If you have ever been in a band–and I hope my buds Steve and Gene affirm this–you are doomed to play covers.
Speaking for myself, and the Biletones, between my own catalog of originals, and that of bandmate/singer/rhythm guitarist Tom Nelson, we could easily play a two hour set of tunes we penned.
However, especially if your group does not have, shall we say, “a name,” then for the most part you have to get used to playing Little Queenie, Dead Flowers, Moondance, and a zillion other tunes that I have played way more often than I wish.
Still, it goes with the territory, as people want to hear and dance to stuff they know. We do play Tom’s Rich Girlfriend as a regular tune, and have done my own Geography Matters, as well as a couple of more Tom wrote (Bad Dreams, DUI Bars) but for the most part we have to squeeze the desire to play originals into playing more obscure covers.
That means we play a chunk of Uncle Tupelo, Son Volt, and Wilco, all of which are fine by me, to go along with Queenie and the more mainstream cover ilk.
Sometimes those odd covers work (Gravity’s Gone, by Drive by Truckers) and sometimes not (Having a Party by Sam Cooke, and Borrow your Cape by Bobby Bare, Jr.).
Well, about a month ago, the song Reform School Girls, by Nick Curran and the Lowlifes appeared on the weekly practice list.
The song is a great paean to the Phil Spector sound, as well as an homage to the Bitch Groups like the Shangri-Las, and well, once we started playing it, I found myself humming it for days at a time.
Written by the very talented Curran, who sadly passed away from oral cancer in October of last year at the age of 35, Reform School Girls is as beautiful a send up to the genre as is the Tubes Don’t Touch Me There.
Freaks and Geeks only ran for one season, did not attract a big audience, and the for a time vanished. I remember the promotion when the season was released on DVD, but it wasn’t until earlier this year I started watching it on Netflix. The premise is simple: The year is 1980, I think. A brainy high school girl, Lindsey, grows dissatisfied with her sheltered suburban life, and decides she wants to be friendly with the clique of freaks who hang together on the edge of academic engagement. Meanwhile, her nerdy brother and his friends enter high school, and try to navigate through the pubescent mine field there.
One of the freaks, Nick, is a stoner whose identity is linked with his giant 29 piece drum kit. He’s not that bright, but he’s sweet and for a while he and Lindsey go out. In this episode a leading local rock band loses its drummer and Nick auditions. The result is wonderfully nuanced.
I know Ilan in the most direct peripheral way: He used to write for the Fantasy Football Guide. But he didn’t write directly for me, so I’ve never met him or even had a conversation with him, except on Facebook a little. I have written him checks. For some reason, I guess having to do with the 20th anniversary of its release, and its pedigree as a T-Bone Burnett production, Counting Crows’ August and Everything After has been discussed quite a bit here recently.
Ilan weighs in with a piece for the WBUR (a Boston NPR station) website about his love for the album. He’s read the Steven Hyden piece about which I wrote a few weeks ago and quotes it, so this isn’t all out of the blue, but I liked Ilan’s personal account and thought it was worth reading. He says:
“For months, the album felt like my own little secret. I evangelized it to friends, family or anyone who’d listen. They had a hard time grasping my zealotry for the fledgling band. It seems strange, today, to think of Counting Crows as fledgling. But, for a period of five months in late 1993 and early 1994, they were. The smash hit “Mr. Jones” — which became a No. 1 song in April 1994 — had not yet been released. In casual conversations, if you mentioned Counting Crows, the likely reply was, “Are you sure you’re not thinking of The Black Crowes?”
In discussion on Facebook Ilan also cops to what can best be described as Counting Crows’ weaknesses, with a rationale I like a lot: “i was a little abashed about the essay, because there are millions of people who don’t respect CC’s album-mastery and judge them as lame/whiny (not without some justification), because of their dreadful joni mitchell covers and the overplaying of certain songs and what the singer LOOKS LIKE, which is so utterly phony i want to barf, but that’s humanity.”
Some time back Lawr wrote about the producer T-Bone Burnett, who produced Counting Crows’ first album, August and Everything After. That led me to tell a story about hearing a song on the radio, ordering the cassette, and then to my surprise discovering that I didn’t like the record at all. I don’t think I told that I took my copy and sent it to my brother in law, which he appreciated. He became a fan, as did much of a broad swath of America. A story that ran in Grantland recently says 7 million bought August and Everything After.
He really likes Counting Crows, finds Adam Duritz to be a compelling lyricist and performer and song craftsman, and he lays out a really interesting case about why Nirvana and Counting Crows are looked at now, 20 years on, so differently (and it isn’t just that one depressive songwriter shot himself and the other depressive songwriter numbed himself with medicines). The piece is a little long, and has those cute/dangerous/irksome footnotes that Grantland is known for, but I’ll let you read Hyden’s story for his explanation of the nature of sad songs, which I think is very smart and on first thought at least, right.
But I’m pretty sure he’s not right about the equivalence he makes between In Utero and August sonically. I mean, maybe some Alternative Radio stations played both, it’s possible, but these two records couldn’t be less alike in terms of their approach to music.
In Utero is a rock record with some quiet songs, while August is a poet’s record, with a jazz/folk rock accompaniment. The difference shows up most clearly in the relationship between the words and the music. Cobain and Nirvana seem to build the sound, the arrangement first, then figure out how to fit the words inside. I’m not saying this is exactly how they do it always, and it isn’t that Cobain doesn’t care about the words, but listening to Nirvana the words are always set inside the sound. Have a listen to one of the band’s quiet songs:
Adam Duritz, on the other hand, surely concocts his story songs on long pieces of paper, maybe typing madly a la Jack Kerouac and his rolls of On the Road. He’s not logorrheic, he’s a poet getting the story down, but his talent is weaving together long shaggy dog stories full of emotionally hurt people doing their best, subject to digressions and qualifications and an occasional hook. That’s the start, and it is hard to listen to a Counting Crows song’ and hear a song, per se, except for the one that is in Duritz’s vocals. Apart from that, the band does a nice job filling in around the edges, but the center of the songs are the words, not the sounds of music.
I’m not sure that this is always a weakness, but it doesn’t help if you find Duritz to be a tiresome voice. As I do. Without chops and musical drive, you keep landing on his quavery whine. But that’s a personal taste. Steven Hyden hears in Counting Crows’ songs emotions and connections that are rarely explored by rock bands, as he discusses in the article, and he finds that valuable. That’s his choice and he’s welcome to it.
I was on the west coast and the north coast the last two weeks, so forgive me if I missed something. But I arrived back in Brooklyn yesterday and found the neighborhood around the Barclay Center in lockdown. Television has landed in our neighborhood. The MTV Video Awards were being presented. I didn’t watch.
Upon waking today I discovered that the most important news of the day was Miley Cyrus’s performance on the show of her own excellent desultory party song “We Won’t Stop” and the execrable-y danceable “Blurred Lines.” For a girl in a teddy bear suit who stripped down to a latex bikini, I think Miley did okay for herself. Which is why I post here.
The first point is that Miley Cyrus was a huge child star for the Disney Corp, and she isn’t any longer. She, as she has famously said, won’t be tamed.
I almost certainly wouldn’t have paid any attention to this, except I have a daughter who is 14 years old, and who grew up with Miley. Her first 3D movie was Miley’s concert, with the exploding drumsticks, for what it’s worth. And she, and I, have appreciated an awful lot of excellent Miley Cyrus pop music over the years. Most of the Miley product is not crap at all and I think that’s an important distinction.
But it is product, and because it is product, it is easy to marginalize. Miley is not the Beatles. Or Wire. At the same time, she’s made more money than any performer over the last, um, number of years, except maybe Oprah. And to ascribe her motives to desperate attention seeking, as today’s social commentators seem to be doing, is naive. Or ludicrously cynical. And just plain insulting.
Miley’s job is to entertain, and her performance as a plushie who strips down and actually humanizes Robin Thicke’s and Pharrel Williams’s Blurred Lines seems kind of noble to me. Goofy, antic, like Lucille Ball perhaps, but ultimately noble. Anyone who condemns her for her performance should watch the “unrated” Blurred Lines video. Here. Which is exploitation? Which is satire? You decide.
As a rock fan I love that Miley pissed everyone off. She confused them. She is funny and fun, no matter what the situation, and kind of fearless in her VMA performance. She’s one of the few stars who can do whatever she wants, with no fear of consequence. It’s her party! Unbridled id? Isn’t that rock?
(There is a rather significant aesthetic issue. Miley’s music is way more interesting as social statement than musical achievement. That’s a good reason not to overplay her significance, but not a reason to ignore her contributions to the cultural discussion.)
Here is a link to video of We Can’t Stop.
But there is also this: Miley says: “It’s my mouth, I can say what I want.” I like that, it has always been Miley’s message.
You don’t have to like Miley’s music or even her performance to see the critical outrage about her performance as asinine. Beat her up for bad choices, she’s a fair target for that, but first grant that they are her choices, not some sort of desperate irrational girlish plea.
There has been a lot of banter among us about what really constitutes rock ‘n’ roll.
For those of us who have contributed to the site–as well I suspect to those who have been kind enough to read us–we all have our interpretations and definitions of the musical form that ushered our generation into control of the various airwaves.
For certainly no matter what else be said, when Led Zeppelin and Steppenwolf and even the Beatles Revolution are the sound backing mainstream TV commercials (for the cynics, note that Joni Mitchell has never let a song of hers be used for advertising purposes) then the influence of rock in our culture simply cannot be denied.
But, it has struck me with the first challenge tunes going back to the very early days of the genre Alan Freed so aptly named, the real soul of the music belongs to the African American community.
Not that I am the first to note this, but when we do talk about the music and its roots, and what it really means, Bill Haley always gets a nod. And, that is fine for Haley was a trendsetter, and had a great band and deserves some respect there.
But really it was Shake, Rattle, and Roll, recorded in February of 1954 by Big Joe Turner, five months before Bill Haley covered the same tune and three months before Rock Around the Clock was recorded and released, that probably owns the title of the breakthrough song pushing the then new form to the masses.
Of course, what cannot be denied is that irrespective of the quality of either version of Shake, Rattle, and Roll, it is the Haley version that got the ink and reaction and coverage in those days. It was also a much bigger hit, as was his cover of Rock Around the Clock.
However, it is important to remember the context of why, and the large reason Haley enjoyed more success than his African American counterparts was that in 1954, the civil rights movement was still in its infancy.
So, aside from the fact that Haley reached a bigger market, white America’s attitude to the African American community was such that music, styles, food, hell virtually anything from the rich culture that emerged from slavery, and to a large degree out of the notion that necessity is the mother of invention (guess whose band grabbed at that one?) was driven by evil dark forces.
It was in May of 1954, that the Brown v. The Board of Education case declared that segregation, and the notion of “separate but equal” was unconstitutional. And, that decision, was 15 months before Rosa Parks and her dog tired dogs, after a hard day of work, refused to step to the back of the bus.
Even with that, it was seven more years until James Meredith was granted admission to the University of Mississippi, the first African American to gain entrance to that institution, and one that met with a fair amount of violence at the time (I still remember reading the headlines, and not being able to understand who cared who went to what school as a then nine-year old). Mind you, that was almost a decade after segregation was ruled unconstitutional.
But, as with Pat Buchanan, inexplicably announcing before his dismissal from MSNBC a few years ago that America was built on the backs of white people, the real grunt work of the country–and like it or not, our current music scene–can completely be owned by that same African American community in the same sense that the Egyptians or the Romans can take credit for their great civilizations, but the building of the cities and the pyramids was completed by slaves.
And, while I can give that respect to Haley, for example, I can give none to Pat Boone for bastardizing the true rock ‘n’ roll of Little Richard. For, Richard, and Chuck Berry come as true to defining the form for me as anyone (and the truth is, it would not matter to me if they were pink Martians, they still rocked the shit out of what Boone and his ilk turned into pablum).
For Boone’s treatment of Little Richard was sanitized out of the fearfulness that the African American community–particularly their men–simply wanted to get white women drunk and/or stoned and then have sex with them, using music as part of the means to that end. And, if that sounds outrageous, try reading Daniel Okrent’s excellent narrative on Prohibition, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. (Also remember that the Volstead Act was repealed barely 20 years before the Brown V. the Board of Education decision.)
In fact, in reviewing Okrent’s tome to that troubled period in our history, Publisher’s Weekly notes that ” He unearths many sadly forgotten characters from the war over drink—and readers will be surprised to learn how that fight cut across today’s ideological lines. Progressives and suffragists made common cause with the Ku Klux Klan—which in turn supported a woman’s right to vote—to pass Prohibition.”
If you wonder about this, here is a vid of Boone’s treatment of Tutti Fruitti:
And, now, here is the man, Little Richard showing us exactly how it should be done:
But, essentially the blues form, and rhythm and blues, and Motown, can all be looked to as the seeds of modern rock and pop whether anyone likes it or not, for virtually all modern rock ‘n’ roll stems from that 1/4/5 chord motif that the blues presented.
Further, if you look to the British wave of music, that followed Haley and Richard by ten years, the bands who made a difference–The Beatles, The Who, The Stones, for example–all cut their early chops playing a heavy dose of Motown and Soul music.
In fact, it really was that amalgamation of American rhythm and blues and the Noel Coward sort of tin pan alley that formed the essence of the Brit-pop that invaded America and changed the musical scene around the world forever.
Oddly, despite now being almost 60 years beyond Brown V. the Board of Education and Shake, Rattle, and Roll being released, we are still essentially fighting the same stupid fights, with laws about immigration and diversity (which are the essence of America’s success) and voting rights.
It is easy to get sanctimonious about all of this, but, at the end of the day, as noted by another great freedom fighter, Mohandas Gandhi, “in the end, the truth is still the truth.”
Long live Chuck, Richard, Turner and rock! They started it all (with a little help from their friends).
Just traveled to California and drove up and down Laurel Canyon and thought not only about Joni Mitchell, who has been such a source of controversy here, mostly backstage, but my love of music very generally and where it began.
In 1972, my mother moved us (parents were divorced) to the Mojave Desert — Yucca Valley, CA. Geologically and geographically different from Laurel Canyon, yet sharing that same artsy vibe (only the poor artists live in the desert).
The people we hung with, the new friends and relatives, aunts and uncles I hardly knew, were mostly listening to that Canyon music — Mitchell, Carole King, Carly Simon, Todd Rundgren, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, Seals and Crofts and, of course, some non-California acts like the Rolling Stones. (I especially remember the hours I spent staring at Goats Head Soup’s cover and how horrified I was of the image of that soup where, now, what’s truly horrifying about that album is how it marked the beginning of the end of the greatest Rock and Roll Band in the world.)
At gatherings, the adults provided the soundtrack. But back home, in my room, lying on my waterbed, the radio was the only free form of entertainment I had. The scoops of ice cream cost $.05 cents at Thrifty’s and I think the occasional drive-in was $5 per car. I was before and am again now a TV junkie. But I never even saw a TV at any adult’s house. Not only was it looked down upon, but there was no reception in the high desert. Yet I still stubbornly spent many hours the first few weeks, maybe even few months, trying to get some signal from the black and white set I badgered my mother into bringing west. Alas, there were only faint ghosts of images, and only at night — nothing remotely watchable or even listenable. (Yes, I would have given anything to even LISTEN to TV.) So all that was left for me was my transistor radio — this model, I swear.
Only the Hits station came in. I can’t say if that period was particularly good for music — that would be like asking the starving man to rate the hamburger you just gave him. But 1972’s top 100.it sure seemed good to me.
I loved “American Pie,” it was the first time I really noticed dramatic changes in sound within one song. And it was the first song where I really paid attention to the lyrics. “Brand New Key” by Melanie was inescapable. I didn’t like it then or now. But another kitschy song, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” was pure childhood delight for me. I loved “Alone Again (Naturally),” oblivious to how sad it was. My love of soul music was forged here: “I Gotcha” by Joe Tex was most popular but I preferred Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together,” “Lean on Me” by Bill Withers, “I’ll Take You There,” “Backstabbers,” “Oh Girl”…. I heard them all so many times that I may as well have owned the records (which nine year olds don’t buy even if they could afford to, which I couldn’t).
“Rocket Man” by Elton John sounded different from everything else, yet was so catchy and was the first time I heard one of those great Elton choruses that I grew to love so much. While I really liked more iconic, Rock Remnants-certified rockers like “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress” by the Hollies, “Go All the Way” by the Raspberries and “Bang a Gong” by T-Rex, I had ample room in my juvenile musical palate for Cat Stevens’s “Morning Has Broken,” too. That was the first time I really noticed how beautiful a piano could sound. I could hardly afford to hate much when hating required me to turn off the radio and thus my only connection to the outside world. I looked for things I liked in everything I heard and if I really hated something, like Melanie, I had to tolerate it anyway and give it every chance to change my mind (as some songs did — like “Hocus Pocus” by Focus — learned to love the guitar riffs, still hated the yodeling.)
1973’s top 100 gave me “Me and Mrs. Jones” by Billy Paul, which seemed so grown up and off limits, but man, did I love it on those lonely desert nights while trying not too hard to go to sleep. But I also loved polar opposite songs like “Frankenstein” by Edgar Winter (Hocus Pocus without the yodeling!) and “Little Willy” by Sweet, which may as well have been The Archies to my ear. It was pure kid music, barely less silly than “The Monster Mash,” another 1973 hit. And about monsters! “Will It Go Round in Circles” by Billy Preston was a pleasure for me every time, as was “Superstition,” “Stuck in the Middle with You,” “Live and Let Die,” “Daniel,” “Superfly,” “Love Train,” “That Lady” and the also-so-grown-up “Wildflower” by Skylark. “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” seemed like it was written just for nine-year-old boys and how could it be that this song inspired Freddie Mercury of all people? Music is such a wonderful chemistry experiment, a fact that comes into sharp relief when you can do nothing else but immerse yourself in it for two, long formative years.
This shuffler exercise, as with lots of stuff on this website, is another underhanded, backdoor attempt to prove who has the most diverse musical taste, the widest appreciation of music, etc.
“Look at me, I like country and reggae and punk and jazz.”
“No, look at me, I like folk and ska and rockabilly and punk and migrant workers playing wooden flutes.”
Well, good for you. You win the friggin’ Dave Marsh Award.
I’m going to lose these contests every single time. And you know why? Let me use a drug analogy. I don’t know a lot about drugs personally, but I read a lot. Let me give you Handsome Dick Manitoba’s number one from “Richard Manitoba’s 9 Best Drugs Ever (In Descending Order), from “The Official Book Of Sex, Drugs & Rock ‘N’ Roll Lists,” first paragraph only:
1. Heroin
“Best drug ever. No matter what drug they invent, what I might have missed – because there are a plethora of new intoxicants all the time – I went out with a World Championship ring on my finger. I went out winning the World Series and I retired in 1983. Heroin was the granddaddy of them all.”
I’m not quite as old as most of the authors of this site, but I’m plenty old. And I’ve dabbled in all those genres at one time or another. But I think I’ve found the heroin of rock ‘n’ roll.
So, I’ll continue to dabble occasionally, but I know what I really need. And there’s plenty of variety within the “heroin” genre. (This will surely surprise the hell out of all of you, but I think if the only music I had left was the fairly big Hellacopters catalogue, I could get by.)
