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Friday, June 26, 2009
DON'T LET IT GET YOU DOWN
Michael Jackson
1973
Farewell My Summer Love
Motown : 1984
[Out of Print]
Not much to say, because there's so much to say. And if you said everything, would it still be enough? Hard to say.
Does anyone remember the first time they heard Michael Jackson? No one does. He was always there for all of us.
Does everyone remember trying to be Michael Jackson? Everyone under fifty does. Leather jackets with superfluous zippers were donned, often indoors. Moonwalks were practiced. High screams were imitated. Few people bothered with the glove. There was such a thing as going too far. But more people tried to be Michael Jackson than tried to be Bruce Springsteen, or Madonna, or Prince, and with less reason to believe that it could ever be possible. No one was like Michael Jackson, and no one could be, because no one had that life: a star as a child, an even bigger star as an adult, talented beyond compare, denied normalcy at every turn, driven mad by fame and ambition and personal demons, gentle but incapable of self-protection, brilliant, beloved, misused, dead.
The video for "Leave Me Alone," a bonus track from the CD version of Bad, will probably be the defining moment in his career, no matter that it will rarely be shown in the next week's countless retrospectives. In it, Jackson piles into a bullet-shaped craft and goes on a funhouse ride through the various rumors about his life: that he proposed marriage to Elizabeth Taylor,that he bought the elephant man's bones, that he slept in a hyperbaric chamber. Anyone with even a little extension into public life knows how painful it can be to be misunderstood or reviled, and how much worse that pain can be when it alternates with periods of unconditional adulation. So somewhere along the way, for reasons of his own -- and they were reasons only of his own, in the loneliest sense -- he started to try to undo it all. He undid part of his race, undid part of his gender, tried to undo the love that the world felt for him. He fell largely silent as a musician. He stopped performing. Almost no one really believed that he'd honor his commitment to play fifty shows in London beginning next month, or that he'd survive the run if he did.
Three pop icons were born in 1958, within months of each other: Prince, Madonna, Michael Jackson. For a few years there, particularly around the time of Purple Rain, Prince and Michael Jackson enjoyed a rivalry. Both were sexually ambiguous, or at least projected that image. Both were racially mixed, or at least projected that image. Both were prodigiously gifted. Both were rich. Both were famous. But even then, if you looked closely, it was clear that the one who was acting crazier was perfectly sane, and the one who was desperately trying to act normal was unravelling inside. In "I Would Die 4 U," Prince sang, "I'm not a woman / I'm not a man / I am something that you'll never understand." Was he talking about Michael Jackson? All three major points were on target. And, now, the fourth: the title.Labels: ben, michael jackson
posted by Ben
LINK |
Thursday, June 04, 2009
PEACE, AT LAST
Chas Jankel
Chas Jankel
Angel Air : 1980
[Buy It]
EVERYBODY WANTS TO FEEL LIKE YOU
John Prine
The Missing Years
Oh Boy : 1991
[Buy It]
GOOD TIMES
Sam Cooke
1964
Available on : The Man and His Music
RCA : 1986
[Buy It]
CRUEL STAGE
Graham Parker
12 Haunted Episodes
Razor & Tie : 1995
[Buy It]
Some weeks are filled with peace: peace in the weather, peace in the work, peace in the world. This wasn't one of them. It started with an illness that passed quickly but was severe enough to unsettle.
That was the first domino, and it fell over.
Then there were professional developments that, while essentially positive, were still destabilizing. I don't want to be vague, but I don't want to revisit them either. Suffice it to say that the same mechanisms that brings my work--the books, the essays, the journalism--to a broader audience brings that broader audience back to me, and while I like to know that readers are out there, sometimes I'm disturbed by how out there they are. Then I spent some time with a friend who is going through a hard time that seem to be half-psychological, half-somatic, if not all psycho-somatic. He will get better, I hope. Then I spent some time with another friend who is going through a hard time that seems to be half her own doing and half her undoing. She will get better, I hope. Then another friend got some disappointing news about a project she has been working on for years, and I spent too many hours on the telephone fighting the mortgage department of my bank over a dishonest escrow policy, and I encountered various forms of humorless mid-level bureaucratic stupefaction. Today I was at the end of the rope, and not the bottom end, either--I had climbed to the top with thoughts of leaping. Energy gone, patience gone with it, I then proceeded to have the worst day of the entire week, a dull afternoon growing frustrated with nonresponse from adults who should know better followed by an exhausting evening in which my younger son was impossible in all the ways that five year-olds are impossible. My older son tried to broker a peace, but I wasn't having any, and my wife, who is now in the grips of the illness that unsettled me at the beginning of the week, alternated between not reacting to any of it and overreacting to all of it. This is trivia, mostly, of course. It's the cost of doing business when the business is life. But this week, too, Dr. George Tiller was gunned down, in church of all places, and though I wrote a piece about that, my writing didn't make me feel any better about the cost of doing business when the business is death.
So I ended up here, now, looking for songs that produce peace. It took a while. The Chambers Brothers' "Love, Peace, and Happiness" makes promises, but it is too effortful to deliver fully on its title. Bob and Marcia's "Peace of Mind," a bit of Motown reggae with a little filip of a string arrangement, is closer, but Bob Andy's vocal is pushed too far forward in the mix to allow any listener to settle back comfortably. Cat Stevens' "Peace Train" and the Eagles' "Peaceful Easy Feeling" begin to create the desired effects, but they are cliches, and cliches turn themselves inside out.
I knew the songs were out there. I have Van Morrison on my iPod, and Caetano Veloso and Miles Davis and Mississippi John Hurt. Some people would try to find peace in the space between the songs, but some people are wrong. Still, the search itself was starting to become disruptive to my day, so I just put the thing on shuffle and gave up. Slowly, they started to come to me. First, was Chas Jankel's "Peace, At Last." Jankel, who played keyboards with Ian Dury and the Blockheads and was responsible for much of the songwriting, particularly the work that leaned out of pub-rock into funk and disco, released his first solo album in 1980; it included a few piano instrumentals, including this one.
After songs by the Beastie Boys, the Fall, and Bongwater--a triple shot of chaos--John Prine showed up. Prine has plenty of peace. I was thinking of him while I was searching actively, particularly "All the Best," from The Missing Years, which is a beautiful, simple song. What I got was even better: "Everybody Wants to Feel Like You," from the same record. While the lyric isn't the most generous he's ever written--it's a song to a woman who won't show him affection in the way he wants--the melody and the vocal are simple and magnetic, like a compass, and Prine's lyrics are always at once childlike and wise: Next time tell me that you want me
Put your little foot inside of my shoe
Next time tell me that you need me
Everybody wants to feel like you
They are also lovingly lickerish, which carries its own kind of peace:I used to love you so hard in the morning
I'd make you stutter and roll your eyes
I put your mind on a brief vacation
To the land of the lost surprise After Prine came the MC5, Iggy Pop, XTC, Grandmaster Flash, the Gun Club: not bad but not peaceful, and not welcome. Skip, skip, skip, skip, skip. Then I got Sam Cooke's "Good Times," which I was about to skip. I didn't. I hung in there. And I was rewarded, I think. "Good Times" is among the most misleading of soul songs. It's a song about pleasure, certainly, because it's a song that's built of pleasure: the swaying melody, Cooke's subtly soaring vocal. But the undercurrent of sadness is at least an undertow, and it threatens to take you back out with it. He's singing about a party, and it's ongoing, but he Cooke doesn't know for how long, or what pain will return when it dissipates. This is especially clear in the final stanza:It might be one o'clock and it might be three
Time don't mean that much to me
I haven't felt this good since I don't know when
And I might not feel this good again This felt hopeless, almost, so I was relieved when after another stretch of chaos (Stooges, Steinski, Sonny Boy Williamson's "Little Village"), the random hand of music landed on Graham Parker's "Cruel Stage." There are songs about coming out of the dark into the light, but few of them take responsibility to this degree, or do it with such a lovely, spiraling guitar part. It's almost a secular gospel:Take me for what I'm worth though it may not amount to much
Take me from this abyss and put me back in touch
Though I have strayed from you though I have fallen from grace
I am back on higher ground up from that lonely place
And I have found the going tough
But I will find the strength enough
And I am undoing this cruel stage
That I've been going through The people who should call won't. The friends who should pass through their difficulties might not. The occlusions may not dissolve, certainly won't dissolve all at once. The frustrations will keep on coming. But so will the songs.Labels: ben, folk, soul
posted by Ben
LINK |
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
NEVER TELL YOUR MOTHER SHE'S OUT OF TUNE
Jack Bruce
Songs For a Tailor
Atco : 1969
[Buy It]
YOU SAY YOU TRUST YOUR MOTHER
Swamp Dogg
1972
Available on : Excellent Sides of Swamp Dogg, Vol. 2
S.D.E.G. : 2001
[Buy It]
MY MOTHER WAS A FRIEND OF THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE
Blurt
1980
Available on : The Best of Blurt Vol. 1: The Fish Needs a Bike
Salamander : 2004
[Buy It]
MAMA TOLD ME NOT TO COME
Randy Newman
12 Songs
Reprise : 1970
[Buy It]
MOTHER
John Lennon
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band
Capitol : 1970
[Buy It]
I DON'T WANNA BE A SOLDIER
John Lennon
Imagine
Capitol : 1971
[Buy It]
WHO PUTS ME IN MY LITTLE BED
Ada Jones
1913
Edison Blue Amberol
YONDER COMES MY MOTHER
Son House
1965
Father of the Delta Blues
Sony : 1992
[Buy It]
In the last week three friends of mine have had what I'll call non-productive moments with their mothers. This isn't the appropriate place for details, so I'll make some up. One friend wanted to go on a camping trip in the wilds of Alaska, and her mother, who once lost a sibling to a vicious Kodiak, overreacted to the plan. "No," she screamed. "You will be torn to pieces by that bear, my darling." Another friend told her mother she was planning on taking crack. "Whatever," her mother said. "Save me some." The woman was then incensed that her mother didn't care more for her. The third friend had given notice at her job, which her mother had never much liked, on account of the fact that her boss was a hardened criminal who bootlegged DVDs and carried a gun in the waistband of his pants. But some important wires crossed in her mother's head, and she became furious with her daughter for once again becoming, at the age of 41, unemployed.
The other day I saw the Albert Brooks movie "Mother," which I have been bothering my wife to rent. She went to every video store within walking distance of our house, and no one has the movie. I despaired for it. Then it turned up on HBO, and we watched about two-thirds of it. I don't usually talk about pop culture other than pop music here, but I urge everyone to see it. It has too much dime-store psychology, and it knows that, but it has a fantastic performance by Debbie Reynolds as the perky, practical, judgmental, loving mother. Brooks is great, because he's always great: when he is forced to eat the permafrost sherbet in his mother's freezer, he screws up his face and says that it "tastes like an orange foot." There are plenty of moments of inspired discomfort -- at one point Brooks taunts his younger brother by pretending that he and his mother are having a sexual relationship -- but the climactic scene, where Brooks, who is playing a successful but blocked sci-fi writer, discovers that his mother also harbored dreams of literary fame, is legitimately moving. Consider this a Moistworks two thumbs up, though both thumbs are mine.
In the last hour I have been working on a technology to beam that movie into my friends' minds. I want them to understand that most of what their mothers do is done from love, and that the poor execution should be forgiven if possible. I would also beam the movie into the mothers' minds and tell them to ease off, that their kids are smart and confident so long as they are permitted to be that way, and that they need not worry so industriously about the worst-case scenarios. Of course everyone already know all of this, but I want to agree. And while I perfected the technology about five minutes ago, now I'm having second thoughts, mainly because the three situations I heard about this week concern mothers and daughters, and the Albert Brooks movie, along with everything I personally know, concerns mothers and sons. I think we can all agree that mother-daughter business is significantly different from mother-son business. It's knottier. It persists. There are mirrors hung next to windows, which can be confusing and exhilarating. I'm not even sure that mother-son solutions can address mother-daughter problems except in the most hapless, generic sense. Oh well.
In the last ten seconds, I put the blueprints for the movie-beaming device into the top drawer of my desk and took out a series of songs about mothers. There's Jack Bruce's "Never Tell Your Mother She's Out of Tune," which is interesting advice if you consider it more broadly - Bruce seems to be saying you should just take the lumps from maternal scrutiny/sanction and move on. Unfortunately, all the reasoned thinking takes place in the title; the song, despite some nice guitar by George Harrison, is a collection of disjointed blues-inflected lyrics. There's a similar problem at the heart of Blurt's spiky, excellent, somewhat nonsensical "My Mother Was a Friend Of the Enemy of the People." For actual answers, it's useful to go elsewhere. Swamp Dogg's "You Say You Trust Your Mother" investigates what can happen when children no longer believe that their mothers are acting in their best interest. As usual with Swamp Dogg, the song is far more complex than it first appears; it's not just about biological mothers, but about nations and patriots, the dangers of unconditional trust and the toxic sadness of suspicion. Randy Newman's "Mama Told Me Not to Come," on the other hand, illustrates what can happen when children fail to heed their mothers' advice - what can happen, it seems, is that those children can grow up fast: The radio is blasting, someone's beating on the door
Our hostess is not lasting, she's out on the floor
I seen so many things here I ain't never seen before
I don't know what it is but I don't wanna see no more
Mama told me not to come
Mama told me not to come
Mama said that ain't no way to have fun So what is the way to have fun? To listen to your mother? To ignore her? To ignore her knowing that what she's saying is half-panic and half-wisdom? In the Albert Brooks movie, he is drawn back to his mother when he starts to believe that he is dysfunctional in life because he has failed to understand what lies at the root of the mother-child dynamic. But he cannot accept anything his mother says at face value: she's always prodding him, always provoking, never saying exactly what she means. If she told him not to go to a party, he'd go, just like the young man in Randy Newman's song - and like that young man, he might spend much of the party thinking of his mother's sound advice, and even missing her a little. One of the most famous mothers in rock and roll belongs to John Lennon, who lost her when he was seventeen; she surfaces explicitly in the Beatles "Julia" and then "Mother," from Lennon's first solo album. She may also be present, though more obliquely, in "I Don't Want to Be a Soldier," the ragged, anguished political broadside that closes side one of "Imagine":Well, I don't wanna be a soldier mama, I don't wanna die
Well, I don't wanna be a sailor mama, I don't wanna fly
Well, I don't wanna be a failure mama, I don't wanna cry
Well, I don't wanna be a soldier mama, I don't wanna die
Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no Is Lennon appealing back to the mother he lost for sanity? For safety? Or is "mama" more generic here? Is it a girlfriend? Is it womanhood in general, understood as protection against the ravages of war and male insecurity? Again, these are all mother-son situations, and not particularly helpful for mother-daughter dust-ups. Again, oh well. I did find one explicit mother-daughter song, from Ada Jones, from 1913, though it's sung from the perspective of a child dreaming of adult romance and complexity and coming back, every time, to the reliability of a mother's affection--and then, as punchline, to the harsher reality of a father's responsibility:I've had the measles and the mumps
The stomach ache and stomach pumps
My ma says she's afraid a cough
Some day will surely take me off
I get five cents each time I take cod liver oil, you see
And when I've got a dollar saved my ma buys more for me
Who puts me in my little bed?
My mama dear
Who hugs me when my prayers are said?
My mama dear
Who buys me every kind of pill
With sugar on to cure my ills?
But who pays all the doctor bills?
My dear old dad In the ninety-six years since the song was first released, it hasn't gotten any less creepy.
Mothers, children, conflicts, bonds: it all comes together and all comes apart in Son House's "Yonder Comes My Mother," which is rich with unanswerable questions of separation, emptiness, fullness, exhilaration, and fear. While most songs about mothers get caught up in domestic particulars or psychodrama, this one sees only the big picture, and this may be because it's mistitled, somewhat: this is Son House's version of the spiritual "When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder," which makes a case for accepting even the flawed among us, and for looking past shortcomings to the common thread that binds together all humans, even those who are already bound together. Wait, maybe it is about mothers and children, after all.Labels: ben, blues, rock and roll, soul
posted by Ben
LINK |
Friday, May 15, 2009
GET UP I FEEL LIKE BEING A SEX MACHINE
James Brown
Sex Machine
Polydor : 1970
[Buy It]
GET UP, GET INTO IT, AND GET INVOLVED
James Brown
1971
Available on : In the Jungle Groove
Polydor : 1986
[Buy It]
GET ON THE GOOD FOOT
James Brown
Get On the Good Foot
Polygram : 1972
[Buy It]
PEOPLE GET UP AND DRIVE THAT FUNKY SOUL
James Brown
Slaughter's Big Rip-Off
Polygram : 1973
[Buy It]
GET UP OFFA THAT THING
James Brown
Get Up Offa That Thing
Polydor : 1976
[Out of Print]
TAKE ME HIGHER AND GROOVE ME
James Brown
Mutha's Nature
Polydor: 1977
[Out of Print]
GET UP OFFA THAT THING (LIVE)
James Brown
Hot on the One
Polygram : 1980
[Buy It]
LET ME GET UP ON IT
Tom Waits
Bone Machine
Island : 1992
[Buy It]
As I have been touring behind my new book, I have been listening to lots of old funk music: Sly Stone, Curtis Mayfield, Parliament, Mandrill, the Bar-Kays, War, more.
I have two things to say about that paragraph, and I will say them in two separate paragraphs.
First, this: touring behind a book is a strange process. When you read a biography of a rock star, fully half of the pages are devoted to on-stage performances. When you read a biography of a writer, readings are rarely mentioned. Writing is a solitary and isolated process, as is reading, and the public component is either overrated, superfluous, or both. Still, you get to meet people. You press flesh. And there is something genuine about that process, something that appears to be beneath analysis but is in fact above it.
Second, this: I am quickly filling up with funk. I have to listen, because the book is about funk music, about a funk musician. It's like a boxer listening to "Mama Said Knock You Out" before stepping in the ring. Did you know that it's built on a Sly and the Family Stone sample? There I go again.
The other day I tried to counterprogram all this funk with the least funky music I could think of: Lefty Frizzell, Diamanda Galas, Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant, Bread, Yes, Beyonce. It worked for a little while. Then I spoke to a friend of mine who is feeling down. There were many reasons, but they dissolved into one large reason: she was feeling underappreciated. "Down happens," she said. We talked on the telephone for a little while. I delivered heartfelt advice that may not have been helpful; it consisted mostly of aggressive reminders about her abilities and attributes. When I went back to the music, I found that it had changed back to funk music: specifically, to the fundament of up, James Brown.
Brown's dead, but he's very much alive, especially when you're feeling like your life is a little deadened. In 1969, Brown recorded "Lowdown Popcorn," but that was the last bit of lowdown anything he'd be serving up for a while; by the next year, outfitted with the Collins brothers and well on his way into the heavy funk, he had entered a period of intense vertical ambition and relentless optimism. In 1970, he urged others to get up (on account of the fact that he was feeling like a sex machine) and also, after the machine had been operated to everyone's satisfaction, to get up, get into it, and get involved. In 1972, he focused his advice more specifically on the good foot, and while he spent a brief stretch down and out in New York City in 1973, things soon went back up with "People Get Up and Drive That Funky Soul" later that year, not to mention "Get Up Offa That Thing" in 1976 and "Take Me Higher and Groove Me" in 1977 (where he repeatedly sings "take me on up").
The upness of James Brown is of special interest in the late seventies, because it was a period where all signs pointed to downness. He was not the volcanic force he had been in the early part of the decade. Disco had stolen some of his heat and most of his light. I have a friend who saw him at a tiny club that he said "held fewer people than a taxicab," and it wasn't even full. But he kept on, not because there were great rewards in front of him, but because there was so much momentum behind him. In the process, he produced several fine albums: "Jam/1980's," "Nonstop!" and "The Original Disco Man." One of the finest was the 1980 live record "Hot on the One," in which Brown takes a set of songs, mostly old, and submits them to sweaty, tireless investigation. He finds new things in the material because he is reaching up to it, not stooping down. Perhaps not accidentally, the strongest performance is explicitly about upness: "Get Up Offa That Thing," which is even fiercer and sharper than it was in the studio four years earlier.
"Get Up Offa That Thing" has philosophy on its mind, to some degree, but it also has its mind in its pants -- the lyrics seem to be about getting off your derriere and dancing, but they're really about releasing the pressure on the lower level. In this sense, it returns Brown explicitly to the first time he was up, with "Sex Machine" a decade earlier. Getting up offa that thing, at the lowest (and highest) level, is a form of creating, if not exactly procreating. Libido can be desire for sex, sure, but it is also that more general energy available for defining and advancing the self. Jung knew it and James Brown did, too. He sang about it almost ceaselessly and embodied it as he did: it's hard to be down when you're rising up. There is something genuine about this process, too, something that appears to be beneath analysis but is in fact above it. Getting up certain keeps the dogs at bay: disaffection, destrudo, various other downs. This may be why Tom Waits, near the end of the difficult but rewarding Bone Machine, weighs in with a minute-long instrumental that is both worlds away from and pressed right up against James Brown. The Waits song makes a request that may be more like a demand (Get up, stay on the scene, like a bone machine?), and there's an implication that lingers: when the world isn't giving you what you want, you should remember that you can always turn things around by getting up to something.Labels: ben, funk, soul
posted by Ben
LINK |
Thursday, May 07, 2009
PLEASE STEP BACK
Swamp Dogg
2009
Available in : Please Step Back
Melville House : 2009
[Buy It]
I have been out of commission for a little while because I have been in commission elsewhere: on the West Coast, specifically, committing the unholy act of Book Touring. I don't know who invented the Book Tour, but it was probably someone with a sense of humor. Or absolutely no sense of humor. I've never quite understood why you would take a private act like reading and try to make it public in some artificial way. When you read biographies of rock stars, fully half of the narrative is concerned with touring. When you read biographies of authors, no one ever mentions readings in bookstores. Do you know why that is? Because readings in bookstores aren't even generally interesting enough to earn mention in books. With that said, it is also a great privilege and pleasure to tour a book around. I went to Los Angeles, to San Francisco, to Seattle, and to Portland. I met staff at several excellent bookstores, and signed stock, and talked to people who graciously agreed to come out and see me read. I don't have a quarrel with the process in concrete cases, only qualms about it in the abstract.
Oh yeah, the book. It's a new novel of mine called Please Step Back that is about Rock Foxx (born Robert Franklin), a funk-rock star of the late sixties and early seventies. To some degree, he's based on Sly Stone. To some degree, he's highly autobiographical. There are also elements of Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, Sam Cooke, and Ray Charles mixed in to the character. I don't have anything particularly wise to say about it, at least in this space, except that if you like writing or music or writing about music, you might like it. There is one interesting wrinkle: about a year before I finished the book, I befriended the cult funk legend Swamp Dogg. Well, befriended is an odd word. We became email correspondents as a result of a review of one of his records I had written for the New Yorker. He contacted me, I expressed disbelief that it was really him, and we went on from there. When I was wrapping up the book, I wrote him and asked him if he'd be interested in taking one of the fake songs I wrote for my fake funk star and turning into a real song by a real funk star: namely, him. To say that he responded enthusiastically is an understatement. We have released the song online and will continue to do so. In a special Moistworks moment, I am pleased to offer Swamp Dogg's "Please Step Back," which is based on original materials by Rock Foxx and the Foxxes. I will be discussing it in greater detail at next week's book launch event.
Oh yeah, the event. Next Tuesday (May 12) at Galapagos in DUMBO, I will be having a party for the book. Sasha Frere-Jones will be talking to me about funk music and literature. DJ Doc Delay will be DJ'ing. People are hereby officially invited to attend. Details are here. Bring friends. Bring enemies. Make more of both at the event. I will try to tell funny stories about the radio interview I did with Swamp Dogg last week.
Oh yeah, the interview. We were in a studio together in Los Angeles. He was great: very generous, very smart, very funny. He had good stories about his country music career, his daughter's time as a disco diva, and about the legendary cover of the early seventies album "Rat On," which is also at the top of the post, next to the cover of my new book. "People say it's one of the worst album covers of all time," he said, "but I kind of like it." I agree. Plus, I think he did a great job with the song.
Oh yeah, the song. My character, Rock Foxx, attains an incredible level of fame. His celebrity exceeds anything you could ever imagine, even if you are reading this and you are Prince. Then he falls on hard times, at least. He has one song he thinks will redeem him: maybe not morally, maybe not financially, but creatively. All his songs have been about highs and lows, both pharmaceutical and cultural and political, but this one is at once his most personal and most elusive statement. He obsesses about it. It is the key to the kingdom he hasn't yet built. That's the song Swamp Dogg recorded. The final verse, which I find very sad for reasons that I will be happy to explain but which may seem stupid to you, are below:Please step
Please step back
A peach out of reach
Never fails to attract
There goes a bird
Without a word
His song is so abstract
Oh, please step back See you at Galapagos, I hope.Labels: ben, funk, novel
posted by Ben
LINK |
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
HELP ME LIFT YOU UP
Mary Margaret O'Hara
Miss America
Koch : 1988
[Buy It]
THINK ABOUT YOUR TROUBLES
Harry Nilsson
The Point!
RCA : 1971
[Buy It]
HELP ME
Van Morrison
It's Too Late To Stop Now
Warner Bros. : 1974
[Buy It]
HELPING HAND
Fats Domino
1962
Available on: Out of New Orleans
Bear Family : 1993
[Buy It]
HELPING HAND (A THOUSAND MILES AWAY FROM HOME)
Snooks Eaglin
New Orleans Street Singer
Smithsonian Folkways : 1959
[Buy It]
'CAUSE I LOST MY HELPING HAND
Little Miss Cornshucks
1951
Available on: 1947-1951
Classics R&B : 2003
[Buy It]
MISTER, WOULD YOU PLEASE HELP MY PONY?
Ween
Chocolate and Cheese
Elektra : 1994
[Buy It]
The other night I had a dream. It was about the Somali pirates, which means that it probably wasn't about them at all. In the dream I was at home, watching the news. Most of the shots were aerial, footage of the captured boat and the captain with a gun to his head. A few of the shots seemed to be from the vantage of the boat; they showed helicopters with cameras bolted to their doors, zipping by in the afternoon sky. That was how the dream went: shot of boat, shot of sky, shot of boat, shot of sky. It started exciting, because it was a pirate dream -- avast, ye mateys! -- but it got boring fast.
Then after a while I noticed something in the background. It was a friend of mine. She was not on the boat. She was in the water, about fifty yards behind the boat, in a tiny white ring of a life preserver, the kind you see in movies. The air was perfectly clear, and I could see her expression. She looked peaceful. In real life, this friend is going through a series of intense experiences, some personal, some professional, some financial, some emotional. I wouldn't say I'm worried about her, exactly, because she's smart and capable and lands on her feet like a cat, but I have occasional twinges of worry, because I don't like her to be sad. Those occasional twinges displease me because I don't know what they're asking me, or even telling me, to do. Sometimes I give advice. Sometimes I back off and offer a sympathetic ear. Sometimes I tell her that if anyone crosses her during this difficult time I'm going to knock 'em out. But it's not an easy time for her, I don't think, and to be, on top of everything else, stranded in the ocean with only a bright white LifeSaver around her, well, that was just too much. She needed my help. In the dream, I called her and she answered. "Hi," she said.
"Hi?" I said. It seemed insufficiently dramatic. "I'm watching on TV and you're in the ocean behind the pirates. Are you okay?"
"Fine," she said. "The water's nice." She seemed unconcerned, like she was certain someone was on the way to rescue her.
"Okay," I said. I started to hang up, but something stopped me. "Wait a second," I said. "How come you're talking to me on the phone now, but in the picture onscreen, you're not on the phone?"
"Don't know," she said. "Maybe it's file footage." She coughed. "Did I just cough onscreen?"
"You're not even holding the phone," I said. "Anyway, I wanted to see how you are."
"Well, I have to go," she said. "Don't worry about me. I'm fine." At times, she has sounded under the weather when she has said these kinds of things, or under the gun. This time she sounded calm and confident. "Talk to you later." I hung up the phone and watched her on TV, there in the middle of the ocean. Her expression shifted -- to boredom, to anger, a flicker of fear, then to something I didn't recognize.
She had told me not to worry about her, but I did. I worried even after I hung up. I called the real-life friend and told her about the dream friend. At first, she didn't believe me. "Is that dream some kind of code?" she said.
"Dreams are always some kind of code," I said, as condescendingly as possible.
"You know what I mean," she said. "Did you really dream it, or are you just pretending as a way of telling me that you think I'm making a mistake about something?"
"Are you making a mistake about something?" I said, still condescending.
"Well, I have to go," she said. "Don't worry about me. I'm fine." Again, calm and confident. "Talk to you later."
We hung up uneasily. Or rather, I was uneasy. Telling me not to worry once, in a dream, was fine. It might have been some kind of code. But telling me not to worry twice, once in real life, was too much. I could take a hint. I wouldn't worry, which meant I wouldn't help. Instead, I went to listen to music, and specifically to songs about help. I listened to "Help!" and "Help Me, Rhonda" and "With a Little Help From My Friends." As forms of counsel regarding advice and assistance, they seemed pat, like songs you've heard hundreds of times. I dug deeper, through Elton John's "Yell Help" and Hasil Adkins' "Can't Help It Blues," until I reached Mary Margaret O'Hara's "Help Me Lift You Up." Mary Margaret O'Hara is often at the deepest reaches of any question. This song is deceptively simple, which means that it can lose its way among some of the knottier, deceptively complex songs on her "Miss America" album. When you separate it from the rest of the class, though, it excels, not only as a song about friendship and help, but as a song about dreams:I have a dream
It's very clear
You're all around
But never near As life preservers go, it's more substantial than my friend's simple white ring but also darker. The chorus, "Help me lift you up," is many things at once, a statement of mutual need, a paradox, a plea. It's selfless but not entirely so. The argument, at least of that one phrase, is that you'll never get lifted without my lift, but that I can't lift you unless you're not just letting me, but helping me. I need to lift you to feel lifted myself, and I need your help. That complex, co-extensive process can unfold over the course of a lifetime--it can nurture two people in parallel or even in intersection--but it has to begin somewhere: with a phone call, say.
And so I was determined not to call my friend. Why should I? I had offered assistance and my offer had been received but not embraced, not once but twice. That was fine. I could take a pair of hints. Still, I went through the morning in a little bit of a haze. The air wasn't perfectly clear. What was my role as a friend, exactly? Should I challenge her? Should I let time pass? Should I joke? Should I call? It wasn't my problem, really: if the emotional circumstances tanked, if the professional circumstances derailed, it wasn't my tank or my train. Maybe the best thing I could do was to let her think about her own troubles. In Harry Nilsson's "Think About Your Troubles," this leads, via a convoluted marine metaphor, to a renewed perspective.Sit down at the breakfast table
Think about your troubles
Pour yourself a cup of tea
Then think about the bubbles
You can take your teardrops
And drop 'em in a teacup
Take them down to the riverside
And throw them over the side
To be swept up by a current
Then taken to the ocean
To be eaten by some fishes
Who were eaten by some fishes
And swallowed by a whale
Who grew so old
He decomposed
He died and left his body
To the bottom of the ocean But I had my own marine metaphor, and it left me with my friend floating in a life preserver in the middle of a heartless expanse. Maybe it was unfair to leave her with her own troubles. Maybe this was one of those rare cases where rushing in was advisable. Thinking about it too much was proving unhelpful, so I left the house and went for a walk in my neighborhood. People were talking about the Somali pirates, though no one mentioned seeing my friend on the news. A new store was opening in my neighborhood. There were apples on a table. "Want one?" a woman said. "Help yourself."
The next day, I was done with the apples. There was a core in the garbage and another one in the sink. My friend was still helping herself, or at the very least hadn't asked for my help. I was curious about her situation but not curious enough to do anything about it; I was all around but never near. And so the songs kept coming: Liz Phair's "Help Me Mary," the Lyres' "Help Me Ann," Stevie Wonder's "Heaven Help Us All." I settled, this time, on Van Morrison's "Help Me," which is a live cover of a Sonny Boy Williamson song. There's a tension built into the center of the song: Morrison is asking for help, but he sounds so vital that it's hard to imagine that he needs it. And in fact, he's not asking for help so much as offering an entry-level (if you know what I mean) position that he means to fill one way or another:You got to help me
I can't do it all by myself
You got to help me, baby
I can't do it all by myself
You know if you don't help me darling
I'll have to find myself somebody else Other songs are more honest in their abjection, like Fats Domino's "Helping Hand":I'm a thousand miles away from home, sleeping in the rain
A thousand miles away from home, waiting for a train
Nobody seems to want me or give me a helping hand
I nevermore will roam again if I ever get home again That's where my friend was in my dream, a thousand miles away from everything. She bobbed on the surface of the water and while she'd answer the phone if you called, she wouldn't call you. The song, which was adapted from Jimmie Rodgers' "Waiting on a Train," was also recorded by Snooks Eaglin, whose version is sadder than Domino's and, paradoxically, less desperate. Eaglin seems aware enough of his confusion and loneliness that there's a good chance he'll grab onto whoever reaches out to help. Little Miss Cornshucks (the stage name of the R&B singer Mildred Cummings) demonstrates this principle even more sharply with "'Cause I Lost My Helping Hand"; she's so deep in the well that it seems certain someone will pull her out.
But certainty's a funny business. Once, long ago, as a kid, I was walking with a friend -- a different friend -- and came upon a dead dog on the side of the road. There was something shocking about the sight, and it wasn't the fact of it. Dogs die. Sometimes they are violent deaths. Sometimes they are peaceful. What was shocking about this dog was that he was neither. He had an expression that I would only recognize much later in life. He was waiting for help that never came. I thought about the dog's expression while I tried to remember my friend's expression in the dream, the final one that came after boredom and anger and fear. She floated on the water and wanted...what? nothing? a chance to make her own mistakes? time to prove that they were not mistakes? a fair shake in the sea of possibilities without interference from, say, me? I was available for help but also happy not to help. The dog's expression was branded on my brain. My friend was out there in the ocean. I had woken up from my dream but that didn't mean it wasn't also true.Labels: ben, blues, pop
posted by Ben
LINK |
Friday, March 27, 2009
COME RAIN OR COME SHINE
Sarah Vaughan
Sarah Vaughan in Hi-Fi
Sony : 1949
[Buy It]
COME RAIN OR COME SHINE
Billie Holiday
1954
Available on : Lady in Autumn: The Best of the Verve Years
Polygram : 1991
[Buy It]
PINKY
Sarah Vaughan
Sarah Vaughan in Hi-Fi
Sony : 1949
[Buy It]
DO U LIE?
Prince
Parade
Warner Bros. : 1986
[Buy It]
This week, Prince released two new albums.
Today is Sarah Vaughan's birthday.
We will bring these two things together soon.
Sarah Vaughan would have been eighty-five today. She's been dead since 1990, taken after a short but painful battle with lung cancer. According to more than a few published accounts, she expired at home, in bed, while watching a television movie starring her daughter.
Of the three women generally considered to be the triple pillar of American jazz singing, Vaughan is usually my least favorite. Billie Holiday comes in first, almost always, and Ella Fitzgerald comes in second. Vaughan is third: not distantly, but definitively. I realize that this is an idiotic exercise, to take three people with vast and important bodies of work and rank them top to bottom like I am filling out a March Madness bracket. I apologize to them, their families, their spirits.
Sarah Vaughan is always praised for her voice, which I suppose makes sense, though it makes less sense to me when I am listening to her. Her incredible control, her vast range, her box (or is it bag?) of improvisational tricks, they're all indisputably impressive, but for some reason they leave me cold, or have generally done so. If I listen to Billie Holiday's version of "Come Rain or Come Shine" and then hers, one moves me and the other doesn't. For a while, I thought it was because Vaughan was following Holiday's more powerful original, but in fact the reverse is true: Vaughan's was recorded a full five years before Holiday went into the studio for Verve in 1955. Maybe the fact that Vaughan's such a virtuoso works against the song, which purports to be about powerful devotion but sounds like a song about romantic helplessness. Why would someone with ultimate power worry about having none? Holiday, on the other hand, is a more limited vocalist who makes the lyric -- and the song -- work the way it should. When she does away with the idea of contentment, it's heartbreaking:You're gonna love me like nobody's loved me
Come rain or come shine
Happy together unhappy together
Won't it be fine? Again, this is just me. I once lived with a woman who put the three women in a different order. For her, Ella Fitzgerald was first, Sarah Vaughan second, and Billie Holiday flat last. "Too mopey," she said with a showily dismissive flip of the hand. It hurt me to see her flip her hand that way, but what could I do? I had no choice but to stand by and watch it happen. To get back at her, I decided to dislike Ella Fitzgerald, and for many years I succeeded: she was too chipper, too cheery, too up. Sarah Vaughan hung in the middle, though. I tried to listen to her, tried often, never had much success. The one exception was instructional: "Pinky," which I loved because it was a wordless vocal, Vaughan's equivalent of "Dark Was the Night." I couldn't identify a lack of conviction in her performance because I wasn't sure what exactly she was trying to communicate.
This woman also hated Prince. Well, I should clarify. She loved Prince in the mid-eighties. Who didn't? Crazy people, maybe, or art directors. She was neither, and when I met her in the late eighties, she was still very much in love with Prince, and we would lay awake at night listening to "Something in the Water Does Not Compute" over and over again. She made me a tape with "Purple Rain" on it, even though I already had "Purple Rain." Who didn't? Crazy people, maybe. She stuck with Prince through "Around the World in a Day," through "Parade," through "Sign O The Times" and "Lovesexy." But then, all at once, she acquired the most dangerous thing a Prince observer can have: perspective. She saw through the ridiculous parts of the "Batman" soundtrack, and most of "Graffiti Bridge," and by then we were heading out the door, perhaps because she had also begun to see through the ridiculous parts of me. Her eyesight improved markedly as we hurtled toward separation. Once, very late in the game, I came home and she was in the bathroom with the door locked. I asked what she was doing. "Thinking how long I can do this," she said. I told her I hoped that was a euphemism for something fun. She didn't even laugh. "If you don't like it," I said, "I'm going to release it to everyone else as a euphemism." This time, there was a laugh, but a tiny one that I knew wouldn't be enough.
This week, Prince released two new records and I thought of this woman, wherever she was (is?). I wondered if she cared about the records, if she planned on paying [insert large amount of money] a year to subscribe to Prince's new Website or in standing in line at Target and buying them for [insert smaller amount of money]. I doubted that she did. I doubt that she does. I have heard the records, repeatedly, and as much as I want to say that I now see through the ridiculous parts of Prince, the fact is that I am as incapable of objective assessment as I was in 1989, when I spent the better part of the summer listening to the "Batman" soundtrack on an auto-reverse cassette player, over and over again. The new albums are not that good, and maybe they're not good at all, but they're Prince, and because of that, I'm somewhat powerless to do anything but love them come rain or come shine.
Does that bring the two things together? Not quite. Time works, when it works correctly, like auto-reverse, always moving forward but reliably returning you to the past. When I heard the new Prince records this week, there was a moment in one song that reminded me of a moment in another song. It's not a direct connection -- not a lyrical or musical one, but an impressionistic one -- and so there's no need to restage it. The song I was reminded of was "Do U Lie?" which was (is?) the second song on the second side of Parade, a moody ballad tucked between the album's two most massive songs, "Mountains" and "Kiss." When the album came out, a billion years ago, I did not know this woman I have been discussing. But when I knew her, the album was not yet old, and we played it the same way we played "Something in the Water Does Not Compute," late at night and often. It was on cassette, and sometimes after "Mountains" I would get up out of bed to fast-forward to "Kiss." She didn't like that, I suppose because she liked "Do U Lie?" After I had been stopped from skipping it a few times, I asked her why she liked it so much. "Sarah Vaughan," she said with a showily dismissive flip of the hand. I understood what she meant, to some degree. She was saying that it was Prince's attempt to mimic Vaughan's vocal mannerisms, especially at the end, when he sounds like he's practicing "Pinky" in the shower. (I release this to everyone for use as a euphemism: practicing "Pinky" in the shower.) But I misunderstood in another regard. I thought she was dismissing Prince for this affectation, or dismissing Sarah Vaughan (who was, after all, second in her bracket). A little while later, a little bit too late, I realized that she was dismissing me.Labels: ben, jazz, vocals
posted by Ben
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Thursday, March 19, 2009
GIVE ME BACK THAT FILET O' FISH
McDonald's Advertisement
2009
COMMERCIAL BREAK
Basehead
The Soul of Rock and Roll
Imago : 1993
[Buy It]
COMMERCIAL
The Tokens
Intercourse
Rev-ola : 1971
[Buy It]
THE COMMERCIAL
Wire
Pink Flag
Pink Flag : 1977
[Buy It]
COCA-COLA COMMERCIAL
The Who
The Who Sell Out
MCA : 1967
[Buy It]
TALKIN' FISH BLUES
Bob Dylan
1961
The other week I was out drinking too much with friends and the question of pop music's use in commercials came up. It came up because one friend is an songwriter and the other one works in advertising, as a copywriter, and eventually the two of them came together on what turned out to be common ground. For a while we talked about the rock songs that have, over the years, been sacrificed on the altar of commerce -- "Like a Rock" has hawked pickups, "Rock and Roll" sold Cadillacs, "Picture Book" moved printers, and most recently "Forever Young" uplifted the Pepsi generation. Some of us had a problem with that, but most of us felt somewhat blase about the prospect. Then we turned to jingles, and the advertising copywriter turned to the songwriter: "You must think there's a big difference between the crappy jingles that advertising companies commission and the songs you write, right?"
He smiled. He shifted in his chair. "Well," he said. "I've written jingles." He proceeded to tell us about a few of them: one was for a national restaurant chain; the other was for something more modest, like dentures or car wax. I don't exactly remember. Like I said, we were drinking. The copywriter was either secretly pleased or secretly appalled. She didn't advertise her feelings. On the way home that night, I fuzzily tried to puzzle through it all, to figure out what lines have been drawn (and then erased) between art and commerce and commercial art. I vaguely remembered that I had read something about a recent album that plays fast and loose with those lines and limits. The next morning, slightly more sober, I sharpened my memory.
The album, as it turns out, is Product Placement, the debut from the Atlanta-based Advertisements. Composed of rock renditions of ten famous jingles, the album is the latest attempt to conflate (or confuse) aesthetics and economics. The four band members, all in their late twenties, use pseudonyms taken from the advertising world -- in addition to guitarist, lead vocalist, and chief spokesman Mr. Whipple, there's keyboard player Mikey, drummer Mac Tonight, and bassist The Michelin Man. Friends since they met in a late-nineties Southern-rock outfit named Red Dash, Whipple and Mikey first conceived of the Advertisements a few years ago, from what I can gather. "We were just sitting around watching TV, and he started to sing the GE song. 'GE, we bring good things to living, we bring good things to life,'" explains Whipple. "On a whim, we went down to his basement and recorded it, and it sounded great. So we called up the other guys, who we knew and had worked with, and that was our band." (I did not acquire these quotes personally. I found them in an article about the band, another form of advertisement.)
What does an ultra-gimmicky advertising-reliant rock band sound like? Well, I'll tell you. Founded on a "brisk organic sound" that recalls the "glory days of the Attractions," the band "crackles" (and "snaps, and pops, presumably") with "infectious energy." Promotional language, sure, but not far from the truth, and the lyrics, grating at first, soon become irrelevant, as they are in "Umbrella," or "Sexyback," or any number of infectious classics. From the sunny cheer of "Coke Is It" to the grungy crunch of "The Wiener Song," the band successfully works with market-tested hooks. And while a few attempts miss wide -- "You Can't Drink It Slow If It's Quik" is refashioned on as a swoony doo-wop ballad -- the LP is, for the most part, unconflicted pop.
The Advertisements' pick of advertisements run the gamut of the American marketplace, from appliances ("GE") to coffee ("Good to the Last Drop [Maxwell House]") to fast food ("Aren't You Hungry for Burger King Now?"). But with so many commercials to choose from, how did they make their final cuts? "We had a terrible time with the final track listing," Whipple says. "For instance, we knew we couldn't do more than one cereal song, and we picked Lucky Charms over Cap'n Crunch because we wanted to do this 'Within You, Without You' bit, Eastern-sounding guitars and a little raga. But we had to shelve some stuff that we loved, like a hellacious instrumental version of 'The Copper-Top Battery' with these crashing keyboards and thundering drums."
Over the years, critics who have charged themselves with protecting music's authenticity side have challenged, sometimes angrily, the appropriation of pop songs for commercial purposes. But this naive inversion -- appropriating commercial songs for pop purposes -- is surprisingly powerful. The Who hinted at this possibility forty years ago with the The Who Sell Out, where they jammed interstitial jingles between real songs. But unlike Ray Charles's "You Got the Right One, Baby" (which was written by Prince, by the way) or Yael Naim's everpresent Apple ads -- the performances on Product Placement are both unsolicited and unpaid, not endorsements of products so much as endorsements of jingles. The Advertisements aren't seeking corporate sponsors, and aren't receiving a corporate dime. "Believe it or not, we recognize these songwriters as artists," explains Whipple. "They're artists working within commercial constraints, but they're still artists. We credit them in the liner notes, people like Tom Dawes, who wrote 'Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz,' and Richard D. Trentlage, who wrote 'The Wiener Song.' These songs are an essential part of Americana, and we want them to get their due. And it's not just old songs. Have you heard that new McDonald's jingle, the one with the singing fish? Amazing."
I have heard that jingle. Have you? If so, you are not likely to forget it. My children have taken it to singing it every morning, and they may even be dreaming about it. I wrote my friend the songwriter. "I only regret that I did not write it," he said. I agree, in a sense: while I don't think it has quality, necessarily, it has qualities, and one of them is that it is memorable to a degree that would shame most pop songs, even those who set out to be purely memorable. Once, years ago, a friend of mine told me that R. Kelly's "Thoia Thoing" was the most annoying, infernally catchy recording she had ever heard. I am not friends with her any longer, but I am sure that wherever she is, she is revising her opinion in favor of the singing fish. The Advertisements take a more philosophical approach. "There's a beauty in the way that music can serve products," Whipple says. "When I was a kid, I loved watching baseball, and in one game there was a ball that was hit deep and the centerfielder had to climb the outfield wall to have a shot at it. Well, Eastern Airlines had rented the wall space, and in the newspaper the next morning there was a picture of this player catching the ball in the middle of the air, suspended in front of these giant wings. I was uplifted. When you see art and consumerism come together all packaged like that, it sticks with you."
Fine, as far as I'm concerned. And I'm not that concerned: the Advertisements have a long career ahead of them if they want it. There are plenty of brilliant jingles out there, some sung by fish, some by other animals. The elements that produce memorable songs (simple lyrics, sticky melodies) are neutral about context; they don't know whether or not they're working for The Man. But what about that fateful day when the well dries up? With the talent they've shown for fleshing out pieces like "Reach Out and Touch Someone" -- the band yells improvised phone dialogue and text-message speak over Michelin's slap bass -- maybe they'll consider recording original material. But maybe not: that might be selling out.Labels: ben, commercials
posted by Ben
LINK |
Thursday, March 12, 2009
DREAM BABY
Roy Orbison
1962
Available on : The Soul of Rock and Roll
Sony Legacy : 2008
[Buy It]
I HAD A DREAM
Howlin' Wolf
1967
Available on : Ain't Gonna Be Your Dog
Universal : 1994
[Buy It]
DON'T WAKE ME UP, I AM DREAMING
Arthur C. Clough
1911
Edison Amberol 696
DREAMS, DREAMS
Smokey Robinson and the Miracles
1969
Available on : Whatever Makes You Happy
Rhino : 1993
[Buy It]
BOB DYLAN'S DREAM
Bob Dylan
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
Columbia : 1963
[Buy It]
I DREAMED I SAW SAINT AUGUSTINE
Bob Dylan
John Wesley Harding
Columbia : 1968
[Buy It]
This week I had a conversation about dreams, and then a dream about that conversation about dreams, and then another dream that came true, and then a conversation about the dream that came true.
The conversation about dreams happened one afternoon this week, and it must have stuck in my head, because that night I repeated it, with variation. In the real conversation, I was sitting across a table from someone who was talking about dreams: not specific dreams, but the entire category, what dreams might mean, what they can't mean. That night's dream was about a conversation, too, but in the dream-conversation I was talking about renting a truck. The person in the dream, who wasn't quite the person I had spoken to in real life, explained to me that the truck I was interested in renting had a compartment behind the driver's seat filled with tools that I wouldn't recognize. That's the phrase that stuck: "filled with tools you wouldn't recognize." Even at the time, while I was sleeping, I assumed that this was a dream about my conversation about dreams.
Before I woke up, I had a second dream. I dreamed I was at a conference somewhere rural--there were mountains and a lake--and a friend of mine was at the same conference. This wasn't a fake friend that my dream invented, but a dream version of a real friend. The whole thing was faintly documentary. I was attending this conference alone, and I called my wife and my kids to say hello; in the dream my phone number was the same as it is in real life. (Again, faintly documentary.) My friend was attending with her mother and her sister, and we were all called to a breakfast meeting. Just after the food was served, my friend left the table. Her mother looked upset but said nothing at the time; a few minutes later she asked me if I would go find my friend. I found her sitting in a meeting room by herself. She had written the word "blue" on the dry-erase board in red marker. "Your mom wants you to come to breakfast," I said. She explained that she couldn't because she needed to write a thank-you note to the owner of the shop that had repaired her boot heel for free. "Look," she said, lifting up her foot to show, "all fixed."
I sneered at her. "Who cares?" I said. "It looks worse than ever." It looked fine, actually. I went back to the table and she showed up a few minutes later, and we had breakfast and talked with her mom and her sister about the conference we were attending. It was a nice dream: no monsters, no missiles.
Today on the phone I mentioned that dream to the real-life friend. "What?" she said. "I just took a boot to have the heel fixed this morning."
"Right," I said.
"I'm serious," she said. "What else did you dream?" I told her the few other things I remembered-- that her phone wouldn't work, that she was wearing a brown skirt--and none of that rang a bell. She hung up, relieved, but evidently it was still bothering her, because she sent me an email a little later: "Tell me if you have any more dreams about what happens to me. I don't trust that you're not dreaming things that might be true. Or, maybe even better, don't tell me anything about them at all."
I understood the problem, partly. Everyone likes dreams but everyone has mixed feelings about the process by which they are shared. Dreams, we tend to believe, are ways of dealing with areas of our lives that we can't politely discuss (fear, libido), and so there is always something a little unclean in the retelling. What did the boot heel represent? Was it something more intimate? Even if a boot heel is just a boot heel, why would I feel connected, even for a second, even asleep, to a female friend's footwear? And why did I have to go and be rude? She was just trying to show me the repair.
Dreams may or may not be psychological skeleton keys. The jury has been out on that for centuries, and then especially for the last century. But they are, at many levels, powerful creative acts, and because of that they have featured regularly in human artwork: paintings, novels, movies. In pop songs, dreams tend to have a more specific function: they provide evidence of life's nasty habit of snatching away objects of desire. Roy Orbison's "Dream Baby," among the most famous dream songs in rock and roll, is about an unattainable woman--"how long must I dream?" he asks, as tortured as he is pleased--and in that it harmonizes with other songs like Howlin' Wolf's "I Had a Dream" or Arthur C. Clough's "Don't Wake Me Up, I Am Dreaming," where love and joy and power are attainable in sleep but cruelly withheld by waking life. There is a countermovement, of course, where dreams aren't a sign of what's been taken, but a reminder to firm your resolve and bring about the dreamed-about thing. This principle is encapsulated in Martin Luther King, Jr's "I Have a Dream" speech and much of the positive-themed soul that ran parallel to and followed it. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles' "Dream Dream" makes the argument, as Parliament would make in "Fantasy is Reality":Dreams oh dreams baby
Go up like a puff of smoke
Dreams oh dreams baby
Wake up and your heart is broke
And I've got to do something bad
Because it's getting the best of me
I've got to make these dreams a reality Bob Dylan has dreamed liberally throughout his career, from "Bob Dylan's Dream" (a melancholy lament for lost innocence) to "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" (a rollicking, stoned bit of surrealism) to "Series of Dreams" (an intentionally fragmented lyric that challenges the very idea of interpretation). In the most beautiful of his dream songs, "I Dreamed I Saw Saint Augustine," he goes deep into the past, where he meets with the fifth-century philosopher and witnesses the ways that leaders can be destroyed by the crowds that follow them:I dreamed I saw St. Augustine,
Alive as you or me,
Tearing through these quarters
In the utmost misery,
With a blanket underneath his arm
And a coat of solid gold,
Searching for the very souls
Whom already have been sold. Here, the object of desire, a comfortable relationship between saints and the rest of society, is taken violently, as Augustine is hanged (this did not, of course occur in real life). The dream is fully realized in the technical sense: it ends mid-song, and Dylan's narrator (who is, most likely, Dylan himself) wakes to consider what he has beheld:I dreamed I saw St. Augustine,
Alive with fiery breath,
And I dreamed I was amongst the ones
That put him out to death.
Oh, I awoke in anger,
So alone and terrified,
I put my fingers against the glass
And bowed my head and cried. Augustine himself, of course, had an abiding interest in dreams. He admitted that they could be deceptive, ways of betraying the world as it is presented to us, though he also thought they could be a form of communication with the divine. Beyond the epistemological dimension, there was an ethical one: if your dream self does something morally wrong, Augustine wondered, are you responsible? (In this he was following the inquiry of several other theologians, including John Cassian, who wondered about assigning culpability for impure thoughts experienced while dreaming.) Augustine decided that a dreamer wasn't responsible for the contents of a dream, but wasn't certain why not. This is obviously one of the issues that Dylan is addressing--if he is there while the mob hangs Augustine, is he implicated? Maybe the dream revealed a secret desire to hang. Maybe an ethical man would have objected, even in his own dream. I'm interested in going back to my conversation about dreaming to discuss this at greater length, but it's trapped in the past and unavailable--or rather, I'm trapped in the present and unavailable to it. Maybe I'll have another dream about a conversation about dreaming, and I can sort it all out. Until then, it's left to me to wonder, and to feel bad for the thing that I said about the boot--again, it looked fine, a nice boot in a nice dream.Labels: ben, folk-rock, rockabilly
posted by Ben
LINK |
Thursday, March 05, 2009
SNOW
Harry Nilsson
Nilsson Sings Newman
Buddha : 1970
[Buy It]
FOOTPRINTS IN THE SNOW
Roger Miller
1960
Available on: King of the Road
Bear Family : 1994
[Buy It]
FOOTPRINTS IN THE SNOW
Ry Cooder
My Name Is Buddy
Nonesuch : 2007
[Buy It]
LOVER IN THE SNOW
Rivers Cuomo
1997
Available on: Alone: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo
Geffen : 1997
[Buy It]
STEAL SOFTLY THROUGH SNOW
Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band
Trout Mask Replica
Reprise : 1969
[Buy It]
HUMIDITY BUILT THE SNOWMAN
John Prine
Lost Dogs + Mixed Blessings
Oh Boy : 1995
[Buy It]
Last week I went to a land of snow, though not the land of ice and snow. I skied, which hasn't happened in years, and skied fairly well, which hasn't happened in about as many years. My only goal was not to fall. I also met some new people and found them all to be very nice, which surprised me. I had forgotten that about people. I should get out more.
While I was in the snow, one of my friends was also on vacation, though she went to a land where it never snows. She was going on her trip, in part, to forget something unpleasant. I won't say whether it was an unpleasant circumstance within her family, or an unpleasant work experience, or an unpleasant relationship. The point is that she was trying to forget, and using distance and difference as tools to do so. She went somewhere with a beach, which made for nice symmetry: her surf, my snow. We figured we'd both be out of the reach of technology, but we forgot that nearly every remote outpost has the dreaded internet, and that the reach of cell phones is now roughly equal with the reach of the human species.
My first day in the land of the snow, it was sunny and warm. People skied in jeans and light jackets. The second morning I woke up to a blizzard. Snow was coming down everywhere. I was determined to get to the mountain early, and so I went tromping out in my ski boots, picked up my skis from the rack outside the hotel, and waited for the shuttle bus to take me to the base of the mountain. When I got there, I got into the lift line and realized that I had forgotten my lift ticket. To say that I was aggravated is an understatement, but I had time, so I went back to the shuttle bus and back to the hotel to pick up my ticket. As I went into the hotel, I noticed that there were no footprints by the entrance. As a record of the morning, this was inaccurate. I had been there, and I assumed other people had been, too. But the snow that was falling had already erased them. I had forgotten my lift ticket, sure, but now the snow was forgetting me entirely. It was like natural amnesia.
When I picked up my lift ticket, I also loaded up my iPod with songs about snow, and pretty soon I saw that I wasn't the only one who had considered the connection between snow and memory. Randy Newman's "Snow," which was recorded by Harry Nilsson but left off the original version of Nilsson Sings Newman, describes snow as a medium where memories both live and die.Snow
Fills the fields we used to know
And the little park where we would go
Sleeps far below
In the snow
Gone
It's all over and you're gone
But the memory lives on although
Our dreams lie buried
In the snow The bluegrass standard "Footprints in the Snow" complicates the case considerably. The song--a staple of Bill Monroe's act that has been covered by dozens of musicians--tells the story of a man who has been separated from his lover and uses the snow to locate her. More specifically, he tracks her:Now some folks like the summertime when they can walk about
Strolling through the meadow green it's fun there no doubt
But give me the wintertime when snow falls all around
For I found her when the snow on the ground
Well, I traced her little footprints in the snow
I traced her little footprints in the snow
I can't forget the day my darling lost her way
I found her when the snow was on the ground This seems like a nice story, right? His darling got lost, he went out to find her, snow helped, the end. But then the song turns, and makes it clear that it really was the end:Well, I dropped in to see her there was a big round moon
Her mother said she just stepped out but would be returning soon
I found her little footprints and I traced them through the snow
I found her when the snow was on the ground
Now she's up in heaven she's with an angel band
I know I'm going to meet her in that promised land
But every time the snow falls it brings back memories
For I found her when the snow was on the ground Miller's version is upbeat, almost chipper, and it's easy to overlook the fact that it's a love song about a frozen corpse. Ry Cooder shifts the story so that it's a cat in the snow, not a woman -- "My Name is Buddy," where his version appears, is a concept album about the American labor movement that uses anthropomorphic felines as characters -- but goes back to the older lyric in one important respect. While neither version disputes that the woman/cat in the song lost her way, Miller "can't forget that day" while Cooder (like Monroe before him) wants to "bless that happy day." Snow death is many things, but a blessing? It almost turns the tracking into stalking, and the death into a wished-for moment of revenge. That's even more plausible in Rivers Cuomo's "Lover in the Snow," which forgoes memory entirely for discovery.I wanna know
What were you doing with my friend?
Out in the eve
Deep in the shady glen I saw you,
Lying with him, down in the snow,
Letting him do all of the things that he wants to My cell phone worked perfectly on the ski lift, and after the third run, legs burning a bit, I called my friend to compare notes. She was on the beach. "Interesting," she said. "Footprints are a pretty dicey issue here, too. You can run from here to there, and as long as you keep close to the water, pretty soon there's no record of it at all. On the other hand, if you're too many yards up on the sand, it's too dry, and the wind blows away any evidence of you. That middle band, where the sand is damp, is the one where footprints last for days. Are there different names for those different kinds of sand?"
"You're cutting out," I said.
"My phone has worked fine all week," she said.
"Maybe it's mine," I said, and hung up.
She had gone too far into the issue, and I wanted to back off to a simpler, more elegant question: Is snow an instrument of memory or an instrument of forgetting? It was snowing harder, and I looked out at a creek, at the trees, at the other mountains in the distance. I didn't know anything about them except that I was among them. And then I wasn't. Let me be clear about this: it wasn't a mystical experience so much as a mathematical one, a calculation of proportion: when everything is covered by snow, what you forget most is yourself. Newman/Nilsson were right (personal pain is under there somewhere), but also deeply wrong (insisting that it be visible is an act of narcissism). Snow may not be time, exactly, but snowfall is a measure of it, a means of cutting human experience down to size. When I got to the top of the mountain, I went through a number of songs--Marvin Gaye's "Purple Snowflakes," Jonathan Richman's "Abominable Snowman in the Market"--until I found Captain Beefheart's "Steal Softly Through Snow," which is even clearer on the opposition between nature and man's desire to mark it:Breaks my heart to see the highway cross the hills
Man has lived a million years and still he kills At the bottom of the run, my phone buzzed. It was my friend, leaving me a message. "I guess we got cut off," she said. "Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that I'm doing fine. I'm not remembering as much about the bad thing as I worried I would. Sometimes I do, and it's not pleasant, but I'm not going to beat myself up about it. It'll pass, right?" She was right but I didn't call back to say so. Instead, I went back up the lift with John Prine's "Humidity Built the Snowman," a song about human limits that stubbornly indulges human hope:The scientific nature of the ordinary man
Is to go on out and do the best you can I didn't fall.Labels: ben, country, folk, pop
posted by Ben
LINK |
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
PUPPET ON A STRING
Sandie Shaw
1967
Available on: The Very Best of Sandie Shaw
EMI : 1999
[Buy It]
YOUR TIME IS GONNA COME
Sandie Shaw
Reviewing the Situation
Pye : 1969
[Buy It]
This time of year is bad for birthdays, for me. There are too many, and they come in from all directions: family, friends, new friends. Recently I almost forgot a birthday. I remembered just in time, if you count being reminded by the birthday person as "in time." I had mentally set the occasion a day later, and I was prepared, but good intentions mean next to nothing when it comes to forgetting or belating birthdays. Soon I'll have to contend with a bunch more, and I'm sure I'll drop at least one ball. Hazard of juggling.
The birthday I almost forgot was especially problematic, because it belonged to a person with whom I have had ongoing nontrivial interaction. Is that the right way to say it? What I mean by that is that it is a friend who is closer than an acquaintance but has on occasion been as far away as an enemy. What this has meant is frequent attempts to move closer (in times where there has been distance) or assess the reasons for the distance (in times when we are close). Plus, we didn't really let each other off the hook, ever: when there were feuds or fights or dustups, we mocked each other as we went through them, sometimes with songs. Once she thought I was talking too much during our phone calls and sent me a mix that included the New York Dolls' "Chatterbox" and the Monks' "Shut Up." Once I thought she was in a rut, down about everything, so I sent her a book called "Creating Optimism," which an online reviewer called "the worst self-help book I have ever read, and I have read many."
A few years ago, we were going through a strange patch where she decided that I was making her miserable, even though I was doing the exact same things I had done when I made her happy. The problem, she said, had to do with the fact that she was too tied up in the particulars of my life. When I was having trouble at work, or in my marriage, or with my writing, she would ask me tons of questions and offer tons of advice. But she felt like it was emptying out her own life. I absorbed her concerns and, because I was in an unhelpful frame of mind, sent her some songs about people who were too tied up in the particulars of other people's lives. It was harder to email songs then -- big attachments -- and it seemed like a major effort, and that combined with the fact that it was a few weeks away from her birthday made it seem like I was sending the songs as a present. She chose not to read the songs as clever or sadistic commentary on our situation, and they helped to restore our friendship. A lack of scrutiny had turned my cruel act into a kindness. It's knotty, I know. Make it a bow. Presents have bows.
One of the songs I sent was "Puppet On a String," which was recorded by Sandie Shaw in 1967. Thursday is Sandie Shaw's birthday, which I had almost forgotten -- or perhaps never knew -- until I saw it listed somewhere on a site that lists birthdays. Shaw's career started, in pop-music terms, well before "Puppet on a String." In 1964, she rose to fame in Britain with her version of Bachrach and David's "(There's) Always Something There to Remind Me." She took the song to number one, where it stayed for nearly a month, and went on to put a dozen more songs in the British top twenty, including "Girl Don't Come," "Long Live Love" and "Nothing Comes Easy." Shaw branched out into fashion (a line of shoes) and television (a variety show called "The Sandie Shaw Supplement"), returning to pop music emphatically in 1967, with "Puppet On a String," which won the Eurovision song contest.
Shaw was born in 1947. She was a teenager for the first wave of her fame. As she got older, as the birthdays mounted, she got sick of pop music. Who wouldn't? She didn't like most of the songs, and hated some of them. She famously derided "Puppet on a String" as "sexist drivel" that "instinctively repelled" her. She was more right than she was wrong, which is why I included it in the set of songs I sent to my friend:I may win on the roundabout
Then I'll lose on the swings
In or out, there is never a doubt
Just who's pulling the strings
I'm all tied up to you
But where's it leading me to? In 1969, as Shaw's pop-star stock was fading, she recorded an album called "Reviewing the Situation," which included covers of songs by Bob Dylan ("Lay Lady Lay"), the Beatles ("Love Me Do"), the Rolling Stones ("Sympathy for the Devil"), and Dr. John ("Mama Roux"), along with a selection from the musical "Hair" ("Frank Mills"). Some were good, like "Mama Roux." Others, like "Sympathy For the Devil," verged on oddities. All were deeply felt, which didn't always make for good music, but always made for music that raised the issue of goodness. The album also included a version of a song that had just been recorded by a new British blues-rock group named Led Zeppelin. "Your Time Is Gonna Come" is generally acknowledged to be the first Zeppelin cover, and it's also one of the best. Shaw hangs back and then belts out. She is gentle where she needs to be, mysterious where she needs to be, and menacing where she needs to be. I'm probably understating how good a version this is. The way she handles the first few lines alone is revelatory:Lyin', cheatin', hurtin, that's all you seem to do
Messin' around with every girl in town
Puttin' me down for thinkin' of someone new
Always the same, playin' your game
Drive me insane, trouble's gonna come to you
One of these days, and it won't be long
You'll look for me, but, baby, I'll be gone And look at how efficiently she reverses gender, taking John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page's "Messin' around with every guy in town" and turning it on its ear. This is sexist drivel that instinctively attracts me.
I sent it to my friend whose birthday I almost forgot. She didn't answer right away, and I figured she was mad. The next day I got a message from her. It was a speechless message, but not silent: she said nothing but played "Your Time Is Gonna Come" in the background, loud. Then I sent her an email that said "You're welcome" and she sent me one that said "thank you." It was like we were winding time backwards.
But time goes forward for us all. In the seventies, Sandie Shaw became something of an eccentric, technically speaking -- her career lost its center and she focused variously on songwriting, a rock musical, marriage, Buddhism, and writing childrens' books. She returned to more active career management in the mid-eighties, raised her profile with the help of Morrissey, had a solo album on Rough Trade that's still in print, and rerecorded much of her early work. But for me, forever, she'll exist for her cover of "Your Time Is Gonna Come." Today, she's 62. Happy Birthday. And happy birthday to my friend. My birthday is later in the year, and I'm expecting some kind of payback. My time is gonna come.Labels: ben, folk-rock, pop
posted by Ben
LINK |
Thursday, February 12, 2009
THE GRIP OF LOVE
Tom Verlaine
Tom Verlaine
Elektra : 1979
[Buy It]
Why are people so quick to love movies, books, songs, paintings, restaurants, and sports teams but so slow to love other people? Sages have been debating this issue for centuries, and continue to the present day. Bill Sage, a kid I went to high school with, used to talk about the girl he was dating, how she was a hot girl who was smart or maybe a smart girl who was hot. "Maybe she's the overlap," he said. "I love the idea of the overlap." But he never loved her, and she found that out a few years later in college, and promptly slept with someone else. It wasn't me, but I knew the guy, and after she got rid of him, too, we became friends. Now she's living in a western state, where she works for a company that helps other companies manage inventory. I spoke to her not so long ago, and she said that her personal life was frustrating, not exactly loveless but not exactly love-filled. Work, on the other hand, was rewarding. "You wouldn't think it," she said, "but I like the purely logistical issues. For example, in most companies, sending things out of the warehouse is a relatively trivial matter compared to bringing things into the warehouse." She went on to explain that since no system is perfect, especially when so many moving parts are involved, a certain amount of management is management of inevitable errors in counting, logging, and ordering. "You have to be precise about imprecision," she said.
I digress. Or rather, she digresses. Or does she, and do I? Bob Sage, Bill's brother, used to say that it was easy to love people so long as you didn't have to look at them, and we would laugh at him, because he was always making these kinds of jokes, but it's entirely possible that he wasn't joking at all. People are quick to love movies, books, songs, paintings, restaurants, and sports because those things don't love back--or rather, can't love back. There is no expectation of reciprocation and consequently never any disappointment when reciprocation falls short. Each and every time you listen to "Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell," say, it produces the same experience for you. If the experience is different, you will quickly understand that the shift has occurred within you rather than within the work. And it's rare that love is withdrawn from a song or a book: you can come to see its flaws, or come to be embarrassed by your earlier ardor, but that might just make you drive your love deeper inside. It won't, for the most part, make you bring your love to a full stop.
Loving people, on the other hand, is a dangerous business, because love isn't just about what you feel. It's an economy in which what you feel must be matched with something of equivalent value, as well as one in which your expectations for ongoing supply can quickly reach self-annihilating levels. Not to mention the fact that you may feel you are not equipped to handle what you are receiving: expectations from another person that are as interdependent and volatile as yours. Love, or whatever you want to call it (pick a less romantic word if you'd prefer, like "relationship" or "commitment") is a frightening prospect. When you accept it, you are assuming risk at a level that often overloads the human organism. Two people acting with single purpose but retaining their separateness? That's an overlap, and nobody likes--let alone loves--the idea of the overlap. Giving love refines the spirit; worrying about getting it clouds and clots that same spirit. Or, to reinvest the digression, sending out of the warehouse is a relatively trivial matter compared to bringing things into the warehouse.
This may be obvious, but it's Valentine's Day, the commemoration of the obvious. The friend in the western state who manages warehouse inventory recently went through a breakup. I think maybe she was trying to hold on until Valentine's Day, but that became untenable for several reasons, some of which I have listed above. The person she was seeing was not a movie or a book or a painting, and so, in trying to love him, she quickly found herself concerned with trying to accept his love, which led to expectations he could not satisfy. These were not unreasonable expectations, not as far as I was concerned -- and, sometimes, not as far as she was concerned. They mostly involved him offering to drive her to work some mornings, or offering to pick her up some afternoons, or leaving little notes in her jacket pockets, or calling in the afternoon and assuming a funny accent to ask if she knew where he might find the "best little wharehouse in the state." Whatever. The specifics aren't important, not to me. The point is that all the things she admired about him statically, all the things that would have worked to his advantage if he was a TV show or a sculpture, dissipated when he couldn't -- or wouldn't -- understand the issues of inventory management. She was able to give him love, for a time, but witnessed repeatedly how pained he was to give in return, and that returned her to a point where giving seemed more like someone else's taking.
After the breakup, she said, she thought often about whether she had give him enough chances. "He made mistakes but so did I," she said. "Why should that be unacceptable?" This was a fair question with a fairly obvious answer. In love, or commitments, or relationships, you don't have to avoid error. In fact, you should embrace error. But you should embrace the proper type of error. This is another way in which static artworks are easier to love than people. As we have said, artworks don't change, really, so they can't disappoint you. But they also can't try to accommodate you and, in doing so, show you that they are utterly insensible about how to find your heart. My friend told me one story that stuck out like a stalactite. After their breakup, the guy came by her office. He took her to lunch. He ate a meal that he would never eat -- a big burger, she said, when he was mostly no-red-meat -- and asked questions he would never ask. "I know he was trying to be a different him so that I would feel differently," she said, "but it only made me feel more the same. The root him and the root me didn't intertwine." It is easy to believe unverifiable things about a song or a book, but harder to do so about a person. We left aside one broader issue, which is the question of why people date people they know are wrong for them -- I have a theory about Controlled Failure which dovetails nicely with the terrors of confronting someone you might actually love, and thus cannot control -- because it was a social call, not a session. We talked about music and politics.
So for this unholy coming holiday, and for my friend, and for the guy, even -- who I never met and probably wouldn't have liked, at least from the description, but who has the right to be happy elsewhere, eventually -- here's Tom Verlaine's "The Grip of Love," which not only contains some of the finest electric rock guitar of the last century (try it, you'll love it), but has a comprehensively elliptical lyric that says most of what I've been trying to say: You do the moon
You do the snake
Everywhere you go
You make the right mistake
You take a picture
And lay it on my tray
Some kind of window
Just like the Milky Way The song doesn't end well -- the girl tells him to get lost, and he says, desperately but slyly, "well, don't that buckle my belt?" -- but it starts beautifully, and that's something. Inventory is managed, at least for a little while, and it's managed exactly as he says it is, exactly as my friend said it is: "everywhere you go you make the right mistake." So find that person, get in the grip, do the moon, do the snake. Happy Valentine's Day.Labels: ben, rock and roll
posted by Ben
LINK |
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
DON'T FORGET ME
Harry Nilsson
Pussy Cats
Buddha : 1974
[Buy It]
FORGET ALL ABOUT IT
The Nazz
Nazz Nazz
SGC : 1969
[Buy It]
DON'T FORGET WHAT I TOLD YOU
John Simon
John Simon's Album
Water : 1971
[Buy It]
The other day I was cleaning out an early-model desktop computer and I found a folder labeled "Old Old Old." Inside it were pictures of old, old, old people. No, no. That's not true. That would be impolite and uncomfortable. Inside it were a number of text files, all date-stamped April 2000. That wasn't the composition date, as it turned out, but the date of transfer from some other storage device (a floppy disk?) to the internal hard drive of the computer. The files seemed to be from the early nineties. Most were short notes. In many cases, I could retrieve the original context. This one was a note to my roommate regarding a feud about a lamp ("I'm sorry that it broke but I think we both know how that happened"). That one was a note to my brother with what I think was relationship advice ("You might never be sure but if you're sure that you'll never be sure that's something to go on"). One of the files completely perplexed me. It seemed to be a note to a friend in which Terms Of Friendship were being managed and reset.Yes I'd like to keep it up. I know that you say you don't, or that you can't. You say different things at different times. I don't know why I didn't think to say that same thing sooner. Wishful thinking, maybe? Hey, yesterday I was out at the store and I thought of you. It was because the woman in front of me in the check-out line was hideous and annoying. Ha ha. Just kidding. It was because in one aisle there was a sign that said "Party Supplies" and I remembered how you like using that word: supply. "What if this isn't supplying me with the things I need," you said. You were standing by your refrigerator, so I made a joke: "What, you want one that crushes ice?" You laughed, which was nice of you. Friendly. I am curious if you really felt like laughing. Why would you laugh when you're so convinced that I'm making unreasonable demands? Anyway, I'm sure we'll talk about this more tomorrow and the week after that and probably next year and it won't get any clearer. Unpolished mirrors, like you said. The next to last sentence was wishful thinking, as far as I know. There are no notes that seem to be sequels to this one. Moreover, I don't remember what the note was about, or who this friend was, or if I sent it, or if I received a reply, or anything else. Maybe it wasn't even a friend. Maybe it was someone I was dating. I figured that it probably wasn't written to a serious girlfriend, because I tended to live with my serious girlfriends and wouldn't have said "your refrigerator." But this was just detective work and I didn't even remember the victim.
I sent the note to a friend who has known me for a long time. She said she recognized my writing, but that she had no idea who I might have been writing to. The note reminded her of something, though: she had recently had a similar experience. She was clearing out a desk drawer and found a legal pad with scribbled notes that she assumed were fragments of a draft for a longer letter. "I think it was to that guy," she said, naming a name that I was supposed to remember but didn't. "It's funny how faint he is now to me. In the notes, I was telling him about how there had been a shift, how one minute I had felt one way and the next I had felt another way. It's like the past never happened."
"That's what you said to him, or that's what you're saying to me now?"
"What?"
"Was that what you were telling him, that it was like the past never happened because you felt one way one second and another way the next second? Or are you saying that to me now because you remember him so faintly?"
"I'm not sure what you're saying," she said. "All I know is that it's very comforting. I love the idea that we have pasts that are unavailable to us. If I had to remember everything about that guy, how would I ever have gotten over the pain?"
"Get over pain?" I said. "Get past it, maybe. If you really forgot everything about him, then what would have stopped you from dating him again?"
"I'd never forget everything," she said.
"Exactly," I said. "But I did. I forgot everything about this letter, this person, this time. I don't know what the inside jokes are about. I don't remember seeing the Party Supplies aisle in the store. Maybe it was a piece of fiction. And, even if it's real, doesn't that mean that the same friend could resurface and the same problem reappear? I could put my hand, or hers, on the hot stove again."
There was then a long pause in which she either considered what I had said with great concentration or ignored me completely and paid attention instead to someone in her office. "I have to go to a fantastically interesting grant meeting," she said.
"Okay," I said. "Later." She went off to her meeting. I went back to the note about supplies and demands, tried again to remember who I had written it to, failed. Part of the problem was in the reciprocity: I didn't like forgetting, but being forgotten was worse. Change was acceptable, even necessary, but the prospect of disappearance triggered an existential shock, and here was solid proof that things did not always persist. In thinking about the note, I found myself thinking about the phone call. Had she forgotten it already? Were a broader set of memories endangered? How could I be sure that the present would not become the future's forgotten past? I wrote that question down and emailed it to my friend: "How can I be sure that the present will not become the future's forgotten past?" Then I went off to a meeting of my own. It was fantastically interesting too. What a coincidence.
Later, as I rode the subway home, I tried to think of songs about forgetting. Or rather, I tried to remember songs about forgetting. I didn't have a pen or paper with me, so I couldn't write them down, and as a result any that I remembered on the subway would have to be re-remembered when I got home.
Most songs about forgetting are really songs about fear of being forgotten, which in turn are really songs about fear of being unloved or unwanted. I remembered Bill Lloyd's "Forget About Us" ("I cannot forget about us"), James Carr's "Forgetting You" ("Don't make me live the rest of my life forgetting you"), Simple Minds' "Don't You (Forget About Me)" ("Don't you forget about me"). Harry Nilsson's "Don't Forget Me" is a pledge of undying loyalty even in times of dying, with a melody too beautiful for the bleak lyrics:When we're older
And full of cancer
It doesn't matter now,
Come on, get happy,
'Cause nothing lasts forever Well, okay, but if nothing lasts forever, then what about forgetting? Eventually that's going to fade, too, and when it does, what replaces it? Utter indifference? Fantasy? Or was it memory? Would there come a time when I would remember exactly who I was writing that note to, and why, and what it meant, and what I meant it to mean? The Nazz's "Forget All About It" is a noisy Who-lite song that makes this suggestion (the chorus, "Forget all about it a while," is either a paradox or a substantial psychological insight), along with another helpful one:If you haven't got time to rest
Then take the record off now There was one song whose title I almost exactly recalled, and that I looked up when I got home. It was John Simon's "Don't Forget What I Told You," from his 1971 solo album. The song--which Simon sings poorly but sweetly, like a tone-deaf Richard Manuel--somewhat resembles a love song but opens up much wider to accommodate fairly apocalyptic notions of disconnection and discontent:This world's a joke they tell me
It'll go up in smoke some day And then later:How would you feel if your world wasn't real? This was the question I had sent in email to my friend, more or less. It was the question that hung over the note I had found. It was the question that I wanted to remember.
There were other songs, too, I think, but they're fuzzy and getting fuzzier by the minute. Unpolished mirrors, like she said.Labels: ben, rock and roll
posted by Ben
LINK |
Thursday, January 29, 2009
QUICKIE
George Clinton
You Shouldn't-Nuf Bit Fish
Capitol : 1983
[Buy It]
PASSIN' THRU
Frederick Knight
1974
Available on : The Complete Stax-Volt Soul Singles, Vol. 3: 1972-1975
Stax : 1994
[Buy It]
LIFE IS...TOO SHORT
Too Short
Life Is...Too Short
Jive : 1988
[Buy It]
RAPIDS
T-Rex
Tanx
Reprise : 1973
[Buy It]
Busy week, at work, at home, busy for reasons that made sense to me at the time, that faintly make sense now, that will cease to make sense soon. But soon's coming too soon: too much to do. And yet, committed. Always committed. (Should be committed?) Will endeavor to provide the maximum Moistworks satisfaction, even if it's just a short visit, a quickie, even if I'm just passing through.
Recently I was talking to a friend of mine who lives in a state that starts with a M. I cannot describe her more specifically than that, for reasons you are about to read. Her husband has become a source of great disappointment to her. As he gets older, he has lost his patience, nearly all of it. They went to a children's party the other week. They came early, because he was hot to get out of the house. They didn't stay very long, because he was hot to leave. On the way out, he found that the family's coats were buried under a heap of coats left by later arrivals. "He blew his top," she said, by which she meant that he stomped his foot once and went to wait outside. "I tried to talk to him about it at dinner but couldn't," she said. "I wanted to agree with him, that the hosts were incredibly stupid to arrange the coats the way they did, but he got up in the middle of the meal. My middle. He was done early. He was quick as always. Plus, he's always tired. He has energy only for moving through things, not for staying with things." She went on to say something about going to bed with him, and how brevity was a problem there, too. Or maybe it was that it wasn't a problem, because she was tired also. I didn't listen to her closely, for reasons you are about to read.
As it turns out, her story had gone on too long for me. I like her, but I sympathize with her husband. Life gets shorter as it gets longer, and it's progressively harder to find reasons to burrow into a pile of coats or to pile on inconsiderate hosts or to consider foreplay, say, in light of the rewarding horizon. Young men can be impatient, but it's from ardor or inexperience. They want to get to the next good thing. Old men are impatient from a whole host of other reasons, not the least of which is getting away from the last bad thing. Much of the time, this isn't morally defensible. Bernardino of Siena, who was old six hundred years before I'll be, wrote about the wickednesses that can get into elderly men: the gloominess, the lickerishness, the willful ignorance, the impatience. Why is impatience last on that list? Why not first? Who can wait?
So, quickly, some older songs about quickness, starting with "Quickie," which is from an album whose title deals directly with impatience -- really, fish, you shouldn't-nuf-bit -- and rushing through the stately secular gospel "Passing Thru" and the plainly philosophical "Life Is...Too Short" (against the lyrics--"Don't be stupid, though / Cause when you waste it, you'll know"--the central sample, from Average White Band's "School Boy Crush," sounds like an explicit irony) before arriving, breathlessly, at "Rapids." It's the first T-Rex song I heard, in the car of an older kid who used to drive me home from school. He drove too fast. He used to yell at older drivers. He couldn't have known that they were every bit as impatient as he was, only more powerfully. The song is still one of my favorites, even though it's from that album that everyone considers a falling-off from The Slider. What's it called, again? Tanx? You're welcome.Labels: ben, rock
posted by Ben
LINK |
Friday, January 23, 2009
THE MEMPHIS TRAIN
Rufus Thomas
1968
Available on : Beg, Scream & Shout! The Big Ol' Box of 60's Soul
Rhino : 1997
[Buy It]
TRAIN TO TAMPA
Sam Dees
1968
Available on : The Birmingham Sound: The Soul of Neal Hemphill, Vol. 1
Rabbit Factory : 2006
[Buy It]
SAME TRAIN TWICE
Swamp Dogg
1977
Available on : The Excellent Sides of Swamp Dogg, Vol. 5
SDEG : 2007
[Buy It]
PLAY A TRAIN SONG
Todd Snider
2005
Available on : Tales From Moondawg's Tavern
TRAIN SONG
Tom Waits
Big Time
Island : 1990
[Buy It]
Last night I took the train up to Boston for a reading, and then took the last train of the day back to New York. There were equipment delays and subways going one way and commuter-rail connections the other way; all in all, the entire trip took fourteen hours, eleven of which were spent on tracks. The way up was a midday trip, crowded and aggravated. The way back was nearly empty, just me and what seemed like a youth soccer team and a woman reading a dirty book and another woman with a highly shaggy dog in a bag. I tried to sleep, had a little success, tried to read, had a little success.
Between these failures, I had plenty of time to think, and one of the things I thought about was trains: or, more specifically, planes, trains, and automobiles, and how they have furnished fertile subjects for songwriters. In rock and roll, cars win: early rock and roll and rockabilly have too many car songs to count--the original "Brand New Cadillac"? "Dead Man's Curve"? the balance of the Beach Boys/Chuck Berry catalogs?--but if you widen the scope to include blues, soul, country, and jazz, trains may pull into the lead. (This is just a metaphor. I am not endorsing any car/train races. Very dangerous.) There's "Mystery Train," of course, and "The Train Kept A-Rollin'," and "Smokestack Lightning" and the Singing Brakeman and a tradition so rich that I would consider it at greater length if I wasn't so tired from the train. There are many, many things to say about trains in song, but I'm only going to be able to extract one today, and that's how trains embody both desire and helplessness, even when they're not heading into a tunnel. In cars, you drive, which is a self-starting and self-determined act. In trains, you're subject to schedules, to conductors, to people meeting you at the station or not being there to meet you. Songs about trains are necessarily songs about waiting, and that makes all the difference in the world. To that end -- I think it's called a terminal in train talk -- here are Rufus Thomas, Sam Dees, Swamp Dogg, Todd Snider, and Tom Waits. The last two are live versions, and in both cases, songs are preceded by highly shaggy dog stories. The Snider is especially epic, more than fifteen minutes of waiting before he gets to the song -- it just keeps a-rollin'.Labels: ben, blues, rhythm and blues
posted by Ben
LINK |
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
SWEARIN' TO GOD
Frankie Valli
Close-Up
Private Stock : 1975
[Buy It]
Too much historical import for me to take it all in, certainly in any kind of glib journalessayistic way, and because of that, I will resist the temptation to put This Label on That Thing or That Wrapper around This Event. Plus, highly orchestrated events that involve millions of people are, to me, troubling things. Still, I sent some spies. There seems to be a surplus of joy and optimism, along with a surplus of merchandise. A friend of mine who is there checked in with this report: "Today, an outpouring of hope; last night, an outpouring of martinis."
Years ago there was another country called the seventies. I remember the inauguration of Jimmy Carter, which we talked about in school. We all had to draw pictures of the new president, and that was easy: big teeth and yellow crayon for the hair. Around that time, Frankie Valli put out the disco single "Swearin' To God," and while it's a love song about how spiritual power feeds the heart, or maybe feeds off of it, it serves equally well as a summary of the stirring oddness of the swearing-in ceremony for our nation's highest office, that (un)holy collision of power, conviction, inspiration, and the personal touch that characterizes the best politicians:Swearin' to god
There's no one else on earth I'd rather be
Swearin' to god
You made me see, so I believed in you
Oh, you've been fillin' my cup
Til' I'm runnin' over with joy
From you heaven sent love
Just touch me again
I'm king of all men and reigning from above Labels: ben, disco
posted by Ben
LINK |
Thursday, January 15, 2009
MY LOVE FOR YOU HAS TURNED TO HATE
Hank Williams
1949
Available on: Original Singles Collection
Mercury Nashville : 1992
[Buy It]
I'VE GOT REASONS TO HATE YOU
Lefty Frizzell
1951
Available on: Life's Like Poetry
Bear Family : 1992
[Buy It]
HATE STREET DIALOGUE
Rodriguez
Cold Fact
Light In the Attic : 1970
[Buy It]
I HATE U
Prince
The Gold Experience
Warner Bros. : 1995
[Buy It]
HATE IS THE NEW LOVE
Mekons
OOOH! (Out Of Our Heads)
Quarter Stick : 1992
[Buy It]
I HATE YOU
Monks
Black Monk Time
Polydor : 1966
[Buy It]
TURN IT INTO HATE
Graham Parker
Acid Bubblegum
Razor & Tie : 1996
[Buy It]
This week I published a short article in the magazine where I work. It was a humor piece about the Holocaust. Well, really, it was a humor piece about the Herman Rosenblat case, and the way that our culture encourages the artificial sweetening of memoirs about even the more horrific events so that those memoirs can better appeal to publishers, programmers, movie studios, television executives, and the public. It wasn't a major achievement, but it was a piece with a point. I should know. I sharpened it.
I thought it would make a little trouble, and it did. People don't like jokes about the Holocaust, even jokes that use it to make a broader case. In the wake of the piece, I have been getting a pretty steady stream of hate mail. The people who have decided to send me hate mail have derided not only the piece, but my entire body of work, not to mention my character and (in one case) my parents' character. That guy was the worst. I won't say his name. Let's say his name was Bill, which it wasn't. Bill wrote many negative things about me. Some I will repeat, some I will not. I will paraphrase and conflate, possibly also inventing: I'm trying the Herman Rosenblat thing. Among the things Bill said was the following: "You should be ashamed of yourself and your parents should be ashamed of you and if they aren't then they are just as self-hating as you." He went on: "race traitor," "talentless," "awful," and one misspelled profanity. (To be fair, it was probably mistyped: does anyone think it's spelled "fcuk"?)
I thought for a little while about Bill, who I won't identify, but whose remarks I will briefly dignify with a response. Dislike of the piece is fine, Bill. I prefer praise, Bill--who doesn't?--but I don't believe in a world where my preferences should always be satisfied. People are under no obligation to like my work, Bill. For me to believe otherwise would be idiotic, Bill. Sometimes, something I write will rub people the wrong way, Bill. Don't you think so, you freakin' moronic eunuch? See: it can happen. Other times, it's just that different readers occupy different territory. Let's say, Bill, that you love Claire Messud. I pick her only as a random example of an author I admire and like, but haven't yet found a way to love. Not her fault. Not mine. Could just as easily have been Etgar Keret or Barbara Pym. It is possible, even likely, Bill, that love for Messud/Keret/Pym is incompatible with love for me. Your heart and mind have staked out territory, and I am beyond the pale. That's fine. That's good. You can't love everyone, as they say, or your love is not love at all. You need hate so that love is real, as they say. They also say that a world without dislike is a world drowning in diet cream soda, and that it's better to have some bourbon and scotch too, so that people get intoxicated by what they consume rather than pleasantly, fleetingly carbonated. So in some ways, Bill, we're on the same page. I'm sympatico with your unsympatico. That's what I would have written back to Bill if I had written back.
I didn't, though. Why? Because I was mad. In the matter of Bill, I felt like stomping his head until I got wine. I put on heavy boots and looked up his address on the Internet. I even had a line I was going to say before I put the boot on his neck: "If you shift things into a hateful register, you might get rung up on that register." It wasn't exactly Dirty Harry -- it wasn't even Gran Torino -- but the boots were all laced up. A friend of mine asked me why I was so mad, when I professed not to care about criticism. I didn't know, and I said I didn't know. "I mean it," she said. "Why are you bothered so much by a reaction that's clearly ignorant? How thin is your skin?" Again, I said I didn't know. My friend was making me mad. It turned out the questions were rhetorical, which didn't make me any less mad. My friend is a writer, and she told me that she has an odd reaction to hateful readers. "Sure, they make themselves look bad, but they also make me look bad," she said. "So, mixed feelings, like watching an ex-boyfriend drive off a cliff in my Jaguar."
Why is it okay for Bill to hate me but not okay for me to hate him? What's the difference between a response that demonstrates measured disdain for me and my writing and one that lashes out? And why is ad hominem hatred any less virtuous than a more global misanthropy? It's the last of these questions that should come first. What's ironic about the whole experience is that the humor piece in question, the one that Bill thought was trivializing the Holocaust, was written from a place of deep and abiding hatred. All the people who expressed outrage that I was burlesquing the Holocaust were, whether they know it or not, simply re-expressing the outrage I felt when I first heard about the Herman Rosenblat affair. You should have seen my face. I mean it. You should have, because then you could have explained my expression to me: it was a look of sadness and distaste and frustration and despair, not only at the poor old man who felt compelled to fictionalize the horrors of his youth, but at the swarm of houseflies that came so quickly to the carrion. My sense of the whole incident just burned at me. I felt more than just hot under the choler. I was, well, Holocaustic. In the end, the outrage got filtered through at least three layers of trickery and irony, through masks, through fictional devices, because it needed to be at a temperature where I could safely handle it. (Incidentally, this is why I'm not as mad at Rosenblat as I am at the people who ringed around him opportunistically: maybe his introduction of fictional elements was somehow psychologically necessary. Who am I to say?) So that's the thing, Bill. I don't mind hate. I depend upon it, as do many people I depend upon--Stanley Elkin, Axl Rose, Ice Cube. But I like it to be deployed correctly, Bill, by which I mean non-idiotically.
Eventually, I took off my heavy boots. I never got the wine from Bill's head. I wrote a sentence about punching him in the face. An ear flew off. Call it cowardice or call it satire. In his honor, I'd like to offer a few songs about hate that use the term (and the weapon) correctly: a pair of bitter country tearjerkers, a hippie relic, the Mekons' "Lone Pilgrim" update, Prince's "Thin Line Between Love and Hate" update, a classic from the eternally mad Monks, and an undervalued anthem from Graham Parker. The Parker is my favorite of the bunch, I think. It's a song about how war and celebrity culture and the deadening of the human spirit has only one proper response, and that's to load up a whole quiver with arrows and then, quivering with rage, let them fly:Send your little boys and girls to go and play in a giant sandbox
Put your movie stars on the cover of People for going in for a detox
Let your happy-face news readers share a little joke
At the end of the night's transmission
Let's see the world through the eyes of some clown
Gonna make all of your decisions
Well if you can sleep at night go ahead that's great
It's all been manufactured like the junk that's on your plate
Come on
Turn it into hate
Turn it into hate Parker doesn't attack anyone individually. Rather, he attacks everyone, implicates whoever contributes to the blindness and complacency that lets the world go on cracked and crooked: that allows a memoirist to be lionized and then turned into a sacrificial lamb, that allows a justice department to be used as a blunt political instrument, that allows an economy to be rubbled by short-sightedness. Though the song was released in 1996, it feels even more contemporary, in the sense that it feels like a hurried, heated pushback delivered in response to a proximate threat. New technologies have harmed music in many ways, but jeremiads aren't one of the victims; digital delivery permits hatred and rage to range more freely, with often bracing results. In fact, Parker himself has recently taken to YouTube with a series of topical songs performed under the pseudonym Tex Skerball, and other rock stars like Neil Young are beginning to see how the death of record stores and radio and the rise of alternate distribution channels can help rather than hurt their cause. Elsewhere on the album, on "Sharpening Axes," Parker delivers a lyric that is nearly a manifesto:I don't appeal to the masses, and they don't appeal to me. Dyspeptic but fair-minded, angry but controlled, misanthropic because of his love for humanity, kicking against the pricks without ever breaking down: that's the kind of hate I understand and, consequently, the kind of hate I love.Labels: ben, country, rock
posted by Ben
LINK |
Thursday, January 08, 2009
EASTBOUND AND DOWNJerry Reed 1977 Available on : The Essential Jerry ReedRCA : 1995 [Buy It]BUSY DOIN' NOTHIN'The Beach Boys FriendsCapitol : 1968 [Buy It]TOO BUSYLouis Armstrong 1928 Available on : The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven RecordingsSony : 2000 [Buy It]WORK SONGDan Reeder Dan ReederOh Boy : 2004 [Buy It]I had a busy week back from vacation. Lots to do and not very much time, and so the days felt pinched, kind of like they did for the Bandit: We've got a long way to go and a short time to get there He wasn't kidding. In only twenty-eight hours, the Bandit and his Trans Am had to block for Snowman as they ran 400 cases of Coors from Texas to Georgia. They had to make the Southern Classic or else they'd never get their eighty thou from Big Enos: Keep your foot hard on the pedal, son, never mind them brakes
Let it all hang out cause we've got a run to make
The boys are thirsty in Atlanta, and there's beer in Texarkana
We'll bring it back no matter what it takes My situation is nearly the same as the Bandit's, with some instructive differences. Instead of ducking and dodging Buford T. Justice and picking up runaway brides on the roadside, I sit in an office, generally either writing or editing, sometimes meeting to talk about writing or editing. In any given day, there are many things to do, but the size of those things is subjective. They have no set physical dimensions and consequently few set chronological dimensions. At my discretion, within reason, the time spent on those things can contract and so, in a sense, the time-container can be felt to have expanded. This was not dreamt of in the Bandit's philosophy. Yesterday I was talking to a friend of mine and...well, that should tell you something about how busy I was. I was pressed for time. I was strapped. I was running in circles. Still, I had time for her in the sense that I had the desire to talk to her, and consequently the will to contract the tasks at hand. You can always count on my making time for friends, because friends are what make time count. I think that was stitched on a sampler I saw once. (One of the other ones was "Peace in your heart can be seen on your face and in your soul." I never quite got that.) As coincidence would have it, the conversation we had was about how another friend of hers is always too busy to talk. The two women have been friends for years. Their friendship with one another predates my friendship with either. Despite that, whenever the first friend calls the second friend during the day, the second friend says that she is too busy, and rushes the first friend off the phone. The first friend has complained bitterly to me about the state of affairs. "How can she be too busy? That's crap." As I have said, to disagree would smack of hypocrisy. The other day, when she called, her purpose was twofold: to reiterate her central complaint about the second friend and then to dispense an epiphany. I think it was a fresh one and that she dialed me as it was crowning. "I don't think it's that she's too busy at all," she said. "If she's really as busy as she says, she would just let the phone go through to voice mail." "Good point," I said. "I think she's trying to put me in my place." "How so?" "Well, we have a different relationship socially. Whenever we're at a bar, she monopolizes the conversation. She tells me about her bad boyfriends, about how this one was mean and that one drank too much and the other one kept meaning not to drink so much." "Monopolize, you say?" I said. "Absolutely. One hundred percent. No, more. One thousand percent. It's not fair. I mean sometimes I have a bad day, like today. My boss is opening a second store and she's been in a terrible mood and she almost took my head off when I asked her where the deodorizer for the bathroom is. I'd like to be able to talk about that. But when this friend and I go out, it's all about her. I like hearing about it, but sometimes I look at my watch and I see that she has chewed up two hours. I don't know where the time goes, and I don't mean that like someone in love." "Have you said anything to her?" "Of course not. What could I say? It would hurt her feelings, and she's my friend. So why doesn't she feel the same way?" I started to answer, but then I remembered the terms. She went on. "You know, the reason I feel so bad about it is that once I had a boyfriend who was exactly the same as her." This, delivered like an epiphany, was not one. It had been rehearsed. In fact, I had heard it before. "He was my first serious boyfriend when I came to New York. He was a lawyer in a big firm and I was just getting started in the office of an art supply store. There were no cell phones then, or far fewer, but I had a phone at my desk, and lots of downtime. I used to call him during the day. He rarely answered, and when he did, he was like a different person. It was like someone was pointing a gun at his head on his end of the phone. It made me feel smaller than a flea, like a worthless little speck. But did I break up with him?" It was my line. "Not soon enough." "You said it," she said. "Not soon enough." Our conversation went on from there into other topics: her brother's nagging cough, the strange appeal of commercial wallpaper, a book she read, another she meant to read. My phone keeps track of the length of the call, and this one was more than fifteen minutes. I won't say how much more. Eventually she said she had to go. Someone was standing near her desk and she needed to look busy. I put on my headphones and forgot all about the phone. I had editing to do. While I worked, I listened to music: it's like being busy in two different ways at once, and since I was listening to music about being busy, it was like being busy in three different ways. I went through Elvis Costello's "Busy Bodies," which is, predictably, about a different kind of getting busy, and the Lyres' "Busy Body," which I think is also about sex, or possibly about rock-and-roll. For more than a little while, I stuck close to the Beach Boys' "Busy Doin' Nothin'," which is a little Brian Wilson vignette about the way that the daily grind can interfere with important things, like communication with friends. I will quote a large swath of it, because that's quicker than picking out a few resonant lines: I get a lot of thoughts in the morning
I write 'em all down
If it wasn't for that
I'd forget 'em in a while
And lately I've been thinking 'bout a good friend
I'd like to see more of, yeah yeah yeah
I think I'll make a call
I wrote a number down
But I lost it
So I searched through my pocket book
I couldn't find it
So I sat and concentrated on the number
And slowly it came to me
So I dialed it
And I let it ring a few times
There was no answer
So I let it ring a little more
Still no answer
So I hung up the telephone
Got some paper and sharpened up a pencil
And wrote a letter to my friend There is a desperate Zen flavor to this, as there is to many Beach Boys songs of the period, but there's also practical advice. Don't spend all your time on the phone. If you don't get an answer right away, write a letter. I called my friend to tell her, but she didn't answer. I called back a few minutes later: still nothing. Once, a few months ago, after weeks of her calling me all the time to tell me about her troubles, she dropped off the map. I experienced an even mix of relief and lack. But this was just a phone that wasn't being answered. I returned to the headphones, and soon enough came across Louis Armstrong's "Too Busy," from 1928, which is a fairly straightforward tale of busted love, distinct only as a result of the spirited and altogether strange lead vocal by Lillie Delk Christian. (Armstrong shows up scatting at the end.) The lyrics are short and sharp, like a pocketknife, and they are occupied (maybe even preoccupied) with what happens when one person can't find time for another person. When you're blown off, what's the blowback? Again, to save time (I could explain the reasons but that would defeat the purpose--you can find them up above, by the Beach Boys' song), I'll quote generously: Why do you keep avoiding me
I confess it's annoying me
Honestly it's so aggravating Play that twice, the way Christian moves from the rhyming verse of the first two lines to the almost witheringly conversational "Honestly, it's so aggravating." Play it three times, in fact, then move on. Won't you tell me just what to do
When I ask for a kiss or two
You say no not now dear
Somehow dear
You're always too busy for my loving
Too busy for my petting
That is all that I've been getting from you
What's more and I'm not lying
I noticed you've been trying
Hard to shake me
And it's making me blue
I can't understand your actions
But I'll get my satisfaction
Don't you worry just you wait and see dear
Wait til you want me honey
Then it won't be so funny
When I say that I'm too busy for you The Armstrong was the flip side to the Beach Boys, not literally--though that would have made a great split single--but temperamentally. Should you let the day run its course and value precious time when you find it, or should you feel acutely the sting of other people's alleged unavailability, sharpen your resentment to a point, and then plunge it into their hearts? I see that my friend has called a few times. I should call her back and see where she falls on the question, but it'll have to wait until later. I tell you, I've got enough to do. Labels: ben, country, jazz
posted by Ben
LINK |
Friday, January 02, 2009
STRANGER IN MY OWN HOME TOWN
Elvis Presley
From Elvis In Memphis
BMG : 1969
[Buy It]
GOIN' BACK HOME
John Fogerty
Eye of the Zombie
Warner Bros. : 1986
[Buy It]
One of the things about this time of year is that it involves lots of time in houses. For me, this year, that meant lots of time spent in one house, as a long-term guest, for a period that spanned from just before Christmas to just before New Year's. I was there long enough to bring about a slight shift. One of the last days, I was out driving with my kids and my older son got tired. "I want to go home," he said. There was a moment of uncertainty. "Home home or home here?" I said. It was a question that meant nothing because it meant too many things.
The house where I was staying was my wife's parents' house. It is in suburban Miami. It is the house where she grew up, and I'm sure she has a different relationship to it than I do. Whenever we visit, she takes a walk through the place to see what's changed since the last time, how it is growing incrementally more distant from her. We stay in the room that was her room when she was a child, and while I'm told that it looks nothing like it used to, the resemblance is strong enough to trigger a cascade of memories. My seven-year-old son likes to hear about how the house used to look, and once or twice he asked my wife what would happen if he walked into the bedroom and saw the ten-year-old version of her there. She had no good answer. These Twilight Zone-style displacements are reliably exciting for seven-year-old boys, but somewhat less so for the adults who have to accept the fact that they are impossible.
The house where my wife grew up is a few miles from the house where I grew up. More than once during my time in Miami, I drove by my old house and parked on the street so I could look at it. Once, I had my kids in the car, and I pointed at the window that used to be my bedroom. The plants just outside the window are different. There aren't asparagus ferns that lizards can run across. The shutters are different so I'm sure the lighting inside is different, not to mention the furniture, the wallpaper, the smell. The people who own it now have a boat in the driveway, which we never did. It's hard to look at it and think it's the same place. I drove home and my younger son, who is four, leapt out of the car excitedly and went to tell my wife that he had seen my house. I didn't punish him for the lie. Later, I asked my wife whether she thought it was stranger to drive by your old house and be put off by a new paint job or to sleep in your old house surrounded by deceptive familiarity. "This bed squeaks," she said, either answering or avoiding.
The house where I grew up is near the houses of lots of other people who grew up with me. I think that's what "where" means. One day, I was going out bike-riding, and I thought I'd probably be going by the childhood house of a friend, so I wrote her to mention it. She said that as far as she knew, the house had been totally renovated, but had since been redone a second time into something that more closely resembled her childhood home. She told me a story about a fire that had once broken out in the yard of the house next door. I started to tell her about the things I was thinking about the insides and outsides of houses, but then I stopped. I was on vacation. She was, too. Why bother her with lots of theories? Instead, I took a picture of her house. It was a picture of the outside of her house but I am sure that for her it is a picture of the inside, too. One person's photograph is another person's X-ray.
The house where my friend grew up is near another house, entirely nondescript, where I once found myself, a few years ago, paying a visit to a friend of a friend who had moved to Miami. While I was in the house, I needed to use the bathroom, and while I was in the bathroom, it suddenly occurred to me that it was the same house where I had spent a few summer afternoons more than a decade before, during college, with a girl from high school. A strange-shaped window in the bathroom tipped me off. I had run into the girl at a movie theatre. We had gone on a date, just one, at a restaurant where the waiter was unfathomably incompetent, and then we had returned to her house and taken up a series of compromising positions on the couch. (I had wanted to go to the bedroom--the couch was the compromise.) Eventually she relented and we went to the bed, where there was a poster of Iggy Pop. "This is a fun house," I had said, as a joke, and she had laughed and buried her face deeper into the side of my neck. In the house years later, I dared to open the door to that bedroom and look inside. It was an office now, with a big wooden desk and a computer and no poster. This past week, I didn't go by that house. Why bother? Houses are hosts rendered unrecognizable by parasites, and that's no fun to hang around.
If I hadn't been on vacation, I am sure that I would have been able to put together a trenchant examination of location and memory as articulated through songs about domestic spaces. In songs, home is a highly elastic term that stretches from the spiritual end of the spectrum (Blind Willie Davis's "I Believe I'll Go Back Home") to the carnal (Alex Chilton's "Take Me Home and Make Me Like It"). Home is proof of presence except when it's a felt absence--sometimes it's where you are, and sometimes it's where you aren't. Figuring all the psychological, metaphorical, and erotic complexities is like counting the rooms in an infinite house. But in Miami, I couldn't even get started. I felt out of place, not to mention out of songs: I was having trouble with my iPod and had to use my wife's, which had almost no music on it. It didn't have Joe Hicks' "Goin' Home" or the 13th Floor Elevators "Slip Inside This House" or Lefty Frizzell's "I Was Coming Home to You" or Grin's "Hi Hello Home" or X's "In This House That I Call Home" or Sarah Vaughn's "Baby, Won't You Please Come Home" or the Shangri-Las' "I Can Never Go Home Anymore" or, most damningly, Sam Cooke's "Bring It On Home To Me." It didn't have them, and so I didn't have them. They were at home without me, and so I wasn't at home without them.
As a result, I didn't write the piece I should have written and I didn't even think about it in any productive, anchored manner. I just rode up and down the streets of suburban Miami, listening to the few songs about home I had managed to locate on my wife's iPod--one was a Elvis Presley soul shouter about home towns rather than homes, the other a beautifully evocative and evasive John Fogerty instrumental about returning home rather than being unable to return home--and looking at the houses of people I no longer knew. Then I flew back to New York alone; my family was following a few days later. I got back to my house late at night and tried to come in like a stranger, but the week or so that had passed hadn't introduced enough unfamiliarity. I sat on the couch, trying to remember what about the place I had remembered when I had sat there before, trying to anticipate what I would remember later. One of the things about this time of year is that it involves lots of houses in time.Labels: ben, elvis
posted by Ben
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Thursday, December 11, 2008
COME FLY WITH MEFrank Sinatra Come Fly With MeCapitol : 1958 [Buy It]IT'S NICE TO GO TRAV'LINGFrank Sinatra Come Fly With MeCapitol : 1958 [Buy It]It's about to be vacation time. People will be flying everywhere, filing onto buses, packing up their cars. They'll be here and then they'll be gone. Poof. This time of year always fills me with some trepidation. Along with the nice parts - I get to spend time with my family, get out of the city for warmer weather, relax, recharge - there are bad parts. Friends go off to other places, and though I like to hear about their experiences, I also don't like to hear about them. This displeasure spreads out in both directions. Frequently the stories will be boring: "I went to see my parents in Florida, and mostly we just hung out and read and watched movies." In those cases I listen patiently and silently wonder how the human mouth manages to ignore the human mind's awareness of other people's boredom. But when the stories aren't boring, it's just as frustrating. Once long ago, I had a friend. I was a little interested in her, but I decided to leave things as they were, mostly to avoid the possibility of rejection. One winter she visited her father in Paris. He was there working on a book about jazz. While she was there, she had a whirlwind romance with one of the older musicians who was featured in the book. He was sixty, I think. She was twenty. I was twenty, too, which suddenly seemed like nothing. She said she didn't want to tell me the best part, which was that the sex was so transporting that it straightened out her hair, and that just made the whole thing worse. The word "embouchure" was mentioned, sadistically. That winter I went to see my parents in Florida, and mostly we just hung out and read and watched movies. No one worked on improving his embouchure, if you know what I mean. This time of year I always fill up my iPod. It used to be harder. I had to pick a bunch of CDs (or, before that, cassettes) and load them into a bag or backpack along with a Discman (or, before that, a Walkman). In those low-tech days, there was one album I always took with me on winter vacation: Frank Sinatra's "Come Fly With Me," from 1958. December 12 is Sinatra's birthday, so in a way, this is the third in a trilogy of birthday posts: Jimi Hendrix the week before last, Little Richard last week. In another way, though, it's a reminder to myself to load "Come Fly With Me" onto my iPod. "Come Fly With Me" was conceived as a concept album about travel, and it occupies a privileged position toward the end of Sinatra's incredible run of late fifties albums: after "In the Wee Small Hours" and "Songs for Swingin' Lovers" but before "Sings for Only the Lonely" and "No One Cares." Every time I hear the record, I experience a mixture of pleasure and surprise. The pleasure comes from the quality of the vocals and the arrangements, and there's even a little extra kick as a result of its kitsch value. The surprise comes from someplace deeper. Each time I listen to any of those vintage Sinatra records, I'm reminded, all at once, just how strong the American songbook was. It's easy to get in a rock-and-roll mindset. I do it all the time. And when my mind is set that way, the giants and slightly smaller giants are Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Richard Thompson, Leonard Cohen, Randy Newman, Van Morrison. You know. If you make a lateral move into soul, the pantheon changes: Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, and many others. If you combine the rock and the soul and add in hip-hop, you'll have enough music to satisfy you for the rest of your life. Graham Parker. Led Zeppelin. Beck. Erykah Badu. Public Enemy. Otis Redding. Jay-Z. Joni Mitchell. Marshall Crenshaw. Creedence Clearwater Revival. Betty Davis. White Denim. The Who. Lykke Li. Sly Stone. Eminem. Cheap Trick. Pavement. Lorraine Ellison. Swamp Dogg. Slick Rick. Julian Cope. You know. You could spend the rest of your life listening to the finest works of the finest artists and never run out of material. Styx! Or else you could travel. Travel back, I mean, but along an alternate route. Rock and roll, extended backwards through time, leads into R&B or country and then blues more easily than it leads into pre-rock popular song. Rock fans often find their way to Blind Willie McTell or Robert Johnson or Hank Williams, but they rarely find their way to Al Bowlly. The reasons are simple and also complicated: they're musically founded, racially shaded, and formally defensible. There's no question that "Subterranean Homesick Blues" has more in common with Chuck Berry than it does with Doris Day. Rock (and country and the blues before it) traffic in (or appear to traffic in) self-expression, like poetry. When George Jones enters the studio or takes the stage, he's carrying his guitar in his hand and his songs in his head. Popular singing, the kind that was practiced by hundreds of vocalists and perfected by Sinatra and a few others, has a more impersonal dimension. Take "In the Wee Small Hours," from 1955, one of the most despairing and melancholy song-cycles Sinatra ever recorded. Sinatra didn't write a word. Bob Hilliard did, and Yip Harburg, and Eddie DeLange. Sinatra also didn't write a note: Richard Rodgers, Kay Swift, Duke Ellington, etc. So whatever the emotional and lyrical content of the songs--and the content is tremendous--it appears, at least to modern ears, more constructed. When Emily Dickinson wrote "After great pain, a formal feeling comes," she wasn't talking about "In the Wee Small Hours," but she manages to capture the mix of experience, distance, and aesthetic conversion: "Remembered, if outlived, / As Freezing persons, Recollect the snow." If "In the Wee Small Hours" is entirely yin, "Come Fly With Me" is mostly yang. The title song was written at Sinatra's request by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy van Heusen. Cahn handled the lyrics, and they waste no time in establishing travel as a romantic and hedonistic activity: Come fly with me, let's fly let's fly away
If you can use some exotic booze
There's a bar in far Bombay
Come fly with me, we'll fly, we'll fly away
Come fly with me, let's float down to Peru
In llama land there's a one man band
And he'll toot his flute for you
Come fly with me, we'll float down in the blue And while the song benefits immensely from Sinatra's performance and Billy May's arrangement, not to mention the playing of dozens of musicians whose identities are mysteries to me, much of what's appealing about it is there already, in the melody and especially in the lyrics. Alcohol, escape, even a phallic flute, all within the span of two verses. Sign me up! I'd like to say that "Come Fly With Me" cures my ambivalence about travel, but the fact is that it articulates it. While the title song is responsible for getting the album airborne, the whole thing operates at cruising altitude. It has lovely and strange landscape paintings like "Moonlight In Vermont," charming and intricately rhymed come-ons like "Let's Get Away From It All," and moody and romantic postcards like "London At Night." Johnny Mercer, who didn't write anything for this album but was responsible for a number of Sinatra's hits, both early ("That Old Black Magic") and late ("Summer Wind"), had a famous quote in which he derided a popular West End musical: "I could eat alphabet soup and shit better lyrics," he said. As this album proves, he wasn't the only one. There's even a contribution from Rudyard Kipling. "On the Road to Mandalay" uses text from of Kipling's famous 1892 poem "Mandalay." But not enough to satisfy the Kipling family, apparently: when Sinatra released the album, the estate objected to the way the poem was truncated, and the song was left off of some British-empire pressings. I could say more about Frank Sinatra. I could talk about how every time I listen to "Come Fly With Me" I can't find even a trace of the thuggish Sinatra who started to settle into the public consciousness after the Rat Pack convened in Vegas. I could talk about "The Night We Called It A Day," from the "Where Are You?" album a few years later, and how happy its sadness makes me. I could talk about the creepy clown cover art for "Sings for Only the Lonely." I won't. I have to go pack, and while I'm packing, I have to foresuffer the upcoming vacation and re-suffer past vacations. I have long since lost track of the young woman who slept with the old jazz musician in Paris, but maybe he is on one of these song. Is that his embouchure I hear in "Brazil"? "Come Fly With Me" ends with "It's Nice to Go Trav'ling," which used to underwhelm me, placed as it is at the end of an exhaustingly rewarding album. But now that I've been in New York for fifteen years, the song seems like what it is, a soft landing and a homecoming. It's also a Cahn/Van Heusen collaboration, and the lyrics manage to be witty and sentimental at the same time, which is no easy task: It's very nice to go trav'ling
To Paris, London, and Rome
It's oh so nice to go trav'ling
But it's so much nicer, yes it's so much nicer, to come home
It's very nice to just wander
The camel route to Iraq
It's oh so nice to just wander
But it's so much nicer, yes it's oh so nice, to wander back
The mam'selles and frauleins, and the senoritas are sweet
But they can't compete 'cause they just don't have
What the models have, on Madison Ave.
It's very nice to be footloose
With just a toothbrush and comb
It's oh so nice to be footloose
But your heart starts singin' when your homeward wingin' across the foam Time to pack. Time to load the album. Happy Birthday, Mr. Sinatra. Labels: ben, sinatra
posted by Ben
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Thursday, December 04, 2008
KEEP A KNOCKIN'Little Richard 1957 Available on : The Specialty SessionsSpecialty : 1990 [Buy It]IF YOU PICK HER TOO HARD (SHE COMES OUT OF TUNE)Little Richard 1972 Available on : King of Rock and Roll: The Complete Reprise SessionsRhino Handmade : 2005 [Buy It]SLIPPIN' AND SLIDIN' (TAKE 2)Little Richard 1956 Available on : The Specialty SessionsSpecialty : 1990 [Buy It]LUCILLE (FALSE START)Little Richard 1957 Available on : The Specialty SessionsSpecialty : 1990 [Buy It]OOH! MY SOUL (TAKE 9)Little Richard 1958 Available on : The Specialty SessionsSpecialty : 1990 [Buy It]RIP IT UP (TAKE 14)Little Richard 1956 Available on : The Specialty SessionsSpecialty : 1990 [Buy It]FREEDOM BLUESLittle Richard 1970 Available on : King of Rock and Roll: The Complete Reprise SessionsRhino Handmade : 2005 [Buy It]DIRECTLY FROM MY HEARTLittle Richard 1956 Available on : The Specialty SessionsSpecialty : 1990 [Buy It]Little Richard turns seventy-six tomorrow. Most of what needs to be said about him has been said, some of it here, on this site, by me. Last September, on my birthday, I wrote about the epochal fifties hit "Keep A Knockin'." I will now idiotically quote myself at length: "Keep A Knockin'" wasn't original, of course. It was an old Louis Jordan number from 1939 that goes back even further, to Lil Johnson's "Keep On Knocking" in the early thirties. At that time, the (double) meaning was clear: it's a woman singing and a man knocking, and what he's knocking on is her front door (you know--the kind of door you can slide a key into and out of until that key ejaculates), and she's not letting him in no matter how much he knocks, so he might as well not even bother. When the gender switches, and it's a man singing, the knocking is a little stranger. Is it a woman knocking? How persistent is she? And why does the man have to bar the door, anyway? And when the gender switches again, and it's Little Richard singing, the strangeness turns into something tremendous--something threatening and seductive and terrified and terrifying, all at the same time. The same theme recurs in other Little Richard songs, like "Heeby-Jeebies" from the previous year, where he says, somewhat sadistically, that he's going to "ring your door til I break your bell." These songs rarely raise the issue of Little Richard's sexual orientation, even obliquely, but they frequently raise the issue of his sexual aggressiveness. If Louis Jordan swings, Little Richard swings a hammer. About a month later, I posted "If You Pick Her Too Hard (She Comes Out of Tune)," a bit of country soul from a shelved early seventies record on Reprise. Richard's Reprise period yielded four records: The King of Rock and Roll (1970), Second Coming (1971), The Rill Thing (1972), and Southern Child. They were roots records, reaching back into country and jazz as well as taking a stab at the rock-and-roll of the time. The vocals weren't as volcanic as the Specialty sides, but they were more than just respectable, and the songwriting was sometimes fascinatingly personal.
Respectable and fascinating sold poorly. Sales were so sluggish that the fourth album of the series, Southern Child, wasn't even released at the time, and only saw the light of day thanks to bootleggers and, eventually, a Rhino anthology of the Reprise years. Southern Child is of a piece with the others, with some key differences: more original songs, subtler vocals, and a more mellow feel. It also contains Little Richard's mid-career masterpiece, a country-folk composition called "If You Pick Her Too Hard (She Comes Out of Tune)." The song has many assets (arresting title, peaceful acoustic guitars, unorthodox structure) but its real strength is in its wordless opening, which consists of some two dozen sweet exhales and then a rousing cry that communicates some kind (and maybe all kinds) of freedom:Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Whoa whoa whoa yeah yeah yeah Those are just two of the songs. I wish I could post all of them. There's the second take of "Slippin' and Slidin'," which has a fairly mannered performance, and the significantly accelerated master take. There's the brilliant false start of "Lucille." There's the ninth take of "Ooh! My Soul," when he is asked by Art Rupe if he wants to rest. He doesn't need to. At the end he asks to move on to another piece. "We've got to leave here in about five minutes," Rupe says. "We'd never get it done in time." Ye of little faith. There's the fourteenth take of "Rip It Up." Fourteenth! Beyond the songs, and within them, there is the man. He appeared onstage at the Grammys last year with Jerry Lee Lewis and John Fogerty, looking frail but sounding fine. He's been in league with Geico. All of this has turned him into something cuddly and accessible, something beloved, which he deserves. But what about that earlier incarnation that you wanted to love but couldn't get near without burning up entirely? Eddie Murphy has a routine in which he talks about being asked by Little Richard himself to star in a official biopic based on Richard's memoir. Eddie asked for the book. Richard sent it. Eddie dove in. Everything was going well until he ran into this sentence: "In 1950 I sucked my first dick." The crowd laughs, but the tone isn't malicious, and certainly not to the degree of...well, almost every other Eddie Murphy routine about gay men. In the bit, Eddie calls Little Richard back and they have a conversation about honest self-presentation, and how Richard's irrepressible gayness is part of the package, and how Eddie feels wrong for it. He's trying to say that he's too manly to play gay, but he comes off as sounding inadequate. "You can't even put me on the piano and then cut to my face and then bring in a stunt ass." The punch line comes when Little Richard says, "Well, never mind. I'll get Prince to do it." But what's vivid about the man and the music has already taken hold, even in the bit. And Eddie Murphy's right, you know. You can't bring in a stunt ass. Though it was easy to see Little Richard as a cartoon--easy because he helped--there was always more to the man, always surprises and hidden shadings. "Freedom Blues," from the seventies country period, is a civil-rights minded piece that opens with an incredible bit of vocalizing. When he was little, his siblings called him War Hawk because of how he shouted; in every recording session, he seems to be going to war with (and for) his songs. When my son was little, I taught him to say this sentence, which he did: "Little Richard is a big deal." For reasons I may never fully understand, Little Richard means more to me than nearly every other rock singer. The fact that he's the best doesn't hurt. Every time I think that connection may be ebbing, I put on "Poor Boy Paul" or "I'm A Lonely Guy" and hear it all come through again. So, for voice and ass both, for body and soul and then some more soul, for slippin' and slidin' and knockin' and rippin', I'd like to wish Little Richard a happy birthday. Directly from my heart to him. Labels: ben, rock and roll
posted by Ben
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Wednesday, November 26, 2008
MANIC DEPRESSION (instrumental)
Jimi Hendrix
1967
Unreleased
SPANISH CASTLE MAGIC (instrumental)
Jimi Hendrix
1967
Unreleased
CAT TALKIN' TO ME (instrumental)
Jimi Hendrix
1968
Unreleased
ELECTRIC LADYLAND (instrumental)
Jimi Hendrix
1968
Unreleased
51st ANNIVERSARY (alternate)
Jimi Hendrix
1967
Unreleased
When Mitch Mitchell died earlier this month I spent a few days listening to his music as tribute--and by his music, of course, I mean Jimi Hendrix's music. Mitchell was on the drums for much of Hendrix's career; his jazz leanings were a major influence on the Jimi Hendrix Experience's sound and direction; after Hendrix's death, he helped oversee "Rainbow Bridge" and "The Cry of Love." Hendrix was never one of my favorite artists. I didn't have the problems with him that I had with, say, the Doors or Cream or Bruce Springsteen, and I willingly gave him a place in the pantheon, but off to the side. He wasn't John Fogerty. He wasn't Neil Young. He wasn't Smokey Robinson or Aretha Franklin or the Kinks or the Rolling Stones or even Curtis Mayfield. I guess you could make the case that what I wanted was songs, and then I could make the case that it's because songs teach things, and then you could make the case that all music teaches but that I have a hard time listening to anything but songs. We would go back and forth but I wouldn't waver on Hendrix. His lyrics weren't obtrusive, but most weren't revelatory either, and after a little while, his vocals started to trip me up: I had read in a thousand different places that Hendrix never liked his own voice, and I wanted to disagree, but I couldn't. I never exactly set Hendrix aside--there's always a reason to fire up "Dolly Dagger"--but I never drew him close, either.
Somewhere along the way, for reasons that are obscure if not exactly mysterious, I acquired a bunch of discs stuffed with Hendrix outtakes, rarities, and demos, a good number of which were instrumentals. During this most recent stretch, after Mitch Mitchell's death, I started listening to those instrumentals more avidly, because that somehow seemed fairer to Mitchell. By a happy coincidence, they reminded me of my favorite thing about Hendrix, which were the way he took basic R&B compositions and sent them into the deepest reaches of space. R&B is structurally rigid. There are beams and there are spaces between those beams. Hendrix filled those spaces with the most unimaginable things. He also wrote beautiful ballads and meandering lyrical open-ended jams, but you can only be in a angel or a merman mood so often. The R&B compositions, on the other hand, were like doors, sturdy and square, but Hendrix--with the help of Noel Redding and especially Mitchell--was a visionary when it came to decorating the spandrels over them. At some level, he was all about space, because space is what gives you the possibility of shape and the possibility of color. Listening to Hendrix without the words is like looking at a beautiful girl without talking to her. Here, by beautiful, I mean not necessarily possessed of full lips or deep cleavage or legs that look good in boots. I mean a girl with a face that has many things playing across it at once. That's a face you want to look into for as long as you're permitted, which is why I put the instrumental version of "Spanish Castle Magic" on repeat past the point where I forgot the words, to a point where I was never sure I knew them. "Cat Talkin' To Me" was played live in the spring of 1967 with Mitch Mitchell singing; this is a studio instrumental from the following year. And "Electric Ladyland," which doesn't appear released on the album of the same name, has eventual California Raisin vocalist Buddy Miles on drums instead of Mitchell; forty years later, it still sounds like the future.
Mitch Mitchell died in a hotel room less than a month ago. Jimi Hendrix died in a hotel room more than thirty-eight years ago. Today, November 27, Hendrix would have been sixty-six. Happy Birthday. Make a wish. May you have all the happiness etc. Had he lived, he would have been...well, there's no way to know what he would have been: whether he would have arrived at the rubedo where Freddie King and Bob Dylan melted into Sun Ra or whether he'd be an oldies act appearing alongside Eric Clapton in Prince's Trust shows or whether drugs and sex and ego would have scaled him until he was smooth. It's exciting to think that he would have continued to evolve at the same rate, but impossible to imagine. Hendrix may have been all about space, but he was also all about time, about always wanting (or needing) more of it to get his business done: "If I Don't Live Today," "Wait Until Tomorrow." "Burning of the Midnight Lamp." Revisionists, who are faced the wrong way, like to think that he precognized his early end. Of all the songs about time and its passage, "51st Anniversary" isn't the best-known -- a version was released, as the British B-Side for "Are You Experienced?"--but it's apropos:Fifty years they've been married
And they can't wait for their fifty first to roll around
Thirty years they've been married
And now they're old and happy and they settle down
Settle down, yeah!
Twenty years they've been married
And they did everything that could be done
You know they had their fun
And then you come along and talk about
So you say you wanna be married
I'm gonna change your mind
Oh got to change
That was the good side baby
Here comes the bad side It's a lovely, compact, earthy, bluesy case for youth's need for time both to speed by and to stop in its tracks, and for age's need to hold onto that aspect of youth: "Settle down, yeah!" But Hendrix isn't done. He has all the time in the world to prove to his girlfriend that she should seize the day, and he doesn't let up:So now you're seventeen
Running around hanging out and havin' your fun
Life for you has just begun, baby
And then you come saying
So you, you say you wanna be married
Oh baby trying to put me on a chain
You sure got a lot of nerve
Ain't that some shame
You must be losing your weak little mind
I ain't ready yet, baby, I ain't ready
I'm gonna change your mind
Oooh look out baby
I ain't ready
I ain't ready
I ain't ready
Let me live
Let me live
Let me live a little longer A reasonable request unreasonably granted.Labels: ben, rock
posted by Ben
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Thursday, November 20, 2008
I AM THE UPSETTERLee Scratch Perry 1968 Available on : I Am the UpsetterSanctuary : 2005 [Buy It]GOOD ADVICESR.E.M. Life's Rich PageantCapitol : 1985 [Buy It]ORIGINAL MIXED-UP KIDMott The Hoople WildlifeIsland : 1971 [Buy It]WHAT WAS I THINKIN' IN MY HEAD?Sly & The Family Stone Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back Epic: 1976 [Buy It]The other day I said something to upset a friend of mine. She called to ask my advice on something and I gave it. It wasn't even advice so much as a suggestion about the way a major decision should be examimed. But when I made this suggestion, she answered with a kind of silence whose depth made me nervous and whose duration made me more so. Part of me thought that I was just helping another human being work through an issue. But part of me also thought that it was condescending to believe that I was helping another human being work through an issue. Who asked me? Except that she did. And yet another part of me knew that along with the desire to give sound counsel, there was a little bit of personal investment in my answer, because I felt that the situation we were discussing might, in theory, work to my disadvantage if it unfolded in a certain way. This is all too vague. Here are some untrue specifics: My friend, who is a talented engineer, is thinking of taking a job in Ohio with a company that manufactures several electronic devices used in household chores and also by the defense industry. It's a major decision, not like selecting a shampoo or choosing between red and green apples. I am not sure that I want my friend to move to Ohio, because then she wouldn't live here anymore. A few years ago, one of my wife's closest friends moved away, to somewhere even further than Ohio, and my wife told me that she had a last-minute desire to stop her friend from going. But what I said then I'll say again now: one person is not the C.E.O. of another person's business. If my friend wants to go to Ohio, she should go to Ohio. Plus, there aren't so many good jobs, especially in this poor economy, and she has been offered a position. "Do you think I should give it a chance?" she said. What could I say to this? Nothing, certainly. I could have said nothing. But I was asked, and so I answered. I made a suggestion that I thought would help her think about it more clearly. I wasn't negative, I don't think, but I wasn't completely positive either, in part because I have heard certain things about this company that give me pause. For example, there is a rumor that this company manufactures some kind of paralyzing sky ray that can, if turned up to the highest level, fry out the brains of innocent civilians. I am not sure this rumor is true. There was an item about it a few years ago in the Intelligencer column of Weapons and Concepts magazine, and you know how they are. It's very possible that the reporter was walking around the office and saw a futuristic desk lamp and let his imagination run wild. But I read the article, and for a minute, at least, it filled me with dread, and that dread resurfaced slightly when my friend asked about Ohio. I went silent as a result, and then I worried that my dreadful silence would be misinterpreted. What if she took my silence as disapproval, or tacit endorsement? I wanted to be clear. I thought that it was fine for her if it was fine for her, and I said so. This sentence sounded idiotic coming out of my mouth. I rushed out several others to cover for it. After I spoke, she was quiet, and it was clear she was upset, though not at all clear whether she was upset at me or at the very real issues involved in the prospect of a new city, a new job, an employer who could one day possibly maybe unleash a death ray upon humanity. We hung up. I was upset, too, mainly because I wasn't sure if I had exercised my right to give advice or violated my friend's right to talk through an issue without receiving advice. R.E.M. addressed this issue, on Fables of the Reconstruction, in "Good Advices," which has an early Michael Stipe lyric and is consequently mysterious: When you greet a stranger look at his shoes
Keep your money in your shoes, put your trouble behind
When you greet a stranger look at her hands
Keep your money in your hands, put your travel behind
Who are you going to call for, what do you have to say
Keep your hat on your head
Home is a long way away
At the end of the day, I'll forget your name
I'd like it here if I could leave and see you from a long way away The song is full of advice but fully aware that advice can devolve quickly into cliche or paradox, not to mention that much of the urgency of the situation in question will, with time, vanish completely. And the plural of the title suggests an even larger problem. What does it mean if there are advices rather than advice? Does it mean that not-Ohio is as valid a choice as Ohio? "It's fine for you if it's fine for you," I had said. But what if the person receiving the advice, the person for whom the advice is intended, has no idea whether she'd prefer Ohio or not-Ohio? What if that's why she asked in the first place? Mott the Hoople has already handled this problem, in "Original Mixed-Up Kid," but handling the problem isn't the same as locating a solution: And he can't make up his mind where he wants to go
Ain't there a heaven ain't there a hell well he just don't know
For in a crowded street he can see the sleet
When the other men just see the snow "It's fine for you if it's fine for you," I had said, and thought I was being helpful. Many of the things I say that I think are helpful have their roots in Sly Stone songs. As it turned out, this one did, too. To say that "What Was I Thinkin' In My Head?" is an odd song is an understatement. It has none of the mind-bending funk, sophistication, or darkness of There's a Riot Goin' On and Fresh. Instead, there's a childish melody, a harsh robotic vocal, and a lyric about a character who is behaving badly because he or she isn't intimately connected to his or her decisions. I wish I could make it less abstract than that: Thought about it, talked it over
Mentioned it to a very close friend
Played the dozens with a cousin
That's not the way to treat your kin
Making waste by making haste
So many things were on your mind
Overdoing your pursuing
Not taking advantage of all your time The chorus that follows this first verse, "What were you thinkin' in your head?" is unproblematic, I think. It's one person questioning another person, or giving advice, or at the very least making a suggestion about the way that a decision should be examined. The second verse extends the theme: Called a brother something other
Than you should have if you had thought
You were only with the lonely
That's not the way that you were taught
Knew it all and you felt tall
Now you realize your own size
'Cause in this world boy and girl
Never a chance to join the wise But then, after this verse, the chorus surfaces again, this time with a new subject. Now it's "What was I thinkin' in my head?" and this is mind-bending in a completely different way. It's a question that is both so self-absorbed that it nearly disappears from the world at large and so universal that it is vital for everyone. This is what I was asking my friend to ask herself, I think, when I said that Ohio worked for her if it worked for her. I didn't even need to hear the answer; I just needed to know that there was an answer. Then we could have gone on talking in New York, or she could have packed up and gone to Ohio. In time, I would have set aside my concern about the death ray, which was probably trumped up anyway. Labels: ben, funk, reggae, rock
posted by Ben
LINK |
Thursday, November 13, 2008
VOICES
Cheap Trick
Dream Police
Epic : 1979
[Buy It]
YOUR SWEET VOICE
Matthew Sweet
Girlfriend
Volcano : 1991
[Buy It]
I HEARD THE VOICE OF A PORKCHOP
Jim Jackson
1928
Available on: Good For What Ails You: Music of the Medicine Shows, 1926-1937
Old Hat : 2005
[Buy It]
Recently I've been doing interviews for my new book, which is a collection of short stories about letter-writing and correspondence, and the way that the recent and advancing technologies are harming, which is not to say destroying, the intimacy that comes from that kind of communication. That's the party line I've been spouting, and I believe it, largely. The interviews have themselves become players in the case I'm building against technology: some of them have been conducted on email, which is at least a little bit ironic. Others have been on the telephone, which is at most a little bit ironic.
The phone interviews have been conversations, of a sort, but they've been conversations with strangers. When I talk to friends these days, it's not always (or even often) on the telephone. I am not alone in this. The thing that we call the telephone is in fact a nodal point for several other kinds of communication that have little or nothing to do with telephony: text, IM, email. This evolution has had several major effects, but the main one is this: there are days when I talk to friends but I don't hear their voices. In a literary sense, this isn't quite true: I read things that they write, so I learn their voices, but the physical fact of their voices is less real than ever: air, cords, tongue. This week, I was speaking to a friend I haven't talked to in a long time; we reconnected on email. She was talking (writing) about someone's voice in her office, which struck me as strange. I could imagine that person's voice, since she was describing it, but I had no information about her voice. Had it changed over time? Was it roughened up by whiskey? Deepened by age? Stealthy? Persuasive? Careful? Candied? I didn't ask, because that would have been embarrassing, but I wondered, and wondered if anyone ever asks. What does your voice sound like? It's an intimate question, and intimacy means different things than it used to.
Though the world has fewer voices in it, it also has more voices in it, and pop music is one of the sites of that paradox. You can't listen to it for more than a minute or two without thinking about voices: why this one is better than that one, why that one is more affecting than the other one, why a certain technical ability fails to convey a certain kind of honesty. Magazines are constantly running features about the best voices in the history of the genre. Is Dylan better than Sam Cooke? Is Christina Aguilera better than Grace Slick? Is Ian Hunter better than Malkmus? Is Bobbie Gentry better than Beyonce? Every answer to these questions is right, and every answer is wrong, but the questions themselves are the point: it is voices that are being considered. The fact that you could go on forever -- or, more to the point, that I could -- is one of the central aspects of the entire art form. And yet, even within a genre universally defined by voices, though, there are only a few songs that are specifically about voices. Cheap Trick's "Voices" is one, and one of the best, because the melody is sweet without being saccharine, and because Robin Zander has a better voice than most singers. It's not about a conversation, but about the memory of a conversation, and about how memory can polish a lover's voice:I remember every word you said
I remember voices in my head This song reveals one of the secret truths about voices, which is that they are mostly for other people. Singers probably know this instinctively, but it's nice when they write songs that sharpen and drive home the point. When other people give you their voice, even a few moments of it, you can use it to build upon: you can yoke it to emotions, retreat inside of it, feather your nest. This idea is handled even more explicitly, and even more self-referentially, in Matthew Sweet's "Your Sweet Voice": Speak to me with your sweet voice
And take me through another night
Speak to me with your sweet voice
And I will surely be alright Try to read this with the pun stripped away. Or rather, try to hear it with the pun silenced. I can't. It sounds like he's at once pleading with a woman and marketing his own work. I once spent the night with a woman whose voice I really liked. I like the voices of everyone I've ever been involved with (how can you not? it would be intolerable) but this one woman had a tremendous voice. I told her so, that night, all the time, until I realized that when I was telling her things, she wasn't talking.
Since I started writing this piece, my phone has buzzed twice. That's two more voice mails I'll be listening to, two more voices which will, as a result of technology, leave me slightly cold.
My younger son is four. He's just recently started reading, which means he's just recently started to learn the process by which language becomes immortal (or is it tragically attenuated?) in the printed word. Up until now, as a pre-literate but already verbal child, he has had only one option for expressing himself, talking, which he did (and does) constantly. He talks and talks, and if using your voice is a form of generosity, he is the most charitable being I know.
Sometimes, when words fill up his head, he offloads them, and pretends that inanimate things are speaking to him: fire hydrants, cars, stuffed animals. The other night, he was supposed to read my wife a book after she read him a book, but instead he picked up a stuffed dog and let it do the reading for him. The dog read well. It was funny, because he made no real attempt to differentiate the dog's voice from his own, and it was also something other than funny, because it illustrated how firmly he's located inside a world of voices. That will change, and that change will be welcome in some small ways, because it will diminish his unrelenting chatter, and it will be sad in broader ways. You can make the argument that one of the dividing lines between childhood and adulthood is the moment when we stop pretending that inanimate things are talking to us, but then you'd have to contend with the counterargument, brilliantly expressed in Jim Jackson's "I Heard the Voice of a Porkchop," from 1928:I heard the voice of a porkchop say, "Come unto me and rest"
Well you talk about your stewing meats: I ain't know what the best
You talk about your chicken, ham, and eggs and turkey stuffed in dress
But I heard the voice of a pork chop say, "Come unto me and rest" Here, the porkchop is talking in the voice of the Savior. Jackson is lampooning Matthew 11:28 (no relation to Matthew Sweet) and the popular hymn based on it, but he's transplanting the divine comfort to something much more earthy. Puzzle out the song on your own time, slowly, and give me a call when it's unpuzzled. I'll pick up. I have one friend who gets annoyed when I don't answer my phone, and instead of leaving straightforward messages, she does funny voices. Her British accent is terrible, but don't tell her. Her sassy Puerto Rican accent is excellent, and you can tell her I said so. Those messages are more like songs, because they're resigned to be one-way communications, and because they're performances. Sometimes she'll pretend to be her own secretary, telling me to call her back.
The other day, my younger son called me at the office. As he goes from pre-literate to literate, he's also going from pre-numerate to numerate, and one of his favorite things to do is to pick up the house phone and dial my wife's or my cell phone number, which he's memorized. Some days, he'll call me four or five times. I am assuming this phase will pass. The other day, he called twice. I picked up both times. The first time, he said "hi," and then I said "hi," and he said "hi" again. The second time, he told me that he was wearing a Superman sweater that had been mine when I was four. That part I understood. Then there was a garbled monologue about pants and fish and, I think, a firefighter who was wearing a hat but wasn't really standing on the side of the road so much as climbing a pole but then his shoes were not rubber but they were black rubber. I may have gotten the details wrong, but it doesn't really matter. It was nice to hear his voice.Labels: ben, blues, pop
posted by Ben
LINK |
Friday, November 07, 2008
HOW CAN I MISS YOU WHEN YOU WON'T GO AWAY?
Dan Hicks and The Hot Licks
1969
Available on : The Most of Dan Hicks
Epic : 2001
[Buy It]
HOW CAN I MISS YOU WHEN I'VE GOT DEAD AIM?
Ida Cox
1926
Available on : Complete Recorded Words, Vol. 3: 1925-1927
Document : 1925
[Buy It]
Tiring week, no? Exhilarating, then exhausting, and the second part, maybe, because of the first. So, welcome, new President. I also went to a wake this week, for a friend's father, and that was exhausting without being exhilarating, except that exhausting isn't exactly the right word. It was sobering without being bracing, spine-straightening without being exciting. If I didn't already know that time marches on, this would have reminded me. Left boot, right boot.
The friend whose father died ended the week more or less tapped out, which is more or less predictable. One of the hardest things about the wake, he said, was having to conduct intimate business with so many people he didn't really know. What do you say to the man who was your next-door neighbor when you were four? You don't really remember him, but he's part of your past, and consequently, part of your present. His absence for most of your life doesn't erase a sense of presence at key moments.
Last night I had a book launch. The event was the opposite of a wake, or maybe the mirror image. Acquaintances showed up, along with colleagues, along with strangers. The people I see and speak to all the time were also there. Those people interest me the most, which is probably why I see and speak to them all the time. They interest me because the very fact of them is so strange. What makes you stay close to another person over time? Though I am not stupid--or because I am--that question interests me. Are you drawn back day after day because you believe that person to be a source of wisdom? Of amusement? Because the person is pleasing to look at? Because the mere fact of interacting with that person gratifies you greatly? Because that person's interest in you is also evident and you feed off of it? I'd say that it's some or all of the above. Cynics or depressives will say that friendships persist as a result of inertia, but inertia is harder to keep up than physics suggests.
There aren't many people I talk to or see every day, but there are some. How much is there to say to a person like that? There are two answers to this question. On the one hand, there is nothing to say, because you've used it all up. On the other hand, there's everything to say, because it's always all in play. Party conversations are a quick, clean illustration of this principle. With old friends, you catch up on plot. With new acquaintances, you acquire information about character. With everpresent friends, you reflect back the ongoing light. You talk about nothing and everything: small talk, non-talk, fragments of conversations from before. Yesterday's inside joke becomes tomorrow's cherished nostalgia.
Assuming, that is, that everyone remembers yesterday's inside joke. The circuit I've sketched out above is how it works when it works. But what about when it doesn't work, when one little wire goes haywire? At the party, I was talking to a friend I talk to all the time, and I reminded her of a comment she made a few months ago. She said that she didn't remember saying it, but that it sounded funny. I laughed and said that she was her own best audience, but for one split-second, I missed her. It was a crazy reaction. She was standing right there. I speak to her all the time. It was nothing. A few seconds later she asked me why I hadn't answered an email she had sent earlier today. I said I thought I had, but even if I hadn't, what difference did it make? I knew I'd be seeing her later. What was it about, anyway? She didn't remember. Another nothing.
Later, after my friend left, after my wife and I went home, after some food, after some TV, I thought about the party conversation a little more. Or rather, I thought about the week that had ended with the party conversation. The wake, in particular, had furnished hard evidence of what happens when the circuit between people breaks irrevocably, leaving all memories one-sided and all emails unanswered. Is that why the tiny hiccups in a relationship have a slightly larger ripple effect, because they're fore-echoes of the Big Forgotten Comment? Does presence in most of your life erase a sense of absence at key moments? I clarified with the assistance of two songs, one by Dan Hicks and the other by Ida Cox. Hicks's song is about being fed up with (or possibly pretending to be fed up with) another person's ongoing interest:Out of three billion people, why must it be me?
Oh why, oh why won't you cut me loose?
Just do me a favor and listen to my plea
I'm not the only chicken on the roost! I am certain that people feel this way about me sometimes, because I feel that way about them sometimes. Get another roost! But the best friendships outlast this impulse and return to finer feelings, in part because they are driven by the fear that when people really go away--back to the wake again--you are condemned to miss them forever. Cox's song shifts the power balance, almost completely, and gives advice for women recovering from their man's sudden withdrawal of interest. Here, too, a lack of attention activates intense attention, but of a different sort--the results have collateral damage:If your man quits you, don't wear no black.
Find the girl that bit you for him, and bite her back.
If you kill my dog, I'm gonna kill your cat;
I'm gettin' even with the world and there's nothing to that. The songs, taken apart and then taken together, draw a bead on the not-quite-conversation I had at the party and the not-quite-problems it raises--at the forgotten comment, at the unanswered email, at the remembered affinity. They reframe the question and, at the same time, answer it: The friends you talk to all the time are the ones you miss even when they don't go away.Labels: ben, blues, folk
posted by Ben
LINK |
Thursday, October 30, 2008
REPETITIONThe Fall 1978 Available on : 50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong: 39 Golden GreatsBeggars UK : 2004 [Buy It]JOY IN REPETITIONPrince Graffiti BridgeWarner Bros. : 1990 [Buy It]You know when you tell someone the same thing over and over again? You know when you tell someone the same thing over and over again? I mean, really: You know when you tell someone the same thing over and over again? Does it help? Does it? Does it help matters? Does it help matters when you tell someone the same thing over and over again? Recently I had to repeat myself. Recently I had to repeat myself. Recently I had to repeat myself. I was speaking to someone with whom I have at least the illusion of common cause. I believe that we are on the same wavelength, in some important ways, as humans. As a result we are friends. That is rare, and so it makes me happy. I repeat: That is rare, and so it makes me happy. People are a mix of learned wisdom and spontaneous immaturity, and to find a friend who either parallels or complements you in that regard, well, it's rare. It ignites the best things in everyone. Usually I have nothing to complain about with this friend. Once, a few months ago, I complained about something. It was a behavior of hers that I found slightly troubling and that I worried might develop into something more troubling. I mentioned it once and let it go. I didn't want to repeat myself. Recently, though, I did. Recently, though, I did. Recently, though, I did. Circumstances hadn't changed, and so I once again said the thing I said once before. I restated it, not in the sense that I revised it, but in the sense that I repeated it. Here we have two kinds of repetition, related but not identical. I repeated myself because the thing I was concerned about has not changed. Does that truly count as repetition, something that has not changed? I read something once by someone who said that all artwork is about finding a balance between repetition and variation. This is true, this is true. But it is truer than true, true not just for artwork, but for everything that artwork imitates and informs: Nature, time, the human mind, sex, breath. Everything is about finding a balance between repetition and variation, and by and large they have equal weights, if not equal shapes. Repetition is a form of variation. Variation is a form of repetition. Take pop music, which depends both on rhythm and melody. One is repetition and the other is, within reason, variation. But songs catch your attention by varying that which is repeated and by repeating that which is varied. The Fall is perfect for this kind of thing. This kind of thing is perfectly illustrated by the Fall. For a perfect illustration of this kind of thing, consider The Fall. Mark E Smith formed a band that depends upon repetition (song after song on album after album, year after year) and depends also upon variation (new band members, new sounds, new topics for lyrics). The Fall's song "Repetition" summarizes this tension concisely: Repetition in the music
And we're never going to lose it Smith is also very funny, and in that sense he also participates in repetition. The French philosopher Henri Bergson names repetition as one of the three foundational rhetorical devices central to laughter, and he traces it back to the childhood game of Jack-In-The-Box. The handle goes around and around and around, the repetition lulling the viewer into submission and creating one kind of pleasure, and then, with a kind of violent suddenness, the Jack jumps out of the box. Laughter is produced when surprise is produced and repetition is shattered. But then that process is good for another go-round, at least: the process by which variation is introduced can itself be repeated. It is a mainspring of the human experience: people say that we learn from repetition, and they are right. Mark E Smith is also very funny: We dig repetition
Repetition in the drums
And we're never going to lose it
This is the three R's
The three R's:
Repetition, Repetition, Repetition When I had to repeat myself recently it was because I felt that the circumstances that produced my original statement had not changed. But because the circumstances could only change as the result of action--by myself, by my friend--my repetition carried an implication of failure on both of our parts. Had there been effort, the circumstances might have changed, and so the repetition would not have been necessary. Because circumstances were the same, because the second identical statement applied months after the first, I felt that I needed to explain that I was not joking. "I am serious," I wrote, and considered writing it a second time for emphasis. Repetition without comedy is a specific form of emphasis, and it is a different proposition entirely from the one sketched above. When repetition is serious, it travels to the extremes of freedom. On the one hand, it can become suffocating and unforgivable. This was my fear repeating myself to my friend, that she would feel suffocated. On the other hand, serious repetition can be ecstatic. Spiritual satisfaction depends on repetition, as does sexual satisfaction. Prince's "Joy In Repetition" is ecstatic in both regards, and it may even suggest that one is a restatement of the other. In the song, a man goes to a nightclub and sees a woman at the microphone, repeating the words "love me" over and over again. He follows her into the alley, hoping for a conversation, but she keeps repeating herself: In the alley over by the curb he said tell me what's your name
She only said the words again and it started to rain
Two words falling between the drops and the moans of his condition
Holding someone is truly believing there's joy in repetition
There's joy in repetition
There's joy in repetition
There's joy in repetition
There's joy in repetition There is repetition in "Joy in Repetition." There is joy in "Joy in Repetition." The woman is repeating her request to eliminate any chance of misunderstanding. Prince is repeating his chorus in the same spirit. Repetition here isn't boring. It's joyful, as I have said--like the repetition of a friendship day after day after day--and as a result, the song makes me feel better about repeating myself, when I have to, which isn't all the time. Recently, I had to repeat myself. I had to tell a friend something that I also told her months ago. I had to tell a friend something I also told her months ago because things haven't changed since then, and so my words, too, haven't changed. My friend replied to my second statement much as she replied to the first, with a promise of improvement. She replied to my repetition with a repetition of her own. Repetition is a source of frustration, because it suggests a lack of progress (why aren't the bad things changing?), and it is also a source of comfort, because it reiterates a central premise (the good things remain intact). I should be able to see the benefits of repetition. I have learned and relearned that there are benefits to repetition. I have learned it repeatedly. I don't want to feel bad about repeating myself. I repeat: I don't want to feel bad. I repeat: I repeat. * HELLO PEOPLE OF NEW YORK CITY AND ENVIRONS: We have a special Moistworks announcement. Regular contributor Ben Greenman, who wrote the post above, will be celebrating the release of his fancy new limited-edition, handcrafted, letter-press book Correspondences at the Tenement Museum (108 Orchard Street) at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, November 6. Ben will read, along with Arthur Nersesian and Todd Zuniga. Come one, come all. Labels: ben, rock and roll, soul
posted by Ben
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Friday, October 17, 2008
SHADOWS OF LOVE
The Pearls
1955
Available on : Atlantic Vocal Groups
Rhino Handmade : 2008
[Buy It]
There is a common mysterious phenomenon I will now try to summarize for you. It involves two people. One of them should be you, because that way you can obtain direct experience of the phenomenon. The other one should not be you. In this phenomenon, one person (maybe you?) enters into a brief social interaction with another person (maybe you?). Maybe there is food. Maybe there is alcohol. Maybe scenery. Those things are often around people as a consequence of our stubborn insistence on civilization. After a little while, though, the first person (for the sake of efficiency, let's just decide that it's you, okay?) feels a growing interest in the second person. Perhaps the interest is physical. Perhaps it's emotional. Perhaps it's simply opportunistic. But there's clearly some sort of pull. There is a leaning in response to the pull, mostly indiscernible to the naked eye, maybe a few centimeters at most. Then the curtain drops.
Why does the curtain drop? Well, for privacy, and also because I have no idea what happens next. Or rather, I know full well what can happen next. Those two people can go to an apartment. They can go to a car. They can go out onto the street. Or they can go, most dangerously of all, into each others' imaginations. That'll happen sometimes, though just as often one person will, upon further consideration, decide that the other person does not fit comfortably into his or her life as already conceived and constructed. In those cases, the second person has nothing to do but recede, either gracefully or disgracefully, until the interest that has grown has shrunk back out of sight. This is what is known as plot. Characters move through it with the illusion of free will. But let's not move into plot. Not yet. Let's remain with that moment just before the curtain drops, the moment at which the air between two people is carbonated with possibility.
Why remain there? Well, for two reasons. For starters, it happens. I am very old these days, with a wife and kids, as tied down as Gulliver in Lilliput, and still sometimes I will be out at a place and enter into a brief social interaction with someone else, maybe with food too, maybe with alcohol, and after a little while I will feel something elastic inside me. Rather: I will feel something inside me and I will know that it is elastic by the fact of its stretching. The sensation is between physical and emotional, and bridges both. Recently I was out with a group of people, and this happened, and I was surprised, both pleasantly and unpleasantly. Maybe by recently I mean years ago. Or maybe I wasn't out and it was during a telephone call, or maybe it was even over email. Who knows? I'll never tell. During this recent happening, not much more happened than I have already indicated. I detected a kind of beauty running through another person like a current and then it crossed my mind that in another world, in another time, under vastly different circumstances, with responsibilities erased and decisions unmade, that this other person and I might be able to spend some time together and not feel compromised about it to the point of mutual paralysis. This all seems extremely run-of-the-mill, doesn't it? One adult likes another adult. Faces and bodies like faces and bodies. Big deal! But maybe it's not run-of-the-mill at all. At one point, I went to the restroom of the restaurant (alone) and stood there by the sink and wondered, for a few seconds only, about the magic of other people. I'm not even sure I always understand why there are other people, let alone why they appear to me as sources of pleasure or (even better) magic. But when they do, they really do: they appear but not as apparitions. They are solid. I left the restroom but my thoughts remained there.
They remained there--and I remain there--for another reason, too, which is that artwork, particularly pop songs, encourages the location. When I was returning from the place where this most recent episode occurred--where, mythology and monumentalizing aside, I met a woman and felt a twinge of interest that I imagined was at least fleetingly mutual, despite the fact that she has a normal old life and so do I and, well, that's pretty much the end of the twinge--I listened to music. I was a little drunk and so the evening demanded it. The first song that came on happened to be about the indefinite nature (but definite existence) of human attraction, as was the second song and the third. The fourth was Bruce Cockburn. Who knows what the hell he was talking about. Nuclear power plants or something? Anyway, after that my iPod got back to the business at hand. I was attracted to the music about attraction, which felt like either a displacement or an extrapolation, but which also felt safe. Music is a source of embrace, especially when it's music about embrace. One of the songs was the Pearls' "Shadows of Love," which is a pretty typical mid-fifties vocal-group song from Atlantic Records, thrillingly sung, highly sentimental:I can see shadows across the sea
Hear your voice calling me
Lord, I suffered, I suffered so
Just to hold you, hold you once more
I went down, down by the sea
I could see shadows of you and me
Yes, I miss you, darling baby
Please hurry home to stay To some degree, the song embarrassed me, because it was about love, and that wasn't what I was thinking about at all. I was thinking about a different kind of attraction, about a short magnetic span. And I wasn't thinking about anything so specific at the exclusion of other things; the source of the twinge was on my mind, but so were other cases of twinge from across the years, in part because I would never be so presumptuous as to erase those other cases and overburden the one (minor) one that had just occurred. The broader notion of twinge was on my mind. That may have been why I came back to "Shadows of Love" a second time, instead of replaying the New York Dolls or Jesus and Mary Chain or Bobbie Gentry. I liked the simplicity and complexity of the song's central idea: shadows of love. It seemed Platonic, both in the nonsexual sense, and also in the sense outlined in the Republic, where shadows on the cave wall are all we know of reality. Is momentary attraction a shadow of love? Does it keep you coming back for more? Does it remind you what you have in real life? Does it risk exposing love as a shadow of something else? I played the song a third time and fell asleep still a little tipsy.Labels: ben, doo-wop
posted by Ben
LINK |
Thursday, October 02, 2008
THE WEAKER ARGUMENT DEFEATS THE STRONGER
The Delgados
Peloton
Beggars Banquet : 1999
[Buy It]
CANDIDATE 1: I'm happy to be here tonight.
CANDIDATE 2: I am, too.
CANDIDATE 1: You shouldn't be.
CANDIDATE 2: Why not?
CANDIDATE 1: Because you shouldn't be agreeing with me. Didn't you see that in the manual?
CANDIDATE 2: Manual?
CANDIDATE 1: You know: little yellow book, about this big, says "Top Secret" on the front. Maybe only I got one.
CANDIDATE 2: I don't know. But what's your point? I shouldn't be happy to be here?
CANDIDATE 1: You should be arguing.
CANDIDATE 2: I will be.
CANDIDATE 1: But you agreed with me. You should be arguing so that the people listening to us have a clear choice.
CANDIDATE 2: Okay. Let's argue.
CANDIDATE 1: No! You're agreeing with me again, only this time it's about arguing. That's kind of a paradox, isn't it? It's like seeing Russia from Russia.
CANDIDATE 2: It's nothing like seeing Russia from Russia. And that's not a paradox, anyway. It's a tautology.
CANDIDATE 1: But a paradox is a paradox.
CANDIDATE 2: That's a tautology, too.
CANDIDATE 1: So a paradox is a paradox is a tautology, which means that a paradox is a tautology.
CANDIDATE 2: It doesn't mean that.
CANDIDATE 1: So you disagree with me that it's a paradox?
CANDIDATE 2: I disagree, yes.
CANDIDATE 1: I think we're on the same page now.
[Both bow.]Labels: ben, politics, scotland
posted by Ben
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Thursday, September 25, 2008
WORKINGMAN'S BLUES #2
Bob Dylan
Modern Times
Sony : 2006
[Buy It]
DON'T TALK TO ME ABOUT WORK
Lou Reed
Legendary Hearts
RCA : 1983
[Buy It]
WORK
Maureen Tucker
Life in Exile After Abdication
50 Skadillion Watts : 1989
[Buy It]
YOU GOTTA WORK
Nathaniel Mayer
I Just Want to Be Held
Fat Possum : 2004
[Buy It]
WORK SONG
Dan Reeder
Dan Reeder
Oh Boy : 2004
[Buy It]
I don't understand very much about the economy. I can read, so I can read the papers, and I know what happens when credit falls apart and I can, if pressed, hold up my half of a semi-intelligent discussion about mortgages (I have one!) and dependents (I have three!). But that's where my expertise ends, after two modest sentences. That means that I have approached this week's news with a mix of ignorance and stupidity, interested in endorsing the policies that will improve matters, but without any real idea what they are. I thought about suspending this post to focus on the financial crisis, but I have already made that joke.
And yet, despite the economic crisis, most people have jobs. Not everyone, of course, and fewer people in lean times, and I don't want to underestimate how devastating joblessness is for those people. I'm just remarking upon the remarkable fact that the vast majority of the people in this country have somehow found their way to a set of tasks that they perform in exchange for some amount of money. In the last few weeks, the fact has pressed a little harder upon the aforementioned stupid parts of my brain, because a friend of mine got a good job. After years of working valiantly and not by any stretch vainly, a job that has a mix of prestige and interest and good pay and standing in this person's community popped into view. Job, meet person. Person, take job. I am highly pleased on behalf of this now much more employed person. I hope the job lasts a very long time and brings with it substantial rewards, among them a wave of magnanimity that results in the purchase of alcohol for friends. In short, congratulations.
But it's a strange time, and stories about people getting good jobs--even if they're good people who do good work--might seem a little untoward. I have put away the cake and whiskey and have decided instead to start with something sobering, like Bob Dylan's "Workingman Blues #2." It's numbered not because it's one in a series of Dylan songs, of course, but because Dylan is acknowledging the Merle Haggard song famously covered by the Grateful Dead. (Paul Simon did something similar with "Crazy Love, Pt. 2," which worked in the shadows of Van Morrison.) When Modern Times came out, reviews suggested that Dylan's song occupied Springsteen territory, but it's stranger than that, a depressive (if not Depressive) collision of lazy poetry and almost academic prose:There's an evenin' haze settlin' over town
Starlight by the edge of the creek
The buyin' power of the proletariat's gone down
Money's gettin' shallow and weak
Well, the place I love best is a sweet memory
It's a new path that we trod
They say low wages are a reality
If we want to compete abroad "Workingman's Blues #2" is exceptional, not in the sense that it's good (though it is good, though it's not as good as "Nettie Moore," from that same record), but because it's very rare that pop songs double as white papers in this fashion. Songs that seem to be about work are more often generic or metaphoric, about romantic effort (Billie Holiday's "Nice Work if You Can Get It," Michael Jackson's "Working Day and Night") or social compromise (Wilbert Harrison's "Let's Work Together," Bob Marley's "Work"). Others address the topic by lamenting the life of the wage slave, often to the benefit of the artist's life (Smokey Robinson and the Miracles' "Got a Job," the Replacements' "God Damned Job"). The Who's "The Dirty Jobs" is about work and the way it both extends and withdraws dignity. Talking Heads' "Found a Job" is about a job, but a highly specific one--the couple in the song collaborate on a TV show that mirrors their own domestic circumstance. And one of the most anthemic work songs, Elvis Costello's "Welcome to the Working Week," is less about the drudgery of redundant work than it is about sexual jealousy.
Lou Reed has framed the issue of work in a few songs, at least. There's "Work," from Songs for Drella, in which he and John Cale illustrate Andy Warhol's keep-busy ethic ("all that matters is work"). But remember: that's work as in artwork. Office work is another matter entirely, as Reed explained a decade earlier:It's a perfect day to get out of bed
Shower, dress, shave, kiss you on the head
Then I hit the office and my head starts to swim
A perfect day to just walk around
See a violent movie, check the sounds
But even on the street
When I hear a phone ring my heart starts to beat
When I get home I don't want you to speak
Don't talk to me about work
Please don't talk to me about work
I'm up to my eyeballs in dirt
With work, with work The greatest achievement in this narrow vein of worksongs from ex-Velvet Underground members comes from Mo Tucker. A little more than a decade after she left the band to start a family, Tucker was living in Georgia, working for Wal-Mart, and though she resurfaced in 1989 with both a studio album and a tour, she never forgot what it was like to be off the road and on the clock. While her album includes contributions from Reed, Jad Fair, Daniel Johnston, and most of Sonic Youth, it is mainly an act of aggressive autobiography, with a number of songs that chronicle Tucker's life in working-class America. "Spam Again" is held up as the standard-bearer from that record, in part because it mentions Spam, but I prefer "Work."I'm trying to make a living working all day long
Me and you and him and her work all day long
Some of us do okay living pretty high
But you and me both know it ain't you or I
When I get my check I know something's wrong
When I get my check I know something's wrong
When I get my check I know oh! something's wrong
Every Friday get my check before I'm home it's gone
Pay the lights, buy the food, I gotta pay the phone
I work hard to pay the rent all day long
I never seem to make a dent all week long
Oh! It's a wonderful "oh!" there at the end, pained and jubilant at the same time: it's Tucker's escape from the drudgery of a day job and her fear of heading back into rock and roll, which has even fewer certainties. One of the certainties is that work matters. This is why I felt good-- why I feel good -- for my friend who just got the job. Some people will tell you that without love, there is nothing. Eh. Maybe. Without love, there is sadness and loneliness. Without work, there is even less. This is true in physics and it's true in economics. Just ask Nathaniel Meyer.You gotta work if you wanna get paid
You gotta work if you wanna get paid
You gotta work if you wanna get paid
You gotta work, baby, if you want to get paid
You gotta work, work, work, work
Work, work, work work, work, work, work, work
You gotta give if you wanna play
You gotta cook if you wanna eat
You gotta work if you wanna get paid
You gotta be real good if you wanna get laid This mantra-like consideration of labor is rendered even more minimally in Dan Reeder's "Work Song." Like many other Reeder songs, it features highly tracked vocals in close harmony and only the slightest of instrumental backing (in this case, just handclaps). Here, Reeder has a very simple message that quickly gets complicated.I got all the fucking work I need
I got all the fucking work I need
I got all the fucking work I need
I got all the fucking work I need
I got all the fucking work I need
I got all the fucking work I need Reeder is either celebrating or lamenting, depending on when you enter the song's orbit and how long you let it spin around you. Is the tone sincere? Sarcastic? Matter-of-fact? That's not clear, but what is clear is how you make something gratifying out of something redundant. You work at it.Labels: ben, rock
posted by Ben
LINK |
Friday, September 19, 2008
I HEARD IT THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE
The Slits
Cut
Island : 1979
[Buy It]
WAR
Bruce Springsteen
1985
Available on : Live: 1975-85
Sony : 1986
[Buy It]
BALL OF CONFUSION
Tina Turner/B.E.F.
1983
Available on : The Collected Recordings: Sixties to Nineties
Capitol : 1994
[Buy It]
PAPA WAS A ROLLING STONE
Was (Not Was)
Are You Okay?
Capitol : 1990
[Buy It]
Norman Whitfield, born in Harlem in May of 1940, moved to Detroit in his teens, joined the Motown record label, and spent his twenties and thirties writing and producing songs for artists like the Temptations, Marvin Gaye, Edwin Starr, Rare Earth, the Undisputed Truth, Rose Royce, and others.
That paragraph, while factually accurate, cannot begin to inhabit the emotional ambit of the circumstances described.
Whitfield died Tuesday after weeks in a coma brought on by diabetes and other ailments.
Neither can that one.
There may have been a time when Whitfield's brilliantly pessimistic anthems didn't speak directly to America. This isn't it.Labels: ben
posted by Ben
LINK |
Thursday, September 11, 2008
PAIN
The Hunter Ronson Band
Y U I Orta
Universal : 1990
[Buy It]
HOUSE OF PAIN
Johnny Dowd
Cruel Words
Bongo Beat : 2006
[Buy It]
PAIN PAIN
Cheap Trick
1975
Available on: Bun E's Basement Bootleg: Beertown '75
SICKBED BLUES
Skip James
Devil Got My Woman
Vanguard : 1968
[Buy It]
MEMORY PAIN
Johnny Winter
Second Winter
Columbia : 1969
[Buy It]
59 TIMES THE PAIN
Husker Du
New Day Rising
SST : 1985
[Buy It]
THE HURT'S ALL GONE
Detroit Cobras
Tied & True
Bloodshot : 2007
[Buy It]
THE HURT'S ALL GONE
Irma Thomas
1965
Available on: Sweet Soul Queen of New Orleans: The Irma Thomas Collection
Razor & Tie : 1996
[Buy It]
An open letter to my side:
I wish you would stop hurting me. What have I ever done to you? One day of this is fine, I guess, but this has been a week or two. I woke up Sunday with a stitch, at first too minor to detect. (I think a stitch is what you say for sides. A crick is in the neck.) By Monday it was slightly worse. On Tuesday it was almost bad. On Wednesday night it disappeared, mostly, for which I was glad. But then it settled in again and even moved around a bit, up into my chest and arm. It twinged and tugged and wouldn't quit. I live a life without much pain. Generally I'm in good health. When I think of sick people, I'm never thinking of myself. But when confronted with discomfort for more than four days in a row, my mind begins to fear the worst. Superstitious crap, I know. But still: you go from feeling fine and leaping into each new day to laying silent on the sofa and wishing the pain away. My dad's a doctor. I asked him. He thought that it was nothing much. He said to watch for labored breathing, a torso tender to the touch. I had neither of these things right until they were suggested, and then I felt I had them both. It was time to go get tested. I called the doctor's office and set a time for late next week. The pain was dull and steady-seeming, had no valley, had no peak. And so I worried and complained, and felt the pain hum in my side. And then one sunny afternoon it overtook me and I died. Ha ha, just kidding. I'm still here. The pain is too. It's status quo. The worst can't happen if you say it. Superstitious crap, I know.
I waited more. I found some music: Ian Hunter, Johnny Dowd, Cheap Trick, Skip James, Johnny Winter, Husker Du (played extra loud). The rhythm was a kind of cure; the rhyme worked well as a distraction. I ceased to be so conscious of my every physical reaction. Then I found a song that dramatized how I might feel better--Detroit Cobras covering Irma Thomas to the letter.The hurt's all gone
When you hold me
Yes the hurt's all gone
When you kiss me
The hurt's all gone
Until you go away
Why can't you stay In the song, the remedy for feeling bad is being held. I tried, experimentally. For a time the twinges were dispelled. Then, unheld, I tried to sleep. My side twinged--ow--and twinged again. I guess I'll leave it to the doctors. Time to rest. Posted by Ben.
* * *
HEY! MOISTWORKS READERS!: Among the least odious duties associated with this blog, or life in general, is to point people toward interesting events. Here's one: at 9:30 p.m. next Thursday, Sept. 18, at Joe's Pub, the legendary alto player Lee Konitz will be in conversation and concert with Ethan Iverson, who plays piano for the Bad Plus and maintains the blog Do the Math. The two will talk, play, talk some more, and play some more. Do not miss this event. Those details, again: Lee Konitz and Ethan Iverson in conversation, Joe's Pub, Sept. 18, 9:30 p.m. Jot them down, enter them into your PDA, or just remember them.Labels: ben
posted by Ben
LINK |
Thursday, September 04, 2008
QUIET MAN
John Prine
John Prine
Atlantic : 1971
[Buy It]
SO QUIET IN HERE
Van Morrison
Enlightenment
Polydor : 1990
[Buy It]
THE QUIET ONE
The Who
Face Dances
Warner Bros. : 1981
[Buy It]
QUIETLY
Fred Eaglesmith
Tinderbox
Lonesome Day : 2008
[Buy It]
CHATTERBOX
The New York Dolls
Too Much Too Soon
Mercury : 1974
[Buy It]
During the summer, my wife and I spent a few weeks taking my kids to see my parents. One weekend, some friends of my parents visited the house with their adult daughter, who was probably twenty-five, maybe a bit older. We had met a few times before. While the rest of us had conversations that ranged from polite and boring to exciting and impolite, she remained quiet. Not off to herself, exactly. She stood near us. She held a beer. But she was very quiet, almost like a tree. Later on, after the guests left, the rest of us were talking, and someone wondered if the woman had had felt uncomfortable with the group. My mother than proceeded to speculate. Had we come on too strong? Had we said something to offend her? Maybe she was having a hard summer. Maybe she was sick. Maybe that morning a cat had climbed up onto her face and gotten her tongue. "But then we'd see claw marks," my mother said. (She is not quiet, generally.) We came to no conclusion.
Later, I was sitting in a room with my dad, who wasn't saying anything, and I found it didn't bother me at all. My dad was reading and he set the book down. I thought he was going to talk. He didn't. He went out to the porch to look at some trees. If you ask a quiet person to explain the content of their silence--which seems like at least a minor paradox--they will tell you that there are plenty of other possible explanations. For starters, they might be switched over to receiving instead of broadcasting, communing rather than communicating. That was the case with my father, and it's also the case in John Prine's "Quiet Man":Oodles of light, what a beautiful sight
Both of God's eyes are shining tonight
Rays and beams of incredible dreams
And I am a quiet man I love this song because it is from John Prine's first album, and I love that album, but I also love it because it slows me down before I judge quiet people too harshly. Maybe they're seeing rays and beams of incredible dreams. My father was looking at trees.
This suggests that there are at least two kinds of quiet, and that outward silence is not always indicative of an inner void--or, for that matter, an inner turmoil. There is a third alternative: silence on the outside and balance on the inside. I saw Van Morrison in concert last year, and when he wasn't singing, he was wordless. Silence preoccupies Morrison; he has written about it several times and even titled an album Hymns to the Silence. Often it is not the absence of sound so much as the presence of peace, as he attests in "So Quiet in Here":Foghorns blowing in the night
Salt sea air in the morning breeze
Driving cars all along the coastline
This must be what it's all about
Oh this must be what it's all about
This must be what paradise is like
So quiet in here, so peaceful in here
So quiet in here, so peaceful in here
The warm look of radiance on your face
And your heart beating close to mine
And the evening fading in the candle glow
This must be what it's all about
Oh this must be what it's all about
This must be what paradise is like
So quiet in here. so peaceful in here
So quiet in here, yeah, so peaceful in here This is a compelling case for paradise, but less straightforward on the matter of quiet. For starters, he's not alone; the first four lines seem to suggest so, but then, out of nowhere, there's another heart beating close to his. So shouldn't he be talking to that other heart? In company, you circulate. As it turns out, he is, but with music rather than simple language, since he seems to believe that the words used to describe events and experiences (as opposed to the events and experiences themselves) aren't meaningfully connected to any vital essence: to spirit, to love, to infinities. He doesn't want quiet so much as purer sound: All my struggling in the world
And so many dreams that don't come true
Step back, put it all away
It don't matter, it don't matter anymore
Oh this must be what paradise is like
This must be what paradise is like
It's so quiet in here, so peaceful in here Quiet doesn't have to mean quiescent. In the Who, John Entwistle was the quiet one, like George Harrison was in the Beatles and Charlie Watts was in the Stones. (Our research department suggests that Charlie Watts may in fact be mute.) But he was quiet like a pro basketball guard is short, quiet because he wasn't a lead guitarist like Pete Townshend, a lead singer like Roger Daltrey, or an explosive drummer/clown like Keith Moon. On "The Quiet One," he insists on this context, and makes a case that he is doing more with less:Everybody calls me the quiet one
But you just don't understand
You can't listen, you won't hear me
With your head stuck in the sand
I ain't never had time for words that don't rhyme
My head is in a cloud
I ain't quiet, everybody else is too loud Again, this doesn't go a long way toward vindicating the quiet woman in my house. There's not much evidence that she, like Entwistle, wanted to be understood if not exactly heard. Are there malignant forms of silence? Fred Eaglesmith thinks so. "Quietly," from this year's excellent Tinderbox, starts off as a love song. There's no talking and only a little movement. The whole thing happens in slow motion:Quietly
Her hair falls across her pillow
Quietly
She stirs in the morning light
Quietly
She stares up at the ceiling
Then she sits up and she looks into my eyes Silence can be sexy if it's post-coital, or pre-coital--or coital, where too much blather and funny accents can be distracting. Eaglesmith's song starts sexy like that, but then there's a turn for the worse. The woman's quiet is exposed as neither wonder (as in the Prine song), proximity that shames language (as in the Morrison), or preparation for powerful expression (as in the Entwistle). It's just silence, at least self-absorbed, probably sullen, and even a little punishing. It turns out that she's miserable and planning to leave. Interestingly, the man who is singing the song is so exhausted by her inability to express herself, by the way her silence suggests blame and abandons him, that he lets her go.
Many people have sounded off about silence. Adrienne Rich said, "Lying is done with words but also with silence." It can also be used to tell the truth disreputably, as Fred Eaglesmith suggests. At the same time, there are plenty of people over the course of the planet's history who have lionized silence. Sam Rayburn said, "No one has a finer command of language than the person who keeps his mouth shut." But I don't think I agree with Sam Rayburn, who got to say what he wanted to when he wanted to. I tend to agree with Francis Bacon, who said, "Silence is the virtue of fools." Once, years ago, during college, I went on a date with a girl, and it went well, and so we went on a second date. On the second date, she said nothing, or nearly nothing. We sat and had a drink. I remember asking her if she was okay, and she said, "yes," and I think she may even have meant it, but I wasn't okay with the way in which she was okay. I was afraid of what her silence meant and when I overcame my fear I found that I was angry at her for presuming that silence was the best that could pass between us. Ultimately, it wasn't silence as romantic tension. It wasn't silence as comfort. It was silence as the virtue of fools and maybe vice, too. In intimate situations (bed) or semi-intimate ones (date) or even hemi-demi-semi-intimate ones (porch with parents' friends), language may be imperfect but silence is the perfect crime.
Okay: I have said enough.Labels: ben, rock
posted by Ben
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Thursday, August 28, 2008
YOUNGER POINT OF VIEW
The Dogs
1976
Available on : We're Desperate: The L.A. Scene (1976-1979)
Rhino : 1993
[Buy It]
TEENAGE PRESIDENT TALKING BLUES
Kim Fowley
Hotel Insomnia
Marilyn: 1994
[Buy It]
This story starts with two beautiful women. I knew neither of them. I know neither of them. It was on the subway. One was black, tall, and to my left. One was short, white, and to my right. Both were around twenty. It made for a nice balance, which isn't to say symmetry. I am old and married but still I ogled for a minute: nature's way. Then I got on with noticing other things, including that both were reading books, one of which was The Secret History and the other of which was The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat.
Despite the beauty, despite the youth, despite it all, I wasn't ogling anymore. I was rereading, or at least remembering reading. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat came out in 1985, when I was in high school. The Secret History came out in 1992, after I was out of college. I can't prove this, but I think that I read more books during those seven years than in any other seven-year period in my life. This doesn't mean that I read with any goal in mind other than the reading itself, or that I retained very much of what I read, or that I was able to connect the books I read to specific emotions or events in my life. It just means that I went through a book a day, sometimes two, friction burns on the pads of my thumbs. I read like it was going out of style, which it was: I couldn't have known it at the time, but a few years after that my pace slowed. It's only gotten worse, unless it's better: I can still rip through a new novel on the subway ride home, but I don't consider it reading. I consider it watching TV on the page. Reading now takes time. It requires losing the thread and then picking it up again. It requires ambition, thwarted and then (hopefully) achieved. Now, a book goes into me over a half-week of stolen hours.
I'm off track. The subway stayed on track. The beautiful girls stayed on the subway. My thoughts stayed on the beautiful girls. I ogled for another minute -- nature's way -- and then I started thinking more about the books they were reading. The second phase of my thinking was significantly more superficial than the first. It went something like this: "Suckers!" And then: "Sucker!" again, but this time directed to myself. I had read both of those books, long ago. Been there, done that. I felt a half-second of superiority and then a much longer period of something else, maybe the opposite. The careful case I had built for setting aside greedy, promiscuous reading for a more carefully curated selection dissolved, and what was left was the sense that youth had passed, all at once. It was wrong to be ogling twenty-year-olds and it was sad that they were discovering books that were long since dead to me and while it was probably true that a sixty-year-old woman was looking at me and thinking the same thing, that was no consolation. Time passes. It passes you. There is no way to remove the venom from this truism. This is the case with music even more powerfully than with books. The years of discovery end with a thud and we become conservationists, at least most of us. The Dogs, who came out of Lansing, Michigan when the Stooges were tearing up Detroit and spent the seventies moving between punk-pop and pop-punk, explained this so perfectly that all I have to do is quote them, which is to say remember them, because I heard them first when I was young, and you don't forget those things:I seen Chicago on the TV yesterday
I didn't make Woodstock
Seen all the children of love fade away
With a younger point of view
What did you used to say
What did you used to do?
With that teenage attitude? The subway stayed on track. One of the girls put away her book and took out a newspaper. Bill Clinton was on the cover, along with Barack Obama's name. Time passes. It passes you. This is the case with politics as powerfully as with music or books. The Dogs understood that, too: they were as political a pop-punk band as you were likely to find, picking up the thread not only from the Stooges but from the MC5. We have years of intense receptivity and then years of trying to make sense of what we received. I saw a documentary on Helen Thomas the other night. What struck me as startling was the way that she became more liberal, more convinced of the importance of taking a strong stance against the evasions of the powerful, as she got older. This isn't the usual way. Usually progress through the world contextualizes passions, fits them in alongside realities, removes sharp edges. Bill Clinton looked old on the cover of the paper. Obama looks so young. The girls on the subway looked so young. Does Obama matter more to them than he does to me? Is that failing in them or in me? Is it a failing at all?
Kim Fowley is older than you think, if you think of him at all. He'll be seventy next year, which means that he was fifty-five when he released Hotel Insomnia, which means that he was somewhat younger when he wrote "Teenage President Talking Blues." The title of the album is probably stolen from a book by the poet Charles Simic. Fowley, of course, is a known cultural provocateur and svengali, an inappropriate appropriator responsible for, among other things, the novelty hit "Alley Oop" and the novelty band The Runaways. "Teenage President Talking Blues" is odd, like nearly everything Fowley has recorded. It describes a young man's arrival in Hollywood in 1959. It's not autobiographical exactly, I don't think, because Fowley, the son of a Hollywood character actor, was already there; he had worked at American International and Arwin records and was well on his way to novelty-song fame. In the song, the young man comes to Hollywood and promptly sets about making a spectacle of himself:With silk underwear and platform shoes
I'm limber like a lady I hang real loose
I dress to kill and am ready to rock
I've got legs like a ladder and hands just like a clock He may be spectacular, but he's not a spectacle:Nobody's watching, nobody's watching, nobody's watching me
Nobody's watching, nobody's watching, I can be anything I want to be I watched the girls on the subway. One of them noticed, met my gaze, dropped her gaze. That's youth, isn't it? Perfect to look at and convinced that no one is looking, needful of attention but also of enough anonymity and freedom to read, listen, see, try, and eventually to grow into something older, something else.
More people boarded. They interfered with my clean lines of sight. The two girls and their books must have had earlier stops, because by the time I got to midtown they were gone. The one who had been reading the newspaper had left it on the seat. Bill Clinton looked old. I felt young remembering when he looked young. This isn't a satisfying piece about youth and age. This isn't a satisfying piece about books. This isn't a satisfying piece about politics. This isn't a satisfying piece about people. Is it ever possible to bring those things into sharp focus, to fix them, or do they escape as quickly as they're acquired, forcing you to go back to them? I don't know, but I mean to find out. Nature's way.Labels: ben, punk
posted by Ben
LINK |
Friday, August 22, 2008
JACK-ASS
Beck
Odelay
Geffen : 1994
[Buy It]
JACKASS BLUES
Fletcher Henderson
1926
Avalable on : A Study in Frustration
Sony : 1994
[Buy It]
THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU'RE DEAD
Warren Zevon
Mr. Bad Example
Elektra : 1994
[Buy It]
GET OUT OF DENVER
Bob Seger
Seven
Reprise : 1974
[Buy It]
GET OUT OF DENVER
Bob Seger
Live in Denver, 1974
GET OUT OF DENVER
Bob Seger
Live Bullet
Capitol : 1976
[Buy It]
GET OUT OF DENVER
Dave Edmunds
Get It
Swan Song : 1977
[Buy It]
GET OUT OF DENVER
Bob Dylan
Live in Detroit, 2004
A man with minimal experience in the United States Senate runs for president. Heard this one before? During the intense campaigning, his opponent maligns the honor of his wife. He also calls the candidate a jackass. The candidate, a tough military hero -- see, you haven't heard this one before -- likes the name and wears it as a badge of honor. Forty-some years later, a German-American political cartoonist, the most famous satirist of his era, revives the jackass label and uses it as a symbol for the modern Democratic party, which the original jackass helped to create. Perhaps you have heard of the satirist, Thomas Nast. You have certainly heard of the jackass, Andrew Jackson.
I locked Paul Harvey in the laundry room until he wrote that paragraph for me.
Monday night, the Democratic Convention kicks off in Denver. There will be drama! There will be Obama! There will be Oprah! There will be hope! There will be a Veep! There will be VIPs! There will be performances from, among others, Kanye West, Black Eyed Peas, Sheryl Crow, Melissa Etheridge, Scarlett Johansson, and Wyclef Jean, who for this occasion have banded together to create a supergroup called "No White Men." Should be great.
None of their music will be featured here today. Instead, we have jackasses from Beck and Fletcher Henderson and a paean to/dismissal the host city by Warren Zevon, who, being dead, may well be there. Finally, of course, we have the best Chuck Berry song that Chuck Berry forgot to write, Bob Seger's "Get Out of Denver," represented by no less than five versions: the original studio track from 1974, a live performance in Denver that same year, the more famous "Live Bullet" version recorded in Cobo Hall in 1975, Dave Edmunds' cover from 1977, and Bob Dylan's live Detroit reprise from 2004. Seger wrote the song, as he explains on a spoken intro to the 1974 live version, after a real incident that says something about the mountain states' traditional response to leftists, radicals, and youth culture:Better go! Get out of Denver, better go
Get out of Denver, better go go
Get out of Denver, better go
Get out of Denver cause you look just like a commie
And you might just be a member
Better get out of Denver
Better get out of Denver In 1924, Fletcher Henderson's year, Calvin Coolidge carried the state handily; the Democratic nominee, John W. Davis, was in a distant second-place tie with Progressive candidate Robert LaFolette. In 1976, Bob Seger's year, the famed Republican understudy Gerald Ford, with 54 percent of the Colorado vote, beat Jimmy Carter, who received only 42 percent. In 1980, Ronald Reagan steamrolled Carter 55-31 (John Anderson took 11 percent), and he whipped Walter Mondale even worse in 1984. The only Democratic victory in recent memory came in 1992, when Bill Clinton won the state by a narrow margin, thanks in large part to Ross Perot. They say that the state is trending Democratic and that Obama has a chance, but they say lots of things:Better go! Get out of Denver, better go
Get out of Denver, better go go
Get out of Denver, better go
Get out of Denver cause you look just like a commie
And you might just be a member
Better get out of Denver
Better get out of Denver Labels: ben
posted by Ben
LINK |
Thursday, August 14, 2008
THE DARK PAGES OF SEPTEMBER LEAD TO THE NEW LEAVES OF SPRING
Paul Weller
22 Dreams
Yep Roc : 2008
[Buy It]
MY PHILOSOPHY
Boogie Down Productions
By All Means Necessary
Jive : 1988
[Buy It]
OKWUKWE NA NCHEKWUBE
Celestine Ukwu and his Philosophers National
1974
Available on : Nigeria Special: Modern Highlife, Afro-Sounds and Nigerian Blues
Soundway : 2007
[Buy It]
PHILOSOPHY
Them
1965
Available on : The Story of Them Featuring Van Morrison
Polydor : 1998
[Buy It]
SHIT FROM AN OLD NOTEBOOK
Minutemen
Double Nickels on the Dime
SST : 1984
[Buy It]
As ususally happens in late summer, I'm in a phase where my reading is split almost exactly between crime fiction and philosophy. Not crime philosophy. Let me rearrange that so that the adjective doesn't look distributive. I'm in a phrase where my reading is split almost exactly between philosophy and crime fiction. Not philosophy fiction! Damn it! I mean actual philosophy: Kierkegaard, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Plato. The crime fiction is easy to explain. It's summer. There's time on the beach. Procedurals and thrillers are printed in mass-market sizes. They fit easily in pockets. Plus, you can read them fast.
The philosophy is trickier. I still have my old books, some from college, some from grad school. But when I read philosophy I rarely crack them open. That's because there's a deeper, shallower reason for needing philosophy at this time of year. I spend most of my time dealing with books: books as products, books as organs, books as bribes and tail feathers and millstones. I write books myself and publish them, as do a(n) (alarmingly) large percentage of my friends. Philosophy can take place in a book, but just as often it takes place in a text, by which I mean that I can locate the innards of the book (online or elsewhere: this is a good place to start), extract them, and carry them around with me. Free philosophy printouts, these brilliant non-books, have summer portability, but that's the least of their powers. They open up a magical door through which I can escape this world, the book world, for a moment, while still getting from it what I need. I can't tell you the number of times that I have been standing in bookstores, looking at this shelf or that table, and that I have started to feel queasy, unable to abide the thought of the latest novel by Writer I Know or the latest memoir by Writer Someone Else I Know Knows. Another book by another person in the neighborhood or someone in an identical neighborhood elsewhere: ecch. This is an uncharitable thought, or at least an uncomfortable one. It doesn't settle easily. But it's true, and that's what blogs, not to mention philosophy texts, are for, right? I (try to) read philosophy because I need to step in many directions at once: to step back into what I perceive as an unreachable past, to step upward into what I perceive as a zone of broader truth, and most of all to step sideways out of the line of fire.
Normally, this would be the point where I would outline some of what I have learned from philosophy and some of what I hope to learn. I might mention Lyotard or Aristotle or the Symparanekromenoi, as unpretentiously as possible, which isn't really unpretentious at all. But I'm not going to do that. I'm not a philosopher, by training or by temperament. I have friends who are. They are programmatic for long stretches. They work through the texts at hand. While they are mastering them methodically, they are storing up energy. Then, all at once, they make an intuitive or a moral or an analytical leap. That's how new philosophy is made and how the case is advanced. I don't work that way, which is to say that I don't work at all, not as a philosopher. I skip around. I master single sentences or paragraphs but leave the rest to chance. It's hard not to think of that line from "A Fish Called Wanda," when Kevin Kline, as the crazy Otto, responds to being called an ape by saying "apes don't read philosophy" and receives the all-time greatest rejoinder. "Yes they do," Jamie Lee Curtis says. "They just don't understand it." Since I am, ape-like, crippled by poor training and poor temperament, I'm just going to say that reading philosophy comforts me via worthy removal from the moment. I'm not reading these philosophy texts to understand books better, but because I understand them as something different (better) than books. It's only one way of dealing with the material, but it's my way. As KRS-One says:This is just one style, out of many
Like a piggy bank, this is one penny One of the problems, I think, is that it's too easy to come to see books as products, partly because they are products. Authors love/hate to talk about sales because they love/hate what sales represent: acceptance of their ideas, of their core. But the truth is that sales mean nothing in a historical sense. Some of the books we read now as classics of the canon were busts during their authors' lifetimes. Some of the books that were huge hits have vanished from sight. You can make (and I have made) the argument that there is in fact an inverse relationship between time-local sales and time-global relevance, that anything that seems to matter so much at the moment is not built to last, and while this is reassuring, it is also sophistic (see: I have been reading philosophy). But the other thing is undeniably true. You just don't know which books will matter later, and how much they'll matter. This is why making books is an exciting and sickening process. Your vogue could peak during your lifetime. It could be sparked again by a critic making a discovery in 2011, or 2019, or never. Still, it is important to remember that there is no real correlation between numbers and value: never has been, never will be. Books may be products with covers and endcaps and tie-ins, but what is inside of them is not. For me, philosophy books are an especially true case of this: while philosophers, when alive, are certainly just as subject to these endcap and tie-in anxieties as any author, their books seem to lend themselves better to de-booking. Innards can be brought out and allowed to speak for themselves. Product can give way to productivity. This is a borderline preachy point, which is why I'll let the Minutemen make it for me:Let the products sell themselves
Fuck advertising and commercial psychology
Psychological methods to sell should be destroyed
Because of their own blind involvement
In their own conditioned minds
The unit bonded together
Morals
Ideals
Awareness
Progress
Let yourself be heard Now it's time to go read some printed-out philosophy.Labels: ben, rock and roll
posted by Ben
LINK |
Sunday, August 10, 2008
NEVER CAN SAY GOODBYE
Isaac Hayes
Black Moses
Stax : 1971
[Buy It]
Obituaries are difficult things, because they're at once final and transitional: final for the person who has died, transitional for the rest of us, who get a chance to remember, reflect, and reassess. When artists die, this effect is especially pronounced. Isaac Hayes, who died over the weekend at the age of 65, had such a broad and eclectic career that reabsorbing it will be a sad joy. As a songwriter and arranger, he (along with David Porter) helped build Stax Records into the undisputed powerhouse of Southern soul; as a solo artist, he tended to set aside originals in favor of jazzy, extended remakes of other people's songs. At once behind-the-scenes and aggressively out front, he created some of the most haunting and strange soul music of the seventies, as well as some of the most canonical blaxploitation soundtracks, all the while building a second career as a campy actor and, ultimately, voice actor. It's impossible to sum up his talent, his influence, and his soul, so we'll just point into it with this heartfelt cover of the Jackson 5's "Never Can Say Goodbye," which takes the young Michael Jackson's most adult love song and repatriates it to the land of actual adults.Labels: ben, isaac hayes
posted by Ben
LINK |
Friday, August 01, 2008
AS LONG AS THE PEOPLE GOT SOMETHING TO SAY
Public Enemy
New Whirl Odor
Slam Jamz : 2005
[Buy It]
IF I GAVE YOU SOUL (WHAT WOULD YOU DO WITH IT?)
Public Enemy
Beats and Places
Slam Jamz : 2005
[Buy It]
LAST MASS OF THE CABALLEROS
Public Enemy
There's a Poison Goin' On
Atomic Pop : 1999
[Buy It]
RACE AGAINST TIME
Public Enemy
Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age
Def Jam : 1994
[Buy It]
HAZY SHADE OF CRIMINAL
Public Enemy
Greatest Misses
Def Jam : 1992
[Buy It]
Carlton Douglas Ridenhour is 48 years old today. Here it is
BAMMM! Most of what there is to say, he's already said. But he hasn't said all that he's going to say. Public Enemy's achievement and influence are so massive that it's easy to overlook some of the superb album tracks that are forgotten simply by virtue of not being, say, "Night of the Living Baseheads" or "Can't Truss It." Here are some. Is it fair for Chuck D. to give us presents on his birthday? Is it wrong to think of him as a scholar and activist as well as an artist? What are fair and wrong, anyway? Are there just words or do they refer to actual underlying concepts? That's the thing about Public Enemy: they get you asking questions that you can't answer unless you ask more questions. It borders on the revolutionary. Happy Birthday, Chuck.
What are your favorite uncelebrated PE songs? Respond in comments.Labels: ben, rap
posted by Ben
LINK |
Friday, July 18, 2008
SOME PEOPLE ARE CRAZY
John Martyn
Grace & Danger
Polygram : 1980
[Buy It]
BABY'S CRAZY
Larry Williams
1958
Available on : At His Finest
Ace : 2004
[Buy It]
CRAZY WOMAN
Bill Wyman
Monkey Grip
One Way : 1974
[Buy It]
DON'T BE CRAZY
John Lennon
c. 1975
8 TON CRAZY
Andy Fairweather Low
La Booga Rooga
Universal : 1975
[Buy It]
RETURN OF THE CRAZY ONE
Digital Underground
Body-Hat Syndrome
Warner : 1993
[Buy It]
I called someone crazy this week. She deserved it. Objectively speaking, for a little while at least, she was every kind of loon. I wouldn't say flibbertigibbet, because that's sexist. I wouldn't say murderer, because that's inaccurate. I'd say crazy. When I told her about it, she balked. She should have thanked me. A crazy person has hundreds of songs at her disposal to clarify and celebrate her condition. In fact, you can argue that it's one of the five or six most decorated words in the history of pop music. Sounds crazy, I know.
The most common use of crazy is romantic: Patsy Cline's "Crazy," Billie Holiday's "I've Got a Man, He's Crazy For Me," Chet Baker's "You're Driving Me Crazy (What Did I Do?)," and Fine Young Cannibals' "She Drives Me Crazy," to name just a few. In others, it's just a way of expressing energy: Prince's "Let's Go Crazy," or for that matter the Clash's. But then there are the songs that investigate a darker, richer seam of meaning, where crazy means what crazy means: a temporary loss of reason due to a combination of emotional and psychological factors.
That's the case in "Some People Are Crazy," one of the signature songs of the British singer/songwriter John Martyn. I missed Martyn the first time he passed through my life, in college, when a slightly older guy I knew insisted that he was like Eric Clapton but with brains. "But that's not like Eric Clapton at all!" I said, and we both had a hearty laugh, and I went on my way. In the last year or two, I have found my way back to Martyn, or he has found his way back to me, thanks largely to his 1980 album Grace and Danger. The record can sound smooth and jazzy if you don't pay close attention, but beneath the surface it's as raw a dissection of a failing relationship as, say, Shoot Out the Lights. "Some People Are Crazy," the opener, isn't among the most bruising songs; it's cryptic, but still dark and disturbing: Some people are crazy about him
Some people can't stand his face
Some people they smile when they know he's coming
Some people chase him out of the place At first blush, it seems like another "crazy for" song, but as it goes on, it becomes clear that there's a broader brief: Some people are crazy
Some people are just plain good
Some people talk wouldness and couldness
Some people don't do as they should, One of the people who didn't do as he should was Larry Williams. Williams started out as a songwriter and performer at Specialty Records in the mid-fifties, and he was designated as the label's star when Little Richard left rock and roll for the ministry in 1957. Williams had the songs, like "Bonie Moronie" and "Dizzy Miss Lizzie." He had the style. He had the platform. In "Baby's Crazy," though, he may be grasping at straws -- his main piece of evidence against the woman in the song, Marie, is that she doesn't love him like she used to do. Maybe she just came to her senses, or moved on. In real life, Williams' problems were more severe than just missing out on the record hop, thanks largely to his involvement with pimping and dealing. His life in the sixties and seventies was marked by drug and gun trouble, and in 1980 he was found dead of a gunshot wound outside of his Laurel Canyon home in a highly suspicious suicide.
Guns also figure in Bill Wyman's solo work, though they seem the stuff of blues legend rather than of reality. Monkey Grip, the bassist's 1974 album, was the first solo product from a Rolling Stone, and it opens with "I Wanna Get Me a Gun," which featured an excellent piano solo by Dr. John. "Crazy Woman" is the second song, and it builds its case slowly: Crazy woman
She caught me with somebody
Crazy woman
She caught me with somebody else
Crazy woman
She flew into a fury
Crazy woman
She said she's gonna get me some
Crazy woman
She said I'm gonna get what's coming
Crazy woman
Gonna get me with a gun Wyman's song highlights the ways in which "crazy" can be used as dismissal, even if it's tinged with admiration. After all, who is more qualified to offer his opinion on a woman's mental fitness than Wyman, who began a relationship with Mandy Smith when he was 47 and she was 13 and who drove her to a nervous breakdown and anorexia?
It has suddenly occurred to me that the woman I called crazy might be coming for me with a gun. Is that sexist? Is it dismissive? Can she even shoot a gun?
I'll end with a plea for sanity from John Lennon -- "Don't Be Crazy," from the Dakota Demos, is Lennon's workup for "(Just Like) Starting Over" -- and a pair of songs that handle craziness from the inside rather than the outside. Andy Fairweather Low is, like John Martyn, a respected and well-connected British guitarist and singer- - he has had professional relationships with Wyman, Clapton, and Roger Waters, among others - - who is more distinctive, if not more well-known, as a solo artist. The loping, beguiling "8 Ton Crazy" may be a love song, but it works more generically as a defense for temporary loss of reason: Hey mama morning, papa night and day
Don't treat me like I've got nothing to say
Please don't tell me that you think it's a shame
When things go wrong and there's no one to blame
'Cause I get 8 ton crazy
I get 8 ton mad
It's the strangest feeling
That I ever had
When you start tap-dancing
It makes me feel bad Finally, of course, there's Digital Underground's "Return of the Crazy One," which makes an strong case that a person's crazy parts are the most attractive, not to mention the most fun to handle. At times, Digital Underground sacrificed its comic genius for standard-issue P-Funk-derived hip-hop, but not as long as Humpty Hump was nearby. Here, Humpty presides over a celebration of alternative and maybe even revolutionary thinking. It seems like a good idea to quote it extensively, because what else can you do with joyful things? Lick lick let me lick
Smell let me smell the flavor
And taste the behavior
The way you
Been kicking it while the Humpster was lamping
Fishing and camping
Out renting boats in the Hamptons
Eating good, working out, and giving charity
Working on my vocal cord clarity
Hell no, I can't front, I been at the crib G-ing
Slapping poontang trying to be the mack pappy
40-dog and pina colada peeing
Making my rounds to keep the Humpty girls happy
If you missed me I was laying in the cut
Wrecking big butts
Scratching my knees
Cause my homegirl's cat got fleas
That's how it goes
The beat flow-flows
Yo peep the new color of my nose
Representing how we been living
That's how it is
I'm not the Biz
But if I was to pick a booger
It'd be a big fat gooey gold plated loogie
But I was born a yankee so I use my hanky
The way I wear my clothes freaks the hos 'cause I'm lanky
Speaking of hankies, I like hanky panky
Especially when the hanky panky's stanky
Of course ain't gonna be too much stanking
Cause then my duty would be to give the booty a spanking
I like biscuits and grits on the sausage
And so you know it's me, I wrote some nonsense
Hova glova nivlan blizman glaze niull And so, by way of apology to the crazy ones -- no, not exactly apology, but more a equal mix of admiration, impatience, fellowship, and challenge, all of which are tuned to a pleasant humming at the base of the brain because, well, there's nothing better than liking a person right on through the craziness -- I say, hova glova nivlan blizman glaze niull. And don't forget it.Labels: ben, hip-hop, rock and roll
posted by Ben
LINK |
Thursday, June 26, 2008
TRANSFUSION
Nervous Norvus
1956
Available on : Stone Age Woo
Norton : 2004
[Buy It]
NOON BALLOON TO RANGOON
Nervous Norvus
1956
Available on : Stone Age Woo
Norton : 2004
[Buy It]
At the start of the week a friend of mine called to say that she was in a poor mood. She considered a variety of causes--job, relationship, weird spot on her arm, crazy West Coat heat, biorhythms--and decided in the end to blame herself. "Maybe I'm too restless," she said.
"What's too restless?"
"You know," she said. "I think maybe I like novelty too much."
We hung up, and I thought about what she said, because, well, it's interesting. Does she like novelty too much? Life is boring at times--that seems hard to dispute--and while that boredom can be a source of frustration, it can also be a source of motivation. If you're in a job that has ceased to engage you, find a new one or a way to make the old one work. If you're in a relationship that feels drab, rejuvenuate yourself within it or rejuvenuate yourself without it. But the process of making things new is sometimes difficult to manage without feeling like a spoiled and greedy child. When you're seeking out new stimuli, how do you know when the jolt you've found is genuinely contributing to your sense of self and to the progress of your life (and when you're genuinely contributing to the lives of others), and when it's merely a new blip whose intensity will soon fade, leaving you yet again in search of something new? Should you settle for boring things and look for excitement in other areas of your life or should you hold out hope that you will discover something that exactly matches your needs?
These are only random notes on the problem, not even a whole melody. But thinking about novelty led me to thinking about novelty songs. The term, of course, refers to songs that are noteworthy not primarily for the beauty of their music or the skill of their musicians or the passion of their vocals, but rather for their comic strangeness. Sheb Wooley's "Purple People Eater," which was released fifty years ago today (well, this month, but today sounds more exciting), is one of the most famous novelty songs, so familiar that I won't bother posting it. "They're Coming to Take Me Away Ha-Haaa!" is another. It's annoying. On the other hand, there's C.W. McCall's "Convoy," which has the power to warm even the coldest hearts, and the dozens of novelty-flavored songs by artists with broader, more legitimate careers (Randy Newman's "Short People," Todd Rundgren's "Bang the Drum All Day," Offspring's "Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)"). Novelty songs provide respite from the drudgery of life, like a juggler appearing at work. But which juggler do you prefer? The guy dressed like a jester? The one who adds an apple in with his juggling balls and takes a bite of it when it comes around? This is a highly personal choice. I once dated a girl who loved Cheech and Chong's "Earache My Eye," no matter how many times I'd try to redirect her to Spike Jones. I'm sure some of you even know people who like Ray Stevens' "The Streak." When they get out of jail, you can ask them why.
Even in the land of novelty songs, there are upjuts of genius. Jimmy Drake was working as a truck driver when he created the Nervous Norvus persona in the mid-fifties. Over the course of a year, he recorded a string of truly cracked songs that mixed absurdist jive (much borrowed from the Bay Area musician and DJ Red Blanchard), conversational singing (with occasional leaps into strangulated yowling), and highly rudimentary guitar backing (supplemented by sound effects). Drake's first hit as Nervous Norvus, "Transfusion," sketches a series of car wrecks, focusing on (as the title indicates) the sanguinary needs of the victims. It belongs to the fairly large genre of car crash songs ("Leader of the Pack," "Last Kiss," "Tell Laura I Love Her"), but it's also a novelty song about novelty--all the crashes are caused by speeding, and all require (literally and metaphorically) new blood. There are parts of "Transfusion" that could come from a love song, or at least a lust song: Transfusion transfusion
My red corpuscles are in mass confusion The transfusion requests are the heart of the song: they end each verse with absurd rhymes--"Slip the blood to me, Bud," "Shoot the juice to me, Bruce," "Pass the claret to me, Barrett," and, best, "Pour the crimson in me, Jimson"--that forecast Paul Simon's "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover," another song about finding new blood. There's a tension, though, because the thrill of recklessness is counterweighted by risk: I'm never never never gonna speed again But he does. He always does.
"Transfusion," which went top ten, was followed by "Ape Call," a consideration of the courting practices of cavemen, and then there was one more Nervous Norvus single, "The Fang," a story about a Martian who comes to earth to chase skirt. But commercial momentum was slowing, in part because Drake didn't like appearing live as Nervous Norvus--he turned down a chance to perform "The Fang" on Ed Sullivan--and soon the act was history. Drake died in 1968. Then, in 2004, Norton records released a compilation that included several outtakes, including "Noon Balloon to Rangoon," which was rediscovered in a thrift store in Oakland and found its way back to the airwaves courtesy of Dr. Demento. "Noon Balloon to Rangoon" isn't just an oddity--it's a masterful oddity that holds up as one of the finest Nervous Norvus offerings. It shares most of the melody of "Transfusion," such as it is, and like its predecessor, it is a meta-novelty song. The lyrics are drawn directly from the Book of One Thousand and One Nights, perhaps literature's greatest lesson in the lifesaving powers of novelty: A boy named Aladdin had a magic lamp
His magic was the hottest in the Baghdad camp
What happened to Aladdin when the lamp got damp?
The noon balloon to Rangoon
Nervous Ali-Baba was a zorch mahalt
He trapped the forty thieves and laughed to hear them shout
What became of Ali-Baba when the thieves got out?
Noon balloon to Rangoon The lyrics go on, through Sinbad, through Scheherezade, but just as in "Transfusion" there's a tension between stimulus and safety: Rangoon is the safest place
When you get in a jam
So don't be a goon
Round about noon
Take that balloon and scram, Sam. The balloon is a vehicle of escape, but look at the escape route--it's to Rangoon, the safest place. Is that the solution, to pursue novelty from a solid foundation? And would Rangoon be deadly dull (rather than "a safe retreat") without the magic of the lamp or the carpet? It's worth further study. I'm not saying that all the answers to the questions of restlessness, energy, intensity, and comfort--how long to hold a job, how long to keep a lover, how long to stay in one place before hopping on a train or a plane or into a balloon--reside in two minutes of a never-released song recorded by a virtually unknown novelty singer. But I'm not saying that they're not.Labels: ben, novelty songs
posted by Ben
LINK |
Friday, June 20, 2008
I'M SAD ABOUT IT
Lee Moses
1966
Available on : Time and Place [reissue]
Castle : 2006
[Buy It]
SAD TOMORROWS
Marvin Gaye
1971
Available on : What's Going On [reissue]
Motown : 2001
[Buy It]
SAD SONG
Rachel Sweet
1978
Available on : Fool Around: The Best of Rachel Sweet
Rhino : 1992
[Buy It]
SO SAD ABOUT US
Shaun Cassidy
Wasp
Warner Bros. : 1980
[Buy It]
Cliff Arnall, a psychologist at the University of Cardiff at Wales, is a specialist in human moods and the conditions necessary to produce them. A few years ago, he used science to determine the unhappiest day of the year. Later on, he developed a precise way to measure the pleasures obtained during weekends. His proclamations are always accompanied by equations. For example, here is Arnall's equation for a perfect long weekend:
(C x R x ZZ) / ((Tt + D) x St) + (P x Pr) >400 A key is required. Tt equals travel time, D equals delays, C equals time spent on cultural activities, R equals time spent relaxing, ZZ equals time spent sleeping, St equals time spent in a state of stress, P equals time spent packing, and Pr equals time spent in preparation. Got it?
Of course you don't, unless you are insistently obtuse. No one gets it. There is nothing to get. It is an ugly thing, this equation, and unwieldy, and senseless in many small details (why Tt for travel time rather than just T?). It is also wrong down to its socks; as the doctor, journalist, and idiot-debunker Ben Goldacre pointed out, "if you pack for 10 hours and prepare for 40, then you get a result of 400, meaning you've apparently had a great weekend." Once I was going out of town with a girlfriend. I packed for ten hours and prepared for forty. It was not a great weekend. She got on the wrong side of a bad oyster and deposited her body weight in vomit upon the bed. [Ed. Note: Since the publication of this piece, an eagle-eyed reader has pointed out that Arnall's equation puts preparation and packing in the denominator, not the numerator, so that a high pack/prepare number would actually limit the pleasure of a trip. Well, the same rule holds. Once I packed a ton and prepared two tons and had a great vacation. Once I ran off spontaneously and forgot to bring pants. And not in a fun way.]
Goldacre's column goes on to point out that Arnall's infamous "Worst Day of the Year" equation was not only promoted by the TV channel SkyTravel but actually designed by the channel:
It's not surprising that these equations are so stupid, because they come from the PR companies almost fully-formed and ready to have your name attached to them. I know that because I have received an avalanche of insider stories--Watergate it isn't--including one from an academic in psychology who was offered money by Porter Novelli PR agency to put his name to the very same Sky Travel equation story that Arnall sold his to. In amongst their aggressive pitch they described how the story would go.
"Blue Monday - January Blues Day is Officially Announced: The 26th January is the most depressing day in the calendar for the majority of Brits as measured by a simple mathematical formula developed on behalf of Sky Travel.
"By taking into account various factors such as avg temperature (C), days since last pay (P), days until next bank holiday (B), avg hours of daylight (D) and number of nights in during mth (N), we create a formula such as C(P+B) N+D. This formula allows us to work out the day with the highest 'depression factor' which you can then use as a focus for making things better, booking your holiday etc ..." This is almost exactly as it was when Arnall revealed his important work to the world. This story is old news. Goldacre's piece ran more than a year ago. So why praise him, or bury Cliff Arnall, in June 2008? Well, here's why: because the ghost still walks. Four times today, I have heard from people that today is the happiest day of the year, and I have heard it because there is a story--a new story--making the rounds. Here is an excerpt from a piece that ran in today's Atlanta Journal Constitution:
Apparently it's the combination of brighter evenings, childhood memories, and the prospect of summer holidays that puts the best possible spin on today.
On paper, Arnall's equation looks like this: O + (N x S) + Cpm/T + He.
O is time spent outdoors.
N is time spent in nature.
S is more socialization in the summer.
Cpm relates to positive memories of childhood summers.
T factors in temperature.
He is vacation anticipation.
Arnall said his calculation isn't rocket science. Being outside produces energy, while increased socialization--such as barbecues with neighbors--stimulates pleasure zones in the brain. Also arousing feelings of euphoria are pleasant memories of childhood summers and the fact that vacations are just around the corner. This piece is foolish. Everything about it. But it would be innocuous enough were it not for the fact it's dead reverse wrong. Today is, as it turns out, not only not the happiest day of the year, but one of the sadder days. It's in the bottom half, easily. I have run across a handful of people today who are having sad days for no precise reason. Not bad days, but sad days. "I feel down," one friend said. "Not sure why." Another friend of mine had a good reason. His girlfriend recently told him that she wasn't sure how she felt about things, and that she had been thinking about an ex-boyfriend of hers, and in her thoughts he was not wearing pants. I told him he was supposed to be happy, and explained Arnall's equation. "Eff him," he said, and then sighed. He didn't even have the strength to say "fuck." A third friend is traveling, and she told me that she was at a train station, and she saw a young mother treating her infant son cruelly. "She had blank eyes, the mother," my friend said. "Aren't you supposed to love a baby no matter what? The whole thing just made me fear for humanity." And a fourth friend is going through some changes, as they say, and as a result she has been off the radar, and her decision to be off the radar saddens me. So that's five: a handful. My wife started the day thrilled. The weather was nice. Her coffee had just enough cream in it. But as soon as she heard about Arnall's equation, the day took a sharp downturn, in large part because of the equation. "Most days are going to have plenty of everything," she said. "How insulting is it to pick one day as a designated happy day? Now I'm in a terrible mood."
I don't blame these people for selling out Arnall's best-day propaganda. I run it in reverse, and blame his best-day propaganda for selling out these people. In their honor, in Dr. Goldacre's honor, here are some songs about sadness. Two are soul rarities, one from the nearly unknown Lee Moses, one from the universally revered Marvin Gaye. Two are power-pop oddities from former teen idols who have forged successful second careers on the small screen. I hope that this music will, though a combination of its formal skill, beauty, emotional reality, and energy, make you happy. (Fs + B) * (Er + En).Labels: ben
posted by Ben
LINK |
Friday, June 13, 2008
CELEBRATE THE NEWS
The Beach Boys
1969
Available on : Friends/20/20 [Extra Tracks]
Capitol : 1990
[Buy It]
I went to an event for a friend recently, a party. I don't need to be so vague but I don't need to be so specific either. This friend had finished a project that had taken up quite a bit of time, and the party was a celebration of that project, and I went to show support and to participate in the celebration. While I was there, I felt proud. Not proud of myself for going--that would be stupid--but proud of my friend for doing the thing that occasioned the celebration. I felt happiness, but there was something else, too, something that started as a little circle at the base of the throat and moved up, warmly, before moving back down again. I wanted my friend to be inspired by herself and her achievement, to feel that inspiration as a palpable presence, without needing the approval of others or cash on the barrelhead or anything else tangible or crass or temporary or illusory or false: without needing anything else at all. Are you allowed to be proud of someone? Are you allowed to want that person to experience, for a little while, the same swell of pride, that same sense of having set the world right--and to want that feeling to last at least until reality descends on the achievement like a pack of birds, pecking and picking? Maybe you're allowed, but I wasn't sure. I worried that if I said anything, it would seem presumptuous, or paternalistic, or cloying, or that she'd say "of course I'm proud" and turn and walk away and I'd feel foolish. Instead, I said that it was a fun party, which was both true and untrue. It was fun enough, but only because it was celebrating something that someone I believe in believed in, if that's not too knotty. It's hard to explain, maybe because it's so easy to understand, and whenever that happens I tend to let songs do the talking.
The song that's talking today is the Beach Boys' "Celebrate The News." Dennis Wilson had begun to assert himself on the 20/20 album, which was recorded in the fall of 1968, but when he headed back into the studio at the beginning of 1969, he was unusually fertile. He produced a handful of songs, some of which ended up on the Sunflower album in 1970 ("Got to Know the Woman," "Forever"). "Celebrate the News" didn't make the album--it was released as the B-side to the Brian Wilson-penned "Break Away," which was the last single the band did for Capitol before moving to Warner Bros. Despite the fact that it was somewhat buried, "Celebrate the News" is one of the finest late-sixties Beach Boys compositions, not to mention one of the oddest, which is really saying something. It starts with a friendly, spoken "hello" and then moves into a very abstract self-directed pep talk that's appropriate for a Friday the 13th posting.My luck was so bad
I thought I used up all the luck I had
Every time I thought I'd get it on
Someone put me on
There's been a change
Beautiful and strange
My life's gone through a change
Somehow I know
Bad luck's in the past
All good things here at last It's not that his luck has turned, necessarily, only that his belief about his luck has. You wouldn't think that he could hold on to that belief, but he does. The title only appears briefly in the lyrics, and what passes for the chorus is performed as a kind of round, with two refrains ("I've got news for you" and "bad luck no more") rising out of the swirling harmonies and chasing each other until neither is exhausted. Then the song lifts off into about a minute of layered repetition:Come on (come on), come on (come on)
Come on (come on), come on (come on)
Come on (come on), come on (come on)
Come on (come on), come on (come on)
Come on (come on), come on (come on)
Come on (come on), come on (come on)
Come on (come on), come on (come on)
Come on (come on), come on (come on) It's hippie philosophy, but it's genuinely felt and performed, which makes it highly affecting, not to mention strangely effective. Whenever I listen to "Celebrate the News," I want to go find some news to celebrate. This time, I celebrated my friend's news, her completed project and what it brought to her. Every silver lining has a cloud nearby, of course: a few years after "Celebrate the News," Dennis Wilson's optimism would wash away and darker tones would dominate, particularly on his ruined, beautiful solo album Pacific Ocean Blue. ("Farewell, My Friend," from that record, is one of the scariest songs you'll ever hear. Wilson described it as "happy." It's not.) By the early eighties, Wilson was floundering in drink and drugs, and then he drowned. "Celebrate The News," buoyant and airy, could have kept him afloat, at least for a little while.Labels: beach boys, ben
posted by Ben
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Monday, June 02, 2008
BO DIDDLEY-ITIS
Bo Diddley
Where It All Began
Chess : 1972
[Out of Print]
Bo Diddley, who died Monday at the age of 79, must have seemed square even in 1960: thick-framed glasses, rectangular guitar, black hat. He was probably the most conservative of the early rock stars who crossed over from R&B or country -- maybe Carl Perkins was -- in part because his persona was slow to evolve, or he was slow to evolve his persona, and in part because his musical formula, at least on the hits that made (and gave him) his name was more hidebound than that of his contemporaries. By the mid sixties, he was done making hits, off the charts for good. And yet, like Little Richard, like Jerry Lee Lewis, like Chuck Berry, some of his most interesting and committed music appeared in the early seventies. There was "The Black Gladiator," on which Bo was refashioned as a funk pioneer, which was not quite true and not quite successful but fascinating enough that the record has become prized by collectors. There were the cover versions of rock hits retrofit with the Bo Diddley beat, including a clutch of Creedence Clearwater Revival compositions. And then there was "Where It All Began," from 1972, overseen by the blues historian and producer Pete Welding and the R&B bandleader and innovator Johnny Otis. Released on Chess at a time when Chess no longer meant much, the record found Bo tearing into a set of new songs with more than simple professionalism, from the slinky and vaguely Latin "Woman" to "Look At Grandma," which is a not-very-poor cousin of Howard Tate's "Look At Granny Run Run." The best song on the album is its last song, "Bo Diddley-itis," which revives the Bo Diddley beat in a funk-freakout context to great effect. Bo lived another thirty-five years; released a number of other studio records, some lackluster, some redundant, some strong; played countless live shows, some seminal; was reintroduced to a new generation thanks to his commercials with Bo Jackson; became a founding father of rock-and-roll with dignity; grew old; grew ill; died. While most of the obituaries will point to "Bo Diddley" or "Bring it To Jerome" or "Who Do You Love" or "Mona," here, we're pointing to the disease, Bo Diddley-itis, which is also the cure. The record, like the man, is out of print.Labels: ben, rock
posted by Ben
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Thursday, May 29, 2008
BY THE LIGHT OF THE SILVERY MOON
Ada Jones
1910
Edison Blue Amberol 421
BY THE LIGHT OF THE SILVERY MOON
Jackie Wilson
1957
Avaialble on : Mr. Excitement
Rhino : 1992
[Buy It]
MOON IN JUNE
Soft Machine
Third
Sony BMG : 1970
[Buy It]
CRASH INTO JUNE
Game Theory
Big Shot Chronicles
Alias : 1986
[Buy It]
EVENING IN JUNE
Van Morrison
What's Wrong With This Picture?
Blue Note : 2003
[Buy It]
June, coming soon, is a fine month. Kenyan independence. Suzi Quatro's birthday. Weddings. But in popular music, it has a reputation--a bad one. June, of course, is held up as one of the words that songwriters just shouldn't touch, and especially not in combination with certain celestial bodies and/or common utensils. Remember when Yoko Ono revealed that John Lennon would wake at night and worry about why people were covering Paul McCartney's songs rather than his? This was how she consoled him: "I used to tell him, 'It's because you are a talented songwriter. You don't just rhyme June with spoon.'"
You can argue she was being too hard on Paul, or that she was treating him fairly and being too hard on June. June/moon/spoon rhymes go back well before popular song, into romantic poetry, but they've been the cliche people use to disparage cliche lyrics at least since the beginning of the last century. In 1915, in Writing for Vaudeville, Brett Page was already forgiving the sin as if it were universally familiar.
So far as the vital necessities of the popular song go, rhymes may occur regularly or irregularly, with fine effect in either instance, and the rhymes may be precise or not. To rhyme moon with June is not unforgivable. Even so, it's hard to imagine that Page would entirely forgive "By the Light of the Silvery Moon." With music by Gus Edwards and lyrics by Edward Madden, the song was first published in 1908 and covered, over time, by nearly everyone: Doris Day, Gene Vincent, Fats Domino, Little Richard. Ada Jones did one of the oldest versions in 1910; Jackie Wilson did one of the most old-fashioned in 1957 (though with some truly crazy falsetto midway through). In any event, the lyrics leave no cliché turned:
By the light, of the silvery moon,
I want to spoon,
To my honey I'll croon love's tune.
Honey moon, keep a-shinin' in June.
Your silv'ry beams will bring love's dreams,
We'll be cuddlin' soon,
By the silvery moon. The backlash came quickly. The Ring Lardner-George S Kaufman play "June Moon" lampooned the songwriting business in 1929, and even before that, in 1921, the popular tenor Billy Murray, a frequent duet partner of Jones, recorded "Stand Up and Sing Your Father an Old Time Tune," which wished for a return to an era of emotional Irish ballads, before Tin Pan Alley had corroded the minds of youth:
Sure now, stand up and sing for your father an old time tune,
Please stop the trash that you sing
Morning, night, and noon
Oh, I'm sick of all those ditties
About moon and spoon and June
So will you stand up and sing for your father an old time tune? The distaste with the commonness of these rhymes has lasted a surprisingly long time, helped along by an explosion of lyrical imagination in the mid-sixties and the birth of hundreds of new cliches in the years since. In the Magnetic Fields' "With Whom To Dance?" (from Get Lost, all the way back in 1995), Stephin Merritt tries to have it both ways:
Moons in June--I've given up on that stuff
Arms have charms but I've no hope of falling in love Merritt may be rejecting hackneyed rhymes out of bitterness over being excluded from the corresponding experiences, but he is rejecting it--the next rhyme pairs "dance" and "significance." The better a songwriter, the thinking goes, the less likely he or she is to lean on arms and charms--or love and dove, or heart and apart, or dream and seem, or fire and inspire. Moon and June is simply the worst of a bad bunch. The critic and poet Clive James tried his hand as a lyricist in the seventies, in collaboration with the singer Pete Atkin. The resulting songs were complex and literary, attempts--sometimes successful--to advance the form. In his poem "To Pete Atkin: A Letter From Paris," James lays the blame at the feet of pop music:
The Broadway partnership of words and tune
Had been dissolved by pop, which then reverted
In all good faith to rhyming moon with June,
Well pleased with the banalities it blurted.
Those speech defects would need attention soon. Soft Machine's "Moon in June" extends the argument even further, defiantly admitting a cliche into its title because its contents are so eclectic. And yet, underneath the thick blanket of prog-rock, it's just a story about a man and a woman, though one sung with incomparable oddness by Robert Wyatt:
On a dilemma between what I need and what I just want
Between your thighs I feel a sensation
How long can I resist the temptation?
I've got my bird, you've got your man
So who else do we need, really? It may take more than ten minutes, but in the end, simplicity outs; the distance between "Moon in June" and, say, "Silly Love Songs" isn't as great as Wyatt (or Yoko Ono) might think:
Singing a song in the morning
Singing it again at night
Don't really know what I'm singing about
But it makes me feel all right Sometimes, you can hold yourself apart from the cliches; sometimes you have to submit. Game Theory's "Crash Into June" frames its romance as jumpy and adolescent ("crash into June / in and out of tune/ it happens all too soon"), and I've never been sure whether Scott Miller is singing about a girl, a summer night, or one in the other. Van Morrison's "Evening in June" opts for a wiser, warmer approach, more autumnal than summery. Morrison has been on good terms with moons for nearly forty years, and here he doesn't betray much anxiety about sinking into cliche (or, for that matter, lifting the song's opening cushion of horns from Joni Mitchell's "Car On the Hill"):
By the light of the moon
When the night holds the secrets
Of the sleepy lagoon
I'm contemplating moonlight
On the water
When I'm walking with you
On an evening in June Labels: ben
posted by Ben
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Friday, May 23, 2008
STONED SOUL PICNIC
Laura Nyro
Eli and the Thirteenth Confession
Columbia : 1968
[Buy It]
PICNIC BOY
The Residents
The Commercial Album
East Side : 1997
[Buy It]
THIS AIN'T NO PICNIC
Minutemen
Double Nickels On the Dime
SST : 1984
[Buy It]
THE ATTACK OF THE GIANT ANTS
Blondie
Blondie
Private Stock : 1976
[Buy It]
ARMY ANTS
Tom Waits
Orphans
Anti : 2006
[Buy It]
I GOT ANTS IN MY PANTS (AND I WANT TO DANCE)
James Brown
1973
Available on : Motherlode
Polygram : 1988
[Buy It]
Before Memorial Day was Memorial Day, it was Decoration Day; wreaths and flags were placed on the graves and tombs of fallen Civil War soldiers. No one called it Memorial Day until 1882, fifteen years into Decoration Day celebrations, and the new name didn't have widespread currency until after World War II. In 1967, a Federal Law officially renamed the day, and the following year, the Uniform Monday Holiday Act fixed it in place on the last Monday in May. Southeastern states still observe Decoration Day on the Sunday before Memorial Day, and if you're looking for music about that, you might want to try the Drive-By Truckers' excellent "Decoration Day," from the album of the same name. If you're looking for music about the military, there's Chip Taylor's "Former American Soldier," John Lennon's "I Don't Want To Be A Soldier, Mama," the Shirelles' "Soldier Boy," and the Ronettes' "Soldier Baby of Mine," among hundreds of others. If you want a song that's straightforwardly about the holiday, without tricks or effects, there's James McMurtry's "Memorial Day." Here, it's all picnics and ants, ants and picnics. Grab a plate.Labels: ben
posted by Ben
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Thursday, May 15, 2008
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Miles Davis
1969
Available on : The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions
Sony : 1998
[Buy It]
YOUR ENEMIES CANNOT HARM YOU (BUT WATCH YOUR CLOSE FRIENDS)
Edward W. Clayborn
1927
Available on : Goodbye, Babylon
Dust-to-Digital : 2003
[Buy It]
(SHE'S SO) SELFISH
The Knack
Get the Knack
Capitol : 1979
[Buy It]
SHE'S MY BEST FRIEND
Lou Reed
Coney Island Baby
RCA Victor : 1976
[Buy It]
MY FRIENDS HAVE
Marianne Faithfull
Before the Poison
Anti : 2005
[Buy It]
OLD FRIENDS
Willie Nelson and Roger Miller (with Ray Price)
1982
Available on : One Hell Of a Ride
Sony : 2008
[Buy It]
The other day I was bothered by life: frustrated by it, impatient with everything around me. I went for a walk with the iPod, set to a playlist I made of especially long songs. They're intended to calm me down. One of them was Miles Davis's "Great Expectations," which he recorded during the Bitches Brew sessions and later released on Big Fun. The desired effect was not what I got. I found myself thinking about the title rather than the music--occupational hazard--and how many of life's disappointments result from unmanaged expectations. I went home and called a friend to complain. I picked the friend of mine who disappoints me the least. I can usually count on her to make me laugh or remind me that the world's a good place, if only because there are laugh-productive people like her in it. She answered curtly. "What's up?" she said. I said that I was bothered by something but couldn't quite figure it out. She said she'd have to call back. She is a landscape architect, and these days she's working on an arboretum, and she was waiting for a call from an insect expert.
"An expert on insects or an insect who is an expert?" I said.
"I have to go," she said. While I was waiting for her to get back to me, I became annoyed again, not at the world, but at myself. I had allowed myself to have high expectations again, and she hadn't lived up to them. Then I got annoyed at her. Were my expectations so high? I was feeling bothered, as I said, and I wanted a sympathetic ear, not an ear connected to a body that was preoccupied with a stupid insect expert. Mostly, I resented the fact that by ending the conversation without really talking to me, she had created an imbalance that, for a few minutes, seemed grave. She isn't always employed, at least not to the same degree. Arboretums are a seasonal concern. On days when she's not as busy, she calls me frequently to talk about her problems. Maybe she's fighting with her brother. Maybe she went on a bad date. Maybe a bird flew by her window and gave her a dirty look. I don't mind listening. I like it. But then the shoe is on the other hand, and I need her to talk to me, and she can't deal with my bad day, it irritates me.
What do you do when you're feeling this way? I've been known to kick a chair or say mean things to people nearby. This time, I listened to music. I started with Robert Johnson's "When You Got a Good Friend," which seems to be a song about treating those close to you well until you get to the third verse:
Mmm, baby I may be right or wrong
Baby, it your opinion, I may be right or wrong
Watch your close friend, baby, then you enemies can't do you no harm Johnson was taking up a theme articulated in other records of the twenties and thirties, most notably the preaching blues "Your Enemies Cannot Harm You (But Watch Your Close Friends)," by Edward W. Clayborn, which seems mostly like a big I-told-you-so to Jesus but also states explicitly that close friends have access to parts of you that others do not, and that they can use that access for good or evil:
People I want to tell you
Just how your friend will do
They will wait to get your secret
And dig a pit for you This started me thinking. What finished me thinking was the Knack's "(She's So) Selfish," which sketches out a related (if far more carnal) problem:
And she say
Gimme gimme gimme gimme
Gimme gimme gimme gimme
Gimme gimme gimme gimme
Gimme gimme gimme gimme please
Oh won't you give it to me please please please baby
Day after day after day
After night after night after night
You've been giving her what she wants
Is she giving you what you need
No way The song is four-and-a-half minutes long, and the impulse to send it had dulled by the third minute, mainly because I remembered that everyone is selfish, and everyone knows that everyone else is, too. If I like listening to my friend's problems and want to hear more of them as a result, doesn't that make me just as selfish as she is, but with a different agenda? Evidently there's something about hearing from her I like, and when the rate of contact is reduced, I kick and scream about it.
I became more reasonable. I couldn't help it. I know that in the days when she's calling me very often, it's partly because she's unhappy. It's not that she associates me with unhappiness. It's just that one of the versions of our relationship casts her as the somewhat underemployed, somewhat isolated one. I work in an office. She doesn't really. I am married. She isn't anymore. So frequent calling is a double-edged sword: I'm making her feel better, I hope, but she must also feel like she's reinforcing that side of herself: the underemployed, the isolated. At other times work gets busier (arboretum season!) or she starts dating someone, and in those times she goes partly off the radar. It's not that she vanishes entirely, or at all. But the parts of her that are more needy recede. Right now, both are true: arboretum, boyfriend. In many ways this is good. I'm sure she feels happier and more balanced. But since I have chosen to make peace with (and even learned to enjoy) the parts of her that are needy, I miss those parts of her. Or maybe I just resent that she doesn't seem to develop a corresponding interest in dealing with the parts of me that are needy. I always liked that part in Lou Reed's "She's My Best Friend" when he sings "she understands me when I'm falling down"; I have included the alternate, far louder version that was included on the "Coney Island Baby" rerelease.
The day went on, and I went on with it. I calmed down into circumspection, and started asking myself rhetorical questions. Did I have the right to feel annoyed I wasn't a higher priority that day for my friend? Of course. Did I have the right to say anything about it? Not really. Was I aware that any real friendship is the average of those days when you're not the other person's priority, the days when the other person isn't your priority, and the days when you're both more interested in engaging? Sure. I even found a song that summed it up nicely: "My Friends Have," which P.J. Harvey wrote and Marianne Faithfull sang. Like many Faithfull songs, it takes a fairly straightforward sentiment and turns it on its head with her blasted vocals:
My friends have many features
Many reasons, I can believe them
My friends have many things that
I am needing, to keep me singing
Yeah, you're a friend of mine
You're a friend of mine
Yeah, you're a friend of mine
You're a friend of mine Eventually my friend called back. We had a nice conversation. I accused her of being a jerk for not coming through but admitted that I was a jerk for expecting too much. She agreed and added that I was a jerk for even thinking of sending her the Knack song, which she remembered had a line in which the woman gets the guy "by the short hairs." "The singer says 'it's the only thing she'll leave you down there,'" she said. "That's disgusting."
As we spoke, I faced into the galling realization that as I get older, I need people more. And not people in the abstract: Certain people. Friends used to be more fungible: if one went missing, I'd pick up the thread with another one. It made life easier. But then you settle into yourself, and you meet your wife, and you have children, and time sifts whether you want it to or not, and most friends recede. Those few who remain become permanently, irreversibly important. You can act casual. You should. Admitting that other people--specific other people--are important to your survival is embarrassing, even more so if it's true. I can't predict the future at all, so I can't predict the future of the friendship between me the landscape architect. It's just as likely she'll acquire a serious boyfriend who doesn't like the idea of her having close friendships, or that someone will hire her to design a town square in Alaska, and she'll vanish never to reappear. But I'm entitled to my hope, no matter how prognostically nostalgic and mawkish. And in the same spirit, I'm entitled to "Old Friends," not the Simon and Garfunkel hit but a Roger Miller song on which he's joined by Willie Nelson and Ray Price:
Old friends
Pitching pennies in the park
Playing croquet til it's dark
Old friends
Swapping lies of lives and loves
Pitching popcorn to the doves
Old friends
Looking up to watch a bird
Holding arms to climb a curb
Old friends
Lord when all my work is done
Bless my life, grant me one
Old friend We can go to the arboretum.Labels: ben, country, rock
posted by Ben
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Friday, May 02, 2008
REELING
Stew
The Naked Dutch Painter and Other Songs
Image Entertainment : 2002
[Buy It]
JEEZ LOUISE
Zumpano
Look What the Rookie Did
Sub Pop : 1995
[Buy It]
Gift horse, mouth: I bitched about spring in my last post and got a week of rain and chill in return. But now the weather may be turning. There's a chance that it'll be the springest spring that every sprang, as the homeless guy muttered to himself as I passed by him this morning. In that spirit I offer two happy pop songs, as befits the springiest spring etc. Though they are quite different--one is Canadian, for godsake--here are five things that the two songs have in common.
1. Both are relatively recent. This is intentional. Last week's selections were all from jazz and popular singers of thirties, forties, and fifties. When my wife read that earlier post, she said, "People will think you're 70," which hurt my feelings as I am only sixty-seven.
2. Both are songs by artists who have gone on to bigger and excellent-but-not-necessarily better things. Stew created the Off- and then On- Broadway musical "Passing Strange," which ensures that more people will know that he is one of the most accomplished (this is a fancy way of saying "best") psychedelic/soul songwriters of the century. Carl Newman, Zumpano's lead singer and main songwriter, went on to form New Pornographers. As it turns out, I prefer the old pornography.
3. Both are indie. I guess. Or are they? See Alex's long, excellent post of earlier this week to resolve the issue. He did the heavy lifting; this post hides behind uplift and light. But if you want to consider the question "What is pop?" to go along with "What is indie?" feel free. Or, better, yet, return to Alex's post and take part in the ongoing colloquy. It is a highly demanding adult conversation that I will not replicate, even in part, here. It seems like the wrong setting. (A friend who read a draft of this post hinted--and then came right out and said--that the process of gushing about pop songs is inherently juvenile. "Teenagery," she said. Maybe. Sourpuss!)
4. Both are perfect. That's why you may find yourself experiencing pleasure when you hear them, or (if you already know them) experiencing both pleasure and the memory of pleasure. They are like girls who are so beautiful that they don't have a bad angle. In fact, I will now irresponsibly and teenagerishly declare that they are the only two songs of the last fifteen years where I wouldn't change a note. For comparison purposes, here are the number of notes I would change in a few other songs:"The Song is the Single": 3
"Endicott": 2
"Generation Landslide": 3
"Nicotine and Gravy": 8
"Albatross": 1
"Badge": 7
"Umbrella": 3
"Small Stakes": .5
"Jambalaya": 82 5. Both are above.Labels: ben, pop
posted by Ben
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Thursday, April 24, 2008
SOME OTHER SPRING
Billie Holiday
1939
Available on : Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia
Sony : 2001
[Buy It]
SPRING IS HERE
Frank Sinatra
Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely
Capitol : 1958
[Buy It]
SPRING WILL BE A LITTLE LATE THIS YEAR
Sarah Vaughan
Sarah Vaughan in Hi-Fi
Sony : 1949
[Buy It]
APRIL IN MY HEART
Billie Holiday
1938
Available on : Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia
Sony : 2001
[Buy It]
A friend of mine called and left a message. I was having coffee with another friend, and I called her back when I was done. "Hi," I said.
"Yeah," she said. "I guess."
"Nice weather," I said. I hadn't meant to say anything about the weather. This friend and I are well beyond small talk, and she had other matters on her mind: she was going through a breakup, maybe, or steeling herself to head back into a relationship that had given her more misery than happiness over the past few years. But the sun was bright and the air was clear and there was actually a bird chirping in the tree just over my head. I didn't look up, but I wouldn't have been surprised if it was a cartoon bluebird.
She sighed. "It seems nice," She sighed again. As it turned out, it wasn't that she didn't want to talk about the weather. It was that she wanted to talk about the weather as a villain. "The weather only makes it worse," she said. "It's like the world is mocking me."
I laughed. That seemed like a preposterous thing to say. On the other hand, when I turned the corner, there was a firework of brilliantly colored flowers in someone's front yard and a little boy chasing a dog on the other side of the street. A minute later, a convertible sped by, driven by a man in his forties, I'd guess, who had a young woman beside him. I didn't mention the flowers or the boy or the man in the convertible. The woman was beautiful, which I didn't mention either.
We spoke for a few minutes. She asked me to call her back when I was home. "It's too noisy outside," she said.
"Okay," I said. When I hung up, I didn't put my headphones back in, which is what normally would have happened. Instead, I listened to the day. It wasn't noisy at all, though the people sitting on stoops and leaning against fences were smiling audibly. Maybe that's what was she was hearing. The convertible had parked on the next block. The man and the woman were still sitting in the car. His hand was on her thigh, inching upward. They were laughing.
When I got home, I called her back. She wasn't home. While I waited for her to return the call, I went to find some songs about the nice weather, and I discovered that the vast majority of songwriters agree with my friend. More often than not, the American songbook sees spring as a cruel trick perpetrated on sad people. The older the songs get, the more certain they are of this theory. Billie Holliday's "Some Other Spring," written by Irene Kitchings and Arthur Herzog, Jr., is the best of the bunch, and one of the most direct:Sunshine's around me
But deep in my heart
It's cold as ice
Love, once you found me
But can that story
Unfold twice? Spring's deceit--or at the very least the oppressive nature of nature during the season of rebirth and beauty--is also the subject of "Spring is Here," a Rodgers/Hart composition that has been recorded by Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, and others. Frank Sinatra's version appears on "Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely," whose bleakness begins with its title and rarely lets up:Spring is here--Why doesn't my heart go dancing?
Spring is here--Why isn't the waltz entrancing?
No desire, no ambition leads me,
Maybe it's because nobody needs me. Neither Billie Holiday nor Frank Sinatra would have been happy to see the guy in the convertible. Sinatra might have snapped off one of the car's side mirrors and beaten the guy with it. Slightly more optimistic is "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year," Frank Loesser's song, which here is sung by Sarah Vaughan and holds out hope that internal happiness is merely lagging behind the weather:Spring will be a little late this year
A little late arriving, in my lonely world over here
For you have left me and where is our April love old
Yes you have left me and winter continues cold
As if to say that spring will be a little slow to start
A little slow reviving that music it made in my heart My friend hadn't called back. I looked out the window and wondered if there was any visible difference between a sunny window in April and a sunny window in September. If trees were in view, you could tell time by their leaves. If people were in view, you could guess the month based on their clothes. But what about their faces? There was one older woman in a heavy sweater, beaming; she would have been in spring even in September, or November. That's the argument of Billie Holiday's "April in My Heart," which is a precise counterweight to "Some Other Spring" and all the rest of the false spring lyrics:There's snowflakes in the sky
And geese are flying high
But it's April in my heart again
The devil got his due
Love's holiday is through
Love and I have made a happy start again
Through leaves lie on the ground
The world just turned around
It isn't fall at all you see
It's spring that I have found
There's frost in Central Park
At five it's almost dark
What's the difference
When you've heard love's sweet amen
There's snowflakes in the sky
And geese are flying high
But there's April in my heart again The phone rang. My friend was calling. I picked up. "Hi," I said.
"Hi," she said. "Took a walk. Feel better."
"Really?" I said.
"Yep," she said. "Though it could fade any second. I'm going to get off the phone and sit outside while I can still bear it."
We hung up. About ten minutes later, the sky darkened and it started to rain. I didn't call my friend to see if she was sitting outside in the rain. I'm guessing it pleased her, in some small way.Labels: ben
posted by Ben
LINK |
Friday, April 11, 2008
MONEY (THAT'S WHAT I WANT)
Paul Revere and the Raiders
1964
Available on : Mojo Workout!
Sundazed : 2000
[Buy It]
I NEED SOME MONEY
John Lee Hooker
1960
Available on : Hooker
Shout Factory : 2006
[Buy It]
MONEY NEVER RUNS OUT
Cannon's Jug Stompers
1929
Available on : The Best Of Cannon's Jug Stompers
Yazoo : 2001
[Buy It]
DIRTY MONEY
Clipse
Hell Hath No Fury
Re-Up Gang : 2006
[Buy It]
MY BABY'S JUST LIKE MONEY
Lefty Frizzell
1951
Available on : Life's Like Poetry
Bear Family : 1994
[Buy It]
SHE TOOK ALL THE MONEY
Frank Black
Bluefinger
Cooking Vinyl : 2007
[Buy It]
LOVE OR MONEY
Prince
7" Single
Paisley Park : 1986
MUSIC FOR MONEY
Nick Lowe
Jesus of Cool
Demon : 1978
[Buy It]
This week has been all about money.
It's tax season, but it's more than that. I have a friend who came into some money. I have a friend who was seized by terror at the thought that she doesn't have enough money. I have a friend who lost money in a bad deal. I have a friend who found some money on the sidewalk. I spent most of a morning and part of an afternoon sitting in a gray chair in a bank lobby, conducting various transactions on behalf of myself and my money. These are just incidents, and they don't coalesce into a philosophy. Money thwarts philosophy, or rather it requires the simultaneous operation of many philosophies. Money is life. Money is death. Money is freedom. Money is a prison. Money is the root of all evil. Money can't buy you love. Money changes hands. Money changes everything.
This week, being all about money, is also about jokes about money. People have been telling them to me all the time. "Joke" might not be the right word. Grimly comic statements about money, let's say. "If I had a nickel for every time I've spent a nickel," one friend said, "I'd break even." Another friend tried to make a withdrawal from an ATM, only to find out that her card had been frozen. "Come out of there, you cowards," she said, pounding on the screen. I told them both one of my favorite jokes about money, which is a Johnny Carson joke. Abraham Lincoln goes to a nightclub. He hands the doorman a five-dollar bill. "You trying to bribe me?" the doorman says, offended.
"Bribe?" Lincoln says. "No, of course not. That's my ID."
There are profound things to say about money, but most of them have already been said in the songs above. Paul Revere and the Raiders say some of them in the mock-bitter spoken introduction to Berry Gordy's "Money." John Lee Hooker, who was performing a version of "I Need Some Money" before Gordy reinvented the song, says some of them in his reclaimed version. Cannon's Jug Stompers imagine a world where money flows like water. Clipse investigates the link between financial and sexual control. As does Lefty Frizzell. As does Black Francis. As does Prince. And Nick Lowe's just singing for his supper.
As thinking is free, please list any and all thoughts about money after listening to these free songs on this wonderful blog where writers write for free.Labels: ben, soul
posted by Ben
LINK |
Thursday, April 03, 2008
QIDRECHINNA (I AM DESTINED TO LOVE)
Abdel Gadir Salim
Blues in Khartoum
Institute Du Monde Afrique : 1999
[Buy It]
YA WANNA BUY A BUNNY?
Spike Jones and His City Slickers
1949
Available on : Greatest Hits!!!
RCA : 1999
[Buy It]
PINBALL WIZARD
Elton John
Tommy: The Soundtrack
Universal : 1975
[Buy It]
VALENTINE AND GARUDA
Frank Black and the Catholics
Black Letter Days
Spin Art : 2002
[Buy It]
YOU'RE THE REASON OUR KIDS ARE UGLY
Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn
1978
Available on : The Definitive Selection
MCA Nashville : 2005
[Buy It]
SEE THE BIG MAN CRY
Charlie Louvin
1965
Available on : Greatest Hits
Import : 2004
[Buy It]
When I was seven, I went through my parents' records and played all of them. It was a pretty standard mid-seventies set: Beatles, Beach Boys, Supremes, James Taylor, Carole King, West Side Story, maybe one or two Jimi Hendrix records. I remember sitting cross-legged in the living room and listening to Smokey Robinson.
I am using this memory as a shield against sentimentality.
Today is my older son's seventh birthday. Last week, my younger son turned four. My wife and I will throw them parties, take pictures, wish they had fewer toys: the usual. It's strange to have kids, especially kids who are becoming people, and it is also the most natural thing in the world.
I am using this truism as a shield against sentimentality.
There are few memories that still survive from 1973, when I turned four; even 1976, when I turned seven, is mostly a blur of Jimmy Carter's gigantic teeth and TV commercials celebrating the bicentennial, principally through low rates on car loans. Still, I remember clearly the first time I heard Jim Croce's "One Less Set of Footsteps," when I was the age of my younger son, and how frightened I was. I also remember hearing the Ohio Players' "Love Rollercoaster" in 1975, when it was all over the radio, and trying to get the blinds on one of the front windows to move in sync with the guitar part. So I don't want to underestimate the degree to which my sons, even if they're not identifying themselves by the music they like, are identifying music that they like. My younger son seems, so far, to favor soundtrack music and classical music, neither of which made a tremendous impression on my older son when he was that age. When we watch movies, my younger son will start humming the score and say, "I like this music." Later on, he will hum it again. My older son prefers songs with simple melodies and complicated lyrics. He repeats the lyrics to himself later. The earliest examples of this, which date from when he was two or even younger, are Ian Dury's "Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll," Captain Beefheart's "Tropical Hot Dog Night," Frank Black's "Valentine and Garuda," and the Rolling Stones "Let It Bleed." I'd be playing them at home or in the car and he'd perk up, and ask me what they were, and smile, and laugh, and ask for them again. There are enough exceptions, of course, that these cease to be rules. The younger one got completely hooked on the Hives' "Tick Tick Boom." The older one loves Buddy Holly. The younger one has, for the last twenty nights in a row, forced me to put him to bed with a copy of "Born in the U.S.A." playing in an old cassette machine that is very similar to the one I had in 1976. The older one, at three, choreographed a modern dance set to Elton John's version of "Pinball Wizard." He later taught it to the younger one, who added a few flourishes of his own. Both of them worship Michael Jackson and AC/DC and Spike Jones, which only means that they are part of the human race. And both of them are obsessed to the point of joy with "Qidrechinna," a song by the Sudanese pop singer Abdel Gadir Salim.
Soon they will get older, will cease to experience that joy, or else they will conceal that joy from me and my wife. That day's not too far off. Until then, they're little, and their appetite for the world is large, and so I'm going to wish them a happy birthday by posting a quartet of songs that they love, and then a pair of songs that they don't know. Both are country songs, because it's a genre they don't particularly like, and I am a sadist. I am using sadism as a shield against sentimentality. One of them is Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty's "You're the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly," which distills the chaos of domestic bliss into low comedy. Besides that, all of our kids took after your part of our family anyway.
Oh they did, huh? What about the one's that's bald?
Well, I guess you might say they took after me. I am using low comedy as a shield against sentimentality.
The other is Charlie Louvin's "See the Big Man Cry," in which a man spies on his estranged wife and the child who does not even know him. Many married men have imagined circumstances that would separate them from their wives--falling in love with others, losing the war of attrition against boredom and self-hatred. But being separated from children is an atrocity, and Louvin mines it for maximum horror: I followed them to the pet shop window the little boy stopped to see
He looked up at her said if I had a daddy he'd buy that puppy for me
See the big man cry mama that's what I heard him say
See the big man cry mama he looks like his heart will break I am using horror as a shield against sentimentality.
I am not, as you will notice, posting Harry Chapin's "Cat's in the Cradle," though I will admit that Verities and Balderdash, the album on which the song originally appeared, was one of the records in my parents' collection, and that I probably took it out and played it once or twice. I am not posting it because, well, I am still holding the shield against sentimentality, though it's quaking a little bit when I think of my sons, littler than I ever remember being, dancing around the living room to "Pinball Wizard."Labels: ben, country, rock
posted by Ben
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Friday, March 28, 2008
MEAN WOMAN BLUES
Jerry Lee Lewis
1964
Available on : Live at the Star Club, Hamburg
Bear Family : 1989
[Buy It]
MEAT MAN
Jerry Lee Lewis
Southern Roots
Mercury : 1974
[Buy It]
ROCK AND ROLL (WITH JIMMY PAGE)
Jerry Lee Lewis
Last Man Standing
Artist First : 2006
[Buy It]
Last night, I saw Jerry Lee Lewis play at Town Hall in New York. Lewis is seventy-two, but he has seemed at least that old for decades -- I remember watching him on Michael Nesmith's "Elephant Parts" in 1981, and he looked ancient even then, stiff behind the piano and vaguely sepulchral until he opened his mouth. At Town Hall, he was in decent spirits and in decent voice, and his piano playing was entertaining, but to use words like "decent" and "entertaining" to describe Jerry Lee Lewis is like saying that Jesse Owens moved okay in old age: depressing. I'm not sure he was depressed, and I'm sure most of the crowd wasn't depressed, but the universe might have been. For starters, there's the obvious problem of playing songs about teenage rebellion and lickerishness when you're within sight of death. People were screaming for "High School Confidential." Why? The songs that as a younger man drew on a not-yet-earned world-weariness, which include many of his country hits, worked better, and the earliest case of this, "End of the Road," which also happens to be his first record ever, worked best of all. His singing took control of the melody rather than the other way around, and the crowd withdrew slightly from appreciating him as a nostalgia act. Which was, of course, most of the trouble. The man a few rows ahead of me who waved his arm above his head for an hour solid knew all the songs, but to him they were all the same: they were Jerry Lee live, and that was enough. And the girl a few rows behind me who came with her parents kept running to the front of the house to try to take a picture of the Killer with her cell phone. She was eleven or twelve; forty years ago, you wouldn't have sent a girl that age toward Jerry Lee without great reservations.
The most conspicuous absence of the night wasn't youth or vigor or even libido--Jerry Lee seemed to get it up fine for "Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On." What was missing, above all, was competition. On "Live at the Star Club, Hamburg," from 1964, Jerry Lee made a point of systematically destroying each of his rivals for rock and roll primacy: leading (and often humiliating) the Nashville Teens, the Killer declared lightning war on Elvis ("Hound Dog"), Ray Charles ("What'd I Say"), Carl Perkins ("Matchbox"), Little Richard ("Good Golly Miss Molly"), and others. The album's opener, "Mean Woman Blues," took the Roy Orbison hit and beat what can only be described as the living shit out of it. That fire burned inside Jerry Lee from the beginning of his career, and never went out. Jealousy drove him to such a great degree that he was the only real choice to play Iago in Jack Good's visionary, if unhinged, rock production of Othello, Catch My Soul. Alex has posted about the show before; all I'll add is that Jerry Lee hardly heeded these lines, either straightforwardly or ironically:
O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-ey'd monster, which doth mock The meat it feeds on Catch My Soul wouldn't be the last time that meat was served. "Meat Man," from 1974, has been read as a dirty song about oral sex, and it most likely is:
I got jaws like a bear trap
Teeth like a razor
Got a Maytag tongue
With a sensitive taste But it's also a song about oral sex in some very specific places:
I been down to Macon, Georgia
I ate the fur off a Georgia peach
Plucked me a chicken in Memphis
Mama, I still got feathers in my teeth Mack Vickery wrote the song, and maybe in his version, the visits to Macon and Memphis are ways of tracing the paths of unattainable idols--and, while he's there, notching some conquests. But Jerry Lee's version has to be read, in part, as an explicit domination of Little Richard and Elvis. Two years after that, in fact, Jerry Lee showed up at Graceland, drunk and packing, demanding to see the King. The Jerry Lee that came to Town Hall last night was still pumping the piano, but the context has changed greatly. Most of those contemporaries who stoked his fire are dead, and the ones who aren't dead aren't stoking his fire anymore. If there was a competition, he has won simply by surviving. His most recent studio album was a festschrift of sorts on which he collaborated, without animus, with several other aging rockers. It was called Last Man Standing, and even though he was seated for the entirety of last night's performance, the point is taken.Labels: ben, rock and roll
posted by Ben
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Friday, March 21, 2008
KILL IT KID
Blind Willie McTell
Atlanta Twelve String
Atlantic : 1949
[Buy It]
Someone once asked me if the reason I wrote was that I couldn't sing. "Sometimes it seems like you'd rather be a singer," she said. "But you do your best." I rolled away from her and faced the other way in bed. It hurt my feelings: not the part about why I wrote, but the part about not being able to sing. If I had been smarter, or quicker, or happier, or older, I would have said that she had hit the nail on the head, gotten up, put on a record, gone back to bed, and done my best. That record would have been "Kill It Kid."Labels: ben, blues
posted by Ben
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Friday, March 14, 2008
LOVE FOR SALE
Elvis Costello
1981
Available on : Trust (Expanded)
Rhino: 2003
[Buy It]
LOVE FOR SALE
Fine Young Cannibals
Available on : Red Hot + Blue
Capitol : 1990
[Buy It]
DAY TRIPPER
The Jimi Hendrix Experience
1967
Available on : BBC Sessions
Experience Hendrix : 1998
[Buy It]
SHE WORKS HARD FOR THE MONEY
Donna Summer
She Works Hard For the Money
Polygram : 1983
[Buy It]
I COULDN'T PAY FOR WHAT I GOT LAST NIGHT
Swamp Dogg
Gag a Maggot
Stone Dogg : 1973
[Out of Print]
THE MIND DOES THE DANCING WHILE THE BODY PULLS THE STRINGS
Swamp Dogg
Have You Heard This Story?
Island : 1975
[Out of Print]
In 1930, Cole Porter and Herbert Fields wrote the musical "The New Yorkers," which told the story of a socialite who embarked on a fling with a bootlegger and began to investigate the city's underbelly: bootleggers, thieves, the demimonde. One of the songs in the production was Porter's "Love For Sale.":When the only sound in the empty street,
Is the heavy tread of the heavy feet
That belong to a lonesome cop
I open shop.
When the moon so long has been gazing down
On the wayward ways of this wayward town.
That her smile becomes a smirk,
I go to work.
Love for sale,
Appetising young love for sale.
Love that's fresh and still unspoiled,
Love that's only slightly soiled,
Love for sale.
Who will buy?
Who would like to sample my supply?
Who's prepared to pay the price,
For a trip to paradise? "Love for Sale" was a hit at the time for Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians; over the years, scores of performers have taken a crack at it, including Billie Holiday, Art Tatum, Elvis Costello (who kept the lyrics intact), and Fine Young Cannibals (who focussed on the chorus and filled the corners of the mix with actual fake street noise). In early 2008, the song was covered, of a fashion, by New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, who was exposed as a customer of a high-priced escort service.
As a politician, Spitzer shot himself in the foot, and then the other foot, and then between his own legs. As a human being, though, he joined a long, storied, and highly equivocal tradition. The Beatles, who consorted with all kinds of ladies of all kinds of evenings in Hamburg, liked to joke that "Day Tripper," was about prostitution, as they did at an August 1966 press conference in Los Angeles:Q: I'd like to direct this question to messrs. Lennon and McCartney. In a recent article, Time magazine put down pop music. And they referred to "Day Tripper" as being about a prostitute...
PAUL: (nodding) Oh yeah.
Q: And "Norwegian Wood" as being about a lesbian.
PAUL: (nodding) Oh yeah.
Q: I just wanted to know what your intent was when you wrote it, and what your feeling is about the Time magazine criticism of the music that is being written today.
PAUL: We were just trying to write songs about prostitutes and lesbians, that's all.
(room erupts with laughter)
JOHN: "...quipped Ringo."
PAUL: (chuckles) Cut!!
JOHN: You can't use it on the air, that. Donna Summer was certainly not joking in "She Works Hard for the Money." The song's video, which you will no doubt remember from the nineteen-eighties, includes scenes of women working in sweatshops, as nurses, and as policewomen; the main character is a waitress in a diner (played by an actress, though it echoes the picture of Summer on the record sleeve). Beneath that, though, it is explicitly identified as a tribute to "the working woman," and it's hard to subtract prostitution from that equation:Twenty five years have
Come and gone
And she's seen a lot of tears
Of the ones who come in
They really seem to need her there
It's a sacrifice working day to day
For little money just tips for pay
But it's worth it all
Just to hear them say that they care Spitzer's escort-service patronage raises several issues about the sanctity of the marriage contract, particularly the function of married sex--which, as we know, is the kind you don't shell out $4300 for, even if it does involve unprotected assplay or drugs or whatever the unsafe practices hinted at actually were. I have sung the praises of Swamp Dogg repeatedly, but it's more efficient just to let him sing. In "I Couldn't Pay For What I Got Last Night," he tells his girlfriend or wife why she's the one for him:Last night you kissed me and my heart began to flutter
And I melted in your arms like good old country butter
You whispered sweet words honey in my ear
I knew it was the truth when you said "I love you"
You got a way of treating a man so right
If I had all the money in the whole wide world
I couldn't pay for what I got last night The girlfriend or wife will no doubt be thrilled to hear this, but also a little disconcerted. After all, who has introduced the concept of payment here? He has. A second before the song started, no one was thinking about paying anything. It's like "Can't Buy Me Love" turned to less reputable ends. And then there's the more philosophical, more funky, and more monumental "The Mind Does the Dancing While the Body Pulls The Strings," which goes halfway to explaining why men--in power or out of power, in marriages or out of them, in sickness or in health--don't always make the right decision in carnal matters:Every time you parade it never fails to rain
All experienced spectators advising you get it together
Oh, a meteorologist what's going to be the weather?
Your mind is playing tricks on you
It's got you so confused
You can't talk right all you do is stutter
You want to know why white milk makes yellow butter
Where do lights go when they go out
There's too many things you feel you gotta find out about
The mind does the dancing and the body keeps pulling the strings But the last word should belong to Michael Keaton--or rather Michael Keaton as Bill Blazejowski in Ron Howard's 1982 comedy "Night Shift," in which a pair of morgue workers (Keaton and Henry Winkler) decide to start an escort service. As the business gets underway, Bill assembles all the working girls, writes the word "Prostitution" on a chalkboard, and proceeds to deliver one of the finest motivational speeches in the history of the movies. I am quoting from a twenty-five year-old memory, so I may be a bit off:Prostitution--what does that mean really? The first thing you have to do to find out what a word means is break it up. "Pros." Doesn't mean anything. "Tit." We're all big boys and girls; I think we know what that means. "Tu." Well, there's two of them. "Shun"--that's from the Greek, meaning "I don't want it, I don't need it, push it away." I have no idea what the hell that's doing here. Labels: ben, jazz, soul, vocals
posted by Ben
LINK |
Friday, March 07, 2008
JUST LIKE A TEETER-TOTTER
Bar-Kays
Animal
Polygram : 1988
[Buy It]
One day this week I was talking to a friend. She was thwarted by this, confused by that, suddenly too clear on the other thing. She said that she needed to make a decision but didn't know what to do. I had no insight into the matter. A few days later, we had switched places. A cloud of uncertainty hung over my head and she, on to other matters, had no counsel. The situation displeased me--not the fact that neither of us could make up our mind, exactly, but the fact that nothing matched. She was up, I was down. I was up, she was down. I spun the dial and landed back in 1988, with the Bar-Kays.
The Bar-Kays, of course, were a Memphis soul band that recorded the immortal "Soul Finger" in 1967, weathered a major tragedy when three members died in the plane crash that also claimed the life of Otis Redding, released a number of solid singles in the early seventies, and survived to become industry veterans despite steadily diminishing artistic returns. In 1988, they put out an album called Animal. If you haven't heard of it, then you belong to the vast majority of humanity. The best song on the album is the only good song on the album, and it hardly sounds like the Bar-Kays at all. That song, "Just Like a Teeter-Totter," was created in collaboration with Sly Stone, and from the first, it sets out to destabilize: It's just as easy to see as it is to say
It looks like it's free but you will have to pay And then, later: You remember the prayer but you forgot how to pray
When you learn how to swear you got less to say
It can't be wrong when it's right
When you lie in the day you lie awake at night The writing is typical of Sly's work during that period, deceptively simple and ultimately maddening. As the title suggests, the song is broadly concerned with not being able to make up your mind, and the music falls in line behind the lyrics. "Just Like a Teeter-Totter" shudders and judders. It lurches through time, both thwarting and enabling perspective (the "see" and "saw" that keep surfacing are not just two halves of the same word, but also the same verb in different tenses). The arrangement is bare-bones in the most frightening sense; it feels like a ribcage that has yet to be covered by flesh, or has recently been uncovered. The chorus is where the Bar-Kays meet Bartleby, and the song not only dramatizes the problem of equivocation but locates the solution in annihilating all choice: Just like a teeter-totter
Don't know if you oughta A few days after my friend and I were out of sync, I called her. I had resolved my problem and she had dealt with hers, too. "Not sure exactly why it gave me so much trouble," she said. I had no insight into the matter. I asked her if she knew the Bar-Kays song. "Nope," she said. "Send it to me." I said I would. I didn't.Labels: ben, funk
posted by Ben
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Friday, February 29, 2008
UNDER MY THUMB
The Rolling Stones
Aftermath
Abkco : 1966
[Buy It]
IT'S THE SAME OLD SONG
The Four Tops
1965
Available on : Anthology
Motown : 1974
[Buy It]
REVOLUTION
The Beatles
Love
Capitol : 2006
[Buy It]
DO UNTO OTHERS
Pee Wee Crayton
1954
Available on : Complete Aladdin and Imperial Recordings
EMI Int'l : 1996
[Buy It]
DO YA THINK I'M SEXY?
Rod Stewart
Blondes Have More Fun
Warner Bros. : 1978
[Buy It]
(IF YOU WANT MY LOVE) PUT SOMETHING DOWN ON IT
Bobby Womack
Facts Of Life
United Artists : 1973
[Buy It]
I have a bad cold, and so am weakened, and so cannot have very many original thoughts, and so have been casting around for thoughts I might borrow from others. That process, humiliating in some respects, comforting in others, got me thinking about originality and copying, which is one of the most fertile topics in pop music and indeed in all of culture. Are new ideas even possible? If you spin an old idea slightly, is it yours? If you copy and no one catches you, are you really free and clear, and what does it matter anyway? These are just some of the questions I stole from the bracing and provocative essay "Why Plagiarism is Central To Creativity," by Robert Scrivini.
Robert Scrivini is a man who was invented by a man named Jon Santore and myself, then a boy, many years ago in North Carolina. Today, Jon is a decorated composer, and I am a decorated writer, but back before anyone hung any decorations we were in the Scrivini business. We invented Scrivini because there were many occasions that called for fake people, particularly fake creative people. Who painted that painting, you know, the one I can't quite remember that shows a woman from the back standing by a window? Robert Scrivini, of course. What was the name of the mathematician who discovered the highest known prime? Robert Scrivini, of course. It started as a joke, like everything, like life itself, but eventually Scrivini became something else, an idea, the all-purpose stand-in for every known type of creativity. Scrivini was a true original. He thought of everything. This achievement was enabled primarily by his nonexistence.
Pop music is filled with tangled cases of unoriginality: "My Sweet Lord," "I'll Be Missing You," Negativland. I have always been most interested in instances where individual pop songs nearly replicate other individual pop songs. Scrivini seems to be, too, enough so that he devises a devilish metaphor to explain the phenomenon. Do you know what balut is? It is a duck egg with a fertilized duck fetus inside of it. It is a Filipino snack food. The previous two sentences seem incompatible with one another, I know. Sorry. Both are true. "The pop balut," he writes, "occurs when one thing has another very similar thing inside of it, and the combination produces both appetite and the violent loss of appetite for both things." Scrivini reviews many cases of pop-chart baluts, including a few I also originally experienced on my own. When I was seven or eight, for example, I heard the Rolling Stones' "Under My Thumb," which is from the 1966 album Aftermath. A few years after that, I heard the Four Tops' 1965 single "Same Old Song." My reaction was similar to the reaction Scrivini describes. I wanted to hear both songs again immediately, and then to never hear them again. The Stones had stolen from the Four Tops outright, and not only that, but stolen from a song that was itself about repetition and replaying. Scrivini has that insight as well: "The theft seems to encode its own confession (though it may have gone unnoticed by the band, which was later accused of copying the melody of k.d. lang's 'Constant Craving' for its 1997 song 'Anybody Seen My Baby?' and compelled to give a credit to lang and her co-writer Ben Mink)." I put the Four Tops song on a mix tape called Beforemath as a form of reparations.
A few years later, when I heard Pee Wee Crayton's "Do Unto Others," I knew far more about the way that white British rockers stole from American bluesmen and early R&B singers. Led Zeppelin is the most obvious example. "Page, Plant and company would never have written a song if they didn't rewrite Bukka White, Sleepy John Estes, Memphis Minnie, and others," Scrivini writes. I disagree: they would have written only "The Song Remains the Same." I was prepared for any level of theft from Led Zeppelin, but other groups' borrowings were still capable of surprising me. Especially when they were so straightforward: Crayton's opening blast of guitar was later, almost laughably, lifted wholesale by John Lennon for "Revolution." For some reason, I didn't mind this case as much. "Revolution" seemed like a better home for the stinging solo (here it appears in the version included on the 2006 album "Love," which George Martin and his son Giles created for Cirque du Soleil). Revolutions, of course, are new things, but also complete rotations that return to the point of origin. Paul Gaugin said that "Art is either plagiarism or revolution." He should have conceded that it can be both.
Scrivini cites Crayton, and Lennon, and the Gaugin quote, but he is most satisfying when most obscure. At the height of disco, Rod Stewart released Blondes Have More Fun, an album that contained the monstrously popular "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?" The song, of course, derailed (or maybe rerailed) Stewart's career, completing the transiton from sensitive singer-songwriter persona to cock-of-the-walk sex jester. "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?" remains one of the best disco singles, as well as one of the easiest to parody. The problem is that it was already a parody. Five years earlier, Bobby Womack had released Facts of Life, the last of a string of classic early-seventies albums that included Communication and Understanding. The album fared somewhat poorly and helped send Womack into obscurity. But Rod Stewart heard the album, I'm sure, not just because the similarities are too glaring but because Stewart would certainly have followed Womack's career--Stewart was obsessed with Sam Cooke, the man who first signed Womack and his brothers to SAR records in the early sixties, renaming them the Valentinos, and who employed Womack as a guitar player. (Speaking of taking what isn't exactly yours, Womack married Cooke's widow, Barbara, after Cooke's death.) So what was Stewart thinking? Was the plagiarism unconscious? Was it an homage? Was it an attack against a powerful forebear in a time when he was fortuitously (or tragically) diminished? In the end, it registers as something Oedipal, wonderful, and terrible, all at once. Scrivini, here, reaches for an original interpretation of Stewart's theft, and perhaps overreaches:Cultural eventfulness of the sort represented by Stewart's hit, which was literally "put on the floor" (read: underfoot) by a generation of dancers, offers a transformative under-standing of Womack that re-energizes Paolo Legno's Menardian reiteration of Edward Said's famous observation: "The best way to consider originality is to look not for first instances of a phenomenon, but rather to see duplication, parallelism, symmetry, parody, repetition, echoes of it. The writer thinks less of writing originally, and more of rewriting." The writer isn't the only one. The post-modernist feminist philosopher Millie Jackson combined the two songs into one medley on the 1979 live album "Live and Uncensored." If I didn't have a bad cold, I'd post it. Maybe later.Labels: ben
posted by Ben
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Thursday, February 21, 2008
NO COMPUTE
Funkadelic
Cosmic Slop
Westbound : 1973
[Buy It]
COMPUTER COWBOY (AKA SYSCRUSHER)
Neil Young
Trans
Geffen : 1983
[Buy It]
WE HAVE A TECHNICAL
Gary Numan
Replicas
Beggars UK : 1979
[Buy It]
MISS CLARKE AND THE COMPUTER
Roy Wood
Boulders
EMI : 1973
[Buy It]
I have a friend who divorced her computer. She went off email, off the Web, offline entirely. The computer became a typewriter. She did it for a book project. "Internot," coming next fall to brick-and-mortar stores near you. No, no. Just kidding. She didn't give up the computer just to write a book about giving up the computer. That would be self-indulgent. I mean, she's not a blogger! She gave up the computer so she wouldn't have to give up on herself.
When she divorced her computer, she called me on the phone. She was in withdrawal. Divorce is hard. "What did I do before the computer?" she said. The question was, sadly, not rhetorical. There are countless essays--some profound, some superficial, some insightful, some moronic, some alarmist, some complacent--about the ways in which recent communications technology has changed our minds and the world in which those minds circulate. Andy Warhol said, famously, "When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships," but post-television technologies have cut back in the other direction and tried to remedy that problem, often with disastrous results. These days, technology does not simply alienate. It connects, and by connecting alienates in much more complex and deceptive ways. Technology has allowed correspondence to proliferate while simultaneously destroying the letter. Technology has brought people together more efficiently than ever while at the same time obliterating the idea of togetherness. I have a young acquaintance, a college student, who will sometimes write to ask my advice about women. That sentence was hilarious. The thought of it! At any rate, when he tells me that he has spoken to a woman, I know to ask him what he means by that. Usually, he means Facebook or MySpace or email. Sometimes he means that he put a comment on a blog. Only once or twice has he walked up to the woman in question and opened his mouth. I have counseled against this, or at the very least counseled against calling this "speaking to."
That friend, the young man, will not divorce his computer. He's not even married to it yet. He's still hot and heavy. My friend who divorced her computer did so because she was becoming, by her own account, an addict of new communications technologies. By nine in the morning, she will already have read most of the newspapers, clicked on links where links appear, sent out emails, worried that they haven't been answered, sent out more emails to treat the anxiety produced by the first wave, and then surfed around to numb the anxiety produced by the second wave. "What did I do before the computer?" she said, not rhetorically. I didn't answer her question. I didn't know the answer. Instead I told her what I did, back in the old days, when Reagan was President and the Challenger hadn't yet blown up and computers were only beginning to find their way into the home. I killed time the way time should be killed: kaleidoscopically. Instruments of its demise included snacking, showering, walking in circles, going outside, playing basketball, whacking off, doodling, echolalia. "Yeah," she said, "I remember that. Snacking and whacking off." Her tone was mock-wistful, which is a valuable strategy for concealing actual wistfulness. "Now I'm more likely to go online and try to find a video of someone else walking in circles around an apartment." There was a pause. "Found one," she said.
"I'm going," I said, not unkindly. I meant to stand up from the computer and take a walk. But the computer has music on it.
Funkadelic's "No Compute" was released in 1973. It starts out deceptively, as if it might be an exercise in warm, psychedelic soul, and the spoken George Clinton vocals might blossom into full-throated singing. They don't. Garry Shider plays lots of guitar, and Clinton goes right on telling his story, which is about a man who wakes up, feels bored and lickerish ("the hornies occupied my being"), and goes out in search of a remedy:I spotted a lady who was also on the prowl
I could tell by her makeup, plus the scent was there
So I sashayed over to her, and, ah, spoke of my plan
She screamed and said, "Are you asking to make love to me?"
I said, "Is pig what's in pork?
Or you gonna play hard
After all the trouble you went through to get chosen?"
She resists. He keeps on point. Soon she comes around. "There was fun to be had, love to be made." Afterwards, the hornies have been satisfied, and the bloom is off the rose:Well, suddenly as she laid there, mouth wide open, wig half off, snoring
Breath smelling like a 1948 Buick
I was sick with the filthies, and she smiled in her sleep
As if to say, "All looks are not alike, all holes are not a crack." Some have suggested that the "wig half off" marks the conquest as a transvestite. That seems fair enough, and if so, it inserts "No Compute" into a long line of flipping-your-id songs that include The Kinks' "Lola" and Schoolly D's "Saturday Night." The title of the song is about the woman's (understandable) confusion when confronted with Clinton's come-ons. That's what she says when she doesn't get what he says: no compute. But it's probably also about the fact that sex isn't equational, or even rational. She doesn't want to go with him, but there she goes. I will also declare, with three decades of warping hindsight, that the song is about the difference between sedentary calculation and a more active extension into the world. As soon as you're alone again with your thoughts, you get sick with the filthies.
Sex isn't the only kind of human connection that's ruined by technology. Neil Young's Trans has been assessed and reassessed several times, generally in an upward direction, as critics and fans come to terms with the fact that Young employed the stiff, vocoder-heavy sound in part because it permitted him to communicate better with his son, who was born with severe cerebral palsy. If the music uses technology, the lyrics bemoan its abuse. For starters, there's "Computer Age," a wonderful and wonderfully vague condemnation of the digital age that has been covered by Sonic Youth, among others. And if there's any question that Young is taking aim at technology for its alienating effects, well, just go outside the song and look at his comments on everything from CDs (they destroy music) to high-tech war (it destroys our souls), or for that matter go three tracks deeper into Trans, to "Computer Cowboy (aka Syscrusher)." It's one of the least-known songs from the album, in part because it seems batshit crazy, but it's also one of the most interesting, playing like a foretoken of Laurie Anderson's entire career. The cowboy lives in a world where everything is programmed, or mediated by programming: Well, his cattle each have numbers
And they all eat in a line
When he turns the floodlights on each night
Of course the herd looks perfect!
Computer Cowboy. So, "No Compute" and the songs that flow down from it investigate the ways that technology thwarts sex. Trans leans toward love. But there's agreement that human touch is compromised.
Gary Numan's Replicas was an offshoot of a book project in which society is controlled by beings called Machmen, androids wrapped up in skin to look human. As a kid, I resisted Numan and his Machmen; he was too straightforward in his sci-fi ambitions. Later, when I hated sci-fi less, I came around. "Me! I Disconnect From You" is a brilliant title, not to mention a brilliant song (I always think it's Robyn Hitchcock for a good solid five seconds). "Down in the Park" is beautifully desolate. "Are 'Friends' Electric?" is known to all, or should be. But my favorite song from Replicas wasn't even on the record. "We Have a Technical," a stepchild from the original sessions, was included on expanded editions; it has a buzzing central riff that sounds like "My Sharona," and the lyrics illuminate what happens when the machines shut down:I suppose it's very shady
At least until the lights go out
Advertising posters on the wall
And the young boys singing softly
Do they ever come back
Or is it always at the wrong time
I could crawl around the floor
Just like I'm real
And move a hand in front of my eyes Reality and romance get even stranger treatment in the hands of Roy Wood, the mad genius behind the Move and Wizzard and the earliest version of ELO. "Miss Clarke and the Computer," a madrigal from his first and finest solo album, Boulders, straightforwardly relates a love affair between, well, Miss Clarke and a computer. Plenty of women love their computers--my friend, for example--but in this case Wood relates the affair from the computer's point of view, complete with highly processed vocals. At the end, the computer's heart is removed, and his voice slows down, and only the delicate strumming of a guitar remains. Is that the sound of romance dying or a sound that permits romance to be reborn? This question is not rhetorical either.
The day my friend divorced her computer, she ventured out into the real world. She thought she might pick someone up, or at least talk to someone. She saw people on laptops, people on cell phones, people on Blackberries. Finally she saw a couple in a doorway. The man's hand was on the small of the woman's back. My friend passed close by. "I'm so glad we met," she overheard the man say. "Yeah," the woman said. "I never thought I'd find someone online." The man laughed. "I have to get home," he said, "but I'll text you soon." Are you going to play into technology's hands after all the trouble you went through to get free?Labels: ben, rock and roll
posted by Ben
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Friday, February 15, 2008
ANTI LOVE SONGBetty Davis Betty DavisLight In The Attic : 1973 [Buy It]DON'T RENEGE ON OUR LOVERichard & Linda Thompson Shoot Out The LightsHannibal : 1982 [Buy It]THINGSLoudon Wainwright III Here Come the Choppers!Sovereign Artists : 2005 [Buy It]BARON OF LOVE, PT. 2Alex Chilton Like Flies on SherbertPeabody : 1979 [Buy It]I DIG LOVEAsha Puthli Asha PuthliCBS : 1973 [Buy It]OUR LOVERhett Miller The InstigatorElektra : 2002 [Buy It]I DON'T WANNA TALK ABOUT LOVE NO MOREAmy Rigby Little FugitiveSignature Sounds : 2005 [Buy It]Back when I was in college, the newspaper I ran offered free valentines for everyone on campus. If you submitted them, we'd print them, no questions asked. Maybe a friend wanted to confess feelings for a friend. Maybe a student wanted to work through a crush on a teacher. Maybe a guy wanted a girl to know that he liked the way she laughed, or the way she looked in a skirt. Whatever. These valentines were signed or anonymous or, most often, pseudonymous. A few days before the issue closed, my roommate and I were sitting in the dining hall and saw an older kid across the room. He was a stocky, loud, back-slapping type, a wrestler I think, and he had never been particularly nice to us. We thought of him as a bully. As we watched him across the dining hall, we came up with an idea, which was to write him a valentine. It went like this: Dear Phil,
I miss you. It's been so long since I've seen you.
Love,
Your neck His name wasn't Phil, though. It was Philip. No, no. It wasn't Philip. It was Jonathan Reed. No, it wasn't Jonathan Reed. I'm not going to say his name, because there's at least a four percent chance that he grew up into a perfectly respectable adult. The valentine we crafted for "Jonathan Reed" was a pretty sophisticated joke, in its own way: we imagined him starting to read it, entertaining a moment of optimism, reaching the end, maybe even tearing up while he felt around for his neck. It was about the love between people and inanimate objects. It was about self-love. It was about the impossibility of knowing the self. And it was sophomoric. Perfect! It was also, of course, a calculated dodge. We were writing mock valentines because we weren't brave enough to write real ones. The prospect of actually telling a girl, in print, that I liked the way she laughed or the way she looked in a skirt was terrifying. For starters, she might not read it. Worse, what if she did read it? Being scared of girls, or of your feelings for girls, is one of life's universal experiences, and though the fear ebbs as time passes, it never disappears completely. I am reminded of that every Valentine's Day, in part because the holiday seems to demand it. I am married now and have kids, and it is easy for me to tell them how much I love them, but it is also not exactly what Valentine's Day is for, I don't think. There are anniversaries (for the wife) and birthdays (for the wife and the kids) that are far more useful for that. They are specific and personal. To place your partner on the scale on Valentine's Day, or have her place you there, seems wrong: you're either going to feel a twinge of pleasure that people followed the script or a twinge of displeasure that they didn't. So I am calling for Valentine's Day to be taken away from significant others and rededicated to all the other people you love: the people you once had and lost, the people you can't have because the risk is too great, the people you have for fleeting moments in your mind, the people you would try to have if you were sure you wouldn't be rejected. It is very rare that an adult has exactly as much love as belongs properly to his or her partner. Love is unruly and unregulated. The question is what gets done with the surplus. I have a friend who writes Valentine's Day notes to old boyfriends, lovers, or could-have-beens, and though she never actually sends the notes, I understand and approve of the impulse. Years ago, I was in a relationship, then out of it and in another one. The first woman hung around on the margins. We briefly got re-involved. We decided we couldn't see each other. We feared we couldn't stay apart. At one point, in a fit of optimism, I made a tape for her that included Betty Davis's "Anti-Love Song." I thought I was telling her that even though we loved each other to some degree, the feelings were untenable and possibly even unpleasant and we should let them go: No I don't want to love you
'Cause I know how you are
That's why I've been staying away from you
That's why I haven't called you
Because I know you could possess my body
I know you could make me scrawl
I know you could have me shaking
I know you could have me climbing the wall
That's why I don't want to love you The woman didn't respond for a while, and then she responded by drinking too much at a party, disappearing with me onto a balcony for ten key minutes, and then going away again for a year or so. I think it was the song's fault. Upon reflection, it isn't primarily a love song or even an anti-love song. It's a sex song. There's sex in the lyrics and sex in the vocals. There's also a specific intended recipient: there's a line later on where Davis sings, "Sure, you say you're right on and you're righteous, but with me I know you'd be right off." Does anyone know any musician who she might have been involved with, maybe even married to, who recorded a song called "Right Off"? Respond in comments. Davis's song is bleak but it's also bracing--it strips love down to the process of stripping down. If she was a man, she'd have no trouble telling a woman that she looked good in a skirt, or for that matter out of it. Far bleaker, because it's far broader, is Richard Thompson's "Don't Renege On Our Love." I was going to write "Far bleaker is Richard Thompson's [insert random song here]," because there isn't another songwriter who has spent as many years doing as much damage to romantic clichés. But "Don't Renege On Our Love" is a good place to start. The story behind "Shoot Out the Lights," the album on which this song appears, is well-known: it is about the dissolution of Thompson's marriage to his wife and musical partner Linda. The story is also untrue. Most of the songs on "Shoot Out the Lights" were completed before the Thompsons separated in early 1982, and even before Richard Thompson struck up a relationship with the woman who would become his second wife in late 1981. Even so, "Don't Renege On Our Love" is probably written to Linda, or to the idea of Linda that Richard held in his mind. I never put this song on a mix tape--how could you, really?--but I did listen to it incessantly when I was left by a girlfriend I lived with and thought I might stay with. I was young. After she moved to another city without exactly telling me, clearing her things out of our apartment in the process, I spent evenings sitting sadly rigid a filthy chair playing "Shoot Out the Lights" over and over again. Young. The song did make me feel better, because Thompson seemed more miserable than I was, but then it made me feel worse, because in the course of his punishing monologue he did at least acknowledge his love for her (and hers for him), something I had failed to do until it was too late. Then it made me feel better again, because of the tragic, fleet solo that Thompson plays over the galloping beat at around the two-and-a-half mark. Should you tell the people you love that you love them? What if they take it the wrong way? I am speaking here mainly of situations mixing men and women, which means they have the potential to erupt into sex or romance. Even friendships in which love is declared are never quite the same again. If you doubt that the very phrase continues to possess magical powers, both bright and dark, just look at how few songs hit the note cleanly. John Lennon had a easy time speaking directly to Yoko, but he was an exception. Paul McCartney's two most famous solo love songs, "My Love," and "Silly Love Songs," are both dodges: "My Love" is written in the first-person evasive, and the famous direct-address bridge in "Silly Love Songs" ("I love you") is held in suspension by the conceit of the title. He wasn't the only one who had trouble. Jim Croce wrote, "Every time I try to tell you, the words just come out wrong / So I have to say I love you in a song," and it's not, I don't think, "I have to say 'I love you' in a song," because the phrase is still a little bit radioactive. Loudon Wainwright III makes a similar claim in "Things" So when I say I love you it's just a thing I've said
Off my tongue, out of my mouth, made up in my head
But when I sing I love you that's a different thing
Nothing smart, just some guts and heart, since I mean what I sing Not everyone is as self-aware or as therapized as Wainwright, and some of the best love songs try to do away with words entirely. "Baron of Love, Pt. 2," is little more than the "La Grange" riff (purists may want to refer to it as the "Boogie Chillen" riff or the "Shake Your Hips" riff) played behind an Alex Chilton monologue that touches on a little bit of everything and amounts to a whole lot of nothing. What is produced, though, is enjoyment, which is one of the basic ingredients of love. "I know there's some love in there, baby. It's been hiding all night. Put me in there with you," he says. In its original form, "I Dig Love" was a perfectly serviceable minor song from George Harrison's "All Things Must Pass." There are barely any words, mostly just the title, repeated and reformed, in keeping with Harrison's mantra-like approach to songwriting. In Asha Puthli's hands, though--and in her throat--the song becomes something monumentally sexy, with yips and moans and what sounds like a giant hookah burbling away in the background. Not necessarily stoned, but beautiful. If there ever was a song capable of convincing someone that your love for her (or him) was touched equally by divinity and carnality, this is it. Eloquence is overrated until it actually appears, of course. "Our Love," the lead-off track on Rhett Miller's first solo album, is a nearly perfect piece of popcraft, wordy and exhilarating, full of historical detail and autobiographical bravery and self-referential cleverness and a big, fat, candy-colored hook: Richard Wagner's letters to his lover Mathilde were a mess
He should have quit before he had written the address
They made love on the mezzanine her husband was his friend Amy Rigby, who came to semi-fame with Diary of a Mod Housewife a decade ago, has since written as many good, sharp songs about sex and love as anyone; in "I Don't Wanna Talk About Love No More," she decides that she's done trying to anatomize the human heart: I'm tired of emotional discussions
I'm tired of repercussions
I'm sick of the o's and the x's
And the sex and the battles and the battle of the sexes Okay, fair enough. No more talk about love. What, then? Rigby has some suggestions: Let's discuss the hybrid car
Let's eulogize the Mason Jar
Let's analyze roofing tar
And the bridge too far
Chicago Blues
The right to choose
A swinging door
The Croque Monsieur
The working poor
The war Does she protest too much? Of course. That's what I love about her. If you see her, be sure to tell her. Labels: ben
posted by Ben
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Thursday, February 07, 2008
THIS IS WHERE I BELONG
The Kinks
1967
Available on : The Kink Kronikles
Reprise : 1972
[Buy It]
THIS IS WHERE I BELONG
Bill Lloyd
Set To Pop
East Side Digital : 1994
[Buy It]
THIS IS WHERE I BELONG
Frank Black
Headache 10"
4AD: 1994
[Buy It]
THIS IS WHERE I BELONG
Ron Sexsmith
Available on : This Is Where I Belong: The Songs of Ray Davies & The Kinks
Rykodisc : 2002
[Buy It]
YOU BELONG TO ME
Rev. Tom Frost
South of Hell, France
Closed For Private Party : 2005
[Out of Print]
It's hard to like the Kinks because of Wes Anderson. No. I said it wrong. What I mean is that these days it's hard to make sense of exactly how much I like the glory period of the early career of the Kinks, in part because the cultural overtones of those songs have become highly specific as a result of their inclusion in a number of mostly excellent Wes Anderson films. Everyone knows what I mean, right? This is just an introductory paragraph and I don't want it to get too clotted. Suffice it to say that "Nothin' in This World Can Stop Me Worryin' 'Bout That Girl" used to mean a tremendous amount to me, and now it means something to me about Rushmore. The same goes for "Powerman" and The Darjeeling Limited. I come neither to praise nor to bury him. I just want to--need to--note that he and his production designers have a way of interfering with my pristine experience of a few Kinks songs. Then I will get on to "This is Where I Belong."
"This is Where I Belong," one of Ray Davies' most perfectly realized compositions, was originally released as the B-side to a Dutch single in April of 1967, which is the rough equivalent of James Joyce publishing "Araby" in the back of a program for a boat show. "And that is why we consider ourselves the premier inflatable boatworks in the Pacific Northwest. . . North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers' School set the boys free." Later on, the song's obscurity was rectified when it was included on the 1972 compilation The Kink Kronicles, and it has also been on subsequent expanded CD versions of the great LP Face to Face. The song is sad, joyous, short, and eternal, as Davies explains everything he knows about devotion, which also happens to be everything everyone else will ever need to know. This is an exaggeration, but not by much:
I can't think of a place I'd rather be
The whole wide world doesn't mean so much to me
For this is where I belong
This is where I belong
Tell me now if you want me to stay
It don't matter, cause I'd stay here anyway
For this is where I belong
This is where I belong
Well, I ain't gonna wander
Like the boy I used to know
He's a real unluckly fella
And he's got no place to go
I won't search for a house upon a hill
Why should I when I'd only miss you still
For this is where I belong
This is where I belong
This is where I belong When a song is this eloquent, there's not very much left to say. What I can say is that I was thinking of it most of the week, because I had two conversations with friends about relationships that seemed to be entering phrases of difficulty. (Phases of difficulty, I mean. I wish this thing had a backspace.) The situations are entirely different from one another, but one of the principal issues in each case was the feeling of belonging. The people who came to talk to me, one man and one woman, both questioned whether their partners could successfully keep them in the relationship, not sexually or financially but emotionally. One person said, "I wonder if she can locate me there," which seemed like a slightly incorrect use of the word "locate," or at least a slightly stagy one, but I got the gist. The other person said, "I sometimes think I should be elsewhere, and that's wrong. I want to want to be there. That's the gist." She saved me from having to talk about the gist of her remarks by actually using the word "gist," and for that I am grateful. Both of them, after articulating their discontent, asked me what they should do. I had no idea, but I had some ideas. The one I shared most readily was this one: make sure you are somewhere you belong. This is very vague and bromidic and almost meaningless unless I supply a few details, so I will. The woman was for many years a normal New Yorker who did not cook. Then about a year ago, just before she met and began to date her boyfriend, she started to read cookbooks and try recipes. They went out to dinner on the first date, but on the second date she had him over and prepared a meal. As the relationship went forward, he demonstrated insufficient enthusiasm for her cooking. "It's not that I wanted him to like what I did, necessarily," she said. "But I wanted him to participate wholly." Instead, he told her not to worry so much about it, that they could just as easily go out or order in. "It is coming to feel like rejection, not sexual but not completely non-sexual," she said. "There I am, willing to put a hot plate on the table, and he just won't eat my cooking."
He won't eat her cooking. In other cases, there are other things people will not eat, or touch, or share, or watch, or place between them and discuss. The idea of belonging is made up of a thousand specifics, but you should always be able to elevate over it, look down, and see if it is intact. If it is not--if the plate is being pushed away--there is cause for more than a little concern. There is an end to the story already written, and all that needs deciding is how long the final chapters are. Once, when I was younger, I tried to forestall a breakup by telling a woman, "You know what I really like? Sitting on the couch with you eating crappy food and watching TV and having a stupid conversation about nothing much at all, and then having sex." I didn't say "having sex." I said something more pointed. I was trying for a show of force. I also didn't say "making love." I was shy to do that.
"What about the crumbs?" she said. "You know, from the crappy food? Won't they get on our backs and asses?" She had a point. We had been fighting but not really fighting. We had been drifting. And after a little drifting, we reached opposite shores. They were not so far away that we were unable to see or hear each other, but I was thinking about what lay behind me, or beyond her. I was searching for a house upon a hill. The whole wide world meant too much to me.
A little while after that, I was telling another girl about the problems in the previous relationship, and she was telling me about the problems in her current one. They were common problems: boy won't do this, girl won't do that, brains and mouths and hands aren't being used to their best advantage, no one knows how anyone feels. We were sitting in my apartment, watching TV and eating crappy food. I wasn't thinking about having sex with her, and we didn't. But at some point in the conversation, one or the other of us sighed, and it was clear that the thought of belonging had just passed through the room. It warmed us and then chilled us, and went unacted upon. Shyness. Much, much later, after I had dated another woman for a little while, I had a dream about that second woman. In the dream, we were sitting on the couch again, and the sense of belonging was heavy in the room. We had just had sex, off-camera. Still some shyness.
I have drifted a bit from the song, which is unfair. The brilliance of the lyric is everywhere, but it is most specifically located in the way that Davies conflates emotional and physical space. The "this" where he belongs moves through time, obviously. Love has to move through time or it is something else entirely: convenience or delusion. But it also moves through space, and when he says "I'd stay here anyway," he really means that he'll go anywhere so long as she goes. It's the song of a fellow traveler, not a non-traveler.
The song enacts this principle. It travels well. In fact, one of the testaments to the greatness of "This is Where I Belong" is that it is virtually indestructible when placed in the hands of a capable interpreter. Here I offer three examples: a lapidary little version by Bill Lloyd (though he changes the "I won't search" line, not for the better), a rough-and-tumble treatment by Frank Black (also has problems searching for the house upon the hill; he gets a little too emotive after searching and disrupts the song's smooth surface), and a majestically mournful cover by Ron Sexsmith that rivals the original. "This Is Where I Belong" has close relatives: Bob Dylan's "She Belongs to Me," Rickie Lee Jones's "We Belong Together," Love's "Your Mind and We Belong Together," even the Dirtbombs' "Your Love Belongs Under a Rock." There is "You Belong to Me," the fifties standard that was made famous by Patti Page and Jo Stafford and then made less famous by the Rev. Tom Frost, and whose argument replaces Davies's expansive generosity with an equally expansive possessiveness. So there are plenty of other songs about belonging. And at the same time, there are no other songs about belonging. I now appeal to Wes Anderson to leave it out of all future films. Much as I like Jason Schwartzman, I don't want to see him scaling the steps of a townhouse, a bouquet of perfectly arranged and colored flowers in his hand, electric piano riff wobbling in the air alongside him.
There is very much more to say about the difficulty (and importance) of belonging to another person. Limits must be set so that you do not vanish inside him or her. Dignity must be maintained so that you do not ask to belong to a club that will only have you as a member after a request has been made. Tactics must be employed to ensure that your mind roams without wandering. But these are gnomic precepts that don't advance the case much beyond where Ray Davies left it in 1967, in Holland, on a B-side.Labels: ben, kinks
posted by Ben
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Thursday, January 31, 2008
THE SUPER BOWL SHUFFLE
Chicago Bears Shufflin' Crew
Red Label Records : 1985
[Buy It]
SUPER COOL
Black Heat
No Time To Burn
Atlantic : 1974
[Buy It]
SUPERGROOVALISTICPROSIFUNKSTICATION
Parliament
Mothership Connection
Universal : 1976
[Buy It]
SUPERFUNKYCALIFRAGISEXY
Prince
The Black Album
Warner Bros. : 1987
[Buy It]
THAT'S REALLY SUPER, SUPERGIRL
XTC
Skylarking
Geffen : 1986
[Buy It]
SUPER TUESDAY
The Shazam
Godspeed The Shazam
Rainbow Quartz : 1999
[Buy It]
The Super Bowl is Sunday. Super Tuesday is close behind. I am supercharged for both events. Between them comes a day of both rest (from football) and preparation (for politics); some people are calling it "Super Monday." I find this designation both superacute and superabsurd, but I will superexert myself to honor it nonetheless. I will watch old Superman cartoons. I will check to see if the Seattle Supersonics are still superawful. I will scour the Internet looking for a full-song version of R.E.M.'s latest single, "Superserious Superstitious," which has thus far been guarded supersecurely and is as a result available only as a supershort snippet taken from a ringtone. I may even reread Superbad, a book I wrote that is not related to the movie of the same name, but which I once pretended might be. (I'm supersorry to even bring it up. Ego made me do it. Superego is making me apologize.)
It's supereasy to find songs for these superdays, from Donovan's "Sunshine Superman" to the Carpenters' "Superstar" to Lee "Scratch" Perry's "Supersonic Man," but I think it's superimportant to be superselective, and that's why I have supervised this playlist. It starts with the "Super Bowl Shuffle" itself which is immortal in the sense that it will never die, no matter how many times you try to kill it:We are the Bears Shufflin' Crew
Shufflin' on down, doin' it for you.
We're so bad we know we're good.
Blowin' your mind like we knew we would.
You know we're just struttin' for fun
Struttin' our stuff for everyone.
We're not here to start no trouble.
We're just here to do the Super Bowl Shuffle. From there, we tour the seventies and eighties with three stellar funk songs as guides: one from 1974 (the Dolphins beat the Vikings in that year's Super Bowl, 24-7), one from 1976 (Steelers over Cowboys, 21-17), and one from 1987.
The 1987 Super Bowl marked the end of Mike Ditka's not-quite-dynastic Bears. They had won Super Bowl XX, of course, blowin' your mind like they knew they would and burying the New England Patriots by a score of 46-10. With the Shufflin' Crew largely intact, the '86 Bears were picked by many to repeat as Super Bowl champions, and, despite aging superstars and a few key injuries, ended the regular season 14-2, only a game behind their 1986 pace. But in the team's first playoff game, at home against the Washington Redskins, the Bears' defense faltered, and the Redskins escaped with a 27-13 upset. The next week, the Redskins were shut out by the Giants, 17-0, who went on to pound the Denver Broncos 39-20 in Super Bowl XXI.
The Giants' victory came at the beginning of the year; at the end of the year, Prince recorded and then shelved the Black Album, which quickly became one of the most famous and common bootlegs of its era. I clearly remember taking the train from college in New Haven to New York City in December to try to buy it. An older kid had told me that a certain store was carrying it, but made me promise not to say where I had heard. I brought along music for the trip, including XTC's Skylarking, which had been released the year before. I liked "Grass" and loved "Earn Enough For Us" and didn't miss "Dear God," which wasn't on my cassette version. I was starting to date a woman who was starting to seem like she might want to have sex, and in that context, "That's Really Super, Supergirl" struck me as filthy, in a good way:That's really super, Supergirl
How you're changing all the world's weather
But you couldn't put us back together
Now I feel like I'm tethered deep
Inside your fortress of solitude
Don't mean to be rude
But I don't feel super, Supergirl I failed to find the Black Album on that trip, though I did see a movie (Wall Street, maybe?), and so I had to return the following semester. It was March 1988 by then. The Reagan presidency was waning. Candidates on both sides of the aisle were lining up to succeed him. Among Democrats, Gary Hart was a clear favorite until his marital infidelities took him down in the summer of 1987, and in his wake a handful of others then popped up: Dukakis, Gore, Jackson. There were many front-runners in the early going, which is to say that there was no front-runner. Then, a few days after I went to New York to look for the Black Album for the second time, Southern Democrats scheduled a coordinated mega-primary (nine states in all) to try to influence the selection process. That was the birth of Super Tuesday, at least in the modern sense. The 1988 Super Tuesday was not as conclusive as Democrats wanted: Dukakis took six primaries, Gore won five, and Jackson five. By then I had the Black Album, and I was listening to it every chance I could get. I'm sure I played it while I watched returns. Gore tried vainly to position himself as a moderate to Dukakis's liberal, but Dukakis surged, and Gore dropped out after the New York primary in April.
Gore was from Tennessee, of course, as was the power-pop group The Shazam, led by Hans Rotenberry, which kicked off its 1999 album "Godspeed the Shazam" with the superb "Super Tuesday," which starts soft and then explodes, much like the election season. When it came out, I was dating the woman I would soon marry, though we were going through a rare bad patch at that time, and the song struck me as true, in a sad way:Somebody needs to set you down
And tell you how things is
Living on the dark side of what is
You're always talking talking ready for a fall
You've got your reasons but you don't believe them at all
You act like you're waiting for the sympathy vote
Tomorrow's Super Tuesday
And the people in the news say
You're sagging in the polls
That's how it goes For bonus points, try to guess which election is represented by the electoral map above.Labels: ben, funk, rock and roll
posted by Ben
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Thursday, January 24, 2008
FLORIDA
Modest Mouse
We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank
Sony : 2007
[Buy It]
FLORIDA
Vic Chesnutt
West of Rome
Texas Hotel : 1992
[Buy It]
FLORIDA
The Shazam
The Shazam
Copper : 1997
[Buy It]
FLORIDA'S ON FIRE
Superchunk
Here's to Shutting Up
Merge : 2001
[Buy It]
LAND OF SUNSHINE
Faith No More
Angel Dust
Reprise : 1992
[Buy It]
TROPICAL HOT DOG NIGHT
Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band
Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)
EMI : 1978
[Buy It]
On Monday, Alex posted all about Alaska. That was the name of one of the alphabet books I used as a kid, "All About Alaska." It started like this: "Abundant Bear and Caribou; Deer Everywhere and Fishing, Too." I was highly suggestible, and so I imagined deer everywhere, showering in locker rooms, reaching their hooves into salad bars. I grew up in Miami. What did I know?
Florida has been in the news lately. I'm not sure why. Something about a primary? I plan to vote Democratic, but I watched the Republican debate in Boca Raton last night, because it's my home state, and my country. Probably because I disagree with most of what the candidates said, I found it more interesting than the Democratic debate. The current of hatred running between Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney was almost visible. Rudy Giuliani wore his underdog status like underwear two sizes too small. John McCain addressed global warming forthrightly and tried to emphasize his conservative bona fides. Romney seemed to control the first half of the debate and McCain the second half, which didn't look like it would shake up the Florida polls much. Ron Paul was there, which I didn't know until the end.
My wife and I let my two sons stay up and watch part of it, and I explained that the primary was closed, and that it was winner-take-all for delegates, and that it was coming up Tuesday. They are six and three years old, and they listened for a while and then their attentions drifted and they began to remind me about our trip to Miami last month, and especially the parts where they ran around outside and then came inside to hear me tell stories about running around outside--swimming in the pool, climbing on the roof, pulling the tails off of lizards. A little much, maybe, but they wanted details. At night, grandparents watched the kids, and my wife and I drove around--the adult version of running around--and listened to the radio, which isn't the radio anymore, but an iPod run through the cassette player. She's from Miami, too, and some of the music we listened to was from bands that she heard at clubs in the late eighties and early nineties, sometimes knew, sometimes worked with: the Goods, Mary Karlzen, Nuclear Valdez, the Mavericks. I haven't posted any of them, not because they're unworthy, but because I have an obvious mind sometimes. Instead, I decided to post songs about Florida by acts from Washington, Georgia (though Florida-born), Tennessee, and North Carolina, along with a pair of songs by Californian eccentrics that may or may not be about Florida but have plenty of sunshine and flamingos, respectively. This set of songs has a more contemporary bent than much of what I have posted; the debate put me in the mood to pander. Indie Rock the Vote! Thursday's temperature in Miami was 79.Labels: ben, indie
posted by Ben
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Thursday, January 17, 2008
SUCCESS
Graham Parker
The Mona Lisa's Sister
RCA : 1988
[Buy It]
One day this week I woke up too early, stubbed my toe, cut myself shaving. Every clumsy bad-day cliche applied precisely. Other factors were present, too: I had gotten a note from a colleague who disliked something I had written, not because I had made a powerful argument that offended her sensibilities, but because she thought it just wasn't very good. Another older colleague whom I respect greatly suggested that the writing game has its limits, and that they are narrower than I might, even after doing it for fifteen years, suspect. Sales figures for another book weren't what I wanted them to be; when are they ever? I read some authors that I love, which usually cheers me up, but it had the opposite effect, inspiring terror (and its crippled cousin, insecurity) that I might never get there myself. What resulted was displeasure with the wife, with the kids, with friends, with myself: a bad mood. I thought I'd get better soon enough. I didn't. Time passed, but not the mood. Nothing was working, so I turned to music. That's not surprising. But it was how I turned.
It is now well known that technology has changed the way we listen to music. The change has been reported, analyzed, and accepted for some time now, as we have passed from pure push technology like radio (where you listen to what you're given) to technologies of increasing pull (LPs, where you have to lift a needle or flip a disc; CDs, where you can scan from track to track or, if you are crazy, program the playing order) to the pure pull world of the iPod and the playlist.
One of the most obvious effects has been to eliminate the physical cost of carrying large amounts of music. In the old days, back when I couldn't wait for winter so that I could justify wearing a coat with pockets big enough to hold a Discman and a few CDs, I packed up with an eye toward variety. If I took a rock record out with me, I tried to take a soul record, on the theory that moods are unpredictable, and that I might get tired of one and need the other. If I took a record with an aggressive vocalist, I tried to take along something instrumental or soothing. If I took male singers, I took female singers. When I traded the Discman for the iPod, the first and most obvious effect was to atomize the album as the unit of music and replace it with the song. Instead of listening to a James Brown album--never his strong suit--I could listen to eight or ten or twenty James Brown songs. Custom albums were instantly available. What I found, though, was that some artists, like Randy Newman or ESG or Al Green, worked best in short bursts, a few songs at most, after which I had an itch to play something else. The iPod encouraged extreme impatience--if a song wasn't aiding a good mood or counterweighting a bad one, it was simple to switch off--but that wasn't really the issue. Some artists were just better at the sprint than at distance running. Maybe it was the richness of the aftertaste: it was difficult to hear Al Green sing "Jesus is Waiting," the final song on Call Me, and not feel like everything else in his catalog was anticlimactic. Maybe it was the way that certain artists suggested other artists: Stevie Wonder always made me want to hear Smokey Robinson. I loved visiting with these artists, but I found I couldn't stay.
A recent Rolling Stone report on the death of high fidelity wondered if extreme audio compression has encouraged a culture of skipping around--songs in MP3 format, it suggested, might not grab listeners in the way that vinyl recordings once did. Perhaps, but there are still certain artists who resist the process and reward residency. When I listen to them, I want to listen to more of them, sometimes for days on end. Pace Yeats, the center holds. Van Morrison has that effect. Sly Stone has that effect. The Ramones have that effect. Mary Margaret O'Hara, despite having a tiny body of work, has that effect. I want to draw a distinction, very important and possibly spurious, between the idea of an artist's quality and his ability to retain my attention for an extended period of time. I'm not arguing that Van Morrison is superior to Randy Newman or that I like him more, only that he (Van) has a certain stickiness that keeps me in place while he (Randy) has a certain re- or propulsive quality that sends me on to other artists. Whenever I come to an artist with stickiness or he or she comes to me, it has the feel of a weather event. It is a front that moves in from the West and hangs around for a while.
I raise the idea of weather events because I am currently in the middle of one. Last week, before the bad mood, everything seemed normal. The iPod skipped blithely from Panda Bear to Peaches to DMX to the Contours. Then, during my bad mood day, I started playing Graham Parker. It wasn't completely accidental. I had included "Crying For Attention" in last week's Moistworks post, and then a friend wrote to say that he loved the song, and then another friend wrote to say he approved of the choice, and then another friend said, "Who is Graham Parker?" I was predisposed. Plus, somehow I had set my iPod strangely, on shuffle by song, and so after the first Graham Parker song I got a second, then a third, then a fourth. I have about two hundred Graham Parker songs total, more than twelve hours' worth, and so there was no reason to reprogram. I went out for walks, went to the gym, sat around the house with the iPod randomly picking Graham Parker songs for me. Some songs weren't as good as I had remembered, particularly the ones from the seventies. Some of the vocal performances, particularly those from the nineties, were better than I had remembered. Some songs were too wordy. Some production choices were curious. But it was a relationship rather than a fling, and so his worldview began to both amplify and clarify mine, and I fell into the sound of his voice.
Somewhere along the way, I got "Success." It's from The Mona Lisa's Sister, an album that is often dismissed as uneven or underwritten when in fact it's neither. It's a strong set of songs, sometimes superb, that are produced down close to the bone and share at least one unifying theme: the world will let you down if you let it. This isn't a new theme in Parker's work, but it came at a time when he had left Atlantic Records under a cloud (after leaving Mercury under a cloud), and many of the lyrics are about an artist trying to find his place in a world populated by hostile (or, worse, indifferent) figures. The opening song, "Don't Let it Break You Down," and the single, "Get Started, Start a Fire," are both self-help texts, though particularly pricky and equivocal ones. But the most striking song is "Success," which doesn't end the record but might as well, since it's followed by a bouncy minor number called "I Don't Know" and a beautifully sung if inessential cover of Sam Cooke's "Cupid." "Success" opens with a strummed chord, some soothing harmonies, and a little lead guitar figure, all very nice and all utterly misleading given what Parker's singing about. He looks at the biggest version of the big picture, especially with regard to his own creative work, and he comes away stung:The dreams and hopes of men are powered by addiction
And who am I to say that this is an affliction
When everybody gets suckered in and lives their lives like fiction
Writing their own stories of success
They say they want you for your colorful evocation
The way you turn a cliche into a sensation
But all they ever wanted was that same vibration
The one that shimmers round success
Success success success success
Success success success success
All you ever need -- success
You can't be happy while someone else has a fistful
They glow from TV screens: healthy, strong and fiscal
And everybody slaps their back while you're alone with a wristful
Jerking to the rhythm of success When I first heard the record, I was eighteen, and I was a little shocked by the last verse. The daring, even foolhardy rhymes (fistful/fiscal?) led directly to the final image, of Parker at home jerking off into the futility of his TV set, which carries a picture of somebody who's more famous. And then there's the way he pronounces the title: "suck-cess." It was brutal and remains so, although now the first and second verses, which are all about writing, cut just as deep. When I heard the song this week, in the middle of my bad mood, it reminded me that the bleakness of life comes in all forms, and that none of those forms obscure the central mission, which is to record it honestly, powerfully, and continuously.
Anyway, the Graham Parker weather event continues. Today I had a good time with the jouncy "Nobody Hurts You," from Squeezing Out Sparks ("Grandfather's money only in the finest stuff / That's enough, that's enough, that's enough") and the angelic, melancholy "Disney's America," from 12 Haunted Episodes ("And we drifted apart like runoff into the Chesapeake Bay"). The poor mood isn't exactly lifting, but I'm getting used to it, and when it finally dissolves and I spin the wheel back to Talking Heads or Chic or Prince or Morrissey, I'll be on the lookout for more weather.Labels: ben, rock and roll
posted by Ben
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