I was casting about in my memory palace today for rock bands that had an impact on me when I was in high school, but didn’t endure. The name Uriah Heep bubbled up to the top. These were, in my memory, Celtic progressive rockers like Jethro Tull, who similarly took the name of a mythological figure (correction: well, a character from David Copperfield), and who rocked.
Or something like that.
I’m sure Jethro Tull has some down moments, but most of them are at least agreeable, and many of them are pretty damn good.
Uriah Heep? I’m sure I’m missing something good, there was a reason they were on the radio, but this is awful! Or is it just me? You decide.
One of the most sacred elpees in rock history is Neil Young’s Harvest. And I love a lot of it, can sing along to a lot it, though I’ve never owned it.
But even when I was a teen in my friend Judy’s bedroom with a whole gang of kids, listening to this elpee for the first time, it was hard to stomach A Man Needs a Maid.
The sentiment fails, and the grandiose arrangement overcompensates for what? This is Neil Young at his absolute worst.
I’m not sure why Neil decided to tart up the song on the elpee, with all those strings. For me it takes a simple confessional statement, a good melody, and makes it a bit ugly and grandiose.
Here’s a live clip where the basic sexist shit comes across as a man looking closely at his life. He could be wrong, but who can fault him for that. I like that a lot better.
Gad ,what a bad run of obits here the past few days. Now, the great time keeper for the Allman Brothers Band has passed on, just shy of 70 years of age
Trucks, who was with the band starting in 1968, had that great swinging percussive style that drove, complemented, and cemented the otherwise fluid playings of the band, just as Bill Kreutzman was at the bottom of the Dead, with Jai-Johanny Johnson playing the rhymthic counterpart to Trucks that Mickey Hart was to Kreutzman.
I guess that is a pretentious sounding sentence of nothing, but what I mean is the band certainly could interplay as on One Way Out , a song that holds arguably the best live trading of licks/solos anywhere ever with a pair of ass-kickers knocked out by Brothers Duane and Betts. But, beneath the guitars, check out the drumming, which is so there and in time behind some very difficult time and phrasing.
And, well everyone who owns a Bic lighter knows the drive that Whippin’ Post held,
and, the band could also be so melodic and soulful with tunes like In Memory of Miss Elizabeth Reed.
Trucks’ DNA is also linked to nephews Derek Trucks (Tedeschi-Trucks Band guitarist) and Duane Trucks (drums for Widespread Panic).
I grew up in the town where the great jazz pianist lived. That would be Smithtown, New York. The reason we knew who Mose Allison was, however, was this blistering recording of his song Young Man Blues.
Allison lived in a development house next to the high school I went to, and we sometimes stood in the schoolyard looking at his house (or what someone said was his house) and imagine the Who stopping by for sandwiches and a jam session.
I later saw him in shows at jazz clubs and the Bottom Line in New York City, and there are special times when his music is awfully good to go to. Casual, bluesy, often funny, it’s cool jazz and warm blues. Maybe you’d call it amiable. Maybe I already did.
If these guys weren’t from Maryland, and this video wasn’t from a show in Philadelphia, I’m not sure I’d be posting it, but some small part of the fun was trying to find our buddy Steve in the crowd at this show.
It’s quite a show. I love the hurtling, twisting, spastic bodies of the stage divers, the oculus of mosh out in the middle of the floor, the way the bass player puts down his guitar and dives into the crowd, then returns to stage and joins back in with the band.
I love the vocalist saying he’s not much with words, and the way he shares the mic at every opportunity.
I love that there are straight edge kids.
I compare this stuff to the Bad Brains clip Steve posted last week and I have to say that it surprises me that this is a style that endures. But the vocalist loves hardcore, it gives him a voice, and you can see it in every angular strut by the stage divers that it means a whole lot to all of them. That’s a great feeling, one I’m happy to share.
Van and Bob sitting on a hill with the Parthenon in the background, singing a Van Morrison song (that isn’t One Irish Rover) with acoustic guitar (Van) and harmonica (Bob).
Followed by One Irish Rover, both playing guitars, singing harmonies. Simple, but excellent nonetheless. With Van playing guitar quite nicely and hypnotically, kind of perfect. You probably don’t want less, and you certainly don’t want more.
There’s more after that, excellent Van, but the songs on the hillside are what got me here. Icons, maybe showing off, but simply.
Ron Howard is a master cinematic storyteller, for sure, but not someone with much interest in complexity or ambiguity. Which can be good for storytelling, but for me usually comes up wanting. I like the messy, the complicated, the things that make you say oh.
I was curious about this picture, but would have let it slide, or ride, but friends invited me and my daughter wanted to go. So we went to Greenwich Village for some fine wood-fired brick oven Neapolitan pizza and Ron Howard’s joint, plus the promise of the whole Beatles at Shea Stadium film, remastered visually and auditorily using all the modern tricks.
The movie is a gas. The camera is up close on the Beatles and their fans through the 28 Days Later rush of Beatlemania, during the charge of concerts around the globe, and headlong up to the show at Shea Stadium. These guys, when they were young, ambitious and full of energy, were terrific cutups. And then it stays up close through the despair that followed the exhaustion that came after, when cutups transformed into turnoffs.
As I had expected, I felt as if I’d seen most of this footage before, but all of it was delightful, looked fantastic, and there are some revelations (for me anyway):
Early footage of some English shows in 1963 are fantastic and transforming. This wasn’t just a group of clever songwriters and melody makers, with winning personalities, but a hard rocking band. Ringo pounds on his kit, and the Beatles deliver with equal and transformative energy. Great songs, but also tight and terrific arrangements and wickedly and aggressively good playing.
McCartney, mostly, and Lennon, too, from old interviews, talk about their songwriting, and the need to hew to a schedule to put out a new single every three months, and an album every six months. The studio footage and tales, plus the clips from all the live shows they’re doing, and movies they’re making, really dial up the grueling nature of it all.
At one point Lennon talks about how silly the lyrics are in those early albums, really just placeholders while they worked on the music. Which seems like a throwaway, since so many are so clever and perfect to the form, until, later, he and McCartney talk about the personal content that John weaves into the lyrics of Help!, a song that to me has always seemed a novelty tied to the movie of the same name. But of course not!
I always forget what a cutup George was, even when I consider the hilarity of his film producing career. I mean, Withnail and I? This movie confirms he’s funny and serious, too.
I assume there will be a follow up, a sequel. Maybe Blue Jay Way: The Studio Years, but more likely Strawberry Fields Forever: The Studio Years, which will go further into the making of the last five elpees. That will no doubt be an equal treat. But the takeaway here is that the Beatles were really great, in a way that has no match, and we would be fools to forget about even a part of that greatness.
Ron Howard’s movie is a crowd pleaser, and lives up to that not modest ambition. Go and enjoy.
