Author Archives: ERM

98th Favorite: Chutes Too Narrow, by The Shins

Posted on February 21, 2014 | 7 comments

Chutes Too Narrow. The Shins.
2003, Sub Pop. Producer: The Shins and Phil Ek
Purchased ca. 2004.

IN A NUTSHELL – Guitar pop, with a touch of folk. Soaring vocals wind through complex, memorable melodies, singing beautifully obscure lyrics about … well, they could be about whatever you want them to be about, but the great thing is that YOU WILL KNOW what they mean to you. WOULD BE HIGHER IF – it was a little more rockin’.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Like many Americans, and probably people all around the globe, I really enjoy a good amnesia story. I enjoy movies like Memento
and Spellbound, which offer a dramatic take on amnesia.

I’ve enjoyed episodes of favorite
and not-favorite sitcoms that have used the condition as a (somewhat) comedic device. Best of all, I enjoy true-life accounts, such as the amazing first-person story I recently heard on the radio of David Stuart Maclean’s battle with amnesia brought on by a medication’s side-effect – a story that he put into a new book, The Answer to the Riddle Is Me, that I will be reading!

It should come as no shock that the Hollywood versions of the disease are much different than what happens in real life. And while it may be fun to watch movies about CIA-created assassins

and the unexpected consequences of experimental medical techniques, I can attest to the fact that real-life amnesia is not so interesting or- frankly – as scary as modern entertainment would have you believe. It’s so mundane, in fact, that it happens every day to hundreds of millions of people around the world, and happens for years at a time, but they barely even mention it to one another.

It is called being-a-parent-of-infants-and-toddlers. It is well-documented.

I have two kids, teen(ish) aged now, born about 4.5 years apart. So just as I was recovering from amnesia from the first one, the second one arrived and – like that giant wave at the seashore that you can’t tell is behind you as you groggily stand up from being wiped out by the first one – clobbered me all over again.

There is so much that I do not remember from those early years. I know we had family routines, operating procedures that allowed us to get little kids fed, dressed, to school, daycare … but I don’t remember how we did it. I can’t even imagine trying to do it now.

We must have bought diapers, right? I do remember changing them … but did they just magically arrive in our house through some mysterious portal, along with all the footy-pajamas, bath time foam, sippy cups, Wiggles videotapes and Hulk Hands? And what did those little buggers DO all day, anyway? Play, I would imagine? They must have played. But did they just crawl all over the place? Wouldn’t they have bumped into stuff, fallen down steps and repeatedly hurt themselves? And, okay, I remember putting their Huggies underwear on them, but other than that, did they dress themselves? If so, what did they do about their feet? How smart were they? How did they communicate? And what did they eat? The more I think about it, the more my life with toddlers raises the same questions I have about early hominids.

All this amnesia is clearly caused by lack of sleep. If you don’t have kids, sometime – for kicks – spend 3 to 7 years sleeping only in three hour blocks at night, and 20 minute catnaps during the day once or twice a week, and after that time see if you remember anything. Lack of sleep is damaging to brains. Books have been written about this concept.

At some point, during my own 7 years of amnesia, I must have picked up the CD Chutes Too Narrow, by The Shins, and I sure am glad I did so. I don’t remember when, where, or how I even heard of this band. I know their music was featured in the movie Garden State but I also know I watched that movie just because I liked the CD, so that’s not how I heard of them. I did, for a time during the amnesia – in a last-ditch effort to maintain some tenuous attachment to modern coolness – subscribe to that old magazine Blender

and it’s possible I read about them there. I honestly don’t remember.

But somehow this CD is a part of my life, and even though pacifiers, internal GPS maps of neighborhood playgrounds, an appreciation of Caillou, and all my Laurie Berkner CDs are long gone, Chutes Too Narrow remains.

The band’s singer, songwriter, guitarist, (and only member of the band remaining from this album in today’s lineup) is James Mercer.

The thing you’ll notice first about him is his high voice. The album kicks off with “Kissing the Lipless,” a straight-ahead rock song, a bit on the folk-ish side, with a careening melody that requires an impressive singer to carry. And it’s a good example of the type of songs you’ll find on the album.

There are enough guitars in there to keep me interested, and that melody – again, the melody – is not simple, but still sing-along-worthy.

In a similar vein is “So Says I.”

There’s a 60s-ishness to both of these songs, with acoustic guitar carrying the song and electric guitar filling in. And there is Mercer’s voice again – soaring and gliding.

I started becoming interested in rock music in the heyday of the High-Pitched, Scrotal-Pinched Male Rock Singer. This trend in music probably started with Robert Plant, of Led Zeppelin, and the howling that is so prominent in songs like “The Immigrant Song.” Of course, Plant could do so much more with his voice than simply use the high register, but a wave of high-pitched wailers followed him. The 70s were the heyday, with bands like Rush, Yes, Kansas, Triumph, Queen, and Styx (who had a pair of singers … but not a single testicle between them. Apparently) …

Heavier late 70s/80s bands like Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Scorpions … all these bands had singers that sounded like they’d aged out of the Castrati choir, but were able to put their attenuated secondary sex characteristics to lucrative use singing about drugs and chicks and warlocks and Satan in guitar rock bands.

So I grew accustomed to the high-pitched male vocalist, and for years sang along to all these artists in an Alvin and the Chipmunks style that sounded perfect in my head, but that I knew was more Rainbow Brite than Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow. So I have a level of comfort with a high-pitched dude singer, and Mercer can really get up there. But he doesn’t wail – he’s more in the Roy Orbison/Michael Jackson vein, guys who just have high pitched voices.

“Turn A Square” is a rocker (well, a Shins rocker, anyway … not exactly AC/DC) with a catchy guitar riff that carries the song, and which features Mercer’s vocal range, offering a good jumping off point to discuss one of the reasons I love this album: lyrics.

I’m a fan of lyrics – all types of lyrics. I like lyrics that are serious and direct, such as “Yesterday,” by The Beatles. I like lyrics that are goofy and nonsense, like “I Am The Walrus,” by The Beatles. I like lyrics that are sophomoric and crude, like pretty much any David Lee Roth lyrics from Van Halen. I like minimalist lyrics – like in Nirvana’s “School,” which has 10 words in the whole song. As long as the lyrics are good, I like them. The difficulty is in determining what “good” is. “Good” to me just means they fit well with the song, and they aren’t too ridiculous. (Unless, such as with Van Halen, ridiculous lyrics are simply the best type to put with the music being played! But even ridiculous lyrics can be bad. See Album #99.)

But of all the lyrical styles, my favorite are probably the oblique kind, in which you hear what the singer is singing, and you know what the words mean, but they conjure an image in your mind that you can’t be sure was the intention of the singer.

It’s a touchy business, writing lyrics in this way, as whenever you leave something up to interpretation, you’re giving each and every maniac, or meth addict, or fundamentalist, or shop teacher or any other nut job out there free reign to come up with any meaning they see fit. And if you get too weird, and you’re not John “You Can Syndicate Any Boat You Row” Lennon, you can just turn everyone off completely. My favorite oblique lyricist is Donald Fagan, from Steely Dan, and Mercer’s lyrics have a lot in common with his.

Mercer does a wonderful job, I think, of conjuring images and letting the listener take over meanings. “Turn a Square” has nice lines about meeting a girl wearing tennis shorts, and the effect it has on him

“Just a glimpse of an ankle and I/
React like it’s 1805”

but then it strangely turns into a lament about the effect she has on him:

“It gets worse every time that we talk/
Can’t afford to be just one in a flock/
But that’s your lot/
When you’re after such a well-made lock/
Who was classically trained to give up”

Frankly, I have no friggin idea what this all means. But it sounds good when he sings it, and it makes me want to sing along. I kind of get the feeling from the song that he met a girl, likes her, but is unsure if the effect she has on him is good or bad … but for all I know the lyric could be about a good bowl of chili he once ate.

Almost all of the songs have a quality whereby I want to sing along, and I try to sing along, but there are so many words packed in, and their meanings don’t help give a context to what I should be singing about, so I end up listening to, say, “Kissing the Lipless” and belting out, “You told us of your new life there,” followed by mumbling “with the bum-de-bumming rounds/ or ba-bum-de something sound/with a secret to be found/ defrayed remembrance/ever seeking something some-something doo-de-criminal.” Then finishing it up with a hearty, “it’s HARD TO LEAVE ALL THESE MO-MENTS BEHIND!!”

But even the obscure lyrics have some nice gems. The song “Young Pilgrims,” a soft acoustic song,

contains the nice lines

But I learned fast how to keep my head up ’cause I/
Know I got this side of me that/
Wants to grab the yoke from the pilot and just/
Fly the whole mess into the sea.

Maybe it should be worrisome that I connect with those lyrics.

“Pink Bullets” is another beautiful, mellow song. In this song, the lyrics tell of a romance that ended too soon (I think):

When our kite lines first crossed, we tied ’em into knots/
And to finally fly apart, we had to cut them off/
Since then it’s been a book you read in reverse/
So you understand less as the pages turn/

All of the songs, both slow and fast, blend the instrumentation perfectly. Acoustic guitar drives most of the songs, but the electric guitar adds nice fills and solos. A few of the songs are embellished with strings, and keyboards are thrown into some, but it’s basically a guitar record. Guitars and melodies – I think you’ll notice a theme through my 100 albums. Guitars and melodies.

I can’t remember getting this CD. But songs like “Saint Simon” and “Fighting in a Sack” have stuck with me. I remember them more than I do lullabyes, legos, and La-La-Loopsy. And I didn’t even have to tattoo the reasons why all over my body!

TRACK LISTING
Kissing the Lipless
Mine’s Not a High Horse
So Says I
Young Pilgrims
Saint Simon
Fighting in a Sack
Pink Bullets
Turn a Square
Gone for Good
Those to Come

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Posted in Albums 100 - 91, Uncategorized

Tagged amnesia, Chutes Too Narrow, folk rock, Gilligan's Island, guitars, High-voiced singers, James Mercer, kids, melodies, memento, parenthood, sub pop, The Shins, toddlers

99th Favorite: Back In Black, by AC/DC

Posted on January 30, 2014 | 6 comments

Back in Black. AC/DC.
1980, Atlantic Records. Producer: Robert John “Mutt” Lange
Purchased ca. 1981.

IN A NUTSHELL – “Stiff-cock Riff-rock.” Big riffs, cool guitar solos, and – best of all – killer melodies are featured across ten songs about sex and drugs and rock and roll. Music that sounds like a pair of hormonal 13 year old boys were asked to write lyrics and guitar riffs for catchy pop tunes. In other words, just about perfect. Would have been higher on the list if I was still 13.

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A few years ago, a good friend of mine – a bit older than me, but a huge rock music fan – asked a bunch of us assembled friends, “What was the first great rock record you ever bought?” The answers – all from friends a bit older than myself – were typical Baby Boomer favorites, albums like Blue, by Joni Mitchell; Tea for the Tillerman, by Cat Stevens; Exile on Main Street, by the Rolling Stones. I didn’t answer immediately – I had to think.

I only bought a few records as a youngster, most at department stores, which – believe it or not, kiddies – used to have an actual Record Department! I distinctly remember the old Record Department at Hill’s Department Store, in the Hebron section of Lebanon County, Pennsylvania. It was in the near right corner of the store, as you walked in the front entrance. (Or in the near left corner if you entered from the Mall that was built onto the store in the late 70s). I would look through the racks of albums while my mom did her shopping, and sometimes I was allowed to buy something.

I tried to think of the albums I’d gotten in such department stores, and I remembered trying to decide whether to buy Elvis Costello’s Trust or REO Speedwagon’s Hi Infidelity and deciding that my folks would be worried about me if I came home with Elvis Costello, seeing as he was weird looking and seemed to be trying to make a statement with his songs, and so deciding REO was the safer choice. (I didn’t seem to notice the woman in underwear on the cover – which may have also caused concern – and I don’t know what that says about my 13-year old self!)

But my friend had asked what was the first “great” album I bought, and I couldn’t honestly say I thought Hi Infidelity was a great album.

My parents really had a big influence on my music purchases as a middle schooler, because my brain next delivered a record store memory of nearly buying Devo’s Freedom of Choice but then noticing the back cover, in which Gerald V. makes the old “in-out, in-out” sign with his fingers, and wondering if my folks would flip out if their 13 year old son brought home an album with such filth on it, so instead I bought …

“Back in Black, by AC/DC,” I said.

My friend’s face twisted into a mask of confusion.

“What are you, thirteen years old?” he asked.

Back In Black actually did come out when I was 13 years old, and I remember it caused a bit of a sensation in my school. I was in 8th grade, listening to whatever was played on WLBR, AM-1270 – pop songs by Elton John, Captain and Tennille, Seals and Crofts. I had a couple Village People cassettes, but I was never really a fan, and I no longer listened to them – they were silly artifacts of my 6th grade self!

My sisters were music fans – American Bandstand, top 40, some 70s rock, disco – and through them I knew that WLBR didn’t exactly have the hippest playlist. Friends would mention artists like Pink Floyd and Queen and Van Halen, but I had no idea where to hear music like that until a couple friends in church got me to start tuning the radio to 104.1, WTPA – a ROCK MUSIC station – when my mom wasn’t around. I liked some of the songs, but some of them were too long, and some of the lyrics were a little more unsettling than “Crocodile Rock” or “Love Will Keep Us Together.”

Into this era of musical uncertainty dropped a black album that pre-dated that other famous black album, Smell the Glove.

Back in Black suddenly became the album that everyone at Cedar Crest Middle School had to have – one of the first albums I really remember as an album, in which a band went into a studio and recorded some songs. Before that I mostly thought of music in terms of singles, 45s, and figured once an act had a bunch of 45s, they probably packaged a bunch together into an album. In the case of Back in Black, it was clearly cool to buy The Album, not just a 45 or two.

However, I didn’t become an immediate fan.

I bought the album, listened a couple times, but I generally found the music too loud and screamy, and I was put off by comments from an adult near me.

In 8th grade, I had a “hip” music teacher/band director named Mr. Meyers, who closely resembled The Burger King, and made students as uncomfortable with his “coolness” as The Culps ever did. Anyway, it was early 1981, and I remember we had several lessons about rock music, and he played us what I suppose he thought were fresh, new hits – like 1972’s Frankenstein, by The Edgar Winter Group – and was disappointed that we didn’t go wild for the songs. He asked what rock music we’d rather hear, and it seemed like the entire class said “Back in Black.” He scoffed and said, “We listened to that album in the other class, and it’s the most basic, simple, uninteresting music I’ve ever heard.” He seemed like he knew music, and I’d found it a little screamy anyway, so I decided I’d put it aside and find other works.

That was probably when I bought Hi Infidelity.

Flash forward to my college years, and me at one of a million parties. I notice some really great songs playing: songs that are raucous and fun, with huge, killer riffs, but that have great, hook-y melodies with cool breakdowns and nice changes. I could tell from the screamy voice it was AC/DC, but it wasn’t until the mega-popular song “Back In Black” came on that I realized which album I was hearing. Soon after that party I pulled out my copy of Back In Black, put it on the turntable and re-discovered what I’d been missing. I’ve been a fan ever since.

The guitar is what I notice first about Back In Black. Each song on the album is built around a riff, a guitar pattern that repeats throughout the song, a hook that pulls the listener in. This pattern is established immediately (well, after 20 seconds of tolling bells) in the opening cut, “Hell’s Bells.”

But – as with any repetition in music – there is a point at which a “cool riff” turns into a “tiresome riff,” and guitarist brothers Angus and Malcolm Young know how to keep the riffs fresh. For example, in the “Hell’s Bells” video above, at about 1:17, the boys change the riff slightly to play behind singer Brian Johnson’s melody. When the chorus comes around, and the original riff returns, at about 2:01, it sounds bright and new.

And Brian Johnson sings some great melodies! Each of these songs has a catchy melody that could be hummed by your grandma, crooned by a lounge singer, or pilfered by today’s top 40 producers. These songs play on in my head because the melodies are so strong. His voice – a seemingly oxymoronic shrill growl – might have to grow on some listeners, but he uses it effectively in the band’s arrangements. It’s hard to imagine a different voice – say, Lionel Richie or Michael McDonald – singing a song like “What Do You Do For Money Honey” – and having it sound as good as it does when Johnson belts it.

This song also displays the album’s winning formula of big riff, thumping beat and melodic vocals that AC/DC nails every time. It’s a formula that sounds simple, and that was the basis for an entire genre of embarrassing music from the 80s.

But it’s proven difficult to maintain over an album’s worth of music. Part of what makes AC/DC successful with this formula is that they don’t overdo anything they do. Those hair-bands from the 80s all made careers (of sorts) out of attempting to have guitar solos with the most notes, drum fills with the most beats, singers with the most operatic trills … But listen to AC/DC and you’ll notice that neither lead guitarist Angus, drummer Phil Rudd, nor especially singer Johnson are particularly showy.

Angus – in his school-boy outfit and wielding a red Gibson SG guitar –
is one of the most recognizable Guitar Gods in rock, and he has an unmistakable sound, as well. What I like about him – apart from the awesome riffs he writes – is that his playing is never overdone. As I’ve written before, sometimes I think overdoing it is okay. But AC/DC songs don’t need it. As heard here in the song “Have a Drink on Me,” (beginning at 2:21) Angus’s guitar solos never use 10 or 20 notes when 3 or 4 will suffice.

Drummer Phil Rudd is similarly restrained. He’s not big on long fills, and he doesn’t have a set of dozens of finely-tuned toms. But he is a pounding machine, and plays difficult rhythms easily. The well known title track has a riff with a tricky rhythm to it, stuttering syncopation and a guitar pattern off the back beat, and Rudd plays along effortlessly. Also, the drums on this album really SOUND good; there’s a depth to them, and they just sound COOL.

Angus’s riffs are awesome, and he sounds like he’s having fun playing them – like the schoolboy who just got off the bus and cranked his amp as loud as it could go before his parents came home. There’s a raunchiness to them, and they are perfectly complemented by Brian Johnson’s equally raunchy lyrics. There is an 8th grader’s fascination with genitals, alcohol, drugs, Satan and rock music running throughout all of these songs, and while that hardly sounds like a positive aspect, the humor (and Johnson’s screech) makes them work.

I never thought much about the lyrics until, sometime in my teenage years, my sister pointed out the misogyny of the lyrics “She was a fast machine/she kept her motor clean/she was the best damn woman that I’d ever seen,” from the song “You Shook Me All Night Long.” It’s true: most (all?) of the album’s lyrics about women sound like a horny, inexperienced boy’s imaginative boasts to his gullible friends. The song “Given the Dog a Bone” describes a blowjob (several blowjobs?) with phrases that resemble graffiti (complete with misspellings) erased from a middle school text book at the end of the school year: “She’s down on her knees/… at ninety degrees/Blowing me crazy/’Til my ammunition is dry/She’s using her head again/I’m given the dog a bone.”

Clearly, even though Johnson (heh heh! Johnson! [Sorry – channeling my inner 13 year old here]) has a way with melodies, he isn’t exactly Lord Byron. Usually his double-entendres and bad puns are humorous enough, and the songs otherwise so great, that their content isn’t as off-putting as one would expect. However, on the song “Let Me Put My Love Into You,” the lyrics reach a nadir.

First of all … “Let Me Put My Love Into You”??? I suppose that’s a metaphor? Or is it a simple request? I guess it could be a pronouncement of a desire to grow spiritually closer to, and form a deep lasting attachment with a significant other, such that two become one. Probably not, though. The worst lyric of the entire album (which is, granted, filled with lyrics that are certainly in the running) is contained in this song: “Let me put my love into you, babe/Let me put my love on the line/Let me put my love into you, babe/Let me cut your cake with my knife.” Jesus H. Christ!! That’s the best he could come up with? So much is wrong with that line. Okay, I don’t want to divulge too much personal information in this blog, but I am comfortable putting out there that I, for one, don’t find knives cutting, no matter how beautiful they or a cake may be, to be particularly sexy imagery.

Secondly, a knife isn’t even a very good metaphor for the male anatomy! At least, anyway, males who haven’t suffered a significant injury or congenital birth defect. And lastly, and maybe worst of all, IT DOESN’T EVEN RHYME!! Come on, Johnson!! (heh heh). To fit with “Let me put my love on the line,” why not use “Let me drill a shaft in your mine,” or “In your shrubbery let me plant my pine,” or “Let me soak my pickle in your brine.” Or why not get rid of the stupid pretense (I mean, look at the song title!!) and just say “Let me put my penis in your va-jine.” There were so many ways to go.

Johnson’s cusp-of-manhood sentiments are better employed in songs like “Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution,” “Shake a Leg,” and “Back in Black,” in which a defiant, us-against-the-world attitude is taken. He pushes back against the “middle men” in “fancy clothes” who sit on the fence, too scared to get off their arses and come face the band. In the title track – which lyrically and sonically sounds like a direct precursor to the Gangsta Rap hits that would follow in the next 10 years – he boasts “I’m in a bang/With a gang/They’ll have to catch me if they want me to hang.” Together with Angus’s ripping riffs and Rudd’s pounding drums, these Johnson lyrics elicit all the silly outrage and indignation that is felt at 13, back when it didn’t seem silly at all.

Back in Black at its best is exemplified by the song “Shoot to Thrill.” Great hooks, great riffs, great melody, cool drums, and boasting young teen lyrics (“I got everything/All you women might need to know”).

Back in Black is the 4th best selling non-greatest-hits album ever in the US, with 22 million units sold. It’s clearly made an impact on lots of folks. It made an impact on me because even though I’m no longer 13, sometimes it’s lots of fun to go back and visit that time.

TRACK LISTING:
Hells Bells
Shoot to Thrill
What Do You Do For Money Honey
Given the Dog a Bone
Let Me Put My Love Into You
Back In Black
You Shook Me All Night Long
Have a Drink on Me
Shake a Leg
Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution

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Posted in Albums 100 - 91

Tagged 13 year old, AC/DC/, Angus Young, Australian rock, Back in Black, bad lyrics, Brian Johnson, Cliff Williams, Great albums, Malcolm Young, Phil Rudd, riffs, rock and roll ain't noise pollution, shoot to thrill, you shook me all night long

100th Favorite: Boys and Girls In America, by The Hold Steady

Posted on January 12, 2014 | 6 comments

Boys and Girls in America. The Hold Steady.
2006, Vagrant Records. Producer: John Agnello
ADDED TO MY COLLECTION: ca. 2011.

IN A NUTSHELL –

Driving guitar rock with a 70s feel. Great, wordy lyrics tell stories about young adults, warts and all.
Singer might not be everyone’s cup of tea. Would have been higher on the list if I’d listened to it more
– it got overshadowed in my collection by other albums by this band.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

This record is by my favorite band from the “new life” era that was created for me when my “old life” was suddenly, and coldly, ripped away by the announcement
– and the subsequent associated all-encompassing thoughts, plans, activities, and emotions – that my wife was pregnant.

In the late 90s, my wife and I lived in San Francisco, in a neighborhood that had been named among “the hippest” in the US and Canada by the Utne Reader. Probably NOT because of the fact that we lived there, but who knows? We are extremely hip.

We went to multiple Farmers’ Markets each weekend, ate brunch at Boogaloo’s or Spaghetti Western, or some other equally-funky cafe, spent our evenings going to pottery class (her) or performing improv (me), saw several movies a month, cooked healthy food, hiked in Marin, or rode our bikes to the beach (on a squiggly route that actually avoided all of The City’s hills). We checked our Juno.com email accounts every couple days (preferably at times when we weren’t expecting phone calls, since the dial-up internet tied up the phone) by launching a program that was separate from our Netscape browser, on a computer with 512 MB of memory (that we thought was way more than we’d ever need) that our tech-savvy friend had recently loaded with cool sound clips from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Cities and towns were finally starting to recycle, decent (not excellent, but at least drinkable) coffee was finally becoming available everywhere, and Greg Louganis had recently come out, and it didn’t seem to alter my parents’ appreciation and admiration for his diving accomplishments. Life, both within our relationship and in the Clinton Blow Job world around us, was bulging with hot, squirming, exhilarating potential. The Dream of the 90s was alive and well.

I was making an effort to stay up-to-date with music and musicians, to find new acts I liked and discover records I’d overlooked. I can remember feeling proud that I had purchased several CDs released in 1997 (including Dig Me Out, OK Computer, and When I was Born for the 7th Time) and it wasn’t even 1998 yet.

Then mid 1998 hit, and a baby was due, and that old life gradually, but surely, ended. Somehow, music – which had always been extremely important in my life – became less so. Well, that’s not exactly right. NEW music became less important to me. I continued listening to the music I knew, and started to buy more CDs from the artists I’d always loved, but I wasn’t keeping up to date on the latest records by the newest bands. Suddenly, finding a decent rocking chair (no, wait … a decent GLIDING rocking chair (with gliding ottoman!!)

god forbid my kid be forced to rock like everyone rocked for millennia before him) became more important than finding a decent rocking band.

And for a good 8 or 10 years, I didn’t really know much of what was happening in music. I picked up some music I liked from newer acts, like The White Stripes and The Strokes,

but I didn’t become a “fan” of any newer acts, not in the way I’d typically dived into musical acts in the past, the way I did with Yes or Rush or The Beatles or R.E.M. or The Replacements or Elvis Costello. I wasn’t able to invest the time and energy into a band the way I had in my “old life.”

Sometime around 2007, after getting tired of all my whining about not knowing any new artists, my young, hip sister-in-law, Johanna, gave me a bunch of new music to listen to, and among the batch of records was Separation Sunday, by The Hold Steady. I got hooked on it, and have become a fan of the band, almost like back-in-the-day.

There are two things about The Hold Steady that draw me to them: instrumentation and lyrics. And both characteristics are grandly on display on Boys and Girls in America.

The band employs a double guitar attack, with some keyboards thrown in – not loopy, atmospheric, techno keyboards, but recognizable piano and organ sounds. Most of the songs are driving rock, reminiscent of 70s classic rock, but not blues based – they don’t sound like they’re trying to emulate The Allman Brothers, or Grand Funk Railroad. Although the instrumentation is 70s rock, the songs are more pop-punk in structure.

Here’s a video for the first song on the album, “Stuck Between Stations,” which is a great example of what you get with The Hold Steady:

The song has guitars and bass cranked up loud, thumping drums, and nice piano fills, and displays the typical Hold Steady vocal style of cramming lots of words into a small space, and nearly singing, but mostly speaking, in an energetic fashion.

If you watched that, you probably noticed the band’s … well, distinct-looking singer, Craig Finn.

Mr. Finn continues the long line of nerdy lead singers that tend to populate many of the bands I really like, like Elvis Costello, XTC’s Andy Partridge, R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe, and Geddy Lee of Rush.

Craig Finn has a voice that probably will divide listeners, some finding it interesting, others dismissing its nasally, speaking-not-singing qualities. I like it, but more than his voice, I love his lyrics. The Hold Steady tend to sing about stupid young people trying to have fun, but oblivious to the fact that maybe their “fun” won’t feel like “fun” the next day. On initial listening, many of their songs seem to be about partying, getting high, being young and indifferent and simply out for a good time. For example, check out “Massive Nights.”

But if you look at the lyrics – and more importantly, listen to how Finn sings them – the good times don’t really sound like they’re all that good. The song describes a drunken, druggy prom date between the singer and a girl, and intersperses the story with reminiscences of all the “massive nights” he and his friends have had (“we had some massive highs/we had some crushing lows/we had some lusty little crushes/we had those all ages hardcore matinee shows”), but ends with an image that – whether a true description of events, or a metaphor for either a sex act or drug use or lost hopes – leaves the listener feeling that maybe those massive nights were massive because they were intended to obscure real problems:

“she had the gun in her mouth/she was shooting up at her dreams/when the chaperone said that we’d been crowned the king and the queen”

But the best part of the song is that it sounds great, and is fun to sing along to! It’s got a bouncy beat, nice harmony background vocals and those 70s guitars. It has a great energy, and even if you’re not some dork who’s into lyrics, there’s a lot to like about the song.

Another track in a lyrically similar vein is “Chillout Tent.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqdT8tIrfEU

In this story, which is probably familiar to all fans of live music who were young and dumb once upon a time, two college-age kids, a boy and a girl (the album is named Boys and Girls in America, after all), separately attend an outdoor concert, and after nearly overdosing end up meeting, and finally making out, in the venue’s infirmary, or “Chillout Tent.”

“They started kissing when the nurses took off their IVs/It was kind of sexy but it was kind of creepy.”

The boy and the girl seem indifferent to their near deaths, and instead sing about the “cool girl” and “cute boy” they met, while enthusing that the nurses at the tent “gave us oranges and cigarettes.” The chorus is sung in the first-person, by guest vocalists Elizabeth Elmore (of the band The Reputation) and Dave Pirner (of Soul Asylum), adding to the overall impact of the song, another one in which young people make bad choices but intend to party on, nonetheless.

But wait! Despite the lost dreams, bad decisions and next-morning regrets, the album isn’t a bummer! I over-analyze these things, I know. It’s a rock record, with strong songs, pounding beats, and in-your-face 70s rock guitars. The best part of Boys and Girls in America is that it’s a fun record, and nearly all the songs are sing-along gems – despite saps like me poring over lyrics and putting interpretive turds into this punchbowl of great songs.

“Chips Ahoy” is about a horse race, and the singer’s attempts to get romantic with a woman who seems far more interested in horse racing than romance, despite his attempts to get her high.

“You Can Make Him Like You” is a straight-ahead rocker that sounds to me like a feminist call to arms, mocking the notion that a woman should leave the “difficult” parts of life – like knowing directions home, or intellectual pursuits – to her man.

“First Night” is a piano ballad about missing an ex, featuring characters who appeared in songs from their previous album, Separation Sunday.

There’s a humor to the band (if you watch to the end of the video for “Stuck Between Stations,” you’ll see it), and a desire to have a wild, fun time – even if the wild fun has consequences. I don’t know why songs about youthful bad decisions make such a connection with me. There are many parts of my younger self that I’d like to forget (as I’ve written about before), and even though the lyrics to these songs can make me cringe with self-recognition, I am strangely drawn to them.

The band is frequently compared to Bruce Springsteen. I never really “got” Springsteen, maybe because when I first became really aware of him, his ass was ubiquitous in America, and I decided he was too popular for me to like; or maybe because my first serious girlfriend, M, of New York Cheesecake fame, was a Springsteen nut, and I was too immature to deal with her love for another man. But I know people who love him tend to love his songs for the stories of lost youth, faded glory and ambiguous memories set to a driving beat and hooky melodies. And if that’s the case, then I understand the comparison completely.

The album has a youthful energy, and evokes in me memories of what it was like to be young and free and unencumbered. Maybe that’s why I got so into them after my “old life” was left behind – to help me remember those feelings. And maybe the lyrics’ subtext of the ugly truth behind the memories appeals to me because I know that the “old life” wasn’t really always as wonderful it seems. In fact, I’ve had some “Massive Nights” of a different kind as a dad.

TRACK LISTING (and some lyrics):
Stuck Between Stations (“She was a really cool kisser and she wasn’t all that strict of a Christian/She was a damn good dancer but she wasn’t all that great of a girlfriend”)
Chips Ahoy!
Hot Soft Light (“It started recreational/It ended kinda medical/It came on hot and soft and then/It tightened up its tentacles”)
Same Kooks
First Night
Party Pit
You Can Make Him Like You (“You don’t have to deal with the dealers/Let your boyfriend deal with the dealers/It only gets inconvenient/When you wanna get high alone”)
Massive Nights
Citrus (“Lost in fog and love and faithless fear/I’ve had kisses that make Judas seem sincere”)
Chillout Tent
Southtown Girls (“Southtown girls won’t blow you away/But you know that they’ll stay”)

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Posted in Albums 100 - 91

Tagged 70s rock, album, alcohol, boys and girls in america, drugs, Favorite, guitars, springsteen, teen problems, the hold steady, youth

“Only the beginning. Only just a start.” – Chicago

Posted on December 28, 2013 | 1 comment

Well, that’s it! It’s over! I’m finally finished! All set!

I finished listening to all of my CDs recently, and it is a relief to be done. The final total was 344 CDs. I listened nearly every (work) day, commuting in my car. It took me the better part of 15 months to finish. And now it is over.

At least it feels like it should be over. I mean, 15 fucking months is a long time to spend on one project, especially one that doesn’t pay money. (Or get you laid). And writing a blog every 4 weeks about records you like, and what a dork you were/are, will most certainly get you neither … Unless I’m missing something …

Anyway, although it feels like the project is complete, it would be folly to pronounce it so, as there is much, much work to do. If I were to say I’m finished now, well, both my readers would think me a laughingstock!

So … Now the hard part starts. I have to decide which of the 344 discs make up my top 100.

This is going to be harder than I originally thought. I figured listening to all my CDs would help me better place them in a list. However, what really happened is that it muddied the waters. There are many CDs that I had barely ever listened to that, upon listening closely in my car, I realized I really liked! And – conversely – there were several that I had always thought were awesome that, upon listening closely in my car, I realized were … eh.

That seems like a simple problem – the ones that aren’t good drop down on the list, and the ones that are good move up on the list, right??

But the name of this site is “100 FAVE albums,” not “100 BEST albums.” This difference may seem to be just semantics, but what if – after objective listening – you realize that some of your favorite albums aren’t necessarily some of the best? What if you realize that an album you always liked a lot, like, say, just for example, INXS’s The Swing,

upon listening, sounds a little thin, and the keyboards a bit overdone, and the weak songs weaker than you remember, and the good songs not as good as you remember, and that as you listen to, say, for example, 343 other CDs, you realize that if you were to sort your records from BEST to WORST, probably this record would be solidly in the middle, placing it somewhere in the 130 to 180 range – certainly not a horrible rank, but definitely not as high as, say, again, for example, Steve Earle’s Jerusalem,

a CD that you bought when it came out, in 2002, because you heard it was great, but then never really got around to listening to much at all, until you decided to listen to all your CDs to rank them, at which point you realized, “Holy Shit! This is an awesome record! Why didn’t I listen to this before!?!?” and so – in that mythical array of BEST-TO-WORST albums – it gets placed near the top, around 50 – BUT then … when you decide to think about FAVORITE albums, albums that come to mind when thinking about your life and the music you’ve listened to, and the good feelings the music arouses, and you think about The Swing in that context,

you start to associate some fun, exciting times, some great experiences while, perhaps, drunk (not drunk, teeny-boppers!) at college, with fun friends – but try as you might, the only experience you associate with Jerusalem is driving to and from work,

which isn’t fun and isn’t exciting, and during which time you are rarely drunk, and plus you still haven’t had time to build up some interest in it by listening to it a bunch more times yet because you’ve been spending the last 15 friggin months listening to EVERY OTHER CD you own, so it’s hard for it to really become a favorite, and so on the FAVORITEST-to-LEAST-FAVORITEST array, The Swing lands at, say, 90 to 100, while Jerusalem is … well, better than Blood on the Tracks, anyway …

What then??

I’ll bet you never looked at it that way, did you?

Well, I am looking at it that way, and I’ll continue looking at it that way, until my list is put together.

In the new year I will return with more regular updates, and a countdown from CDs 100 to 1, plus a look at some records that didn’t make the list, and some more stories of events in my life that I ridiculously associate with music I’ve heard. Unless the process of making a list drives me crazy …

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Posted in Difficulties In Doing This, How Am I Doing This?

Tagged daffy duck, inxs, jerusalem, make a list, mission accomplished, only the beginning, porky pig, steve earle, the swing, top 100 albums, wile e. coyote

“More, more, more! How do you like it? How do you like it?” – The Andrea True Connection

Posted on November 4, 2013 | 12 comments

The first thing I noticed was that the light was on. This seemed very strange to me, as I could see daylight through the window, and I could tell I was lying in a bed. Why would I be in bed with the light on during the day? It made even less sense, in those first few seconds of consciousness, that not only was I lying in that bed during the day with the light on, but I was wearing jeans, a flannel shirt and sneakers. Also, my arm was bent behind my head at such a severe angle that my shoulder burned and my upper arm was numb.

Awareness flooded through my senses, and as strange as the light and the clothes seemed, the most shocking realization came a second or two later: I was in my own bed, just a few feet from Bob’s bed, inside our yellow cinder-block walled dorm room! This was all so confusing because just minutes before … no, SECONDS before, it had been nighttime, and I was awake, enjoying myself drinking beer at a party a few blocks away! It made no sense!

I sat up quickly. “Think! Think!! I was in that apartment, with team mates from baseball, I was with my friend, Dave (not Dr. Dave but a different Dave, who actually went to high school with Dr. Dave, but that’s another story), and I was … what was I doing? We were at that party, I remember that. I was talking to that guy … How did I end up back in my dorm? Wait … this is getting weird …”

A head appeared in the doorway, which opened into the kitchen of the 4-bedroom suite – the typical dormitory for freshmen at this college.

“You alright in here? Sounded like you might have overdone it last night.” It was a suitemate, “Heat” – so-nicknamed because to the seven immature 18-year old suitemates of his, the conflagration-hued hair atop his 22 year old head, coupled with his large-frame 80’s style spectacles, immediately brought to mind the character Heatmiser from the classic 70’s TV Christmas special The Year Without a Santa Claus.

I attended Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science for two years after high school. It was a small school, about 1,200 – 1,500 students, located in the University City section of West Philadelphia, just a couple blocks from Penn and Drexel, the schools that gave the neighborhood its name. It is now known as The University of the Sciences in Philadelphia. I had come to Philadelphia from a rather rural area, and I had led a rather subdued life. I didn’t go to parties in high school, I didn’t get together with friends and drink alcohol, I certainly didn’t take any drugs, apart from those prescribed to control my asthma … I was kind of a dork.

Wait! That’s inaccurate. I was TOTALLY a dork, and in fact, a famous movie was made about my transition to college.

When I got to Philadelphia, I decided to try to hide the fact that I was a dork. This was a futile effort, really, no matter how cool I tried to be, as any school with the words “Pharmacy” and “Science” in the name is sure to attract a significant number of dorks, geeks AND nerds and in a school full of them, the only title one is truly striving to be is “King of the Dipshits.”

(I think the fact that this didn’t occur to me is probably the best evidence of all of how dorky I was!)

But be that as it may, I wanted to try to be somewhat “cool” in my new environment and I decided to start saying “yes” to The Herd – a group that I had usually avoided (but whose approval I secretly sought) during the first 17 years of my life – even when I thought The Herd was making unwise decisions. I started going to bars, like The Track & Turf
and Off the Wagon, which apparently got shut down in 1992 – unsurprising, since it served alcohol to pretty much anyone, as long as they could provide ID (Identifiable Dollars). I went to frat parties, apartment parties and house parties. I found out that I liked to drink beer. I discovered a fondness for tequila. I liked the sensation of getting tipsy, the way it seemed to magically enable me to speak to people – even women! – and make them laugh. I began to notice that I’d show up at parties or bars with my friends, and I seemed to be someone people enjoyed talking to. Sometimes people would just come up to me and – get this – start talking to me! People I had never even met!! This was all very exciting and new.

I saw myself in a new light.

“You alright in here? Sounded like you might have overdone it last night,” Heat (under)stated.

Indeed. I had overdone it. I had overdone it in a way that I would continue to overdo for several years to follow. I had overdone it to a point where several hours of my existence had been deleted from my hard drive. I could query to my heart’s content, but all that would be returned was this:

It was frightening. A little booze had been fun, and exciting, but there seemed to be a point at which adding booze no longer increased the fun and excitement, but began to have a negative effect: it began to erase portions of my memory, hours at a time. I had overdone it, and whenever I overdid it, I saw myself in an even different light:

I bring this up about myself as evidence that I deeply understand the concept of “overdoing it.” Of doing something too much. I am extremely familiar with the concept of taking a good thing, and doing it more and more until it becomes … well, a bad thing. Making a good thing a bad thing. It can happen before you know it. For example – this paragraph you’re reading right now …

Overdoing it in music is very common, and it can happen in a few ways. I’ll go over some of them, with the help of YouTube. (And I’m not saying that overdoing it is necessarily bad – I like some overdone stuff, but I’ll get to that later.)

At the basic level, one can overdo the construction of a song. Too many verses, for example – when an artist feels that the listener needs to hear about those “haunted, frightened trees” and “circus sands” the seventh and eighth time through the melody instead of just leaving it be with two nice lines about “swirling ships” and a “dancing spell,” which clearly was all the song needed.

Artists can also run through a song’s riff too many times, or add extra sections to songs, or extend the fade-out for extra minutes. The Grand Funk Railroad song “I’m Your Captain (Closer to Home)” employs all these tactics AND throws in scary mutiny-at-sea lyrics sung in the first person which are themselves overdone. This song may be the best example ever of taking a pop song construction, and adding too many sections (all with hyper-repetitive lyrics) and doing each part too many times – and creating an overdone Frankenstein’s Monster of a song.

If the song had just been cut down a bit, it would have been really cool, I think. But try to sit through the whole thing without thinking, at some point, “Wait … Is this still that same song?”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8MYsii4DZY

Pay particular attention to the section from 2:00 to 2:20. It sounds like they started playing that riff and forgot that they were actually recording a song. Like they were just grooving along, digging that riff, man, each with a couple bowls already in their lungs, a smoldering pipe resting on the amp, imagining themselves cruisin’ down a wide-open, redwood-lined Highway 101, on a custom Hog, the old lady ridin’ bitch, everyone’s hair a-flyin’, and no sign of The Fuzz anywhere in sight …

… oh SHIT! We gotta get back to playing the song again, bro! Sorry, dudes!

At that point there are still about 7 and a half minutes left to go in the song – and the listener is already wondering if the needle is stuck in the groove (if this were 1970).

Overdoing song construction is only one way of overdoing it. Another way is to add extra instrumentation to the song, anything from a tambourine to full orchestration. A good example of this is the Beatles’ famous song “The Long and Winding Road.”

Brief Beatles Lesson: when the band broke up, it had the Let It Be album recorded, but it wasn’t mixed. Apple Records hired famous producer and as-yet-not-a-murderer Phil Spector to finish things off, and one of the techniques he employed was to add a whole lot of orchestra. The Beatles weren’t thrilled … so much so that in 2003 Paul remixed the album with all the orchestration (and a few other things) removed and released it as Let It Be … Naked. To demonstrate what Paul felt was “overdoing it,” let’s hear both versions of “The Long and Winding Road.”

Phil Version.

Paul Version.

Sometimes these additions work, and sometimes they don’t. And much of it – like all music appreciation – boils down to personal taste. Again, although the words “overdoing it” have a negative connotation, I’m not saying I think it’s always a bad thing.

For example: “Progressive Rock.”

Prog Rock artists from the early 70s, like Yes and ELP and Rush, were HUGE proponents of overdoing it, and they overdid it in ALL WAYS POSSIBLE. Unnecessary verses, unnecessary instruments, unnecessary sections, even unnecessary sound effects!!

As a teenager, I was drawn to these artists who overdid it. Give me 10 minutes of “La Villa Strangiato,” with its 6 different time signatures and 4 different solo sections … or 19 minutes of “Close to the Edge,” with all the extra bullshit PLUS the sound of a babbling brook and birds, and I was in heaven! It was mind blowing, man!!!!

However, even the Prog Rock sounds eventually got to be too much for me. Tracing a path of Yes songs from “Roundabout,” in 1971 (8 minutes long, cool; overdone compared to most songs, but pretty tame by Yes standards) to “Close to the Edge,” in 1972 (19 minutes long; definitely overdone, but really in a sweet spot for my ears) to “The Gates of Delirium,” in 1974 (22 minutes: what the fuck!?!), one can tell just by the song titles that things are spinning out of control. Comparing these songs to my drinking in my young adulthood, “Roundabout” is that first beer where I’m saying hello to the young blond woman who smiles back; “Close to the Edge” is about the third beer, where she’s laughing at my jokes and finding me somewhat charming; and “The Gates of Delirium” is the 12th or 14th beer, where I’m speaking to her incoherently about how nothing matters on Earth except Barney Miller, and that if my eighth grade guidance counselor hadn’t screwed me over I’d have gone to fucking Yale and you’re the only girl I’ve ever met who, wait, where did she go, wait, dude, is no one else left at this party? cuz I got a buck or two if anyone wants to go on a beer run, but my ride left so is that anybody else’s beer there on the back of the toilet? cuz dude it’s like almost full so I’ll finish it and do you care if I just lie down, this is your house, right? or whatever, man, I don’t care if the dog had her puppies on it, it looks comfortable just for me to rest on for a while …

(Extending the Yes Music analogy – waking up the next morning on a stinky dog blanket with no recollection of most of the past evening, and no familiarity with the other people sleeping in the house, no apparent way to go home, and mounting nausea and paranoia and self-loathing would collectively encompass the entire 1978 album Tormato.)

I’ve heard A LOT of overdone music during the last 14 months of CD listening, and I’ve come to believe the most egregious form of overdoing it is in number of songs. This happens when an artist records, say, 20 songs – maybe 8 of which are incredible, two of which are pretty good, and 10 of which suck – but decides to just put all 20 songs on the album because, I guess, “each song is like one of my children …” And okay, I get it. But this is why the artist needs people around to tell them the truth. Let’s face it, you might not be able to fairly distinguish between the characteristics of your own brood of kids, but your friends and neighbors know EXACTLY which one’s got “C.E.O.” written all over him, and which one’s got “D.O.C.”

Here are some albums that could’ve been whittled down to VERY EXCELLENT works if their makers had just had an honest friend in the studio to say, in essence, “We’re comfortable with Jim or Jane babysitting our child, but face it: Teddy’s a psychopath.”

In Your Honor. Foo Fighters.

A double album. Rare indeed is the double album that IS NOT overdone. I actually like this record a lot. One disc is full of rockin’ songs and the other disc is full of mellow. And while there are 20 very good songs included, they could have chosen the best 12 and made an INCREDIBLE record. Let’s face it, Foo Fighters’ bread and butter is raucous, loud rock, and while it’s nice to see an artist stretch a little here and there, most of the songs on the mellow disc could have been reserved for something else. Maybe a bonus disc? B-sides? (Do they make B-sides anymore?) Songs like “Still” and “Miracle” and “Friend of a Friend” weren’t necessary to put on here. “Virginia Moon” … well, as far as Dave Grohl duets go, this song with Norah Jones is somewhere below his version of “Leather and Lace” with Will Ferrell.

They shoulda kept “Another Round,” “Razor” and “What if I do” and put those three onto the first disc, while ditching “The Last Song” and “Free Me,” and we’d be talking about one of the great records ever. On a scale of overdoing it, this record is somewhere around having a third martini, or taking a second shot of Jeagermeister on a dare: not terrible, but probably not a good idea.

Physical Graffiti. Led Zeppelin.

I love Zeppelin, and I love this album, again a double. It’s got a ton of classics: “Custard Pie,” “Houses of the Holy,” “Trampled Under Foot,” “Down by the Seaside,” “Ten Years Gone,” “Boogie With Stu,” “Bron-Yr-Aur,” “Black Country Woman” and, of course, “Kashmir” … They shoulda stopped right there. But they couldn’t. They had to put out a damned double album, and they threw in songs (“In My Time of Dying,” “In the Light,” “Sick Again,” “Night Flight,” “The Rover,” “The Wanton Song”) that weren’t horrible, but that just weren’t as good as the others, and really served no purpose other than to make me think, “Man, this record’s too long …” Maybe this is where Foo Fighters got the idea? On a scale of overdoing it, this is worse than In Your Honor, because this would’ve been an even greater album without the overdone-ness. This record is the equivalent of filling your empty, recently-guzzled “Mad Dog 20/20” bottle with Pabst Blue Ribbon from the keg.

The Unforgettable Fire. U2.

I tend to think U2 are a better singles band than album band. I like a lot of their albums, and I own most of them, but I find I skip over many songs. It’s tough to call a single album of 10 songs overdone, but I place it here because the good songs are SO GOOD, and the bad songs are SO NOT GOOD! This coulda been the best EP ever!! I understand they put out Under a Blood Red Sky just before this and Wide Awake in America just after, so it’s unreasonable to think they would put out three EPs in a row, I guess, but why not leave “Promenade,” “4th of July,” “Indian Summer Sky,” “Elvis Presley & America,” and “MLK” off this record? Then it would just be “A Sort of Homecoming,” “Pride (In the Name of Love),” “Wire,” “The Unforgettable Fire,” and “Bad.” Perfect!! OR – why not keep “Indian Summer Sky,” which wasn’t too bad, and add “The Three Sunrises,” from Wide Awake in America? I guess that’s only 7 songs … This is a tough one, really, but it’s bothered me since I got the tape in 1984 that there was such unevenness. Maybe it’s not all that overdone after all. I don’t know – let’s call it the equivalent of three beers on an empty stomach after playing basketball for 2 hours: marginally overdone, but still regrettable.

Sandinista! The Clash.

Holy moley!!! When this came out in 1980, it was a TRIPLE ALBUM!!! That’s right, three big vinyl LPs in one product. Thirty-fricking-six songs!! Most bands don’t write 36 decent songs in an entire CAREER, let alone in one album. That’s a lot of songs to put out at once, and you gotta have a pretty big set of balls to do it. And Mick Jones and Joe Strummer certainly had ego to spare.

However, it’s not hard to see why they’d attempt such an effort. To this point in their career, they’d put out three LPs: The Clash, Give ‘Em Enough Rope, and London Calling, for a total of 43 songs, plus 5 singles, and Goddammit if all 48 aren’t at least Very Good songs! It was an amazing string of songs, really, which was topped off by the 19-song extravaganza of London Calling, perhaps the greatest rock record ever produced! (Aside from all the Beatles records.) From 1977 to 1979 The Clash went (pretty much) 48 for 48 in songwriting (and cover songs). Sure, not every song was a home run, but all were solid base hits, at a minimum, certainly no whiffs.

So, if you’re in that position, why not expect that you could just saunter into some New York studio, with no songs written, no ideas in place, and just pull an album’s worth of hits out of your collective asses? And you know what happened? THEY DID IT! They wrote (or covered) 10 or 12 excellent songs, once again! “The Magnificent Seven,” “Hitsville U.K.,” “Junco Partner,” “Somebody Got Murdered,” “One More Time,” “Lightning Strikes,” “The Sound of Sinners,” “Police on my Back,” “The Callup,” “Washington Bullets,” “Charlie Don’t Surf,” “The Street Parade” … That’s a great fucking album right there! But you know what else they did? They kept writing and recording and writing and recording. And pretty soon they had 36 songs, not 10 or 12. And hey, if 12 is good, 36 must be three times as good, right?! The same as drinking shots of mezcal!

Anyway, here’s Joe Strummer’s opinion of my opinion:

But the truth remains, this album was way overdone. Way WAY overdone. Extremely. It’s hard to overstate the overdone-ness of this record, but then again our drinking scale would terminate at the high end at Death by Alcohol Poisoning, and certainly Sandinista! isn’t in the same category as total systemic organ failure. So, let’s say this record is the equivalent of waking up in the morning in your own bed, fully clothed, with a light on and no memory of how you got there, and having a cartoon character smirk at you and say, “Sounded like you might have overdone it last night …”
~~~~
(Other CDs with too many songs include Teenager of the Year, by Frank Black, and Nonsuch, by XTC.)
~~~~
Please comment with any music you think is overdone.
~~~~
NOTE: I’m up to album #350 in my listening project. I think I’m into the final 20 – 30.

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Posted in My Life and Music

Tagged Beatles, blackout, Byrds, Clash, Close to the Edge, Drinking, Drunk, Dylan, foo fighters, Grand Funk Railroad, heatmiser, I'm Your Captain, In Your Honor, overdoing it, overdone, Phil Spector, Roundabout, Sandinista!, The Gates of Delirium, The Unforgettable Fire, U2, yes

“How Long Has This Been Going On?” – Ace

Posted on September 30, 2013 | 1 comment

How Long Has This Been Going On?

That’s the musical question posed by one-hit-wonder band “Ace,” which featured serial band-jumper (Roxy Music, Squeeze, Mike + The Mechanics) Paul Carrack. For me, the musical answer would come from The Beatles … “It’s been a long time …” Or Boston might have an even better answer … “It’s been such a long time …”

The non musical answer is About a Year. That’s how long I’ve been driving around listening to CDs, taking notes, comparing contrasting, thinking. The NHTSA thinks I should be paying better attention to the road. Maybe so. Here’s a picture a friend took of the result of me not paying attention to the car in front of me:

Several months ago I reached a point at which I was no longer sure which CDs I’d listened to, and which were still waiting. Sure, I keep a list, so I could double-check which ones were on it, but I did find myself getting a little overwhelmed.

Plus, it’s getting a little BORING. I love listening to the music, but the whole point of this project has been to make a list, and now it’s been a friggin year, AND I STILL HAVEN’T STARTED MY LIST!!!!! Maybe boredom isn’t the word I’m looking for. Perhaps I meant Frustration!

Maybe the best musical answer to the musical question “How Long Has This Been Going On?” might come from Gnarls Barkley: “I can die when I’m done … Maybe I’m crazy…”

But despite my frustration, to paraphrase The Stone Roses, “I’ll carry on through it all/I’m a waterfall.” And really, I am enjoying it, and I am having some musical revelations, of sorts. Here are some things I have learned:

1) It is really difficult to judge “Rock Opera” type records, like Tommy, Quadrophenia and The Wall. These albums are impressive in their scope and story-telling. As works of art they are undeniably profound. I find myself listening to them and thinking, “Holy shit. These guys are working at such a different level than all the other pop and rock acts I’m listening to!”

But then I hear a song like “Fiddle About,” or “Tommy’s Holiday Camp,” (on Tommy) or “Vera,” or “Bring the Boys Back Home” (on The Wall) and I find myself thinking, “Man, this song helps me understand the story, but it SUCKS!!!” So, do I judge the albums as contained works of art and gloss over the fact that there are a few songs that I dislike, since they help accomplish what the writer meant to accomplish? Or do I state – as with other CDs – this album has two, three, whatever, songs that I DISLIKE and adjust my rating accordingly? I’m 319 CDs into my efforts, and I still don’t know how this will shake out …

2) I don’t like records in which all the songs sound very similar.

I like diversity, different styles, bands trying to do something a little outside their comfort zone. (But just a little …) This is probably why London Calling is destined to sit pretty high on the list. And, going back to Insight #1, it’s generally speaking a positive aspect of the Rock Opera. However, there are some bands/CDs for which I’ve broken this rule. The Stone Roses is an album that many of my friends have complained about, stating all the songs sound alike. This is utter donkey dung, and there is no semblance of truth to the statement … however, if it were true, too fucking bad. That CD is awesome. My distaste for similar sounds in an entire CD is probably why hip-hop isn’t prominently featured. As I wrote several months ago, to my ears a lot of it sounds the same.

3) I need some pep. When too many songs are too slow and/or too soft, it starts to sound like this to me:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKQuVT6gedM

I don’t mind a slow, soft song here and there, particularly if it’s got great lyrical content. And such songs help to minimize the “all the songs sound alike” bug from Insight #2. But CDs that are mostly slow songs – whether folky or rock ballads or lowdown blues or love songs or break-up songs – these are CDs I won’t listen to very much. They’ll sink down on the list.

4) I have lots of CDs that I haven’t listened to in a while that I had completely forgotten I really like! Back in SF I had an acquaintance who worked in a record store (note to readers born after 1975: “record stores” were buildings with lights and a cash register and posters on the walls (like this)

where actual physical, (non-virtual) compilations of songs called “records” were sold; the records came in a variety of formats: vinyl (little and big (and before my time, medium);

8-track tape;

cassette tape;

compact disc)

anyway, this guy said that having any more than 100 records was a waste because there’s no way you could listen to more than that over a given span of time and fully appreciate the content of each. So this guy would cap his collection at 100, and anytime he wanted a new one, he’d get rid of one of the existing 100 – sort of like Relegation Rules in the English Premier League. I think he and I have a different understanding of what it means to appreciate music, but it is true that many of the CDs I’ve bought over the years have remained un-listened-to for years at a time. Some disks that I listened to over the past year that I had forgotten were so good include:

Steve Earle – Jerusalem
Thin Lizzy – Jailbreak
Green Day – Warning
Pearl Jam – Backspacer
Foo Fighters and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers – just generally better than I recall.

There were also a couple CDs that weren’t as great as I recall, including Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, by Pavement; Wish You Were Here, by Pink Floyd; and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s eponymous record.

5) The biggest thing I learned is this: I WANT TO START COMPILING THE LIST!!! But I need to be thorough, or I’ll feel like the whole thing was a waste of time. (Which is not to say that an argument for that point couldn’t be mounted right now …) I think I have about 2 months left before I can start. As Tom Petty sang, “The waiting/is the hardest part/every day you see one more card.”

Or in my case, I hear one more CD.

1 Comment

Posted in Difficulties In Doing This, Why Am I Doing This?

Tagged difficulty, foo fighters, frustration, green day, long time, one year, pearl jam, quadrophenia, record stores, rock opera, steve earle, the wall, thin lizzy, tom petty, tommy

“In my life I love you more” -The Beatles

Posted on August 18, 2013 | 37 comments

In my attempt to create the definitive list of my 100 favorite CDs, I have been listening daily to almost all of the records in my collection for the past 11 months. I am currently listening to #281, In Your Honor, by Foo Fighters.

I continue to enjoy this project, but it hasn’t been accomplished without some stress.

See, the entire time I’ve worked on it I have been living with a sense of dread. There has been an inevitable, difficult truth awaiting me since the beginning – a fact more troubling than anything I’ve revealed so far in this blog, including my ignorance of celebrated desserts; my realization that I displayed anti-semitic actions and didn’t even remember it; and (perhaps most embarrassing) my love of Seals and Croft. I’ve put off facing this difficult problem for as long as I could. But the time has come for me to meet it head-on. It’s time for me to see if I can handle The Truth.

Here’s how I’ve dealt with The Truth so far: I’ve avoided it. You may have noticed, on my List of Albums Under Consideration, that I have been listening to my CDs (generally) starting from the “Z” end of the alphabet, working back towards “A.” (I store them alphabetically.) In this way, I have listened to CDs for almost a year and I STILL have not listened to any albums by my problem: The Beatles.

For you see, I am a Beatles fan.

A big Beatles fan.

A big big Beatles fan.

Okay, maybe not that big, but big. And I am aware of this bias, and I recognize that my love of them will overshadow any objectivity I may try to bring to this project. And I really don’t want to bullshit both of my readers (sorry for swearing, mom and dad) by pretending I can be objective.

So I’ve been avoiding listening to them.

(Incidentally, this is the same reaction I have when most Bob Dylan songs come on the radio!)

I already know – and I knew when I started this project – that my top ten albums will be (in no particular order) Let It Be, Revolver, Rubber Soul, The Beatles (The White Album), Abbey Road, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Beatles For Sale, Magical Mystery Tour, Help!, and A Hard Day’s Night. My top 30 would also include Please Please Me, and With The Beatles, I’m sure. (Yellow Submarine might make top 50, but wouldn’t be higher because I always skip the orchestral stuff.)

This prescience would render all my efforts pointless. Why listen to all my CDs to determine the Top 100 when I already know the top 10? To paraphrase Larry Bird, “Who’s coming in 11th?”

I’ve viewed The Beatles as a problem ever since I started the project. I want to give all the CDs I hear a fair listen, but I know I won’t be fair when it comes to the Fab Four.

My Beatles fascination started pretty early. When I was a kid, whenever I was asked what my favorite song was, I’d reply “Strawberry Fields Forever.” My oldest sister had The Beatles’ “Blue Album,” a Greatest Hits collection from the years 1967 – 1970, and I used to love to hear her play it. For some reason, in 1977 – 78, while other kids were getting into Andy Gibb or Kiss or Anne Murray, I was getting into psychedelic pop from ten years earlier.

I also loved the song “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” with the sounds of an audience behind the guitars and drums, and the added orchestral parts. I really thought that The Beatles a) played all those horns and strings and b) did so in front of a live audience; and at the parts where the audience is heard chuckling (40 – 50 seconds in) I always tried to imagine what it was they were doing onstage to make everyone laugh. Were they dancing silly? Doing a pantomime? I can still remember imaginings of long-haired Hippies (my general impression of who The Beatles were) leaping around a stage in Shakespearean dress (for some reason) while playing French horns and electric guitars, causing a staid, rather elderly, British audience in formal attire to laugh uproariously despite themselves.

Through Middle School, and into High School, I still enjoyed hearing my sister’s Beatles album, and I became very familiar with all the songs, big hits like “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” “Lady Madonna,” and “Penny Lane,” (which over time came to rival “Strawberry Fields Forever” for top spot on my list.) But I also started to get more enthusiastic about current acts like Cheap Trick, Van Halen, Rush and U2.

Then things slowly started to change. In high school I was friends with Rick, who introduced me to a lot of music. (In fact, he and I – along with his younger brother Steve – formed the first band I was ever in, a short-lived (very short-lived) punk band whose rude (I’m sure) name I can’t remember, but with tuneless songs like “Drop Out, Kill Your Teacher,” and [I’m not proud of this one, but the point of the band was to piss people off …] “Fat Chicks Suck.” I played bass, Rick played guitar, and Steve drummed on the tape recorder with pencils and sang/screamed.) Rick’s favorite band was The Beatles, and since I respected him greatly, I decided I should listen to them more. I have a distinct memory of watching the old USA Network program “Night Flight” with Rick and Steve, and seeing both the Beatles documentary The Compleat Beatles

and the weird Beatles movie Magical Mystery Tour at their house. I soon purchased Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on cassette.

In college, my Beatles fervor grew. I was now into a serious obsession with “Prog Rock,” – bands like Yes, ELP and early Genesis, but I had met a new friend who was slowly, surely, steering my musical ship toward the wondrous waters of Beatles.

Dave M. Dr. Dave. Phucken Dave. Dave Dude.

“Dr. Dave,” because he is now a Doctor of Pharmacy, one of the smartest people I know, rattling off pharmacological modes of action as easy as song titles from Revolver; “Phucken Dave,” because he is from PHiladelphia, and his language can – at times – be what my mom might describe as “salty” (but only at times – my mom would actually be surprised by this revelation, as I’m sure she’s never heard that “salt”); “Dave Dude” because he is not Taurus, The Black Giant.

When I met Dr. Dave he scared me. It was my first few days of college, I was a small town hick new to the city of Philadelphia, and this young man in the Joe Walsh t-shirt looked and sounded to me like some kind of big-city tough-guy. Before I got to know him, he reminded me of D’Annunzio from Caddyshack.

I was different from most of the folks he knew, as well. Here is a scene from the 80s movie that he thought I stepped out of:

But he turned out to be the friendliest, warmest person I met at college. Dave was/is an excellent guitar player, and he knew The Beatles deeply. He’d make offhanded remarks like, “It’s kinda like the solo George plays in “Honey, Don’t”” or “Ringo plays that ‘Ndah-Ndah!’ organ part on “I’m Looking Through You”” or “Matt Busby! Dig it!” and expected me to understand what he was talking about. I asked questions, the young student at the feet of the Beatle master.

And over time, my knowledge and understanding grew. I listened to the records relentlessly over the next few years. I can remember buying each album: Abbey Road the summer after my freshman year of college; The White Album, junior year (a gift, actually, from my sister); Let It Be later in my junior year; Revolver (UK version) in my senior year (at which time I played “Dr. Robert,” “She Said, She Said,” and “And Your Bird Can Sing” over and over, annoying my roommates, but learning the bass lines for the cover band (JB and the So-Called Cells) that Dr. Dave, his brother and I had formed); Rubber Soul just after graduation; Beatles For Sale, Help!, A Hard Day’s Night and Magical Mystery Tour when I lived in that cottage in Mt. Gretna.

And all through this time I was conversing with Dr. Dave, questioning him, seeking guidance, knowledge, fulfillment. He was my guru, my Beatles-sattva. Also, JB and the So-Called Cells learned a ton of Beatles songs, and played them out. Hits like “Taxman” and “Get Back.” Obscure stuff, too. “Yer Blues.” “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except For Me and My Monkey.” “Oh! Darling.” “I’ve Got a Feeling.” “I Dig a Pony.” We played other artists, too, but there was something special about playing songs like “She Said, She Said,” and playing them right and doing it well.

Here’s a photo of JB & The So-Called Cells from January, 1991, onstage at Zachary’s, in Hershey, PA. I’m far right, next to Dr. Dave.

(I don’t really have a mullet in this picture; it just looks that way due to how my hair is cut.)

Anyway, I guess the point to all this is that I spent a whole lot of time listening to, playing songs by, and reading and thinking about The Beatles. They’ve been a sort of hobby of mine. I react differently to them than I do to other bands, even those other bands that I adore. They mean more to me, for reasons I can’t explain.

What I like about them is that they were extremely creative and interesting, but they still always wrote killer melodies (well, almost always…)

Their songs were also deceptively simple. I remember hearing Harry Connick, Jr., (who – granted – has more musical knowledge in his pinkie toenail than I’ll ever have) say that the Beatles music was too simple, and therefore didn’t interest him. This led Dr. Dave to state, “Obviously he’s never tried to play lead guitar on “I’ve Got a Feeling”!” Almost every time I listen to a Beatles song, I hear something I didn’t notice before – a high-hat in “I Want You (She’s So Heavy);” Paul’s voice cracking in “If I Fell;” the fact that Ringo’s vocal for “What Goes On” is in the left speaker, and George’s strange guitar bursts are in the right speaker. A previously unheard breath here, an extra guitar track there, a nifty bass fill there. (Why, just three days ago, Dr. Dave texted me to ask if I ever noticed the three bass notes that begin “Penny Lane”!)

I think by now, summer 2013, peoples’ opinions of The Beatles are probably set. If you like them, you understand. If you don’t like them, I can’t change your mind. And I’m not going to try. I’m just trying to make a decent list of 100 albums without having to use up 10 – 13% of the spots on one artist due to my irrational emotional ties to it.

So I have decided to exclude Beatles albums from my top 100.

I will listen to them all, and I will rank them, but they will be in their own separate Beatles list. It just doesn’t seem fair to the other bands who’ve worked so hard to be pushed out of the top ten just because I have acute Beatlemania.

37 Comments

Posted in Difficulties In Doing This, My Life and Music, Uncategorized

Tagged 1960s Music, Abbey Road, Beatles, Dig It, Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except For Me And My Monkey, Get Back, Help! White Album, I Dig A Pony, I've Got A Feeling, Let It Be, Matt Busby, Oh! Darling, Revolver, Rubber Soul, Sgt. Pepper, She Said She Said, Sister, Strawberry Fields Forever, Taxman, Yer Blues

“Who Are You? Who? Who? Who? Who?” – The Who

Posted on July 7, 2013 | 1 comment

I haven’t updated my blog in several weeks. I know both of you out there are disappointed about this, but I have been extremely busy the past few weeks. This GIF presents a fairly accurate view of the activities in my life whenever I’m not sleeping or working.

Endless baseball. Not that I’m complaining – the games are good, and my kid is happy (well, one kid is happy … the other one can be happy, unless forced to attend said endless games …) so it hasn’t been a chore. But it has kept me away from some of the other things I like doing. And some of the housework has lagged a bit …

But one aspect of my life that has remained steady is that I have continued listening to my CD collection in my ongoing effort to identify my 100 favorite albums. I have listened to 245 as of this writing, and I think I have about 75 remaining, but it is hard to tell because I find that I am continually ADDING CDs to those under consideration! This is extending the process tremendously. I am experiencing the equivalent of “cost overruns,” a dreaded consequence of people trying to do just a little bit more to make things perfect.

You see, I started out with a list of about 150 CDs from my collection of 400 (ish) that I figured would all be vying for a place in the top 100. But as I flipped through my CD collection, I came across some that I hadn’t originally listed, but that I thought might have a place, so I added them into the mix. Then I realized I had some albums as MP3-only, and thought some of these had Hot Hundred potential, so I burned them and added them to the mix. Also, I realized there were albums NO LONGER IN my collection that I had loved when I owned them on cassette or vinyl, and these were added in as well. Plus, as I listened to CDs by particular artists, I realized that I had other albums by them – albums NOT on the original list – and thought it would be wise to give some of these a listen-to as well.

So my list grew. As a result, I have now been listening to my CD collection since mid-September, 2012, and I’m still only about 2/3 of the way through. (Please don’t check my math. To quote Barbie, “Math … is tough.”)

I’m glad I’ve been adding CDs to my list, for completeness’ sake, but I don’t know if it’s been worthwhile. I think my top CDs will mostly be part of the original 150. This is because they are familiar to me. I’m not trying to make an objective list of Great Albums, I’m trying to list my favorites, so familiarity is a factor in the process. It might seem unfair that the tremendous, new CD by AwesomeNewArtist won’t be ranked as highly as its musical merits would imply, but that’s just how life is: it’s all who you know.

I lived in San Francisco for about 8 years in the 90s, and in January, 1994, I made good on a Resolution by finally trying to perform stand-up comedy. For as long as I remember, doing stand-up had been a dream of mine. I had honed my act in various classrooms since kindergarten. Here’s one of my first publicity photos:

In third grade I entered a school talent show and performed a stand up routine about dog food, featuring a battery-powered yapping dog, “The Frisky Dachshund.”

(I named him “Pup,” and he was a state-of-the-art remote control toy in 1975).

I came in second place to a girl who tap danced.

[Not that I’m bitter, and I must say that the girl, Christy W., danced very well, but I KNOW I had the crowd on my side, particularly when my dog unexpectedly fell over, and I ad-libbed a bit about the dog food killing it. But who cares, I guess. That was almost 40 years ago, and I was just a kid …]

[But still, judges … Ms. Schworer, Mrs. Horst, Mrs. Ellsworth … what were you SEEING up there???!! Let’s get serious!]

Over the years I used any classroom speaking assignment to perform a comedy routine, and I had several successes. I read a poem from Mad Magazine in 8th grade English. I juggled tennis balls, soccer balls and ping-pong balls (even spitting them out of my mouth!!) in a demonstration speech in 11th grade. My masterpiece was when I impersonated my Geometry teacher, “Pinhead” Firestone, in a 10th grade extemporaneous speaking assignment. That performance KILLED!

The thought of doing it in front of strangers terrified me, but by 1994 in San Francisco, I decided to put the fears aside and just DO IT. My first time was at an advertised “Open Mic Night” at a comedy club called The Punchline. I had no idea how the “comedy scene” worked, or – more importantly – how an Open Mic Night worked.

How an Open Mic Night worked at a big comedy club (like The Punchline) was this: just like any other show at a Comedy Club, you respectfully watched professional comedians – even if the night was billed as an “Open Mic Night.” See, the big clubs advertised “Open Mic Night,” but it wasn’t as if the emcee asked for volunteers and selected folks out of the audience to come onstage and tell jokes. It was way more organized than that, and 99% of the performers were professional/near-professional comedians. Very few of the comics at comedy clubs’ Open Mic Nights would be first-timers. It happened occasionally, but it wasn’t typical.

You, the novice comedian, got your start at whatever failing cafes, bars, bookstores and other sad, lonely, empty venues hosted Open Mics. Someone hooked a cheap microphone to an old guitar amplifier, and placed it to the side of the room to create an unusual “stage.” I say unusual because most stages are placed in a room so as to engage as many people as possible. However, most Open Mics placed the stage so as to disturb as few patrons as possible. Here is a typical “view from the stage” at one of these comedy shows:

Usually these shows were initiated in a last-ditch, desperate attempt by the venue-owner to stay afloat before the business finally went under, the expectation being that business would increase because a bunch of alcoholic comedians would bring people in to watch the show. This theory had two flaws (at least): 1) while many (most?) comics are alcoholics, many (most?) are too poor/cheap to buy more than one drink at a bar; and 2) back then, even in those early, early days of email, very few Subject lines generated a quicker “Delete” from a recipient than those of the “Come to my Open Mic!!!” variety. Most of these sad Open Mics were organized by truly heroic (and I DO NOT say that in jest) men and women who realized that live comedy needs places for new performers to start, and who also recognized a need in their own career to learn how to host and emcee a show, which is required to get offers for actual paying gigs.

(Believe me, I don’t mean to shit on Open Mic shows at all – these shows are where the meiosis, embryogenesis and morphogenesis of live comedy occur. In comedy, these processes are just like they are in life: magical, inscrutable and disturbing all at the same time, giving rise to both perfect living machines,

miscarriages, and everything in between.)

So, anyway, you, the newbie, go to the sad Open Mics, and after your soul had been thoroughly and persistently trampled flat by the regular indifference of strangers and other comics in the “audience;” and after the notion of getting booked on Letterman in another month or two (or even Year Or Two!) had been excised like the metastasizing, malignant tumor of self-defeating mythology that it truly is; and after your self-esteem had calloused-over to such a thickness that you believe that Carrie was a total wimp for getting so freaked out by a little pig’s blood …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUfeEZhYs2g

… and after you’ve been hanging around the Big Club for a few weeks/months (not just the Open Mic Night, but most every night), and after the club comics there begin to recognize you as more than just a dreaded “hobbyist,” … maybe – JUST MAYBE – then you’ll get asked to perform 5 minutes at one of the Big Clubs’ Open Mic Nights.

(According to this great article, not much has changed on The Path To Comedy in 19 years.)

But in January, 1994, I had no idea how this all worked. So I strolled into The Punchline on a Monday Night (a typical night for “Open Mic”), was directed to the guy in charge (a nice fellow with a mustache, named Hutch [the fellow’s name, not the mustache’s name, smart-ass]) and told him I wanted to go onstage and tell jokes.

He didn’t have much to say to me. I bought a drink or two and kept asking him when I could go up and tell my jokes. He kept telling me he didn’t think he’d have time for me. I kept telling him I was ready. Finally, near the end of the night, he said, “Look, if you really want to get up there, we have one more bit you could be part of. It’s the Siskel & Ebert part of the show.” He explained to me that this was a somewhat regular feature of The Punchline’s Open Mic in which two professional comics would sit on stage with microphones and provide commentary on and criticism of another comedian’s set.

I think he expected I’d be intimidated by the thought of being heckled by professional comics, but I wasn’t. Not because I was so confident or ballsy, but because a) I was rather drunk by this point and b) I had NO IDEA WHAT I WAS DOING! I was too ignorant to understand!

I took him up on the opportunity, and soon enough the host (and “Siskel”), Chris Hobbs, was introducing me to the crowd, while “Ebert,” (a woman whose name I don’t remember) applauded enthusiastically.

Now, it would be a great story if I told you I either bombed horribly and learned my lesson about how difficult stand-up is, or that I triumphed grandly and recognized that I had “what it takes” to succeed in comedy. But neither of those happened.

I went on stage and basically made fun of Siskel and Ebert before they could make fun of me. I started to tell the jokes I had prepared (some really awful religious puns and a long story I made up about my childhood imaginary friend pretending he didn’t recognize me at my tenth high school reunion) but then I segued into tearing apart the hosts’ looks, jokes, clothes, whatever. I don’t remember the details, but I remember the audience laughed, and the hosts laughed, and they made fun of everything about me, as well, and everyone had a good time.

I left the stage thinking that I had “killed,” but what really had happened was that the audience was somewhat charmed by a likeably drunken “civilian” on stage with professional comics, and grateful for the break in the rather monotonous 2 hour run of comics at 5 – 10 minutes a pop.

A couple new comics congratulated me for busting on Siskel and Ebert, but no comics approached me or spoke with me. After the show I spoke with Chris Hobbs, and he was really nice and gave me tips on where Open Mic shows were, and who to speak to, and he told me about The Road, but he didn’t say “You were hilarious!” or “Man, you are FUNNY!” or anything that made me think I was as special as I thought I had demonstrated. I was a little perplexed. I expected adulation from all the comedians.

“Oh well,” I thought, “they must be jealous. But I’ll show up next week and kill once again, and THEN they’ll see how spectacular I am!”

So, I showed up next week. Hutch didn’t put me up. I showed up the following week. Hutch didn’t put me up. Again, the next week. And the next. Week after week, he just ignored me. I didn’t go out and perform at any of the sad cafes or bars; I thought I had shown everyone that I was above those types of places. I didn’t really talk to a lot of the comedians; I figured they might hold me back, or negatively influence my comedy. I just kept returning to The Punchline, badgering Hutch, and waiting for him to realize he was impeding genius. And he never put me up again. After a couple months I stopped going, figuring “Harumph! Comedy is all just who you know!”

And you know what?

I was right! Comedy IS who you know! Just like EVERYTHING ELSE IN LIFE!!! There seems to be an idea held among people (my 1994 self included) that “fairness” will only occur when everything is evaluated objectively. But objective evaluation simply doesn’t happen very much at all. It can’t! Maybe it does in science (it’s happened in a few of the labs I’ve worked in … a few …) but outside of that, everything is subjective.

Plus, Hutch wasn’t in a position to evaluate my comedy “objectively,” he was in a position to put comedians on stage who had a chance of making people laugh. I hadn’t shown any indication that I could be one of those comedians. He had seen me drunkenly banter with a couple people on stage. That’s it. None of the other comedians who went to The Punchline had seen me tell jokes anywhere else. Nobody had talked to me about my comedy background or goals. Nobody was familiar with me. I was UNKNOWN!

(But not The Unknown Comic.)

After a few years of doing some theater and improv, I decided to give stand-up another try. By this time my experience in performing had led me to realize that yes, it IS who you know, so I decided to get out there and GET KNOWN BY some people! I found myself loving stand-up a whole lot better the second time around.

And this is how I feel about making a list of “best” records. The ones I know are the ones I’m going to rate highest. There are a lot of newer bands who I really like, such as The Hold Steady, Deer Tick, and Surfer Blood, but I don’t know if many/any of their CDs will make my list. It might seem ridiculous that Give the People What They Want gets placed higher than Astro Coast – critics may say the latter is the far superior album – but I’ve heard the former a million times, and the songs are burned (lovingly) into my brain! Give me twenty years of listening to Separation Sunday, and it might end up higher than Let Me Come Over on my list.

But my list is like life … it’s all who you know!

(By the way, when I went back to stand-up, Hutch eventually put me up on stage a few times!)

1 Comment

Posted in Difficulties In Doing This, How Am I Doing This?, My Life and Music

Tagged #WPLongform, CDs, Comedians, Comedy, Favorite, It's Who You Know, Music, Open Mic, Open Mike, San Francisco, Stand Up, The Punchline

“We’ve been together since way back when …” – Orleans

Posted on June 6, 2013 | 2 comments

If you saw The Mona Lisa tomorrow, for the first time ever, and it was hanging on the wall of your uncle’s fishing cabin’s screened-in porch, between one of those paintings of dogs playing poker and a Bob Ross mountainscape, and if nobody told you it was the most famous painting ever, would you recognize it as a masterpiece?

Okay, in that context maybe you would. But if she wasn’t “the most visited, most written about, most sung about, most parodied work of art in the world,” would you look at her and immediately decide, “this is so good, it HAS TO be the most famous painting in the world!”?

I thought of The Mona Lisa Fishing Cabin Conundrum (as it will now be known) because I’ve been having trouble coming up with the proper means to describe my impressions of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours album, which I recently listened to in the car. Now, I’m sure many of you just cringed at my comparison of a 70s soft-rock album to a work of art by Leonardo DaVinci, but in terms of familiarity, I think the comparison is reasonable. Various websites list Rumours as having sold over 40 million copies worldwide, and it is the 5th highest best-selling non-greatest-hits rock record in the US. So clearly many people are aware of its existence. Ask a few friends to name 5 famous paintings and 5 famous rock records, and I think there’s a good chance The Mona Lisa and Rumours would both make most lists.

As would be the case in reviewing The Mona Lisa today, it is hard to appraise Rumours solely on its artistic merits without having your mind tell you “Hey, this is Rumours!” Unfortunately, the Men In Black mind eraser technology is not available to folks drawing a music-blogger-with-a-couple-of-readers salary.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite desserts that my mom would make was something called “No Bake Cheesecake,” by Jell-o. Now, I don’t want to give the impression that my mom wasn’t a great baker. She was, and remains, an excellent baker of cookies, cakes and those twin Pennsylvania Dutch delicacies Shoo-Fly Pie

and Whoopie Pies.

But she has never been the kind of baker to go much beyond the types of desserts that a mediocre sports announcer might describe as being “in her wheelhouse.” So back in the 70s, to add some variety to the dessert menu (which she also allowed us kids to eat for breakfast … [which reminds me of the old TV ad for the cereal Cookie Crisp, in which a boy sharing breakfast with a friend in the backyard (?) asks, “Cookies for breakfast?” to which the cartoon cereal spokes-magician Cookie Jarvis replies, “Heavens No!!” – CJ’s admonition confused me because cookies were standard breakfast fare at our house]) my mom would “mix things up” by mixing up things like No-Bake cheesecake.

I loved it. Then again, I loved all of the pre-packaged, imitation foods of the day: Tang, Space Food Sticks, Spaghettios (with Franks!) and perhaps my favorite of all non-desserts: Mug O Lunch. (Weird fact about me to make your stomach turn: I’ve always kind of enjoyed institutional foods, like school cafeteria or hospital lunches. Maybe it’s because I ate so much of this stuff in the 70s.)

I never thought of “no-bake” cheesecake as anything other than simply cheesecake. It was the only cheesecake I knew. The texture of the filling was creamy, a little stiffer than pudding, but not as firm as, say, imitation butter in a tub, and this very sweet, yet slightly tangy mass was plopped and spread into the loving embrace of a margarine/graham cracker crust. “Cheesecake” was officially my favorite dessert.

When I got to college I started dating a woman, M., who, by probably any standard available, would have been described as “out of my league.” This was the mid-80s, and I was somehow able to accomplish it without the information that is readily available today to hip, young males on the prowl. [Although 70s TV
had provided me with lots of advice on a variety of topics.]) In addition to being more popular and more attractive than me, she was also far more worldly and came from a much wealthier family than me. We didn’t have much in common, but somehow we stayed together for about a year and a half. (If pressed, I’d attribute the tenacity of our relationship to mental illness, alcoholism, self-loathing, lack of communication skills, and an appreciation of a well-told joke; each distributed between us in relatively equal, though constantly varying, proportions.)

I went out to dinner with her and her family sometimes, typically near her parents home in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and often at very nice restaurants. This fact alone attests to the differences between M. and myself, as “going out to dinner” in my family had always meant subs or pizza, McDonald’s or The Red Barn. We just weren’t a family that spent much money going out to restaurants.

At one of my first fancy restaurant dinners with M. and her family (and with my dining history, anything “All-Nite Diner” and up was considered fancy) I was excited to see listed on the dessert menu “New York Cheesecake.” I loved cheesecake, and even though it seemed pretty pricey (one slice probably cost as much as three of the No-Bake boxes of mix from which I guess I figured it was prepared), I knew her family was the type that wouldn’t object to me ordering a slice.

When it arrived, I tried to act nonchalant about the fact that I didn’t know what the fuck this tannish golden giant wedge of not-quite-set Quikrete was that had been placed in front of my face. But my hosts saw my look of distress, clearly, because someone asked, “Isn’t that what you wanted?” Although I hadn’t been completely domesticated by this time in my life, I did have enough couth to understand I needed to be tactful and polite. Thinking quickly, I remarked “No, it’s fine. I just haven’t had the New York style before.”

I ate the cheesecake and pretended to enjoy it, my mouth yearning for the sugary, creamy pudding of the Jell-o brand while it tried to work its way through the lightly-sweetened density of what I now know to be a well-made, tasty cheesecake. I told everyone I liked it (one of many of a variety of lies that M. and I shared) but I vowed to never order cheesecake in a restaurant again. It wasn’t what I remembered it to be, and even if that old, boxed No-Bake dessert wasn’t authentic cheesecake, that’s the version that was familiar and delicious to me.

(I’m happy to report that I now enjoy many kinds of cheesecakes. And if I were to eat a No-Bake Cheesecake, I believe I would still enjoy it, as well.)

I recently listened to Rumours, and it was hard for me to discern if the album was good cheesecake or No-Bake. There are so many songs on it that have played so frequently throughout the years since its 1977 release that the album has almost become part of the ambient world: the birds chirp, cars drive by, “You Make Loving Fun” plays, someone coughs, the sprinklers turn on …

The songs are so familiar that when I find myself singing along I don’t know whether it’s because I actually like the music or because, well … it’s just what you do when “Go Your Own Way” comes on.

Try this test: I will name a song and then give you a line and see if you can sing, or hum, at least 75% of the entire song in your head. (Bonus points if one or more of the songs plays in your head the rest of the day!)

“Dreams” – Thunder only happens when it’s raining.
“The Chain” – And if you don’t love me now/ you will never love me again.
“Go Your Own Way” – Loving you/Isn’t the right thing to do.
“Don’t Stop” – Don’t stop/Thinkin’ about tomorrow.
“You Make Loving Fun” – Sweet, wonderful you/ You make me happy with the things you do.
“Second Hand News” – Won’t you lay me down in the tall grass/ And let me do my stuff.
“Never Going Back Again” – Been down one time/ Been down two times.
“Gold Dust Woman” – Well did she make you cry/ Make you break down/ And shatter your illusions of love.

These are songs of my life. Some of which (“You Make Loving Fun,” “Don’t Stop,” “Dreams”) even WLBR, AM-1270, played in the 70s – songs that my sisters and I now refer to as “pool songs,” because when we’d go to the town pool each day in the summers, these were the songs blaring from the loudspeakers. When my musical tastes “graduated” from 70s pop to Album-Oriented Rock
in the 80s, these pool songs remained part of the playlist, and others from the album (“The Chain,” “Go Your Own Way,” “Second Hand News”) were added. And within the past decade, when I found out – to my horror – that the “cool radio station” I found was not cool at all, but just a gussied up oldies station described by a format called “Adult Alternative,” some other songs (“Never Going Back Again,” “Gold Dust Woman”) made their way into the radio mix as well.

Even though the songs are so familiar, I do enjoy many of them. And there are other songs on the album (“Songbird,” “I Don’t Want To Know”) that I think are good as well. The remaining song, “Oh Daddy,” is rubbish.

A part of me would like to be hip enough to say, truthfully, that I don’t really like Rumours, that it’s too sappy, too overproduced, not rockin’ enough, too voyeuristic into the love lives of the group’s members… But the truth is that I do like it. Just like I like No-Bake Cheesecake. It doesn’t take away from my enjoyment of “New York Style” cheesecake, like Elvis Costello or R.E.M.

One of the reasons I like the album is that I enjoy Lindsay Buckingham’s guitar playing immensely. Even in soft rock, over-produced songs like “You Make Loving Fun,” he has some great guitar work going on in the background. True, he probably didn’t need to put 12 tracks-worth of guitar on it, but hey – it was the 70s. Anything unnecessary was IN! For example, onesies for men:

[Side note – one of the reasons I like Lindsay Buckingham is because of his two major contributions to American Comedy – 1) the theme song to the classic film National Lampoon’s Vacation,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nLiQBV6A7c

and 2) the cover to his 1981 album Law and Order.

Then again, he always seemed to have a penchant for sultry, shirtless album covers

which fortunately has not been maintained now that he’s 63.]

Anyway, I enjoyed the album. I don’t know whether it’s because it’s been so ubiquitous in my life, or if it’s because I think the songs are good.
And I don’t know if the No-Bake Cheesecake analogy really holds. It may be that Rumours is more like toothpaste – it’s hard to tell whether it’s good or it’s bad, it’s just … toothpaste. Sure, I like the taste of it, and I’m glad I have it, but I don’t really think about it much. It’s just part of my life, and I like it. As Stevie Nicks sang on the album, “I don’t want to know the reasons why …”

2 Comments

Posted in Difficulties In Doing This, Uncategorized

Tagged #WPLongform, 70s, Christine McVie, Dessert, Familiar Songs, Fleetwood Mac, Girlfriend, John McVie, Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, Mona Lisa, Overplayed, Processed Food, Restaurants, Rumours, Stevie Nicks

“Just Gonna Have to Be a Different Man. Time May Change Me …” – David Bowie

Posted on May 12, 2013 | 2 comments

Several years ago, while my family was living in a condo without much storage space, I was searching for some item in the hallway closet. I don’t remember what I was looking for, but my kids were very small – younger than 5, I’m sure – so it very well may have been a gift I had put away for them; or a potentially dangerous object I had hidden to keep them safe; or maybe a very large bottle whose contents I felt helped improve my parenting skills.

In my search, I came across a box with a stickynote label – “LETTERS” – printed in a fashion I recognized as my handwriting from the college-age me.

I had been an avid letter-writer in my college days, and all the way through the beginnings of the email era.

I mostly wrote to friends Dan, Dave and Josh. All three of these guys are some of the funniest people I’ve known, and they each had a distinct, clever way of communicating on paper and I always looked forward to their next letter. For some reason, I hadn’t thrown away most of their letters. (I say “for some reason,” as if I don’t know for sure, but I’m quite certain the reason I kept them is because I expected, as a twenty-year old, to lead the kind of life that would culminate with millions (billions?) of people seeking out tidbits from my existence to get an idea of what I was “really” like. I thought people wouldn’t have gotten enough of me in all the novels, music, comedy, and movies I would make – or in all the articles written about me, and TV segments about my life – and that this box of letters would be something for my estate to review, edit and release posthumously; both to help sate my hungry fans’ undiminished appetite for new ERMabilia, but also to maybe provide my heirs with a little more money to purchase that second boat for their extra (but still nice in its own way) vacation home. [Many people share this self-image.] I can only hope Dan and Dave and Josh each have a similar shoebox in their closets.)

Anyway, I dug in for a letter from Josh, because – not meaning to diminish other letter-writers over the years – his letters always had a little something special about them, a turn of a phrase or an interesting way of telling a story – that I thought would have held up well over the years. I opened the letter, imagining myself as a future curator of a museum of the arts that had won the rights to display my memorabilia, excited to find out “what made ERM tick?” and maybe anticipating the book I would write about him, and the interviews I would grant on the topic.

I pulled out a letter from either 1985 or 1986. I know this because I distinctly remember opening the letter and thinking, “I wonder if this will provide insight into why I wore a mullet?”

I tingled with excitement.

Then I read with horror the first sentence from my friend:

“E –

I have to say I was very disturbed to read that you called that guy a kike.”

I folded the letter up, put it back in the envelope, and have never opened that box again. (I didn’t throw the box away, though – I still have my Estate to consider, and that second boat …) It was just too disturbing, for several reasons.

The biggest, most obvious reason is that this was evidence that I was, apparently, a bigoted asshole. I mean, that’s what I’d think if I was the curator/biographer in my dreams – “Geez, despite the Oscars, Pulitzers and scores of humanitarian awards, ERM was actually a bigoted asshole.” And that’s disturbing to think about one’s self.

But nearly as disturbing is the fact that I don’t ever remember using the word “kike.” It’s not a word I even think about using. I was a standup comic for years, and I could imagine, in the service of a joke, a situation in which I might want to use a derogatory term for effect (ironically, to make a point … I’ve done it before), and if I was going to use a derogatory term for Jews in such a case, I think “kike” would probably be the fourth or fifth word I’d consider. (I won’t bore you with a list.)

In addition to being confronted with these upsetting thoughts, I also felt confused because not only was I, apparently, a bigoted asshole, but I was the type of bigoted asshole who not only 1) used the word “kike,” and 2) directed it at another person, but also 3) felt the urge to put the incident in a letter to a friend! Like I was really super-proud!! I was the kind of person you know tangentially in real life, and so accept as a Friend on Facebook, then read a couple of his posts about “nailing chicks” and “the goddam illegals” and so you quietly Unfriend him.

I was a person I didn’t like, and I didn’t remember being him.

Reading that sentence was weird. I don’t remember being anti-Semitic. I don’t remember the feeling of wanting to call someone such a name, or believing there was a reason to distinguish someone with such a term. I know I grew up in a place and time where I was definitely instilled with bigotry and intolerance. And I’m not proud to say it, but I do remember having feelings of superiority over and prejudices toward women, gays and lesbians, African-Americans, Asians, Latinos … pretty much the whole spectrum of non-straight-white-males out there. But the strange thing is that I don’t remember harboring these same feelings toward Jewish people. There were so few Jews where I grew up that I just didn’t “get” the stereotypes.

I knew the Jewish stereotypes because I was a fan of comedy, and many of my favorite comedians – Woody Allen, Garry Shandling, and especially Don Rickles, – were Jewish, and would mention them. I also devoured Mad Magazine, and many of their writers were Jewish and used Yiddish words for a funny effect, and the magazine often tackled the subject of racism in a humorous way, and so touched on all stereotypes. But none of these Jewish stereotypes meant much to me, other than as a punch line for Rickles. Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure that the first time I even remember hearing the word “kike” out loud was as a high-schooler, in a theater, watching the “classic” film Porky’s II.

(The fact that I saw that film in the theater when it was released is only SLIGHTLY less embarrassing than the fact that I used to be such a bigot.)

So reading that first sentence of that old letter was strange, embarrassing, disorienting and quite shameful: kind of like the first after-gym-class shower in 6th grade.

So, WHAT (you may ask) would make me reveal such a distasteful, humiliating part of my past, and place it out here in the internets, where it will be preserved forever, causing folks who don’t know me to think I am a racist, self-delusional asshole, and those who do know me to question themselves about just how well they really do? Where it could cause harm to myself and my loved ones, professionally, personally and just about any other way possible? And HOW ON EARTH could it EVER relate to music??!!??

I have three words for you: Asia, by Asia.

I bought this CD specifically for this list-making project. I remember loving this album back in high school. My sister had it on vinyl, and I listened to it a lot. At some point, I transferred it to cassette (the old-school form of piracy, which was musically promoted by Bow Wow Wow back in the day …) and it remained in heavy rotation in my walkman,

car stereo and bedroom stereo. At some point, I stopped listening to it, and I hadn’t thought much about it in the intervening years, except to remember, “Man, I used to LOVE that tape!” Even when I heard some (both?) of the hits on 80s radio, I never felt compelled to go out and get a new copy of the record. The bootleg tape version is gone, as my collection of cassettes – which numbered hundreds back in the day – has dwindled over the years to a couple collections of TV theme songs, some mix-tapes from my wedding party, and one or two recordings of various high school concert bands in which I played trombone.

So, I thought – for completeness’ sake – I should re-experience Asia all over again. I found it cheap on the internet (cost twice as much to ship as the CD itself, 3 dollars total) and when it arrived, I put it in the rotation of CDs.

I soon found myself asking the same question I pondered upon reading about my younger, bigoted, angry self:

“Who the fuck WAS I???”

I felt no connection to, had no interest in, and could barely listen to this CD. Steve Howe was in the band, and I always did – and still do – like him. And listening to the CD again, I could pick out bits of his playing that were really cool. But they were buried beneath an avalanche of Geoff Downes’ synthesizer woodles (yes woodles) and John Wetton’s voice, which I believe is the least-soulful voice that’s ever been recorded and put to music, apart from that of Radiohead’s “fitter, happier.”

Carl Palmer played drums on the album, and I always did – and still do – like him, but even a great drummer can’t save this crap. As each song began, I found myself thinking, “Wait, this must be the song I loved … right? It must be coming up … I know there must be a song I loved on this thing …” And as I pressed the “NEXT” button on my car’s CD player in the middle of each song, I thought “Nope. I don’t remember this song at all, and there’s NO WAY I ever loved this thing …”

I could find nothing redeeming about this CD, and I can’t recall how I ever loved it so much. Whatever did I hear in this music, and why – today – does it not even conjure a tiny speck of affinity within me? What the hell happened? Who was I?

And for that matter, how did I ever go from being an Asia fan to being a New York Dolls fan? At what point did a musical ablution rid me of the grime of Emerson, Lake and Palmer and leave behind a gleaming finish of The Beatles, Prince and Maria McKee? And maybe more weirdly, how did I retain my love for Yes and Rush, but still become a fanatic for The Replacements and The Hold Steady? How is all of this possible?

I’ve often felt like I haven’t changed much at all since I was fourteen or so. I still find Caddyshack hilarious, Columbo awesome, and pretty women intimidating (including my wife!) I still like the Phillies, can’t wait to play my next game of pickup hoops, and still await the Hollywood Stardom that is just around the corner for me. But in some ways, I’ve changed immeasurably.

I’m proud to say that I was appalled to read about who I was on that day in 1986 that I wrote to Josh about. And I’m happy to divulge that I took a peek at the second sentence in that letter, in which Josh wrote, “That really doesn’t sound like something you would do,” meaning that whatever it was that happened, my best friend at the time found it out-of-character as well.

Really, all I can imagine is that the incident involved someone I knew fairly well, who was Jewish, and who I was trying to piss off because I was pissed off at him – probably during a pickup basketball game. Of course, this doesn’t make the actions more defensible, but it at least provides a context that I can understand. But who knows? If I was such a fan of something that now, 30 years later, sounds to me like music from a different species’ CD collection, maybe I was parading around at the time wearing a white hood and robe …

It’s shocking to say, but Asia sounded so bad to me that it has the power to make me wonder if I was ever part of a white supremacist group.

Maybe I’m overthinking this whole CD thing.

2 Comments

Posted in My Life and Music, Uncategorized

Tagged #WPLongform, Asia, bad music, bigot, Carl Palmer, change, Don Rickles, Garry Shandling, Geoff Downes, John Wetton, letters, personal development, Porky's II, Steve Howe, Woody Allen

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