Stuck In My Head: Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses

U2 formed in 1976 as a proto-punk band called The Hype. But soon enough they changed their name, and during the 80′s, they continued to evolve away from the amateur punk band they once were, and into MTV superstars. U2′s 1991 masterpiece Achtung Baby is a sonically adventurous album that explores the nature of interpersonal relationships. Author Stephen Catanzarite has proposed that the album is actually about the bible, and I’ve come up with my own off-the-wall interpretation: I think Achtung Baby can be heard as U2′s love letter to punk rock.

The fortunes of U2 and punk rock ran in opposite directions during the 1980′s. By 1991, U2 was on top of the world, while punk was almost dead as a genre. No one could have predicted that a then-unknown band from Seattle was about to fulfill punk’s commercial promise and re-ignite interest in the genre. Achtung Baby is an album that looks at failed relationships and here-and-gone passion, and even If U2 wasn’t addressing the punks in particular, that context provides fresh subtext for lines like “I can’t be holding on to what you got/When all you got is hurt” (from ‘One’) and “You’re an accident waiting to happen/You’re a piece of glass left in a beach” (from ‘Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses’). The former could be read as a passionate defense of U2′s decision to abandon the stylistic confines of punk, while the latter is a poetic description of punk burnouts like Darby Crash and Sid Vicious.

‘Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses’ gains surprising new life for me in this context. This song is a rhetorical question to a reckless lover, but heard another way it becomes a scorching sermon on why punk was destined to fail commercially. “You’re dangerous ’cause you’re honest/You’re dangerous, you don’t know what you want” is a wicked two-line assessment of punk’s greatest strength and biggest weakness. “The doors you open/I just can’t close” could be an eloquent acknowledgment of punk’s enduring influence on U2 and other mainstream rockers. This much is true: punk rock was an untamable beast that couldn’t be broken without sacrificing what made it beautiful in the first place, and ‘Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses’ has inadvertently opened my eyes to the idea that the genre was sown with the seeds of its own destruction.

Listen: Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses

Doubleshot Tuesday: All Things Must Pass/Tribute To

[Today: Passing it on...]

Cover songs are a tricky proposition. Bad covers are a dime a dozen, but the right artist covering the right material can present new angles on an old song, and remind us of worthwhile music that has been forgotten. My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James does a little of both on his latest EP, Tribute To, which features six George Harrison songs that James recorded within days of Harrison’s death in 2001.

This music was put to tape well before My Morning Jacket found fame (which explains why these songs have been on the shelf for nearly a decade), and as such, it has a less polished, more country sound that’s awash in reverb and echo. James has since outgrown the Neil Young-on-quaaludes vocal stylings that marked MMJ’s early albums, but that voice works for these interpretations of Harrison’s observations on life and death, love and heartbreak. Harrison’s songs had a higher purpose than pop and the stark gravity of James’ versions highlights the spiritual questing at their core. In James’ hands, ‘Long, Long, Long’ is clearly a conversation with God, ‘Behind That Locked Door’ is a meditation on the prison of love, and ‘Love You To’ is a funeral dirge.

“I find comfort knowing that all things must pass, but that as all things do pass their spirits are still out there moving us somewhere… doing what they do, just as real as they ever were in the physical world…” wrote James in the EP’s liner notes, “I can hear them in singing and feel them in my blood.” The dust on these tapes might explain why this was released under the name Yim Yames, but it’s as moving as anything James has done with his flagship band. Tribute To is a fine exploration of Harrison’s music, and a worthy eulogy to a resonant voice.

Listen: My Sweet Lord [George Harrison]

Listen: My Sweet Lord [Yim Yames]

Listen: All Things Must Pass [George Harrison]

Listen: All Things Must Pass [Yim Yames]

A Dozen Great Album Covers

Here are a dozen (or so) LP covers that hang in frames in our music room. Where possible, click on the images to see them at a larger size…

Sweet | Off The Record

Kiss | Kiss

Fela Kuti | Army Arrangement

Sex Pistols | God Save The Queen 12″

Jimi Hendrix Experience | Are You Experienced?

Dick Dale | Surfer’s Choice | Alternate Cover by Blaine Siegel

Bo Diddley | Bo Diddley Is A Gunslinger

Miles Davis | Volume 1

Ray Charles | What’d I Say

Various Artists | The Guitars That Destroyed The World

Reverend Gary Davis | Harlem Street Singer

New Order | Power, Corruption & Lies

Heat Wave | Too Hot To Handle

Bad Apple: Self-Portrait

[Today: Dylan's stink bomb...]

Here’s a comment I recently left on the blog The Rising Storm, in response to their U-Review on Bob Dylan’s album Self Portrait:

“In a word, horrible. Dylan has made about 185 albums, so there’s no need to ever, ever go here. The only tune on this album that’s even remotely of value – ‘All The Tired Horses’ – features a chorus of backup singers on vocals instead of Dylan. Everything else amounts to a big, steaming pile of horse poop.”

- dk June 8, 2009 @ 12:50 pm

*****

Here’s a follow-up comment by another reader of the same blog:

“The only real problems with Dylan’s most misunderstood and unheard album were the timing and the title. Were it released as The Bootleg Series Vol. 12 in 2009, it might not have dismayed critics and confused most of the rest of his audience. Dylan has long claimed it was his response to unauthorized, bootleg recordings, and that description fits — from the scattershot sequencing to the wildly eclectic repertoire. Given the current Dylan penchant for unpredictable covers in his live show, mixing up country ballads, folk standards and contemporary favorites and a sprinkling of his own songs seems downright rootsy. I’ve always loved this record, but most interesting is that except for the country crooner’s voice, Self-Portrait isn’t much different from his onstage act today. Be honest: When was the last time you listened to it? Or did you ever? What goes around comes around. Self-Portrait takes us full circle.”

- L.R. June 20, 2009 @ 7:28 pm

*****

And here’s my rebuttal, which gets to the heart of my feelings about Self-Portrait:

With apologies to Mr. R, I have to say that my opinion of Self Portrait relates to the music, not the title of the album or when and how it was marketed. His assertion that this album wouldn’t have confused Dylan’s audience as much if it had been released in 2009 as part of the Bootleg Series totally misses the point. The very intention of this album was to confuse and dismay his audience. Noted Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin wrote that “According to Dylan, the sense of a man parodying himself on his first album of 1970, Self Portrait, was a deliberate, concerted attempt to dispel much of the iconography surrounding him, once and for all.”

Zimmy: “That album was put out… [because] at that time… I didn’t like the attention I was getting. I [had] never been a person that wanted attention. And at that time I was getting the wrong kind of attention, for doing things I’d never done. So we released that album to get people off my back. They would not like me anymore. That’s… the reason that album was put out, so people would just stop buying my records, and they did.” [1981]

I had listened to this album passively at some point in the last year, but I just pulled it off the shelf and I’m spinning it right now. While I don’t think it bears much relation to his current live act – his band today is ultra-tight, and much of Self-Portrait feels hackneyed and tossed off – there’s more to recommend here than I had remembered. ‘Alberta #1′ isn’t bad, and in fact most of side one is pretty passable. But side two is where things start to fall apart, and this album gets progressively worse. ‘Belle Isle’ is an abomination – I hereby nominate it as the single worst piece of crap that Dylan has ever foisted on his fans. Most of side two sounds like outtakes from Nashville Skyline that were better off on the cutting room floor.

But it’s Dylan’s ‘covers’ of his own material that really induce shudders. ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ is amateurish, badly recorded, and hard to swallow. The version of ‘Mighty Quinn’ included here sounds like an after-hours bar jam with too many musicians on stage. And his take on Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘The Boxer’ sounds drunk and rambling – a musical insult to both Paul Simon and himself. When critics called this album a middle finger to Dylan’s fans, these were the songs they were reacting to.

I don’t actually think Dylan was trying to juke his audience as much as he might have us believe – that’s revisionist history to preserve his nearly unblemished artistic record. I think that he was searching for his next, post-Nashville sound (and if I were feeling charitable, I might even say that he was going for some sloppy pre-punk version of himself) but he didn’t find it, struck out miserably, and then finally did regain his stride with the confessional Blood On The Tracks.

Personally, I don’t like Self Portrait, but I admire Bob Dylan for having the courage to take chances and follow his convictions. Some of his [music] leads down dead end alleys, but he’s taken me to enough cool places that I’ll follow the guy practically anywhere…

- dk June 21, 2009 @ 1:23 am

Buried Treasure: Beatles For Sale

[Today: The dark side of the Fab Four...]

Before they became the Fab Four, The Beatles were just another band of young lads trying to catch a break. To that end, they spent the better part of 1961 in Hamburg, Germany – playing endless sets for drunken tourists and mafioso, popping pills and drinking beer to stay awake, verbally assaulting their audiences, and honing their sound to a razor sharp edge. In The Beatles Anthology, Ringo Starr describes their diet at that time, “This was the point of our lives when we found pills, uppers. That’s the only way we could continue playing for so long… We never thought we were doing anything wrong, but we’d get really wired and go on for days. So with beer and Preludin, that’s how we survived.” Hamburg was musical boot camp for the band, and the experience of playing six-hour sets in grim conditions undoubtedly helped them become the greatest band in the world.

By 1965, Beatlemania was in full bloom, and the group was fresh off the cinematic and musical triumphs of A Hard Day’s Night. So it was surprising – and perhaps reflected their weariness at living in superstardom’s white hot spotlight – when they elected to release an album that was nearly half covers, and featured some of their darkest material yet. Beatles For Sale is an odd mixture of tunes – ‘Eight Days A Week’ ‘Mr. Moonlight’ and ‘Honey Don’t’ are lightweight stuff, but elsewhere The Beatles revealed what kind of group they were becoming. The opening trio of ‘No Reply’ ‘I’m A Loser’ and ‘Baby’s In Black’ is gloomy stuff, and heralded some great, emotionally complex songwriting to come.

But what makes Beatles For Sale a real keeper is the moments where that earlier, hopped-up band of drunken kids slips briefly through. On ‘Rock And Roll Music’ they sound like they’re playing for their lives, while turning out the greatest Chuck Berry cover of all-time. Paul McCartney’s vocals on ‘Kansas City’ mark his most fierce performance on record, and the group sounds ground down on ‘Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby’. When George Harrison sings “Fifty women knocking on my door…” it’s with a weariness that isn’t make believe. At that moment, The Beatles sound like they’re at the end of a long shift on the Reeperbahn, and the beginning of an exhausting bout of fame.

Listen: Rock And Roll Music

Listen: I’m A Loser

Listen: Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby

Masterpiece: The Great Twenty-Eight

[Today: The first man up the mountain...]

Humankind must be hardwired to admire pioneers. Whether it’s naming islands and countries after those who “discovered” them, or cataloguing the names of the first men to scale Mount Everest and run a mile in less than four minutes, we love us some firsts. Naturally, a lot of time and energy has been spent debating who was the first true Rock & Roll artist. Elvis Presley deserves mention for his Sun Sessions LP, but even The King is clearly trumped by Chuck Berry. Some critics have floated swing artist Louis Jordan or Ike Turner or Jerry Lee Lewis, but even Jerry Lee’s mom knew the real score. According to the Killer, “[My mama] said, ‘You and Elvis are pretty good, but you’re no Chuck Berry.”

Chuck Berry wasn’t just one of the first artists to play Rock & Roll, he was also one of the greatest. He created a catalog of now-standard tunes and transcendent guitar licks that continue to inspire contemporary rockers. If Elvis encapsulated the physical presence and attitude of Rock, Chuck Berry had the sound. When Keith Richards inducted him into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame in 1986, he acknowledged his debt, “I lifted every lick he ever played.” AC/DC has made a career out of super-charging Berry’s licks and tossing in naughty lyrics. The Beatles, Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, and even Elvis himself, were heavily influenced by his sound.

In 1962, in an effort to shut down an important black voice, the government sent Berry to jail for two years on a trumped-up charge related to the Mann Act (which guarded against “immoral” behavior). But the cat was already out of the bag, and by influencing the main architects of 60′s rock, Berry ensured himself a permanent place in the sound of modern music. Fame has its rewards, but as Berry can attest, fortune isn’t guaranteed to be among them. “Of the five most important things in life,” he once shared “health is first, education or knowledge is second, and wealth is third. I forget the other two.”

Listen: Johnny B. Goode

Listen: Maybellene

Listen: Rock And Roll Music