Here Come The Bells

You’re a kid, no more than twelve years old, sitting around listening to the radio with your sister. Amid the Styx and Zeppelin and Journey and Stones there suddenly emerges a tune with a weird, slinky bassline over which a male voice casually sing-speaks a sordid little tale about sex and drugs and transvestites. But you don’t hear any of that because you’re too young to understand it and anyway you’re too dumbstruck by the fact that this bizarre sound is on the radio at all. “Who is this?” you ask your sister, incredulously, “and how did it get on the radio? I mean, he’s not singing, he’s just talking.”

It’s a few years later and you’re a fourteen-year-old music freak, hanging out at a mall, reading Rolling Stone, which, aside from MTV, is your only source for music information. You believe everything Rolling Stone tells you. The lead review is for a bunch of reissues of sixties albums by a band you’ve never heard of, The Velvet Underground. Five stars? The only thing that you’ve ever seen get five stars previously is Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The USA. The review hypes up the feedback, the dirty lyrics, the attitude. The accompanying illustration shows some dudes in black sweaters and shades. You are filled with excitement. You want nothing more in life than to hear this music. Like, right now. So you head over to the mall’s little record store, where the V section turns up only Van Halen.

It's a few months later, you’re fifteen now, and you’ve finally managed to track down a Velvet Underground record – MGM’s Golden Archive Series, a cheap cut’n’paste best-of. You found it, appropriately somehow, amid a pile of records in a disused, smoky trailer. Listening late at night you’re entranced by “Heroin” and “Candy Says” and “Here She Comes Now”. You feel like you’ve discovered the key to some keener, more evolved reality. One where you don’t have to be some kind of genius or prodigy to create cool, smart, atmospheric music. The lights are off, the music still playing, you drift off to sleep. You come awake in the middle of “Jesus”. Those whispered vocals, that creepy guitar sound. The hymn-like words, which you are not altogether certain are sincere. You are terrified, but you flip the record and keep listening anyway.

The Velvet Underground and Nico is one of a handful of albums that provide the soundtrack to your favorite summer. 1987, you’re sixteen. The late nights, the long trips, the innocence happily sacrificed. On the way back from your first concert – Suzanne Vega - the album blares from the van’s tape player, and you try to impress one of the girls there, she has black hair and big brown eyes, with the fact that you know all the words to “Venus In Furs”. She is unresponsive.

Fall, 1988. You buy a book of classic rock writing by the late great critic Lester Bangs. An entire section of the book is devoted to Bangs’ ruminations on and confrontations with Velvets’ mainman Lou Reed. Reading it is such a kick – provocative, illuminating, hilarious – that you are duly inspired. But you can’t decide whether you wanna be the guy who writes the songs or the guy who finds so many life-enhancing thrills in trying to figure the songs out. There is a little of the mad genius and the hapless court jester in both.

Winter 1989. Despite believing, due to the terrible video for “The Original Wrapper” that Lou Reed the solo artist is a lost cause, you buy his just-released solo album, New York. You can’t believe how somebody as old as he is (47!) has been able to come up with an album so vital, so rock-hard. All those grim, grit-infested songs about a city you’ve never been to, making you feel a little glad for once that you only have to deal with the mundane reality of small-town life. “Romeo Had Juliet”, that pure, visceral sound - those snarling guitars in perfect interlock with the somehow loose but forceful rhythm, all a backdrop to the frontman’s sly, if monotone, delivery of those words, which so vividly capture young love among the ruins without resorting to the usual banalities. “The perfume burned his eyes / holding tightly to her thighs / something flickered for a minute / then it vanished and was gone.” So tough, so real, so full of the helpless wonder of living. Of the song, the album, the sound, you write this in the little blue notebook that you carry around with you everywhere you go: “That’s the way I want life to be all the time.”

Spring 1989. You’ve fallen for The Blue Mask, hard, and just like New York a couple months before it’s playing all the time, coloring everyday life in ways that will come back to you in vivid shades every time you listen in subsequent years. Your favorite moment is the impossibly beautiful solo guitar prelude at the beginning of “Women”. This is also your girlfriend’s favorite song. She thinks of it as a feminist anthem, one crucially written from a male perspective. You are not so sure. You just think it’s funny how he sings “We all love women”, because you picture the whole band smiling and nodding in agreement as if to say “Yeah, it’s true, we do.” 

Now you’re nineteen years old. You wear a Velvet Underground t-shirt all the time. You’re in a band. One of the only gigs this band will ever play is at a little bar in the middle of nowhere, a date that you have agreed to play simply because the name of the bar is Sweet Jane’s. A better name for the place might have been Free Bird’s. Gamely, your band plays its versions of  “Oh! Sweet Nothin’”, New York fave “Strawman” and, of course, “Sweet Jane” (three versions – fast, slow, mutant hybrid of both) to a sparse crowd of drunk, uninterested rednecks. The band breaks up shortly thereafter, but every band you are in subsequently will also do Lou Reed covers. 

Songs For Drella. 1990, you buy this collaboration with John Cale, a song cycle based on the life of Andy Warhol, on the day of release. Throughout the next twenty-three years you try to tell anyone who listens how great it is. This is a difficult sell, it is a concept album, unassuming, very spare, also longish. It also may well be the most purely listenable recording of either man’s post-Velvets career, give or take a Transformer here or a Paris 1919 there.

During the winter of 1992 you have moved away from your hometown for the first time. You have also broken up with your longtime girlfriend. You are suffering a strange mixture of homesickness and heartsickness. During this time your constant companion is Lou Reed’s book of collected song lyrics, Between Thought and Expression. Somehow, it is a comfort to read the bleak, vindictive lyrics of Berlin, and “Vicious Circle” and “Kill Your Sons” in stark black and white. Plain, hard-as-nails. The combination of harsh reality – something like “Temporary Thing” contains an emotion so ugly that one can only hope it is a figment of Reed’s imagination, though the horrible truth is that it probably isn’t – and artistry is a motivating factor at a time when you need it most. Soon you have a band again, and are writing your own attempts at two- and three-chord rock tunes with semi-poetic lyrics. None are as good as “Kill Your Sons”, but at least you’re doing something with your time.

In April of ’92 you drive to the city and spend more money than you really oughtta be spending (you work at McDonald's) on Lou Reed’s new box set retrospective. Sharing its title with the recently released book of lyrics, Between Thought And Expression is three discs outlining Lou’s solo career in chronological order, from ’72 up to ’86. The song selection is comprehensive, balanced, unerring. But not nearly as boring as that sounds. Until a new four-disc set comes along that includes the later Warner years, it’s still the best overview of Reed’s solo career available. In 1992 this box works for you in the same way that Neil Young’s Decade manages, providing an imminently listenable presentation of an artist’s many phases and stages via a couple dozen-plus great songs. Many are new to you. “New Sensations.” One of your faves is the previously unreleased live tune “Here Comes The Bride”, a loose, bizarre soul-funk march. “I just wanna tell you a story…” a hoarse Reed shouts, growls, declaims, building up to the title chorus, which female backup singers repeat in fervent gospel response. The delivery is offhand, Reed slurs and stumbles over the words, which seem to be made up on the spot. You think to yourself how amazing it is that art can be made in the moment, spontaneously. This is a new concept to you. As if to reiterate, the box also contains “The Bells” which Reed reveals in his book was made up in the studio and left unchanged. He adds that it is his favorite among all of his lyrics. Power and mystery. “Here come the bells!” A revelation - nothing ever need be planned.  

It’s winter 1996 and you have fallen in love. You and your girlfriend spend what will seem in your memory like hours, days, driving around in the snow listening to an advance copy of Set The Twilight Reeling, an album that coincidentally also contains several songs about new love. Even amid the bliss and good cheer Lou can’t resist some equalizing ugliness – the leadoff track, a rocking ode to childhood treat “Egg Cream” finds Reed claiming that the Brooklyn-born beverage made it “easier to deal with knife fights, and kids pissing in the street, auggghh”.

It’s 2000, you’re on the verge of 30. You and the girl from winter 1996 have recently broken up. Reed is there again with words of solace and wisdom and rage. “Mad” from his new guitar-drenched album Ecstasy, features Lou in classic cold-hearted mode, outlining a break-up of his own. “I knew I shouldn’t have had someone else in our bed but I was so tired / so tired / who'da thought you’d find a bobby pin?” Your own breakup was nothing like this, but you’re pretty tired too, and you take vicarious thrills where you find them.

You’re 36 now. Working a desk job. Florescent lights, cubicles, endless computer drudgery. You feel used up. As though your identity is fading, your soul is off looking for kicks elsewhere. How did you end up here? Every day for days on end you listen to Lou Reed’s live album Animal Serenade. Staring at the screen, numbers and letters scrambling, not making any sense. But Lou Reed is in the headphones, and it’s like he’s trying to tear the curtain away from this nonsense and reveal the beating heart beneath. You’re grateful for the effort, even if it only provides momentary comfort. Your favorite track is the stripped-down take on “Street Hassle”. The guitar rumbling ominously while Lou tells the sad story of Waltzing Matilda. Then the part about the dude telling the other dude to put her body in the street for somebody else to find. Then the explanation, or the excuse. Among the finest lines he ever wrote: “Some people have no choice / they can’t even find a voice / to talk with that they can call their own / so the first thing they see / that allows them the right to be / they follow it / you know what it’s called / bad luck.” On the studio version, those last two words are spoken, matter-of-fact. On this live version, Reed shouts them at the top of his lungs. “BAD LUCK!” The effect, for you, is cathartic. It gives you hope that you might be able to find your own voice again eventually. 

Finally, in April 2008 the man plays in Nashville. The show is good. Lou is fit and fiery. He plays many of the best songs ever written. “Pale Blue Eyes”, “Satellite Of Love”, “Sweet Jane”. But you are distracted by the fact that Music City, despite all the lip service it pays to the art and craft of songwriting, has filled barely more than half of the auditorium.

As the decade turns “Perfect Day” is suddenly everywhere. Your mother plays for you a version that she loves. It’s by angel-voiced Scottish singer Susan Boyle. You are reminded of the time twenty-odd years earlier when you were in your room listening to “The Black Angels Death Song” and your mother stood in the doorway and looked at you as though she thought you might be mentally ill.

Fall, 2013. For your first post on your little blog after a two-month layoff you’re trying to write a few simple words about your beloved 1969 Live, by the Velvet Underground. Word comes that Lou Reed has died. For a few days you ponder the man and his work. You don’t know if you should write about it at all, or how to go about it if you do. You decide that the best way to honor the work is to show how it intertwined so vitally in your own life. You decide also to do this in a weird third-person format, despite the device seeming a little silly and forced. But if Lou Reed taught you anything, it is that it's essential to risk looking foolish. (It’s right there in Songs For Drella, via Andy Warhol, voiced by John Cale: “I think sometimes it hurts you when you’re afraid to be called a fool.”) Besides, any other approach seems either too dry or too sentimental.

Lou Reed had no use for sentimentality, and this was one of his great virtues as an artist. Lack of sentiment, however, does not equal lack of compassion. And dedication to observing and delineating the harshest truths of modern living does not preclude the existence of positive forces.

So many of his songs, including some of his greatest, are gentle, romantic, downright pretty things. “I’ll Be Your Mirror”, “I’m Set Free”, “Perfect Day”, “Coney Island Baby”.

Still, it seems like we always focus on the dirt, the sordid stuff – “Heroin”, Berlin, “The Blue Mask”.

As usual, life does not bifurcate so easily into black and white. There are plenty of subtle gradations within these extremes. Lou Reed always recognized that shit is complicated, and he never stopped dealing with it in his own laconic, three-chord way.

So he was able to take a long cold look at the gruesome realities of human nature, and do it without flinching. This was a brave and necessary artistic act in and of itself. But what elevated his work is that he was so often able to consider our most grotesque, base impulses and turn them into something else - pathos, beauty, redemption. The gamut is often there in one song – “New Sensations” just as a for-instance. One year he’s arrested on Christmas Eve, the next he’s riding on his bike in the mountains, wanting to free himself from those who are “always on a down”.

Or maybe as listeners we make the (sorry, there’s no other word) transformation ourselves. How else to account for why “Street Hassle” and “Temporary Thing” and “The Blue Mask” and “Kicks” and “Mad”, ugly things all, could end up being cleansing, hopeful, regenerative? It’s part of the deal between artist and audience. We do with the work what we will.

It’s a deal you’ve been engaged in for decades now with Lou Reed’s music. Living with, in, and around it, allowing it to color and shade so much of your life.

Lou Reed liked to point out that his friend and mentor, the poet Delmore Schwartz, believed that a man could do worse than to devote his life to studying the work of James Joyce.

You’re pretty sure you can take Lou Reed’s music and run with it for the remainder of your own limited days, and you will feel no sense of loss, no regret, no guilt. You will only feel more alive.

Whose Blood, What Tracks?

To the left is a poorly-cropped paragraph from Patti Smith’s review of Bob Dylan’s 1974 album Planet Waves, printed in the April 1974 issue of Creem. (Which has an absolutely awesome cover featuring the world's forgotten boy searching & destroying a whole bunch of vinyl.) This isn’t even the best part of that review – that comes either when Smith describes how The Band’s music makes her nervous “like a bumblebee in the face” or when she sums up Dylan’s sex appeal thusly: “Positive energy behind a negative mask is very sexy. Like a full basket under straining pants.”

What’s interesting about this particular paragraph is the choice of words in sentence two: “…hero is bleeding is tracked through the snow…”. Could it be that Dylan, recognizing a particularly evocative turn-of-phrase from the pen of a fellow poet, purloined the title of his very famous, very classic next album from the not-yet-famous, soon-to-make-a-classic-album-of-her-own Patti Smith?

Which begs further questions. Did Bob Dylan read Creem regularly? Or did he just read his own reviews? 

Living On Dreams

Why is it that we like death songs so much? Especially the slow, melodramatic kind? There are enough of them to form a full-on rock and roll subgenre. Think about it – from the car crash in The Everly Brothers “Ebony Eyes” to the bike crash in The Shangri-La’s “Leader Of The Pack” to the everything crash in Eminem’s “Stan”. It’s a thing.

My own pick of the bunch is Hot Chocolate’s “Emma”, which really oughtta be called “Emmaline” since that’s the name singer Errol Brown repeats often enough that it becomes the song’s hook.

Hot Chocolate was a British soul/disco band that had a string of hits in the ‘70’s. Most famous in America for the number 2 hit “You Sexy Thing” (you know it - “I believe in MIRACLES!”), with any justice there really ought to be a resurgence of interest in their music due to the use of their song “Brother Louie” over the opening credits of Louis C.K.’s TV show. (Which version, oddly, also becomes a death song due to the alteration of the line “Louie, Louie you’re gonna cry” to the more Louie C.K.-like “Louie, Louie you’re gonna die.” But I digress)

I was eight years old the first time I heard “Emma”.  My older sister played this morbid little tune for me, probably in an effort to creep me the hell out. It kind of worked, but I was also kind of fascinated. I demanded to hear it again, and I’ve never really tired of hearing it since.

“Emma” utilizes a formula that worked well for Hot Chocolate: a spare, pulsing bass, Errol Brown’s schizophrenically smoky and strangled vocal delivery, and their sonic signature – a guitar hook played through (according to Wikipedia, anyway) a Marshall Time Modulator, whatever that is, which ends up sounding kind of like a riff that’s been programmed into a computer and played back underwater.  

The sound pulls the listener in, that bass throbbing like the heartbeat of a man alone in a shabby motel room with nothing but his tortured thoughts, that guitar riff snaking through the song like the ghost of a long gone lover, but the real drama in “Emma” is in the unfolding story in the song’s lyrics. In a nutshell, the singer meets Emmaline at five, she wants to be a movie star even then (as five year olds often do) and everyone thinks she can do it ‘cos she has a face like an angel. Then, when they turn seventeen the singer and Emmaline get married. (Yeah, seventeen certainly does sound young, but keep in mind that twenty-one doesn’t really rhyme with “Emmaline”). He works hard and promises that one day she’ll be a star. But Emmaline can’t stand the grind of searching for that elusive starring role and one day the singer comes home to find Emmaline lying on the bed, still, cold, gone.

“Emmaline!”

The whole song pivots around this ending – Brown, who has been coolly building up to it with all the skill of a great dramatic actor, pushes himself past the point of hysteria, screaming the title name repeatedly, drawing it out, gravelly and rough, the sense of emotional catharsis for those few seconds comparable to John Lennon’s “Mother”. (Extra resonance in this comparison - Brown has said that he wrote the song as a way of memorializing his own deceased mother.)  

The delivery method of that catharsis might be called into question. It’s cheesy stuff, in a way – over the top, melodrama for its own sake. The reading of Emma’s suicide note, for instance, is a maybe a touch too far, with background voices suddenly to the fore, extra echo added for eerie effect.

But you know, “Leader Of The Pack” is cheesy stuff too, and it’s still a totally classic record. Though it might be argued that The Shangri-Las classic has one up on “Emma” in that it’s postmodernism in action, a song aware of its own schlocky over-the-topness.

Still, I think “Emma” is a classic too, give or take any degree of self-consciousness. And that suicide note, while melodramatic, also packs a punch that any listener should have no trouble relating to. Emma tries and fails, and though she loves the singer, she ends up confessing to him, in a turn of phrase that never fails to wrench my gut with its weird mixture of pith and poetry, that she “just can’t keep living on dreams no more”.

Well, nobody can. That’s no reason, of course, not to keep on living, but who hasn’t at some point felt worn out, drained, dragged down by the failure of their own expectations?

We go on. Maybe that’s why we like songs like this so much, ‘cos it gives us a chance to feel more alive, like we’ve survived while others have been swept away by their own desires. Maybe we just wanna feel superior.

I hope not. Hopefully there’s some sense of pathos in our attraction to these songs and their tragic characters.

I think there is when it comes to this one, and that’s why it’s my favorite of the death song subgenre. Unless Jody Reynolds’ “Endless Sleep” counts. Which I don’t think it does, ‘cos the girl in that song survives. Could be near-death songs are a subgenre worth investigating, too. Next time, maybe.
  

Electric Rainyland

It won’t stop raining. Seriously, it’s August. Dead of Summer. Why won’t it stop raining?

Not sure why I care so much, I’m not even an outdoorsy type. It’s not like I just can’t wait to head out to the lake with a six-pack to catch some rays or anything. I’m just about the palest person I know.

 

But dammit, I think seasons should live up to expectations. Stick to the familiar pattern.  And this summer has let me down.

Maybe it’s one of those weird emotional holdovers from childhood. When you’re a kid you want it to be sunny so you can go out and….do whatever it is that kids do. I don’t really remember. Come to think of it, I guess I spent most of my time inside reading comic books and watching reruns on television. So there you go.

Still, summer means sun, leisure, late nights, no school. Ah, no school. It’s weird how that feeling of not having to go to school does a number on the psyche. I haven’t gone to school in more than twenty years, but somehow I still look forward to summer with the same kind of anticipation.

That’s why it should be sunny. Because I want to fully enjoy not having to go to school again. So I can hang out and play video games. So I can crank up Zeppelin or The Who. So I can stay up and watch Letterman. So I can head to the movies or the baseball game. And at the baseball game I’ll turn to my companion and utilize the old Ferris Bueller quote, as my friends and I so often did, regardless of whether it was even appropriate, which means we’d use it even during summer vacation: “Do you realize, if we’d played by the rules right now we’d be in gym?”

Once, in my junior year, on a rainy day towards the end of the school year, my friends and I nearly skipped school. Yeah, that’s the kind of rebellious thugs we were – we NEARLY skipped school. As we milled about before the first bell debating whether or not to leave, I tried to pump myself up for the possible truancy by imagining all the fun we might have. Since it was raining we’d have to stay indoors. Which means we’d end up at the mall, or Burger King. Doesn’t sound like much, but hey, when you’re seventeen and among friends, throwing around wisecracks and lewd jokes and generally acting obnoxious, going to those quaint places and just hanging around can be a helluva lot of fun. It was a simpler time, then. Maybe. Probably not.

The thing I really wanted to do was go back to my house and listen to records. The album I remember specifically wanting to listen to was Electric Ladyland. With the rain and all, it seemed appropriate. Side 3 – “Rainy Day, Dream Away” into “1983” into “Moon Turn The Tides…Gently Gently Away”. I imagined all of us sitting around, watching the rain through the window, floating away on that weird aquatic/astral soundscape while Jimi sings about starfish and mermen. Escaping into some kind of elsewhere. And without drugs even. I mean, none of us even smoked pot. Though I suspect that was due more to lack of ingenuity than anything else.

The point is that feeling of escape. Tripping out on eerie underwater music when we oughtta be in gym. That feeling of escape was so intoxicating back then. I’ve tried so hard so often to replicate it in the years since, and usually failed.

Maybe I don’t have anything that I feel the need to escape from anymore.

Maybe I didn’t then. We didn’t actually skip school that day. Hell, the horrible truth is I kind of liked school.

And I generally like the things I do now. Still, I have this nagging urge to leave. Find something, somewhere else, where something beautiful and weird might be happening.

Maybe I’ll throw on Electric Ladyland. It might be the only escape.

John Lydon's Forgotten Fury

Make no mistake, the name John Lydon will forever be associated first and foremost with the glorious noise he and his bandmates in the Sex Pistols made over the course of two tumultuous years in the late seventies.  Personality and legal conflicts made a shooting star out of the group, and those two factors alone contributed to Lydon’s violent desire to sever his every last tie with them. Given the earth-shattering effect of the Pistols’ music, Lydon must have also felt enormous pressure to escape the shadow it cast.

His next band produced at least one effort that was up to the task. Public Image Ltd.’s 1979/80 Metal Box/Second Edition blended disco, dub and dissonance to hugely influential and enduringly listenable effect.

Between the scorched earth Pistols and trailblazing Metal Box, though, came PiL’s initial effort, the oft-overlooked First Issue. The album has been especially easy to overlook in America, where the be-suited brains at Warner Bros. delayed release of the album in 1978, supposedly because the huge bass sound made them queasy. Despite attempts at re-recording, the album was shelved, and it languished in America as an import-only obscurity for decades.

Earlier this summer, reissue label Light In The Attic finally corrected that bit of corporate negligence, and Americans can now bask in the corrosive wonder of John Lydon’s first post-Pistols effort. It’s a bracing listen.

First track “Theme” is a clear signal that the listener should be prepared for anything. Nine minutes of Keith Levene’s blistering garage/mirage guitar wrapping itself around a lurching, sodden rhythm, over which Lydon repeatedly intones, with wavering degrees of hysteria, “I wish I could die.” It’s a beast of a track.

It’s also a clear signal that PiL is a complete band effort – remove Lydon from the track and the combination of Levene’s guitar and Jah Wobble’s ever-steady bass still get the feeling across.

And it’s a not altogether pleasant feeling. The song is an ugly black cloud, no way in, no way out. Lydon has claimed that the song is simply an over-dramatized reaction to a bad day, but one could be forgiven for hearing something darker. Dark enough that the only logical response might be uneasy laughter. That reaction is given validity at the end of the track, when Lydon tongue-in-cheekly states “I just died.” Then as the instruments fade out he finishes the thought: “Of terminal boredom”.

There’s no comic relief let-up in “Religion” (PiL did love the one-word titles), a two-part diatribe against the Catholic church, and organized religion in general, if one chooses to hear it that way. The song is presented first as a no-frills spoken-word piece, then once again with jarring, rhythmically wayward musical accompaniment. Maybe it’s over-serious, but something in the delivery – the insistence of Lydon’s recitation, the way the rhythm keeps shifting – pulls in the listener and doesn’t let go.

The tempo picks up on “Annalisa”. The beat is simple, caveman-like, with Lydon wailing amelodically about a pair of English parents who let their child starve because they thought she was possessed. It’s fiery and effective, the repetition trancelike, Lydon’s monotone chilling, but like a couple of songs on side two, it shows up the transitional status of the album; not as songful as the Pistols or their punk brethren, not as risky as the post-punk that PiL would embody and inspire.

The Sex Pistols are dredged up again in “Public Image”, at least lyrically, with Lydon pouring all the venom he can muster at the unseemly machinations and exploitations that led to the rise and fall of his former band. Musically it’s something slightly different, with Levene’s chiming, echoing guitar pattern ringing around Lydon’s wavering voice in ways that Steve Jones couldn’t have dreamed of (and admittedly maybe didn’t care to.)  U2 fans should pay attention, because The Edge certainly did.

The album ends on a bizarre note. “Fodderstompf” is another long track consisting of not much more than a disco groove and the Lydon/Wobble duo repeating the phrase “We only wanted to be loved” in shrill Monty Python-as-old-ladies voices. It’s annoying, funny, boring, and hypnotic all at once. Like “Theme” it can make the listener do a 180 in their reaction. You laugh, then something in the impulse behind the phrase “We only wanted to be loved” makes you feel a little squeamish.

And if that’s what PiL wanted – to provoke – then so be it. Because it isn’t cheap. There’s too much real emotion in this music, too much intelligence, too much pure blood and guts, for it to be a simple provocation. It’s an act of palpable release, a testament to fortitude, and it can now take its place alongside The Sex Pistols and Metal Box as a fascinating Lydon-led cry from the soul.  

Ghost Stone

Even when he was alive Brian Jones was more ghost than man. Or so one would think, from the way history has painted his picture. Judging from the scant film footage from his time in the band and the reams of literature (hello, Keith) about the Stones, it’s easy enough to think of him as some kind of mist-like, shape shifting entity rather than flesh and blood.

Which is why the footage in the recently released Charlie Is My Darling is such a revelation. In addition to the most electrifying live footage yet seen from the Jones era (shot in Ireland in 1965), Brian also gets valuable camera time as a talking head, and it’s a refreshing shock to encounter him as a living, breathing human being rather than a spectral presence called up from someone’s unreliable memory. Choosing his words carefully, he is revealed as the ambitious, soft-spoken, keenly intelligent person that many say he was. 

He is also terribly self-aware, observing at one point, “Let’s face it, life as a Rolling Stone is very unpredictable.”

He says that with a slight gleam in his eye, as if he already knows or suspects how that future will play out. For that brief moment it’s possible to feel not only his humanity, but also to catch a glimpse of the mercurial, charismatic quality that made him such a fascinating figure.

To be sure, within many circles (including that of the band he founded) he was not well liked. A notorious drug fiend, womanizer, and all-around self-centered man-child, his must have been an incredibly difficult personality to deal with. It also provided the worldly, sensual, and sinister impulse that lurks within the Rolling Stones’ best music.

There is a subset of Rolling Stones fans that insists that Brian Jones WAS The Rolling Stones. He set the stage, putting the band together, dictating the musical direction and providing the most appealingly exotic ugly/beautiful (in Brian’s case mostly beautiful) physical appearance in a band with many contenders. These fans swear that the Stones really ended with his dismissal from the group.

The trouble with that theory, of course, is that not only did Mick and Keith have more than enough talent and charisma to match Brian, but (duh) they wrote the songs that turned the band into a cultural institution, and eventually into a world-dominating, money-generating, unstoppable corporate machine.

Still, consider the subject matter, and the alluringly dark and comic atmosphere of the Stones best songs. Particularly those of the 65-6 period, with the sardonic social observations and sexually-charged put-downs – “Play With Fire”, “Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown”, “Stupid Girl”. Or the gleefully grim attitude of “Get Off My Cloud” or “Paint It Black.” If this music was somehow mixed together and reprocessed as a movie or a book or a play, the lead character would be Brian Jones.    

Such was the potency of his character - that of the ultimate flash sixties libertine, ceaselessly flirting with any available edge, immersed in erotica, the occult, and the pleasures and pains provided by any number of controlled substances – that it haunted the Stones’ music for years, even after his death 44 years ago. 

In fact, it might be possible to trace the decline in quality of The Rolling Stones music to the gradually diminishing presence of Brian Jones (or his ghost) through the years. On the post-69 peaks Sticky Fingers and Exile On Main Street that presence is obvious. Drug-fuelled, casually carnal, from the dissolute haze of “Sister Morphine” to the grungy harmonica-driven version of Robert Johnson’s “Stop Breakin’ Down”, it’s everywhere on these records, sometimes hidden in the shadows, sometimes in plain sight. It can even be found in the decadent fog of Goat’s Head Soup and the charged-up glitz of It’s Only Rock ‘N Roll.

Only with the later ‘70’s records, the New York-obsessed punk-inspired Some Girls or the funky, exploratory mishmash Emotional Rescue, is his presence more or less absent, though the sheer momentum of the band’s creative drive kept the music interesting during this time. By the eighties it seems to be gone completely, and so is the power, the ability to compel, of the music. “Continental Drift” from 1989’s tepid Steel Wheels, an attempt at Eastern exotica that utilizes the same group of Moroccan musicians Jones recorded in 1967, is less an invocation of Jones exploratory spirit than an impotent attempt at connecting with it.

Or maybe this theory is bullshit, too. Drawing at straws in an effort to understand why this music is so fascinating. More mythmaking to expunge into an endless sea of the stuff.

But mythmaking is part of what both rock and roll and The Rolling Stones are all about. Luckily, we have a pretty hard reality that we can rely on in the form of the Stones’ recorded work. And if you love rock and roll, it’s hard to argue with that.  

For The Sake Of Future Days

It’s here in the thick of summer that I always reach for Can’s Future Days. The fourth (or fifth, if you count Soundtracks) full-length album by the visionary German art-rock quintet just seems to go well with blaring sunlight, slight breezes and long, languid summer hours.

Appropriately, the album was recorded in the summertime, in balmy Cologne, just after the band had returned from vacation. The relaxed atmosphere resulted in a record somewhat at odds with the band’s previous output; where once their improvisatory sound had been clattering and off-kilter - Monster Movie and Tago Mago had been comprised largely of built-up tension and shocks to the nervous system - Future Days was tranquil, the sound of water rushing over rocks downstream.

Water is the album’s primary elemental concern right from the first and title track, in which a gentle, repetitive rhythm evokes the feeling of drifting away on a raft in the ocean. The track is unbelievably sparse, the guitar weaving back and forth over a clipped, metronomic beat, with a one-note bass part emerging periodically as if from mist. Singer Damo Suzuki hovers over the track like a ghost, with his usual broken English/Japanese/German/Nonsense lyrics delivered within an airy, sing-song melody.

As in most Can music, the effect of this track and the following “Spray”, is to induce a trancelike, hypnotic effect. Or to at least disorient the listener. “Spray” approximates the sound of deep-sea diving, full of bubbling water and swirling life. Its floaty, up-and-down feel is so drastic that at least two people that I’ve played the album for have asked me to turn it off because it was making them dizzy. 

After the album’s single, “Moonshake”, a track so groovy and space-age-bachelor-pad-like that Stereolab seem to have based the better part of their recording career on it, comes the album’s tour-de-force, the sidelong “Bel Air”. Using ingredients from the first side, including the watery atmosphere and circular rhythmic patterns, “Bel Air” takes off into more expansive territory. Alternately dreamy and turbulent, the track moves through several suite-like sections, all held together by Suzuki’s beautiful, dreamike vocal melody. The obvious comparison is Pink Floyd’s “Echoes”. Both tracks might work as a soundtrack to the "Jupiter And Beyond The Infinite" section of 2001: A Space Odyssey, though where Floyd were definitely drifting into space Can seem to be dealing with more earthly, if similarly mysterious elements.

Or not. Where one listener hears the ocean the other might hear the stratosphere. And Future Days is an open-ended album, elliptical in a good way. And fascinating for all of its contradictions. It’s both inward-looking and exploratory – “Spray”, evocative as it is of movement through blood vessels, has always reminded me of Fantastic Voyage, with the scientists shrinking down so they can travel through a human body. Elsewhere, the album is both static, as on the shimmering peacefulness of the title track, and full of peaks and valleys, as in “Bel Air”’s movements from drifting bliss to roiling whirlpool of sound.

Mostly the album endures for its utility. I believe it works most naturally in the summer, but it’s probably equally effective in any other season – it might work as a nice respite from winter’s cold, or it might provide regenerative power in the fall, when everything is dying. It also fits most any mood, easing melancholy or reflecting back the glow of happiness.

Or, like almost any good art, it can be a means of escape – the whole album could be heard as the sound of floating away. Who doesn’t need to float away every now and again?

Married, Buried, Yay Yay Yay

Last week it was announced that a twentieth anniversary edition of Nirvana’s In Utero album will be released in September. Twenty years? Holy crap.

It started me thinking about those days in 1993, being a Nirvana fan and waiting/wading through all the scandal and rumor in the run-up to the album’s release. Nevermind had sent such enormous shockwaves through the music world that every move Cobain and company made in 92/93 was noted in the music press with inordinate amounts of scrutiny and hysteria. Following it all could be both dizzying and numbing.

Of course the way the story played out seems inevitable now, with twenty years hindsight. At the time, though, the crazy sense of anything-might-happen was a lot of fun. Innocent, even. Will the band break up? Nah, they’re too smart to ruin such a good thing. So the cops came to Kurt and Courtney’s house to check on a possible domestic disturbance? But those two seem to have it so together, it’s gotta be a misunderstanding.

No, really, back then it was actually very easy to see it that way. Kurt so often came across in interviews as such an erudite, even-keeled fellow. When he said in that Spring ’92 interview with Rolling Stone that he wasn’t a hopeless heroin addict, it was almost believable. Especially if you were a hardcore fan, completely taken in by the notion that these guys really were the rock and roll white knights, sent here by some holy spiritual alliance of The Beatles and The Stooges and REM and Sonic Youth to save us all from the Skid Rows and Warrants then ravaging the rock and roll world with sickening doses of cliché and hairspray.

So when word got out in Spring ’93 that the newly-recorded follow-up to Nevermind had been nixed by the record label for being too uncommercial, there was no reason for panic. Nirvana were a smart bunch of guys, they’d find a way to get the music out there. We all eagerly awaited the surely awesome, probably much punkier batch of tunes, our imaginations fed by tantalizing titles like “Milk It”, “Rape Me”, and “Moist Vagina”.

Then there was the tentative title of the record: I Hate Myself And I Want To Die. Hilarious. See, Kurt Cobain’s making fun of his own (and his generation’s/audience’s) - propensity for unresolved anger and emotional confusion. What most right-thinking adults think of as just a bunch of whiny, privileged Generation Xers who oughtta just get over themselves, Kurt Cobain recognizes as genuinely confused people who are also smart enough to know that confusion shouldn’t stop them from moving forward with life. Self-awareness and irony, see?

Well, the humorous part of the title we got right, but we should be forgiven for not spotting how very black that humor actually was. I mean, look at the promotional video for In Utero’s release, with Bobcat Goldthwaite administering over the band as they give birth to a horde of plastic fetuses. These guys are not that serious.

Even when the album came out, for all of the noise and rage and gross body imagery, much of the focus ended up falling on lyrics that seemed at the time to point to a fairly healthy outlook. If Kurt could note that the pay-off from teenage angst had made him feel bored and old, how far away from finding some route to new found engagement and a youthful sense of purpose could he be? If he's aware that that legendary divorce is such a bore, shouldn't he be able to work through the emotional residue of his own childhood issues?

Maybe those questions were naïve even then. Too hopeful, too blinded by the intoxicating sound of gut-crunching drums and guitars that sounded like gnarly, slippery vines winding around your heart like aural intestines.

Still, I can't help but remember how hopeful the picture seemed then, at least as it was presented in the press, and here I am thinking specifically of the Rolling Stone cover story in which the band appeared dressed in suits with the headline "Success Doesn't Suck". Kurt sounded excited for the future. I don't think it was a put-on, he likely believed his own words at the time he spoke them. If his fans were sometimes willfully delusional, so was he. Artists are mirrors of their audience, but maybe the opposite can also be true.

Sometimes I imagine a Kurt Cobain who actually resembled the Kurt Cobain I really thought existed back then. One who wasn't cursed with a terrible mixture of chemical imbalance and family issues and drug dependence. One who was resolutely positive and determined to pull through the morass of fame and fans and addiction. Dedicated to art at any cost.

Maybe he could have started his own label and been a Jack White kind of figure. Only he'd reissue old favorites like Fang and the Marine Girls instead of old blues singers. (Though Leadbelly might sneak in there.) Maybe the celebrity aura would have died down and he could be an elder statesman figure like Sonic Youth or REM, or an omnipresent fount of ongoing musical activity like Robert Pollard or J Mascis. 

But maybe there's also an alternate world in which Hitler was a really likeable guy and Gandhi was a reprobate. We're stuck with this one, in which Nirvana was a shooting star and In Utero was the last fading glimmer in the trail. Where "Heart-Shaped Box" is an endless, gorgeous mystery and "Milk It" an impenetrable, fascinating beast. Where songs about elation, "Dumb" say, though "All Apologies" qualifies, end up sounding deeply sad. The guy, and the band, were hopelessly complicated, but those songs exist. That's enough. 

Forty Thousand Men And Women Everyday

Recently at their Solid Sound festival in North Adams, Massachusetts, Wilco offered up a set comprised exclusively of  crazy-cool covers. The show was subsequently made available on the band’s website so listeners could enjoy rough-hewn renditions of classics by The Beatles, Big Star , The Velvet Underground, etc.

Listening to this set in the car today I was especially taken by one particular choice. “This song is for Tom,” announces Jeff Tweedy and there’s a nice little moment of suspense (What’s it gonna be? What’s it gonna be?) just before he uncoils the hypnotic opening guitar riff of Blue Öyster Cult's 1976 hit single "(Don't Fear) The Reaper".

 

Wilco’s faithfully eerie version of the tune struck a nerve in me somehow. They do it straight, without any implied tongue-in-cheekiness. And yeah, thank God, because it seems to me that the perception of this song has been distorted through the years in ways that do not do it justice. If people don’t associate it with whatever horror movie it was last used in (Halloween was the first, that '94 TV version of The Stand the most effective) then they often perceive it as just another ready-made classic rock standby – merely one among thousands of others by the likes of .38 Special, Head East, Foghat, etc. Or more likely, they think of it as the set-up to an admittedly hilarious Saturday Night Live sketch.

But the song deserves better, dammit. Seriously, next time you hear it, pay special attention, because it’s a fucking classic. As a record – a three-minute slab of sound that uses words, rhythm and melody to convey an otherwise inexpressible feeling – it’s one of the finest, most effective moments in the rock and roll canon, on par with “Ticket To Ride” or “September Girls” or “When Doves Cry” or whatever you think of as the high water marks of rock singledom.

The song is an anomaly even within the Blue Öyster Cult catalog. Prior to 1976 they were a very good heavy rock band, especially adept at mixing churning riffs with sci-fi/horror mythology. Maybe they were a little more literate that your average hard rock combo – Patti Smith and rock critic Richard Meltzer contributed lyrics – but even if they had come up with three excellent hard rock albums (and they had) there was still nothing in their pre-’76 repetoire that suggested they might come up with a Song For The Ages.  

And that’s what it is. All those swirling, windswept guitar patterns and chilly vibes - the track simply isn’t like much of anything else, especially anything on top forty radio in the mid-seventies. Comparisons to The Byrds aren’t inaccurate, that winding repetitive riff is very similar to “So You Want To Be A Rock And Roll Star” and the vocals have the same hushed, haunted tone as “Eight Miles High”. But there isn’t a twelve-string guitar within earshot, and if there is a hint of the American folk tradition that Roger McGuinn’s crew were so in thrall to, it’s only in the sense of foreboding and the acceptance of death’s inevitability that runs through Old Weird American songs like “The Coo Coo Bird”. Otherwise it stands outside barriers of time or circumstance, even those of the transitional dayglo-to-punk year 1976. 

BÖC would follow up their big hit with an album, Spectres, that only partially attempted to replicate the sound of "Reaper". The song titles give clues: "I Love The Night", "Celestial The Queen", "Nosferatu". But the album's biggest hit was "Godzilla", a return to heavy riffage that stands alongside the band's later "Burnin' For You" as one of those classic rock readymade standbys you can hear about forty times if you drive cross-country for a couple days listening to nothing but classic rock radio.  (Which I actually did once. Whitesnake's horrid "Here I Go Again" was the big winner repetition-wise.)

All of that other BÖC music is worthwhile, in its way, even if Wilco won't be covering any of those songs anytime soon. But hey, they came up with one indelible moment, and isn't that enough? Just because a band only produces one masterpiece is no reason to relegate that band and its finest accomplishment to the ghetto of "More cowbell!"

America Drunk On Itself

Outside it's all happening. I keep hearing the loud bursts of sound, random, like gunfire, with the accompanying lights flashing across the sky. Hell, I kind of wanna go out there and blend in with the commotion. Go crazy with noise and color and pig intestines and beer. Why the hell not? We're Americans, we can do whatever we damn well please.

What I’m doing instead is obsessively watching and re-watching a short clip of Dick Cavett interviewing Jimi Hendrix in 1969. It's just after Woodstock, where Hendrix played a searing rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner”. In his version the bombs bursting in air seemed to be exploding in torturous slow motion. Probably in Vietnam. 

Cavett wants to talk about the animosity engendered by any “unorthodox” interpretation of the national anthem. Hendrix is having none of it, he interrupts Cavett mid-sentence, speaking pointedly, assuredly: “Hey listen, that’s not unorthodox. I thought it was beautiful.”

Those words work like music. Watching the bit over and over, it’s easy to become entranced. Those words, and the way Hendrix says them, take on the air of simple, ineffable truth. They have the same kind of impact, maybe more, as his guitar playing at its most expressive. Bob Dylan, speaking through Jeff Bridges, nailed the subtext of the Hendrix Anthem performance - though he may as well have been talking about the Cavett appearance - in 2003's Masked and Anonymous: "I'm not a traitor - I'm a native son." 

On the Cavett show you can hear in Hendrix's words a vision of (for) the country that he must have felt was just within grasp. One where every window is open and every rule is subject to change. But that's what it's like here anyway, isn't it? Isn't it?

Around this time Hendrix was workshopping a song called “Freedom”. It's a mean, funky song, with Hendrix zig-zagging between exultation and desperation, stretching and repeating the title word again and again, demanding "Give it to me, so I can live." That could be an echo reverberating from two years earlier, when in one of his most powerful songs he had cried "I don't live today".

It’s a slippery concept, freedom. We bandy the word about wantonly, not only in politics but in everyday life. I hear it applied to music all the time. “Rock and Roll is really about freedom.” “Jazz represents freedom.” “Punk means freedom.” You can find variations on this idea just about everywhere. This is freedom. There are a lot of different kinds of freedom.

For a country, and a people, who have freedom inherent in our very identity, it's a little odd that we spend so much time trying to define its parameters. And then trying to burst through them. Like a vicious circle, we're free to be free to be free to be free.

And then we're free to wallow in it. Like right now.

America - drunk on ideas, possibilities, freedom's ever-shifting meaning, and alcohol (mostly alcohol) for two-hundred thirty-plus years. 

Woo-hoo!