Ever heard of a soundtrack to a book? Me neither, but that's what we have here with blackprairie (including members of the Decembrists) and their lovely, moving collection of songs to a forthcoming book about efforts to save three endangered species, called Wild Ones. The author got to know Chris Funke and friends before they hit it big, and he sent them chapters, and they traded him songs.
Speaking of which...author Jon Moonallem writes in Slate and tells the story of "A Tranquilized Polar Bear Rising Thru an Autumn Sky":
The town of Churchill, Manitoba is a shivering little settlement on the edge of Hudson Bay that, every fall, gets overrun with about 900 polar bears and 10,000 polar bear tourists. Polar bears routinely wander into town—they especially love hanging out by the elementary school. When they do, folks call 675-BEAR and a squad of bear patrol officers tries to herd the animals back onto the tundra, firing off pyrotechnics and noise-makers. Bears that won’t budge are tranquilized and transferred to a Quonset hut near the airport, a facility sometimes referred to as the “Polar Bear Jail.” Each bear serves a month sentence—enough to dissuade it (hopefully) from entering town again—then it’s drugged again, packed in a net, and airlifted under a helicopter to a safer area north of town while crowds of tourists gather to watch. It’s a breathtaking thing to see: a polar bear lifting off the ground and flying away.
This week George Jones, by consensus one of the greatest of country singers, passed away. Have to admire his ability to tell a story (as in the wonderfully rich Southern California, a duet with Tammy Wynette) but also his ability to make a story:
...make no mistake, he could be menacing, a word that came to be
associated with Jones for much of his life. To sugarcoat his worst
impulses is to ignore the truth: When Jones was drunk, coked up or
otherwise out of his mind, he turned bad. In "I Lived to Tell It All,"
Jones' astonishingly honest 1996 autobiography, he tells of being drunk
on his tour bus and shooting five bullets from a .38 near a teetotaling
manager who wouldn't join him in finishing a bottle of vodka.
Jones once drove a lawn mower to a liquor store after his wife hid
his car keys, and then sang about it in a ditty called "Honky Tonk
Song": "I saw those blue lights flashing over my left shoulder / He
walked right up and said 'Get off that riding mower.'" Jones was one of a
kind — in both the best and worst use of the term.
The same could be said of Paul Westerberg and the Replacements. Westerberg was just as witty, and just as wild, if not more so. From Aquarium Drunkard:
"Toward the end of their touring behind Pleased to Meet Me, the
Replacements gigged in Portland, Oregon with the Young Fresh Fellows
opening. And in the history of notorious Replacements shows, this one
ranks high. Though it’s difficult to nail down the exact story behind
the fabled night, the following anecdotes show up repeatedly: the ‘Mats
pelting the Young Fresh Fellows with various objects during their set;
the band breaking into a room (the show was held at the now-defunct Pine
Street Theatre) purloining costumes (of which they then wore ontstage);
the band being far too drunk to play effectively; clothes being taken
off and thrown into the audience — and the audience, in some cases,
returning the favor. This last part is my personal favorite as
apparently Tommy Stinson remembered, after throwing his clothes into the
crowd, that he had left ten dollars in his pocket. After raging at the
crowd to throw his pants back, he instead rifled through the clothes
thrown on stage, located twenty dollars in a pocket, and danced around
the stage in victory. Another account just reported that they stumbled
through a set of less than 45 minutes, played a cover of Bryan Adams’
“Summer of ’69″ and then split. Either way, a typical ‘Mats show."
Is it possible that the desire to tell a story is part of a desire to be dramatic? To be a diva, an acter-out, a drama queen? And that genre is less important than that desire to live in drama?
Regardless, you have to love the Replacements for writing a song about the city they dissed -- and at the end apologizing for their antics. "Portland, I'm sorry." To apologize to an entire city! Reckless charm.
Like the lyrics:
Shared a cigarette for breakfast
Shared an airplane ride for lunch
Sitting in between a ghost
And a walking bowl of punch
Can you play a little hunch?
Predicting a delay on landing
Well I predict we'll have a drink
Lost my money on the first hand
Got burned on a big fat king
And your ears are gonna ring
And your eyes just wanna close
Nothing changing I suppose
Although Frank Ocean captured the headlines and topped the critics' lists, for yours truly what stands out in pop music this year is the discovery of a consensus acoustic sound that is not rock, for better or worse, and yet is shared by the likes of relatively new bands Mumford & Sons, Fleet Foxes,Grizzly Bear, the Avett Brothers, The Lumineers, and Lord Huron, among countless, countless others.
Anthemic folk-rock, as Jon Parelessaid. With a dash of sarcasm, he voiced the thoughts of a young fan newly converted to this "roots" music: “Wow, I’m cool. I heard a banjo. I’m different. And I’m going to tell all my friends how much hearing an actual banjo as opposed to a synthesizer moved me.”
Yes, but...stand-out tracks include I Will Wait, Stubborn Love, and the instant classic Winter in My Heart (though it's a yearning ballad, not an anthem). My fav band is everyone else's too, Mumford & Sons, the most exciting, although Fleet Foxes still have the best harmonies, and the Avett Brothers make me ache the most.
Most visual is surely Lord Huron:
...who seems to offer in their visual work a destination, a virtual home in the lonesome wilderness.
The temptation for most memoirists is to beef up, at times even to make up, life; for Richards, who has lived one of the most eventful and excessive lives ever, the point is to tamp it down. His is an odd book for many reasons, among them its refusal to impute any meaning to the structure of experience, beyond its basic contingency. The book tells no “story,” presents no overwrought “themes,” proposes no shape to life beyond the amorphous ooze of passing time. Thus the hilariously nonchalant title, which, shorn of the expected first-person possessive, would suggest that Richards’s life is more or less the one we all experience.
At one time or another, everyone rides in a red Cadillac with the Ronettes out to Jones Beach, then wakes up on Ronnie Spector’s mother’s living room floor in Spanish Harlem, to a plate of bacon and eggs. We’ve all had the major licks of “Satisfaction” come to us in a dream, then adjourned to the pool to write the lyrics with Mick Jagger. This is the kind of thing that happens. Uschi Obermaier, the German leftist supermodel, chews off your earring in a Japanese-style hotel in Rotterdam, leaving you with a “permanent malformation” on your right earlobe. The prime minister of Canada’s wife turns up in your hotel room, looking eager to party. That’s life. Or,Life.
From a great review of Richards' memoir, Life, by poet Dan Chiasson in the NYRB. Which he really likes! Typical with Keith: Take him for granted, despite his fame, his known brilliance as a writer of songs, his greatness as a player. As his old pal and bassist Bill Wyman said, in the doc Crossfire Hurricane on HBO a month ago, the Stones' have an unusual sound for a reason.
Most bands follow the drummer. When we got together, something happened, something magical. Every band followed the drummer. We don't follow Charlie, we follow Keith. So the drums are barely slightly behind Keith. Just a fraction, you know. I tend to play ahead. It's got a sort of a wobble. And it's dangerous, because it can all fall apart at any second.
Think you can hear that in some of the songs: the near-chaos that resolves into a chord in "Tumbling Dice"; the yelling back and forth in "Get Off My Cloud," and harrowing violence in "Sympathy for the Devil." And too, the unexpectedly sweet ballads, such as "Wild Horses," which the band was glimpsed finishing in the studio in the famous doc "Gimme Shelter."
The image of Richards, though, is what stays with you: head back, eyes closed, sloppily lip-synching to Jagger’s vocals. Keith had written the song as a lullaby for Marlon, his son, according to Jim Dickinson. Jagger got his hands on it and made it a love song, probably addressed to Marianne Faithful. It is hard to know whether Keith is synching his own lyrics, which Jagger changed, or is simply too high to sing along. But it is an unforgettable image, the image of a band beholding its own complex chemistry, even as they are beheld by the Maysles’ camera. That moment seems to me the peak of the Stones’ career. From there, as Richards puts it, things went “from the sublime to the ridiculous.”
Hard to disagree. Here's a photo from that era, l971, with Mick, Keith, and Gram:
At age 62, Bruce Springsteen is on tour, and the young bucks (or semi-young bucks) of today, including Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, and Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, are joining him on stage.
Good to see, and great to read a full-scale feature on Springsteen by the editor of The New Yorker (especially meaningful given how much space the mag has given of late to the corporatized hit-making machine of today, which can be depressing for those of us who value authenticity over flash/money).
Rock music has many fine songwriters, but Springsteen is without doubt the music's greatest storyteller. The stories he tells the crowd on stage evolve into his songs, until the singer becomes the man in the chorus. (Although the singer looks more muscular than the character -- his vulnerability is expressed in his lyrics, not in his look.) Still, no one embodies himself in his work more fully than Springsteen:
Remnick includes a story from Springsteen on stage in l976:
My mom, she was a secretary, and she worked downtown. . . . And my father, he worked a lot of different places. He worked in a rug mill for a while, he drove a cab for a while, and he was a guard down at the jail for a while. I can remember when he worked down there, he used to always come home real pissed off, drunk, sit in the kitchen. At night, nine o’clock, he used to shut off all the lights, every light in the house, and he used to get real pissed off if me or my sister turned any of them on. And he’d sit in the kitchen with a six-pack, a cigarette. . . .
He’d make me sit down at that table in the dark. In the wintertime, he used to turn on the gas stove and close all the doors, so it got real hot in there. And I remember just sitting in the dark. . . . No matter how long I sat there, I could never ever see his face. We’d start talking about nothing much, how I was doing. Pretty soon, he asked me what I thought I was doing with myself. And we’d always end up screaming at each other. My mother, she’d always end up running in from the front room crying, and trying to pull him off me, try to keep us from fighting with each other. . . . I’d always end up running out the back door and pulling away from him. Pulling away from him, running down the driveway screaming at him, telling him, telling him, telling him, how it was my life and I was going to do what I wanted to do.
You can hear this especially well in the central lyric in his underappreciated Downbound Train, from Born in the USA record (although actually written for Nebraska). A young band named Roadside Graves, invited to pay tribute to Springsteen, was asked to record Downbound Train. Their version, available via Aquarium Drunkard, is a little 80's for my taste, but lead singer Johnny Gleason wrote thoughtfully about the song (here slightly edited):
"I immediately knew I had to tinker with the lyrics a bit, the last verse
has always bothered me because I couldn’t see the character working at a
car wash and then swinging a “sledge hammer on a railroad gang”. I
prefer leaving the character after the third verse, dreamlike running to
his empty house."
Agreed, but Gleason did not change and could not improve the central verse. No one could:
Last night I heard your voice You were crying, crying, you were so alone You said your love had never died You were waiting for me at home. Put on my jacket, I ran through the woods I ran till I thought my chest would explode There in the clearing, beyond the highway In the moonlight, our wedding house shone I rushed through the yard, I burst through the front door My head pounding hard, up the stairs I climbed The room was dark, our bed was empty Then I heard that long whistle whine And I dropped to my knees, hung my head and cried...
And here's a typically strong live version, from July in Paris this year:
Once upon a time in rock and roll, a great rock star, set off by something called Johnny Rotten. wondered out loud in song if rock and roll demanded a fiery, perhaps suicidal finale. Neil Young set off a storm with the idea, on Rust Never Sleeps, one of his greatest albums, and among his fellow rockers.
Sheff [Playboy]: You disagree with Neil Young's lyric in Rust Never Sleeps: "It's better to burn out than to fade away..." Lennon: I hate it. It's better to fade away like an old soldier than to burn out. If he was talking about burning out like Sid Vicious, forget it. I don't appreciate the worship of dead Sid Vicious or of dead James Dean or dead John Wayne. It's the same thing. Making Sid Vicious a hero, Jim Morrison - it's garbage to me. I worship the people who survive - Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo. They're saying John Wayne conquered cancer - he whipped it like a man. You know, I'm sorry that he died and all that - I'm sorry for his family - but he didn't whip cancer. It whipped him. I don't want Sean worshipping John Wayne or Johnny Rotten or Sid Vicious. What do they teach you? Nothing. Death. Sid Vicious died for what? So that we might rock? I mean, it's garbage you know. If Neil Young admires that sentiment so much, why doesn't he do it? Because he sure as hell faded away and came back many times, like all of us. No, thank you. I'll take the living and the healthy.
Lennon had a point. Young himself shows no sign of burning out, after all. He's busy not just with his music, but with his hybrid biomass/electric car, not to mention his interest in Lionel trains, his new biography coming out this fall, Waging Heavy Peace, two records this year, a tour, and the Bridge School benefit this fall.
But if the early word can be trusted, it's a comeback by his old buddy Bob Dylan that seems likely to make the music news this year. Dylan is about to release a new record, Tempest, on which he has largely turned away from his airy jazzy 20's Americana sound, and gone back to the electric guitar.
He's excited about it, he says. So is the Los Angeles Times, extolling his story-telling prowess on the title song, about the Titanic going down, and British press, including Uncut. Here from the Telegraph is just one of several enthusiastic advance peeks:
There’s a lot of blood spilt on Tempest through murder and revenge, chaos and
confusion. On the Muddy Waters style, harmonica-driven blues of Narrow Way,
Dylan declares “this is a hard country to stay alive in / I’m armed to the
hilt.” Although unfolding with a lot of wit and relish, this is Dylan’s
darkest, maddest, most provocative collection of songs in a long time.
The word is that Dylan is pleased with his latest effort, or, as someone at
his record company told me, “he wants people to hear it.”
The Telegraph critic does admit that Dylan singing has a range of just a few notes, but says he pulls it off nonetheless. Here's a new video, Via The Guardian:
This one seems like a pleasant throwback to the New Morning style. Rumor has it that Bob is coming to town...for an expensive show.
Speaking of rebellious rockers...it's generally agreed, by both fans and skeptics, that rock and roll is all about attitude, so in these post-modern, post-truth times, it's only natural and proper that Pussy Riot, a Russian group that has never released a record, has become the biggest punk rock band in the world. More famous, with more famous friends (from Daft Punk to Paul McCartney) than any other punk band.
Not on the basis of their music, which is unexceptional, but on the basis of their self-described "impudence." Being outrageous in an Orthodox church, for instance. Shouting at the tyrant Putin, miming playing guitars, but with no sound, for thirty seconds. The perfect post-modern performance.
For which they were sentenced to two years in prison yesterday, a sentence that rewards their "impudence" with preposterous over-punishment.
This has occasioned much commentary, but none more telling than from Irish novelist Roddy Doyle, who on his Facebook page recounts a conversation (of his creation, we presume) at a pub, in his usual profane, sly, beguiling style:
-Pussy Riot. -That’s just middle-age. It’ll sort itself ou’. -No. The Russian young ones. The group, like. -What abou’ them? -I can’t get me head around it. Hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. What the fuck is tha’? -It’s just the excuse.
-Wha’? -It’s nothin’ to do with religion. They’re in jail cos Putin doesn’t like them. -Is that all? -Listen. Remember punk – back in the day, like? -The Sex Pistols. God Save the Queen an’ tha’. -Exactly. -Brilliant. -I wasn’t mad about it meself. But annyway. It blew the other music away. -Glam rock. -Putin loves it. -Wha’? -Glam rock. -Fuck off. -Serious. He’s mad into Gary Glitter. -Tha’ makes sense. They prob’ly like the same videos. -Ah now. Anyway. Fuckin’ Putin an’ the other cunts in the politburo all have platforms an’ silver suits, an’ he mimes along to I’m The Leader of the Gang an’ Do Yeh Wanna Touch Me. -Ah, fuck off. -I’m telling yeh. He’s been doin’ it for years. He fuckin’ hates punk. -An’ that’s why those young ones are in jail? -The Pistols made Gary Glitter look ridiculous an’ those three young ones make Putin look even more ridiculous.
Yes.
Irony alert: Important to note that Gary Glitter was once a huge star in the UK, with many hit songs, including the (nah nah nah nah, nah nah nah nah, hey hey, good bye) anthem often heard in sports arenas. Also important to note that he was convincted of possession of child pornography in the UK, and then, after fleeing charges on his yacht, traveling the world, and being booted out of Cambodia, again allegedly for sexual abuse of children, was arrested and convicted of child molestation in Vietnam.
Though in his 60's, Glitter served time -- about two and a half years.
Yet another day of stifling heat, but this time with rising humidity too! Time for a break.
Here's a tremendous cover of the great Clash song Rocking the Casbah, by Algerian rocker Rachid Taha. Except that probably Taha and his band of Algerian outcast rockers inspired it...see below.
The French-Algerian singer Rachid Taha has a story about the first time he met the Clash. It was September 1981, and Taha bumped into all four members of the band just before they were due to play at the Théâtre Mogador in Paris. Taha gave them a copy of a demo tape by his band, Carte de Séjour (Residence Permit), an outfit from Lyon who combined Algerian rai with funk and punk rock. "They looked interested," remembers Taha, "but when they didn't get in touch, I thought nothing of it. Then, a few months later, I heard Rock the Casbah." He cackles mischievously. "Maybe they did hear it after all."
The incident has since gone down in French rock legend. Taha has recorded his own Arabised version of the song, entitled Rock el Kasbah, something he's since performed live with the Clash's Mick Jones. Jones only vaguely remembers meeting Taha in 1981, but both he and Joe Strummer did eventually get heavily into Taha's music. "Joe heard some Rachid tracks on Andy Kershaw's radio show some time in the 1990s," says Jones. "He used to ring me up and tell me about this fantastic Algerian guy that I should listen to. In fact, Joe and Rachid were going to meet up, but then Joe went and died. I'm not sure he knew that he'd actually met him at the Mogador all those years ago."
Rachid Taha wasn't the only musician to be inspired by the Clash on that seven-night residency. Just as the Sex Pistols show at Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall in June 1976 served as the catalyst for Morrissey, Ian Curtis, Mark E Smith and Mick Hucknall, the Clash's run at the Théâtre Mogador five years later was witnessed by a veritable who's who of French rock. Manu Chao was in the audience with friends who would later form Mano Negra, as was Helno and his ramshackle world music combo les Négresses Vertes, gypsy rockers Lo'Jo, members of anarchist punk collective Bérurier Noir, and Kortatu, the Basque ska-punk band formed by Fermin Muguruza.
That was the Clash at their best: stirring it up, making shit happen.
