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.”
I woke up this morning to a story in Slate by the critic Carl Wilson that admonishes cranky critics to admire the fresh virtues of HAIM and Lorde, about whom this cranky critic recently wrote. Oh, and he also extols Drake, also treated crankily here recently.
Now, my first-listen critiques of HAIM and Drake weren’t meant to be for the ages. It is entirely possible that I got either or both of them totally wrong, and that at some point down the road I will love either or both of their records, but that does not excuse the thin gumbo Wilson serves up here as some sort of revelatory musical trend piece. “By the end of the decade, will people look back at the fall of 2013 as the moment when the outlines of twenty-teens pop music began to solidify into a distinctive shape?” he starts his piece. “It’s starting to feel that way.”
Wilson goes on to say that HAIM and Lorde are, “young white women drawing on multiple genres to forge voices as brash as any dance diva’s or swaggering MC’s. In the mirror play between the two trends we might be glimpsing a new chapter in pop cross-dressing, sexually and racially, or at least a fresh length of leash for the century of everything-goes.” What?
Wilson’s incredible argument is that these young ladies are transforming the world of music, marrying white-girl lyrical concerns with the beats and textures of dance music. He says they treat all sounds as “common property, as matter-of-factly as someone flipping through tracks and pictures on her smart phone and grabbing whatever grabs her.” He seems incredulous that Lorde, facile with words, is performing without an acoustic guitar and beret, and writing about things other than the beauty of the natural world. He also finds it ironic that in the song “Royals” she mocks those who value brand-name luxury, but then in real life says Kanye West is one of her favorite artists. Incredible!
I really like “Royals,” and Lorde’s album, “Pure Heroine” is equally appealing most of the time, if ultimately a little draggy. But even if you thought it was electric all the way through is there justification for Wilson’s claim that “while Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber strain to assimilate completely to the dance-pop mainstream and Taylor Swift enters it with wariness, Lorde haughtily assumes a place that’s in that game but not of it.” Can’t the same be said of scores of artists? If you just want to focus on poetical girl singer-songwriters who could have gone the acoustic guitar and beret route, Ellie Goulding certainly got there first, and you can’t listen to “Pure Heroine” without hearing the echoes of what Lana Del Rey and Kid Cudi created last year. And isn’t it surprising to hear rhythmically and sonically how much of what Amy Winehouse and Adele have produced echoes in these newer artists?
Admire Lorde all you want, but to claim that she is singular in this business is pretty crazy.
Wilson then goes on to describe HAIM, and reveals something I didn’t know. The group’s album was supposed to come out last spring, but there was unhappiness about it and they went back and reworked it. He extols the new version’s “bear-trap-tight production values,” what I might (and did) call “a giant machine of a production that envelopes it, full of synths and booming drums, spastic tempo changes and processed voices erupting out of nowhere,” and goes on to praise the group’s melding of their prodigious musical skills (all play percussion as well as their other instruments!) and the contemporary R+B sound so many indie groups (like the Strokes and Jenny Lewis) reject. Which just seems like whacked out straw-indie rockerism.
He does, here, credit Amy Winehouse and Lana Del Rey, along with Grimes and The Blow, as getting there first, which raises another question. If so many others got there first, why is he claiming that Lorde and Haim are ushering in this new age? And does he really mean what he seems to, when he looks “across the divide” and brings in artists of color who are working the same turf, like Janelle Monae, Solange and (gender disruption here) Cee-lo Green? It seems that Wilson, looking for an angle, has executed a tremendous overreach, turning enthusiasm into the discovery of a trend so big that it extends across all of history. Young women make music and like to dance, and sometimes they do both at the same time.
I’ll leave you with Wilson’s head-scratcher of a penultimate graf, which seems to be more about dudes like Wilson than anything having to do with this music:
“[Young women are] making the case for the sounds that have always been their default domain. Dance-pop has been disdained for decades by rock dudes and jazz guys before them with sneers that this music “for girls” (or at best, with some forms of R&B, “for the ladies”) is manufactured pap, seldom meriting serious consideration. By blending dance-pop pleasures with an auteurist individualism that defies such condescension—as Sasha Frere-Jones recently wrote in The New Yorker, HAIM “became everyone’s favorite band in America in roughly two weeks”—these younger artists are taking the sting out of that stigma, with luck for good.”
I think John Legend‘s “Get Lifted” is one of the great records of the current millennium. It could be classified as neo-soul, a genre that is meant to appeal to grown ups drinking wine (or even better champagne) and talking just a little dirty while waiting for the hot tub (or lube) to warm up, but the thing is that the songs are sexy, the sound starts with old soul and gospel and, surprisingly, surprise. The words flow full of new ideas (or old ideas cleverly reframed) and often a hint of edge or menace that make the mix of rhythm and melody sound fresh, redolent of musical and lyrical pleasure. Perhaps no subsequent record could stand up to that monumental achievement, but on first listen the new Legend, “Future of Love,” is a mess of cliche and sappy melodies, with treacly arrangements and tired melodic and lyrical ideas. Legend was a singer songwriter who seemed early on to have the chops and sensibility of Sam Cooke, smooth melodicism, sexy charm, and a bit of righteous indignation, but in hindsight perhaps the excellent taste might be better attributed to his producer and partner, Kanye West. “Wake Up,” Legend’s elpee of protest song covers with the Roots released last year is mostly charming, if too often a little staid, but after the excessively polite third album, “Evolver,” offered welcome affirmation that this was a man with a political, socially-engaged heart. But this new disk made me question my love (is the future of love disdain?) for his first two albums. A quick relisten to “Get Lifted” again confirms its greatness. The new record has none of that going on at all.
I was never a Nine Inch Nails fan, so I’m not qualified to compare the new record, “Hesitation Marks,” to the rest of their/his oeuvre. What is striking here is that these songs are very much songs, full of electronic textures and details in the background, but with plaintive simple vocals on top. It isn’t that the vocals or the arrangements don’t relate, but they have very distinct and different aural profiles. The music is hard edged and polished, machine music, even when it careers toward the emotional, while the vocals are plaintive, all too human, the opposite of hard. Not out of tune, but a bit warbly and textured by throat and tongue. The contrast has the effect of foregrounding the lyrics, which unfortunately all seem to be rhyming couplet cliches. I remember the driven sense of NiN’s MTV hits back in the day that some powerful interpersonal dynamic was at stake. That doesn’t seem to be the case here, though I wouldn’t mind hearing vocal free versions of some of these tracks. They might work well in a soundtrack.
I’m one of the few people in North America who just doesn’t get the appeal of Arcade Fire, who have a new single out called “Reflektor.” I’ve tried to get into them a number of times and just can’t get past the superficial similarities with Talking Heads, whose “Stop Making Sense” live album seems to be a huge influence. In any case, I listen to Arcade Fire and I often hear the Heads, only not nearly as good or interesting. Maybe that’s because the vocals are sludgy and dull, regardless of the lyrics. I’m not someone who needs lyrical meaning to make a song, but I do need the vocals to somehow sound like they deserve to be there. I can’t judge the lyrics of Arcade Fire, I haven’t been able to get into them, but I can judge that the singer doesn’t make we want to hear more. If you like Arcade Fire you’ll probably love Reflektor, it has the big textured sound of the band, but be aware that it also has the prosaic vocals that smudge into a blur running through the middle. I get the impression they’re supposed to signify passion, but I hear anything but.
According to Mick Jones this is the last package of product the Clash will be releasing. It’s primary raison d’etre is complete remixes/remastering of all the old records. This particular linked package of “Sound System” has a bunch of video which may be worthwhile to you or not, and you may or not have most of these tracks. There is a bunch of live and studio stuff that is “new,” though the band never held much back, so it’s unlikely (I haven’t listened to it all) that it’s essential. The bottom line here is that this is one of the greatest of bands of all time, and if you don’t know about all that they did, you should.
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).
A new feature. One of us will nominate a song, another with nominate a challenger. Debate and vote (there will be a voting widget in the sidebar). We’ll keep the vote open until a song gets (hmm, since we don’t have a ton of traffic these days) 12 votes (so please vote, don’t be shy). Then there will be a new challenger to the reigning champ.
Let’s get things started with a song that says a thing or two about rock ‘n’ roll, the Showmen’s “It Will Stand:”
My site mate Mike Salfino really touched on a subject so near and dear to my heart with his piece on listening to the radio–and pretty much only the radio–during his time in Southern California in the early 70’s, that it really spurred me on to state just how much I love the radio.
Say what you will about cable and streaming and dish and CDs and downloads and instant gratification: I come from time where no one had to walk six miles to school through a driving snow storm. My version of childhood deprivation is that we only had three TV stations in the Sacramento Valley (four in the Bay Area) and as a kid, local radio was AM only.
Since it was the universe in which we lived, we did not think much of it. FM was as odd and obscure as was cable TV, when it was offered at hotels a few years later for an extra charge.
But, whatever you wanted was out there on AM at the time. In Sacramento KROY was the station in the early 60’s, and though I hungered for time in Berkeley–which meant decent bookstores, and extra TV station that showed Dodger/Giants games, and much better radio–with my grandparents while I was too young to move back to the Bay Area, there were some ok things about what I now refer to as “excremento.”
The main was the original Tower Records store, about 3.5 miles from our home, which seemed to make for a formidable bicycle ride for an eight-year old (don’t ask me, no one wore helmets then, bikes had maybe three speeds, and if you wanted to ride your bike to the record store, yay, we were out of the house for three to four hours) in 1960-61.
Tower was a treasure trove, though, with listening booths and stacks of current stuff and oldies, and since part of the deal was to build a record collection, it was not out of the question to buy “The Wa-Watusi” as an oldie, as it was “The End of the World” as a current hit.
It was the radio that was our salvation, bringing the new, and to me the rockin’ and the loudest, inhabiting my every pore and cell so infectiously that I was almost paralyzed when I heard a song that sent me.
At night we could often draw in the cool Bay Area stations–KYA and KEWB–which somehow seemed to waste the local stuff in its sophistication, something I seemed able to discern that early in my years (I was also always drawn to The New Yorker at the Dr.’s office for some reason, and I don’t ever remember anyone suggesting I read it).
At the time–before I realized I had a contrary streak in me–I was also a Dodgers fan in Northern California, and sometimes I could adjust my radio against the evening sky and pull in KFI, 50,000 watts over Los Angeles, and hear Vin Scully and Jerry Doggett anounce my beloved team (sponsored by Farmer John and Union 76).
Before clock radios, and bedroom stereos, though, I would go to sleep, seemingly surgically attached to my transistor which was stashed neatly under my pillow, full volume, so I could hear it through the down feathers upon which my head rested.
Then, magically, as those same stereos and clock radios became more mainstream, so did FM radio, and San Francisco debuted the first free form station–KMPX–started by two ex-KYA jocks, Tom Donahue and Jim Washburn.
Within a year or so there were political issues at KMPX, so Donahue fled and started KSAN, right around the time I moved back to the Bay Area for good in 1972 (that station lasted until around 1983).
Much like listening to my shuffle, though, it was great. I will never forget a set that featured a movement from Swan Lake, Brother Jug by Gene Ammons, Chelsea Morning by Joni Mitchell, and She Said Yeah by the Stones.
All so different, and yet all so great, and none of it disrupted by commercials or any of that crap.
To this day, listening to radio like that–be it music, or especially baseball which still translates so beautifully via the radio medium–is and will always be my favorite.
I don’t really do Sirius/XM, or even play CD’s much any more.
But, there is something so right and intimate about listening to the radio, hearing a familiar voice describing a 53 ground out, or telling us about a new Jake Bugg tune.
So, I must share the station I have been listening to for almost the last year: KTKE, 101.5 in tiny Truckee, California (population around 10,000).
Truckee is about 40 miles southwest of Reno, and about 20 miles from the North Shore of Lake Tahoe, and as we have some property in Soda Springs–about ten miles east of Truckee–I simply discovered the station by accident, surfing through the car radio dial looking for any signs of intelligent programming.
When I found KTKE, though, it was paydirt.
To give an example of the breadth of what they play, here are the last ten tunes they list on the live stream that showed as I write:
Time to Move On (Tom Petty)
Further On (Bronze Radio Return)
Radio Girl (John Hiatt)
Vaporize (Broken Bells)
They Told Me (Sallie Ford and the Sound Outside)
Smile Happy (War)
Louie Louie (Black Flag)
I’m Shakin’ (Jack White)
Sugar Craft (Medeski Martin and Wood)
When You Were Young (Killers)
I admit, I don’t know Medeski Martin and Wood, nor Bronze Radio Return, and I could do without the Killers, but War, John Hiatt, Black Flag, Jack White, Tom Petty, and Sallie Ford all in the same set?
And, that is pretty much why I gave up tracking the news all day, or simply listening to my shuffle, as I love streaming KTKE, hearing the funky commercials from the Tahoe area (like Smokey’s Cafe and Burger Me) and the great playlist of new and old from really good and personable jocks (whom I also feel like I know).
Mostly, I love this though because I really do love listening to the radio.
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.
While concocting my top 50 albums for our collective list, there were a lot of discs that I wish could have made it but didn’t.
I wanted to put my 16 hits by Buddy Holly on, but I don’t believe Greatest Hits albums belong in a “what’s best” competition with the albums from which the best songs came.
Lou Reed’s Rock and Roll Animal also deserved some attention as it is a fabulous piece of work, although its strength lies largely within two cuts: Rock and Roll and Sweet Jane.
There were others but one album that completely slipped my mind and list was the British band XTC’s wonderful record Skylarking.
The fact is I still might not have remembered this lovely piece of Brit pop, save Diane and I were streaming the last season of Weeds, and the closing song on one of the episodes was Dear God from Skylarking.
Released in 1986, and produced by the one and only Todd Rundgren (who also managed to bring other bands, like Grand Funk Railroad to the mainstream), Skylarking is as lovely a piece of Beatlesque Brit Pop as has been produced.
The title, lifted from Percy Shelley’s poem, To a Skylark is enough to make me love the disc and concept (my MA focus was on 19th Century British Literature, and that included a lot of Shelley and my favorite, Samuel Coleridge) which is sort of A Day in the Life expanded into the pastoral.
Apparently there was a lot of friction between principal songwriter/guitarist Andy Partridge and Rundgren during the recording, but in retrospect Partridge yielded to his producer’s wizardry, noting in the book Song Stories, by Neville Farmer, “Musician and producer Todd Rundgren squeezed the XTC clay into its most complete/connected/cyclical record ever. Not an easy album to make for various ego reasons but time has humbled me into admitting that Todd conjured up some of the most magical production and arranging conceivable. A summer’s day cooked into one cake.”
The album kicks off with the lazy flowing effect laced Summer Cauldron which portends–and segues–into Grass, as sweet and dreamy a cut as you will find anywhere.
The Meeting Place, in fact all the subsequent cuts, smack of a fabulous amalgamation of that Beatleseque pop along with a new wave attitude that affirms the influence and direction the Fab Four started as a natural evolution, realized by a really good band, under the direction of a really really great producer.
However, these songs and this sound are hardly derivative as XTC is clearly their own band, with their own sound. They just also understand their roots and as with most successful artists, understand how to reinterpret their heritage with their vision of the contemporary and even and eye on the future.
In fact with Ballet for a Rainy Day, the band even points to their next studio album as XTC (they released Psonic Psunspot in 1987, a year after Skylarking,as the Dukes of Stratsphear) opening the vocals with the lyrics “oranges and lemons.”
Probably the most controversial tune on the disc is Dear God, which Partridge both hated, and which did not make the first cut of the disc. The song also wound up being the definitive song on the album, not to mention the most covered.
There are a couple of tracks after Dear God on my CD–Dying and Sacrificial Bonfire–that I remember being on my cassette, the format on which I originally purchased Skylarking in the late 80’s when I first purchased; however, I seem to remember Dear God being the last cut, which added to the punch and the message of the song.
Of all the tunes on Skylarking, my favorite was always Earn Enough for Us, a paean to love, life, society, and British life, that bops along so breezily and with such solid and catchy parts it almost seems like the participants don’t even have to try.
My father once told me, “A genius is someone who can do easily what the rest of us cannot do at all.”
I think there is not only some truth to that, but also that both the band XTC and producer Rundgren were totally in control of their art with Skylarking. They were also at the top of their game. Meaning the anguish noted in Song Stories just sounds easy.
Columbia Records announced today that on August 27th (my birthday, so you know what to get me), they’re releasing Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series No. 10: Another Self Portrait.
When Dylan released the original Self Portrait, in 1970, Greil Marcus’ review in Rolling Stone started, “What is this shit?” And pretty much everyone wondered the same thing.
I was 14 years old at the time, and I’d listened to Dylan, but I didn’t grow up with him. I remember as a 12 year old being at my young aunt’s house in Brooklyn for a weekend, playing Freewheelin’ and Bringing It All Back Home for the first time, many times, enough times to have them ask me to stop. When Self Portrait came out some forgotten relative bought me the songbook for my birthday, and I “learned” the album by playing the songs on my guitar, figuring out the melodies on the piano. I was well aware that Dylan didn’t write most of them, and I was aware the world thought the album was crap, but what I found in that songbook was a collection of great singable songs I was able to play despite my rudimentary six-string skills.
So, what happened when I finally heard Self Portrait, the album, performed by Bob Dylan and his associates? I loved it. It really is a collection of great dynamic musicians sitting around playing some very famous and some less famous songs, with Bob crooning in front of some excellent chick singers, and everyone is seeming to have real fun time (but not making any kind of big deal about it). It’s loose, but the arrangements are bold and artful. It sounds great and the songs really are great. Not folk, not pop, but simply enduring classic songs written for a clear voice and a bunch of friends backing you up.
Not many saw it that way. Some jokers in the 90s created a list of the 100 Worst Albums, and Self Portrait landed third, behind only Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music and that album of Elvis talking to the audience. This is funny and just plain stupid.
Self Portrait comprises songs that were recorded in the studio while the band was warming up for the Nashville Skyline sessions. Dylan has had a few explanations for why he released them, as a double album(!), next. The one that seems truest is that he was sick of being the voice of a generation and wanted to do something that was the opposite of supercharged. Nashville Skyline got him part of the way there, but they were still Dylan compositions, still ripe for superheated analysis. (This was the period when AJ Weberman was stealing Dylan’s garbage and publishing about what he found.) An album of casual covers was Dylan’s way of taking the air out of the ball.
But my life was outside that history. For me, Self Portrait was a collection of very agreeable songs presented in a very pleasing way. Casual, appealing, easy to sing. Not the greatest Dylan album, not even close, but one I have listened to often. A great pleasure.
Which is always a good day to reflect upon freedom and liberty and justice for all.
As the progeny of immigrants who fled the holocaust–and then whose father was drafted and sent to invade the country from which he fled–I have a pretty serious appreciation for our freedoms, and more frequently than just July 4.
In fact, at this time where revolution and talk thereof, along with the drive for democracy, occurs before our very eyes–in Egypt, as I write–on the television almost daily, I do have some hope for the world and that change, albeit slow, is possible.
So, why am I writing this jingoistic crap on a rock and roll site?
Because music, and literature and the arts play such a serious role in changing our culture and pushing forth the idea of progress.
In fact, there is no better case in point than John Lennon’s struggle not to become an American citizen, but to simply stay in the States back during the Nixon era.
The FBI, led by J. Edgar Hoover and wanting to protect the Nixon White House and its policies back in the 70’s, worked hard to expel Lennon and Yoko Ono. In fact there is a great PBS American Masters film called LENNONYC that documents Lennon and Ono’s battle with the government. (And keeping things current, I found a pretty good article correlating Lennon’s struggle with the Dream Act.)
So, over the past month, I noted a couple of rock’n’roll documentaries that I wanted to see, and that tie the notions of freedom to music.
The first is the HBO produced film Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, a movie that ostensibly depicts the Russian punk band Pussy Riot and their three members who were sentenced to two years in prison for protesting the return of Vladmir Putin to the head of the Russian government (the charge was “hooliganism”).
I confess that did not watch the whole film because in truth the movie wasn’t really very good, and the music of Pussy Riot was not really the issue anyway. It is clearly freedom of thought and speech and a government’s suppression those freedoms–the same thing in 2013 in Russia, that Nixon wanted to suppress–that was the core.
The other film was the Oscar winning documentary of last year, Searching for Sugar Man: a movie about the Detroit-based singer/songwriter Rodriguez, his music. For Rodriguez album Cold Fact, virtually unknown in the United States (though distributed through Motown) was as influential among the youth of South Africa during the final throes of Apartheid in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s as anything Bob Dylan produced domestically a decade earlier.
Though both journeys–those of Pussy Riot and Rodriguez–are beyond compelling, yet completely different paths, the influence and notoriety that each propagated due to their respective art is huge. (Interestingly, both artists are identified as rock and rollers, though their music could not indeed be more different.)
The point, though, is that just as the US wanted to censor John Lennon, and the South Africans did indeed censor Rodriguez (by the way, Searching for Sugar Man is indeed a terrific movie as well as a wonderful celebration to the human spirit) now, 40 years later, the Russians have worked to suppress Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina Samutsevich and Maria Alyokhina, the three convicted members of Pussy Riot.
What these examples remind us is just how powerful music is, for it can make national governments fearful of performers who simply want to tell their own version of the truth.
I write this remembering that our country is far from perfect; however, at least there are now ideally few of us who need fear being imprisoned for speaking our mind irrespective of which side of the political fence we live or speak (meaning I think Trace Adkins is a xenophobic pig, and that Ted Nugent is an idiot, but I am glad they have the freedom to say and sing what they want).
I think the other points are never underestimate the power of art, which includes music. And, finally, that the struggle for freedom for all the inhabitants of the planet is a long and winding road.
Just a few things to think about as we enjoy our own Independence Day (and, do catch both LENNONYC and Searching for Sugar Man).
