Doubleshot Tuesday: Stop Making Sense/This Is Happening

[Today: Back to the future...]

LCD Soundsystem’s latest album dropped at the end of May, and has been kicking around my collection since early July. Like their other two albums, This Is Happening hasn’t grabbed me right away, but will no doubt be one of my favorite albums by the end of the year. Group mastermind James Murphy has indicated that this will be LCD Soundsystem’s last album. If that’s true it would be a shame, because Murphy and Co. have mastered a combination of funky beats, anxious lyrics, hip humor and a totally urban point of view. Not coincidentally, that’s pretty much a paint-by-numbers description of Talking Heads, the last band to sound this stiff and loose at the same time.

There are plenty of similarities between these bands (NYC-based, synthesizer-based, be-suited frontmen, etc), but they represent two generationally different takes on the same character. Both Murphy and Talking Heads’ frontman David Byrne play the outsider, but where Byrne’s outsider is an emotional drifter, a psycho killer who hangs bitterly on the fringes of society, Murphy is the ironic hipster – no less removed from the crowd, but with a totally different point of view about that remove. Where Byrne put on deranged, damaged or just plain odd masks in his songs, Murphy looks out coolly on a messed up world of drunks and emotional cripples.

While Byrne sings desperately about his girlfriend being better than everything, Murphy wryly counters with “…love is a murderer…love is a curse…love is an open book to a verse of your bad poetry…” Byrne wants you to take him to the river and drop him in the water, while Murphy wants you to dance yourself clean. Byrne sings about slippery people – Murphy sings about drunk girls. Byrne sings about life during wartime, Murphy turns his fingers into toy guns and goes pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, knocking down hipster after hipster. Byrne’s characters carry the glint of paranoia and madness, the search for redemption in a wasteland, while Murphy’s characters have a fun-loving, prankster gleam, happy to be on the outside of whatever’s in…

Listen: Life During Wartime [Talking Heads]

Listen: Pow Pow [LCD Soundsystem]

Listen: Slippery People [Talking Heads]

Listen: Drunk Girls [LCD Soundsystem]

Buried Treasure: Sold American

[Today: Ride 'em Jewboy...]

Most country music is geared toward tear-in-the-beer stylings, but no other country album makes me sob into my Budweiser quite like Sold American. And not because it’s overtly sad – Kinky Friedman is a fearless humorist who turns racist rednecks and rough treatment into comedic gold – but because too much of this 1973 album still rings true nearly four decades later. In the vein of comedians like Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor and Redd Foxx, Friedman shines a bright light on the bigoted, hypocritical underbelly of the land of the free, and uses every taboo word in the book to get the effect he’s after.

“Kinky Friedman… is on his way to becoming the first Texas-Jewish country music star,” proclaims Newsweek from the back of the album cover. And if the delicious absurdity of that statement appeals to you, the songs surely will too. ‘We Reserve The Right To Refuse Service To You’ recounts Friedman being slurred and insulted out of a “bullethead cafe” by an intolerant restaurateur. ‘Highway Cafe’ has a chorus of “oh make it a corned beef on rye” and features two rednecks recounting a fatal trucking accident with infectious dumb laughter (“AHAHAHAHA AHEEHEEHEEHEE”). ‘Get Your Biscuits In The Oven And Your Buns In The Bed’ is an anti-feminist rant the likes of which is unimaginable today, while the title track is a wistful, beautiful ballad about a fading America, that could serve as the theme song for PBS’ Antiques Roadshow. Like the rest of Sold American, ‘Ride ‘Em Jewboy’ is both lovely and ludicrous.

In 2006, Friedman mounted a serious, and seriously offbeat, campaign for governor of Texas. Campaign slogans included “He ain’t Kinky, he’s my Governor” and “My governor is a Jewish Cowboy” and Friedman qualified himself thusly: “Musicians can run this state better than politicians. We won’t get a lot done in the mornings, but we’ll work late and be honest.” He pulled a respectable 12.6% of the vote and finished fourth out of six candidates. Friedman might be a funny Jewish cowboy, but he’s a also a thoughtful, driven Texan who has made Lone Star statements like “If you ain’t Texan, I ain’t got time for you.”

Like his politics, Friedman’s music might appear silly, but it’s ultimately serious stuff. His band featured top-notch Nashville session musicians like guitarist Norman Blake and pianist David Briggs, and this music is as polished as a new mandolin. But nobody else in Nashville (or anywhere else for that matter) was singing ballads about Texas Clock Tower shooter Charles Whitman or suggesting we roll Jesus into a big fat doobie and get high on religion. Friedman’s funny, but in the end the joke’s on us – racism, mass murder, religious intolerance, misogyny, hyper-materialism. Kinky Friedman may have held his fun house mirror up to this country in 1973, but the songs remain the same…

Listen: Sold American

Listen: We Reserve The Right To Refuse Service To You

Masterpiece: The Joshua Tree

[Today: Lost in America...]

“Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America – that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement.” Thomas Wolfe’s paradox is just one of hundreds of cryptic quotes that grasp at the haunting beauty and restless character of the American psyche. In the 1980s it was left to a wide-eyed band of ascendant Irish rock stars to catpure the wide-angled grandeur of the land of the free. With their 1987 album The Joshua Tree, U2 sought to contain the multitudes of America, and reflect some of the myth and magic of this country. And because this is also an album about love and death and politics, it succeeds at what should have only been wild ambitions.

Elvis Presley, Jesus Christ, John Dillinger, Geronimo, Robert Johnson, Martin Luther King, Woody Guthrie, John F. Kennedy. All are present and accounted for, if not named out loud. There are ghosts swirling around this record, like the idle thoughts of someone blasting across the country along backroads, kicking up great plumes of dust and memories. The person behind the wheel is running from death, divorce, dissolution, bankruptcy, drug abuse, scandal, heartbreak – running into the arms of America. Behind that wheel, fixed in motion, nestled within the solid arms of a great big country, is the perfect place to make peace with the most difficult questions.

‘Where The Streets Have No Name’ hits the open road in search of reinvention. ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’ is spiritual questing, a journey into the desert. ‘With Or Without You’ questions the precepts of love. ‘Bullet The Blue Sky’ is war and God and money. ‘Running To Stand Still’ is a deadly habit. ‘Red Hill Mining Town’ is a broken family. And finally the fever lifts with ‘In God’s Country’ and ‘Trip Through Your Wires’, as we break on through to the other side and exalt in a country so big that it makes any problem seem small. Here it seems, we can escape the self and arrive in a new place. But ‘One Tree Hill’ and ‘Exit’ present the same conclusion to two different questions – the peaceful and the mad both end up in pine boxes. ‘Mothers Of The Disappeared’ is their eulogy.

This album’s working title was The Two Americas. That title came from lead singer and songwriter Bono, who had “…started to see two Americas, the mythic America and the real America.” But you can no sooner divide the country that way than you can separate a horse from the horse’s ass. America is contradiction and conformity, beauty and ugliness, great and small. America made the myths that made America, and every day we make more. Nearly every road leads to one…

Listen: Bullet The Blue Sky

Listen: Running To Stand Still

Listen: Trip Through Your Wires

Stuck In My Head: One In A Million

After this song dropped on America like a two-megaton bomb of racist hatred and homophobic agitation, stories were required to explain its genesis and reason for being. The controversy over ‘One In A Million’ centered around two separate passages, one which used the derogatory term for African-Americans, and another that suggested “immigrants and faggots” were only in this country to spread disease and take it over. People were appalled that Guns ‘N Roses lead singer W. Axl Rose would dare use such words and express such sentiments. In the court of public opinion, he was branded a racist and a homophobe, and forced to explain himself.

Author Stephen Davis has Rose in front of a television, watching shock comic Sam Kinison, while gaining inspiration for the shrieking tone of this song. Anyone who saw Kinison’s act in the 80s remembers how stunningly raw and shockingly hilarious it was. His banshee death screams (“KILL ME…KILLLLLLLLLLL MEEEEEEEEEEE”) made you sit up and pay attention. The lyrics to the song reflected Rose’s arrival into a seedy Los Angeles of pimps, pushers, hustlers, con-men and thieves. According to him, the “one in a million” was a guardian angel of an older black man who pointed a hayseed country boy in the right direction and spared him a mugging. Whether or not you buy these explanations, it’s interesting that they needed to be made in the first place.

It’s unimaginable that authors or actors would ever be held to the same level of scrutiny for the characters they inhabit and bring to life. As far as I remember, nobody ever accused Anthony Hopkins of being a cannibal, even though he played a damned spooky one in Silence Of The Lambs (I’ll never think of fava beans the same way again). Far from the slings of anger and accusation, he was handed an Oscar. Author Bret Easton Ellis turned out one of the grossest books of my lifetime, American Psycho, about a brand-name obsessed, preppy cannibal. Ellis took a few tough questions, but rode them to a higher profile and a movie deal, his writerly reputation well intact.

And then there’s Axl Rose. He may very well be a racist and a homophobe – I don’t know the man, but from what little I’ve read about him, I tend to think he’s not. But I do know that ‘One In A Million’ is no more proof that he’s a hateful bigot than the works cited above are proof that Hopkins and Ellis are cannibals. So I wonder why singers and songwriters are held to a higher standard, and the only thing I can come up with is that we invest ourselves in music more than books or movies or paintings. Either that or Axl Rose isn’t taken seriously enough as an artist to be allowed the artistic license that others, like Robert DeNiro, Dennis Hopper, and Bruce Springsteen, enjoy. You can call it hate speech and possibly trump all of the above, but if our artists aren’t allowed to reflect the worst sides of ourselves, what kind of art are we left with?

Sleeve Notes: We’d Like To Teach The World To Sing

The title of this album probably should have been We’d Like To Teach The World To Sellout. After Coca-Cola re-worked the title track and paired it with visuals of bright-eyed people on top of a mountain, singing about giving the world a Coke, it became the de facto soundtrack for soft drinks in the 70s. There go the New Seekers, helping each other up that mountain with a surprisingly catchy brand of pop/folk – ‘Tonight’ sounds like a pre-cursor to ‘Afternoon Delight’, while ‘The Nickel Song’ (with lyrics like “They’re only putting in a nickel/And they want a dollar song”) anticipates the issues with MP3s and easy downloads. A neighbor of mine gave me this album the other day, and it’s fitting that it’s still in its original cellophane – I like to imagine the New Seekers in there, hermetically sealed away from cries of sell-out and the new realities of the music marketplace…

Doubleshot Tuesday: The Star Spangled Banner/Rockin’ In The Free World

[Today: To mosque or not to mosque...]

Because our government is more than 230 years old, it’s tempting to think of American democracy as a finished product. But the recent outcry over a proposed Islamic community center near the site of the World Trade Center bombings in New York only underscores that our democracy is an ongoing process, subject to challenge from some of the people who consider themselves its most patriotic citizens. Those opposed to the construction of this community center feel that it’s an affront to the victims of that disaster, regardless of how the families of those victims may feel about it.

I’ll admit that when I first heard about this proposal I was slightly uncomfortable with it – it’s easy to see this building as a thumb in the eye of the New Yorkers who suffered through 9/11. But what the protesters of this structure either fail to grasp or refuse to acknowledge is that personal feelings are irrelevant to this discussion. Our country was founded on the principle of freedom of religion, and compromising that ideal is more dangerous to our democracy than all the suicide bombers in the world. Our constitution and bill of rights can’t be for some of the people some of the time – we’ve got to go all in, even when it’s a painful challenge. Such challenges are the litmus test of whether our government can live up to its strictures.

In this sense, our democracy isn’t well-represented by the note perfect renditions of the national anthem that occur before our sporting events. Instead, the slippery inner workings and intense national debates that drive our government are better represented by Jimi Hendrix’ raw, shattered version of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’. His swooping, diving guitar fires off angry feedback that sounds like crazed protest. Here democracy isn’t melody and harmony, but friction and fractures, and within that noise is the sound of authenticity.

Neil Young’s ‘Rockin’ In The Free World’ gets right to the heart of the immediate issue – it’s not difficult to imagine the narrator of this song as a young Muslim American (“Don’t feel like Satan but I am to them/So I try to forget it any way I can”). For good measure Neil digs into abortion, peeling back a scab on an issue that has eaten at the national consciousness for decades. This song waves the red, white and blue at the intersection of democratic ideals and hard reality. When one of our citizens is denied rights and freedoms enjoyed by all, our whole nation becomes poorer for it…

Listen: The Star Spangled Banner

Listen: Rockin’ In The Free World

Video Break: F**k You

Cee-lo Green >> F**k You. This one’s for free speech…

Masterpiece: The Best Of Ray Charles – The Atlantic Years

[Today: Genius at work...]

Ray Charles Robinson was born into the blues. At age five he watched his younger brother drown in a wash tub, and then, in a cruel twist of fate, started to lose his eyesight just a few months later. By the time he was seven, he was completely blind. At 15 he was orphaned by the death of his young mother, Retha. Fortunately she had taught him to fend for himself, and so shortly after her death he left school to venture out in the world and make a living behind the piano. Charles had been tutored on the instrument by Mr. Wiley Pitman in his hometown of Greenville, FL, and by Mrs. Opal Lawrence at the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind in St. Augustine.

During his formative years, Charles learned to play a wide range of music, including classical, gospel, country and jazz. He spent several years kicking around the nightclub circuit, earning as little as $2 a night, before signing up with Swing Time Records in 1949. At this point he still hadn’t developed an individual style, but he showed enough promise that Ahmet Ertegun signed him up for Ertegun’s fledgling label, Atlantic Records. Between 1952 and 1959 (when he left Atlantic for a lucrative deal with RCA), Charles fused the blues, jazz and gospel into what would become known as soul music, and became a mainstay near the top of the charts (14 of the 20 tracks on this compilation were Top 10 R&B hits).

But Charles’ combination of gospel music and secular (some would say lewd) lyrics didn’t go over without controversy. As he remembered to author Robert Palmer, “There was a crossover between gospel music and the rhythm patterns of the blues, which I think came down through the years from slavery times, you know, because this was a way of communicating. But when I started doing things that would be based on an old gospel tune, I got criticism from the churches, and from musicians too. They thought it was sacrilegious or something, and what was I doing, I must be crazy.”

In December of 1954, he entered the studio of radio station WGST in Atlanta, and changed the face of modern music with his recording of the song ‘I Got A Woman’. With one foot in the church and the other in the gutter, this song represented the birth of a legend and the foundation of soul music. But it was the 1959 recording of ‘What’d I Say’ – a song that he improvised on the bandstand in Pittsburgh one night – that etched Charles’ name in the public consciousness. The song went #1 on the R&B charts and #6 on the pop charts, and made him a hot enough commodity that his days at Atlantic were numbered.

Asked by Life magazine in 1966 to define soul music, Charles replied, “What is soul? It’s like electricity – we don’t really know what it is, but it’s a force that can light a room.” If that’s the case, then The Best Of Ray Charles: The Atlantic Years provides enough sparks to light an entire city….

Listen: What’d I Say (Part 1)

Listen: I’ve Got A Woman

Listen: Hallelujah, I Love Her So

Listen: (Night Time Is) The Right Time

Buried Treasure: The Boss Of The Blues

[Today: The Grandfather of Rock...]

Well before Elvis shook his thang, before Chuck Berry had Beethoven rolling over in his grave, before Bill Haley was rocking around the clock or Ike Turner was singing about his Rocket 88, Big Joe Turner was shouting the blues raw and getting banned from the radio for his troubles. Make no mistake, Turner’s music wasn’t rock & roll – rather, he sang what was called “Jump Blues”, a spirited pre-cursor to R&B and Rock. On paper, the configuration of his band looks like a jazz group, but their driving swing is punctuated by Turner’s powerful, primal growl. If his voice was raw, it wasn’t nearly as raw as his lyrics, which usually touched on skirts, skin and sex.

The term Rock & Roll was originally slang for sex, and in that respect Turner has certainly earned his designation as the “grandfather of rock” (he was posthumously inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame in 1987). The Rolling Stones would eventually sing about not being able to get any satisfaction, but Turner sang like a man who couldn’t get enough of the stuff. “You can take me pretty mama, jump me in your Hollywood bed/I want you to boogie my woogie ’til my face turns cherry red,” he sings on ‘Cherry Red’, the first cut on The Boss Of The Blues. ‘Roll ‘Em Pete’ is named for his piano player, Pete Johnson, but there’s no question that the rolling Turner references here involves a mattress and box spring.

Joseph Vernon Turner Jr. was born in 1911 in Kansas City and was singing professionally by the time he was 14 years old. He worked his way up through the nightclubs of Kansas City, washing dishes, tending bar and waiting tables before eventually stepping behind the microphone. He earned his nickname (‘Big Joe’) through sheer girth – he was 6’2″ and weighed nearly 300 pounds. But his voice was by far the biggest part of him, and his urgent, booming vocals led him to become one of the first artists signed to Atlantic Records.

The Boss Of The Blues was recorded on March 6th and 7th, 1956, well after the rock & roll revolution was underway. This album doesn’t include his breakthrough hit ‘Shake, Rattle & Roll’, but it’s a fine introduction to the original voice of rock and roll sin…

Listen: Cherry Red

Listen: Roll ‘Em Pete

All Shook Up

On the afternoon of August 16th, 1977, my family and I were headed back from my Grandma’s little house in the woods in Southern Oregon. As we made our way up I-5 in our orange Volkswagen Bug, I laid in the back seat, drifting in and out of consciousness, when an urgent bulletin came over the radio: “…ELVIS PRESLEY… FOUND DEAD… MEMPHIS TENNESSEE…” Utter grief and disbelief breaks out in the front seat, which was all the more shocking because neither of my parents were any kind of Elvis fan (they were the half-generation after him, and came of age with the music of The Beatles and Stones).

The funny thing is that even as an 8 year old kid, I felt like I knew what Elvis was about. After all, his myth and music were more or less common property of America – something akin to the Statue of Liberty, in sequined, musical form. He was Young Elvis – belting out killer tunes like ‘Return To Sender’ and ‘All Shook Up’ while making ladies swoon with a swivel of his hips. He was Old Elvis – a fat, sweaty mass of over-emotive singing, bad karate, and pre-packaged glitz. He was a cautionary tale about the dark powers of fame and fortune. He was a walking anti-drug poster. Even if I wouldn’t have articulated it in exactly those words, that was my general understanding of him at that time.

And that’s pretty much where things stood between me and Elvis for several decades. Somewhere along the way I stumbled across an LP copy of the The Sun Sessions, which blew me away, but perversely made me think less of him as a musician. The brilliance of his Sun work only magnified his late-period albums as the efforts of a bloated, drug-impaired clown. But recently I picked up Peter Guralnick’s Last Train To Memphis: The Rise Of Elvis Presley, and discovered how little I really knew about the man behind the myth. Fame is a hall of mirrors that tends to distort and dehumanize, and perhaps no celebrity has been as twisted out of shape by the process as The King.

Guralnick’s masterful biography reveals that Elvis was both much more and much less complicated than I’d ever suspected. He was a poor kid from Tupelo, MS whose ambitions didn’t extend far beyond buying his mama a house and making sure his parents didn’t have to worry or work. It’s nearly impossible not to view Elvis through the modern prism of fame, and judge him by blueprints that were drawn up long after he built his career. But as much as humanly possible, Guralnick walks in his shoes and makes clear not only why Elvis made the decisions he made, but also why those decisions made perfect sense at that time.

For instance, just before he went into the Army, Elvis put a successful recording career on the back burner so that he could concentrate on making movies. That shift is now widely viewed as either horrible artistic miscalculation or contrived sell-out. But in 1958 there was no template for a 40 year career in rock & roll. Everyone concerned with it saw it as a passing fad, and so Colonel Tom Parker sought to hitch his client’s star to a more stable (and yes, better-paying) line of work. At that time, to earn a fraction of what he would make in 15 days shooting a motion picture, Elvis would have had to tour 45 cities over two grueling months.

Perhaps the most stunning revelations in Last Train To Memphis concern his commitment both to his music and his acting. Many stories are told of a young Elvis in the studio, pressing for extra takes of a song because he knows he can do it better. The portrait Guralnick paints is of a young man moved by the spirit of the music that came through him, and surprised by the violent reaction that music caused. After his mother died (the conclusion of the first of this two-part biography) Elvis got lost in the maze of fame and drugs. But before he became The King, he was just a likable, charismatic kid, riding a wave for as long as he could…