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!