|
|
|
|
|
|
HOME | ABOUT | BIOS | EMAIL |
|
 |
| |
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
BARON OF LOVE, PART 2
Alex Chilton
Like Flies on Sherbert
Peabody: 1979
[Buy It]
LET ME GET CLOSE TO YOU
Alex Chilton
High Priest
Big Time: 1987
[Buy It]
DOWNS (demo)
Alex Chilton
1974
Available on: Thank You Friends: The Ardent Records Story
Big Beat: 2008
[Buy It]
IT'S YOUR FUNERAL
Alex Chilton
A Man Called Destruction
Ardent: 1995
[Buy It]
Alex Chilton, who died, wrote songs. He recorded songs. He made songs. He unmade them. In the end, the life was largely in song, and the songs all had life, and that's all there is to say, and there isn't anything that can be done. Once he covered "Let Me Get Close to You," which was Goffin-King via Skeeter Davis:How long I'll never know
I've waited to tell you that I love you so
Now I have finally said it
Come on baby don't make me regret it "It's Your Funeral" is an instrumental. There are no words.
*
With a few hours to absorb the news, some memories came into focus, mostly distant ones, like hearing Big Star for the first time in the early eighties in Miami, or buying Like Flies on Sherbert in college, or driving upstate with some friends some years ago and listening on the car radio to Stuff, which collected some of Chilton's songs -- you could say that they were his best songs, but it might be more accurate to say that they were the songs of his that sounded most like songs that might be on a car radio. I remembered beginning to date the woman I'd later marry, playing lots of Chilton's music for her, and trying to figure out his secret: the way his try-anything-once aesthetic was both forthright and evasive, how he could combine an anarchic sense of humor and an unironic ability to convey pain, his addiction to the brilliant throwaway, his graceless grace. He drew lines back to Slim Harpo and Ronny and the Daytonas and Danny Pearson, so many it seemed he'd get trapped in the tangle. He escaped, again and again--but escaped to what? The most recent memory was the blurriest: it was just last November when I saw him with the reconstituted Big Star (half original, half Posies) at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple. I wrote a little piece about the show for the New Yorker that now seems dismissive to me, though I didn't mean it that way. I had no idea it would be the last I'd see of him.
*
NOTE: This is obviously not the first time we have written about Chilton here at Moistworks. Here is a piece by Alex Abramovich that investigates the end of Big Star and the beginning of Chilton's solo career.Labels: ben, chilton, pop, rock, soul
posted by Ben
LINK |
Friday, October 30, 2009
BO MEETS THE MONSTER
Bo Diddley
1958
Available on : I'm a Man: The Chess Masters 1955-1958
Hip-O Select : 2007
[Buy It]
COSTUME MAKES THE CLOWN
Shakira
Oral Fixation, Vol. 2
Sony : 2006
[Buy It]
HALLOWEENHEAD
Ryan Adams
Easy Tiger
Lost Highway : 2007
[Buy It]
THINLY VEILED DISGUISE
Ron Sexsmith
Other Songs
Interscope : 1997
[Buy It]
Years ago I knew a woman who was obsessed with Halloween. I remember one conversation I had with her in which she tried to explain that it was a night that put into practice, if only temporarily, every interesting idea about identity, theatricality, and sexuality. "As a children's holiday, it's amusing; as an adult's holiday, it's revelatory because of what it conceals," she said. She was a graduate student, which is a peculiar kind of disguise that involves taking highly personal and vexed questions and holding them at arm's length, in intellectual suspension. The costume comes with extra-long arms.
"I don't care," I said. I think we were going up the stairs to her apartment. She turned around to glower at me. "Turn back around," I said. "That way it's harder for me to hear you."
"To hear what?" she said.
"I'm assuming you're going to go on with this grand theory of Halloween."
She went on. She said that even though it's considered a holiday that honors the dead, it more accurately honors the dead parts of living people, the aspects of their personality they can't bring to life in their ordinary routine. "People dressed up as evil spirits to ward off evil, supposedly, but weren't they really dressing up as evil spirits to give voice, even if only temporarily, if only theatrically, to the evil impulses in themselves that they couldn't otherwise abide?" She then breathlessly mapped the holiday into literary history, linking it intimately with Twelfth Night, especially, and the way that Viola's decision to dress up as Cesario both validates and explodes everything that we believe about appearance, reality, self-knowledge, and attraction. The play, she theorized, was an interrogation of identity and imposture. Are we defined by the clothes we wear or by the clothes we don't wear? Are we most ourselves when we are dressing the part or when we are wholly undressed?
"I don't care," I said. We had gotten to her apartment by now, and we tested the various theories: dressing the part, wholly undressed. That year for Halloween, she went as a milkmaid and carried an oversize bottle that she labeled "deception." Go figure. I didn't dress up.
I won't be dressing up tomorrow night either. I like to say that it's because I'm so honest about every aspect of my being, but that's just an oversize bottle labeled "deception." The fact is that I have other ways of disguising myself--or, to be more honest, one other way. I do it in print. When I write, whether it's these essays, or a book of fiction, or any other piece, I put on a costume. I can be a little more introspective, a little more cavalier, a little more wounded, a little more dour. I don't have to be myself, exactly. This year, that's a relief. For a month or so, I've been slightly destabilized, mostly for stupid reasons: a birthday that affected me more than I thought it would, followed by some mild emotional distemper. I thought that some friends were mad at me. I snapped at other friends. I exhibited both churlishness and paranoia. I got past it, but the way I got past it was interesting: I explained it away as a voluntary strategy I employed to deal with a larger set of issues: in short, as a costume. That meant that it wasn't real, that I could just do away with the problematic feelings and behavior whenever I wanted. There's another option, of course -- that when that mask is removed the face beneath is identical, that the costume is a confirmation rather than a distraction -- but rather than confront that head-on, I'll proceed to the Halloween parade.
I know four people who are staying home tonight to put the finishing touches on their costumes.
I know three people who have the same costume from year to year (always a pirate, always a ghost), to the point where that other identity has acquired a stability of its own.
I know two people who have, in the past, gotten in trouble with their significant others because their costumes appeared to reveal some previously unknown truth about them.
I know one person who says that he will never dress up again because on a normal day he doesn't know who he is and doesn't feel confident enough to risk it.
I know countless people who (like me) aren't dressing up for the holiday, but who (unlike me) like to joke that they are dressing up as themselves, and who believe that this is a trenchant remark that reveals something about the way that society forces us to play certain roles (worker, partner, child) for which we may not, deep down, be any more suited than we are for the roles of "vampire" or "sexy barmaid." I know countless other people who handle the holiday more traditionally, who take on the vampire or sexy barmaid identities at face value, as id aids, and who want the rest of us to believe that's who they really are underneath the social roles, or who they could be if they were better at pronouncing their true selves.
I no longer know one person who, the year she dressed as a milkmaid, got her costume knotted up while she was trying to take it off. She was stuck inside her false identity, and she reacted to this problem with academic glee. "O time, thou must untangle this, not I," she said. "It is too hard a knot for me to untie."
"I don't care," I said. But then I started to feel her panic at being trapped inside there and went for a Bobby pin to help her free herself.Labels: ben, rock
posted by Ben
LINK |
Thursday, October 15, 2009
LIFE AFTER DEATH
Ian Hunter
You're Never Alone With a Schizophrenic
Chrysalis : 1979
[Buy It]
DON'T GET EXCITED
Graham Parker
Squeezing Out Sparks
Arista : 1979
[Buy It]
STRETCH
Ian Hunter
Shrunken Heads
Yep Roc : 2007
[Buy It]
ALL BEING WELL
Graham Parker
Don't Tell Columbus
Bloodshot : 2007
[Buy It]
Ian Hunter and Graham Parker are two artists who have made frequent appearances on this site. They are paired, for me, because of the quality of their vocals, because of the honesty of their lyrics, because of the dedication they have both demonstrated over the years to rock and roll. I don't want to say too much about them here because tomorrow I'll be interviewing the two of them at (Le) Poisson Rouge for the New Yorker Festival at 7:30. Today, I offer two songs from each of them, one from 1979, one from 2007.Labels: ben, rock
posted by Ben
LINK |
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
ANXIOUS MO-FO
Minutemen
Double Nickels On the Dime
SST : 1984
[Buy It]
This morning there was a weight pressing down on my mind. This morning it was windy. I mean there was wind, not that my mind wound, though my mind did wind. My mind wound because I heard, in quick succession, about a series of projects undertaken by friends and acquaintances: a book, a movie, a television series. All were being undertaken by people for whom I have fondness, so I was happy to hear that they were working on new things. And yet, the news exhausted me. Sometimes, other people's projects have this effect by way of envy (if it's a project I'd like to be doing) or disappointment (if it's a project I think they don't want to be doing). This was something different. To the last, these projects sounded like they were, for lack of a better word, stunts, slightly desperate ways of passing time and acquiring attention while contributing nothing to the self, the world, or to a sense of how one might profitably exist within the other. And because they were stunts, the people performing them seemed stunted: powered by disinterest rather than interest, filled with anomie and irony rather than energy. It wasn't a question of whether or not these people were taking their projects seriously, only that they weren't taking on serious projects. This is a judgment, and a fairly severe one, but it is rooted in an uncertainty regarding the real value of these projects and a certainty of the strong need for real value within these people, and as a result I came away displeased, with a weight upon my mind.
That last sentence is even windier than this morning was, so let me clarify. All these projects I heard about began in anxiety. Here, when I say anxiety, I'm talking not about my anxiety, but about Kierkegaard's, which he defined as the result of freedom. Freedom created boredom and also choice and was consequently the thing felt acutely just before a leap of faith. For Kierkegaard, this leap of faith was a leap into faith, into Christianity, but let's say that it can be secular or creative or even carnal: a leap into love, into sex, into friendship, into art. I am not saying that it is better or worse to write a paragraph about your spiritual condition or to plan a series of sculptures or to end up in a midtown hotel with your arms tied to bedposts and your memory stuffed full. You decide. But if you decide to take something seriously, whether mind or body or soul, you will have found that your anxiety has worked like a charm, or at the very least a spur--it will make you tremble at your freedom and then motivate you to take that leap. But if that anxiety is treated with trivia (and what is more trivial than stunts?) then it's a kind of sin that just compounds anxiety by enacting meaningless freedom. Objections will be raised. I'll even raise them. How do I know that these projects are stunts, or trivial? How do I know that they're not heartfelt? How do I know that they're not intimately connected to the mainsprings of the people in question? How dare I be so presumptuous? All I can say is that I believe that I am right in this regard, and that I believe that these projects are inconsequential stunts because they address no real issue apart from that of relieving boredom. Eighty percent of media is an answer to this question, both for creators and consumers, and while projects/stunts that take this as their central mission are not crimes and their creators not criminals, they are not crime-solvers either. They are, in the sense outlined above, sinners, and they are sinning by spending their energy on unworthy pursuits. The miasma of anxious opinion and media-enabled yammering is a morbid emanation.
Kierkegaard had plenty more to say about this issue, as did other philosophers, artists, prophets, and fools. The issue crystallizes and falls out of focus. When I was seventeen, the clearest formulation I knew came from the Minutemen, and particularly "Anxious Mo-Fo," which kicks off the philosophical tract "Double Nickels on the Dime."Serious as a heart attack!
Makes me feel this way...
No device to measure, no word can define
I mean what I'm trying to say is how can I express--let alone possess?
Serious as a heart attack!
Makes me feel this way... And from there, I guess, I'll wind over to Charles Bukowski. I don't have a great investment in the man, though I love "Factotum" and I wince at "Women" (isn't it responsible, at least in part, for "Californication"?). But Bukowski once said "An intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way; an artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way," and for that simple formulation I'd like to thank him, and thank the Minutemen, and thank Kierkegaard, and put my fingers in my ears at the rest of it, if not for all time, just for a little while, as a form of relief. I am not wishing ill for the projects or the people who are involved in them. I am only turning away.Labels: ben, rock
posted by Ben
LINK |
Friday, September 25, 2009
FEAR IS A MAN'S BEST FRIEND
John Cale
Fear
Island : 1974
[Buy It]
MY FRIEND GEORGE
Lou Reed
New Sensations
RCA : 1984
[Buy It]
BEST FRIEND
Cheap Trick
Special One
Big3 : 2003
[Buy It]
SEE MY FRIENDS
Richard Thompson
1000 Years of Popular Music
Cooking Vinyl : 2003
[Buy It]
Every year at this time I go into a defensive crouch. There are lots of reasons: years of training in back-to-school wariness, the High Holidays and the corresponding high level of vigilance they demand, my birthday. It's last on this list, my birthday, because I want it to be least. I don't like it. Birthdays are occasions of increased expectation, which necessarily means they are times of disappointment. No matter how many times I try to convince myself otherwise, it turns out that the day has no special capacity for ecstasy or surprise.
This year, my hostility toward my birthday is even more pointed because it's a big year, though I won't say which one. Okay: you twisted my arm. I'm turning eighty. As a result of this event, I have been thinking about everything, all the time. Mainly I have been thinking about the way that life limits you. No matter how hard you try, you'll never get to live in enough places or work enough jobs or write enough books or love enough women or hear enough music. If you submit to the limits, you can start to feel defeated. If you complain about them, you come off as churlish or, worse, idealistic. Everyone knows this, but it's hard to let the thought crystallize, because then it's so sharp it wounds. About a month ago, my five-year-old was looking at the clock, and he said, "Time is the thing you can't get out of, right?" Now he will begin the endless process of trying to repress that fact.
So with the impending cake and candle, this has been on my mind, and my mind's been on it, and as a result I have felt a little caged, and as a result of that I have been a little cagey, and as a result of that, the other day, in the midst of all this thinking, I did something thoughtless. I was talking to a friend of mine and I mentioned a piece of news, something interesting and maybe good that's about to happen. She was surprised that she was only hearing about it now, and not pleasantly surprised. She suggested, in no uncertain terms, that I should have told her the news earlier, because she's my friend, and because she deserves to know. About an hour later, she said she wasn't bothered by it, but I was.
In most cases, I don't care if I upset people. In some cases, I prefer it. Call it a character flaw if you like; when you turn eighty, see how much goodwill toward your fellow man you have left. But in a few cases, where a few people are concerned, I care tremendously if I upset them. I care so much that "care" is a precious, polite, desperately insufficient little word that can cast neither light nor shadow on the fact of the matter. Which is this: I have made most if not all of the close friends I will make. The other day, when i was talking to this friend, who is maybe my closest friend, it suddenly occurred to me that maybe I haven't been clear. Sure, I say nice things, friendly things, supportive things, but I'm not positive that I'm ever exactly straightforward about how important (some) people are to me. The older I get, the fewer of them there are, and the more central they become. The ones in the innermost circle have a tremendous amount of power, maybe more than they know, maybe more than they want. As a younger person, I thought that if one friend disappeared, another would appear as a replacement. It may have even been true then. Now I know that's not true. If any of these friends disappear, it will be like losing a limb, and I'll have phantom pain in that lost limb for decades and decades, until I am taken off the case. So I didn't like the idea that I had disappointed this friend by not sharing my news. (It also occurred to me that maybe this friend was displeased with me for receding in the days surrounding my birthday. On her last milestone birthday, she had a nice big party and invited people. I am being a shut-in, relatively.)
Of course, I may be missing the mark by a wide margin. She may not be upset for these reasons or even upset at all. When she said an hour later that she wasn't bothered, she may have been telling the truth. So maybe the point is that I'm upset, possibly as a result of unease brought on by an impending eightieth birthday. As commentary, as cure, even as celebration, I am posting a set of songs that look at friendship, and particularly the way that it takes hold of you over time. The most pointed and pertinent is John Cale's "Fear Is a Man's Best Friend." The funniest is Lou Reed's "My Friend George." The most energetic is Cheap Trick's "Best Friend." And the saddest is Richard Thompson's cover of the Kinks' "See My Friends," which Ray Davies wrote about the his older sister, who gave him his first guitar on his thirteenth birthday and who died later that day after falling ill while dancing at a nightclub. He wrote about her absence often, from every angle; even a song like "Come Dancing" is shot through with melancholy because of it. Davies is sixty-five, and he'll probably feel the loss unti he's my age. You know: birthdays, seen friends, phantom pain.Labels: ben, rock
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 |
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 |
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
LINK |
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, 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 |
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
LINK |
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
LINK |
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
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
LINK |
Thursday, February 28, 2008
YOU WON'T SEE ME
The Beatles
Rubber Soul
Capitol : 1965
[Buy It]
OFF THE HOOK
The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones Now!
Decca : 1964
[Buy It]
TELL HIM I'M NOT HOME
Chuck Jackson
I Don't Want to Cry
Wand : 1965
Available on The Very Best of Chuck Jackson 1961-1967
Varese : 1997
[Buy It]
BIGGEST FOOL IN TOWN
Gorgeous George
Stax : 1965
Available on: The Complete Stax/Volt Singles: 1959-1968
Atlantic : 1991
[Buy It]
YOUR PHONE'S OFF THE HOOK, BUT YOU'RE NOT
X
Los Angeles
Slash : 1980
[Buy It]
HANGING ON THE TELEPHONE
The Nerves
Nerves EP
Bomp: 1976
Available on: D.i.Y. Come Out & Play : American Power Pop 1975-1978
Rhino : 1993
[Buy It]
ANSWERING MACHINE
The Replacements
Let It Be
Twin-Tone : 1984
[Buy It]
I hate the telephone. It's fine for taking care of business or making contact in a more personal mode than e-mail. I doubt that when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone he had any idea the type of misery it could create in personal matters. The telephone is an idiotic and torturous enemy to the lonely or obsessive. These songs all predate cell phones, e-mail and text messaging, which further complicate matters. I don't even have a land line anymore - just a cell phone. I'm always there, whether I want to be or not. Presence can be painful when you want to be absent, and even worse is absence when you want to be present.
Most of these songs deal with that dynamic in on one form or another. Paul McCartney wrote "You Won't See Me" after having his phone calls ignored by girlfriend Jane Asher. Her line is always "engaged" - the English really have a way with words. Mick Jagger, too, gets only "an engaged tone." He figures it's off the hook or maybe she's ill or sleeping, until he's heading off into paranoia. Why won't she talk to him? He's Mick Jagger for Chrissake! Even The Beatles and Stones are getting dissed.
Chuck Jackson's really got it bad. Every time he calls his girlfriend, someone else answers and he hears her in the background saying "Tell him I'm not home." The telephone has turned Gorgeous George into the biggest fool in town, and he's had enough. And from the sound of things, George doesn't seem like someone you'd wanna fuck with.
"You're Phone's Off The Hook, But You're Not" is a great title and a great line that I once used on a girlfriend when, after a terrible conversation in my apartment, she said the first part ('cause it was) and without missing a beat, I responded "But you're not!" "What did you say?" "Oh, nothing." Jack Lee from the Nerves is "in the phone booth - it's the one across the hall," but guess what? She won't answer and he's hanging on the telephone. He's gonna let it ring off the wall. He can't control himself. It's a common reaction to being ignored.
Finally, Paul Westerberg takes us to the eighties version of no reply: the answering machine. Remember those? No call waiting. No voicemail. A machine and a tape. "How do say goodnight to an answering machine" he asks.
How do you say I love you to an answering Machine?
-by Ted BarronLabels: indie, power-pop, rock, soul, ted barron
posted by James
LINK |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
