Masterpiece: Red Headed Stranger

[Today: Happy 75th birthday to Willie Nelson!]

As the 70′s became the 80′s my brother and I were a couple of snot-nosed kids who loved Spiderman, KISS, the Oregon Ducks, Star Wars, baseball cards, Atari, and almost any sport that involved Nerf™ products. Against this backdrop, it’s hard to imagine Willie Nelson cracking our consciousness, but the man stormed the castle of our young imaginations.

The first time we listened to Red Headed Stranger was when we put it on for a laugh at our dad’s expense. We got our yucks in, but it was also clear to both of us that this album was telling a story (stories were good) that involved lots of gunplay (guns =’d great fun) and murder (awesome!). The back of the LP even featured comic book panels with song lyrics, to drive home the narrative – and the guy doing the killing looked like Willie Nelson! Each successive spin after that the laughter died down a bit more, and we listened as this country version of Mister Rogers told us a tale of infidelity, bloody revenge, and ragin’ black stallions.

Fade out for about 15 years and cut to me post-college, living in San Francisco, and flipping through Amoeba Records’ dollar bin. Whoa, there’s Red Headed Stranger… I haven’t heard that in years… definitely worth a buck. I took it home, expecting a trip down memory lane, and maybe a good laugh, and got hit between the eyes by one of my favorite albums of all time. Not coincidentally, it’s a record filled with many of Willie’s best moments.

Willie Nelson turns 75 years old today, but he’s been a wizened old spirit for decades. Take a look at that album cover – Nelson was 42 years old when he sat for that portrait, but he already looked like a guy who’d been to hell and back. And on Red Headed Stranger he told a story so compelling that it could sink into a couple of kids with their heads in the stars and their feet on the ground in Springfield, OR.

Listen: The Red Headed Stranger

*****

Not an urban myth dept: Here’s evidence that suggests Willie actually did fire up a doobie on the roof of the White House!

Blender Magazine: 33 Things You Should Know About Willie Nelson

On The Fence: Born To Run

Holy hell, yesterday was so much fun that I’ve decided to do a double shot (as KZEL-FM in Eugene would have put it back when I was in high school) of On The Fence madness.

Today, I dare to question one of rock’s holy scriptures, Born To Run. Not an album I grew up with, or ever really lived around, the importance of this LP has always eluded me. I’ve heard it in fits and starts over the years, and listened to many people expound on its brilliance, but it still just… well… read on…

THUMBS UP: Forget my faint praise, AllMusic.com says “Born to Run was an intentional masterpiece. It declared its own greatness with songs and a sound that lived up to Springsteen’s promise.” Pitchforkmedia.com says “Born to Run lies entirely on the dreamy and reckless side of maturity and is all the better for it.” Rolling Stone named it the 18th greatest album of all-time, and said that “In his determination to make a great album, Springsteen produced a timeless, inspiring record about the labors and glories of aspring to greatness.” Amazon.com editor Daniel Durchholz wrote that “When Born to Run was released in 1975, it earned then-unknown Springsteen the rare honor of simultaneous covers on both Time and Newsweek. The attention was warranted then, and it still is now.”

THUMBS DOWN: I have a ton of respect for Bruce Springsteen as an artist, and I dearly want to enjoy Born To Run as much as everybody tells me I should. I actually get jealous when people tell me how much this album means to them, because I love music, and love finding albums that are meaningful. But Born To Run is partly undone for me by its breathless reviews – no album could possibly live up to the hype that’s been bestowed on this. And more importantly, this album has always sounded overwrought to my ears – like bad high school drama. If such thoughts make me a heretic, then so be it, but every time I listen to Born To Run, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m hearing a pretty good bar band taking 8 minutes to play 3 minute tunes.

[This is the place where I would normally invite you to share your opinion, but today I'm not even going to bother. The mob of angry Springsteen fans is already forming outside my front door...]

Album info:

Release date
August 25th, 1975

Producers
Bruce Springsteen, Jon Landau, and Mike Appel

Label
Columbia

Side One
Thunder Road
Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out
Night
Backstreets

Side Two
Born To Run
She’s The One
Meeting Across The River
Jungleland

On The Fence: The Stranger

Few public figures have fallen farther and faster than Billy Joel. A platinum-selling, super model-marrying superstar in the 70′s and 80′s, he’s become an easy punch line and the poster boy for drunk driving in the 90′s and 00′s. But bad jokes and DUI’s aside, how does Billy Joel’s music hold up?

To find the answer, let’s take a look at The Stranger – a multi-multi-multi-multi-multi-multi-multi platinum success and perhaps the best album of his up and down career…

THUMBS UP: I don’t mean this sarcastically – the best thing about Billy Joel’s songs might be that nobody ever plays them any more. Really, when was the last time you heard any of his stuff? Because it’s been hermetically sealed, and hasn’t been appropriated for commercials, movies, etc, his music retains the power to take you back in time. And believe it or not, much of The Stranger actually sounds great. Crappy ballads aside, it’s much more tough and world-wise than what I remember. ‘Scenes From An Italian Restaurant’ is one of the very best songs of its era, and an epic slice of musical storytelling. The Stranger isn’t perfect, but it’s easily good enough to offset the understandable embarrassment that comes with dropping the needle on a Billy Joel album.

THUMBS DOWN: The Stranger contains two of the most atrocious songs of all-time – ‘She’s Always A Woman’ and ‘Just The Way You Are’. Lines like “I said I love you and that’s forever/And this I promise from the heart/I could not love you any better/I love you just the way you are” are bad enough to induce uncontrollable cringing, but were good enough to win the Grammy for song of the year in 1978 – go figure. Throw in the lesser-known but equally horrible and sappy ‘Everybody Has A Dream’ and you’ve got a trifecta of tripe that would pull even the greatest album into the sewer. Like a microcosm of Joel’s entire career, this LP has a few very memorable moments, followed by some really embarrassing stuff that leaves a lingering bad taste. But hey, the whistling is pretty cool…

[The real question is, will anybody stick up for Billy Joel? Can a piano man get some love in the 21st century?]

Album info:

Release date
September 1977

Producer
Phil Ramone

Label
Columbia

Side One
Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)
The Stranger
Just The Way You Are
Scenes From An Italian Restaurant

Side Two
Vienna
Only The Good Die Young
She’s Always A Woman
Get It Right The First Time
Everybody Has A Dream

Masterpiece: Unplugged In New York

[Today: Kurt Cobain and the high price of integrity...]

There are three tried and true story lines that surround Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged album. They are as follows:

A) Kurt Cobain’s letter from beyond the grave. The Unplugged show wasn’t intended – and probably wouldn’t have been released – as a Nirvana album before Cobain’s untimely death. But once it was released, it became a chilling snapshot of his dark frame of mind in the months leading up to his death.

B) A roadmap of Nirvana’s influences. The covers included here shed light on several of the band’s musical relatives; from Leadbelly to David Bowie to Meat Puppets to the Vaselines, one can connect the dots among a number of influences that might not otherwise have been readily apparent.

C) Cobain was sick and tired. By all reports seriously addicted to heroin and in poor health during the weeks leading up the Unplugged date in November of 1993, Cobain alienated his bandmates to the point that Dave Grohl offered to quit the group during rehearsals.

Unplugged stands out for me personally because it was the first album that really defined the generation gap between me and my relatively young parents. My mom – in her early 40′s when Cobain died of a shotgun blast to the skull – openly scoffed at the idea that his premature death could draw comparisons with John Lennon’s murder.

But like Lennon, Cobain was the unwitting voice of his generation. His was an ironic, sarcastic, and often petulant voice, but his music contains an uncomfortable, soul-baring honesty that is impossible to turn away from. Like Lennon’s 1970 masterwork, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, much of Cobain’s music sounds like it was written in a psychiatrist’s office.

Chuck Klosterman summed up the harsh truth of Cobain’s legacy when he wrote, “From a cultural standpoint, his suicide was the only ‘great’ thing that happened to music in the 1990′s. He is the only artist of my generation who was indisputably sincere.” Kurt Cobain left behind an infant daughter, and if only for her sake, I sincerely wish that he had lived a longer and happier life. Artistic integrity has never seemed so expensive or pointless.

Listen: Where Did You Sleep Last Night

Buried Treasure: Whiskey For The Holy Ghost

[Today: Mark Lanegan's darkest hour...]

The music that would come to be known as grunge exploded onto the scene in early 1992 with the unexpected multi-platinum success of Nirvana’s Nevermind and Pearl Jam’s Ten. But by 1994, grunge was already feeling played out and overexposed, with fashion models sporting flannel on Paris runways, Eddie Vedder on the cover of Time and Newsweek, and the abominable movie Singles – Hollywood’s own weak take on Generation X and grunge.

As lead singer of the band Screaming Trees, Mark Lanegan lived very near the epicenter of the grunge explosion. His second solo album, Whiskey For The Holy Ghost, sounds like a condemned man’s dying prayer, and the cover shot – featuring a bible, a bottle of whiskey, and a crowded ashtray – captures the intense desperation of the music. If Lanegan fulfilled his role in Screaming Trees as a more traditional heavy rock screamer, here he invokes the darkest spirits of popular music: Blind Willie Johnson, Hank Williams, Jim Morrison, Skip Spence, Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Gary Higgins, and almost any other musician in the process of burning out and/or fading away.

Like the best blues, it’s hard to tell where Lanegan’s music ends and his life begins. He certainly didn’t intend the album as a post-mortem on the grunge experience, but the timing of this release (mere months before Kurt Cobain’s death) as well as its raw-as-an-open-nerve sound, positions it as the natural album to serve that function. If grunge had been afforded a funeral, this would have made an excellent soundtrack.

Fortunately, Whiskey For The Holy Ghost was just the first milestone in Lanegan’s post-grunge career. He would make one more album with Screaming Trees before striking out on his own, where he has become something of an elder statesman in indie circles. He’s released a number of fine solo albums and served as a part-time member of Queens Of The Stone Age, but for a few months in 1994, he sang like a beaten man at the end of his rope.

Listen: Carnival

The Greatest Show That Never Was

In late 1994 I was a 24-year-old hayseed who’d just moved to the big city a few months before. I was way too busy walking around with a huge grin on my face, absorbing the bright lights and seeing the sights, to be overly concerned about the dangers of my new zip code. In Oregon, people had always been friendly and helpful, and those who weren’t were whisked away by the police and deported to Los Angeles, or wherever else they’d crawled in from. What, me worry?

As Johnny Johnson, Buzz Miller* and I left the office on that warm fall day, we were laughing and joking about some co-workers and looking forward to an evening on the town. As we approached the parking lot where Buzz’s car was stashed, a sketchy dude with bad teeth (I’d now instantly classify him as a “tweaker”) popped out from behind one of the parked cars. “What are you guys doing tonight? I’ve got three tickets for a benefit show at the Fillmore… you guys interested?” Who’s playing The Fillmore, we asked. “Melting Point, man… it’s a supergroup with Eddie Vedder, Bono, and lots of other superstars. Real hot ticket…”

Of course now I’d laugh at homey and tell him to get bent, but back then San Francisco had me wrapped in its warm embrace and anything seemed possible. Supergroup? Fillmore? Benefit concert? Only 20 bucks? Count me in! Homey was supposedly a roadie for this unannounced event, and had some freebies that he was looking to sell. The only catch was that we had to drive him across town to get the tickets from his manager. So Buzz, Johnny, homey and I jumped in Buzz’s jeep to go get the “tickets”.

Along the way, homey kept his mouth moving a mile a minute, probably to keep any of us from thinking too hard about the proposition at hand, and probably because he was scared we’d get wise to him and start beating his ass. According to him, he’d jammed with Hendrix back in the day, spent 20 years on the road working for various bands, etc etc etc. He kept telling us what a great time we were in for, and how lucky we were to get these tickets for 20 bucks apiece, because scalpers had been selling them for hundreds of dollars.

So we pulled up to an office building/hotel on Van Ness Ave, and we each gave him a Jackson. He told us he’d be right back, jumped out of the car and hustled into the building (which conveniently opened onto the street on the other side). Not two seconds after he disappeared through the lobby doors, Buzz said “He’s not coming back – we’re idiots.” And it was instantly obvious that yes, we were idiots, and no, homey was not coming back with any concert tickets.

Of course, I felt every shade of stupid for weeks on end. In hindsight, every part of homey’s story reeked of scam. How could I have been so dumb?? But it didn’t take me long to realize that I’d learned a valuable lesson for a small price. And beyond that, whenever JJ or Buzz bring up that great Melting Point show, I get a big chuckle out of it – and those laughs have easily added up to $20 worth of entertainment over the years.

*[names have been changed to protect the gullible]

Instant Classic: Attack & Release

[Today: The Black Keys + Danger Mouse = instant classic...]

The Black Keys’ formula is a deceptively simple one: Patrick Carney beats up his drum kit while guitarist Dan Auerbach rolls through a series of blues/rock licks and sings like a chimney full of smoke. The Keys sound like the world’s greatest bar band, and their records are notable for what they don’t include: production gloss, complex song structures, showy solos, exotic instrumentation. So the choice of Danger Mouse as producer of their new album was a bit of an eyebrow-raiser. One could be forgiven for wondering what kind of hip-hop/electronica rinse the group’s sound was in for, but Attack & Release proves that any such concerns were entirely unfounded.

The Keys are probably the only group in the world who could make the addition of a couple of backup singers and a banjo sound like the transition to Phil Spector’s wall-of-sound. Recognizing this, Danger Mouse uses the slightest flourishes to enhance the group’s strengths. Rather than tweaking their formula, Attack & Release shows that the band’s tough blues/rock will cut through a more fully rounded sound. From the church organ that finishes off ‘All You Ever Wanted’ to the electronic bubbling that lies underneath ‘I Got Mine’, the album is full of small touches that frame Carney and Auerbach center stage.

The Black Keys have quietly emerged as one of the most consistently and prolifically rocking groups of this decade. They’re good for at least one album every year, and each of their records has been better than the last (with the exception of 2003′s Thickfreakness, which is just off-the-charts awesome, and might remain their defining album). That Carney and Auerbach are from Akron, OH and have continued to live there and stay close to their roots is no surprise. If that’s what it takes to achieve their brand of small town blues, then I hope they never move.

Listen: All You Ever Wanted

Heartbreak Hotel

We’re observing a moment of silence in honor of our beloved friend Dooley Fletcher, who passed away one year ago today…

We miss you Dooley!

Mother Nature’s Sons – The Cover Art

Tomorrow marks the 38th edition of Earth Day – that eco-friendly blip on the calendar that celebrates the environmental movement. Having grown up around the natural splendor that is Oregon, I’m an environmentalist through and through. This mix had been kicking around in my brain for a long time, and I was pretty happy to get it out in time for the big day.

Altogether now, let’s stop eating those trees…

*****

[here's the front cover]

[here's the front gatefold]

[inside gatefold]

[quote reads: "It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it." - Dan Quayle, former US vice president]

[inside back]

[for use in a clear jewel case]

[back]

[and here's the track list]

Rain Forest – John Fahey
Mother Nature’s Son – The Beatles
Last Great American Whale – Lou Reed
(Nothing But) Flowers – Talking Heads
Equitorial Forest – Cymande
Pollution – Bo Diddley
Rainbow Stew – Merle Haggard
Let Nature Sing – Richard Betts
Paradise – John Prine
The Mountain – Steve Earle & The Del McCoury Band
Dry River – Dave Alvin
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall – Bob Dylan
The Dolphins – Fred Neil
Green Arrow – Yo La Tengo
Bein’ Green – Kermit The Frog
3 Rs – Jack Johnson
Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology) – Marvin Gaye
Trees – Snooks Eaglin

*****

Listen: Mother Nature’s Son [The Beatles]

5 Great Independent Record Stores

The first annual ‘Record Store Day‘ was held yesterday to raise the profile of – and provide a shot in the arm for – struggling independent music sellers. Music stores across North America took the day to celebrate the culture of buying and selling records, and draw attention to their financial plight. More than 1,400 independent music stores have closed in the US since 2003, and that number only figures to grow in the coming years. For those of us that take record stores for granted, it’s hard to imagine that one day they might be a thing of the past.

In the spirit of yesterday’s festivities – and because on this blog every day is record store day – here are five of my favorite independent record stores…

AMOEBA MUSIC – San Francisco [pictured] & Berkeley, CA – Both of these stores are so massive and all-encompassing that it seems like they sell every record in existence. The selection is so large that I’ve actually experienced brain-freeze at the Berkeley store – wandered around befuddled and left without buying anything. It’s Disneyland for music fans.

In business since: 1990 [Berkeley store]

*****

HOUSE OF RECORDS – Eugene, OR – This converted 3-bedroom house full of music sits off the east edge of the University of Oregon campus and has one of the least generic/corporate interiors of any music store in existence. It gets bonus points for being the record store where I bought my first LPs in college, and it still gives me that thrilling ‘High Fidelity’ record buzz.

In business since: 1971

*****

2nd AVENUE RECORDS – Portland, OR – 2nd Avenue stocks a vast number of CDs and t-shirts, but the real draw is their staggering selection of LPs, which features many hard-to-find new releases, re-issues, and original nuggets. If you like vinyl, this store can be dangerous.

In business since: 1982

*****

DAVE’S RECORDS – Chicago, IL – Dave boasts more than 40,000 LPs in stock, which is amazing considering that his store can’t be more than 200 square feet. ‘Most records per square foot’ would be a reasonable motto for Dave’s, but they already have an even better one: “CDs – Never had ‘em, never will.”

In business since: 1983 or so

*****

WATERLOO – AUSTIN, TX – Waterloo is less record store and more community activity center. It’s been voted ‘best record store’ in the Austin Chronicle reader’s poll every year since its founding, and always features both up-and-coming and well-known artists at in-store events. With more than 6,400 square feet of retail space, Waterloo has the space to offer a large selection of both LPs and CDs.

In business since: 1982

*****

And five defunct record stores that I wish were still kicking…

RECORD FINDER – San Francisco, CA

HAPPY TRAILS – Eugene, OR

DJANGO’S – Portland, OR

SATURN RECORDS – Oakland, CA

VILLAGE MUSIC – Mill Valley, CA

*****

“You can’t roll a joint on an iPod – buy vinyl!” – Shelby Lynne

*****

More on the first annual Record Store Day:

New York Times: ‘Record Stores Fight To Be Long Playing’

NPR: ‘High Fidelity Memories on Record Store Day’

The Edmonton Journal: ‘Record Stores Get Their Special Day’