The Freedom of Music: Re-discovering Zep
October 28th, 2012
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The Freedom of Music: I Don’t Do Lists
October 7th, 2012
One likes to believe in the freedom of music.Rush – Spirit of Radio.
“Do you think you could make him a list of bands and songs from the 70’s to listen to?”
My daughter is asking on behalf of her boyfriend, who is a Stones fan, “but he’s not into Zeppelin,” and wants to expand his musical horizons. Well, besides the fact I don’t really do lists and I consider anybody who’s “not into Zeppelin” beyond hope, sure.
For starters, any fan of 70’s era Stones should check out The Faces. The two groups sound, at times, remarkably alike, yet you would never mistake one for the other. Get their greatest hits album, “a nods as good as a wink….” and check out Stay With Me, Three Button Hand Me Down and Ooh La La.
As well, never ignore the albums when talking about 60’s and 70’s music. If you are a Stones fan based on any number of their hits, know that buried on the albums are songs you have never heard but are great. Pick your favourite Stones songs, and listen to the albums they came off. Chances are you’ll find songs you’ll like, and possibly whole album sides that just seem perfect (yes sides: the artists thought in terms of sides – not songs, not albums – and they are the way to approach the music of the era)
Working backwards from the 70’s, The Stones and Yardbirds both came from the same place, The Crawdaddy Club of the early 60’s. Each went in different directions, but they started at the same place. So too shall we.
The early Yardbirds is the thing, that Clapton stuff, and moving into the Jeff Beck years. Five Live Yardbirds to start, and then a greatest hits package of some sort. Branching out, check out the individual guitarists post-Yardbirds careers: Clapton with Cream, Derek and the Dominoes and his early solo work; The Jeff Beck Group (featuring pre-Faces Rod Stewart); and of course – you knew I had to get here – Led Zeppelin.
Now I know, not a Led Zeppelin fan, he’s heard them before and found them wanting &tc. But discussing the era without discussing Led Zeppelin is like not discussing The Stones or The Who. It’s an incomplete conversation. Everybody knows some Led Zeppelin songs, and judgement can be clouded by an incomplete picture of a band that played such a variety of music. Here’s what you do. Listen to, in order, Led Zeppelin I side 2 – the blues album; Led Zeppelin II, side 1, the heavy metal album; Led Zeppelin III side 2, the acoustic album; Led Zeppelin IV, side 1, the masterpiece.
Here’s the logic. After The Yardbirds, Cream and The Jeff Beck Group, the first album is in context. It’s their blues album, but side 2 will surprise you with the almost pop sounding You Time is Gonna Come, the acoustic solo Black Mountain Side, the pre-punk Communication Breakdown, Old Willie Dixon blues on I Can’t Quit You Baby and the jam How Many More Times. It has a little of everything, and turning the album over just to hear Good Times, Bad Times and Babe I’m Gonna Leave You will be a revelation.
The second album is their road album, and if Led Zeppelin invented heavy metal (they didn’t, and it’s an awful description of them as a band), II is when they did so. That in, everything you ever wanted to know about Led Zeppelin is in the first two songs of Led Zeppelin II. Whole Lotta Love, the supposed birthplace of heavy metal and What is and What Should Never Be, sweet ballad turned hard rocker in the chorus. They may not have invented heavy metal, but they did invent the heavy metal ballad with What is… The slide solo alone is worth listening to this album for.
The third album, written at a rustic cabin in the Welsh countryside, is everything Led Zeppelin is not supposed to be. Side two will literally shock the person who thinks they know Led Zeppelin but have never heard this. Four acoustic songs, each one completely different, yet not an electric guitar to be found. They return to the blues on the last song but it’s probably worth skipping until you’ve listened to the first four songs enough times to a) love them and b) wonder what the hell they are about. My favourite album side as a teenager, and still one that mesmerizes me.
Finally four, the masterwork. You know the songs on side one, but hearing them in context improves them. The sound of needle on vinyl (yes, listen to the records if you can – just ask first and put the damn things away when your done) a quiet E string being played in the open position, and then, all on his own Robert Plant, bel canto, singing on of the great opening lines:
Hey hey mama said the way you move, gonna make you sweat, gonna make you groove.
How can you not like that? It’s immediately followed up with Rock and Roll, Zeppelin’s answer to critics who said they had gone soft after the second side of the third album. If you can take it up a notch from Black Dog, they do. And then, the greatest 14 minutes in rock and roll: The Battle of Evermore/Stairway to Heaven: Prelude and Masterpiece. Everybody has heard Stairway to Heaven in isolation, or at dance’s end after Play the Funky Music and Night Fever, or on the radio in a set with Hell’s Bells and Let it Be, and it loses something. But the pastural intro to Stairway in the shadow of the war ballad of Battle of Evermore gives it an entirely new feel. Oh and by the way, here’s why Led Zeppelin are the greatest band ever. That slide solo in What is…, Page gets the sweetest sound using an electric guitar and a distortion pedal yet in Battle of Evermore they convincingly create a massive sounding war song with 2 mandolins and an acoustic guitar. Nobody else can do that, and they do it while creating emotional intensity. Stairway ends side 1 ends the way Black Dog began it, Robert Plant singing a cappella – because when I tell you the artists thought in sides, I wasn’t kidding.
So that’s Led Zeppelin, and hour and a half spent investigating some of the greatest music ever. If you’ve followed the directions and still don’t really like Led Zeppelin, well then find someone else’s daughter to date, ’cause there’s not much hope for you. But at least everything else you listen to from the decade will have the appropriate context.
Moving on, but staying ever so briefly with the Stones offshoots, Aerosmith took influence from all of The Yardbirds, The Stones, Led Zeppelin and, as I’ve argued before, The Faces. Forget everything since they’ve reformed in the 1980’s, forget that Stephen Tyler loses credibility with every TMZ day, Aerosmith’s 70’s stuff is good to great. Start with the greatest hits if you must, but hit the albums too. The hits, Walk This Way, Sweet Emotion, Dream On are all excellent. But in the albums are some stellar tracks: Mama Kin, The Yardbird’s Train Kept a Rollin, Same Old Song and Dance.
In 1981 the Rolling Stones where playing locally at Buffalo. Opening that day at Ralph Wilson Stadium was a guy the rumoured to have been readied to step in and take over for Ron Wood if he was unable to continue, which seemed possible. Reportedly the only artist Bill Wyman would ask for an autograph over the Stones long career, the guys in the Stones where George Thorogood and the Delaware Destroyers fans, so shouldn’t a Rolling Stones fan be too? Start at the beginning, with One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer. If you can’t recite the line “I know, everybody funny, now you funny too,” with confidence, you really don’t get rock’n’roll.
Also on the act that day, Foghat. Try them out, and their British counterparts (I know, Foghat are British, but their success was in the US), Status Quo.
Leaving the Stones influence behind, there’s almost too much music, too many bands of the era. In some cases whole repertoires should be explored, in others, a song or two. In most cases, I’ll discuss and album or album side.
The Beatles: Since we are discussing the era of the late 60’s early 70’s, explore at your leisure the later Beatles. While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Revolution, Back in the USSR. There’s a lot of good rock music in there between John Lennon’s experiments in avant-garde and Paul McCartney’s soppy ballads. You’ll find stuff you like, including possibly some ballads and avand-garde.
Also, the solo Beatles is good. To me, Paul McCartney’s best work, ever, was his early Wings stuff – Band on the Run and Venus and Mars. Also his first few solo albums, including the song Maybe I’m Amazed. Lennon’s solo work is also good, sometimes great. Everyone knows Imagine, but Jealous Guy, Whatever Gets You Through The Night, Watching the Wheels and Woman are all excellent. George was the underrated Beatle, and he proves it in his solo work. His first post-Beatles work is All Things Must Pass and it has My Sweet Lord and What is Life. But pick up his greatest hits and find out how good he is. Then get Somewhere in England, or at least the song All Those Years Ago and hear his tribute to John Lennon, who was killed the year before. Most people don’t know that Ringo had a fairly good solo career, and his greatest hits album is full of fun little pop songs that are a perfect way to waste an afternoon.
The Who also fall into the must listen category. Considered one of, if not the most exciting live act of the time, the Who’s work spans the decades. From the 60’s, grab their greatest hits album, Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy, as well as their live album Live at Leeds. For sport, imagine seeing The Who, playing as good as they do at Leeds, playing your university.
In the 70’s, check out Who’s Next. You know all the songs anyway, from the CSI intros, but listen to them in their entirety, in context. In the 80’s the post-Kieth Moon Who had former Faces drummer Kenny Jones keeping beat, and they released a couple of good albums, 1981’s Face Dances and 1982’s It’s Hard. Check them both out, including You Better You Bet, Athena, Eminence Front and John Entwistle’s ironic rocker, The Quiet One.
How’s that fro a start? There’s your homework, and there’s enough there to keep you too busy to be bothering my daughter. And when your done that, we’ll move on to individual songs you should be listening too.
The Freedom of Music Goes 8-Track
May 27th, 2012
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One likes to believe in the freedom of music.Rush – Spirit of Radio.
“If you want,” I said to my son, “you can put some music of your music on for a while.”
He’s 14, quiet in the monosyllabic way unique to teenage boys and has a lovely smile. He flashed it now, half in a laugh.
“No.”
We were renovating a bathroom/closet and the two of us were putting up the drywall. Born to Run was on, not something he would listen to voluntarily. He’s into rap and modern pop, meaning Beyonce, Usher &tc. Bruce Springsteen is not his thing. Yet he refused my simple request with almost a chuckle.
“Don’t have any rap 8-tracks?” I asked innocently, and his time he did laugh.
“No.”
I bought the 8-track player on eBay about a year ago, and now have a small collection of tapes, also mostly bought on eBay. It was a lark really, buying a piece of obsolete audio equipment that most people couldn’t get rid of fast enough back around 1980. But it was a lark that has come with it’s small pleasures. The fact that, as near as I can tell, a rap album has never been released on 8-track is one of those pleasures.
But there’s more. eBay is full of tapes at any given time and spending half-an-hour nosing through, bidding a dollar here, two there is a bit of fun. More fun is wandering through a used stuff store and stumbling on an otherwise unexpected cache of tapes. Truth is, until you have heard Boston’s first blasting though an 8-track player, as I have after stumbling across it at the Stratford Antique Mall, you just haven’t heard it in all it’s analogue glory.
Pulling out the 8-track and throwing on some classic rock is guaranteed to generate a conversation. Other people my age remember having 8-tracks, haven’t seen them in years, and end up reminiscing about everything from music they haven’t heard since 1978 to the way you had to use a matchbook to lift the tape and keep the audio lined up with the tracks.
A couple of years ago I predicted 8-tracks might make a comeback and while I hate to take credit, even when well deserved, and it hardly qualifies as a real comeback, a noticeable thing has happened. A year ago, one-dollar 8-tracks where common on eBay. Those same 8-tracks now cost $6-8. There’s been a defined spike in the price, which leads one to believe it’s not just me who has discovered 8-tracks.
The good life is in the small pleasures. Discovering a love for 8-tracks after all these years is one of the smallest.
The Freedom of Music: Levon Helm
May 20th, 2012
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One likes to believe in the freedom of music.Rush – Spirit of Radio.
The Band was, undeniably, one of the great acts of the rock era. A Canadian band with a lone member from Arkansas, they played Toronto’s haunts for years backing up Ronnie Hawkins as The Hawks. Hawkin’s was a taskmaster and a perfectionist. After performing all night, virtually every night, Hawkins would rehearse his band for hours afterwards into the small hours of the morning. 
The practice time paid off, and The Hawks became masters of their craft. So much so that when Bob Dylan decided to change rock’n’roll irretrievably by mixing folk and electric blues, he chose the Hawks to be his back up band. The Arkansas boy however, had had enough of the life and, disappointed by the initial response to Bob Dylan’s decision to “go electric,” quit music and went home. Levon Helm left his bandmates to suffer the indignity of being booed and jeered every night, just because Bob Dylan decided to expand his musical horizons.
In 1967, living in Woodstock with Bob Dylan, Rick Danko contacted Helm asking him to rejoin the band. He did and became one of the staple voices of rock music. Music From the Big Pink, released a year later, became one of the most popular and influential albums of the 1960’s, cited by George Harrison as a great album, and Eric Clapton as the reason he left Cream for more rootsy styled music. Helm, for the record, never really left Woodstock again, his popular Midnight Ramble’s, ongoing until his death, took place in his barn/studio at his home in Woodstock.
A few weeks ago, an announcement appeared on Helm’s webpage, signed his wife and daughter. Helm was, it said, “in the final stages of his battle with cancer.” Usually such notices mean you have days to live. In Helm’s case, it was 2 days, as he succumbed to cancer on April 20th. He was 72.
As the post-mortem tributes came in, none summed Helm up better than Bruce Springsteen, who told a New Jersey audience about a week after Helm’s death:
Both his voice and his drumming were so incredibly personal. He had a feel on the drums that just comes out of a certain place that you can’t replicate.
When Springsteen refers to Helm’s voice as personal, he doesn’t just mean unique, although it was certainly that. Whether he was stretching his voice as in Ophelia, reciting a history lesson as he did in The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down or mock yodeling in Up On Cripple Creek, It felt as though Helm was singing directly to you. His voice had so much soul, every note dripping with that intangible something that made him one of the very special singers.
The Freedom of Music: The Front Men (and Women) of Rock
September 5th, 2010
One likes to believe in the freedom of music.Rush – Spirit of Radio.
Gibson Guitars had a list of the top 50 front men (and women) of all time on their webpage. Actually, they had two lists: one put together by Josh Todd of Buckcherry, Chad Kroeger of Nickelback and Ric Olsen of Berlin, plus staff at Gibson.com. The other list was chosen by readers. Here’s the top 10 of each list:
Gibson
1.Mick Jagger
2. Freddie Mercury
3. Robert Plant
4. Elvis
5. James Brown
6. Jimi Hendrix
7. Michael Jackson
8. Roger Daltrey
9. Prince
10. Jim Morrison
Readers
1. Freddie Mercury
2. Bruce Dickinson (Iron Maiden)
3. Marc Bolan
4. Bon Scott
5. Robert Plant
6. Brian Johnson
7. Mick Jagger
8. Bono
9. Robin Zander
10. Elvis
We can pick and natter about the list, and ultimately that’s what these lists are for. So lets:
Really? Freddie Mercury is pretty much the undisputed best? Really?? While the “experts” pick Jagger, the readers placed him well enough down the list to make Freddie indisputable. One suspects however that too many fans think of Mick circa 2005, or 1995, when he looked like a skeletal old man refusing to acknowledge his age. Longevity has it’s curses…
There is an argument to be made that Elvis wasn’t really a front man, he was the act. And if we are allowing guys like Elvis, why not Frank Sinatra? Could you make a list of front men, and not have Sinatra on the top 25, never mind the top 50? Hell, Neil Diamond is there. And not to pick on Elvis, the same questions apply to Jackie Wilson, Otis Redding, Garth Brooks and, too a lesser degree, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Elton John &tc….
And what’s this about Stephen Tyler being at #11 on the Gibson list and #22 on the fan list, yet Rod Stewart is #22 on the Gibson and doesn’t make the fan list? People don’t seem to realize how much Tyler copped Stewart’s Faces act. Oh, I know, I know, he copped Jagger not Stewart. Except other than looking kinda, sorta like Jagger, there is little comparison. He dresses more like an early 70’s Keith than Mick, but his stage stuff is all Stewart. The scarves hanging off the microphone, the dragging the mike stand around the stage. All Rod, before Aerosmith came along. Granted, Tyler uses silk scarves and Stewart football scarves, but that’s details. The point is, if Stephen Tyler is to be so high on the list (and don’t get me wrong, he belongs up there), then Faces era Stewart belongs in that neighbourhood.
Quibbles and Bits,however, as the dog is always saying when we argue philosophy (these discussions usually involve vodka). If Gibson readers think Freddie Mercury over Bruce Dickinson, then I’ll not argue. He wouldn’t top my list – and you know there’ll be a list – but then again, Bruce Dickinson? Not on my list.
Dickinson and Robin Zander. When I said top front men, did Bruce Dickinson and Robin Zander come to mind? Iron Maiden and Cheap Trick’s front men? Is Zander even Cheap Trick’s guy, wouldn’t Rick Neilson really qualify as Cheapest Trick? But lets face reality. A couple of fan web sites put fans on notice there was a readers poll and a “lets get Robin to the top of the list,” button. Even accounting for that, however, Marc Bolan? Who’d a thunk it?
For those who don’t know, Marc Bolan was the leader of T. Rex, although that was by no means his only band. T. Rex had a significant American hit with Bang a Gong. Bolan was their singer and guitar player, had male model good looks (in fact he did some modelling), the requisite big curly hair, and played a Les Paul on stage. He is credited with inventing Glam Rock, what we here in America tended to call Glitter. Think Ziggy Stardust era David Bowie, and you have Glam (or think Cherrie Currie dressing up as David Bowie in “The Runaway’s” and you’re there).
T. Rex released nine albums from 1970-1977, a decent output, to put it mildly. In fact, Bolan’s discography is impressive. In September 1977, however, Bolan was killed in a car crash, a passenger in a purple mini, in London. He was two weeks shy of being 30.
The thing is, I have never, ever, had somebody mention how good Marc Bolan is to me. In all the years, and all the music conversations, never once has his name even come up. It’s not a name that would have ever occurred to me. And to be clear, I’m not poo-poohing the idea that Bolan is the third best front man ever: I have no idea if he is or not. I have zero frame of reference.
Or at least I had no frame of reference. What did we do before the internet? Before YouTube?
Marc Bolan fan: Marc Bolan is the greatest.
me: Is he now?
Marc Bolan fan: Don’t argue with me, I’m telling you
me: Never seen ‘im.
Marc Bolan fan: Well you should check out… um…er…
But with YouTube, there he is, in full purple colour (the 70’s were incredible for music, but they really were a crime against fashion). He is more charismatic than athletic, all good looks and pretty smile. The physical manifestations of the job he leaves for others, the heavy Les Paul keeps him pretty rooted in spot. But for that, he’s not bad. I see what they are talking about, although he’s not about to make my list.
My list: you knew it was coming… here it is, my list of the top ten (plus some)front men (and women).
1. Roger Daltrey – he moved constantly, he had all that blonde curly hair. He had the most powerful voice in rock, and didn’t have trouble singing on stage. He would twirl his microphone by the cord sending it twenty feet in the air and during Who Are You he ran on the spot through the whole song. In Won’t Get Fooled Again he offered up the greatest scream in rock and roll, that counts here.
2. Mick Jagger – Not tired old guy circa now Mick Jagger, but the young Mick Jagger that preened and pranced. Pre 1980’s Mick who exuded sexuality out of every pore. Once he put on the knee pads it was pretty much over, but I’ll even give him the knee pads tour of 1981. Mick pretty much invented the genre and virtually everybody else is an imitator to one degree or another. He deserves to be much higher than seven.
3. Robert Plant – The best band in the world, bar none (even the dog doesn’t argue that point with me). By a long, long shot. Heads and shoulders above the next. So how low can their front man be? Not below 3, that’s how low.
4. Bruce Springsteen – Even now he fronts an energy packed band, never stopping, never seeming to breathe for two, two-and-a-half, three hours. If you’ve never seen him, it’s exhausting. And yet, those in the know will tell you he’s nothing compared to what he was in 1978.
5. Janis Joplin – Rent the DVD Festival Express and skip to Cry Baby. Those chills running up and down your spine, that’s why Janis Joplin is not just the token woman on this list.
6. Russel Mael – Every one who makes one of these lists, every critic needs their obscure, arty band to prove their bona fides: Sparks are mine.
7. Stephen Tyler – He really is good, no matter who did what first.
8. Alice Cooper – He hung himself, onstage, with mascara running down his face. He wore a boa constrictor for a necklace. He danced with a corpse, and with skeletons in top hat and tails (with walking sticks, naturally). That stuff counts for something.
9. Rod Sewart – Of the Faces, not of Do You Think I’m Sexy. He tied scarves around his mike, duct taped the mic to the stand and taught Stephen Tyler how it’s done – the tutu is a but much though.
10. Freddie Mercury – I have no frame of reference having never seen Queen live or watched any Queen concert footage, but if he’s #2 for the Gibson experts and #1 for their readers, that’s good enough for me.
10a. Elton John – The electric boots, the mohair suits: OK that technically isn’t Elton John, but he has worn both. Also, he has dressed by like Luis XIV, worn oversized glasses with windshield wipers on them and played Crocodile Rock on stage opposite a crocodile. At the end of the day, this is supposed to be entertainment.
10b. Ian Hunter – The shades, the rock star hair and cockney accent. Ian Hunter was still doing Glam in 1980, and getting away with it. You couldn’t get away with Glam in 1980.
10c. J.Geils – More fun on stage than anybody you have ever seen, that has to count for something.
10d. David Lee Roth – He can jump microphone high, and do the splits. He wore yellow jumpsuits. He once said, “I’m not like this because I’m a rock star; I’m a rock star because I’m like this.” Some people are born to be front men, some have front men-ish-ness thrust upon them. Diamond Dave is of the former.
10e. Bob Seger – Since we’re allowing Bruce Springsteen…
The most fun you will ever have at a concert.
The Freedom of Music: Robert Flirts With Cabaret
August 15th, 2010
One likes to believe in the freedom of music.Rush – Spirit of Radio.
“Now there’s a man who’s never let you down.” So remarks a friend of Nick Hornby when he tells him he is a Rod Stewart fan. Yes, admits Hornby. “…it‘s true Rod‘s record is not without its blemishes.” Us old Robert Plant fans know a thing or two about disappointment.
On his last solo album, Mighty Rearranger, Plant wrote,
My peers may flirt with cabaret,
Some fake the rebel yell.
I assumed he was talking about Rod Stewart’s American Songbook. But then his next album was a duet of old bluegrass songs with Alison Krauss. No rebel yell in sight, Plant became a crooner, and not a very good one.
It wasn’t just new songs either. He is currently on tour with his new band, Band of Joy, and bootlegs have been circulating since the first show . Get your hands one and see what he’s done to the old Zeppelin classic, Houses of the Holy to learn about butcher’s block song arranging. At least Rod Stewart still sings Stay With Me as a rocker. Plant can’t even work up the enthusiasm to sing Rock ‘n‘ Roll from the nutsack, preferring a rockabilly arrangement. I’d have a hard time deciding whether to laugh or cry if I could just keep my eyes open.
But disappointment is about more than a real shitty version of Tall Cool One.
I have a list. A mental list, not a sheet of paper with a bunch of bullet points, but a list nonetheless. It is artists who have earned a pass from me, who’s work I buy automatically based on past performance. All members of Led Zeppelin are on the list. Or at least they were, until Raising Sand.
I did what I always do with a Robert Plant album, I listened to it a number of times. I convinced myself I liked it. Then one day I listened to one of the Plant/Krauss live shows. A couple of songs stood out: in the Mood, a Plant hit from his second solo album, The Principle of Moments. It’s a great song, and the producers of Glee should be all over it, because it would work. The other was Battle of Evermore, the Zeppelin mandolin masterpiece. I wondered if Plant and Krauss would do it, thought it was the perfect song for them as it was folk/acoustic and a duet with a female singer not dissimilar to Krauss. I was excited at the possibility, and never more disappointed in the reality. The arrangement sucked all the energy, and thus all the life out of the song. Folk was out, bad acoustic country was in.
As I listened, a realization dawned on me, like the Grinch listening to the Who’s singing on Christmas morning. There he stood, the Emperor, Robert Plant, clothe-less. In a flash I’d realized, I hadn’t enjoyed Robert Plant in more than twenty years. Other than the odd song, you have to go to Now and Zen since I liked what Robert Plant had done. His first two solo albums were, in my opinion, brilliant. Now and Zen, his fourth, was good, very good even. But everything else since the passing of John Bonham was sub par, even lousy sometimes.
Oh sure, the Page/Plant thing was good, that first Unleaded album a treat. But the follow up, Walking into Clarksville simply isn’t good. And it isn’t the guitar work, or the music that doesn’t work on that album. No, Robert Plant has been, for the better part of thirty years, disappointing. As the time approaches when he releases his next effort, I’m prepared to be disappointed, prepared not to like it, fully prepared not to buy it.
So what happened?
Plant released his first single from the new album, Los Lobos Angel Dance. It’s in that tempo, he sings it in that voice. By all rights, I should be feeling pretty smug that I’m not being fooled by this guy again. Except…
Except, I like it. It has a groove I can latch on to, and if he’s not giving a Viking yell over an oar pounding rhythm, he at least sounds interested.
Damn You Robert Plant, nice clothes.
I still don’t know if I can sit through a whole album of new Robert Plant, not sure it won’t be breathtakingly dull after three or four songs. But Angel Dance is Plant’s best song in at least three albums.
It’s not gonna put Plant back on my list, but maybe, just maybe, he won’t disappoint this time.
The Freedom of Music: Jailbreak
May 23rd, 2010
One likes to believe in the freedom of music.Rush – Spirit of Radio.
In his classic heavy metal treatise, Fargo Rock City, Chuck Klosterman says in the Prologue:
…if you wrote an essay insisting Thin Lizzy provided the backbone for your teen experience in the mid 1970s, every rock critic in America would nod their head in agreement. A serious discussion of the metaphorical significance of Jailbreak would be totally acceptable. I just happen to think the same dialogue can be had about Slippery When Wet
Critics, start your nodding.
I missed Jailbreak when it came out in 1976. In fact, I only discovered it in the past few weeks. Who knows why, I was 13 that year, certainly into music. I knew who Thin Lizzy was, liked the songs Jailbreak and, of course, The Boys Are Back in Town. But I never owned the album, still don’t own it although I did recently acquire the album on MP3.
Avast, and how would you be acquiring that? you ask. Fear not, acquiring a legal copy during my infrequent visits to my local record store is on my agenda. Bad news if you’re Phil Lynott’s survivors, I’ll be buying a used copy. The only reason I can figure I never owned it is that I have a Thin Lizzy Greatest Hits album, that returned with my mother from one of her occaisnal trips home to Ireland. I had all the Lizzy songs I’d need, I must have reasoned. That’s where I reasoned wrong.
Sure the hits are good: Jailbreak and The Boys are Back in Town are both great rock songs, classics even. And Cowboy Song, which I’m not entirely sure was ever released as a single or was a hit, but is a standard of the classic rock canon. “It’s just like Wanted, Dead or Alive,” people always say. It was the jumping off point for Chuck Klostermans comparison of the two above:
…the car radio played Thin Lizzy’s “Cowboy Song“. I was struck by how much it reminded me of Wanted, Dead or Alive.
Yes, it is just like Wanted, Dead or Alive, in that both songs use the word “cowboy,” a lot, and both have electric guitars in them, and Wanted, Dead or Alive uses the cowboys as a metaphor for being a rock star and Cowboy Song uses cowboys as a metaphor for people who work on ranches in the American southwest, and Wanted, Dead or Alive is in the key of D, and Cowboy Song the key of A and that’s only like, four apart. Otherwise, there’s not that much the two have in common that they don’t also have in common with Stairway to Heaven and Kiss’s Black Diamond and Chilliwack’s My Girl (Gone, Gone, Gone) or any of the 1,000 other songs that starts slow before kicking it up.
What makes Jailbreak such a good album though, is the non-hits. The real magic lies with the unheard songs in the collection. Romeo and the Lonely Girl might be the best song I never heard before. In the last week, it’s been the song that I’ve played over and over. Running Back is what amounts to a love song in Phil Lynott’s world. Not a ballad by any stretch, but a pretty song. And how can you not love lyrics like the following:
I’m a fool now that it’s over
Can you guess my name?
I make my money singing songs about you
It’s my claim to fame.
That’s what almost every rock singer is trying to say in about half the songs they do: “I make my money singing songs about you.” They just can’t quite get those words out, and waste 3 1/2 minutes of your time not quite saying it. Angel from the Coast is a piece of guitar genius from start to finish. Different and original, yet unmistakably rock and roll.
Even the weaker songs, and Jailbreak has a couple of weak songs, have their moments. Warriors is just another hard rock song, the kind hundreds of bands were doing at the time, and would do for ten more years. But the guitar solo is a monster. One of those stunning solos that make you appreciate why so many songs have the guitar solo. Fight or Fall is weak, derivative work. But listen closely, because what’s unmistakable is that Elvis Costello was. Hell, who am I kidding here, listen to the echo section at the 1:25 mark: I’m tellin’ myself, tellin’ myself, tellin’ myself, tellin’ myself, tellin’ myself, tellin’ myself. Akon was listening. And this band’s real magic was there deft sense of melody. The delicate little solo in Fight or Fall is note perfect.
Listening to Thin Lizzy’s Jailbreak this week, I can’t help asking myself: how was this band not one of my top three bands growing up? How did I miss these guys? And how did I ever miss this fabulous album?
The Freedom of Music: Making a Few Bob.
May 16th, 2010
One likes to believe in the freedom of music.Rush – Spirit of Radio.
What’s going to save the music industry from itself? You know what I mean, that whole CDs, golden goose, dead thing. To hear the rockstars and industry execs tell it, sharing files – they call it pirating for Gods sake – will ruin the industry. Who’s going to make music if you can’t make obscene amounts of money doing so?
“Make a few bob and then open a hairdressing salon,” Ringo Starr answered when asked what he hoped to get out of The Beatles. It was The Beatles first trip to the United States, and the press was already asking “what next?” I’ll make enough money to start a little shop, thought Ringo. By the time I get around to writing Octopuses Garden, I’ll have no one to sing it to except my customers. They probably all thought that: A bookstore for John; a music store for George; a hat store for Nigel (Tufnel, the oft forgotten sixth Beatle).
Who indeed?
During a television interview aired worldwide before The Who’s live simulcast farewell concert from Toronto in 1982, Roger Daltry talked about the band’s habit of breaking their equipment at the end of their shows: ‘we would run into a store, grab a guitar off the wall and run out again saying over our shoulder, I’ll pay you later,’ he said. ‘We didn’t make any money until the mid-70’s.’ Yet they managed to come out with Tommy and Who’s Next, alternatively known as the greatest rock opera and the CSI soundtrack album.
Kiss would work their way to the west coast, and have to book gigs, any gig, to eat and travel their way back to New York. Ever seen those early Kiss shows? Phenomenal. They were hungry, they had attitude and they were good. They started making money around the time of the Destroyer album. They stopped making listenable music exactly around the Destroyer album. “They prostituted themselves,” a high school buddy said one day about Beth. I rather think not, think Beth was in retrospect, a reasonably heartfelt song. It was immediately after Beth that the Kiss act became red-light. “This is a great Rod Stewart song,” Paul Stanley told the band about Hard Luck Woman, hoping to sell the song to Stewart. That, my friend, is prostituting yourself.
Nobody got into the music business for the business potential until sometime in the late 70’s or early 80‘s. Before that, even the big stars figured by the time they were 30, then 40, they wouldn’t be acting like rock stars. Mick Jagger said once that he couldn’t imagine running around a stage when he’s 60. He knew then what he refuses to acknowledge now: that he’s become somewhat absurd. But somewhere late in the 70’s, early in the 80’s guys started choosing rock star as a career option. It is considered a remarkable coincidence that people stopped making rock music that was transcendental at the same time.
Who am I kidding? The moment musicians stopped thinking I’ll give it all I got until I’m 28 or so, then get a real job is the moment music changed. If you imagine music as a career, what you’re going to do for the rest of your life, then you’re not about to go out on a limb because you believe from the depths of your soul that the 3rd bar in the 2nd verse should be a C#m instead of an E. If the record company guy, the one in the charcoal suit, says it should be an E, then who are you to withhold the master tapes and risk your future until he concedes your point? And while one C#m may not matter in the grand scheme, once you concede the 3rd bar in the 2nd verse, then why not cut the solo because nobody does solos anymore? And why not rewrite the last verse to make it more radio friendly? Never mind that you talked to God on that solo, or the third verse was absolute poetry, this is about selling records. So why not let the art director from the design department design your album covers, why worry your pretty little head over artistic direction? After all, it’s not art, it’s business.
While the artists were busy working for the man, the people who buy the product, the important line in the supply and demand curve, stopped buying. Instead they, ahem, stole it. Not stole as in left the store with a product, stole as in they took a bunch of 0’s and 1’s that one person voluntarily put on their computer, and moved them to your computer without removing or in any way changing them. Want to talk about the law? Here’s a basic law of economics: price = scarcity. Without scarcity, there’s no need for price. Computer files are technically an unlimited resource. They can be duplicated an infinite number of times without experiencing any degradation of the original file. And if you can duplicate something ad-infinitum, you can’t impose a price on it in the long run. Notice I said can’t, not won’t or shouldn’t, but can’t. You cannot impose a price on something that has no scarcity. And if you can’t impose a price on a music file, the business model of the career recording artist falls apart.
My favourite theory is that recording will become the incidental effort, to promote the live experience that the musician offers. Sooner or later musicians will give away files, sell records and CDs to those (say, me) who must have them, but will make their money for what they do today, or rather tonight, not what they did back in 1982. For this to happen, some things within the industry will have to change, not the least of which is the expectation that musicians should be paid in perpetuity: musicians will have to be first, and always, musicians. Brittany Spears need not apply, we need people who can step on a stage, and sing, or play their instrument; the idea that a concert should be a spectacle will have to end. If you need a ten piece band and dancers – especially if you need dancers – then you can’t be expected to turn a profit on tour. No profit, no performance, it needs to be that simple. A five man band giving it their all, ala the Stones 1972 can be profitable work. An eleven man band playing Jumping Jack Flash while Mick, Keith and Ronny prance and preen ala the Stones now, no Dice, Tumblin’ or otherwise; prices need to come down. Sure Roger Waters or Madonna can carry a circus act, tractor trailer loads full of bricks and flying pigs, then charge $150, but nobody else can. Fourty dollars to hear some band on the margins is too much, they need to be able to play, profitably, for less, maybe a lot less. The trick is get enough people in the seats for $20, and sell them shirts, ring-tones, iPhone cases and downloads of the show.
I mention this because it is, I think, the future, and it is coming sooner than most believe. Here’s an item from this weeks paper:
Christina Aquilera has announced a 20-date North American tour… in support of her upcoming album Bionic. Fans will receive a digital copy of the album with every ticket purchased before June 4.
Give away the music, sell the concert. It’s a new idea, and will take some working out, but it’s economically viable. To put it simply, performance is a scarce commodity, one that can be charged for. As it gets harder and harder to collect on the bits and bites sitting on your hard drive, it will become more viable to look to the performance of music to make a living.
What’s going to save the music industry from itself? That’s easy: musicians. And when they do, music consumers will be better off for it.
The Freedom of Music: Slashing Fergie.
May 9th, 2010
One likes to believe in the freedom of music.Rush – Spirit of Radio.
I was never a big Guns N’ Roses guy, never quite caught on to the hype about the late 80’s hard rock icons. In truth, I was probably too old to get too excited. By the time GN’R’s first album Appetite for Destruction came on to the scene I was 24 and had become fairly set in my musical ways. Sweet Child of Mine was, of course, brilliant and I bought Appetite for Destruction based on it. I never loved the album, and while I would take to other GN’R songs such as Welcome to the Jungle or Patience, I never bought into the GN’R thing whole-hog.
Guitarist Slash was a different kind of cat in 1987. Strutting, not preening as was the order of the day, with a classic Les Paul plugged into a Marshall amp he was the classic kind of guitar player. This was a time when guitarists were using Strat rip-off guitars with Schaller locking systems on whack-job tremolo systems, active pick-ups and transistor amps. Think Eddie Van Halen minus the warm tone, dynamics or creativity and you have the state of guitar playing in 1987. But Slash had it, that big Les Paul tone, a style of playing that breathed, making his songs more musical, albeit at the expense of soul-less technique. In short, I didn’t have to like them, but I sure respected where Guns N’ Roses were coming from.
Since his exit from GN’R Slash has had a few side projects but like guitar players before him, Slash eventually found himself band-less and went for the solo album. Whenever a guitar player does a solo album, he inevitably runs into a problem regarding singers. He can’t just bring in a singer to sing the songs. It is one of those inescapable truths that a song will belong as much as, if not more, to the singer as any guitar player. Thus if Jimmy Buffet sings your song, it will sound like a Jimmy Buffet song. So the single singer turns a solo project into a band project, albeit one named after the guitar player.
Of course some guitar players decide they can sing, and sing the songs themselves re: Eric Clapton or Peter Frampton. But then, some guitar players start focusing on singing and stop doing what made them great guitar players, rendering themselves adult contemporary acts, re: Eric Clapton or Peter Frampton. You can always solve these problem by not having any singing, doing an instrumental album. Peter Frampton also did this recently, as has Jeff Beck a number of times. The problem here is you produce an album that only other guitar players are really interested in, and not all of them.
The solution to these dilemma is, bring in a different singer for each song, or a group of singers. If this works well, you get Rob Thomson and Dave Matthews and your disk goes a Supernatural 15X Platinum. If you get unlucky, you get Chris Farlowe and John Miles and they write lyrics for your music like:
I’m gonna leave my little honey
Like a rabbit needs a hole
A-ow-ah, leave my little honey, baby
Just like a bunny rabbit leaves a holeI got a weasel in my pocket
I’m gonna stick that weasel down my momma
I’m gonna stick it right down that little hole
You could be Mozart vonBeethoven (nee Bach), and you couldn’t turn crud like that into a listenable song, but that’s the task Jimmy Page has all through his Outrider album, and it absolutely ruins it.
This last route, Jimmy Page’s experience notwithstanding, is the one Slash chose. Like Sanatana, he chose some big names, and let them influence the songs. The result is what you expect, 14 songs that sound somewhat like each singer, somewhat like Slash. Crucify the Dead sounds like Ozzy Osbourne, I Hold On sounds like a Kid Rock song. The opening song, Ghost, featuring Ian Astbury, is a metaphor for the whole album. The opening lick is all Slash, not far off from that great Sweet Child of Mine lick. But as soon as Ian Astbury starts singing, it turns into a Cult song.
The revelation for many on this album is the Fergie song, Beautiful Dangerous. She can sing! She can rock!! I’ve seen it mentioned in reviews of the album. Black Eyed Pea rapper, Fergie can sing rock ‘n’ roll. Well, yea. She can, and that’s not new. Check out Fergie doing Heart’s Barracuda for the Shrek the Third soundtrack. Barracuda is not a song for the feint of lung. If you can handle, just handle Barracuda, you can sing rock. Hell, if you can do Barracuda and not embarrass yourself, you can do rock better than a lot of “rock” singers. So yes, Fergie can sing rock.
Not convinced. Listen to her easy rock hit Big Girls Don’t Cry. A bit of a slow old style soul, she brings to the song some of the most soulful singing you’ve heard in a long time. The girl can sing and exhibit C is Beautiful Dangerous. It starts out with a repeating guitar line with some classic Fergie moans over top, it moves into a standard Fergie song. Literally purring the verse while Slash bounces a standard power chord rhythm behind her:
You like it smooth like brandy
Savor the flavor with delight
You can be Sid, I’ll be Nancy
Cuz sometimes it’s more fun to fight
The surprise for Slash fans is the bridge or pre-chorus, which Fergie raps a stanza over a classic Slash guitar line. Next up, that proof I was talking about. She steps up and gives a full on rock chorus, worthy of a Slash album.
I’ve never minded Fergie. As I’ve mentioned, some of her previous work is pretty good, and she has shown in the past that she has some vocal chops. However, if you had told me Slash was going to do an album, a good album, and my favourite song was the Fergie vehicle, with a repeating rap in it, I might have dismissed that possibility. Yet that’s the case.
Slash’s album is, on the whole, quite good. And the standout track is Beautiful Dangerous sung by that girl with The Black Eyed Peas. Who’d a thunk I’d ever say that?
The Freedom of Music: New Stones
May 2nd, 2010
One likes to believe in the freedom of music.Rush – Spirit of Radio.
Have you heard the new Rolling Stones song, Plunder My Soul yet? It was released for Independent Record Store Day on April 17th as a vinyl 45RPM single. There was a limited amount made and they moved quickly. If you managed to pick one up on Record Store Day or, like me stumbled across a copy a few weeks later, you got a nice collectable and a good song.
What is the best new Stones song of the last 25 years? – An argument could be made that the best Stones song of recent vintage was by a Montreal band recording their first English language album in ten years. The Respectable’s Sweet Mama is the Stones at their very best, even if they aren’t the Stones (actually a better argument could be made that Sweet Mama is the best Faces song in 35 years) – Plunder My Soul may well be the best Stones song since Little T&A from 1981’s Tattoo You?
Plunder My Soul was recorded in 1972 as part of the Exile On Main Street sessions. Most Stones aficionados would highlight 1972 as being in the middle of the bands peak creative years. Going a couple of years either side of 1972 you get the following singles released: Honky Tonk Woman (b side/You Can’t Always Get What You Want); Brown Sugar; Wild Horses; Tumbling Dice; Happy; Angie; Heartbreaker; It’s Only Rock and Roll; Ain’t To Proud To Beg (b side/Dance Little Sister). Add a year on the front end and you can throw in Jumping Jack Flash and Street Fighting Man. Then there was the album tracks, the stuff that didn’t get released as a single, but deserves mention: Sympathy For the Devil; Give Me Shelter; Midnight Rambler; Can’t You Hear Me Knocking; Bitch; Dead Flowers; Tumblin’ Dice; ‘Til The Next Goodbye. That’s quite a list, far from comprehensive as it is.
To many Rolling Stones fans, Exile On Main Street is the penultimate album, the apex of Rolling Stonery. But Exile has it’s weak moments, songs that sound more like jams than well crafted songs fit for a top level album. Other’s still are just weaker songs, songs that hint, ever so gently, that Fool To Cry is coming. When Plunder My Soul is played next to the rest of Exile, deserves to be there, and is better than many songs that made the cut.
By 1976 the Stones were no longer firing on all cylinders creatively. Black and Blue, that years release featuring the aforementioned Fool To Cry as it’s main single, was a much weaker album. It had been two years since It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll (my personal favourite Stones album). Things were about to go very badly for the band: Keith would face the possibility of a 7 year to life prison term when he was arrested on heroin possession “for the purposes of trafficking” charges by the RCMP in 1977. Convicted of a lesser possession charge, the judge did the sensible thing: he gave Richards a suspended sentence, one year probation and made him give a benefit concert.
Clean (of heroin, at any rate), chastened by the Canadian judicial system and the punks who were starting to dominate the English music scene, the Stones returned in 1978 with a stripped down, punk influenced album, Some Girls. One of their finest works, Some Girls featured four strong singles, Miss You, Beast of Burden, Respectable and Shattered. The Stones could have disappeared from the radar as many big early 70’s bands did around this time. But Some Girls put them in front of a new generation, and cemented their standing as a great rock ‘n’ roll band.
Followed by Emotional Rescue in 1980, a much weaker effort even if it did have Dance and She’s So Cold (a friend recently confessed Emotional Rescue was his favourite Stones song). Tattoo You would end the punk inspired period with an album of mostly outtakes including Waiting on a Friend, Little T&A and one of their best songs, Start Me Up. The Stones would never be this good again.
By 1983 Punk had died away and the MTV generation was ruling the airwaves. The Stones answered with Undercover, a largely forgettable album of largely forgettable songs. Dirty Work would follow three years later with Harlem Shuffle being the best of a bad bunch. Nineteen-eight-nine’s Steel Wheels the Stones hit rock bottom, with Mick uttering the horrific lyric in the albums biggest hit, Mixed Emotions:
Button your lip baby
Button your coat
Lets go out dancing
Go for the throat…This coming and going
Is driving me nuts
This to-ing and fro-ing
Is hurting my guts
So get off the fence
Its creasing your butt
Life is a party
Lets get out and strut
This to-ing and fro-ing, Is hurting my guts? From the band that gave us:
Think the time is right for a palace revolution
‘Cause where I live the game to play is compromise solution
Well, then what can a poor boy do
Except to sing for a rock ‘n’ roll band
‘Cause in sleepy London town
There’s just no place for a street fighting man.
Untenable! It would get no better, and while the Stones would make a well deserved fortune playing the old stuff, any new work was average at best.
It is in this light that the Stones released Plunder My Soul last month. A throwback song, on a throwback format, it is quite the best Stones song since Tattoo You, possibly the best since Some Girls or even, It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll (but I won’t go that far). Best Stones song in 25 years? For sure. Best in 35? I’ll leave that for you to decide.
One things for sure, it is great to have a new Stones song to love.
The Freedom of Music: Return of the Eight-Track?
April 25th, 2010
One likes to believe in the freedom of music.Rush – Spirit of Radio.
I’ve discussed the return of the LP in this feature before. In fact, this feature could almost be called “The Return of the LP,” some weeks. The music industry looking backwards in order to move forward comes up a lot, it seems. This week, for instance, Foo Fighter’s drummer and Dave Grohl pal Taylor Hawkins released his second album with his non-Foo’s band, Taylor Hawkins & the Coat Tail Riders. The album, Red Light Fever, is available in the usual sources: iTunes download, CD and LP. What’s new in the last year is, the LP sales are featured prominently on the bands websites. Buy it today on…, and LP is right there with the other two getting front billing. There was something else, something different and entirely new to me at the TH&TCTR web site: mention of eight-tracks. There was a twitter contest were you could win an eight-track of Red Light Fever and they would throw in the 8-track player. You could also listen to a streamed version of the album by taking a virtual eight-track and putting it in an virtual eight-track player.
So are eight-tracks back?
In his self-proclaimed classic rock manifesto, I Hate New Music, Dave Thompson argues the eight-track was the best delivery method of music ever devised:
…Vinyl? Scratchy, warped and needs too much cleaning. Cassettes? Hissy, fragile and they look like crap. CDs? Coasters with a superiority complex.
MP3s? Great! I’ll happily pay ninety-nine cents for nothing whatsoever. Eight-tracks, on the other hand – you know you’ve got a pocketful of something with an eight-track. Plus, they have the greatest sound reproduction you’ve ever heard.
I’ve never owned a pre-recorded eight-track. I had an eight-track player/recorder as an adolescent, and used it to turn my brothers LPs into something I could listen to without pissing him off three times a day. Pirating they call it now, which it was in as much as I had to gain access to his room and leave again, with an album I wanted, without getting caught. Making an eight-track and getting the album back in less than an hour was survival more than piracy, but pirates had to survive too.
So while I learnt all the words to Bat Out of Hell, and had my introduction to Led Zeppelin IV – the greatest album of all time – off of an eight-track, I have never owned a store bought one. Never had Houses of the Holy with the fade-out-click-and-fade-in during No Quarter, may be the only person of my generation not to have owned Frampton Comes Alive on the format and certainly never had Venus and Mars on the format – which Thompson claims is the greatest aural experience a human can have, or something like that. No, I owned all that stuff on album, and made eight-track mixed tapes of the best of it.
Taylor Hawkins, however, apparently agrees with Dave Thompson about eight-tracks sound reproduction. The web site that streams his album brags of being in “eight-track quality.” It’s a cool page, where you place the eight-track tape into the animated deck, and it plays. You can’t skip songs, but you can click through the tracks the same as with a regular eight-track player. Nice.
But does it mark the return of eight-tracks? To answer, an observation: they don’t sell eight-tracks on the web site. It’s possible Taylor Hawkins is waaay out ahead of a trend, however, he doesn’t have enough faith in the trend to actually sell eight-tracks. Furthermore, I could find no other artist making their music available in the format, no stores specializing in it, not even any one selling new eight-track players. There are some web sites that specialize in eight-tracks, but they are nostalgic in nature.
Eight-tracks inherent strength in it’s day was it’s portability. When the car companies started putting eight-track players in cars in the mid-late 60’s, a time when AM radio was the norm, they created a drive around music system where you could chose what you would listen to when you drive. It created a demand, and eight-tracks took off. With in car entertainment systems that include DVD players, CD/MP3 players and iPod connectors, modern cars have no need for eight-track players.
It seems unlikely that any real demand for eight-tracks will be forthcoming, which means it seems unlikely eight-track tapes are about to achieve any kind of renaissance. Sorry Taylor Hawkins.
The Freedom of Music: Independent Record Store Day
April 18th, 2010
One likes to believe in the freedom of music.Rush – Spirit of Radio.
Yesterday was Independent Record Store Day. Did you miss it? Are you, at this moment, slapping your forehead because you forgot all about it? Not likely. More like your saying to yourself, “there’s an independent record store day?” Why, yes there is, it’s a promotional event by some players in the music industry, and is significant because a number of artists supported the idea, and got behind it. 
Of course, if you go the right websites, are on the right mailing lists, you knew about it. And quite a few people go to those websites, subscribe to those mailing lists. At Other Music in New York City, they lined up around the block to get in. Easy for them, you might think. They still have record stores in New York. While it’s true New York has everything, including a street with two chess shops across the road from each other and a peanut butter restaurant, you didn’t have to be in Manhattan to enjoy Record Store Day. Chances were there was someplace within a short enough drive. Out here in Cambridge, I had four or five options nearby, more than ten if I was willing to put in an hours driving.
Why, on the other hand, would you want to attend Independent Record Store Day? Why stand in line on Saturday to shop at a store that was there Friday, and still will be, presumably, Monday. The reason is that, as I mentioned earlier, a number of artists got behind the idea. Real, artists, significant artists, with long histories in the music world, released new material specifically for this event. We aren’t talking a new Lady Gaga video here, although she may have done so. How about a new Rolling Stones single, only on vinyl? The song, Plundered My Soul, is a find from the vaults. A lost song from the Exile on Main St. sessions, Plundered My Soul is a great rocker. Proof that The Rolling Stones were once a great band, especially considering Plunder My Soul didn’t make the final cut.
Plunder My Soul singles, which sadly were gone by the time I got off my lazy ass and wandered over to Encore Records, are already selling on eBay in the $30 to $60 range . As an aside, the Kitchener Record claims there was also a line-up at Encore Records at opening time. They did have a number of the items specially released for Record Store Day. A number of vinyl albums, Jeff Beck’s new one, and John Hiatt’s newest for example. Myself, I picked up two 10” singles, a new, Bruce Springsteen and a Them Crooked Vultures picture disk.
The Springsteen features two previously released tracks, but tracks that have never been out in a physical format before. Both have gotten the iTunes treatment, but the limited edition 10” is just for Record Store Day. The A side, Wrecking Ball, was recorded and written specifically for his 2009 Giant’s Stadium concerts. Giant’s Stadium will go under the wrecking ball itself. The song itself, according to Pitchfork upon it’s iTunes release, is:
dedicated to the big building, New Jersey, living, dying, turning 60, and trying to hold onto memories in the age of parking lots.
B side is a live version of Ghost of Tom Joad from 2008.
The real treat of my day, the real keeper, is the Them Crooked Vultures 10” picture disc. In case you haven’t been keeping track, Them Crooked Vultures is a new “super group,” with Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, Foo Fighters frontman, and ex-Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl back on the drums, and Queens of the Stone Age front man Josh Homme on guitar and vocals. They are loud, brash, ballsy and real, real good. Their imagery, various drawings of a humanoid with a vulture head, is always excellent. Displayed in a Crooked Vultures red see through envelope, the picture disc is an excellent piece. The disc contains an album cut Mind Eraser, No Chaser, and a new live song, Hwy 1 on side one, and an interview on side two.
Over all Independent Record Store Day seems to have been a success, both for the stores that took part, and for me personally. It is simply great to be buying a new song, on vinyl, by some favourite artists, at a favourite record store. What more could a music fan ask for?
The Freedom of Music: Rock and Roll
February 28th, 2010
Comments Off on The Freedom of Music: Rock and Roll
One likes to believe in the freedom of music.Rush – Spirit of Radio.
A few weeks ago I was on about the resurgence of the LP, this week I’d like to take a moment to whine about an LP I can’t find. Canada’s Social Code has a new disk “Rock ’N’ Roll,” available in the usual ways, CD, iTunes, various illegal download sites.
It is, however, almost the perfect disk for LP release and yet, that’s the one format I haven’t found it on yet.
Rock ‘N’ Roll. That’s the title. It used to be that meant something, something more than barre chords, 4/4 time and a shuffle rhythm. As kids we listened to rock, but we believed in rock ’n’ roll. In Kiss’s seminal live album, Kiss Alive, Paul Stanley asks the Cobo Hall audience, “Do you believe in Rock and Roll.” It wasn’t corny, and the audience cheered. “Then stand up for what you believe in,” he answers them back. As if rock ’n’ roll is freedom, or killing Nazi’s or women’s rights or peanut butter (sorry, that‘s clap your hands). The thing is, was, we did believe in rock ’n’ roll in the same way a person believes in freedom and civil rights. We believed rock ’n’ roll was more than music, it was a movement.
While it was a movement, it was also very personal. We didn’t just listen to music, we loved it. It breathed life into our being. It “moved our soul,” and as such we accepted it as important. In a world of pre-packaged disposable everything, including music, I miss that. I miss the feeling that music is important, that it can affect the world. I still listen to a fair bit of rock ’n’ roll, but in a world where the Rolling Stones have sponsored tours, the Who play the Superbowl on Prime Time TV and Bob Dylan is like a Rolling Stone only in so much as his music is also available for advertising, I miss the idea of Rock ’n’ Roll.
Note the quotes above. Rock ’n’ roll “moved our soul.” The quotes are from the title track to Social Codes Rock ’n’ Roll album. It’s a ballad in the old style, acoustic guitar with a running bass line melody, a cello, and one guy singing his heart out. Not in the academy style of a well trained voice, but a from the testicles, gut it out style of singing from rock ’n’ roll’s old school. And it speaks volume about what’s missing, what’s wrong with today’s music.
I like it stripped down raw and naked,
A Little Peace of your Heart I’ll take it
Turn it as loud as it will goI don’t want it packaged neat
I don’t want it bought and sold
Don’t play it safe it’s time to lose controlI’m Gonna’ kill my television
Nad burn my radio
I want something that will move my soul
I want rock ’n’ rollLet’s set these city streets on fire
Strike a match and start a riot
Burn it to the ground with rock ‘n’ rollThe battle stopped my ears still ringing
I miss the sound of sirens singing
The tattoo on my heart says rock ‘n’ roll
Wonderful stuff. And at the end, when he quietly moans “Where did you go” a couple of times between choruses, it‘s spine tingling. Somebody out there, somebody with a guitar, a microphone and a record deal gets it.
The Freedom of Music: LP’s under the Christmas Tree
January 31st, 2010
One likes to believe in the freedom of music.Rush – Spirit of Radio.
Pictures from my youth. The family is gathered around the Christmas tree. It’s Christmas morning and wrapping paper is flying. A flat square, wrapped in red paper, gets passed across. There can be no mistaking what it is: a record. Twelve inches of vinyl that when rotated 33 1/3 times a minute with a needle stuck in it’s grooves, produced music. The question isn’t what is it? – although it is often asked with humour – but which record is it? The Christmas in question peeling back the wrapping paper produces a familiar red cover, with what looks like an impatient vulture, staring into the distance with it’s arms folded.
It must be twenty years between receiving an LP for Christmas, but the musical landscape is changing and this Christmas brought Them Crooked Vultures in all it’s double LP, gatefold cover glory. I reviewed the album via you tube download, when it first came out. If your interested in what I have to say about the music, that review still stands.
The bigger question is, why am I getting it on LP? How did it come to pass that 2009’s super group, Them Crooked Vultures, are releasing their inaugaural disc on vinyl? The answer, in my opinion, is two fold. LP records are back, and they came back because they make more sense as a keepsake in the era of MP3s, and because humbled record companies are, finally, giving their customers what they want.
To the latter point first. Records, or fans of the record, have never gone away. Always a substantial minority, CDs began to overcome records only after the record companies started restricting records. Up went the price, down went the supply and that’s a bingo, we live in a CD universe where the record companies profits double per unit sold and Yuppy morons were trading in their Saturday Night Fever soundtrack LPs and buying Phil Collin’s and Sting CDs. Soon the rest of us had no choice and, in the name of quality, we are buying our second copy of Born to Run, this time on CD sourced from the same LP we still have. Who voted for this business model?
Actually, no one voted for it because there never was a choice. Not for ten years or so anyway. But soon enough choice reared it’s ugly head in the name of Napster and in the form of MP3s. Suddenly there was another way to listen to music, and people voted for “not the CD.”
To be sure, CDs had their advantages, convenience being the main one. You could throw it in the CD player, play song 2,4,7 and 9 without having to hear the rest and without scratching your record or having to turn it over. It didn’t take long before you could program your CD player to play those songs, and soon after you could buy a CD player that holds 5 CDs, push on random and not have to hear the same song twice between dinner and the Tonight show. I was at many parties between 1988 and 1995 when the home stereo was turned into a muzak player, with a constant rotation of Sting, Phil Collins, Mariah Carey, Celine Dion and The Eagles (if the hosts put as much thought into the selection of beer as they did music, I never made it to Sting song #2).
Eventually CD’s became portable. It took a while, but the hardware makers developed the Discman, and you could stick a CD player in your pocket and listen while in the line at the bank. You couldn’t move and listen to it without it skipping, but you could still take it with you. Eventually they solved for walking, even if running was still a problem. By the time portable CD players became obsolete, they had solved the running problem too.
They put CD players in cars too. In a list of life’s great mystery’s, one has to include the following: how do they get the Caramilk in the Caramilk bar? Who put the ram in the ram-a-lam-a-ding-dong? How come they had CD players that didn’t skip in cars by 1990 but you couldn’t do the Terry Fox run without your CD skipping until 2005? But they did it, they had CD players in cars. You could plunk it in and go. Buy that Spin Doctors CD and sadly discover that while you could listen to Two Princes from Milton to Niagara Falls, you would gladly stick knotting needles in your ear before you listened to any of the other songs on the CD again? No problem, just keep hitting the back button and you could repeat the same song over and over. Because it was CDs, and if the music they were putting on them was, on the whole, crap, the CDs themselves were a great convenience.
But the advantage of CDs ends with their convenience. The quality argument never really held water and even if CDs had superior quality, what MP3s prove is that people don’t care that much about the quality. It was good enough on record, and it’s still good enough on the far inferior MP3s.
And if we can stand the sound of MP3s, they’re extremely portable, can be got or purchased without leaving your bedroom, are available for free, although often not legally, and work regardless of whether you put them away properly. Soon came the MP3 player, and suddenly it’s never mind Terry Fox, you could do Jump Rope for Heart and not have your music skipping. You can program them, carry around hundreds of albums and literally thousands of songs. Five CDs playing a random selection of songs? Now you can DJ a wedding with nothing but a good amplifier, 2 good speakers and an I-pod – and never play the same artist twice. DJs used to show up in vans, now if the hall has a good in-house PA they show up on a Vespa and still have room for an assistant.
MP3s, however, don’t make for a good collectable. If you can have far better variety of music on hand at all times without causing a bulge in your pocket, CDs lose their convenience. But if you want to collect music, LPs have always been a better choice. Bigger covers mean that you can print who played keyboards on song #3, or the songs lyrics in a font bigger than that found on an Asprin bottle. And the new LPs are being made of more, and better quality vinyl, creating a quality of sound inarguably as good as anything you can get on a CD. They stack nice against a wall, and look good doing so, while the smaller yet bulkier CD take up more floor space. LPs also allow for cooler covers. Now you don’t have to have a close up shot of the singer, you can do some actual art.
LPs are back, made useful again because the advantages they always had over CDs still exist, the advantages CDs had over LPs are made redundant by MP3s. And the record companies, losing customers, power and money had no choice but to listen to what their customers demanded: 20 years too late perhaps, but finally they listen.
And finally, a new record under the Christmas tree. Yes Virginia, you can go home again.
The Freedom of Music: Back in the Highlife
August 30th, 2009
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One likes to believe in the freedom of music.Rush – Spirit of Radio.
It’s been a lot of years. Too many really, but you get out of things: work too much, raise a family, go back to school and finish that degree. Next thing you know you haven’t slung a Les Paul in anger in twenty years. 
Hell, I haven’t blown through Sweet Home Alabama, start to finish in eighteen.
It’s not as though I have been musically inactive. as anyone who has followed this blog for very long knows. I have spent ten years learning, working on the classical guitar. I Have practiced, learnt very complex music, and performed: the most significant performance (and nerve wracking) being in Oneonta New York two years ago where I sat at the front of a beautiful church, all eyes upon me, and played John Duarte’s English Suite, amongst others. Difficult music in a very intense environment. But occasionally the urge would get me, the Les Paul, or less often the old ’63 telecaster, would come out of the case, the Fender twin reverb cranked up to 8, and I would rock the house. Lately, the urge has grown stronger and come more often.
So there I was last Sunday, trodding the boards as it were, at the 20 Hobson Street summer luncheon for The Cambridge Memorial Hospital and The Argus Residence for Young People. Four songs, sans bass player:
I Saw Her Standing There
Squeeze Box
Brown Eyed Girl
Night Moves
It wasn’t Immigrant Song or Livin’ On A Prayer I admit, not the hardest rock in the quarry, but that’s irrelevant. As I said, we have no bass player yet, so we needed material that we could cover without the bass. And it was a smallish room in the afternoon with a pleasant, not rockin’ crowd. None the less, the old Goldtop got dusted off, the groove was found and hey, we were pretty good. And we’ll be back, with bass, kickin’ it up with some serious rock ‘n’ roll before long. Now that I’m back in the game, I’m stickin around a while:
It used to seem to me
That my life ran on too fast
And I had to take it slowly
Just to make the good parts last
But when youre born to run
Its so hard to just slow down
So dont be surprised to see me
Back in that bright part of townIll be back in the high life again
All the doors I closed one time will open up again
Ill be back in the high life again
All the eyes that watched me once will smile and take me inAnd Ill drink and dance with one hand free
Let the world back into me
And on Ill be a sight to see
Back in the high life againYou used to be the best
To make life be life to me
And I hope that youre still out there
And youre like you used to be
Well have ourselves a time
And well dance til the morning sun
And well let the good times come in
And we wont stop til were done
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