music – Page 5

Nostalgia

I attended two events last weekend that left me with the sense that my generation is overly nostalglc. First, on Friday night, I went to see the Pixies on their “Doolittle 20th Anniversary Tour.” I was an indie rock groupie in Boston in the late 80s, and this record was something of a watershed event in that world; on top of that, I had blown all of my opportunities to see the Pixies in their heyday, so I was very excited at the chance to see them play the record, even 20 years later. As I soon learned when I arrived at the third consecutive sold-out show at the Hollywood Palladium – a venue they never could have filled in 1989 even for one night – I wasn’t the only one: the club was jam packed with adoring Pixies fans in their 30s and 40s who went completely bananas when they took the stage. pixiesdoolittlecd As my friend who accompanied me pointed out, “Both the band and everybody in the audience want to pretend it’s 1989.” It was very redemptive to see them deliver a completely amazing performance of all of their old hits, and get the adoring crowd response they deserved, as they were relegated to opening for the Throwing Muses or U2 back when the material was new, despite the fact that it would be largely responsible for chart-toppers like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and many more. It was weird, though, to realize that it isn’t just the baby boomers who are aging rock fans anymore – there is now a whole new generation of aging indie scenesters to pay the $60 cover charge to a show like this to transport them back to the halcyon days of 1989.

Then, the next night, I saw “Where the Wild Things Are.” I suppose that the book is neutral as to which generation it’s about – it’s just a fantasy of childhood escapism. But I couldn’t help but see Spike Jonze’s treatment, with its indie score by Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, as aimed, once again, at the 30- and 40-somethings from Jonze’s generation who now have kids themselves. wildthings Although the film did eventually succumb to the criticism that I, and doubtless many others, thought of even before we saw it – “Is this 20-sentence book really going to lead to a satisfying feature-length film?” – it was nevertheless very powerful at times, especially in the opening scenes where we see how isolated Max is in his childhood world, and also, to a somewhat lesser extent, when we see how the petty jealousies and resentments from which he is fleeing exist even in his new wild kingdom, leading him to sail away back home to his still-warm supper.

As mentioned at the outset, the cumulative experience left me with the sense that I’m in a generation – or maybe a sub-group in a generation? – that is extremely, perhaps excessively, nostalgic. But I wonder if this is just what happens to everybody when they reach a certain age, or perhaps to everybody that age who doesn’t have kids yet …

Bad analogy theater

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TK has a new post up on Andre Agassi’s newly-revealed crystal meth habit. Even by the standards of the ‘shocking, tell-all biography’, Agassi’s new book Open seems like a pretty dramatic public self-depantsing. Even the awful signature hair turns out to have been fake– a big bantam rooster-like wig that once nearly fell apart before a big tournament match. One relatively small bit from the book that made a big impression on me: Aggasi spent his childhood basically imprisoned in brick tennis court that his authoritarian father had built, endlessly returning balls shot out of a homemade ball machine that Agassi called ‘the dragon’.

Of course, the full entertainment value of a lurid sports story lies not just the story itself but in the ripple effect of hammy sports writers straining to hit the right emotional notes. ESPN.com’s Rick Reilly – winner of something called the Damon Runyon Award for Sportswriting – submitted a column about the Agassi book with this deeply-felt gem: “Your own life is hard enough. Living somebody else’s life for them weighs on a man like a stone backpack.” A stone backpack? A stone backpack with stone books inside, even? Or how about a more tennis-related analogy: hitting stone tennis balls served up by a homemade stone tennis machine, all while wearing a decomposing stone wig?

New+Order++classic

Speaking of ham-fisted analogies, I’ve recently been in a bit of a New Order revival phase, listening to the two ‘Substance’ albums quite a bit. Along with a renewed appreciation of the music, I’ve also had an uncomfortable growing awareness that Bernard Summer is not exactly the world’s greatest lyricist. Consider ‘Thieves Like Us’- the song mentions love literally about 380 times, which is a bad sign in itself, but then advances the idea that “Love is the air that supports the eagle.” Yikes. Not only that, but it also “cuts your life like a broken knife.” (Broken knife? Why broken?) You have to appreciate New Order’s story – as Tony Wilson’s character in 24 Hour Party People says, no band survives the death of its lead singer. But it does seem as though when Ian Curtis took his life, he also somehow managed to strangulate the band’s ability to come up with a decent simile.

Then there’s ‘1963’, the one that goes ‘Johhhhhnyyyy… don’t point that gun at me‘. I was always puzzled by the lyrics and vaguely assumed they described some gay crime of passion, but then found a wikipedia entry about the song which explains that the lyrics are actually about ‘the JFK assassination, which occurred in 1963. In the song, Sumner sings from the point of view of Jackie Kennedy, and theorises that John F. Kennedy (a devout Catholic for whom divorce was unthinkable) paid the mobster Jack Ruby to arrange for a hitman to take out his wife so that he could continue his relationship with actress Marilyn Monroe. It further theorises that Monroe committed suicide when she found out that the hired gun, Lee Harvey Oswald, had hit the wrong target. Oswald was, according to Sumner, then in turn assassinated by Ruby for causing his hitman business to go bust. Sumner’s theory is unlikely to be intended seriously, given that Marilyn Monroe died in 1962, over a year before the assassination took place. The producer Stephen Hague has referred to the song as ‘the only song about domestic violence you can dance to'”.

I emailed this entire inane paragraph to a friend who is an ardent New Order fan. His reply:

That new order story is the most retarded thing I’ve ever heard. The last quote makes we want to give away my record collection. I’ve actually been obsessing about it all day.

Kitty, Daisy and Lewis

I am obsessed with the British teen music trio Kitty, Daisy and Lewis. They’re three siblings, all under 20 apparently, whose parents are session musicians (also I think their mom was briefly a drummer in The Raincoats).

Here’s one of their videos:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxW3Ed7GrhQ&hl=en&fs=1&]

From the first moment I heard them it seemed obvious that they were “retro,” but I’m not very familiar with the particular brand of spirited hillbilly music at which they excel.

Take the song above, “Going Up the Country.” I vaguely recognized it when I heard their cover, and figured that it was some bluesy standard. But a little digging reminded me that the version I recognize is actually a Woodstock-era song with that grating, TV-commercial-like flute hook, by Canned Heat. So even though these precocious teens probably consider themselves to be covering the blues original, for most ears it’s an overdue reinterpretation of that hippy debacle — and the line “We might even leave the USA” sounds distinctly late-60s.

I’m not sure what to make of all this. Would I be better off just listening to “era-appropriate” music? Or is there something new about three British teenagers redoing these standards? I am definitely enchanted, even despite the fact that their parents are obviously exercising some degree of Svengali-like influence (they’re both in the backing band for example).

Here’s a clip from a documentary that has some further detail, including their festishistic obsession with using only analog equipment when they record. Note the slightly awkward explanation of “letting Dad into the band,” because he was always sort of hanging around anyway.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cm-koG5RHPM&hl=en&fs=1&]

And here is the first minute of a great live performance of probably my favorite track of theirs, “Honolulu Rocka Rolla”:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETvsQh0jD7g&hl=en&fs=1&]

Again, I have no idea where this song comes from. It appears to have been a hit for “Bella Di Waikiki,” and here is Eartha Kitt singing it.

Drawing a Blank

Today’s featured mixed-ethnicity jazzercise couple:

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Disco producer Bob Blank and his wife, one-time James Brown foil Lola Blank.

I’m not sure what to make of Bob Blank. On the one hand, he worked with the great Arthur Russell. Generally, this would be enough in my mind to immunize him against criticism for anything (yes, even for posing in the above photo). On the other hand, he also had the nerve to say semi-mean things about Arthur Russell in the Arthur Russell bio-pic Wild Combination (where I got the image from). Judas! Purple Jazzercise Judas!

Moreover, he produced ‘I Got My Mind Made Up‘, the first minute of which is one of the great defining minutes of disco ever recorded. On the other hand, the rest of ‘Mind Made Up’ is pretty lame. So, yeah: mixed verdict.

William Eggleston and Big Star revisited

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Now that Rhino Records has released the glorious Big Star box set Keep An Eye On The Sky, it seems like a good time to revisit the topic of William Eggleston and Big Star that I blogged on a few months ago…

The first time I wandered into a retrospective of Eggleston photos, I thought, ‘Jesus, this guy’s photos remind me so much of Big Star’s music, I can’t get over it’… and this was a few minutes before I ran into the Red Ceiling image that Big Star used for the cover of their seminal Radio City album. The point being, I can’t think of another example of pop music sounding so much like a visual artist, or of photographs looking so much like a band’s songs…. and judging from the Radio City cover, the band agreed. Well, one thing I learned from the Pitchfork review of the box set is that the kinship between the two ran deeper than I’d known: the reviewer mentions that Eggleston is actually playing piano on one of the tracks off the third album, ‘Nature Boy’ (not a great or important Big Star song, to be sure… but still).

Reading about Eggleston’s piano cameo reinvigorated my curiosity about the connection between these two, and I spent a few minutes looking through Eggleston photos on Flickr and trying to match them to Big Star songs in terms of mood and subject matter. Obviously a pretty dorky and subjective exercise, but fun nevertheless. This one, for example, make me think right away of the song ‘Thirteen“:

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A few other things about Keep An Eye On The Sky:

1. It sounds great to me, and all my audiophile friends who are really into remasters and whatnot give it the stamp of approval. The acoustic songs, in particular, seems to benefit from the remastering treatment, as songs like “Thirteen” no longer have this muffled quality that previously allowed the considerable sentimentality of the song to outshine the prettiness of it. Now, it just sounds so damn good that who cares if he’s crooning wondering “would you be an outlaw for my love?” Also, the alternate versions of songs are honestly often really different and revelatory and good, all of which is pretty unusual.

2. There’s the interesting matter of the third album, Sister Lovers, having a different song order than we’re used to from the previous official version. The little vaudevillian, clowny opening to ‘Jesus Christ’ starts the album, but this time it’s stretched out into a whole song of it’s own. Then, ‘Friends’ and the great ‘Femme Fatale’ cover follow before the rocker ‘Kizza Me’ which is the opening track on the old version. Now, I’ve always been a more of a Sister Lovers guy than a #1 Record or Radio City fan– it’s really one of my favorite albums and has a whole dimension of smacked-out introspection that I think the other two records lack somewhat (to me, the other two have always sounded like studio transcriptions of a live set, faithful and brilliant recreations but somehow soulless compared to Sister Lovers), so this reshuffling of the song order is all pretty interesting to me. I couldn’t find any explanation for this in reviews, but I like to think that the order on the box set is the ‘real’ song order that the band intended. ‘Kizza Me’ is a good song, but it has elements of the obligatory knee-jerk rocker, the kind of song that a record label wants to have the album start with, and seems like filler before ‘Friends’, ‘Jesus Christ’ and ‘Femme Fatale’- the real marrow or the album- come marching in. Then again, both the record label and the band mates were reportedly in total tatters (suffering from bankruptcy and heavy drug abuse, respectively) by the time the album was finished, so who really knows who intended what or when.

3. The Pitchfork reviewer makes a few disgusted remarks about past attempts to anthologize the band which have resulted in some pretty badly-assembled best hits albums. Nothing, however, could beat the decision made back in the early CD days to combine the band’s first two albums into one album but leave off ‘On the Street’ in order to fit them into one CD. ‘On the Street’ was only so catchy and rocking that That Freaking 70s Show even used it for their opening theme.

When Natural Disasters Collide: Misc. Edition

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A few quick follow-up thoughts on Krafty’s When Natural Disasters Collide: California Edition post:

1. I couldn’t be more excited about the (slim) prospect of Hurricane Jemina wiping out the forest fires ravaging SoCal right now. It’s clearly the best chance that the ‘When Natural Disasters Collide’ concept has of ever actually happening. But, it would be even better if forest fires were also given names, like hurricanes. Imagine how invested one could get in rooting for Forest Fire Gerald vs. Hurricane Jemina, say. You could probably even gamble on the outcome.

2. Another potential matchup that only just occurred to me would be Tsunami vs. Tidal Wave. This would have an instructive component, in that people often confuse the two or think that they’re the same thing. So, this would be for bragging rights, like those pro wrestling matches where one guy gets to tear the other’s mask off. Although, it would be hard to stage a fair fight, because tsunamis are much, much bigger than tidal waves (which actually hardly qualify as natural disasters at all, to be honest). It would have to be a very small tsunami against a very big tidal wave, such as the ones in the Bay of Fundy that supposedly reach 50 feet.

3. All this talk of natural disasters over the last two days, I’ve listened to ‘When The Levee Breaks‘ a good 3 or 4 times. Is there a better song about a natural disaster? Or is this as good as it gets?

What I did on my vacation

Before I moved to Central Europe, I never really thought about the words vacation and Polish border fitting into a sentence together. But in fact, that sentence precisely describes what we’ve been up to for the past five days (and, by extension, why I haven’t posted anything here for several days).

It’s interesting how much moving here has changed my sense of proximity and orientation to this part of the world. When I lived in the U.S. and travelled to Europe from time to time, I used to think of Prague as an exotically eastern location, slightly beyond the outer edge of what’s known and familiar (known and familiar being, I suppose, Western Europe), a gateway to a mysterious land of slavic spires and Orthodox churches. Or something like that. Anyway, now that I’ve lived here for three years, Czech Republic feels overwhelmingly central, for better or for worse– as its best, cozily and conveniently in-the-middle-of-things; at its worst, boringly midwestern. So, within that new framework, driving to Poland spent somewhat like when I was in college in Minnesota and we used to drive to Wisconsin on beer runs. (For more on this European nations = U.S. states analogy, see this post).

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Our five days were spent with friends in this renovated old hunting lodge just over the border (the first time, incidentally, that my three month-old son has been abroad), re-christened the Saraswati Hotel by its current owners, Raj and Kamila. Raj is an American of Indian descent; Kamila, Polish– I imagine that this combination must give them a pretty distinct pedigree among hotel proprietors in Poland. Gratifyingly, Raj told me that the lodge had been converted to Communist offices when they bought it, the upstairs subdivided into innumerable dinky offices that were promptly torn down. Leave it to Communism to bureaucratize even the most scenic of places.

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Raj has also built a complete recording studio in a nearby farmhouse (shown above). This was visually interesting to me, in part because the structure itself so clearly retains the character of farmhouses found all over Poland and Czech- such that you could almost picture a babushka peeling potatoes in the main room- and yet was filled with state-of-the-art sound boards and pre-amps and general recording gadgetry. Also, there was this incredible-looking harpsichord sitting in one of the main rooms (shown poorly in this photograph, unfortunately):

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The event was a week-long get-together among a bunch of musician friends, including a troupe of players from the Warsaw Opera. In fact, everyone there was an accomplished musician except for me and my family, who were egregiously freeloading off the creative vibes. Of course, the great thing about hanging out around musicians is that they’re constantly expressing their enjoyment of things in musical terms, whereas I can only express myself through sarcasm. I particularly enjoyed a surprise midnight baroque extravaganza staged for Kamila’s birthday. The weekend in general reminded me a tad of the Simpsons episode where Homer achieves his dream of working at a bowling alley but then has to quit for financial reasons: as he trudges back towards the power plant, his depressed bowling-addicted co-workers are heard in the background: ‘I’m depressed… What should be do?… I know: let’s bowl!’ followed by happy cheers and sounds of bowling. The vibe with the musician troupe had the same feeling, except with ‘Let’s make music!’ interjected at every opportunity.

Finally, there are a few interesting things to check out on the way:

1. Disused Poland/Czech border checkpoint. I love abandoned checkpoints. This one was fully operational as recently as 18 months ago, creating a thriving and pointless bureaucratic traffic jam. Since Czech and Poland joined the Schengen area (the mass of Western and Central European countries that have open borders) and closed their checkpoints, all that’s missing is some rusting girders and tumbleweeds. It was more romantic and lonely on way up when we passed through this point in the rain; unfortunately, I only got around to taking pictures on the way back when it was sunny… so, I converted them to black-and-white as a compromise:

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2. Ještěd. This nutcase sci-fi observatory (pronounced ‘YES-shtead’) sits on one of the highest points in the Czech Republic, just over the border in Liberec. It looks just like something out of one of those 1950s visualizations of the future where everyone takes their own aircraft to work and talks on TV telephones.

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Also, some pics of nice countryside on the Czech side of the border (a bit blurry, as they were snapped from a moving car):

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Mailbag: Muluqèn Mèllèssè and Paradise Lost

Reader JS – despite finding the Muluqèn Mèllèssè song I posted ‘nice but not memorable’ – pluckily set out for his local Ethiopian-manned newsstand to get some information on the mysterious singer. Here’s what transpired:

I wrote the name of the song and the singer on a sheet of paper and showed it to the Ethiopians at the newstand. As soon as they cast eyes upon it, the two Ethiopian guys behind the counter broke out in beatific smiles and launched into a duet rendition of the song in close harmony. It was like a real-life evocation of those moments in musical theater where people break into song without apparent premeditation, but unlike karaoke in that it was done by people with strong musical aptitudes who apparently had been preparing for this moment for a decade or so. (Like the Beatles blackbird.) The singer is some kind of legend in Ethiopian music, who produced this masterpiece more than 20 years ago, before he renounced “profane music” for sacred music. These days he lives in Washington D.C., pumping out spirituals. They offered me a CD of his profane music on the house, but they will have to root around in their house to find it. In any case, I am now a hit at the newstand just for knowing someone who likes the song, I suspect they will start singing it whenever I walk thru the door, and I may have to pressure them to take my money in exchange for newspapers. I like ethiopians. Now if I could just learn to like Ethiopian food.

So, there you have it: he’s now living in D.C. and singing church music. Thanks, JS!

—–

Meanwhile, regarding yesterday’s post on quiet visualizations of evil, occasional guest-blogger and Milton scholar (no, really) Grandjoe provides some context for the image of Satan On His Throne:

Here are the lines that go with the wonderful illustration by John Martin of the infernal conclave in Paradise Lost. I’d never seen it –thanks.

High on a throne of Royal State, which far
Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind,
Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand
Showers her Kings Barbaric Pearl and Gold,
Satan exalted sat . . .

Given that “sat’ must be the most undignified word in the language, Milton’s choice of it so close the gorgeous fanfare that starts with “High” plays a practical joke on Satan and on us as well, who started out impressed. There are many other places in the poem where Milton pulls the rug out. Why? Stanley Fish argues that Milton lures us into Satan’s point of view, so that he can then snap us out of it into a realization of our own sinful sympathies with evil. But that’s too moralistic for me. I think that Milton just takes pleasure in pulling off reversals and other kinds of surprises. It’s fun. Mozart enjoys springing surprises too. There must be artists also who trick us.

Contra "The Gram Parsons Zone"

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This post is the first in what I hope will become standard fare at Mock Duck – a polemic against a prior post by a different author. My target is Dan’s “Gram Parsons Zone.” First, to be clear, I am entirely on board with the concept – it’s the use of Gram Parsons as a namesake that irks me.

I have actually had a very similar experience with Radiohead as Dan’s – I never really understood their appeal until, hilariously, I was asked to “jam” with some Radiohead fans who wanted to get together and play their songs. I was given a list of 15 or 20 songs to learn on bass, which I did, and over the course of the next 2 years I got together with these guys five or six times to play them – often, their insane Radiohead groupie friends would show up. (It’s the closest I’ve ever gotten to being in a cover band.) I thus became intimately familiar with Radiohead’s catalogue, and really enjoyed rocking out to it – but I was never able to escape that sensation that Dan describes of respecting them without every really wanting to listen to them.

What is it about Radiohead that is so “respect-worthy” but ultimately not quite as enjoyable as the constituent parts would suggest? Part of it perhaps is captured in the refrain to one of their more popular early songs, “I wish it was the 60s/I wish that something would happen” – they seem to be peculiarly trapped in a sound whose time has come and gone. The innovations they practice are no longer innovative. Their dabbling in electronica seems forced. And Thom Yorke, for all of his brilliance, just doesn’t seem totally convincing as a lead singer. I don’t know – probably there is a counter-argument to each of these points. But I think they are an appropriate namesake for this phenomenon because whether you like them or not, it’s hard to say how they really changed music – it’s more like they squeezed a few more drops of “innovative, Beatles-esque rock” out of a dangerously dry sponge.

Gram Parsons, on the other hand…along with Alex Chilton, Nick Drake and Lou Reed, he belongs, in my mind, in the Mount Rushmore of under-appreciated and wildly influential musicians of that era. He invented an entire genre, practiced today by lots of horrible mainstream country musicians but also by some pretty good ones too like Wilco or Lucinda Williams. And the first side of the Burrito Brothers’ “Gilded Palace of Sin” is one of the very greatest LP sides in existence, along with Side One of “Exile on Main Street,” Side One of “After the Goldrush,” and a few others (and, by the way, he was basically a member of the Stones when they were recording Exile, and a lot of its rootsy sound is thanks to him.) (Indeed, a little known Parsons fact is that the Burrito Brothers released the first-ever version of “Wild Horses,” which Keith gave to them.) “Christine’s Tune” and “Sin City” are one of the best one-two punches on any record, maybe second only to “Sweet Jane” and “Rock and Roll.” Considering how little music he released before his death in his mid-20s (a few Byrds records, a few Burrito Brothers records, and the two solo albums), the ratio of influence-to-released tracks is basically unparalleled.

In short, Parsons is way too influential and significant to be an acceptable namesake for this phenomenon. Dan would probably counter that it is exactly because Parsons is so revered that he fits the bill – the whole point of the “Zone” is that you have to respect the musician/band and accept his/her/its place in the canon, etc. But with Parsons, not only is he just too towering a figure, but also, I think that his cross-pollenization of country and rock, and all of the controversy this has caused, adds too many layers of complexity for him to stand in for the relatively simpler phenomenon Dan describes. I have a friend who is an obsessive country purist, and he hates Parsons, because he thinks that he bastardized country, just as the folk purists called Dylan a Judas. Likewise, lots of rock fans can’t get into pedal steel guitar, etc. (I still remember how I first discovered Parsons as a teen through Evan Dando’s cover of “Brass Buttons,” and how I scrunched up my nose at the country stylings of the original.) Whatever Dan’s particular take on this aspect of Parsons’ sound and influence, I think that it makes him too complicated a figure for the Zone in question. Or, to put it slightly differently, I think that the reasons why Parsons “just doesn’t take” for Dan or any listener are unique to Parsons and his particular place in American musical history, and can’t stand in for a similar reaction to Radiohead or anybody else.

So how about “The Radiohead Zone” instead? Admittedly it doesn’t have the same ring to it, but that’s just because Gram Parson’s name is so awesome.

My favorite song that I know nothing about

Wètètié Maré by Muluqèn Mèllèssè (click to play MP3).

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I know this track from one of the Ethiopiques compilations and have never been able to find out a single thing about the artist or track. Allmusic.com? Silent. Dr. Rhythm? Stumped. The only person on the entire yawning internet who has anything to say about it is one Ted Leo who suddenly mentions it in a Pitchfork Media guest-column as perhaps his favorite song ever amidst such incongruous recommendations as PIL, the Slits, and Curtis Mayfield, and feels the need to preface his recommendation with “I feel a a little pretentious saying this, but…” You and me both, Ted Leo.

I feel a little pretentious saying this, but there are about 20 songs I’ve heard in my life where I can remember experiencing a reaction of complete excitement literally within the first 3-4 seconds. For point of reference, ‘White Riot’ was one of the first songs I can remember giving me this feeling, and Bobby Fuller’s ‘Let Her Dance’ was one of the most recent. This is definitely the only one on the list that I know nothing about. It clearly owes a lot to the Memphis soul sound in terms of inspiration, but remains a mystery to me otherwise. So I call upon you, O Great Internet Readership, in hopes that you’ll be able to shed some light.

Thanking you in advance,

Dan