all the things...

We've Moved!

2010-10-05T21:31:00.000-07:00

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It's Been a Long Time

2010-05-18T16:27:00.000-07:00

I'm back after a long break, doing this for nothing other than self-clarification. This blog is no longer really meant to be consumed by an audience, though it's perfectly fine if people are interested in my ruminations. I once had a writing teacher who told the class that the vast majority of people in the world fail to realize that their lives just aren't that interesting. It's a lesson that's stuck with me...

Before I was six months old, my father was out the door for good. I never got to know him at all. I saw him maybe a dozen times over the next 35 years. Some of those visits were pretty freaky, and maybe I'll write them down at some point. A few years ago, a sister I barely knew I had called me from out of the blue to tell me that my father had died several years earlier of liver poisoning. The guy liked to drink. I think about this every night as I'm fixing myself a big vodka and cranberry, realizing that I need the drink to relax and feel free of all the low-level shit I have to deal with everyday...

My mom was/is a workaholic and a striver. She subordinated everything, including me, including my real sister, to her career. She says that the 60s passed her by and that she didn't even notice they were happening. This is true up to a point. She was not a beatnik or a hippie. She hates the sound of electric guitars. She never protested or joined any causes opposing the status quo. On the contrary, she was a conformist, singular focussed on money and achievement. Still, her soaring career success probably would not have occurred had it not been for feminism and evolving gender roles. So maybe it's more accurate to say that she was an unwitting product of the 60s, old enough to have one foot still planted in the 50s.

...This is where my family tree starts to get complicated. My mom met my non-biological dad before I was born. I think of him my real dad because he raised me as his son. I have reason to believe that the two of them were romantically involved while she was pregnant with me. She let it slip out once that he was at the hospital on my birthday while my biological father was nowhere to be found. I've tried on occasion to probe for details about the whole dynamic, but it''s uncomfortable and remains murky. She tends to paper over the messy details in her life. My biological father was rarely discussed when I was growing up. I got the unspoken message that he was a part of my life best forgotten.

I've always had a sense that there's something fundamentally wrong with me...

a break in the action

2008-12-16T16:01:00.000-08:00

Over the next few days, I'm gonna be taking this blog down for a bit while I attend to some personal stuff. I thought about chronicling it all like I did when I was fighting depression and anxiety, maybe even in more detail, but then I decided that my latest problems really aren't that interesting. ...It's kind of disappointing, I think, when you visit a blog over and over again only to find that the content is almost never updated, so I figured I'll take All The Things down until I'm more equipped to make regular contributions. I'll let everybody know.

a portrait of the artist as a young man

2008-12-05T08:23:00.000-08:00

I'm happy to report that I've managed to claw my way out of the dark place I talked about over the last few posts. I couldn't have done it without the love and support of my family and friends. I also want to thank the Eli Lilly Corporation for the wonders of Cymbalta - 60 mgs a day is guaranteed to turn your frown upside down. Hooray for Big Pharma! ...My recovery feels a bit tentative and precarious at this point, but I'm doing much better.

The struggle against personal demons left me out of it for a few weeks, so much so that I failed to notice that Neil Young has released another archival recording, Sugar Mountain: Live at Canterbury Hall, from Ann Arbor Michigan in 1968. All of the recent archival tapes Neil has made available over the last few years are terrific and worth adding to your collection if you're a fan. Live at the Fillmore East captures Neil Young and Crazy Horse in early 1970, between what are arguably Neil's two greatest studio albums, Everybody Knows this is Nowhere and After the Gold Rush. Then there's Massey Hall, 1971, a solo acoustic concert from the heady period between CSN&Y's Deja Vu and Neil's Harvest. I like the Massey Hall show quite a bit, but it doesn't hold a candle to the Canterbury Hall tape, recorded a few days shy of Neil's 23rd birthday, in the immediate aftermath of Buffalo Springfield, and on the eve of the release of Neil's self-titled first solo album.

From the first few strummed notes of the Live at Canterbury Hall opener, "On the Way Home" (which was initially sung by Richie Furay on the Springfield's Last Time Around), you're in for a special treat. Even though the concert is just Neil armed with an acoustic guitar, the playing is crisp and his singing is angelic and expressive. What really strikes me about the recording as a whole is that it's a snapshot of Neil at an especially pivotal transition point in his career. His between song banter is that of a kid who knows he's a special talent but has yet to be jaded by the corrupting effects of money and mass adulation. It's disarming to hear Neil speak with such light affability. He tells silly jokes and stories with good natured ease and without the guarded, vaguely antagonistic tone he would soon frequently adopt as he became more and more of a bona fide rock 'n roll icon. It's easy to forget that by this time he had already been through the crucible of the mid 60s Sunset Strip scene and its demise. Listening to the recording, I was reminded of seeing Neil perform Greendale a few years ago at the Greek Theater. At one point during the show, a cell phone went off. Neil stopped in mid song, looked directly at the offending party, and then sneeringly asked, "Is that for me?" Granted, I hate cell phone rudeness as well, but this was still Neil a billion light years away from the cheerful, pleasantly naive space he'd occupied 35 years earlier at Cantebury Hall.

For those of us who love Buffalo Springfield, Live at Canterbury Hall is all the more worthwhile as Neil plays lovely, stripped-down versions of "I am a Child," "Broken Arrow," "Out of My Mind," "Mr. Soul," and "Expecting to Fly." There's also a quite stunning version of "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing" thrown in, the first time I've ever heard Neil sing it himself... The performance is additionally peppered with great songs from his solo debut album - "The Loner," "If I Could Have Her Tonight," "I've Been Waiting for You," "The Old Laughing Lady," and "Last Trip to Tulsa." A number of these songs were rarely if ever part of Neil's live repertoire later, so if you're partial to the early phase of his career, or if you're an obsessed fan interested in the bridge period between Neil as a member of Buffalo Springfield and Neil as a wildly imaginative solo artist, then Live at Canterbury Hall is a recording you need to have.

homo economus

2008-11-22T09:07:00.000-08:00

I feel a little self-conscious being so 'out there' with my depression and anxiety issues, but writing about them is helpful - especially since my shrink is out of town for a few weeks and I've got nowhere else to spill. Let me say here that I am not one of those people who revel in their own misery. There's nothing exhibitionistic about any of this. I'm looking forward to having this episode go away, to getting past it and getting back to some semblance of normality. Luckily, I'm not completely debilitated. I'm going to work, doing my job, exercising, seeing friends, working around the house, etc. I even went on two dates last weekend. But I feel different from my normal self - more nervous, less focussed, more distracted, less engaged, more fearful of some impending disaster, less motivated... When I'm at my best, there aren't enough hours in the day for me to do everything I want to do. When I'm at my worst, I can't wait for the day to end so that I can find peace in sleep. I'm not at my worst anymore, due in large part to a change in meds after 15 years or so of being on the same thing. (Antidepressants apparently 'poop out' after extended use). That I can sit down and write this blog post is a tribute to the effectiveness of the new meds. Antidepressants used to take a few weeks to kick in. Now they work right away... So I'm not at rock bottom, but I'm also far from being at my best. I haven't really been able to do much work on my book or short story in the last few weeks. I also haven't been eating as much as I normally do (which may be a hidden blessing), and I still have my morose moments and episodes of intense anxiety.

I'm not a doctor or an expert, but I've read enough to know that depression and anxiety are partly physiological phenomena having to do with imbalances in brain chemistry. This is the part of the equation that the meds can address. But there's also the external triggers - the things outside of oneself that impinge on the brain chemistry and lead to certain responses. In my case, the biggest external trigger at the moment is the state of the U.S. and global economy. It may seem silly to spend so much energy worrying about something over which I have no control, but the fact that I can't control it only makes me feel more anxious. And the trappings of the Information Age only serve to make the fear worse. It would be great if I could just put my head down, go on about my normal business, and forget about things that are beyond my reach. Some people can do this. I envy them. Trouble is, these days we're all bombarded with horrible news wherever we go. Let me describe how my morning went yesterday...

It was Friday, my day off. I woke up, popped my new pills, and read my e-mail. Then I looked at CNN.com. The headline read, 'Economists predict prolonged, severe recession.' OK, not exactly a Kellogg's mornin'... I get dressed and head to Starbucks for my daily fix. I sit down with my coffee and there's an L.A. Times on the table in front of me with a headline that's something like, 'Markets in Free Fall over Fear of Bank Failures: Years of Gains Wiped Out.' My stomach begins to tighten, but I do what I can to shake it off... I drive to the bank to make a deposit and take out some money for the weekend. There's a flat screen over the teller's window. CNN is reporting that jobless claims are at their highest in 16 years. My knees get rubbery, but all I can do is absorb the blow and move on... I drive to the barber shop. The place is normally jam packed but today it's strangely empty. My barber, Juan, takes me right away. He watches the Telemundo news on an old Zenith T.V. while he works. The report's in Spanish, but I can tell from the graphics and the sound of the words that they're talking about recession, unemployment, foreclosures, and all that other pleasant stuff. By the time I walk out of the shop, I look good but I'm a complete mess emotionally. ...As I drive back home, I tune in to Sports Talk because I figure they won't be talking about economic stuff. Sports are a soothing escape. But the first thing I hear when I turn on the radio is an ad for some company selling gold. Gold, the announcer says, increases in value during times of crisis. He adds that it's important to own gold now because 'things will be getting much worse before they get better.' Thanks for that. ...Once I'm back home, I respond to a few e-mails. Then, although I know I'll regret doing it, I look at CNN.com again and see a story header that reads: 'What's next? Severe recession or something worse?' It's not even lunchtime yet and I'm already sick to my stomach, scared, and depressed. For the rest of the day I vow to stay away from all forms of media, lest I go completely fucking insane. But the tone for the day has already been set, and sticking one's head in the sand probably isn't a viable coping strategy anyway.

Several years ago, I went out a few times with a woman who teaches in the Spanish Department at UC Riverside. She was a lovely and very intelligent woman. I can't remember why things didn't go anywhere. I think I may have put her off when I took her to an Allman Brothers concert at the Greek Theater. I vaguely remember being surrounded that night by older, grizzled biker gang types. It was probably more than she bargained for, or less... Anyway, the two of us were having dinner one night at Fred 62 in Los Feliz when we started talking about the generally grim direction in which America was headed. I don't recall whether this was before or after Bush's reelection, but the Iraq War had by then turned into a quagmire, religious yahoos were ascendant, and Bush was hellbent on making the distribution of wealth in the country even more lopsided. Things just didn't feel like they were going well at all. ...At one point, she asked me what I thought it would take to turn the country around. Never one to shy away from sweeping historical analysis, I began by explaining that when I was in college I thought socialism was the answer to all the world's ills. But then the fall of the Soviet Union, combined with the inevitable cooling effect aging has on the utopian dreams of middle class 'radicals', led me to eventually conclude that another New Deal was the best we could hope for. I said that all empires eventually decline and that the American Empire appeared to be finally stretched to the breaking point. I predicted that the resultant crisis would turn the tide away from expansionist laissez-faire economics and back towards heavy government involvement in the economy and a reinvigoration of the welfare state. (That's some dinner conversation, huh?).

I don't wanna toot my own horn here too much, but I think my analysis was right on the money. President-elect Obama, for example, is already talking about public works projects to rebuild the nation's crumbling infrastructure. This is beside the point I wanted to make. I remember this dinner at Fred 62 very clearly because at one point I said, "I look forward to the end of the American empire." I said it breezily, unthinkingly, like some sheltered college student. My dinner date was both more thoughtful and more guarded. "Well," she replied, "we'll see how we like it." I see now that she was wise to be more sober. America's decline may be a good thing in the abstract, but it seems as though living through its convulsive manifestations may very well be painful, difficult and, yes, depressing. So maybe it's not so crazy to be depressed and anxious. Still, there's gotta be a way to remain fatalistic and calm, even in circumstances where there's no hiding from the relentless onslaught of information about the difficult challenges that lie ahead. I need to learn how to do this.

the big d 'n a

2008-11-17T15:41:00.000-08:00

Apologies for the long gap between posts. I've been struggling with some personal issues, but I'm doing what I can to fight my way out of it. I'll be back at this again soon. In the meantime, here are some random images that make me happy...

Tom Terrific throws the circle change in the '73 Series...

Catherine Keener, who just keeps getting more beautiful with age...

Ms. Portman, all the more lovely with short hair...

Gil Kane's rendering of Spidey, though this particular issue is guaranteed to break your heart...

Gene Clark...

Double Indemnity...

'Book 'im Dano, murder 1...'

James Ellroy...

Dennis...

Pastrami at Langer's, serious as a heart attack...

Malibu sunsets...

...OK, I feel better already.

you see it all in 3-D

2008-10-31T09:00:00.000-07:00

It seems a bit absurd to remain fixated on old guy's music in the wake of Obama's inspiring victory on Tuesday, but here goes...

I don't really have much to add about Steely Dan's Aja that hasn't already been said much more elegantly than I could say it here... We all know that the album's 'adult' sound is as smooth as a baby's ass, almost to the point of being elevator music... The guitar solos are super tasty, especially the one in "Peg," where the last coke-fueled note sustains into the subsequent verse. I love that! ...The Michael McDonald backing vocals on the album are just plain weird. I've never heard such bizarre harmonies with the notes so close to each other...

So, ok, as cringe making as it may sound to the angry punk rockers out there in my huge readership, I'd venture to say that Aja is one of my two or three most formative records, having been one of the key soundtracks of my life during an especially impressionable period in the mid-late 70s, when not only "Peg" but also "Deacon Blues" and "Josie" were played multiple times every day on AM and FM radio stations in New York City... We're gonna break out the hats and hooters when Josie comes home... The songs evoke random, fragmented memories. When I hear the dissonant guitar intro to "Josie," for instance, I feel like I'm lying on my shrink's couch, suddenly remembering something intense and maybe even painful..."Deacon Blues" reminds me of riding in the family car (a '76 Volvo), through Spanish Harlem, in the summertime, when I was 9 or 10. The windows were rolled up and the doors locked. Outside, Puerto Rican kids stripped themselves down to their underwear and ran through open hydrants, anything to get a break from the blazing heat. The men on those streets wore dingy wife beater t-shirts, played checkers, and took nips from dark green bottles in brown paper bags. It's a trivial memory, I know, but it's poignant in a way that I have trouble getting at with words. I also flash on things like the graffiti that decorated every inch of New York's subway trains. ZAP... CHOKE... DONDY ... 295 ... NYC was a different place, a better place. Trash and filth covered the sidewalks and the casual smell of pot always seemed to be wafting through certain side streets down near the East River. I was afraid of the .44 Caliber killer, even after he was in jail. I was also afraid of the Purple Pooper Scoopers, two guys with Jesus beards who dressed in tie dyed coveralls and would roam around the city on their three-speed bikes, picking up dog leavings. I think they were doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, as a weird form of hippy civic pride, but there was something creepy about them. Even then I was a cynic, always questioning the motives of harmless do gooders... They got a name for the winners in the world...

The incredible thing about Aja for me now is the way it's taken on an additional meaning since I became an Angeleno. Aja is one of the greatest L.A. albums ever recorded, with its banyan trees and dude ranches above the sea. The protagonists in the songs seem dazed, suspicious of the strangeness of the place and its people. 'Up on the hill, they think I'm OK...or so they say.' Yet those same protagonists 'crawl like vipers through the suburban streets,' adapting to the weird ways of Los Angeles until they become second nature. 'A world of my own, I'll make it my home sweet home...'

Much of the sentiment about Los Angeles on Aja is offered with Steely Dan's typical ironic distance, but they were ironic before irony was grating. The album captures the experiences of a very specific late 70s L.A. millieu. 'Sharing the things we know and love, with those of my kind... But there's more to it than irony and narrow vision, I think. Maybe it's just that I hear what I want to hear and impose my own agenda on things, but Aja's sarcasm is not expressed bitterly but instead with curiosity and wonder. When Fagen sings of 'the night of the expanding man,' I see a man who's escaped the compressed claustrophobia of New York for the physical and spiritual vastness of Los Angeles. I see myself, in other words. This brother is free, I be what I want to be...'

I don't know what else I can say about Aja without getting overly solipsistic. For all the talk of the lack of emotion in Steely Dan's music, Aja is one of the most emotional albums I own.

reelin'

2008-10-25T08:15:00.000-07:00

Looking over some of the posts I've written over the last few months, I've come to the realization that my notion of the Great Collapse remains somewhat amorphous. Part of this is of necessity since the historical phenomenon itself is comprised of many diverse events and sets of circumstances, and trying to unify them conceptually is a complex bit of business. And unlike the use of historical terms like, say, 'the Gilded Age' or 'the Antebellum South,' which refer to precisely demarcated time periods, I haven't offered much specificity in terms of when the Collapse started or when it ended. I was thinking that it might be useful to make a distinction between the Collapse itself and the fallout from the Collapse, but even there the causes and consequences bleed into each other. The Rural Turn, for example, was a symptom of the Collapse but also part of the Collapse itself. This type of complication is something professional historians face all the time. I've merely stumbled upon the problem accidentally in trying to write about history in my own layperson's way.

If I hold my own hands to the fire, I'd say that the Great Collapse refers to the dissolution of the idealism first set in motion by the Baby Boomer Generation after JFK's election in 1960. The idealism consisted of a growing belief in equality for all and a reassertion of individual uniqueness and creativity over and against the stifling moral conformity of the 1950s. It took JFK's assassination for 60s ideals as we know them to take on lives of their own, and one difficulty comes in trying to grasp the way the 60s reached a peak with the civil rights and anti-war movements, but also showed initial signs of decay at the same time.

The Collapse gathered steam with the onset of the second half of the 60s. I've tried to show how this uneven and protracted phenomenon was captured in rock... The Beatles and The Who, among others, approached the Collapse with varying degrees of pathos and disillusionment. The Rolling Stones, Neil Young and Frank Zappa seemed somehow to know all along that 60s ideals would eventually disintegrate or morph into something more sinister. Bob Dylan, The Band, The Grateful Dead and The Byrds turned the Collapse into an occasion to escape into the countryside. Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne used the Collapse as an excuse to escape into themselves. Still others, like Bowie, Iggy, Lou Reed, T. Rex, and the rest of the Glam crowd, responded to the Collapse by engaging in sensationalistic artifice, debauchery and sexual experimentation.

My observations on the music of the Great Collapse started and will end with Steely Dan. Their 1972 debut album, Can't Buy A Thrill, is a definitive expression of post-60s disenchantment. The record's opening track, "Do it Again," is one of the greatest songs they ever recorded and forms something of a template for everything else on the record and even everything Becker and Fagen subsequently did during the 70s. The song's nasty snake-like beat and freaky electric sitar solo, along with its bad trip lyrics alluding to murder, hangmen, gambling and adultery, leave little doubt that the era of love and sunshine has receded into the distant past. With Nixon cruising towards easy re-election against a wimpy opponent, and the Viet Nam war lumbering further into the abyss, flower power became a quaint memory, and on songs like "Reelin' in the Years" and "Turn that Heartbeat Over Again," Becker and Fagen are only too happy to impose buzz kill on the remaining hippy believers. A World become one, of salads and sun, only a fool would say that.' Ouch...

But along with the social commentary on Can't Buy a Thrill, it's also important to emphasize how musically satisfying the album is. The phenomenal guitar playing from the likes of Jeff "Skunk" Baxter (now a right-wing national defense consultant), Denny Dias and Elliot Randall, perfectly complement the amazing songwriting prowess Becker and Fagen bring to the table. The infectious tunefulness of the songs easily compensates for any bitter aftertaste that might be left by the album's cynical post-60s vibe...

I go against the grain of most critical opinion in my view that Countdown to Ecstasy is a disappointment after the greatness of Can't Buy A Thrill. The songs are not as good and the album feels a bit thin with a mere eight tracks. Still, the record has some great moments in "Razor Boy", "The Boston Rag" and "Show Biz Kids," and the aftermath of the 60s is still very much on everybody's minds in "King of the World": 'No marigolds in the promised land, there's a hole in the ground where they used to grow.'

But Steely Dan only really became the outfit most people know as Steely Dan with their third album, Pretzel Logic. The album cover would have you believe that listening to the record will be a distinctly New York-ish experience. But Pretzel Logic actually represents the beginning of a decisive shift in Steely Dan's center of gravity away from the road and touring and into semi-permanent residence in the insulated recording studios of Los Angeles. The move to L.A. walked hand-in-hand with a much smoother sound. Even songs with flaming guitar solos, like the great "Night By Night," have a new mellowness about them. ...Pretzel Logic is where Steely Dan begin to embrace the fuzak that turned a lot of listeners off. But don't let the seemingly benign sound fool you. What makes the album so compelling is the way it uses infectious, M.O.R. sounding songs like "Rikki Don't Lose that Number," "Barrytown," and "Through With Buzz" as packages for acerbic social observations. This would be the band's approach for the remainder of the decade.

Starting with Katy Lied, all remaining pretense of following the normal rules of a rock 'n roll band went out the window. Steely Dan quit the road for good and were reduced to Becker, Fagen and whatever other session players they needed to create the atmospherics that are such an essential part of their sound. The song arrangements and musicianship on Katy Lied are flawless. Becker, Fagen and, one presumes, producer Gary Katz, continued to show off their impeccable taste in guaitarists, this time using Rick Derringer as well as Denny Dias and Elliot Randall. Although the rigid perfection of the music on Katy Lied left some listeners cold - John Mendelsohn of Rolling Stone wrote that he was "unable to detect the slightest suggestion of real passion in any of it" - the album is, in my opinion, the ultimate Steely Dan record, even though Becker and Fagen disavowed what they perceived to be its shoddy sound quality after the album was released in 1975. With songs like "Dr Wu," "Black Friday," "Everyone's Gone to the Movies", and "Daddy Don't Live in that New York City No More," Katy Lied is a perfect distillation of the rampant self abuse, paranoia and decadence so endemic to its own historical moment. And in spite of the frequently leveled charge of passionlessness, there's also a refreshing degree of warmth and yearning on tracks like "Any World (That I'm Welcome To)", "Bad Sneakers" and "Your Gold Teeth II." In any event, I've always felt that the alleged coldness of the Steely Dan enterprise ceases to be an issue if you approach the music as a soothing, L.A.-style echo of the post-Collapse era's drift into mellow pensiveness.

More on Steely Dan next time...

long time no speak

2008-10-23T08:34:00.000-07:00

It’s been about a week since my last post because I’m busy putting finishing touches to a draft of a short story, Summer of ’63, based on a chapter from my in-progress novel. I’ve gotten some excellent feedback from several readers, and now the question for me will be what to do with the story. Obviously my goal is to publish it somewhere, but I’m still trying to figure out the best way to approach things. I’ll keep everyone posted on any progress I make. ...It'll be a few more days until my next post as I'm working on a longer piece to conclude what I've written on the music of the Great Collapse...

flower power sucks!

2008-10-15T08:46:00.000-07:00

Freak Out * We're Only In It for the Money

Some listeners find Frank Zappa's music to be cold and overly intellectualized. There's certainly something to be said for this in those numerous instances where he makes a fetish of compositional complexity and substitutes abstruse musical theory for passion and feeling. At the same time, though, you can't hear albums like Freak Out! or We're Only In it for the Money without being struck by the (albeit controlled) anger fueling Zappa's overall approach to social commentary, nor can you ignore his passionate commitment to making incredibly intricate and thoughful music. ...After Zappa's early days in the mid 60s as something of a fringe figure in the Los Angeles pop scene with his Mothers of Invention, he became a fierce critic of the counterculture, often offering his acidic analysis of things from a decidedly Libertarian perspective. But he was also a countercultural trailblazer and one of the truly inventive forces in rock, especially during the five-year stretch from 1966 to 1971. I think it's this chasm between Zappa as 60s icon and Zappa as 60s naysayer that throws people for a loop. Perhaps that was his intention all along.

Freak Out!, released in 1966, is supposedly the first double-album in the history of rock. It's also notable as an album Paul McCartney is said to have listened to intensively in the interstitial period between Revolver and Sgt. Pepper's. ...My friend Drew Carolan, whom I've written about on this blog before, turned me on to Freak Out! in the summer after I finished 10th grade. Freak Out! is one of those rare albums that becomes deeper and more meaningful every time I return to it. When I was 16, I dug the record's great doo wop flavored pop and amazing orchestral arrangements. Back then I really identified with the album's love songs, each seeming to be about the chick doing the guy wrong ("I Ain't Got No Heart," "Go Cry on Somebody Else's Shoulder," "How Could I Be Such A Fool?," "You Didn't Try To Call Me," etc.), as well the album's Holden Caulfield-ish perspective on life. ...Freak Out!, staggeringly enough, was the first album for The Mothers of Invention, and already Zappa can be heard adopting a position beyond the generational divide, pointing to the phoniness of both the straight suburban parents and their beatnik-hippie children. In the end, Freak Out! is nothing short of a relentlessly thoroughgoing critique of American Society, starting with the album's stinging opening track, "Hungry Freaks, Daddy."

Mr American, walk on by, your super market dream,

Mr. America, walk on by, the liquor store supreme,

Mr. America, try to hide, the emptiness that's you inside,

But once you find that the way you lied, and all those corny tricks you tried,

Will not forestall the rising tide, of hungry freaks, daddy!

As would continue to be the case throughout his career, Zappa seems committed on Freak Out! to the preservation of personal liberty ("It Can't Happen Here") and absolute freedom of expression ("Who Are the Brain Police?"). The most poignant moment on the record is "Trouble Coming Every Day", which is Zappa's impression of the Watts riots.

There 'aint no Great Society, as it applies to you and me,

Our Country Isn't Free, and the law refuse to see,

If all you can ever be is just a lousy janitor,

Unless you uncle owns a store,

You know that five in every four,

Just won't amount to nothin' more,

Gonna Watch the rats go cross the floor, and make up songs 'bout being poor

What I find most fascinating about Freak Out! these days is that, in adopting a detached point of view, outside the counterculture and its enemies, Zappa seems to understand that the upheavals of the 60s are bound to end badly, or at least they are bound to have negative consequences. His perspective becomes even more critical with We're Only In It For The Money, an album that can be interpreted as the Great Collapse put to music. Listening to the record is like hearing someone from another planet describe two sharply divided generations, each refusing to meaningfully communicate with the other. 'I will love everybody,' Zappa says, mocking the Summer of Love, 'I will love the police as they kick the shit out of me on the street.' But he casts an equally rational glance onto the Greatest Generation and asks, 'Ever wonder why your daughter looks so sad? It's such a drag to have to love a plastic mom and dad.' It's not feel good stuff, that's for sure, but Zappa's perspective is prescient, fiercely original, and represents a set of ideas and perspectives with which it's very difficult to find fault. The only real criticism I have is that Zappa's point of view is so steely and sober that it leaves you wondering if there's any joy in Zappa's world at all. His use of humor makes up for this a bit - even if the humor is usually bitterly cynical - as does the tiny bit of hope he gives us at the very end of the album when he sings that, 'There will come a time when everybody who is lonely will be free to sing and dance and love.' Still, based on the rest of the album, we're left wondering when that time will be.

last day at VCCA

2008-10-11T08:23:00.000-07:00

I'm headed back to L.A. first early tomorrow morning. I got quite a bit done here (one book chapter and a short story) and I had a great time, but I'm definitely ready to go home. I'm writing a post right now on Rust Never Sleeps. My my, hey hey. The post should be up within the next day or two...

not fade away

2008-10-10T08:27:00.000-07:00

When I was 10 years old, I asked my mother for tickets to see Neil Young and Crazy Horse play at Madison Square Garden. My mom was always very generous and open minded about letting me go to concerts when I was a kid. She knew that rock was important to me. The only condition was that I had to have adult supervision, but this wasn't ever a problem because I had a built-in concert companion in my brother, who is 20 years older than I am (long story) and loves rock as much as I do.

Of all the concerts my brother Billy took me to see - including Kiss, Jethro Tull, The Who, Pink Floyd, and Frank Zappa - Neil Young and Crazy Horse was the loudest and the biggest freak show of all. ...The line to get into MSG that night was like some kind of unwashed hippie Halloween party. This was, after all, less than a decade removed from the 60s. All the kids were dressed in their army jackets and ripped clothing, lighting firecrackers, drinking beer from brown paper bags, and getting rowdier by the minute. The sidewalks in front of the Garden were teaming with squirrelly looking dudes selling T-shirts and drugs. 'Smoke and coke, how high you wanna fly?' I was just barely ten years old and I remember being a little scared as we got on line, but also feeling like I was part of something cool and rebellious that I'd be able to tell my friends about the next day.

Once we got inside the arena, the atmosphere became even more carnivalesque. The smell of pot hit us like a sledge hammer as we walked from the rotunda into the arena. People were smoking joints and bowls out in the open, without any worry at all that an usher might confiscate things or throw them out. I can recall bottle rockets getting shot across the arena, and I remember the kids in front of us snorting something called Rush - one of them proceeded to do a headstand on his seat for about ten minutes. It was the kind of scene you'd never see today, where all events like this are so tightly controlled by mookish bouncers with their yellow shirts and schmucky earpieces, and there's virtually no chance of anything spontaneous or surprising (or exciting) happening.

When the lights went down, the energy level and the weirdness quotient increased another hundred points. The memories are all a bit hazy now but the stage was decorated with 25-foot-high mock amplifiers and microphone stands. Before the band played one note, several gnome-like, bug-eyed creatures wearing hooded monk robes came out to twiddle knobs and dials. I later found out these were roadies in costume, but at the time it just seemed bizarre and a little frightening. But any fear was quickly cast aside and replaced with awe. It's the best feeling in the world when you're 10 and you get that first glimpse of one of your rock idols standing in the blue and white spotlight. The deafening roar of the crowd as Neil and the boys took the stage was nowhere near as savagely loud as the opening riff to "Cinnamon Girl." If I had to choose one (non-sexual) point in time to travel back to in my life, I'd have a hard time picking out a place I'd rather be than that concert...

The concert was part of the tour for Rust Never Sleeps, which is one of the headiest albums I've ever heard. Although Neil was by then a 'mature' artist representing an older cohort, he managed to make an album that bridges the divide separating the hippies from the fledgling punks and New Wavers. Side 1 is Neil's nod to the struggles of his 60s compatriots via acoustic folk songs that harken back to the pre-Collapse period as well as the naturalistic imagery of the rural turn. "Pocahontas" is, most immediately, part of Neil's long standing fascination and sympathy for the plight of Native Americans. At the same time, the song is symbolically a metaphor for the ruthless march of modernity over all that's innocent and nurturing. 'They massacred the buffalo, kitty corner from the bank/The taxis run across my feet and my eyes have turned to blanks/In my little box at the top of the stairs/With my Indian rug, and a pipe to share. "Thrasher" similarly acknowledges the death of a peaceful utopia - read: the hippie idyll - but does so in wistful tones, and not without alluding to the humanism and morality of those naive dreams.

Where the eagle glides ascending

There's an ancient river bending

Down the timeless gorge of changes

Where sleeplessness awaits

I searched out my companions

Who were lost in crystal canyons

Where the aimless blade of science

Slashed the pearly gates

Side 1 is the elder statesman's sorrowful but also appreciative look back at where he's come from. Side 2, featuring some of the hardest and most incendiary music Neil has ever made ("Sedan Delivery", "Welfare Mothers", "My My, Hey, Hey"), shows that he is not content with simple nostalgia and clears the decks for punk rock and its attempt to break through the malaise of the 70s. With its images of brute force overtaking little people living their communal lives, "Powderfinger" - rumored to be Neil's response to The Band's "The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down" - is thematically similar to much of what is heard on Side 1 and serves as a warning to those who plan to go up against the system. But placing the acoustic/electric "Hey Hey, My My"/"My My Hey Hey" at the album's bookends, Neil also seems to be saying that the struggle against conformity is worth it - even if it is bound to eventually collapse under its own weight. 'It's better to burn out than to fade away.'

This brings me back to the concert I attended when I was ten. I've often wondered about the meaning of those huge stage props - the mic stand, the amps, the roadies dressed as gnomes... I should also mention here that I saw Neil Young and Crazy Horse again in the early and mid 1990s (the tours for Ragged Glory and Broken Arrow) and the big props were still part of the show on both occasions. You might or might not get a satisfactory or even coherent answer from Neil if you were to ask him what the props are all about, but it seems to me like it's a commitment to making a BIG statement against conformity, regardless of whether defeat is inevitable. The virtue is in making actually making the statement as much as it in its results. This approach has enabled Neil to stay relevant for over 40 years and is why his music continues to give inspiration to those who strive to live on their own terms.

darkness, darkness

2008-10-08T10:40:00.000-07:00

Tonight's the Night, On the Beach, and Rust Never Sleeps. Neil Young's Tonight's the Night, recorded in 1973 but not released until 1975, views the 'left turn' into the abyss at the end of the 60s through the prism of the drug related deaths of his two friends, Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry. The brilliance of the album lies largely in Neil's ability to sublimate his grief and depression into a devastatingly raw collection of songs. Tonight's the Night is not a record you put on as background music while you're cleaning the house or doing the laundry (at least I don't), but rather is one you play on a rainy Sunday afternoon when you're feeling pensive and want to contemplate the fragility of the human condition. Although it was recorded some 35 years ago under very different historical circumstances, you will be hard pressed to find an album that sounds more appropriate to the desperate times we are living through today.

Like the Rolling Stones, Neil Young has always had a certain element of dread built into his music. You can hear it on songs he did with Buffalo Springfield ("Mr. Soul", "Nowadays Clancy Can't Sing", "I am a Child"...), and it is pervasive on all his work through the 1970s. Let's face it: Neil may want you to believe he's a peacenick hippy, but he's very much a dark hippy of the Topanga Canyon variety - moody, brooding, and often extremely self centered and selfish, to say nothing of frequently being politically confused. This probably means Neil's not a great guy on an interpersonal level, but the sum total of his personality traits makes for some pretty haunting music.

One of the great things about Tonight's the Night is the way so much of it was recorded live in the studio, imperfections and all. The rough sound of the album, which infuriated the suits at Reprise when Neil first presented them with the finished product, is precisely what the material cries out for. The album vents unrepressed, jagged emotion from start to finish. When Neil sings about his roadie and compadre, Bruce Berry, who 'died out on the mainline,' the cracking of his voice amounts to a plaintive cry of total anguish, not just for the passing of a friend but for the distortion and destruction of everything the 60s were supposed to represent...

Neil has apparently always been drawn to damaged souls like Danny Whitten, the guitarist for Crazy Horse. All accounts I've ever read of their relationship suggest that the two of them had a special intuitive connection. In this respect, the live version of Whitten's "Come on Baby Let's Go Downtown" on Tonight's the Night seems to have a double purpose. On the one hand, the performance illuminates just how electrifying Neil and Danny could be when they played together and underscores the utter tragedy of Whitten's loss to 60s excess. On the other hand, the lyrics of the song point to the paranoia and burn out that were so essential to the mood within the counterculture when the 60s started to go sour. 'Pretty bad when you're dealing with the man and the light shines in your eyes.'

From the stoned whine of the pedal steel in "Albuquerque" and "Tired Eyes", to the creaky fury of "World on a String" and "Lookout Joe", Tonight's the Night finds a self-medicated Neil Young confronting the end of the 60s in a way that is simultaneously deeply personal and far reaching in its interpretation of the zeitgeist.

The Manson murders quickly became a lasting symbol for what I've been calling the Great Collapse, and nowhere is this more evident than on "Revolution Blues", one of the more striking songs from Neil Young's On the Beach. '...I hear that Laurel Canyon is filled with famous stars/But I hate 'em worse than lepers and I'll kill them in their cars...' On the Beach was released before but recorded after Tonight's the Night. The album is quite a bit more patchy and uneven, but also features some of Neil's most tormented reflections on the death of 60s idealism with songs like "On the Beach" and "Ambulance Blues." Now I'm livin' out here on the beach,' Neil sings on the title track, 'but those seagulls are still out of reach.' For me, this is the defining moment on the record and one of the defining moments in Neil's career, a tragic omission of spiritual emptiness from a spokesperson for a generation that had such great potential yet flushed so much of it away.

angels 2008 season is over

2008-10-07T12:39:00.000-07:00

Normally I would thank the boys for a great season, but anything less than a ring this season was to be a disappointment, as unfair as that might seem. And with so many free agents set to test the waters (Teixeira, K-Rod, Figgins, Rivera, Garland, among others), who knows when the Angels will have the pieces in place again the way they did this year? Luckily the club seems to have solid ownership and management, though I'm still scratching my head over the decision to squeeze with the season on the line, especially when a simple fly ball to the outfield would have done the job. I guess if Erik Aybar had gotten the bunt down, we'd be saying that the squeeze was a brilliant move. But the thing is, he didn't get it down, and it seems like a very low percentage play to call with so much at stake. So you can pin this letdown, in part at least, on Mike Scioscia. He made the squeeze decision, he's the one who has to answer for it, if not for the failed execution of the play. But you can't pin any of this on the front office - they gave the team everything necessary to get the job done. The Angels bats didn't show up, the team made too many defensive gaffes, and in the decisive moment Sosh made a very questionable call. ...The only thing left to say is, I hate the Red Sox and the fat, drunken louts they have as fans. LET'S GO RAYS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

day 6 at VCCA

2008-10-04T11:23:00.000-07:00

I've been rooting for baseball's Angels for about 15 years. I remember the Great Collapse of '95 as if it were ten minutes ago, and yet it also seems like something from out of the distant past. I feel like I've been with the team long enough, through all the low lows of the 90s and the dizzying heights of the 2002 World Series, that I can now legitimately say that the Angels - and no longer The New York Mets - are my primary team. I place a lot of importance in baseball at a metaphoric level. Becoming an Angels fan has been an important symbol for me of the way I've put my New York upbringing behind me and become an Angeleno. I know the Angels are from the O.C., but let's face it: O.C. is really an extension of L.A. Sorry OCers, but it happens to be true, and we all know it.

I can recall when I first moved to L.A. and the Angels were The California Angels. The club still shared the Big A with the Los Angeles Rams back then. I liked the stadium better in those days. After the Northridge quake, the ballpark was transformed into a Disneyfied Corporate Playground, and it lost whatever charm it might have had. ...The Halos were managed by the likes of Buck Rogers and Marcel Lachman when I first started following them. Sparky Anderson would do the color commentary on TV alongside guys like Bob Starr, Ken Wilson, and Billy Sample. I remember no-name players like Jorge Fabregas, Randy Velarde, Dave Hollins, and Matt Walbeck, as well as the few bright lights the team had in Mark Langston, Chuck Finley, Ramon Ortiz, Shigatoshi Hasegawa, Jim Edmonds, Chili Davis, and, of course, Garret Anderson and Tim Salmon, aka 'Mr. Angel.' ...I decided to root for the Angels instead of the Dodgers because I was also a diehard Mets fan, going back to the '73 World Series, and I didn't want to have my loyalties split between two National League teams. I also liked going against the grain. The Dodgers seemed to be not only L.A.'s team but Southern California's team more generally, and I wanted to differentiate myself from the pack...

I've been telling friends and family all season that the Angels are gonna win the World Series this year, especially since they acquired Mark Teixera at the trading deadline. The team won 100 games in the regular season and seem to have everything necessary to make a second championship a matter of course. They have sluggers in the lineup (Teixeira, Guererro and Hunter make for a pretty fearsome 3, 4 5 combo). They have great starting pitching (the Angels' #5 could be a #1 on a lot of teams). They have a great bullpen (Frankie Rodriguez broke the all-time saves record this year, plus Scott Shields, and Jose Arredondo, and also John Garland and Jared Weaver moving to the pen for the playoffs). The Angels also had one of the best fielding teams in baseball this year, including gold glovers like Tori Hunter and Mark Teixera, and they have speed (structured around Mike Scioscia's 1st to 3rd philosophy and fleet footed players like Howie Kendrick and Chone Figgins. Plus, let's not forget that the Angels have - or had - home field advantage throughout the entire playoffs...

But now the Angels are on the verge of getting swept in the first round by the Boston Red Sox for the second year in a row. It hurts when you've been thinking all year that this is your year, and then you crap out in the first round. Oh sure, they could come back and win three games in a row, but they probably won't. So goes another baseball season.

The good news is that I should be done with another chapter of my book tomorrow. It's hard to believe that I've been able to write a chapter in one week. It usually takes me two or three months. That's why I love VCCA as much as I do...

day 5 at VCCA

2008-10-03T12:50:00.000-07:00

This is a clumsily taken laptop photo of me and my friend Fella. Fella is the Mr. Ed of Virginia. Before lunch today he told me that Erwin Santana better sack it up tonight or the Angels are gonna be in a world of hurt. He's a smart dude - Fella I mean.

I am thinking very seriously about turning a few of the chapters from my book into short stories. This wouldn't be instead of a book but just something supplemental. A fried of mine suggested Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting as an example of a book where a lot of the chapters can stand as self-contained short stories. Off the top of my head, Last Exit to Brooklyn. ...In any case, I'll be immersing myself in short stories when I get back to L.A., so send me any of your 'must reads'...

angels lose game 1 and home field advantage

2008-10-02T09:14:00.001-07:00

Better get the next one, boys.

day 3 at vcca

2008-10-01T11:53:00.000-07:00

I had my most productive day yet today, which is a good sign. I was starting to worry that I would remain blocked the whole time...

I've had a lot of quality time with my iPod, meaning that I've been able to hear some music I hadn't listened to in a long time. One thing I realized is that I have the exact same musical sensibility as the guys in Teenage Fanclub. They love poppy hooks, I love poppy hooks. They love all kinds of guitars, especially 12-string jangle and Neil Young fuzz, and I love those things, too. They love West Coast harmonies, I love all harmonies, especially West Coast harmonies. They love power pop and...well, you get the picture. ...Teenage Fanclub are not terribly original, but originality is a category that has been dead in rock for a long time now. The guys make music that feels like warm summer sunshine. Their stuff brings a big happy smile to my face. Ain't that enough? Songs from Northern Britain is especially satisfying. Check

out "Mount Everest," "Planets," and "Start Again." All three songs are absolutely perfect. ...As far as loving Teenage Fanclub goes, I would be remiss if I didn't give a lot of credit to my friend Dan Epstein, a great guy and my source for all needed bits of rock esoterica. I bought TF's Badwagonesque back when it came out because a friend told me they sounded like Big Star. I was a very serious young man at the time, and like many other very serious young men, I took my Big Star very seriously. Anything that sounded like Big Star would be something I would seriously dig. I loved and still like Badwagonesque, but I lost the plot after that. It wasn't so much that I lost interest in Tenage Fanclub, it's just that they kind of fell off the map ...About three years ago, Dan invited me to join he and his lovely wife, Carole, for a TF gig at the Troub. I was so impressed with how great and clean and amazing those guys sounded. Every song had the most unbelievable multi-part harmonies you could imagine. I've been a big fan ever since then, and I owe a lot of that to Dan. Thanks, man.

Speaking of harmonies...has there ever been a more creative harmonizer than Paul McCartney? Holy shit! He throws some incredibly weird and excellent harmonies into so many Beatles songs. Funny thing is, he did it throughout the life of the band. The earliest Beatles songs have great but strange Maca harmonies, and so do some of the very last songs they did...

Angels and Sox Tonight, Game 1. Go Halos!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

first day at vcca

2008-09-29T11:30:00.000-07:00

First day of work here at VCCA is complete. I came in last night at about 10:30 and then did not sleep well. At least this is how I'm trying to explain away my less than fully productive first day here. I worked on my book for about four hours, but I never really got into much of a rhythm. Also, it's a bit of a mind fuck when you get here and you suddenly have nothing but time to do the thing you care most about. It's almost like, 'do I deserve this?' I'll take it up with my shrink when I get back to L.A. ...Angels and Red Socks on Wednesday!

go halos!!!!

2008-09-27T10:22:00.000-07:00

I'm headed to Virginia on Sunday morning to work intensively on my book for two weeks. This means I will be out of town for the first round of the playoffs, as well as probably some of the second round (speaking confidently). But I ordered MLB Gameday Audio, so I'll be able to listen to every word from Rory, Terry, Phys and the Hudster. Baseball is so great on the radio, so it'll be quite fun...as long as the Angels win. I'll be checking in here occasionally with Angel talk and other observations and experiences from VCCA. ...First game battery is likely to be Lackey and Napoli. Don't know who the opponent is yet.

mccain and palin

2008-09-25T08:29:00.000-07:00

Since when does a crisis preclude debate? Isn't a crisis precisely the time when public discourse over ideas is most essential?

the day of the locust

2008-09-20T13:31:00.001-07:00

Forever Changes. After I moved to L.A. in the spring of '92, I bought a used CD copy of Love's Forever Changes at Rockaway Records on Glendale Blvd. This was in the days when Silver Lake was already hipster central, but the neighborhood had not yet become yuppie-hipster central... It's an important distinction. Gelato cups have since replaced the spent syringes that adorned the gutter at Lafayette Park Place. Back then, I used to ride my bike in Griffith Park everyday. I taped Forever Changes and would listen to it on my Walkman as I pedaled up the steep hills, accompanied by raccoons, coyotes, snakes, lizards... I have very sweet memories of that time in my life because I was still in the early stages of learning my way around town, and everything seemed so wide open and ready for discovery. Whenever I play Forever Changes now, my mind drifts back to that time and a wistful smile comes to my face. The haunting acoustic guitar that opens "Alone Again Or" transports me to those hills in the park. Griffith Park is the most breathtaking public park in the world, more gorgeous than even Hyde Park in London or Central Park in New York. To experience this crown jewel for the first time is like hearing your favorite record for the first time or finally leaning in for the first kiss after days or weeks of anticipation. The dry smell one is treated to at the park's higher elevations is so distinct. It's phantom redolence still mingles in my mind today with Arthur Lee's plaintive voice. 'And I will be alone again tonight my dear.' I recall coasting down Mount Hollywood, my long golden locks (RIP) flapping out the bottom of my crash helmet, the late-day sun reflecting off the Hollywood sign back behind my shoulder as I zoomed through the dried-out palms lining the park's roads. Then I'd arrive at the Observatory, where the vistas looking out over the vast expanse of Los Angeles make even the most skeptical among us feel as if we're part of some infinitely divine plan... The sonic psychedelia of Forever Changes - replete with Spanish horns, Bolero guitar flourishes, and drammatic strings - is the perfect soundtrack for this humbling experience. 'And if you see andmoreagain, then you will know andmoreagain...'

To listen to Forever Changes is to relive the moment when the spiritual tectonics of Los Angeles shifted under the weight of the Great Collapse. The record conjurs up an image of this city quite similar in parts to Nathaniel West's conception of L.A. as a place perpetually teetering on the brink of infernal apocalypse. I believe it was Paul Kanter who once quipped that Love should have called themselves 'Hate'. He was referring more to Arthur Lee's prickly personality than to the band's music, but Love's L.A. is still light years from the utopian vision that Jan and Dean and The Beach Boys presented in their early days. On Forever Changes, Los Angeles is a place of creepy violence and macabre hallucinations, a lurid paradise caving in on itself. More confusions, blood transfusions/the news today will be the movies of tomorrow...

I love Love as much as I do because they are the embodiment of noir juxtaposition in music. The songs are beautiful and highly evocative, yet they often refer to ugliness in the world (Sitting on a hillside/watching all the people...die/I'll feel much better on the other side'). The music is white, so to speak, but it takes a black man to pull it off in all its tragic vulnerability (And if you think I'm happy, paint me white). Forever Changes is, in one sense, the apotheosis of the Sunset Strip beatnik hippy vibe, but the same music gives expressesion to the deterioration of L.A.'s 60s countercultural dream...

Down on Go-Stop Boulevard

It never fails to bring me down

The sirens and the accidents

And for a laugh there's

Plastic Nancy

She's real fancy

With her children

They'll go far

She buys them toys

To Keep in practice

Waiting on the war

I put Forever Changes in the same thematic category as the jazz of Chet Baker and Art Pepper, the movies of Fritz Lang and Samuel Fuller, and the novels of Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy. Love was that good. God bless 'em.

topanga windows

2008-09-19T08:34:00.001-07:00

Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus. Picture this: The year is 1968. A hippie rock 'n roll band, who call themselves Spirit, rehearse in a garage at the end of a dry, dusty road in Topanga Canyon. Lou Adler has recently signed the band to his Ode label and recorded their first album... A lot of hippies have begun to migrate to Topanga in what can be thought of as L.A.'s version of the rural turn. The move to a more rustic setting is compelled in large part by the LAPD's imposition of authoritarian rule over the Sunset Strip in the wake of the recent teenage riots. Additionally, Laurel Canyon and some of the other Hollywood canyon communities (Beachwood Canyon, Nichols Canyon, Bronson Canyon, etc.) are becoming crowded with scenesters. Topanga feels more removed and low key, at least in the beginning...

So as Spirit practices its repertoire there in Topanga, a little man, not much more than five feet tall, shows up, takes a seat on a rock outside the garage, and watches them play. He has recently been released from prison and appears to be in very bad need of a bath and shave. After spending the Summer of Love in Frisco, he traveled down to the Plastic Fantastic Wonderland for reasons unknown. He goes by the name of Charlie.

Charlie fancies himself something of a songwriter and musician. Eventually he will befriend Dennis Wilson, who will arrange for the Beach Boys to record Charlie's song, "Cease to Exist," on their album, 20/20, though the title of the song will be changed to "Never Learn not to Love."

Cease to resist, come on say you love me

Give up your world, come on and be with me

I'm your kind, I'm your kind, and I see

This (true) story about Manson and Spirit, such as it is, is admittedly gratuitous. I guess you could say that I'm one of those very distinct geeks who fixate ghoulishly on Manson Family esoterica, especially those aspects of the Family that intersect with Southern California's 60s rock scene. I know this is probably not an especially appealing quality, and perhaps it's best to keep it under wraps, but it's difficult to resist sharing the pleasing mental image I have of Charlie watching, wild-eyed, as Randy California shreds out Hendrix-esque licks in a Topanga garage. In my defense, I should point out that Charlie and Spirit are actually connected in a way that goes beyond my blissed out rock reveries (a friend of mine, by the way, calls these daydreams 'chick repellents'. Oh, well.). ...While Charlie is arguably the personification of The Great Collapse, Spirits's 1970 classic, Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus, is an important musical expression of said Collapse. This, in combination with the image of Charlie sitting on the Topanga rock as the band kicks out the jams, means that the two - Manson ad Spirit - will forever be etched together in my scrambled little brain...

Spirit's sound is hard to classify. 'Jazzy folk-pop psychedelia' maybe does it justice, almost. The jazzier it gets, the less I like it. The folkier and more psychedelic it gets, sans the jazz noodling, the more I fall in love with it. This is just a matter of taste, of course. The band's first album, Spirit, is heavier on the jazz than I would like it t be, but the record has a few great songs, including the blistering guitar fest that is "Mechanical World." Spirit's second album, The Family That Plays Together, is an outstanding psychedelic pop album, on par with Love's Forever Changes and The Byrds' Notorious Byrds Brothers. The Family That Plays Together features Spirit's first well-known single, "I Got a Line on You," a song that I find absolutely infectious, especially if you're on an empty Hollywood Freeway, early Sunday morning, heading towards Topanga State Beach... The group's third album, Clear Spirit, is their least jazzy and most conventional attempt at hard rock, and yet I find the songs fairly weak overall (except for "Dark Eyed Woman"), and the album as a whole strikes me as being unsatsifying.

All the right elements come together gloriously on Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus, Spirit's fourth and best album. By this time, Lou Adler turned production duties over to David Briggs (who was working closely with another Topanga resident, Neil Young), and the result is magical... Dr. Sardonicus is by no means a perfect album. It has several annoying jazzbo interludes that, for me anyway, detract from the overall pacing of the record. Nor is Dr. Sardonicus an unambiguous expression of the Great Collapse. The album has definite moments of what you might call hippy naivete, especially given that it was released in 1970, and late 1970 at that. 'You have the world at your fingertips,' Jay Ferguson sings in the opening line of the album, 'No one can make it better than you.' Please. ...Elsewhere, Randy California (whose real name is probably something like Irv Birnbaum) seems to pat himself on the back as he proclaims, 'you know I was never born to wear no collar, you know I was never born to make no deals...' So it's not as if Spirit have completely thrown in the towel on hippie utopia. But the record also has a darkness about it and a number of the songs seem to acknowledge that things have changed. 'Oh no, something went wrong/Well you're much to fat and a litle too long/Hey, hey you got too much to lose/Gotta find your way back to the animal zoo.' And in the most moving moment on the album, Ferguson sings,

I don't know what it is to be free

And I cry when you say that you can't free me

(please free me)

I just can't go on

Why can't I be free?

Dr. Sardonicus is also one of the first records to deal with ecological issues. "Nature's Way" is the obvious example of this, but there's also the sadness is Randy California's voice as he sings,

See what you done to the rain and the sun?
So many changes have all just begun
to reap
I know you're asleep
Wake up!

This refers directly to the problem of enviornmental deterioration, but it should also be interpreted as a metaphor for the social deterioration that has taken place as a result of the arrogance and hubris of the counterculture. What once seemed progressive and librating has now created oppressive dysfunction and unleashed the ruthless forces of unthinking reaction. It's nature's way of telling you something's wrong.

PS - Apologies for the changing fonts. I'm having a little trouble using this blogging program...

dow theory

2008-09-17T13:55:00.000-07:00

I’m not much of an investor anymore. During the Go-Go 90s, the “new economy” tech bubble fooled a bunch of us into thinking we could pick stocks as well as the pros. Back then, it seemed as if you could pin the tail on the ticker symbol, buy the stock, and then just watch it go up, up and away. Little did we know the stock market had become the instrument of a flim flam American economy that produces plenty of high quality paper wealth, internet porn and milkshakes, but not so much in the way of cars, semiconductors, TVs, and shoes. When the tech wreck finally came in March of 2000, the subsequent housing bubble replaced stocks as the new ‘engine of growth.’ Alan Greenspan was a ‘maestro’ when it came to financial manipulation for the purposes of short sighted fixes, but he was anything but a responsible steward of the U.S. economy. One wonders how he could possibly warn against “irrational exuberance” in 1996, and then turn around and fan the flames of not one but two asset bubbles, one right after the other, and each of disastrously large proportions. I feel sorry for Ben Bernake, now charged with cleaning up the blood spatter…charged, in other words, with doing the impossible, the reason being that there are seemingly no bubbles left to inflate (Bonds, gold and oil are all counter cyclical, meaning that increases in their value tend to be bad for the economy or are signs of a weak economy). In the end, there really is no substitute for producing useful things. American manufacturing has been in steady decline since the 1960s.

The capital markets have gotten bludgeoned this week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average declined 8 percent in three days. I’m not looking forward to receiving my next 401K statement. A lot of my hard earned dollars will have evaporated. Can you imagine what an even bigger calamity this would all be if the conservatives were successful in their scheme to privatize social security? If there’s anything positive coming out of the current financial meltdown it’s that the idea of private social security accounts will die, with no chance of resurrection. The public now hopefully understands that social security cannot be an extension of the market precisely because it’s supposed to be an insurance policy against market vicissitudes.

What’s especially interesting about all this to me is that the Dow is now more than 1,000 points lower than it was on the day before it began to take its tech wreck nosedive in early 2000. That’s more than eight years ago for those of you keeping score at home. It’s important to remember here that the market collapse back then ended an eighteen year secular bull market that began in the summer of 1982, and that during the period from 1966 to 1982 the Dow had its significant ups and downs but never made a new all-time high. It took Reagan’s destruction of the legacies of FDR and LBJ to unleash the full, ruthless force of American finance capital in the late 20th century. Now that this strategy has been tapped out and it’s clear that laissez-faire economics ultimately invite disaster, the question becomes whether America will move back to the mixed economic policies of the New Deal and the War on Poverty. One hopes this is the case, yet the cultural and political polarization in this country - as well as the increasingly weakened position of America in the global economy - suggest that our options are pretty limited.

light up the halo!

2008-09-10T22:27:00.001-07:00

Congratulations to the Los Angeles Angels on winning the 2008
American League West Crown.

It's been an unbelievable season. This is their year!

We love you, Big Daddy!

art decade

2008-09-10T15:47:00.000-07:00

Here are some more observations on Bowie's work through the remainder of the 70s. Why? Because you can never get enough Bowie! ...You'll notice that the remarks tend to be cursory, and the reason for this is that it would simply take me too long to say everything there is to say...

Diamond Dogs. Diamond Dogs is somewhat Glam-ish, somewhat of prog-ish, and a lame attempt at a Ziggy-ish concept album. The Glam phase of Bowie's career had no life left by this point, and Diamond Dogs sounds bloated and confused as a result. That said, I love "Candidate" and "Big Brother", and the "Rebel Rebel" riff is so fuckin' killer. 'Hot tramp, I love you so...'

Young Americans. At last, a radical change in direction! Young Americans is Bowie’s admirable attempt at Blue Eyed Soul (one of his eyes is blue, anyway). The album marks a transition between his Glam and New Wave incarnations, which is interesting since his late 70s material often detachedly references the excesses of the earlier era… Young Americans is a really fun album, but I’m not sure Bowie had much fun making it as he was repotedly in the full throes of heroin addiction at the time. Check out the photos of him on the album’s inner sleeve. He looks gaunt and trashed. Still, the music sounds fresh and features a young Luther Vandross on backing vocals. The title track is a great song, even if it hasn’t been able to withstand FM radio overkill. “Fame” is an even better song and goes a long way towards explaining why Bowie looked so haggard at this point. Other standouts are “Win”, a great lovemaking song, and my favorite track on the record, “Somebody up There Likes Me.”

Station to Station. Station to Station inaugurates the most adventurous five-year stretch of Bowie’s career. The music is not always as accessible as some of his other stuff, but it gets under your skin over time, until one day you wake up and find that it’s the only stuff you wanna hear…OK, I guess I’m generalizing on the basis of my own experiences and taste, but I really do think the years between 1976 and 1980 were fantastic ones for Bowie creatively… Station to Station retains some of the funk and soul from Young Americans with songs like the title track, as well as “TVC15” and “Stay”, but the album also represents the point at which Bowie’s obsession turns from America to Europe. The upshot is that the funkiness is filtered though a synth-heavy, Euro-Romantic vibe that remained part of Bowie’s repertoire for years to come. Everything I’ve read about Bowie indicates that the development of his new persona, the Thin White Duke, was largely informed by his having become quite taken with Krautrock, especially Kraftwerk, Neu and Cluster/Harmonia. You can certainly hear those influences all over the place from Station to Station onwards. Meanwhile, Europe also becomes a symbol for a staid and reflective way of life, the very antithesis of Glam’s debauchery. But this only goes so far as several biographies have reported that Bowie needed mountains of cocaine to get through the sessions for Station to Station...Station to Station is Bowie's most self-conscious record to date. On songs like "Stay", "Station to Station" and "Golden Years", we find him ruminating on the nature of performance, his alienation from his audience, and the emptiness of a life built around spectacle. 'Run for the shadows in these golden years.' It's heady stuff, but oh so satisfying...

The Man Who Fell to Earth. When I was nine, I had a friend, Adam, whose parents were much more laissez-faire with him than mine were with me. Adam’s dad kept stacks of Oui and Penthouse on the coffee table in their living room, and when I came over we were allowed to look at them, which we would do for hours, and hours. Adam’s parents had something inside their TV I’d never heard of before called Home Box Office, and Adam was permitted to watch anything he wanted, even if it was rated R. On one sleepover at his house, we ate Original Ray’s Pizza and watched The Man Who Fell to Earth on HBO. It freaked us out, especially the blow job scene and the one where Bowie takes his eyes out of his head. I remember the movie being so strange and mysterious, as well as the thrill of watching something my parents would never, ever let me watch. I had no familiarity at all with Bowie at the time, except that I remember seeing copies of Low in the stacks at Dicomat on 59th street, when I went there to buy Kiss’ Alive and Destroyer. But when I saw Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth, he seemed so cool and different. Nowadays, I watch the movie and get a thrill out of seeing actual color footage of what Bowie looked like in the ’75 – ’76 period, right before the release of Station to Station. And it ain’t pretty. ...Yet somehow it is pretty. He looks so drugged out and out of sorts. The scenes where he's naked are disturbing and nauseating, but even in that state he has astonishing charisma and presence. The movie is still very weird, even by today’s standards. It’s also kind of pretentious, but its conceptual overreach, like that of Nicholas Roeg’s other famous film, Performance, is part of its charm. The film tells a convoluted tale of a being from another planet (Bowie, of course) who comes to earth in search of a way to save his kind from extinction. It’s definitely a worthwhile timepiece, if for no other reason than it shows how badly ravaged rock stardom had left Bowie by the mid 70s.

Low. The albums comprising Bowie's 'Berlin Trilogy' - Low, 'Heroes', and Lodger, each of which include collaborations with Brian Eno - are patchy, but the highpoints on each include some of the greatest music Bowie ever recorded. ...In an effort to sober up, Bowie moved to Berlin in late 1976. Low is an album in which Bowie further assimilates Euro-Romantic atmospherics and the synth-heavy dronage he's absorbed from his growing obsession with Kraftwerk. Almost all of Side 2, in fact, consists of synth instrumentals (I've always assumed these were largely Eno's doing). At the same time, the album's best songs feature intense New Wavey guitar playing from Ricky Gardiner. ...True to the title of the album, the growing reliance on synthesizers enables Bowie, with the help of Eno and Tony Visconti, to create an emotional flatness of sorts that expresses a sense of alienation from the illusory temptations of the modern world. But things get complex as Bowie has a peverse way of articulating mixed messsges. While Low presumably seeks to give voice to a numbness resulting from sensory overload, Bowie manages somehow to communicate his deadened emotions with a passion that's all the more striking for being so subtle. 'You're such a wonderful person,' he sings in "Breaking Glass", 'But you've got problems - oh, let me touch you...' Even on "Sound and Vision", which might strike a first-time listener as one of Low's rare moments of uncomlicated warmth, things are not exactly what they seem as Bowie's delivery swings, often in the space of one line, from resignation and reserve ('Don't you wonder sometimes...'), to manic euphorica ('...bout sound and vision?). ...The best song on Low, for me anyway, is "Always Crashing in the Same Car." When Bowie says, 'I was going 'round and 'round/ the hotel garage/ must've been touching close to 94,' I feel like I'm listening to a man who's had almost every last bit of feeling sucked out of him, but he's held just enough emotion in reserve to deliver the song in a way that sends chills down my spine. You have to hear it to dig what I'm talking about - but trust me, you will dig it...

'Heroes'. 'Heroes' is a hard album for me to talk about because, as an album, it's really not very good. Like Low, 'Heroes' is about half instrumental and half songs with singing. One thing that's noteworthy about the album is that some of the songs feature Robert Fripp on guitar. The collaboration would continue over the next two albums. But a great guitarist doesn't mean much if the songs he's playing on are forgettable. Having said this, though, there is one exception: I think I can safely say that the title track on 'Heroes' is my favorite song, period. I never tire of it, no matter how many times I hear it. “Heroes” builds in intensity with each verse. By the end, Bowie sings with such raw emotion that you’re forced to drop whatever it is you’re doing and marvel at the way he commits every last fiber of his being to the song. ‘I, I will be king/And you, you will be queen…’ Listen to the song closely, perhaps on an old timey set of cans, and you’ll be amazed at how Eno’s ethereal sound effects make it seem as if the music is floating on air. I also love the song’s existential image of a ‘Hero’, in quotes, as one who beats impossible odds in an alienating and senselessly cruel world. The victory, as Bowie sees it, is short lived and ultimately meaningless, except in that fleeting moment when it takes place, at which point it means everything, all the more so because it will last 'just for one day'...As an aside, I also really love Bowie's look from this period. The sleeve photo for 'Heroes ' is one of the great iconic images.

Lodger. Bowie completes the Berlin trilogy with Lodger, one of his darkest and least accessible albums. It also happens to be quite brilliant in parts if you’re willing to devote time to letting it sink in… The image of Bowie’s grotesquely contorted body on the album sleeve gives a rather unsubtle hint of the record's depiction of the modern world as an arena of desensitization and cruelty. But, as always seems to be the case, Bowie injects passion and humanity into even the most difficult topics. Even on songs like “Repetition” and “Boys Keep Swinging”, where he deploys either an emotionally flat or blithe tone to show the predatory and violent tendencies lurking within men in their relationships with women, the heartlessness in his voice becomes a vehicle through which he communicates the monstrosity of it all... The same type of paradox is present in “Fantastic Voyage”, a strange meditation on nuclear war…Other standouts include “Red Sails”, “Red Money” and “Look Back in Anger”…Adrian Belew provides some stellar guitar pyrotechnics throughout…Like Low, Lodger seems to obliquely reflect Bowie’s eschewal of the more sensationalistic elements of his Glam years.

The Idiot. I’ve always found the Bowie-Iggy relationship compelling and even moving. After Raw Power more or less wrecked Iggy’s career (until it’s later reassessment), he went into a long tailspin of drugs, drink and depression. In 1976, Bowie brought Iggy to Berlin and helped him get back on his feet creatively. Bowie produced Iggy’s resultant comeback album, The Idiot, using essentially the same musicians used for Low. With songs like “Dum Dum Boys”, “Nightclubbing”, and the original version of “China Girl”, The Idiot is a great new wave sounding album that seems to both look back fondly on Iggy’s past while also attempting to exorcize his demons… If you ever have a few minutes and wanna see something really bizarre, go onto YouTube and watch Iggy’s performance of The Idiot’s “Fun Time” on the Dinah Shore show in 1977, featuring David Bowie on keyboards. Iggy's interview with Dinah is a bit cringe making, but you won’t be able to turn it off.

Lust for Life. Again using many of the same musicians from parts of the Berlin trilogy, Bowie also produced Lust for Life, Iggy’s follow up to The Idiot. Thematically and musically, the two albums are quite similar, though it must be said that nothing on The Idiot can compare to “Turn Blue” or“Tonight”. On both songs, Bowie’s backing vocals dominate. My friend Toby has pointed out that when Bowie does backing vocals, he has way of making sure everybody knows that The Great David Bowie has entered the room, which is fine with me. ...The thing to remember about Lust for Life and The Idiot is that they are both major departures from Iggy’s typical sound and approach. Some critics have said that Iggy was the guinea pig Bowie used at the time to help realize his own Euro-romantic vision. It’s hard to disagree with this assessment, and it’s hard not to see The Idiot and Lust for Life as Bowie albums with Iggy singing, even if Iggy wrote most of the songs. Although both records are fairly upbeat, their mechanical electronic sounds convey the same sense of modern alienation we hear in the albums comprising Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy.

Scary Monsters. Scary Monsters is the last great David Bowie album. For some, “great” may be overstating things, but it’s always been one of my favorites, and I think it features some of the best music of Bowie’s career. Like Station to Station and, to a slightly lesser extent, Lodger, Scary Monsters is a highly self reflective album showing how haunted Bowie still was by the destructive trappings of fame and superstardom. On the title track, ‘scary monsters and super freaks’ are a metaphor for the drugged denizens of a phantasmagoric rock world. ‘When I looked in her eyes they were blue but there’s nobody home.’ ...With “Ashes to Ashes”, Bowie revisits Major Tom (presumably an earlier version of himself) and finds a pervy, balding junkie adrift in the abyss. Bowie had clearly come a long way from the Ziggy character who courted spectacle and excess as a way out of the impasse of the Great Collapse. And on “Teenage Wildlife” he seems to pass the torch onto the ‘broken nosed moguls’ of the new New Wave, but he does so in a way that makes clear he no longer wants to be a part of their world, seeing it as the ‘same old thing, in brand new drag…’ Musically, I don’t think it’s too much to say that Scary Monsters is absolutely stunning, featuring both Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew trading their insane guitar chops, and our old Friend, Tony Visconti, adding some very nice acoustic rhythm guitar playing. …When Scary Monsters hit the record shops, it probably felt as if Bowie would be continuing his greatness into the 80s. Too bad it was not to be.

transformers, six

2008-09-09T09:51:00.000-07:00

Aladdin Sane and Berlin. Aladdin Sane is an impressionistic rock diary chronicling Bowie’s perceptions of America during his 1972 U.S. tour in support of Ziggy Stardust. The record is the beginning of the end of Glam, at least as far as Bowie is concerned, which is certainly not to say it’s a bad album. I know there are plenty of Bowie aficionados who rate Aladdin Sane as his best. I think the record is a bit patchy as a whole, though there’s no denying the dirty backbeat of “Panic in Detroit,” the relentlessly heavy guitars of “Cracked Actor,” the sing-songy desperation of “Drive-in Saturday," or the fist pumping rebelliousness of “The Jean Genie.” Still, the journey that began four years earlier with Space Oddity seems to be running out of steam by the time Bowie gets to Aladdin Sane. ...While Ziggy Stardust sounded crisp and vibrant, Aladdin Sane’s sloppy and muffled sound quality conveys exhaustion and even a certain sickness. Part of this is the inevitable result of trying to piece together an album in a number of different studios during a tour. But there’s obviously more to it. The rushed feel of the record gives the impression that Bowie knows the hedonistic worldview he embraced in the wake of the Great Collapse is about to reach its limits as a creative force…’Millions weep a fountain, just in case of sunrise…’

The line separating Bowie’s various stage personae from who he really is has always been blurry at best. The enigmatic nature of his personality is a big part of what makes him so damn cool. Towards the end of the Ziggy tour, he announced that he’d never perform live again. This turned out to be bullshit, of course, but only if you assume that he was speaking as himself and not as Ziggy Stardust. Several years later – I believe it was during the Station to Station period – he told journalists that totalitarianism was the only way forward, and a photographer caught him giving a Hitlerian salute to a crowd of fans outside Victoria Station. Was this David Bowie, or was it a new character? When he started wearing those horrible red suits with suspenders in the 80s, was he David Bowie selling out, or was he David Bowie playing the part of a yuppie scum bag? When he took his song catalogue public and sold shares of himself on the stock exchange, was it greed at work or is it all just performance art...? His marriage to Iman is equally mysterious: Two insanely attractive yet completely desexualized people getting hitched. Who knows if it’s real or theater? Or maybe the age of high-tech celebrity worship renders the distinction between real life and theater moot.

Bowie himself deals with a lot of these heady issues in various ways on songs like “Fame”, “’Heroes’”, “Teenage Wildlife” and "Ashes to Ashes”, so I might come back to them next time. The point I wanted to make is that Bowie was in the midst of becoming a bona fide superstar during the recording of Aladdin Sane. Along with the album’s shoddier sound, the songs together suggest that the decadent ethos of his music and public persona had now completely spilled over into the reality of his life. Performance and reality became increasingly fused together, and the resulting concoction was the harrowing portrait of spiritual illness that comes across on Aladdin Sane. The major symptom of the illness is a fever hot enough to fuel one last gasp of unholy passion. You can hear it especially in the way Bowie cries 'Let yourself go!' in "The Jean Genie," and in the lurid imagery of "Cracked Actor", which sounds like something lifted from the pages of Hollywood Babylon or City of Night... But once again, Bowie saves the most haunting moment for last, closing Aladdin Sane with “Lady Grinning Soul.” As Mike Garson’s piano tinkers in the background, like the gentle feel of a lover's fingertips, or the weightless sensation one has after the first fateful taste of an addictive drug, Bowie sings, ‘touch the fullness of her breast, feel the love in her caress…She will be your living end.'

A little more than ten years ago, when I was still a graduate student at UCLA, I had a ten-day ‘crisis of confidence,’ which is a euphemistic way of saying that I broke down. Several things precipitated this ‘development’, or ‘event’, or whatever you want to call it. I had doubts about my ability to finish my degree, but I didn’t know what else I might want to do with my life. I had also just split with a woman I’d been with for a year. My family was on the other side of the country and all my friends were out of town for the summer. So I was all alone with nothing to keep me company but my self-loathing thoughts... The night before the crisis started, I made the mistake of playing Lou Reed’s Berlin for the first time. I had bought the album several months earlier but then never listened to it. I’m convinced that the record was the final bit of heaviness that sent me into my tailspin. Berlin is one of the most depressing records ever made – almost to the point of being a parody. I can’t say I care for the album all that much, but it expresses some of the same mood and spirit as Aladdin Sane, so it’s worth discussing here. But only quickly. Otherwise I might break down again, and I don’t have time for that anymore.

Berlin tells the story of a bohemian husband and wife in Berlin who start out happy and have children, but then quickly spiral downwards into a vortex of drugs, anonymous sex, abuse and depression. After they split up, the woman (Caroline) has her kids taken away from her because the authorities discover that she’s a neglectful addict who sleeps with all manner of men and women for drugs…

They're taking her children away
Because of the things she did in the streets
In the alleys and bars no she couldn't be beat

That miserable rotten slut couldn't turn anyone away

Pretty uplifting, huh? I might be missing some of the nuance here, but trust me when I tell you from experience that Berlin is guaranteed to bring you right down, and not in a good way. The films of Ingmar Berman, to give an example off the top of my head, bring you down, too, but they still leave you feeling nourished because they’re visually beautiful, intellectually penetrating, and they have something to say about the human condition. Lou Reed’s Berlin just leaves you lying face down in the gutter, and you don't gain anything for having gone through all that anguish. Maybe some people respond to this kind of thing. In recent years, Berlin has been reassessed and is now seen by some as a forgotten classic. It’s not my cup of tea… What’s strange to me, in a way, is that Lou Reed would make a joyful bit of amoral mischief like Transformer and then follow it up with something as relentlessly sad and upsetting as Berlin, as if all the things he embraced in an attempt to move beyond the Great Collapse suddenly turned nightmarish. Then again, this mirrors the way Glam breached sacred boundaries in an attempt to get out of the shadow of the 60s, but then fell victim to the consequences of its overindulgence.

transformers, five

2008-09-03T14:45:00.000-07:00

Transformer and Raw Power. I heard Iggy Pop for the first time during the first week of my freshman year at Syracuse University. I made friends with a punk rock guy at a Circle Jerks gig - they were playing in town at a club called the Lost Horizon. Noah, the punk rock guy, invited me to his dorm room a few days later. We drank a few Old Milwaukees and he popped a tape of Raw Power into his box (remember when a ghetto blaster used to be called a 'box'?)... Iggy knocked me out. He sounded so wound up, and angry, and aggressive, like a guy who just wants to break shit, even if it's his own head... I immediately got me an LP copy of Raw Power, noticing right away that Bowie was involved in making the record (apparently for the worse, but I didn't know that at the time so Bowie's participation made the record even more alluring). ...Over time, though, the newness of Raw Power wore off for me and I eventually got to a point where I would only listen to the first two tracks, "Search and Destroy" and "Gimme Danger." I still think these are the only two songs on the record that are any good, but they're both so great that I pull Raw Power out of the stacks regularly just to hear them...

Backtrack a bit...I was a high school fuck up, ill advisedly sent to a pressure cooker prep school in NYC. But I don't regret it because some of my dearest friends to this day date back to that time and place... When I was 16, my worried parents wanted to fix what was wrong with me. They sent me to a head shrinker who put me on Ritalin. You may wonder what any of this has to do with Raw Power. Well, take a few tablets of Ritalin, play the record, and you'll find out in about 20 minutes time. ...Ritalin is fantastic, but also habit forming. They'll tell you it's not addictive, but don't believe it for one second. Imagine speed with a soft landing. That's Ritalin. Actually, check that: The landing is only soft if you don't mix the shit with Iggy Pop... Ritalin was prescribed to me to improve my academic efficiency, but I took a dosage of the stuff one night in college just for kicks. I thought it would help me get laid. I always felt more virile, charming and confident with the stuff coursing through my veins. I went out to a few of the bars in town that night but didn't get laid - didn't even talk to anyone, let alone any comely college co-eds who might be interested in casually bedding down with me. I walked back to my dorm room when I saw the writing on the wall. Now I had nothing to do, but I was still flying high. So I played Raw Power. Bad idea.

'I'm a streetwalkin' cheetah with a heart full of napalm.'

...Within a few moments, Iggy's frenzied singing and James Williamson's jackhammer guitars practically had me climbing the walls, like Spidey trying to evade the Vulture or Kingpin in Amazing Spiderman #79. I started screaming along with the music and slam dancing with myself. I must've looked like a mental patient. My roomate, who was 'rushing' one of the douche bag frat houses on campus, came back from a party and tried to calm me down. Next thing you know, the two of us were throwing spastic haymakers at each other out in the hallway. He connected with one of his punches and bloodied my nose, but it knocked some sense back into me so it was for the best... I never took Ritalin for kicks again, but to this day Raw Power is an album I associate with reckless aggression.

Even though I don't think much of Raw Power beyond the one-two punch of its first two tracks, it strikes me as an album about drugs and sexual catharsis. 'There's nothing left to life but a pair of glassy eyes', Iggy sings, capturing the tied off aimlessness hanging in the air after the Collapse, 'raze my feelings one more time...' More in concept than execution, Raw Power epitomizes the Aftermath, in all it's delicious moral turpitude.

About a year before the appearance of Raw Power, Bowie produced Lou Reed's seminal Glam album, Transformer, with lots of help from Ronno. Transformer, in my opinion, is far superior to Raw Power. The comparison is admittedly a little unfair since the two records are so different sounding, but the atmosphere created by each is somewhat similar. ...Like Bowie and T. Rex during the same period, Lou Reed refused to wallow in the disappointment of his generation's lost chances and failures. I doubt he ever put much stock in those chances anyway. ...Transformer takes us for a walk on the wild side, through the dark alleys of downtown Gotham, where the casualties of a warped and distorted counterculture lay prone in pools of their own filth. And you can tell Lou loves every fuckin' minute of it - loves the underground misfits and losers, the trannies, the hookers, the junkies... The most poignant moment on the album for me comes at the end of "Perfect Day", a gorgeously crafted ode to heroin. With piano and lush strings slowly fading, Lou repeatedly sings, 'you're gonna reap what you sow.' It's chilling and ominous, but it's beautiful, too, turning the destruction of 60s idealism into both a logical outcome and a cause for celebration.

the kids are alright

2008-09-02T14:13:00.000-07:00

Like any self-respecting guy approaching middle age, I tend to look down a bit at the youth of today - i.e. kids today don't read, they have no attention span, they need instant gratification, they're in love with their annoying little gadgets, their minds are wastelands of corporate colonization...and on and on. It's the same shit people said about my generation in the 80s. Some of you may remember Alan Bloom's book, The Closing of the American Mind? The criticism had some validity then and may have even more now...

I feel especially old when I go to the Mac Store. Those Geniuses are so damn young. But I've gotta give 'em their due. They are as competent and knowledgeable as can be. The Emo guy who helped me, Chad, looked at first to be everything I've become so crotchety about. He had a metal pole stuck horizontally through his nose, another one stuck vertically in his tounge, and narly ink all over his body - I'm talking like Mike Ness ink, or Ultimate Fighting ink. And don't even get me started on the guy's hair because talking about it will make me feel like I should be wearing a damn diaper. ...But this guy - this Chad - was fuckin' great. Friendly, professional, and capable beyond anything I would expect these days from a large cost-cutting corporation, even one with a supposed heart like Apple.

...One thing I will say is that Chad has this horrible verbal tic where he affirms almost every statement made to him by saying, "very excellent."

"Hi, I'm Max S. You just called my name for Mac support."
"Very excellent. I'm Chad."
"Hi Chad. So, there's something really wrong with my Macbook."
"Very excellent. Let's see if we can fix it. Are you under Apple Care?"
"Yes. I've still got two years."
"Two years. Very excellent."
"My Mac won't turn on. I don't even get the greeting tone."
"Very excellent. Typically problems like that have to do either with memory or the logic board. Let me take it in back and see if we can do a diagnostic."
"OK. Should I just wait here?"
"Very excellent."
"Oh, one more thing. I just killed four people and ate their innards for dinner.
"Very excellent. I'll be right back."

Normally, I'd be stewing in my grouchy juices, muttering things like, "one more very excellent out of you and I'll be sticking my very excellent boot up your very excellent ass." But not this time. So impressed was I with Chad's excellence that I now believe, like Whitney, that the children are our future.

My computer is sick and in the shop, so the next few posts might be a little shorter. A few of my recent entries have been somewhat turgid anyway, so forced brevity probably isn't a bad thing...

transformers, four

2008-08-26T12:24:00.000-07:00

I received a thoughtful e-mail from a woman in Vancouver who got routed to this blog while doing research on Bob Dylan. She had some kind and flattering things to say, but also noted that I "seem to have a weird porny fetish for pictures of men and their guitars..." The comment gave me pause, but after thinking about it for a few days the only thing I can say is...

...guilty as charged! Trouble is, images like the above photo of Marc Bolan say more about what music ought to be than anything I could ever hope to express with millions of words... Which brings me to my main point. The thing I love most about Glam is its unrestrained passion. It's impossible to listen to early Roxy Music, or Bowie, or the first Eno album, etc, etc, without being moved by the raw emotional energy of the performances. Glam is also compelling to me because, in more than just literal terms, it's a post-60s phenomenon, conveying a sense that the time for the serious business of changing the world has passed. Some saw this condition as the tragic outcome of missed opportunities. But Glam filled the void with a libertine spirit and enthusiasm that fueled some of the most exciting music you'll ever hear.

On T. Rex's Electric Warrior and The Slider, two of my favorite Glam records, Marc Bolan retains his penchant for spacey psychedelia. But with an increasingly assured Tony Visconti in the smoky control booth, and a full band now playing behind Bolan (including completely daft backing harmonies from Mark Volman and Howie Kaylan of The Turtles), the dreamy feel of the music gains a renewed sense of purpose on standouts like "Ballrooms of Mars", "Cosmic Dancer", "Mystic Lady","Planet Queen" and "Rock On." One listen to the flaming guitar solo in the latter - virtually one note played repeatedly with furious abandon - is all you'll need to be convinced that Bolan was out to offer a sexed-up, raucous alternative to the clouds of depressed stagnation hanging over the early 1970s.

T. Rex takes us to a place where dirty sweet girls boogie and ball all night in lizard leather boots. It's a world I really enjoy visiting, especially when Bolan accentuates the lusty rhythm of his own language.

'...Mild mouthed Rita, she's a chevy chase cheetah, loves everyone, everyone...'

'...You diamond browed hag, you're a gutter gaunt gangster, John Lennon knows your name and I've seen his...'

'...Girl you're good and I've got wild knees for you, on a mountin range I'm Doctor Strange for you...'

On those rare occasions when deeper meanings accompany the guitar spangled euphoria, they tend to affirm the freedom of a new unrestrained way of life. 'I danced myself right out the womb, I danced myself into the tomb, what's it like to be a loon?' This perspective, along with the unmistakable druggy feel pervading the two records, holds within it the seeds of the Glam scene's eventual self-destructive streak, but for the time being the music sounds liberated from the heavy yoke of the late 60s. 'Life's a gas,' Bolan sang as he stood on the threshold of T. Rextacy and all the excess it would entail, 'I hope it's gonna last.'

Next time: Lou, Iggy and David...

transformers, three

2008-08-21T17:11:00.001-07:00

T. Rex, Electric Warrior and The Slider. After Marc Boaln and Mickey Finn changed their name from Tyrannosaurus Rex to T. Rex and recorded "Ride a White Swan", a crackling gem of a single, they went on to make the first album under their new name. T. Rex, which continues and solidifies Bolan's great creative relationship with producer Tony Visconti, is essential listening for those of us interested in hearing the 60s become the 70s. The twee-hippie stylings of Tyrannosaurus Rex are still there on "One Inch Rock", "Suneye" and "The Wizard", and we are even graced with a meditative 'om' at the end of "Children of Rarn." But with "Beltane Walk", "Root of Star" and "Is it Love", the album also offers preliminary tastes of the fuzz toned wah wah dream fog that later became more commonly associated with Bolan at the height of T. Rextacy in Britain... Listening to T. Rex recently, it struck me that its most memorable songs straddle the line separating Bolan as winsome folk gnome and Bolan as God of Glitter. "The Time of Love is Now" has a throwback flower child message, weedy acoustic guitar, and Tolkeinesque lutes, but the song's hand claps and insistent chord progression offer a small taste of nascent T. Rex Boogie. Similarly, "Jewell" and "Summer Deep" feature the elfin vibratto that was such a distinctive part of Bolan's style with Tyrannosaurus Rex, and yet the songs are propelled forward with the kind of filthy hooks that would shortly make Electric Warrior and The Slider so irresistible. ...T. Rex is an aural bridge connecting two periods. 'One day we changed from children into people', Bolan sings on "Seagull Woman." The album seems to recognize transformation in the air, but the nature and significance of the changes have yet to be fully absorbed. I know there’s a metaphor somewhere in here involving dinosaurs, archaeology and evolution, but it's probably a bad metaphor, and I’d rather just say that, while uncertainty can sometimes be paralyzing, the sense of flux and interstitial ambivalence that comes across on T. Rex contributes mightily to the record’s appeal.

transformers, two

2008-08-18T18:19:00.001-07:00

Hunky Dory and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. I can’t remember who said, “if you want to know about the 60s, listen to the Beatles.” These quotes always sound better at first than they really are after you take some time to unpack them, but I suppose you could equally say, 'if you want to know about the 70s, listen to Daivd Bowie...'

Hunky Dory is very much a programmatic album in that it represents the watershed moment in Bowie's career when he realized that creative innovation could and should be an end in itself. There were already hints of Glam on Space Oddity and The Man Who Sold the World, but Hunky Dory is Bowie's first sustained attempt to carve out a vision that heralds the end of the 60s and anticipates a new spirit of exploration. While “Andy Warhol” and “Song for Bob Dylan” pay tribute to those iconic figures of the past, they're performed with the retrospective pathos of a man bidding farewell to a fallen age. But it still isn’t altogether clear what the future will bring ('is there life on mars?'), and tracks like “Quicksand” and “Bewlay Brothers” derive their mysterious power precisely from the way they embrace the ambiguity of a transitional moment in history. This ambiguity, of course, extends into the sphere of sex, and tracks like “Changes”, “Queen Bitch” and “Oh, You Pretty Things” point to sexuality as the next great frontier of experimentation.

The first thing I notice about Ziggy Stardust when I play it (and I still do so quite often) is just how great the record sounds. The album rings from the speakers in sonic waves of celebratory ecstasy. Bowie's singing is utterly impassioned as he completely unleashes the fullness of his expressive range. Ronno's guitar snorts and snarls with balls out distortion, and yet the riffs are addictively tuneful and catchy at the same time... I can't imagine what life would be like without Ziggy Stardust... 'Wham bam thank you, ma'am!'

Ziggy Stardust's narrative arc, loosely chronicling the rise and fall of a rock star from outer space, is much less compelling to me than what the album says about life in the aftermath

of the Great Collapse. So much (though not all) of the 60s countercultural impulse was premised on fostering a freedom of expression that would allow people to be who they really are. But once this became distorted and went down in flames, notions of authentic living and a brighter future seemed naive. Maybe this is what Bowie means on Hunky Dory when he says that 'homo sapiens have outgrown their use' and complains that he 'can't take his eyes off the great salvation of bullshit faith.' With Ziggy Stardust, the 'bullshit faith' that leads us to live for tomorrow is fully jettisoned ('five years, that's all we've got'), and the kids are told to freak out in a moonage daydream of drugs and infinitely twisted sexuality. In this new world, where all meaning is ephemeral and nihilism is fused with the pleasure principle to create a new religion, the crash and burn of rock 'n roll suicide is an inevitable rite of passage.

ronno!

2008-08-15T23:26:00.001-07:00

transformers, one

2008-08-12T15:04:00.001-07:00

Velvet Underground and Loaded. I’m not old enough to have been there at the inception of Glam in the early 70s, but it must’ve been a heady experience for kids when they first came across androgynous men performing testosterone drenched rock. Glam was a twisted bit of business, appropriate to the confused, transitional era in which it emerged. Its brilliance lay in the way its sexual ambiguity - the make up, the clothing, the fey theatrics - served to reinforce the utter masculinity of the whole enterprise. Slade, Alice Cooper, The New York Dolls, Sweet…they all seem so, well, ballsy when their crunchy riffs come blasting out the speakers. But then you watch their performances on shows like The Old Grey Whistle Test and Midnight Special, and the bands appear to be comprised of ugly girls and cross dressing trannies. Still, there’s never any question that but you’re watching men play their phallic Les Pauls through powerful Marshall stacks…

Glam has roots in some of the fruitier elements of 60s psychedelia. But whereas mid-late 60s dandyism tended to accentuate a kind of prim and elegant foppery, the androgyny of Glam in the early-mid 70s turned into something more raw, more openly sexual, more decadent, and more confrontational. Compare the look, sound and vibe of, say, early Move or SF Sorrow-era Pretty Things with the first few Roxy Music albums or Bowie during the Ziggy and Alladin Sane period. The change reflected the quest for more sensational degrees of spectacle after the collapse of the 60s and the allure of amorality as a response to the drift into uncertainty.

Notwithstanding the allusion in "Sweet Jane" to 'Jack in his corset and Jane in her vest', it might be a bit of a stretch to categorize The Velvet Underground as Glam. But because Glam artists like Bowie, New York Dolls and Iggy Pop assimilated VU’s mondo bizarro skepticism towards the 60s, I tend to think of VU as a precursor to Glam. In turn, Bowie and Mick Ronson were hugely instrumental in launching the Glam years of Lou Reed’s career.

Velvet Underground and Loaded are actually quite a bit less avant garde the previous VU albums (The Velvet Underground and Nico and White Light/White Heat), but with songs like "Jesus", "I'm Set Free", "Rock and Roll" and "Oh! Sweet Nuthin'", both records sound like epilogues, as if they're trying to lay the aspirations of the 60s generation finally to rest. ...The songs on Velvet Underground are especially atuned to the Great Collapse and the cynical thinking prevailing in its aftermath. 'There are problems in these times,' Lou Reed sings in "Beginning to see the Light", 'but none of them are mine'. He strikes a similar tone with the line, 'I'm set free to find a new illusion.' There's no hiding the palpable emotion in Lou's voice when he sings these lines, yet they seem to be such flippant and dismissive statements. The interpretive possibilities are vast, but the sentiment undoubtedly signals the movement into 'the beginning of a new age', one in which everything becomes artifice (or 'illusion') and notions of authenticity, truth and progress dissolve into thin air. Welcome to the age of Glam...

Next time I'll be sinking in the quicksand of my thought...

take it easy

2008-08-08T13:20:00.000-07:00

My book-in-progress, provisionally titled Canyon Fodder, is set in Los Angeles and tells a series of intersecting stories about three musicians who live through the Great Collapse. I took my initial inspiration from three sources. The first was Alan Rudolph’s Welcome to L.A., a film that in Pauline Kael’s words “looks drugged.” She intended the remark as criticism, but for me Welcome to L.A. has the same dreamy, fragmented feel as some of Robert Altman’s best movies. Rudolph, incidentally, worked very closely with Altman for many years and Altman produced Welcome to L.A., which is loosely centered on a singer-songwriter, played by the great Keith Carradine, and is about the precariousness of meaningful romantic connection in the splintered metropolis. The film drips with decadence and should be viewed, in my opinion, as one of the definitive representations of West Coast-style 70s malaise… The second source of inspiration for my book was Easy Rider, arguably the ultimate Great Collapse movie, and the third was Jackson Browne’s song, “The Pretender.”

“The Pretender” is Jackson Browne’s most explicit statement on the death of the hippie dream. ‘I wanna know what became of the changes we waited for love to bring/Were they only the fitful dreams of some greater awakening?’ The song deploys remarkably evocative poetic symbols to express the disillusionment of Baby Boomers who watched the communal ideals of the 60s morph into empty materialism and dull suburban routine.

Where the sirens sing and the church bells ring
And the junk man pounds his fender
Where the veterans dream of the fight
Fast asleep at the traffic light
And the children solemnly wait For the ice cream vendor
Out into the cool of the evening Strolls the pretender
He knows that all his hopes and dreams
Begin and end there

Much to Jackson Browne’s credit, the acquisitive protagonist in “The Pretender” is not an object of derision or scorn but instead is depicted sympathetically as a person trying to navigate forces beyond his control, ‘caught between the longing for love and the struggle for the legal tender.'

“The Pretender” elaborates on ideas scattered over Jackson Browne’s previous albums, Jackson Browne, For Everyman, and Late for the Sky. I’ve always been compelled by Jackson’s ability to communicate broadly relevant problems with a personal, confessional style. He also keeps things mellow and understated, as if to underscore his milieu’s need for quietude after the turbulence of the 60s. While “The Pretender” is my favorite song of his at this level, my favorite collection of his songs is Late for the Sky, an album that, as Stephen Holden wrote in his 1974 review for Rolling Stone, explores “romantic possibility in the shadow of apocalypse..." What emerges from the songs on Late for the Sky is a portrait of a man and a generation adrift, having lost all sense of identity and meaning 'after the deluge.' How long have I been sleeping? Jackson asks on the album’s title track. ‘How long have I been drifting along through the night?’ What makes the album so affecting is the way Jackson balances sadness and dislocation with hope and a faith in renewal. ‘Don’t let the uncertainty turn you around’, he sings in “For a Dancer,” ’go ahead and make a joyful sound.’ I wouldn’t describe the sounds Jackson makes on Late for the Sky as ‘joyful’, but his humanistic impulse gives you reason to believe - or reason to want to believe.

Running on Empty, released about one year after The Pretender, is a ‘life on the road’ album, as in ‘life on the road is so damn hard.’ I find this hackneyed rock theme pretty tedious. Every time I watch The Last Waltz, I wince when Robbie Robertson tells Martin Scorsese that touring is “a goddamn impossible way of life.” How impossible can it be, really, when the record company is paying you tons of money to bask in mass adoration and get fellated by a different woman every night? Coal mining is an impossible way of life. The life of a rock star is comparatively easy… Having said this, though, Running on Empty is a pretty great record. The album features a number of solid songs (“The Road”, “Rosie”, “You Love the Thunder”), all recorded during live performances, sound checks, and in hotel rooms. The most well-known track on the album – and I think the most famous song Jackson ever wrote other than "Take it Easy" – is “Running on Empty.” The song is one part road exhaustion (‘I don’t know how to tell you all just how crazy this life feels’) and one part post-60s disillusionment (‘In ’65 I was 17 and running up 101 / I don’t know where I’m running now I’m just running on’).

Running on Empty was Jackson’s last really good album. He called his next album Hold Out, likely a self-congratulatory reference to his increasing social activism and ongoing belief in the values of the 60s generation. Hold Out has one or two good songs, but the record as a whole gives the impression that Jackson was, by this time, truly running on empty.

a child in these hills

2008-08-05T11:24:00.000-07:00

Remember “Buddy Green”, the camp counselor I mentioned a few weeks ago? Buddy was probably 17 or 18 when we knew each other. He loved rock and wore his black hair in a stoner bob, just above his shoulders. I thought he was the coolest. I remember this recurrent thing he'd do with me where he'd look at me very seriously and say, "I don’t suppose you would remember me, but I used to follow you back in ’63.” I had no idea what it meant, but it sounded fuckin’ great and I thought I was hot shit when I turned around and did the same performance for my friends… Buddy introduced me to albums like Who’s Next, Quadrophenia (obviously), Houses of the Holy, After the Gold Rush, and Let it Bleed. He also exposed me to Jackson Browne.

It’s funny how certain isolated, seemingly trivial episodes can take on larger than life meanings in retrospect. One afternoon Buddy and I were in the bunk together, just the two of us. Buddy played Jackson Browne on his eight-track tape player. Other than "Running on Empty", a big hit at the time, I had never heard Jackson before. I was too young to grasp what the words were about, but something in their sound and meter captivated me, especially coupled with the mellow tunes and sweet backing harmonies…

'…Caught between the longing for love and the struggle for the legal tender...'

“Who is this?” I asked.
“Jackson Browne, man. We’re going to see his concert tonight at Tanglewood.”
“Tanglewood? I thought that was for classical.”
“Naw. They have rock.”
Buddy reached into the back of the wooden cabinet where he kept his underwear and t-shirts and retrieved a plastic bag containing a strange looking greenish-brown block of some sort. Then he sat down on his bed and stuck his nose in the bag. “That’s some good shit,” he said, looking at me with a serene smile.
“What is that?”
"Nothing."
“Is it grass?”
No answer.
“Are you gonna smoke it?”
“Yup.”
“How?”
“How? I’m gonna roll it up and smoke it.”
“Now?”
“Of course not. Tonight, at the concert.”
“With Daisy?”
“Yup.”
“Do the other guys know you smoke grass?”
“No, and you better not tell them.”
Buddy’s girlfriend, Daisy, was an arts and crafts counselor. Even now, 30 years later, I still remember Daisy’s enchanting summertime beauty. She had sandy blonde hair and lovely freckles. Daisy may be the reason freckles on a woman have always sent my heart racing. She used to come up behind me as I sat at the pottery wheel, and she’d press her chest against my back. Then she’d reach around and guide my little hands over the wet clay as it spun round ‘n round...

"What kinda stuff do you do with Daisy?” I once asked Buddy.
“What’d’ya mean, what kinda stuff?”
“Do you kiss?”
"What do you think?"
“I don't know. Have you ever seen her boobs?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“Have you ever seen her pussy?”
“Hey! None of your business.”
“Come on, tell me. Have you ever seen it?”
Buddy paused for a few seconds to consider his response. Then that serene blissed-out smile flashed across his face again. “I’ve seen it, and I’ve tasted it.”

When I think of Buddy nowadays, I hear Jackson Browne's music, and when I hear Jackson's music my mind turns to Buddy. That summer occupies such a sweet and pivotal place in my memory that I’ve never been able to let go of Jackson Browne, even when it became completely uncool to be into him... I embraced “New Music” in high school and loved me my Husker Du, Soul Asylum, Minutemen and X, but I somehow also made room for Jackson Browne. “What is this wimpy shit?” my friends would ask impatiently before changing the tape to Black Flag’s Slip It In or The Replacements Stink…

I moved to the Southland in the spring of 1992 (three days before the riot). Being an Eastcoaster, I had never really connected Jackson Browne to California, but I quickly grasped that his music was the soundtrack to 70s LA... For me, Jackson is to the 1970s what The Beach Boys are to the 60s. While Brian Wilson saw and felt the darkness creeping into the sunshine, Jackson Browne teased a little bit of sunshine out of the darkness. The shift reflects the changes taking place over ten years.

Jackson, the ultimate troubadour-singer-songwriter, used personal, often confessional words metaphorically to capture L.A.'s spiritual evolution during the transitional years after the Great Collapse. In Jackson's songs, Los Angeles becomes a solitary yet romantic place. When I hear "Late for the Sky", "The Pretender", "From SIlver Lake", or"Fountain of Sorrow", I just want to get in my car and drive in the atomistic vastness of the city. No matter how somber his songs get, hearing them makes me feel that I may spend most of my time alone and lonely, but I'm still blessed to be living in the greatest city in the world.

More on Jackson Browne next time...

all about me

2008-07-30T16:07:00.000-07:00

Blue and Late for the Sky. I have complicated relationships with Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne. Much of what I’ve read and heard about the two of them would suggest that they’re both assholes. Jackson strikes me as being pompous, self-righteous and smarmy, and Joni seems like a bitter egomaniac. But I’ve never met either one of them, so the ‘complicated relationships’ really refer to my connection with their music. Besides, I’m sure a lot of the music I cherish comes from people I wouldn’t like if I met them. In the cases of Joni and Jackson, the best parts of their careers make me forgive everything else that may or may not be true about their personalities. They are (or were) both supremely talented songwriters, so much so that their songs create alternative personae – people you want to talk to, question, and get to know... For me, the gap between the people they ‘really’ might be and the people they become in song widens even more because they both represent a part of L.A.’s history I’ve been obsessed with ever since I moved here…

When I grab my body board and drive to County Line in my Mustang, I like to play Joni’s Court and Spark on the car stereo as I drive down to PCH from Kanan Road. Something about the way she sings ‘breaking like the waves at Malibu’ makes me picture myself as Elliot Gould in The Long Goodbye, walking through a sunken living room and out a back door that opens onto the golden sands of Paradise Cove... If I sit at home and try to conjure up other images of early 70s L.A. for my book, I often turn to Jackson Browne’s first album. I know it’s bland, but it’s a blandness of a very distinct, melancholy sort. The record is like a blurry snapshot of this city, shrouded in yellow smog and haunted by ambiguities of the 60s...

I am a dizzy dinosaur in this age of gadgetry and instant gratification, hopelessly nostalgic for a place and time continually fading into the distant past. Neither Joni Mitchell nor Jackson Browne can take me back to that time entirely, but they both give me a window into its state of mind…

The ‘fitful dreams’ of the Love generation lay in ruins at the end of the 60s, and one very common response was to withdraw into downbeat self-examination. Joni Mitchell’s Blue is not the first singer-songwriter album in this vein and isn’t even Joni’s first crack at it. By the time she recorded the album in 1970-71, she had already made several records and enjoyed some moderate success with Ladies of the Canyon. But in my opinion, Blue is worth singling out as the ultimate representation of the hippie mind turned inward at the dawn of the 1970s. Listening to it, I feel as if I'm privy to Joni’s most intimate ruminations on the highs of giddy romance, the lows of love lost, and the inextricable connection between the two. ‘I’m so hard to handle/I’m selfish and I’m sad/Now I’ve gone and lost the best baby that I ever had’… Joni allows herself to be more nakedly vulnerable on Blue than on any other record she made over the course of her career. When she sings ‘I wish I had a river I could skate away on’, or tells the child of “Little Green” that 'there’ll be icicles, and birthday clothes, and sometimes there’ll be sorrow', I can't help but go down to those despairing depths with her. The stark emotional authenticity is what distinguishes Blue from a lot of other singer-songwriter fare. I just don’t respond in the same way to James Taylor, or Carole Klein, or Linda Ronstadt…

On “California”, one of the upbeat songs on Blue, Joni sings, ‘They won’t give peace a chance/That was just a dream some of us had.’ This is one of the only instances on the album where Joni moves outside herself. The irony is that, in a way this is Joni trying to tell us why she has retreated into such profound introspection.

Next Time: Jackson Browne...

more mc5 and groovies

2008-07-25T09:31:00.000-07:00

MC5's High Time, the follow up to Back in the USA, turns the dark passage between the late 60s and the early 70s into an occasion for an apocalyptic party. The music may not be as easy to absorb at first, but the album's chaotic atmosphere eventually sinks in, evoking a sense that compromise with the powers that be is very much a thing of the past. 'Atom bombs, Viet Nam, missiles on the moon. And they wonder why their kids are shootin' drugs so soon...' The album is ominous sounding but somehow still has infectious enegy. You will be hard pressed to find a song that rocks more furiously than High Time's opening track, "Sister Anne", the anti-hero of which has 'the ten commandments tattooed on her arm' and is the personification of a new and freeing amorality. 'Sister won't you tell me where I went so wrong/I used to say my prayers baby all night long/I'd listen to the gospel ringing in my ears/Come on sister Anne save me from my fears/if you can...' The songs on High Time tend to be longer, a bit looser in places, and sometimes even unhinged sounding, all of which suggests that the band was knee-deep in drugs at this point. But this seems to intensify the fierce desperation of "Baby Won't Ya", "Future/Now" and "Poison", and it adds twisted incisiveness to the album's dark wordplay. 'Viet Nam, what a sexy war, Uncle Sam's a pimp, wants us to be whores...' In the end, High Time swings between resignation and an ongoing commitment to convulsive deliverance, but this conflict only adds to the album's explosiveness and makes the whole affair unique amongst the music of the Great Collapse.

Although The Flamin' Groovies keep things fairly primitive on Flamingo and Teenage Head, the band's sound becomes harder and more aggressive. The two albums dabble in many aspects of the Collapse - drugged out paranoia ("Comin' After Me", "Teenage Head","Headin' for the Texas Border"), rustic escapism ("Sweet Roll me on Down", "32-20", "Childhood's End"), moral and sexual depravity ("Jailbait","Second Cousin"), and burnt-out exhaustion ("High Flying Baby", "She's Falling Apart", "Whiskey Woman"). More so than even MC5's High Time, Flamingo and Teenage Head have a druggy quality about them that leaves you feeling like you're swimming in the social decrepitude of the early 70s. This may be depressing to hear on one level, but there's something perversely appealing about it, too. I cringe when I think about all the mainlining that must've been going on (I'm squeamish about needles and veins), but there's a part of me that wishes I could have been there and participated.

The Flamin' Groovies went the way of many victims of The Great Collapse after the release of Teenage Head, disappearing into a black hole of self abuse, but not before releasing an angusihed song about it in 1972, "Slow Death". The band disappeared for a few years and and then returned in 1976 as a Power Pop Beat revival group. Their Dave Edmunds produced gem from that year, Shake Some Action, is an outstanding collection of Anglophilic jangle, with harmonies that harken back to The Searchers, The Dakotas, and The Beatles... In the late 60s, the Groovies looked to the 50s for inspiration. Then in the mid 70s, the band looked to the mid 60s. I find Shake Some Action completely irresistible. It's one of my 'default' records - something I put on when I can't think of anything else I want to hear. But listening to it is also a strange experience because it's an album from the 70s that tends to bolster my somewhat unhealthy belief that the years from 1962 through 1966 represent the absolute peak of Western Civilization...

*Quick Note: I will probably be posting a little less frequently from now on - maybe like 2 times a week. I am going back to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts for a two-week residency starting at the end of September, so I really need to try and get going on my book again. But I will definitely continue to post, so check in periodically, if the spirit moves you...

the primitives

2008-07-23T13:29:00.001-07:00

Supersnazz * Flamingo * Teenage Head * Back in the USA * High Time

A friend and I had a conversation a few nights ago about our mutual fascination with American Graffiti... The Great Collapse cast a long shadow over American cinema in the 70s. American Graffiti ends right before the 60s become the 60s, at least in the popular understanding of the decade, and the film’s elegiac sentimentality for Malt Shop USA creates a sense that everything was fine until the 60s got out of hand and fucked it all up… We got to talking about how American Graffiti touched off a whole trend of TV nostalgia for the 50s and early 60s. There's Happy Days, of course, the title of which speaks volumes... And remember when they gave Sha Na Na that awful TV show? ...Even the TV version of MASH is set during the Korean War - never mind that the subtext is Viet Nam, or that the male characters somehow evince post-feminist sensitivity.

Nostalgia for the 50s in movies and on TV was really about the 60s. Something similar started to happen a few years earlier in music, a kind of pining for primitive (often 50s influenced) rock and roll. Aside from The Rolling Stones and The Stooges, the best examples I can think of are The Flamin' Groovies and MC5. The throwback element of the music was motivated by the same circumstances that influenced the backward looking aspect of the rural turn, but the nature of the reaction to the Great Collapse was different and had different consequences.

Supersnazz, the first full-length album from The Flamin’ Groovies, came from out of left field in 1969. It’s hard to believe that music this basic could come from a place as muddled and self-important as late-60s San Francisco. The Groovies lacked the reckless ferocity of The Stooges, but much of their music during this period was just as crude, in the best sense of the word. While mainstream pop and rock made increasingly hollow statements about love, war, peace, hate, and so on, The Groovies took a few very large steps backwards to an era when pop music was much less self-conscious and much more fun. “Love Have Mercy” sets the tone on Supersnazz with a melody line ripped off from “That’s All Right,” and then the band pays tribute to the likes of Eddie Cochran, Al Dexter and Little Richard with adoringly rendered versions of “Somethin’ Else”, “Pistol Packin’ Mama”, “Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu”, and “The Girl Can’t Help It.” The two-chord flippancy of “The First One is Free” ratchets down the refinement even further, as does the cartoonishness of “Bam Balam.” …Supersnazz mostly tries to take Rock ‘n Roll back to its roots, but the record also features a few somewhat more sophisticated songs with great guitar playing and even some strings (“Laurie Did It”, “Apart from That”). Listening to the album recently, I wondered if The Groovies wanted to give listeners a few glimpses of their ability to play more ‘evolved’ music. Either way, the glimpses are small and the band mostly keeps things uncomplicated, as if to insist that difficult times call for simple music…music the way it used to be...

MC5 also turned the clock back to a more rudimentary style, but in the process they rocked much harder and were more direct in their social commentary. The band's Back in the USA is a proto-punk classic. No flute solos. No Court of the Crimson King. Nothing too pretentious. Just cranked up guitars, great two and three-minute songs, and a bottomless supply of raw passion that makes you wanna dance and scream and get laid.

'...OK Kids, it's ROCKIN' time...!'

Actually, to reduce MC5 to a party band is an oversimplification. They were involved for some time with John Sinclair and the White Panther Party, and their live shows frequently provided a platform from which to spew hatred for The Man ('a lot of honkies, with a lot of money...'). Along with the good times on Back in the USA, there are flashes of social protest. 'They told you in school about freedom,' Rob Tyner sings in "The American Ruse", 'but when you try to be free they never let ya.' There's also an acute awareness of the 60s gone bad with the anger and violent imagery of "The Human Being Lawnmower" and "Call Me Animal", though it's the band's simplified approach that speaks most clearly about the Great Collapse. The album's bookends, Chuck Berry's "Back in the USA" and Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti", create a perfect context for what MC5 wanna do - inject old fashioned hedonism into the muck and mire of '69 America in terminal stasis.' ...The failure of the revolution was accelerating in 1969, but with the boppin' ecstasy of songs like "Tonight", "Teenage Lust", "High School", and "Looking at You", Back in the USA retrieves the original elements that made the youth insurgency crackle and spark.

Next time: More on The Flamin' Groovies and MC5...

rama lama fa fa fa

2008-07-21T16:57:00.000-07:00

In the summer after I finished 10^th grade, I got a job working as a gopher in a New York City photography studio. The work was not at all glamorous, but I had a nice time being around friendly and creative people. Drew Carolan, one of the photographer’s assistants at the studio, made the summer especially fun. Unfortunately for Drew, he was charged with the task of finding menial things for me to do – things that normally wouldn’t get done if there wasn’t a 16-year-old around willing to do them for minimum wage (cleaning windows, reorganizing cabinets, clearing junk out of closets, etc.). But instead of being resentful about having to deal with me, Drew treated me kindly. He showed me the ropes around the studio, joked with me, asked me questions about myself, and took an interest in me in a way that made me feel like somebody actually gave a shit.

As we became more comfortable with each other, we found that we shared a love of music. Drew used to buy albums at Freebeing records on 2nd Avenue, near St. Mark's. He'd bring them to work and crank them on the studio stereo. I really admired the range and adventurousness of Drew’s taste. Without his ever knowing it, he taught me to cast a wide net when it comes to discovering and appreciating music. He turned me on to a lot of what was then called “New Music”, bands like REM, The Smiths, Echo and the Bunnymen and Aztec Camera (remember Roddy Frame?), but also older stuff like The Turtles and The Mothers of Invention…

…Drew also introduced me to the MC5’s first album, a raucous live recording called Kick out the Jams…

There are a couple of songs on Kick out the Jams that I still have a lot of fun listening to today (“Ramblin’ Rose”, “I Want You Right Now,” Motor City is Burnin’,” “Kick out the Jams”), but what I loved most about the record back then was the insane and hilarious banter between songs. A manic emcee at the start of the record introduces the band. “Are you ready to testify?” he yells, “I give you a testimonial... The MC5!”… At the end of a song called “Come Together”, one of the guys in the band (I think either Wayne Kramer or Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith) says, “thank you, and we hope you all did come…together.” …Elsewhere on the record, the same guy sounds like he's foaming at the mouth as he yells, 'I hear a lot of talk, by a lot of honkies, sittin’ on a lot of money, tellin' me they're high society. Well, I'll let you know something. If you ask me, this is the high society! This is the high society!”

But the best part of the album is when Rob Tyner announces that, ‘right now, right now, right now, it’s time to…KICK OUT THE JAMS, MOTHERFUCKER!!!

I doubt any of this translates all that well when I try to describe it in writing now, but believe me when I tell you that this was exactly the kind of talk I wanted to hear when I was 16, and I think Drew played Kick Out the Jams for me because he knew it would be right up my alley. For the remainder of the summer, we spoke to each other in the language of the MC5. If he saw me crossing the street, he would greet me with ‘right now, right now.’ …If I had to call down to the darkroom where Drew was working, I would call him on the intercom and ask, ‘are you ready to testify?' ... This would go on all day. Those are some of the nicest memories I have from that time in my life.

Sadly, I lost touch with Drew after that summer and we didn’t reconnect until he shot me an e-mail from out of the blue last year. In that long time between, though, Drew became a much sought after photographer, filmmaker and music video director. He is currently working on a book titled Matinee, a collection of amazing photographs he took in the mid 1980s of young punks at the CBGB weekend hardcore matinees. If you’d like a little taste of how intense these photographs are, go to www.myspace.com/drewcarolan. ...You can also view a great video about the project.

After I got the e-mail from Drew last year, I went to visit him at his home here in L.A. I remember driving across town and wondering if he’d even recognize me since he hadn’t seen me since I was 16. I look a little different now than I did then…I parked the car and crossed the street, looking for Drew’s house. Then I heard a familiar voice calling out to me for the first time in 25 years, but it picked up right where we had left off...

'...And right now, right now…'

I originally wanted this post to be about The MC5 and The Flamin’ Groovies. But thinking about the MC5 diverted me, so I’ll hold off on the rest until next time.

paradise waits

2008-07-20T13:43:00.000-07:00

Workingman's Dead and American Beauty. The Grateful Dead had already been touring continuously for almost five years, first as The Warlocks and then as The Dead, when they began to bolster their live repertoire in the fall and winter of 1969 with songs from what would become Workingman’s Dead (“Uncle John’s Band”, “Black Peter”, “Easy Wind”). The prototypes for those songs sound great today, but they give only a small hint of the direction the band would take on Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, released within five months of each other in 1970.

The two albums together chronicle the trajectory of the rural turn. Workingman’s Dead is the first and darker of the two, with its tales of ordinary men – miners, cowboys, railroad engineers, rock breakers - living heroic if also tragic lives. The album’s tone, at once foreboding and wise, is the result of a perfect union between the traditional texture of the music, the mythic American archetypes in Robert Hunter’s lyrics, and the world-weary expressiveness of Garcia’s singing (as well as Pigpen’s on the incomparable “Easy Wind”). ...The well-known line in “Uncle John’s Band”, ‘when life looks like easy street there is danger at your door’, sounds like a life lesson you might get sitting at Uncle John’s knee. It also expresses the washed out hopes of a generation disillusioned in the wake of Manson and Altamont, each of which is alluded to in “Dire Wolf” and “New Speedway Boogie.” In the latter we hear Garcia pleading for a way out of what the 60s have become. ‘One way or another,’ he sings, ‘this darkness got to give.'

American Beauty points towards an escape route from the madness of the Great Collapse. Hunter supplies impressionistic word paintings that create a sense of organic unity between man and nature, elevating the redemptive potential of the migration back to the land, or back to a place ‘between the dawn and the dark of night.'

‘…Walk into splintered sunlight, inch your way through dead dreams to another land…’

‘…Going home, going home, by the riverside I will rest my bones, listen to the river sing sweet songs to rock my soul…’

On both records, Garcia handles Hunter's poetry with just the right shades of benevolence and vulnerability, and the words seem to become naturally entwined with the band's intuitive feel for folk and country music. ...Listening to Workingman's Dead and American Beauty back to back, one walks away - maybe in spite of knowing better - with a hopeful yearning for freedom and human connection. I guess this is the source of their power and longevity.

My experience has been that there are those of us who adore The Grateful Dead, those who can’t stand them, and there’s very little in between. The polarization has its roots in the Great Collapse. More than any other band, The Grateful Dead exited the 60s as an island unto themselves, taking their legions of fans with them to a place offering shelter from the storm. The band made some utterly phenomenal music in front of the audiences who remained behind the band’s protective walls. The period from 1970 to 1974, in particular, is arguably the most exciting five-year stretch of live Grateful Dead. But while the band gave rise to a community based on brotherhood and great music (at least in theory), there’s something conservative about the decision to 'opt out' from the craziness of the world... from responsibility... from the constraints of 'normal' living... etc. This is not only true of The Deadhead scene, but also the rural turn more generally. ...It doesn’t surprise me that hippie living has become more and more of a commodity in the marketplace of lifestyle choices as the 60s have receded further and further into the distant past. In a perverse way, the lifestyle is a kind of white flight or gated community for people who have been conditioned by the 60s, either directly or indirectly, and could never stand to live in dreary suburban tract homes, surrounded by people who aren’t Patagonia Progressives…

‘…Honey, don’t forget to pick up some organic tomatoes on the way home. Take the Prius, and call me on my iPhone if you need me…’

This gets to the heart of why there's that other group of people, too, those of you who hate The Grateful Dead (and/or hippies) with a passion that burns... I'm ambivalent. The Grateful Dead and the rural turn provided an escape that formed the basis for some of my favorite music, but they also held within them the seeds of some things I find distasteful.

untitled

2008-07-16T19:59:00.000-07:00

Sweetheart of the Rodeo. I lived in England for a year and a half, right around the time of the first Gulf War. I remember it as the most miserable time in my life – a shame since I was in my early 20s and should have been enjoying the freedom of youth. I was free all right, but more in the Existentialist sense of freedom, ‘condemned to be free.’ I felt terribly lonely and isolated in a strange new place. English winters have the peculiarity of feeling equally damp whether you’re inside or outside. The sunless days made my struggles with depression and anxiety torturous. Thankfully, I never thought about offing myself (because I have a very low threshold for physical pain), opting instead to smoke tons of hash and drink several pints of beer every night at a grim local pub... When I reflect back on that period now, many of the distant memories are murky at best, but I mostly recall myself being perpetually sad, stoned and nervous.

But every now and then good things happened for me. I walked into a rinky-dink little bookshop one afternoon and found a used compilation cassette tape of Byrds songs, distributed by some weird company out of Germany. The cover featured a sepia toned photo of one of the band’s more obscure, latter-day line ups, and while the tape offered great songs like “Here Without You”, “Goin’ Back”, and “Chestnut Mare”, some of the smash hits were omitted from the collection (no “Turn, Turn, Turn”, no “Eight Miles High”, no “So You Wanna be a Rock and Roll Star?”). Maybe it had to do with some kind of European licensing problem. Who knows? Who cares? I took the tape home with me, rolled a joint, and the love affair began…

I already had some passing familiarity with The Byrds because their more conventional Greatest Hits from Columbia Records was one of the goodies I found in my dad’s record collection when I was a kid. …At some point, I might write a post on the scattered treats my father had sandwiched between piles of Stephen Sondheim, Mel Torme and Frank Sinatra. …Anyway, England is really where I first encountered The Byrds for real. They had a magical effect on me during that difficult period. The ringing sound of Roger’s 12-string Rickenbacker; the beautiful 4 and 5-part harmonies, with David singing the top end so angelically; the pop perfection of the arrangements; Gene’s sad love songs, all the more heartbreaking when played at a sunshiny tempo… The Byrds lifted me out of my stupor that first winter and gave color and life to those bleak English months.

As much as I adored The Byrds back then, in retrospect I don’t feel like I really understood their music at a deep level until I moved to Los Angeles. A real connection with The Byrds only comes after driving in the L.A. canyons, through the passes, and down the long, electric boulevards, at dusk, with the sky lit up in incandescent colors, and the tall palm trees swaying in the breeze. L.A. has heightened my appreciation for The Byrds ten fold, and The Byrds have heightened my appreciation for L.A., knowing that this is where those celestial voices came from, and understanding, at long last, that they couldn’t possibly come from anywhere else…

Funny thing is, I really don’t love Sweetheart of the Rodeo. To me, it’s the least Byrdsy of all their albums. I guess I’m just not all that keen on Gram Parsons when you get right down to it. I love his notion of ‘cosmic American music’, and I think his image and the mythic tales about him are cool aspects of L.A. lore. But his music has never done it for me. I like a few tracks from The International Submarine Band, and the same goes for The Flying Burrito Brothers, but I still don’t see why GP and Grievous Angel are such revered albums. They’re OK, but they’re not worth wetting yourself over, are they? I have friends who practically have to change their drawers every time they hear those records.

Gram’s presence dominates Sweetheart of the Rodeo. I compare the Byrds with Gram Parsons to the Byrds after Gram left and Clarence White joined as a permanent member, and I find that I much prefer the latter. Clarence wanted to be a Byrd, whereas Gram wanted to do his own thing.

OK, I’ve traveled pretty far from what I originally wanted to do in this post…Must focus… I may not feel all that connected to Sweetheart of the Rodeo, but there’s no question that it represents The Byrds version of the rural turn, even though the band had already been dabbling in country music for quite awhile before the album came out in 1968, thanks to Chris Hillman and Gene Clark.

The Notorious Byrd Brothers, released some months earlier in 1968, is a masterwork of psychedelic pop. It could very well be my favorite record, period. There’s still some naïve sentiment scattered throughout the album (“Change is Now”, “Natural Harmony”), but you can really hear the 60s starting to take the “left turn” Hillman talks about in that interview I alluded to a few posts ago. 'Do you really think it’s the truth that you see?' McGuinn asks in “Artificial Energry”, a cautionary song about speed, 'I’ve got my doubts, it’s happened to me.' …David Crosby was fired during the making of The Notorious Byrd Brothers, but he added some brilliant flourishes before he left, conjuring up images of the 60s at their apotheosis and beyond (“Tribal Gathering”, “Draft Morning”). …”Wasn’t Born to Follow”, written by Gerry Goffin and Carole Klein, is an incredible piece of songwriting both in terms of melody and its naturalistic lyrics about the refusal to conform. But is it a rejection of the establishment or of a counterculture that by then was starting to look and feel exhausted? Goffin and Klein additionally wrote “Goin’ Back”, a song that pines for the innocence of childhood while also giving a hint of an immanent retreat with the line, 'A little bit of courage is all we lack, so catch me if you can, I’m goin’ back.'

Sweetheart of the Rodeo came along less than a year later with a drastically different sound. In place of cutting edge L.A. pop, the band recorded the album in Nashville and turned in a collection of songs drawing from Country and Western and other traditional American influences. The album's timing and frame of reference places it in the same category as Music from Big Pink. Sweetheart of the Rodeo, in fact, features two Dylan songs from his 1967 (Basement Tapes) sessions with The Band (“You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere”, “Nothing was Delivered”). ...There are admittedly some great moments on the album. I love the pedal steel on “100 Years from Now,” and I love the way the interpretations of Dylan maintain a long standing Byrds tradition. I’ve also always found something quite nice about Gram's rendition of "You're Still on my Mind." But still, Sweetheart of the Rodeo is an album I reach for only rarely. It is arguably the quintessence of the rural turn in rock, but for me it’s first and foremost a Byrds album that somehow just isn’t a Byrds album.

I know I promised Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty this time around, but I’m fighting fatigue so they’ll have to wait until next time...

the rural turn

2008-07-13T17:06:00.000-07:00

The Basement Tapes * John Wesley Harding * Music From Big Pink * The Band * Sweetheart of the Rodeo * Workingman’s Dead * American Beauty

The late 60s migration ‘back to the land’ was a reaction to the Great Collapse. In making an exodus to a more elemental and organic way of life, communally minded hippies hoped to escape the race riots, drug freak outs and bloody assassinations. The musical corollary was the transition from psychedelia to a simpler, more rootsy vibe, resulting in a return to the mid 60s fusion of folk and pop, but giving it a more rustic inflection. I don’t know if it can be said definitively that this shift originates with Bob Dylan, but for me the songs he recorded during the summer of 1967 with The Band, which later became known as The Basement Tapes, are a good place to start the conversation.

Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited was the most emphatic expression of the increasingly cosmopolitan point of view he developed between The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in 1963 and Blonde on Blonde in 1966. The year 1967 marks the start of Dylan’s ‘rural turn’. Although some songs from The Basement Tapes still express the modern anxieties of city dwellers (“Tears of Rage”, “This Wheel’s on Fire”, “You Ain’t Goin Nowhere’, “Nothing was Delivered”), a number of other songs evince a shift to the perspective of forgotten people living in small towns (“Tiny Montgomery”, “Crash on the Levee”, “Yeah Heavy and a Bottle of Bread”, “Please Mrs. Henry”). More to the point, The Band helps Dylan cultivate a more rag-tag sound, with slapdash piano, twangy guitar and rough, imperfect harmonies, calling to mind whiskey drenched poker games at the old saloon. The music travels back to pre-urban America at precisely the moment when the social fermentation in America’s cities is at a tipping point.

John Wesley Harding, recorded immediately after the songs comprising The Basement Tapes, is that rare work of art that communicates enormously complicated ideas with deceptive simplicity, often speaking from the point of view of drifters, hobos, and simple country folk, again as if to insist that the cosmopolitan vantage point has become irretrievably corrupted. The album is a billion light years away from "Like a Rolling Stone.” Interpreting Dylan’s intentions can be treacherous, but I read his use of biblical and mythic metaphor (“The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest”, “The Wicked Messenger”, “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augistine), along with the opacity of the personae he adopts, as a way of expressing ambivalence towards the counterculture and of insisting that the social and cultural fissures of the period are more ambiguous than they seem. The richest instance of this is “I Pity the Poor Immigrant”, which some reviewers and commentators have seen as a shocking lapse and example of small-minded bigotry, but is in reality a portrait of the heart that beats beneath the reviled perspective of a backwoodsman.

The Band continued the rural turn they started with Bob Dylan and made it more direct and accessible on Music from Big Pink and The Band. The underlying idiom on these albums is undeniably late 60s rock, but the songs derive their distinctness from heavy dosages of traditional music and an idealization of agrarian America that’s even more explicit than anything found on the songs comprising The Basement Tapes. Tracks like “Across the Great Divide”, “Kingdom Come”, “Rag Mama Rag” and “King Harvest” conjure up images of plain folk in frontier towns, living off the land but also faced with a growing threat of encroachment from the modern industrial world. But the nostalgic nature of The Band’s entire enterprise on these two albums – mirroring the sentimentality of those who would escape the growing chaos of urban life – is at its most striking on “The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down”, where the fall of the Old South is lamented in all-too-human terms, from the standpoint of a vanquished confederate soldier.

Next time: The Byrds and The Grateful Dead… What could be better than that?

juiced up and sloppy

2008-07-09T18:08:00.001-07:00

Sticky Fingers. I read a quote from Chris Hillman recently where said “the 60s took a left turn in 1968.” True enough, but I wonder whether what he’s talking about is really the sharpening of a turn that began earlier. Thinking about The Rolling Stones made me reflect on this quote because of the way their sinister image seemed to predict the ‘left turn’ several years before it happened. It’s commonplace by now to point out that there’s always been something sinister in the air with The Rolling Stones. Still, starting on Beggar’s Banquet, released at the presumed beginning of the left turn, their darkness becomes more manifest, with the Nietzchean historical scope of “Sympathy for the Devil,” and the violence, rape and decay represented in “Street Fighting Man”, “Stray Cat Blues”, and “Dear Doctor.” The balefulness is then ratcheted up a notch on Let it Bleed. 'I’ll stick my knife right down your throat,' Mick spews at the end of “Midnight Rambler,” one of the album's two or three genuinely scary songs. …The Summer of Love was only two years in the rear view mirror by then, but the notion of ‘letting it bleed’ (or bloodletting) must’ve made that world of peace and flowers seem distant and quaint.

If you could choose only one Rolling Stones album as their definitive Great Collapse record, a great case could be made for either Beggar’s Banquet or Let it Bleed. But in my mind the distinction goes to Sticky Fingers, the third volume in this ‘Collapse Trilogy.’ Part of this is just personal preference. When I’m in the mood for late-60s Stones (which is an important distinction to make), Sticky Fingers is usually where I go. But the reason I love the album as much as I do is that it’s their most fully realized expression of the period. It all starts with the statement of intent made with the notorious bulge ‘n zipper album cover, an assertion of the primacy of unbridled libido, Mick’s cock symbolizing debauchery as the only thing that matters anymore. “Brown Sugar” continues the blithe depravity with its sharp, choppy riff and lyrics using master-slave imagery as a metaphor for interracial sex. The line, ‘brown sugar, how come you taste so good?’ still brings a smirk to my face, (one part guilt, one part sly satisfaction), as does the story I once heard that Mick and Keith initially wanted to call the song “Black Pussy.”

Although Rolling Stones records going all the way back to Aftermath, if not before, are all probably soaked in drugs, this feels especially true of the albums in their Collapse Trilogy, and I think the druggy vibe reaches a peak, at least as a creative force, on Sticky Fingers. But we are no longer talking about the hashish clouds hanging over "Ruby Tuesday"and "She Smiled Sweetly", nor the psychedelia of "Dandelion" and "2000 Light Years." Instead, Sticky Fingers paints a scene of people with ‘cocaine eyes’, speaking ‘speed freak jive.’ What’s amazing to me – admirable even – is how aware the band seemed to be of their own decadence at the time. ‘It’s just that demon life has got me in its sway’ is one of the greatest stoned harmonies you’ll ever hear from Mick and Keith. Part of the self-awareness, though, entails a harrowing recognition of consequences. 'You know and I know in the morning I’ll be dead,' Mick cries on “Sister Morphine.” …Maybe the greatness of ‘Collapse-period Stones’, and Sticky Fingers in particular, is that they know they’re inching closer to the abyss, but they embrace it lovingly, as the realization of their destiny.

the wasteland

2008-07-08T18:19:00.000-07:00

Who’s Next. Who’s Next was one of the first ‘serious’ rock records I bought with my allowance money when I was a kid. I got it at a little record store/head shop called Record Connection on 86th and Lexington in New York City. It’s the kind of joint a kid would never be allowed into today. But back then I poured almost every cent I could get my hands on into records from that place. I’d walk through the jingling front door and the heavy sounds of Blue Oyster Cult and Deep Purple would fuse in the tight air with some weird smell I couldn’t identify. The guy working the cash register, Mitch, would appear from behind a beaded curtain with bloodshot slits for eyes. “What’s up ‘lil buddy?” he would say with a slight giggle every time he saw me. He could never remember my name.

A camp counselor turned me on to The Who. Let’s call him ‘Buddy Green’, a fitting pseudonym for sure. Buddy and I were only in each other’s lives for two months, but that precious eight week period, some 30 years ago, proved to be pivotal for me. He introduced me to so much great music, and to some other things too, but that’s maybe a conversation for another time...

Of all the music Buddy played for me, The Who had the most dramatic impact. It’s difficult to convey now because years and years of radio overkill have snuffed out much of the pleasure I used to get from some of the greatest Who songs. These days, “Won’t Get Fooled Again” and “Pinball Wizard” sound like annoying muzak when I'm sitting in rush hour traffic and they come on the Classic Rock radio station. But then again, “Substitute”, “Behind Blue Eyes”, “The Punk Meets the Godfather”, and “You Better You Bet” never get old…OK, that last one was a joke…There are also Who songs that haven’t been played nearly as much which still sound great (some of my favorites are “Circles”, “Tattoo”, “So Sad About Us”, “Pure and Easy” and “Naked Eye”).

Who’s Next was my favorite record. Everything about it seemed so cool and mysterious and epic. The strange pee pee sleeve; the moog, piano and crashing drums at the start of “Baba O’Riley”; the freedom radiating from “Goin’ Mobile”; the rockin’ deftness of Pete’s guitar playing on “Bargain”, along with the way Roger’s voice rises when he sings ‘the best I ever had’; the soaring majesty of “The Song is Over”; the fire and rage of “Behind Blue Eyes” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again”…

Today, Who's Next strikes me as an amazing distillation of the Great Collapse. ‘She was the first song I ever sang,’ Pete sings at one point, ‘but it stopped as soon as it began.’ In one way or another, the record as a whole has always made me feel like I'm experiencing a passage from one world to another, a transition laden with loss (“The Song is Over”), desperation (“Bargain”), loneliness and isolation (“Behind Blue Eyes”), and the need for transcendence (“Goin’ Mobile”). More explicitly, “Baba O'riley” seems to suggest that the legacy of the 60s – the ‘teenage wasteland’ - should be left behind (‘put out the fire and don’t look past my shoulder’), and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” offers an even more stinging indictment (‘the world looks just the same, and history ain’t changed’)…

But you can’t really do Who’s Next justice without talking about the sleeve photo… Pete, Roger, Keith and John stand in the midst of a rocky, grey (teenage?) wasteland. It looks like a strange battlefield with a nondescript piece of concrete emerging from the ground, against which the four men have just finished relieving themselves. I used to look at the photo for hours, wondering what had happened in and around that field, eventually concluding that it was some kind of stormy event or series of events, leaving only a monument in its wake. I look at it now and have a very similar reaction. The 60s have come and gone. Their impact has been imposing and will be memorialized and celebrated for a long time to come, but there is a sense of anger and betrayal among what were once some of the most fervent True Believers.

wiseguy

2008-07-06T15:47:00.000-07:00

The Stooges and Funhouse. What could be a bigger slap in the face to self-important hippie fantasies than hearing some bored dolt sing words like,‘Well it’s 1969 okay/ All across the USA/ Another year for me and you/ Another year with nothin’ to do...? If there’s an accidental message running through The Stooges and Funhouse, it’s that the 60s generation has become “No Fun." Nihilistic self-gratification is the new order of the day. 'Every little baby knows just what I mean,' Iggy sings on "Funhouse", 'livin’ in division in a shifting scene/Hold tight - callin' from the funhouse.' …With tracks like "I Wanna Be Your Dog” (‘So messed up, I want you here’), “Loose” (‘I’ll stick it deep inside’), and “1970” (‘Beautiful baby be my love/All night til I blow away’), Iggy stakes his claim to a new vision in which the only thing that matters is getting stoned and getting fucked. In the midst of the rising number of war casualties overseas, and with growing social and cultural strife at home, Iggy barks 'I feel all right' over and over again on Funhouse, each time with more taunting defiance. Compare this with the self-deluded pomposity of contemporaneous offerings from bands like Jefferson Airplane (Volunteers) and Crosby Stills Nash and Young (Déjà Vu), and it becomes clear that, in spite of the dim witted pose he was so fond of adopting, Iggy must be considered one of true visionaries of the Great Collapse.

primal scream

2008-07-04T15:42:00.000-07:00

John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band. Just what exactly did Phil Spector do to earn his ‘produced by’ credit for John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band? I ask the question like this not to be snide or dismissive but instead to underscore the record’s minimalist feel, which may or may not have come as a bit of a surprise to those expecting cloying string arrangements and a fulsome Wall of Sound. As far as I know, the tracks feature John on vocals and guitar, Klaus Voormann on bass, and Ringo on drums. Billy Preston adds some understated piano on one song as well. But that’s it. It sounds like Spector simply pressed ‘record’ and captured the players doing the songs live in the studio. The stripped down immediacy allows John to return to his rocker roots and create a collection of songs that are confessional, acutely aware of the historical moment, and nothing short of devastating.

Throughout John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band, the sparse sound works to emphasize the exhaustion of a grandiose era, and it gives John room to welcome the Great Collapse in terms that are at times barbed and dripping with ridicule. ‘I told you before,’ he snarls on “I Found Out”, accompanied by a jagged sounding guitar, ‘stay away from my door, don’t gimme that “brother, brother, brother.”’ So much for love and togetherness. …Even on the songs that are less directly about John’s place in a changing public world than they are about his psycho-emotional predispositions, there’s a confrontational violence to the approach, the beginnings of which admittedly date back to the White Album, but which now unequivocally express a rejection of pacifistic naivetee. With the ungodly primal screams unleashed on “Well, Well, Well” and “Mother”, John works to exorcize personal demons, but he’s also purging the history he’s played such an enormous role in making. But the climax of the purge, if it can be put this way, comes on “God” when he sings, ‘I don’t believe in Beatles’, which is among the most jaw dropping lines he ever wrote and one which made it possible for him to also say what by then was ever more obvious… ‘The dream is over.’

Happy Fourth of July to all my friends and family.

the music of the great collapse

2008-07-02T17:21:00.000-07:00

What are the best and/or most significant pop albums or songs of the Great Collapse? I’ve been thinking about this for a long time with the help of a very dear friend of mine, but it’s still not an easy question to answer. I’ll try and do one or two Great Collapse albums per post over the coming days or possibly weeks, depending on my energy level. They'll be done in no particular order of importance. Feel free to chime in with your own opinions along the way...

Abbey Road. Compare the awakening and discovery ringing out from the tracks on Rubber Soul and Revolver with the sense on Abbey Road, released only three or four years later, that something magical has come to an end. There’s still a good bit of 60s righteousness (‘Come Together’) and sentimentality (‘Here Comes the Sun’), along with a few cringe making tracks (Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, Octopus’s Garden). But Abbey Road also features some of the best, most poignant and most fascinating moments in Beatledom. …The strung-out desperation of ‘I Want You’, with John and Paul singing “she’s so heavy” against a backdrop of furious guitar, organ and bass, was not merely John’s passionate lust letter to Yoko, but also a clear indication that smack had replaced LSD as the most appropriate form of chemical escape, a protective shield grizzled hippies could use to numb themselves against the pain of disillusionment and unrealized aspirations. …Then there’s the medley on Side 2, which John hated for reasons I can't fathom (other than that it was Paul's brainchild) becaue it's such a remarkable string of melodic fragments, all held together by what is arguably the most passionate playing those guys ever committed to record. They clearly knew the end was near and they wanted to go out in memorable fashion. …When Paul sings openly about the collapse of the Beatles (“and in the middle of negotiations, you break down”), isn't he also singing more generally about the collapse of the 60s? In a lot of ways, after all, The Beatles are the 60s. I think this is why I still get chills when I hear Paul sing, “soon we’ll be away from here, step on the gas and wipe that tear away.”

…What’s incredible to me is that I’ve probably listened to Side 2 of Abbey Road a thousand times since I was seven years old, but I still love it every time I hear it. Sure, there’s no longer the same mixture of fantasy and wonder that’s sadly limited to the way a child hears music (I’d give almost anything to get that back), but I still manage to catch something exciting every time I put Abbey Road on the 'ol turntable, even though I can sing every word, hit every one of Ringo’s excellent fills, and play air guitar to every Leslie toned note.

no marigolds in the promised land

2008-06-26T11:46:00.001-07:00

About five years ago, I started work on a novel I hoped would bring my preoccupation with the collapse of the 1960s together with my other great obsession, Southern California social history. I wanted, naturally, to frame the former within the latter, and I envisioned my book as a meditation on California’s post WWII experience.

I’m not altogether sure what drove me in this direction other than that I’m a 60s junkie, by which I mean that I’m addicted to the 60s as an object of appreciation and intellectual contemplation. I guess there’s also the part of me that’s fascinated conceptually with instances of social disintegration. I listened incessantly to The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars when I was a kid. …Some of my favorite books are The Magic Mountain, The Fall of the Roman Empire, and The Leopard. …As a graduate student, I became enormously interested in the decline of the Old South, and I later wrote my thesis on the collapse of the U.S. Coal Industry after WWI. …More recently, I was really blown away by Jared Diamond’s book, Collapse, which is the follow up to his great Guns, Germs and Steel, and deals with the basic question of what makes societies fall apart.

For me, the collapse of the 60s, or the Great Collapse, refers to the destruction of the hopes, dreams, idealism and optimism of the era, and their replacement with disillusionment and nihilistic self-indulgence. Welcome to the 70s! The Great Collapse was not, of course, a singular moment in time, nor was it a linear progression of occurrences. For commentators like Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion, the 60s already seemed to be coming to an end by the Summer of Love. But then it’s interesting that, from a different point of view, 60s idealism culminated in Woodstock, even though Woodstock occurred well after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination and was only separated by several months from Manson and Altamont.

It’s so difficult with this stuff to impose thematic coherence onto all the sequences of events, all the more so because the collapse of the 1960s arguably spilled over into the 1970s and even the 1980s. Would it be entirely far-fetched, for example, to say that Watergate marks the end of the 60s? Or maybe stagflation killed the 60s, or maybe it was the final defeat of the U.S. in Viet Nam. I’ve heard some argue that punk rock was the final dagger in the heart of the 60s, and others say that the 60s finally ended for good when Reagan defeated Carter in the 1980 presidential election.

After five years, I’m only about a third of the way through my book. I work pretty slowly for sure, but I also have to earn a living, so the novel is not a full-time endeavor, much as I would like for it to be. The novel consists of a series of intersecting stories, but it’s primarily centered on two singer-songwriters in the 1970s Hollywood/L.A. scene, both of whom are negotiating the aftershocks of the Great Collapse after having grown up in Southern California and come of age during the 60s. The working title for the book is Canyon Fodder.

This brings me back to my defense of Steely Dan. Along with several other sources, they were a huge inspiration for me in coming up with the concept for my book. I defy anyone to name a body of work that more perfectly captures the aftermath of the Great Collapse, L.A. style, than the seven albums Steely Dan made between 1972 and 1980. And like many of the best interpretations of the Southland experience, Steely Dan’s observations, and their overall vibe, are those of non-native outsiders, giving them a certain critical distance, even as they find themselves getting swept up into the strange sprawling vortex that somehow makes L.A. simultaneously repulsive and alluring.

While the 70s sensitive singer-songwriters mourned the passing of 60s communality, even as they became rich and snorted coke from the ass cracks of underage groupies, punk viewed the hippie dream as a total lie and expressed a deep hatred for the indulgences of the wimpy sensitivos. The greatness of Steely Dan comes from their punky cynicism towards the vestiges of hippie idealism (‘only a fool would say that’), combined with their willingness to engage – albeit detachedly and in a spirit of supreme irony - in the excesses of life at the intersection of Sunset and Vine.

It’ll take me way too long to go through every Steely Dan album, and that’s not my purpose here anyway. This all started because somebody said something unflattering about The Dan, and I felt the need to clarify, at least for myself, why they’re important to me and to what I’m trying to do with my book. I’ve been struggling to make progress on the book lately, but thinking about Steely Dan in relation to the Great Collapse all over again is getting my creative synapses firing a bit more than they have been of late. Hopefully it won’t be long before I’m back at it.

no static at all

2008-06-26T11:32:00.000-07:00

A good friend of mine wounded me the other night with something he said in passing. ...Well, 'wounded' is too strong a word, and I know he didn't mean anything by it. He probably doesn't even remember making the comment. At the time, I didn't feel a response was necessary. But later in the evening I tossed and turned in bed, feeling frustrated about not having had an opportunity to set things straight from my point of view...

Somehow or other, the conversation that evening had turned to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. When I mentioned that I would like to visit the place someday, my buddy said, 'that place lost all credibility when they inducted Steely Dan.'...

...Excuse me? Do you know the extent to which you have just ripped off my head and crapped down my throat with that remark? Do you realize I will now have to challenge you to a duel?

Actually, I think I understand why people from a particular time and place hate Steely Dan, especially the final several albums Becker and Fagen made before their first break up (The Royal Scam, Aja and Gaucho). If you were lucky enough to grow up in New York and move from adolescence to adulthood between the late 60s and the end of the 70s, and if the sounds shaping your consciousness most profoundly during that period came from Lou Reed, the Dictators, Television and the Voidoids (all of which applies, more or less, to the friend making the offending comment), then it's almost automatic that you'd view Steely Dan as the worst kind of overly polished, soulless M.O.R. fare. With each successive album The Dan put out, their fuzak oriented approach became slicker, the guitar solos became tastier, and the overall vibe grew more crassly commercial, at least on the surface of things. By the time Gaucho hit the record shops in 1980, you could practically hear a dentist's drill humming along insistently underneath the fretless bass lines.

But this is exactly where so many people get things wrong and fail to see Steely Dan paradox - namely, their emergence from - and the similarity of their response to - the same malaised zeitgeist that gave birth to punk.

There's more at stake here for me than the issue of musical preferences and taste. I'll take about it more in my next post...

welcome

2008-06-22T13:57:00.001-07:00

Hi, and welcome to my blog, ‘All the Things’. This blog won’t have a specific focus per se other than providing a way for me to talk about ideas and experiences through the filter of my passion for the ebb and flow of life here in Los Angeles. I suppose I have a vague – quite possibly delusional – notion that a few people here and there might be interested in what I’ve got to say. But the real reason I’m doing this, at least initially, is that my life has been in a state of upheaval for about six or seven months now. Change is always difficult for me, and in this instance the ongoing disruptions have left me with a debilitating case of writer’s block, manifesting itself in my becoming overtaken with paralyzing fatigue every time I sit down and attempt to make progress on the novel I’ve been working at for five years and counting. In my more insecure moments, I imagine that the blockage is God’s way of saying, ‘You’re 40, man. No way anybody’s gonna publish that thing. Why put yourself through all the trouble?’ ...Where’s the benevolent George Burns-ish God when you need Him?... But even if it’s true that, from a purely market oriented perspective, writing a first novel at this stage of my life is a shaky proposition at best, I need to write for a lot of different reasons – not just the gratification of getting a book published. So I got to thinking that a secondary and more casual outlet, other than a ‘serious’ novel, might not be such a bad idea – a low-pressure way for me to get some ideas out there and hopefully reignite my creative energy. …I don’t know whether this medium will agree with me or not. Blogging lends itself to a certain immediacy of expression that seems anathema to the way I like to do things. I tend to labor over what I write for long periods of time before I’m comfortable sharing it with others. I would make a horrible journalist. On the other hand, though, this blog thing might end up being exactly what I need to work out of my current impasse so I can get excited again about my book. Plus, it’ll just be nice to have another way to express all my brilliant ideas. …Enjoy!