At Home in Hespeler

One likes to believe in the freedom of music.Rush – Spirit of Radio.

Procrastination is an ugly thing. It lends itself to taking a task, simple or complex, and making it harder. Case in point, David Bowie died and I was going to write about it, maybe discuss how often Bowie eulogies seemed to start with “I’m not one of those Bowie freaks, but I really liked x,” x being a song, en era, a character. Bowie offered, I would have written, seemingly something for everyone. But instead of writing it, I procrastinated, held it off a week. And then Glenn Frey died.

Glenn Frey of the Eagles may be the anti-Bowie, never out of character as the cool guy. Instead of being the kind of act were everybody likes something in the catalogue, the Eagles are always surprisingly contentious. There is much more of a love/hate element to the Eagles. Who could imagine, for instance, The Dude getting thrown out of a cab protesting, “I fucking hate David Bowie man!”?

So I procrastinate, and now I have to weave together a web that interestingly compares David Bowie and Glenn Frey. Good luck with that, I’d say.

Do you remember when Farrah Fawcett died? It was the same day as Michael Jackson and of course the sad news of this beautiful woman, a highly talented and successful actress, was buried in the avalanche of grief for Jackson. So too is the fate of Dale Griffin, whose passing was announced a few hours before Glenn Frey’s.

Dale Griffin passed away on Sunday at age 67 after suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. He was the drummer for 70s British glam-rock band Mott the Hoople. Mott the Hoople spawned the careers of Ian Hunter and Bad Company’s Mick Ralphs. Their biggest hit was All The Young Dudes, written by, wait for it… David Bowie.

Considered to be a youth anthem, Bowie protested that All the Young Dudes was nothing of the sort. “All the Young Dudes is a song about this news…” the news being that the world had only five years left to live, as told on the Ziggy Stardust song “Five Years.”

Pushing through the market square
So many mothers sighing.
News had just come over,
we had five years left to cry in.

Like so many Bowie songs, five years is a story that begins by introducing a person, or in this case, persons, as in mothers sighing. The mothers may sigh at the news and the young dudes may carry the news, but All the Young Dudes opens with Billy rapping “all night about his suicide…”

Five years opens the Bowie album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, featuring the song Ziggy Stardust:

Ziggy played guitar,
jamming good with Wierd and Gilly,
and the Spiders from Mars…”

Story telling is at the heart of art. We all get that a great book, or play, or movie tells a story. Fewer think along those lines when it comes to a picture, but spend an afternoon at a good gallery amongst the renaissance masters and you’ll find stories of heroic deeds and stories of saints and historical stories and even stories of average people, or at least average people of some degree of leisure.

But pop music as story telling? Oh sure, we all get the Bob Dylan is a storyteller, even named his box set Storyteller. And yes, we get that The Who’s Tommy has some vague storyline, if only because we have been told as much so often. And above you can see that Bowie was telling stories, but it’s hardly the same is it? It’s not like you open a song with “it was a dark and stormy night.”

On a dark desert highway,
cold wind in my hair.

And so the Eagles open Hotel California with a variation of “it’s a dark and stormy night.” Like the opening to many a good story, it presents a time and a place, the desert at night, and creates an action, driving. Here’s another, see if you can spot the elements of setting:

I’m standing on a corner in Winslow Arizona…

The essence of good art is good story telling. In the last two weeks we have lost David Bowie and Glenn Frey, two men who were outstanding at telling their story through pop songs, no easy feat. They had different styles, used the format of the three to five minute song in different ways, but at their heart, they both told stories that we as an audience responded to.

May they rest in peace.

for certified professional guitar repair in Cambridge Ontario: Brian Gardiner Guitar Repair

musicians, The Freedom of Music All the Young Dudes, Bad Company, Dale Griffin, David Bowie, Eagles, Glenn Frey, Hotel California, Ian Hunter, Mick Ralphs, Mott the Hoople, Ziggy Stardust

You have a music fan on your Christmas list, 60’s and 70’s rock mostly, and you’re looking for a book. Perhaps another crappy Brian Jones biography is what he needs. Or not. In reality, the only book you want to get your music lover this Christmas is Glyn Johns’ great autobiography, Sound Man: A Life Recording Hits with The Rolling Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin, The Eagles, Eric Clapton, The Faces . . .. I myself have purchased copies for two music fans on my list.

Johns’ started out as an Engineer in the very early days of rock and roll, engineering the earliest Stones and Who singles in London’s IBC studio, “which was without a doubt the finest independent recording studio in Europe at that time.” He got his first job at IBC out of school, strictly because his sister knew someone who worked there and he loved music. He started as a man Friday, setting up microphones, running cable and brewing tea. His first engineering job came as a result of a weekend session in 1964 by Georgie Fame, “Rhythm and Blues at the Flamingo,” and nobody else wanting to do it. It’s success, and his age, meant that he was well placed for the rock and roll revolution that was just about to sweep London.

Sound Man isn’t a great book, though, just because Johns’ is the Forrest Gump of the British Invasion: he first heard Jimmy Page at a boys club talent show when they were both about 12, saw Jeff Beck in the Tridents, his pre-Yardbirds band, and lived with original Rolling Stone Ian Stewart (in fact, he and Stewart’s rented house was a gathering point for the very early Stones). Sound Man is also a book that sticks to the music. There is no chapter, no story in Sound Man that is not directly related to Johns’ career in music. There’s no grandpa Gus took me across the river for fish and chips stories here. Childhood stories are either of the church choir, a budding singing career or summers on a uncles farm, the uncle of whom was a guitar player and American folk music fan.

Similarly, Johns, who claims to have never done any drugs, never smoked a joint, keeps the stories of the musicians he worked with to musical ones. If he has various tales of debauchery, he keeps them to himself. But what a list of musicians he did work with:

The Kinks (All Day and All of the Night/I Gotta Move, and You Really Got Me/It’s All Right)
The Rolling Stones ( from 1965’s December’s Children (And Everybody’s) to 1975’s Black and Blue)
The Pretty Things
Davy Jones
The Small Faces and The Faces
Led Zeppelin (the first album)
Manfred Mann
Marianne Faithfull
Spooky Tooth
Procol Harum
The Steve Miller Band
The Beatles
Joe Cocker
Humble Pie
The Eagles
The Who

That’s the partial list.

When I had to choose a Christmas present for music fans on my list, I chose Sound Man by Glyn Johns. It’s the best music book I’ve read in a long time.

Uncategorized Eagles, Faces, Glyn Johns, Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, Sound Man, The Who