you to work hard at appreciating it, that you couldn't expect to understand first go, that needed technical and professional knowledge to evaluate it at all levels, this revolutionary explosion that spoke for our time while at the same time being traditional in the fullest, the deepest . . . . Of course! This was the language of criticism of modern painting, modern poetry, modern music. Of course! How glibly I had talked of modern jazz, without realizing the force of the adjective: this was modern jazz, and Parker was a modern jazz player just as Picasso was a modern painter and Pound a modern poet. I hadn't realized that jazz had gone from Lascaux to Jackson Pollock in fifty years, but now I realized it relief came flooding in upon me after nearly two years' despondency. I went back to my books: 'After Parker, you had to be something of a musician to follow the best jazz of the day.' Of course! After Picasso! After Pound! There could hardly have been a conciser summary of what I don't believe about art."

You don't have to agree; I don't, really. But Larkin's ironic exposition certainly challenges some of the shibboleths that still govern much thinking about modern art -- especially jazz. But if -- apart from the legacy of his masterful poetry -- you still think Larkin is a Bad Guy, consider that this is the man who gave his godson Martin Amis a copy of the Rolling Stones' live album Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! for his fifteenth birthday. How cool is that?

Greatest Hits by the Lovin' Spoonful

2009-09-29T20:49:00.000-07:00

At a concert in New York’s Town Hall in the early eighties, John Sebastian delivered himself of this rueful bit of self-appraisal to an audience that, though friendly enough, was really there for the headliners, NRBQ. “You know,” he said about halfway through the set, “when you’ve been in this business as long as I have, a day comes when you wake up to find yourself [pause for comic effect] incredibly unfashionable!” I’m happy to say that Sebastian was in good form that night, with NRBQ backing him on roughed up versions of old Lovin’ Spoonful tunes. But he was right: the tie-dyed minstrel of Woodstock, the smiling, autoharp-strumming symbol of mellow vibes and good timey rock was incredibly unfashionable. In fact, I considered devoting this chapter to another relic of flower power gaucherie, Donovan, but there are signs that the cognoscenti now take a somewhat more tolerant view of Donovan, whereas Sebastian and the Spoonful remain permanently beyond the pale. However the winds of fashion may shift in rock and roll, one injunction remains timeless: Never admit you like the Lovin’ Spoonful.

For the convenience of my readers, I’ve devised a list of what will and will not pass muster should they ever encounter rock taste makers common in places like New York or, to be more precise, meet my friend Wayne, who knows vastly more about music than I do and whose judgment admits of no appeal. Though the list fluctuates and is almost completely arbitrary anyway, here’s what it might look like at any given time:

Acceptable Unacceptable

The Rolling Stones The Beatles

Leonard Cohen Bob Dylan

Nico Joni Mitchell

Nick Cave Bruce Springsteen

Cat Power Lucinda Williams

Neil Young Crosby, Stills, and Nash

Nick Drake Van Morrison

The Replacements Phish

The Stooges The Band

Early U2 Late U2

Captain Beefheart Frank Zappa

Peter Tosh Bob Marley

Tom Waits Paul Simon

The Jackson Five Michael Jackson

The Carpenters The Doors

Hole The Grateful Dead

The Velvet Underground Lou Reed

Brazil Ireland

To the extent that any generalization can be made – apart from the obvious one of the column on the right representing music quite as wonderful as the column on the left – it is that white musicians identified as roots rockers don’t cut it. (Also, that some musicians are so tacky that they’re cool by default.) Rock snobs expect a degree of ironic detachment with their music, unless the musicians happen to be black, in which case ironic detachment is taken as a sign of inauthenticity. No one ever admits these things, of course, but when Talking Heads covered Al Green’s emphatically unironic “Take Me To the River,” there was no chance they were going to play it straight. Though the Heads’ version succeeded on its own terms, there’s no use pretending that the attitude (freakily detached yet weirdly deferential) mattered less than the music (pretty funky, actually). In left wing rock circles, musicians are allowed to become populists after they’ve established their hipster credentials. But they must never, if they expect to be forgiven, start out that way. Lean and hungry punks get sentimental about country music when they’re no longer lean and hungry punks.

You can see where these assumptions leave poor John Sebastian, white, unironic, reverent toward his forbears, and cloyingly optimistic. Unfortunately, the criteria for musical hipness tend to minimize the importance of well-crafted songs and fundamental musicianship. I agree that that Lovin’ Spoonful and some of Sebastian’s songs were too insistently genial; a little squalling feedback might have helped. But John Sebastian was an excellent songwriter, and the string of hits the Spoonful had in their two years under the spotlight make up one of the best of the “Best Of” collections available in discount bins everywhere.

Once again I must make the usual disclaimer about having lost the original LP. It matters, though, not only because the LP included the superb “Night Owl Blues” (omitted from the standard CD compilation), but because the cover art, showing the band members spread out like paper cut-outs in a children’s game, revealed what doomed them as the mid sixties turned into the late sixties: their cuteness. Certainly the Lovin’ Spoonful were a lot cuter than their principle “folk rock” rivals the Byrds, who looked like drug addicts. With their intricate guitar parts, sumptuous harmonies, and daring covers of some of Bob Dylan’s most compellingly turgid compositions, the Byrds were unquestionably the better band, but their strung-out look (cowls, scowls, and granny glasses), gave them a cachet that Sebastian’s sideburns and Zal Yanovsky’s floppy hats couldn’t match. If only Sebastian could have stopped smiling! Alas, the drummer, Joe Butler, was handsome in exactly the wrong sort of apple-cheeked way, and no mystique attached to the regular-guy bassist Steve Boone or to Zal, the goofy, extroverted lead guitarist. The knock on the Spoonful, however, was not that they looked like lightweights but that they sounded like lightweights. Although they never approached the grandeur the Byrds achieved with songs like “Eight Miles High,” the Spoonful made perfectly valid music out of the commercial, pop idiom that they chose to exploit. “Folk rock” is a lame term, but it usefully applies to the Lovin’ Spoonful in the sense that the band grew out of the Greenwich Village folk scene. Their orientation was more to the crowd-pleasing acoustic variants of the blues tradition than to its grittier, electric incarnations. As Sebastian once said, they rolled more than they rocked. At any rate, why the Spoonful’s blend of folk roots with top forty song craft should be considered less respectable than, say, the Monkees’ blend of top forty song craft with trash is a question I can’t answer. . . .

Danny Kalb in Fretboard Journal

2009-09-24T19:18:00.001-07:00

My old friend Danny Kalb has an article in the current Fretboard Journal (no. 15, fall 2009) called "My Scene: Greenwich Village, Early 1960s." It's so Danny. For instance: "My blues-guitar-artist-to-be path accelerated with my discovery, at the age of 17, of my mentor, the great Dave Van Ronk. Dave was a trip, the perfect shock mentor, a grown-up, a bohemian, living in a West 15th Street neo-tenement. An anarcho-syndicalist wise in the ways of the outre left -- who gave me the real skinny on the Rosenbergs, a shock to this Westchester Stalinist kid at the time -- a pot-smoker iconoclast up the wazoo and more." The article is full of similarly warm and fascinating reminiscences of that whole remarkable scene, of which Danny was such a part -- written in, as he might say, his "neo-Kerouacian prose." Bravo for Danny, and check it out.

The Remains

2009-09-18T17:52:00.000-07:00

One spring day in 1970 or so I was strolling along the beach in Westport, Connecticut, casually singing a few lines from a song called “Don’t Look Back,” when, lo, there appeared before me the song’s original singer, Barry Tashian, he of the seminal mid-sixties garage band the Remains. Actually, there was nothing casual about the encounter at all. With his close-cropped hair and vaguely Arabic appearance, Tashian looked like no other rock star of the day. Sitting with a couple of friends on the sand, he was a giveaway from fifty feet out. Though I had sufficient time to plan the encounter, in my first, trembling acquaintance with Fame, I quailed. He might have shot me a mildly annoyed glance as I mutely passed within a few feet of him.

Such was and remains the extent of my acquaintance with the glittering world of rock royalty. I suppose a New England-based band with an oeuvre consisting on one twenty-four-minute album ranks pretty low on the rock totem pole. (Two compilations from the vaults, very much worth listening to, have since been released.) Furthermore, that eponymous album poses no threat to the pre-eminence of Blonde on Blonde or Exile on Main Street. The Remains purports to be nothing more than what it is: ten extremely basic rock and roll songs averaging two minutes and forty-two seconds in length, sung and played by four late adolescents with more zealotry than subtlety. It is, as we used to say back then, a gas.

Though Tashian, the lead singer and guitarist, and his band mate William Briggs (keyboards) grew up in well-heeled Westport and attended Staples High School seven or eight years before I did, the Remains were a Boston band, indeed the Boston band of their time. They met as Boston University undergraduates and were a professional rock and roll band and college dropouts before their junior year would have begun. It all happened very fast: formation of the band in 1964, a couple of regional hits in 1965, an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, the recording of their one and only album, a taste of the big time as an opening act on the Beatles’ last American tour in 1966, followed by immediate dissolution and eventual elevation into the pantheon of minor rock cult bands.

To a degree, the Remains owe their place in that pantheon to Nuggets, an influential anthology of ragged pop singles from 1965 to 1968 compiled by Lenny Kaye in the early seventies. There they share space with the Standells (“Dirty Water”), the Seeds (“Pushing Too Hard”), the Blues Magoos (“Tobacco Road”), and other bands of limited aspiration but undoubted achievement. Perhaps it’s my civic pride, but I think the Remains were the best of the lot. Though I’ve yet to undertake an exhaustive comparative analysis of the leading American proto-punk bands of my youth, my sense is that the Remains’ musicianship and professionalism were a notch higher than those of most of their peers. I suppose, to be fair, I ought to make a serious study of the Electric Prunes, but life is brief, and I don’t have enough time to listen to Mozart, let alone the Salieris of mid-sixties American garage rock.

The jacket copy says that Tashian’s and Briggs’s parents were surprised when their sons decided to abandon college for careers as professional musicians. Briggs’s parents must have been even more surprised when his younger sister Marilyn decided to become a professional entertainer of another sort, bringing further glory to Westport as the pornographic movie star Marilyn Chambers. All part of the sixties zeitgeist, no doubt, including the groovy double exposure album photo, which shows the band, at that late stage, starting to look like serious hippies.

The Remains inspires confidence from the opening notes of the opening song, “Heart,” when Briggs strikes a few moody minor chords on electric piano, while low rumblings from the drums and some glides on the bass are heard underneath. Even the tambourine sounds dramatic. At first Tashian’s vocal is similarly somber and stately, as he sings lines that are, alas, fairly representative of the entire Remainian oeuvre:

Heart, I can hear my heart

Every time we meet

Every time we part

When I’m in your heart

Well, it goes on like that for a few bars, increasing in pressure and stress, until it sort of explodes. I hope that doesn’t sound too sexual. . . .

The Feelies at Southpaw

2009-09-14T16:55:00.001-07:00

I promise never to write a review, but I just want to note that I was lucky enough to see the Feelies last night (Sept. 13, 2009) at Southpaw in Park Slope. Later in this blog I'll have more to say about the Feelies, when I compare them to Mozart and so on. All I want to say for now is that the world is a better place with them back in it. In fact, they were so great last night that they almost made me forget the misery of rock concert going: the standing for hours in sweaty, squalid, illegally crowded clubs with people spilling beer on your shirt, and the impossibility of reading or having a human conversation while you wait. Well, some people enjoy it; I never did. I guess I'm just too sensitive for this world. Be that as it may, and despite their almost unbelievable lack of stage presence (not a spoken world from their lips other than the occasional, perfunctory "thank you"), Million, Mercer, Sauter, Weckerman, and Demeski were superb -- my five favorite musicians in the world, at the moment.

The Cribbs

2009-09-12T08:23:00.001-07:00

The strapping youth doing a back flip off a railroad bridge in Mallet's Bay, Vermont, is John "Rotten" Akey, bass guitarist, sometime singer, sometime drummer, sometime lead guitarist of the Burlington-based band the Cribbs. He doesn't look like that anymore. Neither does the pale, delicate, rather more cautious lad watching from the safety of the bridge -- me. We are old, Father William, we are old. I promised John I would plug his band because many years ago he showed me the chords to "Purple Rain," which I have forgotten and which he has not. That's why he's in a band and I'm not. More to the point, I have heard the Cribbs, and let me tell you, they're good. They're a four-piece band (two guitars, drums, bass), with an interestingly varied repertory of songs by Radiohead, the Tragically Hip, David Bowie, the Stones, and a few of their own. The musicianship is solid across the board, and the two guitarists can really wail. I'll post the information for their next gig when I find out about it. So far they've played in and around Burlington, but you better get ready, because, like the Monkees, they may be coming to your tow-ow-ow-ow-own.

The Best of the Animals

2009-09-09T16:41:00.000-07:00

One of the governing prejudices of a certain type of rock criticism is that music must be, above all else, tough. The mention of a few names – Brian Wilson, Sam Cooke, Dusty Springfield – ought to suffice to demolish that shibboleth, but when has evidence ever trumped ideology? In “Lunch with Rock Critic Establishment,” George W. S. Trow amusingly captures the macho attitudinizing that many rock critics mistake for toughness:

“This kid Calvin,” Lester said. “Wasn’t he . . . didn’t he . . . do backup for Donovan?”

“He was a child, “ Allison said. “My God, you can’t hold that against him. And he was very disillusioned. He practically had a breakdown. It was very painful.”

Toughness, in short, isn’t everything, but it’s still better than softness, and whatever else can be said about the Animals, the next band up in this potted history of rock and roll, they sure were tough. Not that their surly, bluesy authenticity precluded marketing campaigns featuring the band in trumped-up Beatlesesque motorcades and similar frauds that the five members colluded in more or less enthusiastically. And one of their greatest songs, “When I Was Young,” featured – prominently – a violin. But even Trow’s sternly disapproving rock critic (a thinly disguised Lester Bangs) would have had trouble faulting The Best of the Animals, an eleven-song compilation from 1965 that is nothing if not tough.

The liner notes, however, are sheer camp: “In our language, the Animals are outa sight. They’re intense DEVOTED people. . . . It’s like Eric Burdon is saying, ‘What’s happening? Where’s it at? Do they really care about us, or are they just accepting us because we’ve had a few hit records?” I particularly relish the explanation of the departure of the keyboard player Alan Price, whom some might remember as the guy paling around with Bob Dylan in D.A. Pennebacker’s 1967 documentary Don’t Look Back and as the soundtrack composer performing his songs on screen a few years later in Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man!: “Of course, Alan Prince [sic] has now left the group on doctor’s orders, as his health couldn’t hold up to the wild pace, and been replaced by Dave Rowberry.” In fact, Price left the band because, in the internecine power struggle between him and Burdon, the vocalist, someone had to lose, and it wasn’t likely to be the lead singer. Also, they seemed genuinely to despise each other. Price probably wouldn’t have liked the name the band subsequently adopted: Eric Burdon and the Animals.

All of which goes to show that, at least for a little while, you can pander to thirteen-year-olds and still be a great rock and roll band. The first notes heard on The Best of the Animals emanate from Chas Chandler’s mighty bass guitar and are instantly recognizable as one of the most famous riffs in rock. The song is “It’s My Life,” and when (following the sequenced entrance of guitar, drums, and organ) the vocal comes in, we encounter a world view that must have made a lot of sense to five working class kids from Newcastle who had already been knocking around a few years:

It’s a hard world to get a break in

All the good things have been taken

Though well on his way to rock star megalomania, Burden got the vocal across with a ferocity seemingly born of disenfranchisement and exclusion. Almost all of his vocals sounded this ferocious. Naturally, he was imitating every black bluesman he had ever heard, but he happened to be as good as they were. A big baritone in a small body, Burdon could caress, growl, leer, or plead with equal conviction, and when he needed to shout, as he does at the end of “It’s My Life” (“Don’t PUSH me!” “You can’t tell ME!”), he could do that too. Price, who had sung lead before hooking up with Burden, had nothing like this vocal firepower. No wonder he was miffed.

Price’s involvement on “It’s My Life” was somewhat peripheral, but on the next song, “Gonna Send You Back to Walker,” he helped supply the crucial “whoo-whoo-whoos” that set off Burden’s tumbling vocal and the organ flourishes that set off Hilton Valentine’s jumping guitar solo. “Gonna Send You Back to Walker” is one of those uptempo blues shuffles that the Animals did better than almost anyone else. But where exactly is the “Walker” to which the singer threatens to send his sorely disappointing girlfriend? A long way from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, surely. Whatever the real or imagined small town of the original composition (dubiously attributed to John Hammond, Jr.), the Animals’ “Walker” represents a platonic ideal of Americaness that could exist only in the minds of five blues-obsessed Geordie boys. Not a single allusion to their native land blemishes The Best of the Animals. On the other hand, Al Capone, Sonny Liston, and “Cassius Clay” appear as fellow rageaholics summoned by Burden in his semi-improvised version of John Lee Hooker’s slow blues, “I’m Mad,” which follows a magnificent rendering of Sam Cooke’s “Bring It on Home to Me” – not exactly Vera Lynn ballads, either one. And the band’s most celebrated song wouldn’t have had quite the same ring if Burden had had to sing, “There is a house in Newcastle-upon-Tyne / They call the Rising Sun. . . .”

John Fogerty at South Street Seaport

2009-09-04T17:36:00.000-07:00

In a rare night out for me, I went to hear John Fogerty's free concert at South Street Seaport on September 2. I won't attempt anything so boring or superfluous as a "review." We all know that John Fogerty is an extraordinary musician. If anything, on the basis of the Creedence songs he played on Wednesday night, his guitar playing and singing have improved. If the good-timey vibe he now projects seems a lot less compelling than the brooding intensity of his Creedence days, well, he's entitled. Nor is it to be expected that anyone, short of, maybe, Michelangelo, could continue to work at the level of creative fertility that Fogerty achieved in the miraculous heyday of Creedence Clearwater Revival. So, all praise to John Fogerty and to Pendulum, my vote for the best CCR album. I just wish that one day he would find it in his heart to say one kind word about his former band mates Stu Cook and Doug Clifford.

Rock Snobbery

2009-09-01T16:30:00.000-07:00

Hard as it is to believe, I am occasionally accused of rock snobbery. My response to this calumny is twofold: (1) Moi? Mais, vous blaguez! and (2) They mocked Jesus too (actually, I think He deserved it, but that's another story). In truth, snobbery of any sort is an endlessly complex and fascinating subject, so much so that even Proust, the great anatomist of snobbery, could only begin to fathom its dizzying social and psychological implications in his depiction of the hideous Verdurin circle in Du côté de chez Swann -- now how's that for a snobbish reference? But I suppose Mme Verdurin, like anyone else accused of snobbery, would answer that one person's snobbery is another person's passion. To return to the subject of rock and roll, am I a snob because I prefer the Replacements to Hootie and the Blowfish? Here's what I'm leading up to: Golly, I really don't know. Speaking of the Replacements, some rock critic told a great story about hanging out with Paul Westerberg in a bar when "Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves" by Cher came on the jukebox (or maybe Westerberg picked it out). The critic moaned in agony and Westerberg said something like, "Why do you have to be such a snob? Why can't you just enjoy this wonderful little song for what it is?" The one thing it seems safe to say about rock snobbery is that the distinctions that obsess snobbish fans (e.g., that Burning Spear is infinitely superior to Bob Marley or that James Taylor is wholly unacceptable) are meaningless to musicians. Real musicians -- the good and the the great ones -- will listen to anything. And I still say I'm not a rock snob. How can I be? I like Jackson Browne.

The History of the Dave Clark Five

2009-08-26T18:12:00.000-07:00

If you were a nine-year-old Beatlemaniac in 1964, the band you considered their nearest rival was not the Rolling Stones but the Dave Clark Five. That this rivalry was a marketing ploy engineered by the band’s record company is clear to me only now, and I still get a little annoyed when I recall the aspersions that “Dave” supposedly cast on “Ringo.” Nevertheless, the Dave Clark Five, though no match for the Rolling Stones, were one of the best bands of the British Invasion, an artistic movement whose world historical significance I somewhat overestimated at the time. Still, if Susan Sontag said it was permissible to like the Supremes, I say it’s permissible to like the Dave Clark Five. So does Bruce Springsteen, if that helps.

I’ve lost my LPs with their jacket illustrations of the “DC5” battling back hordes allegedly more rabid than those encountered by the Beatles, and once again I’ve had to work up my nostalgias with a retrospective compilation on CD. Like most such compilations, The History of the Dave Clark Five errs on the side of prolixity; not all of its fifty songs are, strictly speaking, indispensable. Fortunately, no magnificent folly of a concept album was lost in the selection. The Dave Clark Five were a singles band, and nine or ten of those singles were superb. Perhaps if the band hadn’t been so flagrantly uncool (their uniforms made them look like dental hygienists, and if they ever took LSD, they were fatally discreet about it), those songs would be remembered as the exhilarating dance-floor raves that they are.

It was Dave Clark himself, the handsome, smiling drummer boy and closet entrepreneur, who created the band’s image as clean-cut, soccer-playing lads from Tottenham. Maybe they were clean-cut, soccer-playing lads from Tottenham, but the image belied the sound. With a baritone sax churning through a drum-heavy rhythm section, they had a grittier, more R and B style than most of the other, guitar-based band of the British Invasion. I remember Mick Jagger sneering at them in an interview around 1964, but even the Stones rarely sounded this – how shall I put it? – black.

The band’s first big hit, appropriately, was a cover of the Contours’ “Do You Love Me?” There are two ways of regarding the Dave Clark Five in their take on an already great song: as white musicians ripping off black musicians and in the process losing whatever qualities made the song worth imitating in the first place; or as talented pupils honoring and maybe even surpassing their teachers. Well, I know where I stand. In the long and often lamentable history of white appropriation of black music, the Dave Clark Five do not qualify as bad guys. It’s certainly possible to prefer the original “Do You Love Me,” with its raw-throated lead vocal and spare instrumentation (drums and piano, mostly), to the remake. The Contours begin with a slow, half-spoken prelude (“You broke my heart cuz I couldn’t dance / You didn’t even want me around”) that the white boys dispense with entirely. Actually, that omission, which explains why they singer has learned to dance, makes rather a hash of the lyric that follows, but I doubt anyone has ever preferred the Contours’ version for the greater consistency of its governing conceit. And whatever the Dave Clark Five version lacks in, shall we say, verbal complexity, it makes up for in sheer relentless. In fact, the song isn’t much more than an extended chorus with a couple of rests, punctuated by Dave Clark’s indefatigable hammering. In contrast to the somewhat chunka-chunk rhythm of the Contours’ version, the Dave Clark Five’s glides majestically on an underlay of saxophone and organ, while more than matching the momentum of the original. And there you have the Dave Clark Five in a nutshell: raw power getting along quite amiably with pop smoothness. The terms ought to be mutually exclusive, and to listen to some of the band’s fluffier ballads (“Crying over You,” “Everybody Knows”) is to agree, momentarily, with the charge of frivolous bourgeois deviationism so often brought against them. Although a few of the slow songs are lovely, such as the McCartneyesque “Till the Right One Comes Along” and even the shlocky “Because,” the band’s more characteristic songs helped to define one of those hybrid genres that rock and roll is so good at inventing: power pop. . . .

It Might Get Loud

2009-08-23T18:20:00.000-07:00

In order to pass as au courant I suppose I ought to make a point of hearing as much live music as possible and posting my musings forthwith, but truly, I'd rather go to the movies. Which is why I have a few things to say about Davis Guggenheim's new rock and roll documentary, It Might Get Loud, rather than the Nine Inch Nails show at Webster Hall. To begin with, I actually saw the movie, whereas I've never seen Nine Inch Nails. Maybe I should feel bad about that, but at a certain age, going to the movies seems a blissfully hassle-free experience compared to the typical rock and roll show. Although I might have missed a once-in-a-lifetime experience with Trent Reznor at Webster Hall, it felt pretty good to settle into my seat at Sunshine Cinema on Houston Street and spend an hour and a half with Jimmy Page, the Edge, and Jack White. Maybe it's all in the editing, but each one of them comes across as funny, articulate, and self-aware. Most of all they manage to convey, through their words and their playing, their passionate devotion to guitars and guitar-based music. How lovely that they're still feeling it after all these years, or in White's case, that you have every reason to believe he will be. The best line in the movie is the Edge (who surely knows whereof he speaks) on This Is Spinal Tap: "I didn't laugh; I wept."

Beatles Interactive Video Game

2009-08-19T18:20:00.000-07:00

An interesting article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine of August 16, 2009 ("While My Guitar Gently Beeps" by Daniel Radosh) posits that in the very near future people will experience the Beatles' music more fully than ever before through the medium of an interactive video game called "The Beatles: Rock Band." Paul, Ringo, Yoko, and Olivia Harrison are all with the program. "That's what you want," Paul says in the article. "You want people to get engaged." The head of the company that designed the game says, "When you need to move your body in synchrony with the music in specific ways, it connects you with the music in a deeper way than when you are just listening to it." There are many conclusions to be drawn from the advent of this potentially revolutionary technology, but the first one that comes to mind is this: Maybe I'm too old to be writing a blog about pop culture. What the hell are these people talking about? Honestly, I'd give the game a try, but I'm afraid that it would upset my stomach, like those video games in bars where you're driving a car and dodging obstacles on a winding road. I know my legions of worshipful readers look to me for guidance on just such momentous issues, but about "The Beatles: Rock Band," I can only borrow an adage from the proudly reactionary Harold Bloom, who had this to say about another -- admittedly somewhat more mainstream -- technology: "The Internet is like Borneo: I know that it exists, but I will never go there."

Meet the Beatles

2009-08-17T16:55:00.000-07:00

When my sister brought home her copy of Meet the Beatles in February of 1964, I could not have known that she was yet again determining my fate. I wouldn’t insist on the banality of this life-altering encounter with the Beatles if it hadn’t happened to so many millions of people at the same time. And we weren’t even getting the real thing. Basically, Meet the Beatles is a bowdlerized American version of the original U.K. recording With the Beatles, adding “I Saw Her Standing There” but omitting “Please Mr. Postman” and “Money,” which is rather like omitting “La Habanera” and “Près des ramparts de Séville” from Carmen. (The recent re-release of Meet the Beatles and the other cheapo Capitol recordings for their putatively superior sequencing strikes me as endearingly misguided.) Still, even a bowdlerized early Beatles record is better than most bands’ Greatest Hits, and I’m too much a sentimentalist or maybe just too much a cheapskate to trade in Meet for With. Before discussing the music, however, I’d like to consider that irresistible temptation to pop sociology, the album cover. Four moody young men with turtlenecks and shockingly long hair peering out of the backlit darkness: this, rather than The Ed Sullivan Show, was America’s first sustained glimpse of the Beatles. In other words, they were already arty, though the photo on the back (moptops laughing in mod suits) somewhat neutralized the seriousness of the photo on the front. But that iconic cover image, reflecting the bohemian trappings they had picked up in Hamburg (as opposed to the semi-criminal tendencies they had also absorbed there), introduced a concept till then unknown: an unsmarmy rock and roll band. If it took Capitol Records a while to catch on (“Here’s the big beat sound of that fantastic, phenomenal foursome!” screams the jacket copy), it took the Beatles a while, too. “I Wanna Be Your Man” – and I intend this as praise – is nothing if not shitty. But they were fast learners.

Precisely because it seems so average, “Not a Second Time,” the last song on the album, is a good place to begin. A mid-tempo ballad carried by piano and sung by John (I’m on a strictly first-name basis with the Fabs), it has a catchy melody, a lovely, descending vocal line, and some deft drum fills, though the left-handed piano solo, clumsily restating the melody, borders on muzak. But what distinguishes the tune, to my ears, is something more intangible: the quality of John Lennon’s voice. I realize that emoting over John’s singing is no substitute for criticism, and on this point you might want to read Wilfrid Mellers (Twilight of the Gods: The Music of the Beatles) rather than me. But what can I do? Either you hear whole worlds of tenderness and toughness and poignance in that voice or you’re just not as sensitive as I am. (I hear the same qualities in the Band’s Rick Danko, John’s only rival for my affections among white male rock singers.) Tim Riley’s description of this vocal performance in his indispensable Tell Me Why: A Beatles Commentary -- “The uneasy balance between trepidation and determination is sung desperately, making the wish for reconciliation implicit in the overstatement of the refusal” – is a valiant effort but may leave an impression contrary to the one intended: maybe criticism is no substitute for emoting over John’s singing.

There’s a poignant moment in the 1996 television documentary The Beatles when George Martin, sitting at a mixing board, plays back the first take of “A Day in the Life.” His wonder, thirty years after recording the song as the Beatles’ producer, is palpable. Even in this early take, he says, just before John sings so wearily of reading the news that day, “he has a voice which sends shivers down the spine.” Then Martin bows his head, folds his hands, and glances almost sheepishly at his interlocutor, as if embarrassed to be so obviously affected by the overwhelming majesty of a few casually sung lines. How British. The truth is, as Martin goes on to say, John hated his voice and insisted on double tracking, echo effects, and other studio gimmicks to cover its nakedness. Accordingly, the vocal on “Not a Second Time” is double tracked, which, to me, makes it sound twice as good – two Johns instead of one. Maybe John’s voice needed a little tweaking; it certainly wasn’t as clean or pretty as Paul’s. It’s a tribute to Martin’s production techniques that these embellishments, which might have cluttered the mix, seem only to accentuate the plaintiveness already there. Much to the amusement of cynical John, a critic in the London Times noted the similarity between “the Aeolian cadence at the end of ‘Not a Second Time’” and “the chord progression which ends Mahler’s Song of the Earth.” That’s as may be. I just think the way John sings it is really soulful.

With such a voice, John Lennon had a way of turning banal pop tunes into fierce psychodramas. The words at this point were still fairly anodyne, but not entirely: unlike Paul’s generally sunny lyrics, John’s kept coming back to resentment, recrimination, and rancor. John Lennon was an angry young man (“a right bastard,” as his songwriting partner once called him), and when he sang of his hurt and pain in the clichéd phrases of the pop lament, he sounded as if, rather tactlessly, he meant it. “This Boy” (side one, track three) isn’t one of John’s angrier songs, but you get the sense that the singer hates his rival a lot more than he loves his girlfriend. Not that too much can be made of lines like:

This boy would be happy just to love you

But oh my-y-y-y

That boy won’t be happy

Till he sees you cry-y-y-y.

Nevertheless, as formulaic love songs go, “This Boy” is weirder than it needs to be. The singer seems to relate to his (former) girlfriend primarily through the despised rival, the crucial mediator of this tortured relationship – triangular desire, as René Girard called it (Deceit, Desire, and the Novel), thinking, admittedly, of Proust. And though you can make the Bee Gees sound Proustian if you really work at it, I do think that “This Boy,” like many of John’s early compositions (“Misery,” “You Can’t Do That,” “I’ll Cry Instead”) describes a situation rather more fraught than the typical pop song of the day. Even so, this boy/that boy, loves you/doesn’t love you, will take you only so far. Without John’s keening vocal, Paul’s loping bass, the stately 12/8 strumming on electric and acoustic guitars, and the superb harmonies throughout, the words would hardly seem noticeable, let alone “fraught.” Compared to the elegant conceits in Smokey Robinson’s song of the period – “This Boy” is, among other things, a deliberate homage to Motown song craft – John’s amateurish lyrics ought to embarrass. And yet the twenty-three-year-old husband and father singing “This boy wouldn’t mind the pain / Would always feel the same” comes across as touchingly absurd rather than as laughably ridiculous. Tertullian (De Carne Christi, Book 5) might have liked rock and roll for the same reason that I prefer it to more sophisticated forms of music: It is to be believed because it is absurd. . . .

Steely Dan at the Beacon Theater

2009-08-12T16:52:00.000-07:00

In a half-hearted effort to make this fake blog seem somewhat authentic, I will occasionally weigh in with some piece of ephemera, in this case my take on the Steely Dan concert at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan on Monday, Aug. 10, 2009. Here's my review: They were very very good. What did you expect? Steely Dan were always very very good. The only surprise on Monday night was Donald Fagan's bizarre Ray Charles-on-acid mannerisms, which I found kind of endearing. Also, I discovered that I'm not the only one whose favorite Steely Dan song is "My Old School." The crowd seemed to go nuts over everything but especially that one. Anyway, technical perfection always seemed to be the goal of this band, sometimes at the expense, alas alas, of real feeling. Furthermore, there are some Steely Dan songs marred not only by an excessive slickness but by an insistent banality, as in "The Fez" and "Green Earrings," both of which they played on Monday night. But who am I to criticize such brilliant musicians and songwriters? (Also such irresistible smartasses -- the gleefully cynical liner notes Becker and Fagan wrote for the reissue of their catalog put most such efforts to shame.) Every Steely Dan album is a good or a great one, and if I had to choose one I guess it would be Katy Lied because it was the favorite of a girl I had a mad crush on in college. How's that for critical acumen?

Johnny and the Hurricanes Featuring “Red River Rock"

2009-08-11T16:15:00.001-07:00

Fifties rock and roll stands to sixties rock and roll roughly as Bach does to Beethoven: later isn’t necessarily better. But while I yield to no one in my admiration for the Founders, I was born too late to experience their music contemporaneously. Thus my perception of fifties rock and roll is free from the warping nostalgia that I have every intention of indulging throughout this book. For me, rock and roll began with the Beatles, but they did have a precursor – not the recordings of cowboy songs or Children’s Party Favorites that my mother optimistically introduced into the household before rock corrupted me forever, but my older sister’s copy of Johnny and the Hurricanes Featuring “Red River Rock.” It certainly got the house jumping.

Megs must have had other LPs and 45s lying around, but Johnny and the Hurricanes is the one that got to me, and I think I know why: the cover. There was Johnny perched atop the roof of the band’s Volkswagen touring bus and blowing into his tenor sax while the other Hurricanes and their gear spilled out of the open doors beneath him and a river stretched into the distance. Was there anything cooler in 1962 or so than a rock and roll “combo” with snazzy uniforms and a Volkswagen bus lettered with the band name in cursive script? Probably, but to my seven-year-old mind that image evoked an ideal of freedom and glamour that my cowboy songs couldn’t touch. And I still think a record sounds better if it has a good cover.

Although I cling obstinately and irrationally to my LPs, I’ve lost many of the earlier ones, and my sister’s copy of Johnny and the Hurricanes is long gone. In its place I’ve had to make do with a more recent compilation, The Very Best of Johnny & the Hurricanes, which is more complete anyway (so much for nostalgia) and includes a peerlessly cheesy cover shot of Johnny bending way back with his tenor while the Hurricanes, in skinny suits and photographically retouched pompadours, grin sheepishly over their axes. Crazy, man.

My sister’s record lacked many of the songs on the compilation, but it did have “Crossfire,” the one Hurricane song likely to be familiar to rock and roll fans otherwise ignorant of the band, that is, virtually everyone. Aside from a reference to them in a 1973 Kinks song (“One of the Survivors”) and some sites on the Internet, Johnny and the Hurricanes have pretty much passed out of rock and roll history. This neglect is a pity because, apart from the role the Hurricanes played in the formation of my preadolescent consciousness, they were a hot band. “Crossfire,” for instance, is so primal that most people would swear they’ve heard it before even if they haven’t. Over a pulsing guitar, the saxophone plays a grindhouse riff and the band goes into a variation on a twelve-bar blues, with some nifty touches: a call and response passage between sax and guitar, a stop-and-start turnaround on the twelfth bar, and a bridge that omits the first interval in the standard one-four-five progression. Though it’s sobering to consider what Miles Davis was doing at the same time, “Crossfire” has an earthy jouissance, let’s say, and its momentum is irresistible. I suppose it would be possible to dislike this song and still like rock and roll. But I doubt it. . . .

Eli and the Thirteenth Confession by Laura Nyro

2009-08-04T18:14:00.000-07:00

I figure I’ve spent 15,025 hours of my life listening to rock and roll records. By tomorrow I’ll have spent 15,026. Roughly an hour a day for forty five years: not so excessive, really, though I’d prefer not to dwell on how I might have otherwise used that time. Still, I don’t fundamentally regret the hours I’ve devoted to my collection of four or five hundred records, a notably dilettantish one compared to the staggering audio libraries compiled by more typical rock obsessives. One of the central assumptions of my life – and the thesis of this book – is that rock and roll music is pretty good. I’d hate to think I’ve spent 15,025 hours listening to crap.

Give or take a few thousand hours under the headphones, the music I’ve been listening to most of my life has been that created by rich, white, famous British and American rock stars. I don’t say these musicians haven’t received their due, but it’s certainly more impressive to prefer Elmore James to the Allman Brothers Band (or the White Stripes or My Chemical Romance or whoever – references change fast in rock and roll). It may be that James’s music had a depth and authority beyond the reach of the Allmans. After all, they were imitating him, not the other way around. But depth and authority are not the sine qua non of rock and roll, and I’ll be honest: I’d rather listen to the Allman Brothers. Maybe I’m just shallow. But I grew up with rock’s appropriation of roots music, and it’s partly the rootless immediacy of rock – its shallowness – that appeals to me. Denouncing rock musicians for selling out has always struck me as pointless. They’re supposed to sell out; otherwise, they’d be blues musicians, some of whom might have been delighted to compromise their integrity if, unlike white people, they hadn’t been denied the opportunity. (Far from negotiating exclusively with the Devil, Robert Johnson, it is now known, threw in crowd-pleasing standards to oblige his audience. Well, why not?) There’s still plenty of room for edgy, nonmainstream stuff in rock and roll, but, if depth and authority are what you want, you listen to Elmore James, not the Allman Brothers Band.

Because I suspect there are legions like me – boring, responsible adults who occasionally read hard books but remain in thrall to the music of their youths – the question must be asked: What has 15,025 hours of rock and roll music done to me? Well, I don’t think it has fatally corrupted me or degraded my taste, though perhaps I would appreciate chamber music a little more if rock hadn’t got to me first. Yet if there’s any incompatibility between a moderately reflective, bookish life and a mild addiction to rock and roll, I haven’t found it. I suppose others could make the argument that I’m so mired in degradation that I can’t see it as degradation. Imagine what Alan Bloom would have said! But another way of looking at it is that rock and roll has redeemed me from priggishness. Though no more arrogant than my fellow New Yorkers, I don’t want to miss all the fun that the multitudes seem to be having. If a certain amount of sleaze and slime comes with the package, that’s something I can stand to know about too. Still, relative to other forms of mass culture, the proportion of sleaze and slime seems slightly lower in rock and roll, which is why I listen to records rather than watch mud wrestling matches on TV.

It’s not all good, mindless fun, however. This musical universe contains “A Day in the Life” as well as “Louie Louie,” and if forced to choose between the two, as Yogi Berra might have said, I wouldn’t. Rock’s status as Art is a touchy subject, and I don’t intend to press it, let alone prove it. How much aesthetic purity do you want in rock and roll anyway? Yet surely a Laura Nyro song achieves a level of emotional complexity and technical mastery not utterly incompatible with that of high art. O.K., maybe Laura Nyro comes in on the low end of the high art scale, and New York Tendaberry isn’t Don Giovanni. But do we really need to worry about how much greater Mozart is? Beauty and art are everywhere in vernacular music, as Mozart would have been the first to acknowledge. I think he would have found those qualities in Laura Nyro, though I can’t say what he would have made of Mötley Crüe.

Unlike most country or blues musicians, rockers often conceive of themselves quite consciously as artists. Laura Nyro is a case in point, and her apparent anomalousness (she was a lesbian, she played the piano, she didn’t smash hotel rooms), points up one of rock’s greatest strengths: the impossibility of ever defining it. Nyro belongs to rock and roll partly because her songs use rock structures and traditions but also because there’s no other place to put her – and because she’s so arty. Portentous chord progressions and some really bad poetry just come with the territory. What after all can you say about lines like, “Kisses from you / in the flames of December’s boudoir, / they fill me like melons”? It’s not enough to note that such gaucheries, fatal to a poem, merely blemish a song; without Nyro’s willingness to incur them, she couldn’t have composed Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, one of the more astonishing song cycles ever created by a twenty-year-old Jewish-Italian girl from the Bronx. And though it’s slightly embarrassing when she overreaches, most of the time her abrupt changes in tempo, her vocal leaps and runs, her cryptic, stream-of-consciousness lyrics, and her appropriations of black musical idioms result in something uncannily resembling art. If she hadn’t been so ambitious, she would have given us merely clever and finely crafted pop tunes, which is what the Fifth Dimension (or, as they might have been called, the Guilty Pleasures) did with a bunch of her songs in the late sixties. Of course, Nyro’s songs are clever and finely crafted pop tunes. They are also – in their deferred gratifications and in the demands they make on the listener’s attention – art. This must be so, because whenever I listen to Eli and the Thirteenth Confession I get all weepy. . . .