At Home in Hespeler

One likes to believe in the freedom of music.

Rush – Spirit of Radio.

Dee Snider, the make-up clad, iron haired singer of Twisted Sister, once remarked during an interview that yes, a lot of his music was downloaded free and illegally off the internet but, ‘twenty years ago I wasn’t making two-and-a-half million dollars a year on ring-tones.’ It was the first, and only time, I heard a classic artist take a good with the bad approach to the internet and music.

iTunes currently shows 80 results when you search ring-tones for Bon Jovi. Pity Jon Bon Jovi never got the ‘take the good with the bad’ memo. During an interview with the UK’s Sunday Times Magazine this week, Bon Jovi rather pessimistically suggested, “Steve Jobs is personally responsible for killing the music business.”

Oh, I know: context man, provide context. Here’s the whole of the quote:

Kids today have missed the whole experience of putting the headphones on, turning it up to 10, holding the jacket, closing their eyes and getting lost in an album, and the beauty of taking your allowance money and making a decision based on the jacket, not knowing what the album sounded like and looking at a couple of still pictures and imagining it… God it was a magical time.

I hate to sound like an old man now, but I am, and you mark my words, in a generation from now, people are going to say: ‘What happened?’ … Steve Jobs is personally responsible for killing the music business.

In 1986, I was teaching guitar to kids in their homes. Driving from lesson to lesson, I had installed a tape deck in my Chevette, and Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet got a lot of listening time. I bought the itty bitty cassette tape not for the cover, which was puny and unreadable, but for the songs I knew: You Give Love a Bad Name; Livin’ On a Prayer; Wanted, Dead or Alive. At a guess, Bon Jovi got very rich selling cassettes and CDs of this album, considerably less so LP’s, with their magical covers.

When his next album, New Jersey, came out two years later I bought it on LP unheard. Not because the cover was so cool, by then covers where boringly being made for CD size readability, which meant they looked more like a corporate logo than art. No, I bought it because Slippery When Wet was so good. And when I got it home I put my headphones on, turned it up to 10, held the jacket, closed my eyes and got lost in an album.

Then I found myself again. After about three songs it was clear, whatever this was, it was no Slippery When Wet. And those three songs were the hits. Imagine how many songs I would have lasted if I had dropped the needle on Wild is the Wind.

It’s easy to be wistful for the days when Led Zeppelin IV was followed by Houses of the Holy, followed by Physical Graffiti. Or Styx’s Equinox was followed by The Grand Illusion. If you liked the first, you would like the second, yet the second wasn’t just a rehash of the same songs with new words. Those where, as old goats like Bon Jovi like to say, the days my friend.

Of course Jon Bon Jovi didn’t base his buying decisions on last album, he bought based on whether the cover was cool. Buying Born to Run because of that great shot of Bruce and Clarence on the front would have led you to one of the all time great albums (which led to Darkness on the Edge of Town, and The River). The cool spaceship guitar which donned the first Boston album led to 40 minutes of great and original music inside. You could, in fact, rely on the idea that a cool cover meant the band put effort into the album. It wasn’t a perfect way to buy an album, but it was probably reliable about 50% of the time. Try that today and see how many really bad albums you have to wade through to get a gem.

Nobody was ‘holding the jacket, closing there eyes, getting lost in the music by the end of the 1980’s because the hard plastic cases of CDs and cassettes were not conductive to cuddling up to. Bon Jovi, however, never once complained about the romance being taken out of the thing. He made his millions selling CDs and cassettes of formulaic, derivative music to kids who still thought of music as important, and hadn’t caught on that the people making the music thought of it as a commodity.

Apple, and by extension Steve Jobs, didn’t invent the MP3 player, they just designed one that customers preferred. They didn’t invent the MP3, or downloading music, they found a viable way to commodify downloading MP3’s, putting money back in the pocket of the artists. If Bon Jovi isn’t doing as well selling MP3s as he did CDs and cassettes, maybe it’s because in that time his band went from one of the better, but still one of, the hair metal bands that all sounded much the same to a Kid Rock imitator with a sensible hair cut.

Runaway was a crappy song long before people started paying $1.29 for a 30 second ring-tone. That’s what killed music.

The Freedom of Music Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen, Led Zeppelin, New Jersey, Runaway, Slippery When Wet, Steve Jobs, Styx, Wild is the Wind

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, This Week on my I-Pod Akon, Angel from the Coast, Black Diamond, Chuck Klosterman, Cowboy Song, Dead or Alive, Elvis Costello, Fargo Rock City, Fight or Fall, Gone, Jailbreak, My Girl (Gone, Phil Lynott, Romeo and the Lonely Girl, Running Back, Slippery When Wet, Stairway to Heaven, The Boys Are Back in Town, Thin Lizzy, Wanted, Warriors