Masterpiece: Nevermind

[Today: The game changer...]

Every decade or so, an album comes along that represents a before-and-after moment in the history of rock. The closest my generation came to experiencing one before the 1990s was Thriller, which was more of a freak pop culture tsunami – a huge-selling album that didn’t truly affect the way music was made – than a bona fide game changer. But Nirvana’s 1991 album Nevermind really did feel like the beginning of a new chapter in music. Here was a band that channeled The Sex Pistols, The Beatles and Velvet Underground in equal measures, and topped it all off with big, FM-ready guitar licks courtesy of bands like Boston and Aerosmith.

Ever-catchy lead single ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ has rightly been described as a generational anthem. Lead singer Kurt Cobain took the song’s title from a phrase spray-painted on his wall by a friend, but his line “Here we are, now entertain us” captured the demanding boredom of a generation that made common the word “awesome” while refusing to be easily awed. Elsewhere, ‘Come As You Are’ has a creepy bass line that adds to the desperation and bitter irony of Cobain’s lyric “No I swear that I don’t have a gun…”, while ‘Lithium’ uses the loud-soft-loud formula to depict wild mood swings.

Nevermind is filled with raw music that was punk enough for a real charge, yet polished enough for mass consumption. Cobain was a brilliant songwriter who turned his personal pain into disturbing, compelling songs that raised the bar on rock-&-roll authenticity. Lost in the shuffle of his star turn is drummer Dave Grohl, who has since been recognized as the strongest drummer this side of John Bonham by none other than Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. Grohl’s wildman Animal impersonation underscores Cobain’s obtuse, poetic irony (“Sell the kids for food…”) and semi-psychotic rants (see ‘Polly’ and ‘Territorial Pissings’).

Aside from the spark in his music, I wasn’t particularly fond of Kurt Cobain’s public persona. He was far too whiny about success and fame, he married a certified nut, and he let a petty drug habit get the best of him. And yet, pulling Nevermind from the shelf often feels like looking through a box full of pictures of a long dead friend. Sometimes it’s comforting and takes me back to better times, but more often it just rips the scabs off old wounds that are better left alone…

Listen: Smells Like Teen Spirit

Listen: Come As You Are

Listen: Lithium

Buried Treasure: Here Are The Sonics!!!

[Today: Abrasive, savage, beautiful...]

Here Are The Sonics!!! is as abrasive, nasty and raw as you can possibly hope for from an album that dropped in 1965, near the height of Beatlemania. Founded in Tacoma, WA in 1960, The Sonics rotated through several different members before coalescing into their classic lineup: Andy Parypa on guitar, his brother Larry on bass, Bob Bennett behind the skins, Rob Lind on sax, and Gerry Roslie handling piano and vocals. Said Bennett in the reissue liner notes, “We wanted people to gasp, we wanted people to go ‘oh my gawd!’ And so that’s how we approached it. We wanted to blow people off their feet, not just with loudness, but with tightness, with music that made you want to dance.”

The most gasp-inducing element of The Sonics’ music has to be Roslie’s tonsil-shredding screams that punctuate nearly every other line of lyrics. His hyper-aggressive singing enabled a band of barely competent teens to pull off covers of well-known tunes like ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ and ‘Roll Over Beethoven’. Andy Parypa’s guitar is set for max distortion, and the band’s lack of chops only enhances the brutality of their sound. Their first single, ‘The Witch’ was originally written as a do-the-twist style dance number, before mutating into a heavy classic. The band was heartbroken by the result of the session, but Etiquette Records founder Buck Ormsby went ahead and released the song anyway, because he liked it.

When both ‘The Witch’ and B-side ‘Psycho’ shot up the charts, the group was rushed into the studio to record a full-length LP. Out of necessity, it was mostly covers with a few originals thrown in. But those originals – including ‘The Witch’ ‘Psycho’ and ‘Strychnine’ – are now considered to be some of the original blueprints for punk. Even though they had a massive local following and proved to be hugely influential, The Sonics’ sound was too savage for a national following, and they were never able to break through to a larger audience. And so after a handful of scorching albums, they quietly called it quits at the end of the 60s…

Listen: Psycho

Listen: Strychnine

Listen: The Witch

Sleeve Notes: Axis Bold As Love

David King designed and Roger Law drew the cover art for the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s sophomore album, Axis: Bold As Love. It features colorful artwork that mimics a Hindu devotional painting called Viraat Purushan-Vishnuroopam (see below). To competing ace guitarists of the day, it must have seemed like Hendrix had a dozen arms, but on balance this album is more restrained and soulful than his debut. Jimi was reportedly less than thrilled with this cover art, but my friends and I treated this LP like a holy grail. One day during the summer of 1991 my buddy Jonesy triumphantly found a used copy, brought it home, and then watched in mute horror as our friend Matt tacked it up on the wall by driving four thumbtacks through the corners of an otherwise pristine cover. All hail thumbtacks! All hail Viraat Purushan-Vishnuroopam! All hail Jimi Hendrix…

Doubleshot Tuesday: Temple Of The Dog/Singles

[Today: Remembering Grunge...]

A few years back I dragged The P out to the Great American Music Hall to see Mudhoney. I’m sure she was bored witless, but one of the things I love about my wife is that she’s always up for a show. I was never a huge Mudhoney fan back in the day, but lately they represent one of the few chances to get a taste of real grunge music, and they didn’t disappoint this semi-fan. It seems so apocryphal that I feel the need to qualify the following: as I remember it, lead singer Mark Arm ran up into the balcony overlooking the stage, climbed up onto the railing, and jumped down onto the stage. Not an impossible jump, but it seems like such a perfect grunge moment that now I wonder if I dreamed it up to satisfy my expectations of what the show must have been like. Who cares? All I remember is a great, rowdy show that delivered exactly what I was after…

Grunge reached its peak in 1992, the year I graduated from college. My college roommates were a diverse bunch – four guys who liked all kinds of different music, from metal to rap to classic rock to pure pop. My roommate Keith was a metalhead and had like-minded friends from Seattle who would drive down for periodic visits. Each time, they’d come storming in raving about bands like Mudhoney, Soundgarden and Nirvana. They brought us Temple Of The Dog in the fall of 1991, minutes after it was released and months before anyone else had a clue. We’d put their discoveries on the hi-fi and crank them up and drink cheap beer and sit around basking in the glow of this music. Additionally, my high school friend Aldo was at the University of Washington, and I’d get the occasional word from him about these amazing triple-bill shows he was seeing for two bucks in Seattle bars. It’s viewed in hindsight as a huge corporate grab (which it turned into) but grunge really was a local movement that had genuine energy and excitement behind it, well before the majors caught on.

At that time, of course, it wasn’t called “grunge”, it was just the next wave of rock, and it sounded a lot fresher than the same old stuff clogging the airwaves. I’ve never quite understood what distinguishes music as grunge – perhaps a combination of geography, attitude, flannel and distortion? The soundtrack to the movie Singles collects some great songs and provokes a few more questions. What is Paul Westerberg’s sap doing here? Are Smashing Pumpkins really grunge? Why was this movie so bad? Alice In Chains kill it on album-opener ‘Would’ – perhaps the purest distillation of the idea of grunge, but lead singer Layne Stahley’s gruesome death makes their music sound like chilling, self-fulfilling prophecy. Pearl Jam contribute a couple of decent songs that anticipate the boring albums they’ve been turning out for the last decade. Soundgarden add two completely different tunes that foretell their split later in the decade – ‘Birth Ritual’ and Chris Cornell’s acoustic ‘Seasons’. Nirvana was already too huge to be included here, but they were as doomed as grunge itself.

And right in the middle of the pomp of the Singles soundtrack sits ‘Overblown’ by Mudhoney. Shouting against the very commercialization of his scene that this soundtrack represented, Mark Arm sings “Everybody loves us/Everybody loves our town/That’s why I’m thinking lately/The time for leaving is now.” Ironically, Mudhoney was probably the band least affected by the spoils that grunge brought. And far from leaving town, Arm and Mudhoney are the last band still regularly conjuring the spirit of Seattle circa 1992…

Listen: Pushin’ Forward Back [Temple Of The Dog]

Listen: Would? [Alice In Chains]

Listen: Seasons [Chris Cornell]

Listen: Breath [Pearl Jam]

Listen: Overblown [Mudhoney]

Video Break: Boy With A Coin

Iron & Wine >> Boy With A Coin. This one’s for Bob Fosse…

Weekend Playlist

“All is spontaneity.” ~ Can lead singer Damo Suzuki

Junior Wells | Coming At You

Van Halen | Van Halen II

Guy Clark | Old No. 1

Ween | The Mollusk

The Meters | Cabbage Alley

The Incredible String Band | Wee Tam

Iron & Wine | The Shepherd’s Dog

Ray Charles | Ray Charles Live

Eric Clapton | 461 Ocean Boulevard

Little Feat | Waiting For Columbus

The Black Crowes | Before The Frost…

Ramones | It’s Alive

Metallica | Metallica

Miles Davis | Tutu

Lee Morgan | Lee Morgan

The Jimi Hendrix Experience | Live At Clark University

Can | Ege Bamyasi

The Byrds | Untitled

Memphis Slim | The Blues Of Memphis Slim: Steady Rolling Blues

Lightnin’ Hopkins | Lightnin’ Strikes
[album cover not pictured]

Various Artists | I’m Not There Soundtrack

Masterpiece: 20 Golden Greats

[Today: Rock's first martyr...]

Lubbock. Glasses. Stratocaster. Peggy Sue. Plane crash. What most people know about Buddy Holly can fit in a thimble. Because he was one of the founding fathers of rock, he has influenced an entire wing of the rock and roll hall of fame, including luminaries such as Dylan, the Stones, Byrds and Dead. But his notoriety as rock’s first martyr has helped obscure a catalogue of songs that still sound surprisingly contemporary. That Holly recorded all of it by the time he was 23, and that many of his songs were demos meant for later re-recording only enhances the legend of the man in the black-rim glasses.

Just one of the 20 songs compiled here touches three minutes (‘Listen To Me’ checks in at 3:26). That fact, combined with Holly’s standing as the first rocker to dedicate himself to love’s concerns, has led some to dismiss him as a lightweight. On their surface they tick and tock like watches, but each of these songs has been finely crafted, and they’re full of more intricate moving parts than first appearance would grant. Offering advice to would-be rock stars, Holly said “If anyone asks you what kind of music you play, tell him ‘pop.’ Don’t tell him ‘rock’n'roll’ or they won’t even let you in the hotel.” He wasn’t considered a pop singer in his own day, but his craftsmanship has been a key component in the evolution of what is now called pop.

When he died in a plane crash in an Iowa cornfield in early February of 1959, the man born Charles Hardin Holley became the first rock star to leave a long, seemingly hit-filled career on the table. It’s always tricky to speculate on what an artist might have accomplished had they not died, but Holly’s music left plenty of clues to where he might have headed. The growl in his voice in ‘It’s So Easy’ shows that he could have handled harder rock, while the connection between ‘Peggy Sue’ and ‘Peggy Sue Got Married’ indicates that he might have been ahead of the curve in creating concept albums. The jangle of ‘Bo Diddley’ is proto-blues/rock and ‘Brown Eyed Handsome Man’ betrays some country flavor. These songs provided so many avenues that his music might have traveled, but what seemed like such a promising start instead became the whole show.

It’s a shame that Holly didn’t live to see the 60s – there’s no reason to think that he wouldn’t have continued to make outstanding music, and his love-first message would have been right at home with the hippies (as umpteen Dead covers of ‘Not Fade Away’ more than attest). That his music is so innocent, bright-eyed and hopeful only amplifies the tragedy of his young death. In the essential book Rock Dreams, Nik Cohn wrote about stardom from the point of view of Buddy Holly: “I like it. Everywhere I go, girls scream at me, boys ask for my autograph, and I ride around in a Cadillac. But sometimes I can’t believe it – I remember Lubbock, Texas and everybody laughing and I ask myself, can it last?”

Listen: That’ll Be The Day

Listen: Peggy Sue

Listen: Not Fade Away

Listen: Everyday

Listen: It’s So Easy

Buried Treasure: The Mona Lisa’s Sister

[Today: The forgotten contender...]

In its August 27th, 1987 issue, Rolling Stone magazine counted down the 100 best albums of the previous 20 years. In a musical upset for the ages, Graham Parker had not one, but two albums on that list – #45 (Squeezing Out Sparks) and #54 (Howlin’ Wind) – both ranked ahead of usual suspects such as Electric Ladyland, Ramones, Rust Never Sleeps and Led Zeppelin II. That showing speaks volumes about the kind of musical contender Parker was once considered. His early albums channeled the fury of punk rock through a folk sensibility, and were as literate and biting as the best early Bob Dylan albums.

But he made some bad career decisions (firing his excellent backing band The Rumour and making an intentionally lousy album to get sacked by his first label, to name a couple), switched record labels the way Larry King switches wives (Mercury to RCA to Elektra to Atlantic back to RCA and so on…), and generally sabotaged any chance he had of reaching the kind of audience his music deserved. Tellingly, when Rolling Stone issued another Top 100 list a decade later, none of his albums were on it. Quite the snub for an aritst who was once considered a cinch to have a career on par with Elvis Costello.

But against all odds, Parker released the best album of his career in 1988, the year after the original RS list. The Mona Lisa’s Sister should have put him right back on the fast track – this is an excellent batch of songs that are slightly softer around the edges than his earlier, angrier work. He brought back some of the key pieces of The Rumour, including guitarist Brinsley Schwarz, who co-produced this with him. It’s impossible to pinpoint why some albums fail and others succeed, but Parker put his best foot forward here to no avail. Songs like the ‘Get Started, Start A Fire’ and ‘Under The Mask Of Happiness’ were probably too intellectual for the mass market, but they still burn brightly and intensely. Rolling Stone even agrees – when it released its list of the 100 best albums of the 80s, The Mona Lisa’s Sister checked in at #97…

Listen: Get Started, Start A Fire

Listen: Under The Mask Of Happiness

Listen: I Don’t Know

Sleeve Notes: The Last Gunfighter Ballad

Death doesn’t ride a pale horse or wear a long black robe – he sports a floppy wide-brim hat, a few days’ stubble and a six shooter that’s aimed right between your eyes. Released in 1977, at the very height of punk music, The Last Gunfighter Ballad saw Johnny Cash making music that’s virtually indistinguishable in quality and content from his albums of the previous 20 years. At this point, Cash was a second generation anachronism, just a few years away from losing his record deal and nearly two decades from the rediscovery and appreciation that his American Recordings albums would engender. The back of this album has a short essay titled ‘We Just Smell That Way’ in which Cash bemusedly recounts some of his reckless past with firearms – “Wound up shooting every tree in the yard full of holes and God only knows why I didn’t shoot off all my toes.” The pistol in the cover photo once belonged to Hank Williams and was gifted to Cash by Hank Williams Jr. – the killer sneer however, is all Johnny. He may have lost his mojo for a few years in the 80s, but right up until the end of his life, “John D. (Deadeye) Cash” – as he signed off on these liner notes – was the best draw in Nashville…

Doubleshot Tuesday: Catch A Fire/Legalize It

[Today: Smoke it if you got it...]

You read it here first: Marijuana will be legal in California at this time next year…

Listen: Kaya [Bob Marley - from the album Kaya]

Listen: Legalize It [Peter Tosh]

Listen: Burn One Down [Ben Harper]

Listen: Illegal Smile [John Prine]

Listen: Champagne & Reefer (Live) [Muddy Waters]

Listen: Let’s Go Get Stoned [Ray Charles]

Listen: Get Blind [Hurricane]

Listen: My Kind Of People [Cee-Lo Green]

*****

Happy 4/20!