I know it’s not a popular sentiment to broadcast, but holiday music generally blows egg nog. Although the argument could be made that most Christmas carols just aren’t very good songs, the problem here is one of quantity not quality. The world is still singing the exact same batch of songs it was singing when I was a kid, and anytime you’re subjected to the same music in perpetuity, bad things will happen. What was inspiring and uplifting as a seven year-old becomes tired and dull several decades and a few hundred thousand listens later. Whenever I hear about homicides during the holiday season, I always suspect ‘Deck The Halls’ as a mitigating factor. Strangely, there don’t seem to be many new additions to the holiday music canon, and most of the recent memorable holiday songs seem to be of the ‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus’ or ‘Santa Got Run Over By A Reindeer’ novelty/kitsch varietal. In other words, we’re talking about a pretty stagnant pool of music.
So what are discerning listeners to do this time of year, besides gouge out their ears with a pencil? There are certainly a handful of very good holiday albums by excellent interpretive musicians – John Fahey’s The New Possibility comes to mind here. It’s an album of guitar instrumentals, and unless you were paying very close attention, it’s unlikely you’d realize you were listening to a holiday album. Which in my book is almost perfect.
But an even better idea is to skip the interpretations and move away from holiday music altogether. There’s a certain strain of classical music that sets the right kind of mood for the holidays, and two of my personal favorite examples of it are Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos and Wynton Marsalis’ Baroque Music For Trumpets. The obvious huge disclaimer here is that if you’re not down with classical, this isn’t much of a solution. But I think we can all agree that almost anything beats yet another three minutes spent with the likes of ‘White Christmas’. Call it humbug if you must, but there’s no reason to let bad music dampen your holiday spirit.
Santa’s elves left a nice little gift under my tree this year: the 7-LP edition of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers’ The Live Anthology. I had assumed that this was strictly a chronological, greatest-hits-style live collection – thankfully it’s not. The individual tracks bounce from era to era, but Petty et al have mined the same sound for so many years that the leaps in time don’t feel the least bit disorienting (a group like U2, for instance, would be hard pressed to pull the same trick). One three song sequence on sides 5 and 6 goes from 1997 (‘Friend Of The Devil’) to 1981 (‘Woman In Love (It’s Not Me)’) to 2006 (‘It’s Good To Be King’), but feels entirely coherent. As Petty writes in his introduction, “We threw out the idea of ordering the songs chronologically – we were far more intent on getting a sequence that felt right, one musical and emotional moment leading to the next.”
Well then, mission accomplished. The songs are off the beaten path, but make for a revealing set about the band playing them. Petty’s intro to ‘Spike’ tells the story behind the song, provides some context, and leads perfectly into the tune itself. The covers (Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac, Grateful Dead, Van Morrison, Willie Dixon, Booker T & The MGs, Bobby Womack and more) are a telling pastiche of the the band’s influences. In total this anthology is about one-third established hits, one-third oddball tracks, and one-third covers – selected with enough care to follow the typical pacing and trajectory of a live show (albeit a very long one).
Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers are at their best on stage, so all of these songs feel organically, inherently correct. Also, the sound quality of this entire set is remarkable. It’s billed as “Long Playing Microgroove” but I’ve learned to eye such claims as so much snake oil – if the source material is poor, all the long-playing microgrooves in the world won’t get you there. Santa’s elves also brought me Tom Waits’ recent live release Glitter & Doom, which has such a muddy sound that it makes me feel like I’m sitting in the balcony of the Berkeley Community Theater. By contrast, the Petty set puts you right inside the speaker cabinet onstage.
This set also includes a 24-page booklet that contains liner notes and essays from various people associated with the group. SF Chronicle critic Joel Selvin weighs in on the band’s month long residency at The Fillmore in Janaury/February of 1997 (I was fortunate enough to attend a couple of shows in that run), during which he writes, “The guys played what they wanted to play. They did their songs the way they wanted to do them… It was music for the music again for Petty and the Heartbreakers, the kind of rough-hewn, hand-made music, rich with the feeling of the moment, usually only heard in rehearsal halls or sound checks.” The Live Anthology is seven LPs of such music, and a vivid reminder of why Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers are such an essential American band.
Wrap an album in all the pretty paper and shiny bows in the world, lay five-star reviews from every major music source on the table, and at the end of the day, for an album to move you it just has to hit you in the gut – or hit you at some level, and hard. In a very real sense, all the critical hand-wringing in the world (like this blog) is just background noise to the moment of needle hitting record, and album hitting (or missing) heart. That eureka (!!!) moment of hearing a great new sound is what keeps record junkies (or at least this record junkie) taking reccos and reading up for promising new leads. Many miss, but enough hit to keep us/me chasing the high.
Lest you think I’m just wandering through the garden of critical masturbation, fear not – there’s a reason for the graph above. Living Things’ 2005 album Ahead Of The Lions was met with a fair amount of indifferent, shrugging reviews that compared it unfavorably to contemporary groups who were supposedly doing this sound better. The sound in question is straight-ahead guitar/bass/drums rock that aims for the gut and spews a fair amount of young man’s angst. In other words, good ol’ fashioned rock and roll. That in itself seemed to doom Living Things to critical scorn in an era of extreme genre specialization. Who-styled, big arena rock had gone the way of the Lincoln Continental, claimed a posse of paid opinionators. Thanks… next.
But who cares what a bunch of smirking, egg-headed critics think, once good songs start pouring out of the speakers and punching you about the ears? On Ahead Of The Lions, Living Things sound pissed about corrupt CEOs and politicians mindlessly dropping bombs, and at a time (2000-2008) that seemed very grim on the homefront, this music fortified me during my daily commute. Songs like ‘Bombs Below’ and ‘I Owe’ filled me with with the fire to march through another workday even as I wondered if my country was being driven off the rails by an inept chief executive. I think it’s one of the better “lost” albums of this decade, but who knows if it’s your cup of tea. Only you can decide…
[Today: Jack & Meg White have a ball & biscuit...]
It’s easy to look at the music industry and see an obstacle course of challenges facing any artist in search of an audience. Pirated MP3s rob musicians of royalties. Labels are built to hit home runs, not nurture artists. My feet hurt. And so on. But one listen to an album like Elephant (or Exile On Main St, for that matter) is an ear-opening reminder that the music business isn’t about new-age marketing so much as it’s about riffs and hooks. The gigantic, throbbing guitar line that opens ‘Seven Nation Army’ (and this album) is a clarion call of world domination. You got riffs like that, you can lock your marketing people in the closet and throw away the key. And Jack White has bushels of riffs like that.
At the dawn of the 21st century, albums like this just weren’t supposed to get made anymore. Released in 2003, Elephant is a throwback in both form and function – an album of vintage styles recorded on early-60’s equipment. The distortion, fuzz and blues that form the backbone of this album are exactly what made it sound so fresh in a digital world. After the crunching, Led Zeppelican riffs of ‘Seven Nation Army’ we’re treated to dirty blues, psychedelic rock, tender balladry, and even a torch song from Meg. Retro in all the best ways, The White Stripes don’t simply mimic and pick over the musical past – they infuse it with their own particular brilliance, while playing with the energy of a punk band.
Jack White is one of the best guitarists of the modern era – a high-voltage bluesbreaker who lets loose a frenzy of hot licks every time he picks up the instrument. In one sentence of its original review of this record, Rolling Stone compared White to Lightnin’ Hopkins, Marc Bolan and Buzzcocks. Throw in the serious stomp implied by its title, and you’ve got a landmark album that sounds more timeless with each passing year.
Nick Tosches’ 1982 biography of Jerry Lee Lewis is a one of the best rock books in print, and a worthy rendering of a man nicknamed ‘Killer’. Lewis is an idiosyncratic character who, in his own words, was “one mean sonofabitch”. He’s first cousins with the preacher Jimmy Swaggart, and his life has been an ongoing struggle between the sacred and the profane, with plenty of madness thrown in for good measure. Tosches captures the tone of Lewis’ twisted life with a writing style that’s part biblical brimstone, part gumshoe detective. Hellfire isn’t just a great story, it’s a first-rate piece of writing and a perfectly stylized biography of a truly American character.
Witness Tosches’ vivid description of what happened when Lewis’ disapproving father first discovered him playing rock music in some Southern den of iniquity:
Elmo walked past the crowded bar, past the roulette wheel, the blackjack table, and the Beat-My-Shake – walked until he saw his son, sitting up there at the piano, pounding and howling about how them big-legged women better keep their dresses down ’cause when he stared drillin’ on ‘em they were gonna lose their nightgowns, and that old blind man standing up there next to him, nodding his head up and down and wrenching at that electric squeeze-box as if it were the instrument of his blindness and he could not free himself from it. Elmo liked it – all of it. He had him a drink, and he liked it even more.
The book opens with Jerry Lee getting arrested at the gates of Graceland after causing a drunken disturbance in the wee hours of the morning, and after covering the bases of his life, circles back to an aging rocker losing his grip on reality. One nightmare sequence sees Jerry Lee morphing from dressing room to dressing room, the only things that remain constant are the drink in his hand and the idiotic reporter across from him asking inane questions. It’s a scarifying, crystalline take on the mind-numbing rigors of fame. Another passage finds him lost on tour somewhere in the midwest, ordering a bottle of booze from room service and watching the static on his television turn into a swarm of insects. This is chilling stuff, and from everything I can glean from Lewis’ character, it ought to be.
A straight-up re-telling of the facts of Jerry Lee Lewis’ life would make for an unsatisfying account. It’s a credit to Tosches’ stylized writing that even though Hellfire is nearly 30 years old, it still reads like the definitive biography of a rock and roll hell-raiser.
I’ve always been amused at the uproar caused by Hip-Hop. The fact that anyone, anywhere could be threatened by this genre is pretty laughable. Like professional wrestlers and comic book characters, hip-hop artists are meant to be outsized personalities – indeed, their very profession dictates that they must be so. For the same reasons that Ned The Accountant will never be a Marvel superhero, bland nice-guy rappers just ain’t happening. But unlike wrestlers and comic book characters, rappers don’t break down into heels and faces or super-heroes and villains. In hip-hop, most everybody is a bad guy, even if that Bad is more figurative than literal.
For me, the tough guy hierarchy of hip-hop personalities seems to break down along roughly two lines – for clarity’s sake let’s call them kingpins and jokers. Kingpins are the rappers who demand to be taken seriously and with the utmost respect. Whether they’re educating (KRS-One), getting political (Chuck D), flexing (LL Cool J), slinging dope (Biggie Smalls), cornering the market (Jay-Z) or all of the above (Ice Cube, Ice T), these gentlemen are very much not to be trifled with.
On the other side of the coin, you have the jokers – MC’s who aren’t afraid to be tell a dumb joke or be politically incorrect. The Beastie Boys are classic jokers – it’s difficult to imagine them harming anyone, even if they talk a good, street-smart game. But while that’s a fine guiding line, it doesn’t necessarily separate the two camps. Wu Tang Clan’s Ol’ Dirty Bastard threatened plenty of bodily harm, but was such a far-out clown (he called himself, among other things, “Big Baby Jesus”) that it was impossible to take any of his bluster too seriously. Ditto Flavor Flav, who always seems to either be punching a female or rapping about how bad he is. But anyone who wears a giant clock around his neck is definitely a joker, in spite of any rap sheet.
Two of my favorite jokers are Biz Markie, the classic court jester of hip-hop…
…and Sir Mix-A-Lot, a gun-collecting funny man who has never been afraid to speak his mind…
If you ask me, hip-hop today has too many kingpins and not enough jokers…
“Captain James T. Kirk, Starship Enterprise.” It was a role that William Shatner was born to play. With his staccato voice and the twinkle in his eye, it was impossible to see where Shatner ended and Captain Kirk began, and whether he was beating up alien bad guys or seducing some green-skinned beauty, it was a role that he always seemed to relish. Star Trek famously ran for just three seasons before it was cancelled, but it ended up being repeatedly syndicated for re-run, bringing Shatner/Kirk to generation after generation of new fans.
In 1968, near the end of the show’s original run, Shatner recorded an album of spoken work poetry and cover songs called The Transformed Man. While that album has gained cult-favorite status in some circles, it’s difficult to take seriously. Shatner’s overwrought covers of songs like ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ and ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ sound like parodies of the lyrical content of those songs – as if by treating their work as the most serious poetry in the world, he was pointing out that the rock emperors wore no clothes. Taken at face value, it was a bizarre album of suspect covers – a curiosity at best.
And that was Shatner’s musical legacy until he released Has Been 36 years later. Never before in the history of popular music has an artist released just two albums of such disparate quality. With the help of Ben Folds (who served as arranger and musical director), Shatner here made an album that was intentionally funny, oddly charming, and genuinely entertaining. Just like with Star Trek, it’s hard to tell where these characters end and Shatner begins. Most of the songs deal with middle-aged crises and trying to make sense of a world gone mad, but this never gets close to heavy-handed.
The album begins with a bang – Shatner’s cover of ‘Common People’ is an outstanding twist on one of the best songs of the 90’s. Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker wrote the song as an ode to snotty rich youth, but taken through Shatner’s musical filter it becomes a tune about a vast generational divide that seems even more incomprehensible across the smoke and booze of the local bar. Elsewhere, his duet with Henry Rollins on ‘I Can’t Get Behind That’ sees the duo run down a hilarious laundry list of the ills facing the world. The title track sees him shoot down a trio of hecklers like a spaghetti western hero. And on ‘You’ll Have Time’, Shatner reminds listeners of their mortality, gleefully singing “By the time you hear this, I may well be dead/And you my friend, might be next, ’cause we’re all gonna die.” You might even die laughing…
David Bowie has constantly shape-shifted during the course of his five decade career. From earnest folkie to coked-up alien to thin white duke to soundscape explorer, he has changed musical personalities with the frequency that other people change socks. But Bowie’s most interesting persona was easily Ziggy Stardust (the name was derived as a tribute to both Iggy Pop and The Legendary Stardust Cowboy), an alien who comes to Earth to offer hope to a planet that has just five years until extinction. Ziggy becomes a rock star, but ends up destroyed by his fans and fame. Released on June 6th, 1972, the album turned Bowie into a world-wide star, and remains his finest artistic statement.
Concept album is a phrase that sends shudders through even the most adventurous music fan, but Ziggy Stardust… is an album that doesn’t get hung up on overwrought conceits. The three main ideas of this album – impending armageddon, feelings of alienation, and the dark powers of fame – are hardly new to rock. By orbiting these concepts around a magnetic, theatrical character like Ziggy Stardust, Bowie created an album that looks and feels like a story, but is really about moods. Of course, it succeeds first and foremost not because of concepts or Martians, but because it’s a great batch of songs. Guitarist Mick Ronson is the secret weapon here – the licks he extracts from his guitar are the very spaceship that allows Ziggy to fly. As musical director, Ronson drilled The Spiders From Mars into a tight unit that credibly pulled off space-age rock. He is deserving of much more credit for the sound of this album than he’s generally accorded.
But Ronson can be forgiven by being overshadowed by Ziggy-era Bowie. At the time of the album’s release, Bowie had seemingly been on the verge of stardom for years – a photogenic talent who hadn’t put together the music to match his hype. That all changed with Ziggy Stardust… – ‘It Ain’t Easy’ ‘Moonage Daydream’ ‘Suffragette City’ and ‘Starman’ were just a few of the songs that served as de facto coronations of a new rock icon. By conceiving an album about an alien who becomes a star, David Bowie finally propelled himself to the very apex of stardom. And if that doesn’t spin your head, just wait until I tell you about the time he made an album with Stevie Ray Vaughan…
The great fraternal brotherhood of cats lost one of its best members yesterday. Othello wasn’t my cat, but he was a good one – the kind of little prince who made you understand why the ancient Egyptians treated cats like royalty. I’ve lived around a lot of cats during my life, and tom cats have always been special. In particular, I’ve lived with and around a string of male black cats who, one after another, stole my heart with their sleek good looks and winning personalities.
First came the late, great Othello, who lived to the ripe old age of 19. He was followed by the legendary Gato Negro, my roommate’s cat who was a happy dog trapped in a feline body, and died unexpectedly at age 6. Along the way I got my own black cat, Omar, who came from the SF SPCA psych ward, and wouldn’t let me touch him for six months. He ended up being the only cat I’ve ever owned who would come and jump in my lap when called. He passed away three years ago, and sent us little Oscar, who has become the neighborhood ambassador for any creature – be it raccoon, dog or human – who wanders by. The fact that black cats are considered bad luck, and are the last cats adopted from any shelter (sad but true) is yet one more reason why America is the dumbest country on earth.
As the great Albert Schweitzer noted, “There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.” The former gives me great pleasure, but it’s the latter that I can’t imagine living without. Today I’m sadly humming Jorma Kaukonen’s ‘Tom Cat Blues’ and remembering a sweet little boy named Othello…
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