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Boston’s “More Than A Feeling” and the Lost Art of Artisanal Recording

July 27, 2014

Change is constant, change is unavoidable. All of our favorite buildings will one day be destroyed, all our favorite bars reduced to rubble or hipster coffee houses, all our treasured theatres where the rock bands of our youth stomped and swaggered, with sticky floors and soaring, chipped ceilings turned ash-gray by decades of smoke, will be reduced to dormitories or parking lots. We have lived long enough to have seen typewriters, analog television, the art of the phone call, the joy of cracking open the crease of a cardboard gatefold album sleeve, all vanish and disappear.

So what.  Things change.  You can never put your hand in the same river twice.  Water is always moving.  So what.

But I do find myself deeply sad that the age of Artisanal Recording is gone forever.

Now, I said sad, but not regretful.  I’ll explain that shortly.

Prior to the ubiquity of computer-based recording technologies, records were made at massive console desks, with inputs feeding into giant, needy tape machines; This resulted in extraordinary achievements of patience, coordination, imagination, mystery, and happy accident; and whereas this process, time consuming and often frustrating, resulted in hundreds of thousands of magical recordings (from Louis Armstrong’s Hot 5 recordings to the Ramones, and so very many more), there are times when the process itself —  that is, not just the act of a magical band being recorded, but the method itself being almost supernaturally inspired – resulted in Art, in Michelangelo’s David, in Brunelleschi’s Dome.

Now, let me state, very goddamn clearly, that generally I applaud this change.  Personally, I think the onset of the computer recording era actually engenders and encourages imagination, spontaneity, and a more perfect path between artistic vision and result.  Also, a good engineer, producer or imaginative musician can actually make trashier, noisier results on the computer; it is actually easier to make a “lo-fi” recording, reproducing the spirit of, say, the Sonics or the Monks or whoever, on a computer-based system than on a tape-based system.

When I speak of Artisanal Recording, I am not just talking about the Age of Tape.  I am talking about a very specific mind-set and creative process:  using the console, tape machines, human power, and instruments in extraordinary harmony to produce an extremely elaborate and holistic result.  In other words, I am not just talking about using hammer and tools and a few cranes to put up an apartment building; I am talking about using hammer and tools and a few cranes to put up the Cathedral of Chartres, using (essentially) manual tools to create something so delicate, so reliant on every other element, so firm but light, and so elaborate that the absence of even one element could lead to collapse of the whole thing.

When I speak of Artisanal Recording, you think I am going to cite Sgt. Pepper or Pet Sounds, yes?

No.  In essence, those amazing works of art are “just” recordings of extraordinary performances, extraordinary arrangements.  Artisanal Recording is the art of extreme coordination in the control room, with not just the instruments and arrangements being orchestrated perfectly (as is the case with Pepper/Sounds), but the coordination between those factors and the console desk and the tape machine being so precise as to be virtually – if not literally – at the level of the finest renaissance craftsmen.

When I consider the pinnacle of Artisanal Recordings, some wonderful records immediately spring to mind, especially the work of Queen and Abba.  Both groups combined stunning songwriting and performance talent with incredible, artisanal work in the control room, making the consoles and the machines do the artists’ bidding through elaborate synchronization, invention, and creative insight.  I have often thought that an instructor could teach an entire semester of a class on music production just by using “S.O.S.” by Abba. But one recording stands out as the pinnacle, the most gorgeous realization, of the lost age of Artisanal Recording.

And that’s “More Than A Feeling” by Boston.

I’m sure Boston could play “More Than A Feeling” perfectly well live, but that’s not what’s going on in the studio recording of that song.  What’s happening here is an astonishing union of hands, technical elements, tape decks, mixing desks, to produce a unique product that is a precise blend of intent, imagination, patience, melody, energy, and emotional resonance.

First of all, the song fades in, which boldly and plainly announces it as a studio concoction; how many songs can you name that fade in?  Probably, off the top of your head, just one — the Beatles’ “Eight Days A Week.”  After the fade-in (often obscured on the radio), the first thing the listener is really aware of is a shimmering, attentive arpeggio, an immediately identifiable signature that tells us very little about what’s to come, but announces that something very important is going on here.  The guitar sound on this arpeggio, like all the guitars in the song, are an expert mixture of multiple guitars – at least one acoustic and multiple electrics, and I suspect a balance of 12 strings and 6 strings  – morphed into one seamless and unique whole.

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From here on, we encounter a rare balance of mathematical precision and evocative contact with listener; even though a casual listener would not necessarily be aware of this – or need to be – there are no accidents in “More Than A Feeling” — every element is as deliberate and calculated as a scientific formula.  Very, very rarely has such cold precision been so effectively utilized in the service of such a truly emotionally suggestive result.  Every level is full of precise intent (even a drum roll, which signals the entry of the verse vocal, seems a little “hot” to the listener, but is clearly “intentional,” awakening the listener out of the slumber of the seductive arpeggio), and likewise, as the song moves from section to section (and there are a pile of them, subtly different but unified, all serving the emotional and structural grace of the larger piece without ever disrupting the flow), different guitars shift as needed, sluicing and gliding in and out without ever breaking the flow of the song or making the listener conscious of all the work going on.  As we move into the chorus (brilliantly set up by a melodically inventive pre-chorus, where a guitar sings a brilliant lead melody — and although there’s a lot of single-line guitar work in the song, there’s no soloing, every guitar ‘run’ is a part, not a solo), something extraordinary happens…

In the history of “heavy” rock, there are many stunning, staggering, shattering rhythm guitar sounds – It’s hard to beat the signature tear and roar of Leslie West, Fu Manchu’s Scott Hill, and Johnny Ramone – but very little in the history of riff-roar tops the sound that Tom Scholz achieves in the four-chord slurring, skipping chop on “More Than A Feeling.”  It beautifully combines the heavy with the fleet, the instantly attention-grabbing with the non-disturbing.

And unlike the aforementioned West, Ramone, and Hill (not to mention Iommi or Townshend), it’s a synthetic sound, and immediately identifiable as such, built of multiple guitars, expertly tweaked boxes and amps, and perfectly calibrated tape.  This is a signal moment in the history of guitar rock; although “processed” guitar sounds had been used extensively in music, rarely had they been applied to the fat, thick, sexy riffs of hard rock; that moment ends with “More Than a Feeling.”  And although this discovery would be greatly, horrifically abused in the future, for one shining moment, it is utterly perfect.  Like a thousand cups of sweet cream poured over a Golem-esque Dave Davies wandering through Stonehenge, the primary riff of “More Than A Feeling” crunches without aching, shakes without breaking, whirrs without screeching; it is, in a word, the rarest combination of a perfect riff with a perfect sound with a perfect song.  This so rarely happens; for instance, “You Really Got Me” may be one of the fundamental riffs of all time, but it’s difficult to listen to it without wanting the guitar to sound just a tiny bit, oh, wider; “Mississippi Queen” starts out as the best goddamn thing you ever heard, but kind of meanders through the un-mapped woods of a less than perfect song; it’s hard to top the “Sweet Jane” riff, but the “official” released version of the track is flawed, both in mix and composition; and so on and so on.  The riff to “More Than a Feeling,” the sound of the multiple guitars that build it, and the song it sits in are, well, perfect.  One would have to look forward to Roth-era Van Halen to find a comparable mix of riff, recording, composition, and personality.

Where Was I?

Lest we get too hung up on the riff – and it is phenomenally easy too – the rest of “MTAF” falls together with equal genius and precision, achieving the ultimate thing a pop or rock recording can do:  make the listener feel enraptured by the story and the texture while inserting enough changes and “surprises” to keep the listener alert.  This lasts until the very end of the song; while the piece is fading out, the bass does an octave drop for the first and only time, and you know that this was done just to state “You thought you had heard everything, right?”

And all of it is an extraordinary product of Artisanal Recording.  Tracks like “Dear Prudence” or “Getting Better” by the Beatles, or “Knights in White Satin” by the Moody Blues or “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd are just extraordinary recordings of extraordinary performances of extraordinary arrangements of extraordinary songs played by extraordinary bands; “More Than A Feeling” is a piece where the studio (by which I mean the whole apparatus – console, tape machines, outboard gear, EQ’s, etcetera) is an extra musician, and that musician is expertly, precisely directed by very, very skillful hands who (as Einstein said about God) do not play dice.  There is zero dice playing on “More Than A Feeling,” and what makes all this so much more remarkable, it is accomplished entirely in the era before there was computer automation of recording boards, much less computerized mixing or recording.  “MORE THAN A FEELING” IS THE PRODUCT OF HUMAN HANDS CREATING ART, WORKING SO CAREFULLY AND DELIBERATELY THAT THE PRODUCT OF THE HANDS AND TOOLS CAN AND MUST BE SEEN AT THE LEVEL WHICH WE WOULD APPRECIATE THE WORK OF THE MOST SKILLED ARTISAN.

(And that’s even without discussing the amazing vocal performance, achieved entirely without auto tuning or the vari-speeding that, for instance, was used so widely by Led Zeppelin.  It is genuinely heartbreaking to think that no one will ever sing like that again, like Brad Delp or Freddy Mercury or Steve Marriott; auto-tuning, which, when expertly used, is undetectable, makes the art of pure rock singing extinct).

And it’s all gone, gone, gone.  The day of Artisanal Recording is literally as dead as analog television, the rotary dial phone, or the typewriter ribbon.  Never again will hands (or a series of hands) scramble in frenzied coordination across a mixing desk to achieve precise, seamless results; I am old enough, thankfully or not, to remember being part of recording mixes where you would have six or eight hands on a single mixing desk, moving in excited and exact calibration, a performance in and of itself.

Now, these days computers do it all.  And I am NOT a Luddite; in fact, as a producer and musician, I probably PREFER that. Never again do you need to go with a very, very slightly botched mix because you just can’t run that whole complicated mix one more time and fix that tiny little mistake four minutes into the song; likewise, computer recording programs encourage the musician to create wonderful and subtle events for the briefest moments or towards the most delicate end.  So, personally, I am actually all for the computer recording era, I just honor the extraordinary artisans who would do it all with their hands.

And, as it happens, there are plenty of luddites out there who will tell you “Oh, ya gotta use tape, man.”  But unfortunately, the kind of musicians who do insist on using tape are not the kind of musicians who are building Brunelleschi’s Dome, like Tom Scholz did with Boston, or Bjorn and Benny did with Abba, or Roy Thomas Baker and Queen did with “Bohemian Rhapsody” and a pile of others.  The musicians still using tape are, without exception, trumpeting some kind of useless primitive theory, and as I stated much earlier in this piece, I have found I can make garbage sound more like garbage with computers.

There will probably come a time, in the relatively near future, where some filmmakers with a small digital camera, a green screen, and a computer can make something absolutely as mysterious and beautiful as the extraordinary chiaroscuro of the sewer chase scene in The Third Man or the Bruegel-esque dreamscapes of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.  That moment has already happened in music, and the age of the Artisanal Recording is over.  Next time you hear “More Than A Feeling,” remember what the grace, coordination, wisdom, time and art it once took to make a seamless pop recording, and honor it.

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Friday Random Noise: The Third Greatest Band of All Time, That Hit Song I Played On

July 25, 2014

The Random Noise List:

WORST BAIT AND SWITCH ON CLASSIC ROCK RADIO:  Okay, “Riders on the Storm” fades out, and this very mysterious, serpentine violin comes in, and then this rising dramatic string section sneaks under the speakers, and the violin does this gorgeous, seductive dance that reminds you of perfectly-peaked Eastern European rooftops, and the strings punch and swell, and you wonder, is this some great Klezmer Zeppelin delight?  And then it turns into “It’s A Living Thing” by silly old ELO, masters of the pompously maudlin, defilers of the great legacy of The Move, the creepy morticians abusing the corpse of the Beatles…and all you can do is weep, and you want to tell anyone listening about the magic that is Roy Wood, and say “I will only feel better if we drive to Carvel right fucking now.”

BEST SONG YOU’VE NEVER HEARD:  “Hallelujah Europa” by Jona Lewie.  Lewie is one of the great melodicians of all-time, writing hopping, soaring songs that are equal parts Cajun and Kraftwerk.  He produces intensely rich confections, tiny giant songs absolutely oozing emotion, memory, and insanely perfect melody, he is a cross between Harry Nilsson and Jimmy Webb and utterly worthy of our worship; and he’s recorded some pretty well known tunes, too, like “You’ll Always Find Me In The Kitchen At Parties,” “Seaside Shuffle” and “Stop the Cavalry.” But a little less known is “Hallelujah Europa,” an edibly delicious and goose-bumping skylark of an anthem to the continent which sounds like a melody cast down from the clouds and up from the heart.  This song should be played all the time by, like, everyone.

BEST CHRISTMAS SONG: And while I’m at it, Lewie’s “Stop the Cavalry” is the best Christmas song of any genre or any era PERIOD, it is a perfect weeper of pure solid air and snow and sadness, but let’s fully discuss that at Christmastime, okay?

BEST THIRD-MOST UNDERRATED BAND OF ALL TIME:  Now, a few weeks ago, I calculated, utilizing fairly exacting criteria, that the Damned were the most underrated band of all time, with the Small Faces not too far behind.  Who is number three?  Well, that would be the Move, who combined the power of the Who, the frippery and detailed songcraft of the Beatles, and lot of their own very English character, full of instrumental twists that presage metal and prog and a soaring melodicism that would make ABBA proud (and probably actually influenced them, a bit).  The Move were a huge influence on such a diverse group of artists that you wonder HOW could one band cover so many bases (usually in a single song) and do it so well; Bowie, Black Sabbath, Big Star, they all bear the mark of The Move.  If you recall, my criteria for delineating The Most Underrated Band of All Time was (something like) this:  I’m not just talking about who was the BEST, or who was the COOLEST, or what fascinabulous and obscure band should you tell Layne about; I’m talking about what band had everything to become a first-rank classic band of Immortal Hugeness, but (usually due to industry and/or management atrocities) never got their due.  And the Move are the Third most underrated act of the post-Beatles era, after the Damned and the Small Faces.

Oh, the Move kind-of evolved into ELO, but that’s a long story.

BEST OBSCURE WORD USED IN THE ABOVE PARAGRAPH:  “Frippery” is a hell of a word, isn’t it?  It means “unnecessary ornament in architecture, dress, and language.”

BEST BAND THAT I REALLY WANTED TO HATE BUT ENDED UP LOVING:  Rush.  Because.

BEST HIT SONG THAT I ACTUALLY PLAY ON:  “I Go Blind” by Hootie & the Blowfish.  Actually, it’s the only hit song I play on.  I play the B-3 organ on it.  The band were in the recording studio, and they tried a bunch of things for that song, and even bought in some pros to try a keyboard part, and nothing was quite right.  I was there, and I thought I heard something in my head that would be just right.  So, even though I am not exactly a keyboard player, I asked if I could have a go at it.  So I went to the other side of the glass, stood up behind the organ, put on a pair of headphones, and told them to run the track.  I did nothing for the first verse, but then after the first verse ended, I stuck one finger on one note and held it for the rest of the song.  That was it.  One finger, one note, just like I learned from studying LaMonte Young and Tony Conrad.  And it worked really, really well.  And they – that would be the band and producer Don Gehman – actually mixed that one organ note pretty high; so I will be wandering around in CVS, sometimes, and that song will come on, and I’ll hear that note, and I’ll go “Hey, that’s me.  Maximum Minimalism. Yeh!  Oh yeh! That works! Excuse me, where’s the Neo-Synephrine?  You mean it’s right there?  I’m standing right in front of it?  Sorry…I still don’t see it.  Oh…right…yes, right there on the second to bottom shelf.  Y’know…I still don’t see it.”

BEST BAND NAME/CONCEPT STUMBLED UPON ACCIDENTALLY IN THIS COLUMN: Klezmer Zeppelin – or Klez Zeppelin – is a helluva band concept.  Someone get on that, okay?  And don’t transmute it into some crappy ukulele orchestra playing Zeppelin songs, because that idea is a pile of goat crap, and if I see such a band, I will holler, “You are sheep dicks, every one of you!”  I am talking here about a group interpreting Led Zeppelin songs in the manner of the traditional music of Eastern European Jewry.  That works.  That really works.  Think about it.  And I do NOT want to hear the words “Ukulele Orchestra” UNLESS those words are connected to “…was playing on the deck of the doomed South Korean ferry.”

BEST AMERICAN SINGER-SONGWRITER:  Paul Sanchez is an American treasure who should be playing multiple nights at the Beacon Theatre, and whose songs should be assembled to make a Broadway Musical, one that tells the story of hope, disillusionment, loss and love in 20th/21st Century America.  He is the Bayou Springsteen, the master of the wistful and memorable, weaver of melancholy and witty and dark and uplifting stories about the very extraordinary ordinary folk of America, he is a cross between Steve Goodman and John Prine and Springsteen and he is the equal of all of them, and stop reading this column and find his music and listen to him right n

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Wooly Bully Is A Very Effing Heavy Song

July 24, 2014

“Wooly Bully” came on the radio.

I’ve been listening to it for a lifetime, but I never really heard it.

It is far, far too easy to dismiss this hopping, hollering, shrieking, stomping habanero’d hash-sling of a screech, almost sinister in its’ hysterical simplicity, as a glorious piece of garage trash, a novelty product of cough syrup and too many late nights playing greasy covers in VFW halls.

But it is so very, very much more.

“Wooly Bully” by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs is a radical repudiation of the strings, baroque influences, minor chords, and maudlin grace sneaking into pop music circa ’65.  Just as the Beatles were confirming their interpolation of the influence of Broadway/Tin Pan Alley pop  — REAL music with bridges and modulations an’ everything! – into the rock mainstream, here comes “Wooly Bully,” the lucid, luscious, ludicrous opposite, something BASHED and memorable and probably playable on the very first try by anyone with a few amps and a basement to put them into.  At first, “Wooly Bully” appears to be AN ACT OF WAR, a barbarian pouring oil on the fairy dust of the gathering tribes of the soon-to-be-psychedelic ‘60s; but in fact it is the house bands of those tribes, those lovers of sitars, 12 strings, delicate tunings and fancy turnarounds and the studio-bound Beatle boys and their ilk, who were waging the war: the war on the bolt of black and blood that was primitive and perfect American rock’n’roll.

But the aborigines, that is the FIRST SETTLERS, the children of Treniers and Moonglows and Dominoes and Big Mama’s and Piano Smith’s, STILL HAD A FEW BOMBS LEFT IN THEM before the John Phillips and George Martin’s of the world made their kind of Dean Moriarty thug-joy dead forever; and these last feral, fierce cries are the howls of Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs.

Got it?

By 1965, the Beatles were making gorgeous wedding cakes out of tape; in ‘65 they recorded “Yesterday,” “It’s Only Love,” “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,”  “I’ve Just Seen A Face,” and other songs that would completely redefine what the teen soundtrack would and could sound like.  That’s brilliant stuff, it really is, but in that very same year, Sam the Sham stood on a pile of twisting grease and said “This is my little Big Horn, I am American rock’n’roll, I am the sound of the disenfranchised disguised in the cloak of simplicity!  Hear me, the story of America is the story of the disenfranchised, and I am going to tell it simple and proud and Dick Clark will play it loud and you will dance and need no cello or piccolo trumpet to do so,  Sister Rosetta needed no oboe and neither do I to tell the American story of thump and grind and shout and bridges?,  we don’t need no stinking bridges.”

Your Beatles did a lot of beautiful, amazing, stunning things; perhaps most significantly, they formally, fruitfully, and finally married American rock to American pop.  By this, I mean that the rock’n’roll of Bo Diddley, Eddie Cochran, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Ledbelly, Louis Jordan, Wynonie Harris and a hundred others had not been significantly infected – or to use a kinder word, influenced – by the songcraft of Tin Pan Alley, and the subsequent Broadway and vaudeville tradition of wordplay and melody that spun off of that (n.b.:  I use “Tin Pan Alley” to stand for the idea of workman-like, crafted American songs, full of wit and clever musical and lyrical devices tweaked to create an emotional response).  These aforementioned artists – Wynonie, Jerry Lee, etcetera — were, to put it simply, doing their own thing, and what they did was a very goddamn natural growth from the sounds of Basin Street, Beale Street, Congo Square, and Clarksdale; this “other” thing, the “thing” I am lumping under “Tin Pan Alley,” this thing that was a hundred and eight thousand miles from Congo Square, was the (also) thoroughly American music of Jolson and Rogers and Hart and Ukulele Ike and Crosby and Columbo and many, many others; and that (frequently spectacular) music was, well, something else entirely, not only a different branch of the species, but a different species entirely.

Artists had certainly experimented and even succeeded with marrying the two traditions, but by the early-ish 1960s, the engagement was far, far from solidified.   When the Beatles entered the American consciousness, they did something so giant that it is almost overlooked, and that may their most significant contribution to the culture:  they cemented the relationship between rock and traditional Tin Pan Alley pop music, in essence creating pop-rock, and insuring that the vast majority of rock songs – British and American – that would surface in the public eye in the next decade would be based in Tin Pan Alley’s lyrical, structural, and melodic philosophy.  By the way, if you want some hard, cold evidence of this shit, ask yourself this curious trivia question:  The first song the Beatles performed on their (literally) world-changing debut appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show was “All My Loving” (which in transcription form would have been perfect for any of the old-school crooners, like Crosby or Columbo or even Jolson); but what was the second song the Beatles performed on The Ed Sullivan Show?   It was “Till There Was You”, a fairly mawkish and hoary piece of pure Tin Pan Alley songcraft from the hit musical, The Music Man.  The Beatles started a revolution that night, but they also ended one.

I am not making any judgment on this, by the way.  And I am most certainly not casting any aspersion on the extraordinary achievements of the Beatles and the two extraordinarily gifted songwriters who led the band.  I am just pointing out that a lot changed when the Beatles came to America, but perhaps the most important change was the virtually complete integration of the Broadway/Music Hall/Tin Pan Alley approach to songcraft into a form, rock’n’roll (and/or rock-blues), that had previously largely been devoid of it.  I mean, there are plenty of times when I find myself genuinely angry at the Beatle-fication of American pop rock, and the entire industry that sprang up to support this ringing, glorious, catchy, rhyming, familiar but new phenomenon; I try to imagine how American music would have evolved, how it would have grown, exploded, chilled, thrilled, shook, soothed, rattled, rasped, and even relaxed us, if the beautifully handsome sharpie that was Tin Pan Alley moon-in-June hadn’t been inserted into American rock’n’roll.   But then I remember how completely satisfying and enrapturing, to listeners of any age, experience, and taste, the goddamn Beatles are, and all is forgiven, I mean, except the part where they ruin the art of American rock forever.

So Wooly Bully is a number of amazing things, it is not just a piece of beautiful trash:

It is a repudiation of the rapidly progressing developments in English and West Coast pop rock circa 1965, but in a un contrived, unpretentious sort of way; instead of being a novelty, it’s more of a glimpse of an alternative reality, one shared by the Sonics, the Troggs, even the Velvet Underground, and many etceteras;

It is a insight to a secret alternative history of American rock’n’roll, a keyhole into a world that changed on the night the Beatles arrived on our TV screens, when the simple, pile-driving, parade-rolling rhythms of Bo Diddley and Huey Piano Smith and Jerry Lee Lewis and even Hardrock Gunther and the plaintive, plain, plainly powerful words and god-simple melodies of the Louisiana Bayou Parishes and the Mississippi crossroads were displaced by the Lords of Clever;

It is a presaging of the market correction of 75 – ‘77, when a pile of young bands on both sides of the Atlantic largely repudiated the baroque filigrees of Beatle-ism (and the all the layers of frosting that the 1970s had laid on top of that) and returned rock to the pure sound of ‘50s shave-and-a-haircut shimmers, ‘60s three-chord shrieks (the line between the Sonics and the Ramones is so very small indeed), and the melodic minimalism of Sam the Sham and Question Mark and Herman’s Hermits…

(Because lest we forget, this was all punk was, a long craved and delicious market correction; as discussed last week, very little of actual innovation was spilled or spelled in those heady days, instead it was a perfect bursting of morphed influences, pared and filleted, and a discarding of arena and studio tropes implied by the excesses of the Beatles, but which the Beatles had tastefully and gracefully avoided).

It is a very fucking heavy song, “Wooly Bully” is.  It’s what rock could have been, it’s an artifact of the World Without Beatle, a survivor from before the Beatles made it safe to sing Broadway show tunes and call it revolution.  You want revolution?  You want the sound of America, rebelling?

Uno Dos One Two Tres Quatro 

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How Did This Item Meet Your Expectations?

July 23, 2014

Because I recently purchased a Rubik’s Cube…

Amazon kindly wrote me and asked the following question: 

“So, Timothy Sommer, how did this item meet your expectations?”

Here’s what I (actually) wrote back: 

Dear Sirs and/or Madam and/or Former Member of Counting Crows now employed operating the mailbot that asks me to review products recently purchased on Amazon:

(If you are the latter, don’t take that personally. It’s not that I hate Counting Crows.  It’s just that I recognize that the 21st Century is our most Counting Crows-free century since the 19th Century, and we are really all the better for it, don’t you think?)

Firstly, I am glad, indeed, that you care about my expectations.  As it happens, I have expectations about a great many things, and I can only assume that if you care whether a simple Rubik’s Cube met my expectations, you probably care about some of my other expectations, too!

So here’s a partial list of things I have expectations about:

I expect Sally Field to be a nice person

I expect capers to liven up any dish.

When I see Sandy Kenyon talking to me from the TV screen in the back of cab, I expect I will think ‘My, I bet anyone who does a good George Takei impersonation could probably also do a very acceptable Sandy Kenyon impersonation.”

I expect the middle reliever to be an under-appreciated position in baseball, at least until they find a satisfying stat to honor its’ importance.

When I turn on Channel 4 news, I still expect to see Sue Simmons, dammit.

I expect one day to use the words “irredentism” and “conventicle” with authority. I look forward to such a day.

Whenever I am asked “What is the greatest guitar riff of all time?” I expect that I will answer “Jailbreak” by Thin Lizzy.

When Astronaut Michael Collins dies, I expect I will have to explain to people that he was the “other” guy on the Apollo 11 crew, the one who didn’t walk on the moon.  I then will likely interject that he is not to be confused with the Irish revolutionary Michael Collins, and I expect to receive a lot of blank stares after that. 

I expect that whenever I go on a tirade about the saxophone having no place in modern rock’n’roll, I will then pause and say “Well, yeh, that sax solo on ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ is pretty freaking hot.”

I expect that the fact that there is a Texas Rangers Second Baseman named Rougned Odor will always fill me with glee.

I expect that sometime in the next 12 months I will deliver a long and not necessarily solicited lecture to a very young and largely disinterested person on the genius of the Bonzo Dog Band.

I expect that sooner or later I will find myself on University Place in NYC and still be confused that it’s no longer a two-way street.

I expect that if my 18-year old self had been asked “Do you think a day will come when you would ever kind-of/sort-of like Steely Dan?” the answer would have been a resounding “No effing way.”

I expect that every time I see Bjork in the CVS on Henry Street I will automatically hear that amazing bass riff from the song “Birthday” by the Sugarcubes in my head.

Amazon, I suppose that last one demands a little further explanation.  See, the two celebrities I always see in Brooklyn Heights are Bjork and actor Paul Giamatti (I have never seen them together, by the way, though one day I saw one literally 90 seconds after I saw the other.  Does it matter which one I saw first that day?  No, it actually doesn’t, Amazon, but in case you were wondering it was Bjork).  Anyway, the first time I saw Bjork I was as baffled as Sarah Palin being shown an episode of Blackadder, and I thought to myself, “That can’t possibly be Bjork, it must be some other pixie-ish Eskimo chasing their kids around CVS,” but then I realized, “Nope, that’s definitely Bjork.” As for Paul Giamatti, well, I suspect I’d like to tell him how freaking genius he was as John Adams and as Harvey Pekar, but you know, I don’t like interjecting myself into the life of innocent celebrities unless the time is just right.  But I don’t need to tell you that, Amazon, I cannot even imagine the celebrities you know!  Phillip Roth, J.K. Rowling, Cheech Marin, Viggo Mortensen, George R.R. Martin, George Martin, Chris Martin, you’ve known them all.

Where was I?

Oh…about the Rubik’s cube…it’s a freaking Rubik’s cube.  Did it meet my expectations?  As stated, it performed it’s cube-like functions in a suitably Rubik way.  I mean, what do you want me to say here.  It’s a Rubik’s Cube.  It interested me for about eight minutes, then I began to think about Great Pizza Slices I’ve had in the past and the infinite superiority of the mono mix of the Sgt. Pepper album to the stereo one.  I thought I had lost it for a while, like maybe a day and a half, but it was just under a sweater.  By the way, it’s likely Adam Durwitz (your old band mate in Counting Crows) will be growing hair on his head again before anyone ever tops Benny Tudino’s in Hoboken. For the pizza slice, that is. So did the Rubik’s cube meet my expectations?  Well, yes, I guess it did.

Kind regards, Timothy A. Sommer

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Existential Stuff, Opinion

The Hideous Future of Bloomuliani’s City

July 22, 2014

Over the last generation, Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg set out to transform the economic, physical, and social landscape of Manhattan in a way that would impact all future generations of New Yorkers.  To put it kindly, they wanted to make the city safe for economic investment and the interests of a white, money-spending and taxable upper class; we have seen their goals realized, in spades.

Eine Klienes Historikal Perspektiv:  From the 1930s to the 1960s, a curious and often despicable man named Robert Moses sought to transform the city, specifically the Island of Manhattan. He wanted to clean out anything that felt dirty, ethnic, unkempt, European, cloistered, crowded, and noisy, and replace it with sterile highways, sterile parks, and ugly high-rise projects. To a great degree, Moses succeeded, but by the 1960s, his power began to wane, and some of his most fearsome and destructive ideas – the Broome Street Expressway that literally would have obliterated Soho, the mid-Manhattan Expressway that would have turned most of midtown into a multi-lane freeway, the Battery Bridge that would have cast the skyline of Lower Manhattan into shadows — were ideologically refuted and ultimately cancelled.

Bloomberg and Giuliani set out with many of the same goals as Moses, but with far greater scope and ambition:  rather than box the poor into sterile cubes, they would eliminate them entirely; rather than create freeways to encourage ease of suburban commute into Manhattan, they would make the Island of Manhattan, traditionally a land of nooks, shadows, sepia spires and Weegee-esque alleys, into a clean, poor-less paradise for the super-rich and the international megacorps that they help run.

For generations, I mean since the days of Cooper Union’s formation and the grim mudcity of the Five Points and the spiraling syllables of Melville, Manhattan had been the Kingdom of Outsiders, the only conceivable destination for Woollcott and William Burroughs and Woody Allen and Warhol and Dylan and Ginsberg and Verlaine; the only conceivable destination for anyone who felt rejected in the grey and green heartland, and who knew that their souls already lay in the Kingdom of Outsiders, a land of walk-ups and wishes, sluiced between two dirty rivers.

Bloomberg and Giuliani hated the Kingdom of Outsiders.  Their goal was to turn Manhattan into the Kingdom of Insiders.  Giuliani, that controlling, bullying pimp, took us about half way there; Bloomberg not only was going to take us the rest of the way, but was going to insure that his wishes would wreck Manhattan for generations to come, maybe forever.

If you thought that it couldn’t get any worse, if you thought the worst was over, you were all wrong, wrong, wrong. Let me tell you a little something about the plans laid by the billionaire for the billionaires, and where this will all lead us.

Okay.  You’ve been reading a lot about the supertall needle skyscrapers, largely residential, sprouting up all over Manhattan like hair plugs on Adam Durwitz’s head (or, in a more timely reference, piling up like meaningless gifts in Derek Jeter’s garage).  Thin slivers higher than the highest skyscrapers, there’s been a lot of worthwhile chatter about how these are going to furiously alter – almost certainly for the worse – one of the most legendary skylines in the world. ‘Tis true, but the other damage these foreign-looking monstrosities will do will be far worse:  these supertalls (I think that’s the actual ‘accepted’ word for them) will be the domains of the super-rich; that is, quite literally and realistically, who they’re being built for.  Now, we are not just talking the rich, who have always given Manhattan a certain flavor, or even the really really wealthy, who have dominated the Island since Rudy G. made it his personal mission to evict the middle class from below 96th Street; we are talking rich rich rich rich rich, like Russian/Chinese/Saudi Billionaire rich.  That’s who these things, these fucking needles, are being built for.

When the architects and shills of big money start blabbing about these supertalls, they say they same horseshit Bloomberg said – that they want New York to become a global city.  First of fucking all, what they really mean is this:  We want New York City to be less, ohhhh, New York City-ish, and more like Bahrain or Hong Kong or Beijing.  And that fucking translates into WE WANT THE RICH TO NEVER HAVE TO SEE THE POOR.  Listen, here’s a handy reminder:  Anytime you hear anyone talking about wanting to make New York City a global city, tell them this:  WHAT THE FUCK WAS THIS PLACE BEFORE?!?  Schefuckingnechtady?!?

Now, back to the supertalls (what an awful word; if some coffee joint tried calling one of their drink sizes a fucking “Supertall,” I would say “Sirs, I am taking my coffee business elsewhere, and besides, I heard a Counting Crows song in this establishment yesterday, and therefore, you are dead to me”).   As stated, the plan is to shill the 10 to 75 million dollar apartments in these floating shithouses to Russian billionaires (and let’s not leave out the Chinese and the Saudis, and any fucker with fifty or so million lying around to waste on an apartment that will not be their primary residence).  AND LET’S NOT FORGET, THAT GAULEITER BLOOMBERG ACTUALLY SAID (and he really did say this, though admittedly I am just paraphrasing) that he wanted to make Manhattan safe for Russian Billionaires.

Anyway, New Yorkers won’t be moving into these things, shit, Americans won’t even be moving into them, which raises this point:  because these narrow palaces in the ether won’t be the primary residences of these fuckers, they won’t be paying into the New York City tax base.  Also, do you think any of these people are going to be patronizing all those groovy little Greek diners and all those yogurt shops and little cupcake stores or whatever the fuck it is that makes New York “New York” in the 21st century?  NO.  They will have their gourmet shit flown in or driven in from wherever the fuck these people get their gourmet shit driven in or flown in from.  Seriously.  You think Sergei Q. Billlionairski is going to eat anything from Gristedes?

And THIS will be the real legacy of the next stage of Manhattan’s ascension into a Bahrain-esque “global city” of the super-rich:  The local stores will no longer be patronized. They will wither and die. Even the high-end shops will wither and die, much less the places for the merely rich.  The diners will die.  The restaurants not patronized by pieces of shit whose bar fights are covered in Vanity Fair will die.  The newsstands will die, the candystores will die, the delis will die, anything not specifically geared to the billionaire or the tourist will die. 

 LISTEN, THIS IS THE REAL LEGACY OF BLOOMBERG, and the real estate deals and zoning laws he put into effect when he was making Manhattan safe for all his Private Jet-flying Pals:  Within our lifetime, Manhattan will be a ghost town peopled only by the very, very rich and the very, very poor. Mark my goddamn Counting Crow-hating words.  The billionaires will live high in the sky, not supporting local businesses and not paying into the local tax base, thereby engendering the collapse of any “normal” business; this will be complimented by the COMPLETE elimination of the middle class, upper middle class, “merely” rich, and lower middle class from the Island (of course the working poor were driven out a long time ago), a process initiated by Giuliani and largely completed by Bloomberg, but only to be fully realized via the  deals he set in motion;  and this will LEAVE NOTHING ON THIS ISLAND BUT THE SUPER RICH AND THE HOMELESS, except for a few spots of normalcy in Spanish Harlem, Washington Heights, Inwood, and maybe a couple of apartments right around the tunnel entrances.  The wheels have been set in motion to turn this lauded, legendary, transcendent, trashy city into a GHOST TOWN, and within our lifetime, It will be an ugly, peculiar ghost town…I give it 20 years…

…and it’s ALL Bloomberg and Giuliani’s fault.

These evil animals hide behind the word “global city,” because they look at the money and the hideous skyline of fucking Bahrain and Beijing and THINK that’s what a city is supposed to look like. GLOBAL CITY. NYC was already a global city, you awful, evil MEN.

And this was all written before I saw the news that the developers of the 40 Riverside Boulevard project, who had to allow some non-rich people to live in their building so they could get some land abatement or tax break or whateverthefuck, are aggressively petitioning the city to allow them to create a separate entrance for their poorer residents.  And what is this Riverside Boulevard crap!?!  The name Riverside Fucking Drive was good enough for my parents when they lived there in the 1940s, but it isn’t good enough for you?!?  Are you insulting my parents?  Yes, they had their issues, but do not fucking act like you are better than them because you want to call it Riverside Boulevard.  Fuck You.

 Net out:  the city is going to fucking hell, and not in a cute 1970s’ Robyn Byrd/Al Goldstein/Ritz Thrift Shop sort of way.  

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December, 1980. Weinstein Dorm, U2, and…

July 21, 2014

Last week, I wrote about the year 1980.  Today, I want to write about just one month:   December 1980.

In December 1980, I was 18 and three-quarters years old; when you are that age, these fractions still seemed to matter). I was a sophomore at NYU, and I was living in the Weinstein Center for Student Living, on University Place between 8th and Waverly.

I cannot say enough about what a creative and fertile place for self discovery Weinstein was; in many ways, it felt like the center of the Universe, IN the center of the Universe.  It was a time when NYU only had three dorms, and Weinstein was the “weird” or “cool” or “punk rock” one, full of geeky and brilliant and arrogant and creative and adventurous children, all newly free.  We were all discovering the amazing Shabby Utopia that was Manhattan ’80; we were all discovering the people who would finally laugh at the same jokes and like all the same bands and films we did.  Weinstein was a place of infinite wit and discovery, both wildly immature and inviting maturity far beyond the age of its’ residents.  It was intellectual salon, rock club, whorehouse, cinematheque, drug den, land of the first-time free and brave-enough to walk home from Avenue A at a quarter to 4 in the morning.

(NYU was a little different then.  Today, I understand it’s a place you go to if you can’t get into Harvard; back then, it was a place you went to if you couldn’t get into Fordham.  I mean, that’s a little harsh, but only a little.  And the East Village, whose borders were only two or three blocks from Weinstein, was an infinitely different landscape then, as can be recalled from the little mnemonic we dutifully recited at that time:  Avenue A – Adventurous!  B- Brave!  C- Crazy; D – Dead; FDR: Found Dead in River.)

I know all dorm experiences share many commonalities:  they are places of self-invention, sexual and emotional discovery/abandon/shame, and the first flowerings of (frequently false) freedom; but there was, truly, something unique about Weinstein.  It was the art school within the art school, the film school within the film school, the haven of punk rock and night adventure within the haven of punk rock and night adventure, the nexus of libidinous experimentation within the nexus of libidinous experimentation. In other words, it was a mini-Manhattan within the environs of greater Manhattan, only with a cafeteria and a safety net.

In December of 1980, I was a columnist for the amazing, pioneering Trouser Press magazine, and I was just beginning to write for other publications, including the UK Weekly Sounds, the Village Voice, and the Daily News.  Also, I was hosting an interview show on WNYU called MusicView (Noise the Show, the WNYU show I would come to be identified with, was still six months away).

Which is all to say I lived and breathed music.  I went out to see live music three to six nights a week, and did the rounds of about half a dozen record stores at least twice a week.   As December cracked open, the events I was most immediately excited about were the imminent American debuts of the Ruts D.C. (arriving in the U.S. five a little under five months after the death of Ruts’ vocalist Malcolm Owen, which I wrote about last week) and the Skids, the gorgeous Scottish punk band who were incorporating Celtic breadth and depth into the landscape of musically adept punk rock.  Both would be playing multiple night stints at Hurrah.

On December 6, I went to the Gramercy Park hotel, which was then a reasonably clean but ragged-at-the-edges hotel that housed visiting British bands, but only those with enough label support to keep them out of the Times Square and Madison Square semi-S.R.O’s where British bands usually stayed (in a future column, I intend to fully explain the hierarchy of Manhattan band hotels circa 1980).  I was there to interview U2, who were in New York for the very first time.  In fact, I would be interviewing them twice:  once for Trouser Press – I found the group intriguing, so the magazine had agreed to let me do a small single-page feature – and once for WNYU.  I had heard a few of their early singles and been very intrigued by their sound, which seemed to mix the dynamics of the Skids with the minimalism of Joy Division and PiL, but who had a vocalist who had the sweet, soaring pomp of Midge Ure, plus there was something hanging over the whole enterprise that had the dynamics of classic rock.  Seriously, that’s exactly what I thought when I was walking up to the Gramercy to interview – wait, do two interviews – with the band.

I can detail this curious adventure elsewhere; let’s just say that the afternoon ended with Bono and the Edge playing a four-song set in the room they shared for me and my friend Mike Dugan.  Just for me and Mike Dugan. Also, the fact that I was the first American to interview U2 was not, at the time, the noteworthy fact it later became.

Back to Weinstein Dorm.  The locus of all social life in Weinstein was the front desk, located immediately to the left of the main doors on University Place.  It wasn’t actually a desk, really more of a room with two open sides, fronted by a chest-high wall.  Behind this low wall was a board which connected to intercom buzzers in all the rooms, and a high chair on which sat the desk clerk, somewhat imperiously, somewhat apologetically. There was also a small, gorgeously archaic black-and-white TV with bunny-ears that was perched on the desk, visible only to the desk clerk and anyone leaning a little bit over the front partition.  It was all colored gruesomely industrial maroon and cream/beige.

The desk clerk was not a grave, dutiful fellow in a uniform who buzzed in guests and did light security.  Oh, no. Rather, the Weinstein front desk clerk was the host and concierge of the whole extraordinary R-rated talk show/class-clown convention/whorehouse/drug dispensary/record-club/cinema discussion group that was the Weinstein Dorm. The desk clerk’s real job was to serve as a cross between Dick Cavett, the Emcee in Cabaret, and Siskel and Ebert.  Since the desk clerk essentially sat at the nexus of all dorm life, and not only observed all social life in the dorm but was the primary dispenser of gossip, cultural recommendations, and spiritual and romantic advice, the position of front desk clerk at the Weinstein Front Desk was a much sought-after post; it was held by a few trusted undergrads and some recently graduated cineastes, and every single one of them was wise, friendly, and had their own area of expertise (film, music, trash culture, porn, gay life, each of these were covered, as if you were students in a master class).  My real education at NYU came from the extraordinary men and women who worked behind the Weinstein Front Desk, and a pile of people reading this will heartily concur.

If we weren’t doing anything particular – studying, clubbing, listening to music, going through the awkward and embarrassing first groans of sexual discovery – many of us Weinstein residents were likely to be hanging around the front desk, listening to the desk clerk pontificate, gossip, lecture us on the similarities between Goddard and Win Wenders, or just do stand-up.

On the evening of December 8th, 1980, when word began to spread that something ghastly, unimaginable, incomprehensible had happened 63 blocks north of our dorm, there was an unspoken, organic migration to the front desk.    I vaguely recall already being in the Weinstein lobby before the news broke; or perhaps a desk clerk had buzzed my room, telling me to get downstairs; or maybe I was coming in from a diner or date; I really don’t recall.  I just remember being one of a few, than a few more, than one of many, many people clustered around the desk, and the tiny black and white TV.

I am quite sure we did not know how to process news so grave, so shocking, so shattering to our sense of generational stability.  After the silence, after the awe, after the shock that shuddered us into stillness, I recall there being confusion regarding how to react, how to process.  I will admit that my reaction slightly shames me now, but doesn’t surprise me:  As an advocate and student of the cultural shift caused by punk, I wanted to treat the event with the obscene, obnoxious logic of contrarian.  Fortunately, I kept (most) of this to myself, and allowed room for the emotions of others to expand and express.

With a third of a century passed since the event, I find myself most admiring of the reaction of Martha Quinn, who also lived in the dorm, was a friend, and was another habitué of the Front Desk Salon (I think she may have even worked as a desk clerk, too, but she would have to confirm that).  Martha allowed herself to weep, allowed herself to lead a delegation up to the Dakota, allowed herself to feel the pain and sorrow that so many of the rest of us, in our youthful arrogance, could not access.

(For the record, I do not recall how Bill DeBlasio, the future mayor who was then President of the dorm, reacted; perhaps he can weigh in?)

The rest of the week passed in a bad dream-like haze of shock and gloom.  The Ruts D.C. played a few days later, and it was a terrible weekend to play music in the city, no one really wanted to go out; but I felt something invigorating about seeing this band, who were also scarred by loss, yet who played rich, original, dark, and triumphant music.

I now recognize something else.  The striking mortalities of 1980, the sad role call of loved musicians who died due to crime or misadventure, were a harbinger and an initial doorway to the greater, graver mortalities of the decade:  these losses, and most notably the crime and generational injury of December 8, 1980, presaged the extraordinary defacement and desiccation of our loving, lovely downtown world by the indescribable tragedy of the AIDS plague.  On that night, on December 8th, our generation of goofy, serio-comic, arrogant, playful, sexy, sex-craved, music-crazy inheritors to the many crowns of the Kingdom of Outsiders (for this is what Manhattan was, circa ’80), had the shock of impermanence and indisputable loss inserted into our cocky and frequently silly lives; at that moment, the unimaginable mortality toll of the rest of the decade, which was to claim the lives of some of the people in the lobby that very night (and impact all of us), was foreshadowed.  The theme of hope and joy and lust and love and the magic of music, art, and film would remain resounding, but that night we learned that death would follow us close.

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1980: Life, Death, and the Ruts

July 17, 2014

1980 was an extraordinary year in music.  It was the first year of the new decade, the first year of the first completely Beatles-free decade, and the first year of the first post-punk decade.  1980 also saw the release of Back in Black, Boy, Second Edition, British Steel, London Calling (in the U.S., anyhow), Underwater Moonlight, Freedom of Choice, Los Angeles, Killing Joke, Black Sea, Dirty Mind, Closer, The Black Album, Ace of Spades, and Double Fantasy.

Stunning.

It was also the year rock music discovered its’ mortality.

Until 1980, the death of a rock musician was a sporadic, shocking event.  Prior to 1980, rock deaths were a sad novelty, more news than a harbinger of time, and the average music fan could probably count on one-and-a-half hands the number of famous musicians who had passed.  The inevitability of impermanence was something that Generation Rock had somehow avoided.

1980 changed all that.

1980 saw the passing of Bon Scott, Ian Curtis, John Bonham, Darby Crash, and John Lennon (not to mention Larry Williams, Amos Milburn, Professor Longhair, Jacob Miller, Keith Godchaux, Carl Radle, and Tim Hardin).  One or more of these deaths touched every type of fan, avid or casual; followers of every genre variation were affected.  After 1980, it was no longer an amusing parlor game to talk about the All-Star Band in Heaven; after 1980, we had to recognize the mortality of our peers and heroes, as opposed to ignoring the inevitability of life’s end.

I have left one name off the list of those who passed in 1980, a name that too-frequently is omitted from that sad roll call.

This week marks the 34th anniversary of the death of Malcolm Owen.  Owen was the lead singer of a spectacular, fiery, serpentine, inventive, promising, and furiously joyful band called The Ruts.

The Ruts were many things:  they were the Clash’s Clash, which is to say that they ripped through punk conventions like extremely adept rabid dogs, and were always acutely aware of the power of rock to effect social change and educate; no band ever more effectively integrated reggae and rock, and punk and dub, and they achieved one thing the splendid Two Tone bands never actually accomplished, which was to marry the TRUE roar of punk with the hopping fragility of reggae and ska; there was NO tighter or musically adept punk band (with the possible exception of the Bad Brains), and the Ruts ability to turn a chord change on a thin, sharp dime made their shifting, glistening slaps of metal the predecessor of the chunka-chunka dive-bombing of Metallica; and they created some of the era’s most powerful 45s, PROVING that punk rock had the ability to evolve musically and spiritually while retaining spit, speed, and venom.

The Ruts were also a gliding, crunching, beacon of what the 1980s COULD have been, the progression of punk rock into an arena where musical aptitude was appreciated and actual political/philosophical content was DEMANDED, and where the integration of non-Caucasian musical forms into the monochrome of Punk could seem logical and natural, and could be executed without ANY sacrifice of volume and power.

The Ruts could have been, should have been, huge in America.  They were (truly) as musically adept as Rush, only they found, uniquely, a way to apply that skill to punk. Their swift, broad tongue-biting chomp certainly could have appealed to lovers of metal, and in front man Owen, they had the un-imagined love-child of Strummer and Bon Scott, howling with righteous intent of Jello Biafra and the sincerity of Jon Langford.  And their rhythm section – bassist Segs Jennings and drummer Dave Ruffy – was (and is) one of the best rhythm sections in rock, NOT a statement I make lightly.

Malcolm Owen died on July 14, 1980, shortly after the Ruts recorded two of the best singles of the era:  “West One (Shine on Me)”, a foreboding arpeggiated-riff-nugget that told the story of the night city, and the tripping, serpentine, noir dance-punk salute to the dark shadows of Two Tone, “Staring at the Rude Boys.”

Although I know that he died the same year as Lennon, Curtis, Bonham, and Scott, I have little hesitation in saying that Owen’s death was the greatest loss of that sad and incredible year, if you measure loss by the yardstick of music un-heard, potential never realized.

The Ruts re-constituted as the Ruts D.C. (the D.C. standing for “da capo,” Latin for “back to the beginning”), and made some extraordinary records pioneering the interface between dub and post-punk; guitarist Paul Fox, who perhaps understood the tricky recipe for the appropriate blending of punk, metal, and classic rock better than any guitarist I’ve ever heard, died in 2007, but not before brilliantly performing at a reunion show, with Henry Rollins subbing for Owen.  Today, after a roughly two-decade hiatus, Ruts D.C. are recording and touring again, and that is a magical thought, but nothing will ever restore the sense of loss at the music they never had a chance to make with Malcolm.

There’s not a big “point” here.  I am not going to curse the American label system circa 1980 that (almost actively) didn’t foster success for a generation of brilliant post-punk bands like the Ruts, nor am I going to devolve into a well meaning “say no to drugs” rant.  This was just a fan letter.  The Ruts were a punk rock band that acknowledged everything positive, musically, conceptually, and ideologically, about the first-generation of Britpunk, while looking forward to the high-competence, high-power tightrope-walking of Northern British Metal and later speed metal; and they did all that while being deftly aware of (and brilliantly integrating) the political and musical tradition of non-caucasian music.  WOW.  The Ruts really did do all that.  It was an extraordinary, unprecedented balancing act, and goddamn did they pull it off.

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Gloria in Excelsis DEREK! For we have seen the star in the east, and we come to worship him…

July 16, 2014

(Although this column is a forum for facts and opinions, today’s Noise The Column is a flight of fancy, and exclusively the domain of the the imagination of the Head Noise-Maker, Timothy A. Sommer)

To commemorate yesterday’s Baseball All-Star Game, and the surprise appearance of Minnesota Archbishop John C. Nienstadt to grant Derek Jeter the privilege of dispensing the rite of Extreme Unction in the name of the Catholic Church (making him the first non-cleric to have been bestowed this honor since Charles Lindbergh), I thought I would take a few moments to comment on the Great Man’s final circuit around the playing fields of North America.

As he marches off into the sunset of a well-earned retirement, Derek Jeter, one of the truly honorable men of Baseball, has collected many tributes and gifts from the teams that have respected him as an opponent and honor his contribution to the game.

Watches, cufflinks, donations to his favorite charity, a surfboard, a set of golf clubs, a ten gallon hat…this is just a very small sampling of the gifts presented to ol’ No. 2 as he visits ballparks on his season-long retirement tour.

As admirable and deserving of praise as Jeter is, I must confess that I believe that some of the honors he is receiving are getting a bit out of hand.  Here are some of the recent gifts that raised the eyebrow of this Jeter-watcher (and, in parentheses, the team that presented the gift):

*  10 ounces of Gold bullion in the shape of Baseball-loving President William Howard Taft (the Washington Nationals)

*  A 1995 Pontiac Seville, containing inside of it a 2014 Chevy Spark (from the Detroit Tigers, commemorating Jeter’s first and last season in baseball)

*  Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh and a wooden plague noting in Aramaic that Jeter is King of the Baseball Players (Atlanta Braves)

*  A Daily wake-up call from Eddie Money singing Jeter’s favorite song,  “Two Tickets to Paradise” (from the Baltimore Orioles; later rescinded when it was discovered that this was a terrible misunderstanding based on a Orioles public relations executive confabulating the song “Gangsta’s Paradise” with the name of L’il Wayne’s record label, Young Money; a distressed Eddie Money still offered to call Jeter every day and tell him what Money had watched that morning on the Weather Channel and what flavor Ramen he had bought that week from the food aisle of Rite Aid)

*  Renaming Jeter’s favorite Disneyland attraction, The Country Bear Jamboree, “The Country Bear Jeteree” (Los Angeles Angels)

*  Presenting Jeter with the actual jackhammer used to remove the Hollywood Boulevard Star of his least-favorite actor, Ron Silver, who Jeter famously dismissed as “The Poor Man’s Al Pacino”  (Los Angeles Dodgers)

*  A comfortable shroud to wear during the three days between Jeter’s retirement and his surprise re-appearance at something like, oh, the Source Awards or Fallon (Kansas City Royals)

*  A short film of former pitching ace Randy Johnson dressed as Jim Varney, saying “Hey Vern!  Hey Vern!” for eight minutes (Seattle Mariners)

*  An audio recording of Yankee great Mickey Rivers reciting Shakespeare’s “What a piece of work is Man!” speech from Hamlet  (New York Mets)

*  Marge Schott’s dog, Schottzie, stuffed, with his eyes replaced by glass balls that light up the number two when someone “pets” Schottzie (the Cincinnati Reds)

*  A Rocking Chair and a donation of $50,000 in Jeter’s name to the Make-A-Wish Fund (Florida Marlins)

*  Eddie Money’s Daughter (Philadelphia Phillies)

 

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Another Great Moment In New York Times History

July 15, 2014

The great moments of our history have been treated with memorable gravity in the pages of the New York Times.  July 20, 1969: MEN WALK ON MOON.  August 8, 1974:  NIXON RESIGNS.  September 11, 2001:  U.S. ATTACKED.  These are the milestone moments of our lives, expressed in simple yet supremely effective fashion via New York Times headlines; let us honor the march of history via bold font most solemn.

And friends, let us add to these moments of comfort and wisdom via America’s Newspaper of Record this extraordinary opening line from an article in this past Sunday’s Times:

“Being a teenager is hard – being the parent of a teenager is even harder.”

APPARENTLY, sometime while I was watching the World Cup or considering the infinite superiority of King Kullen to Waldbaums, THE NEW YORK TIMES BECAME AN EPISODE OF BLOSSOM.  Because the above sentiment is something I hardly expect in the FIRST LINE of an article in THE NEW YORK FUCKING TIMES (out of respect for a fellow journalist, I refrain from mentioning the name of the writer; let’s just say that her name begins with an “L” and rhymes with Lisa Damour).  I mean, I KNOW this whole teenage-parent thing must be hard indeed BUT I WANT TO READ ABOUT HAMAS AND IRAQ AND CARMELO ANTHONY AND SHIT, and YEH I’ll tolerate the articles about Alan Cumming and THE DAILY rants about how Manhattan is the new Brooklyn which was the new Manhattan; but if you want to write things like “Being a teenager is hard – being the parent of a teenager is even harder” I will SIMPLY have to present you with The First Annual Noise The Column Mayim Bialik Award For Irrelevancy in the Newspaper of Record.

(And I DEARLY HOPE that Ms. Bialik, the VERY DEFINITON OF THE KIND OF SASSY AND OBERLIN-BOUND FOX I WOULD HAVE HAD A LIFE-ALTERING CRUSH ON WHILE I WAS AT GREAT NECK SOUTH, is not insulted by my appropriating her VERY HONORABLE NAME for the moniker of a Very Special Media Prize.)

I am sure the writer is a perfectly nice person.  I mean that.  I was just a little startled to encounter a sentence in the New York Times that, truly, seems better suited as the voice-over in a promo for Clarissa Explains It All About Being a Mom of a Teenager!

(YES I KNOW mixing up the whole Blossom and Clarissa thing is problematic, but I’M A GUY, WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU EXPECT, I AM TRYING MY BEST HERE, AND MY EDITOR JUST TOLD ME THAT HODOR IS DOING A DJ TOUR, SO I AM A LITTLE DISTRACTED, dammit.)

And now…MORE NEW YORK TIMES CORRECTION FUN!

This is one of the best ones ever, and I must credit poynter.org (via my great friend, the actor Kevin Hogan) for making me aware of this CLASSIC:

“Correction: June 19, 2014:  An article on Tuesday about Germany’s 4-0 victory over Portugal at the World Cup misspelled the surname of the Portugal center forward who left the game with a leg injury. He is Hugo Almeida, not Almeido. The article also misstated, in some copies, the year Germany last won the World Cup. It was 1990, not 1090.”

 Otto the Great was crowned in Aachen in 936, and then by the Pope in Rome in 962; the latter event, especially, marks the true beginning of the Holy Roman Empire, which is where the story of Germany, as we would recognize it, really begins.  Now, In 1090, the Emperor (also recognized formally as King of the Germans) was Henry IV; history tells us that circa 1090, Henry IV was consolidating his power after his historic invasion of Rome, during which he actually attempted to OVERTHROW A POPE, and install his own.  The history books, however, MAKE NO MENTION OF A GERMAN WORLD CUP VICTORY AT THE END OF THE 11TH CENTURY.  Honestly, I think it would have, if such a thing happened; Germans love their Footie, y’see.  But even though I can’t find ANYTHING in the history books referring to it, according to the New York Times, the Germans won the World Cup in 1090, just 24 years after the Norman Invasion of England, and 840 years before the FIRST World Cup.

The Lesson Here Is This:  Dear NY Times:  Your words have comforted me and your articles have roused me to sundry levels of elation and indignation since I was an information-hungry child, lusting after Bialik-esque peasant-blouse’d-wearing Queens of the Island that is Long.  However, IF YOU ARE GOING TO MAKE A MISTAKE AS EGREGIOUSLY DUMB AS CLAIMING THAT GERMANY WON THE WORLD CUP IN 1090, or, for that matter, that METALLICA BEGAN IN THE 1970s, DO NOT DRAW ANY ADDITIONAL FUCKING ATTENTION TO IT.  Got it?

Or maybe HIRE SOME PROOF READERS and not just give the job to some freaking unpaid Syracuse Intern in a Kenny Rogers t-shirt that they wear ironically.  Seriously, New York Fucking Times, when will you learn NOT to trust proof reading to anyone who a) doesn’t get paid b) knows someone who went to The Dwight School with the Strokes.  Seriously, man.

Finally, the World’s Greatest Rock’n’Roll Bands are Neu! and Fu Manchu.  I shall elaborate on this at a later date.

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Arts and Entertainment, Life, Music

Ramones: Perfection Remembered, Perfection Forever

July 14, 2014

The pop-rock era has only produced two flawless full-length records:  Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys and Ramones, the debut album by the Ramones.

I am not talking about “great,” or “influential,” or “classic,” or “favorite” – I am talking about flawless.

Now, a pile of records are near-flawless – Abbey Road, Funhouse by the Stooges, Pink Flag by Wire, and Back in Black by AC/DC all come very, very close – and there are literally hundreds of perfect singles, and of course there’s a plethora of fantastic, classic, treasured albums; but I do believe that the pop-rock era (which I am defining as the fifty years since the Beatles’ debuted) has only produced two flawless albums.

Flawless: not one single unnecessary bar or beat on any song, nor any song less than the great sum of the albums’ parts; not one single bar or beat unworthy of joyful abandon and detailed examination, yet not one second or one minute distracts from (or is incompatible with) the whole; every moment compelling to the ear without being overwhelming, and inspiring to the heart without insisting; every chord and arrangement choice perfectly chosen, a perfect object heard perfectly by the listener who expected nothing more yet is so drawn in by the experience that they expect nothing less; every moment is riveting without being distracting in its’ brilliance, on both macro and micro levels; every song evokes recognition, yet is “startling” enough to keep casual and experienced listener engaged; every musical choice fascinating, intent-filled, and ideal; not one half-second of the whole experience too long or too short, either on the micro or macro level.

…and you are left with Pet Sounds and Ramones. 

(Because even the most extraordinary and exemplary albums – let’s say The White Album, for example, or Velvet Underground and Nico, or White Light White Heat – have, in essence, their flaws built into them, as part of the whole experience; some of our greatest albums are, indeed, flawed; but I speak here of the only two flawless albums I am aware of, the eleventh album by the Beach Boys and the first album by the Ramones.)

Despite a lot of contemporary (and reflective) hype to the contrary, the Anglo-American flowering of punk rock circa ’75 – ’77 was anything but a clean break; rather, it was a natural evolution (albeit a very welcome one).  99% of the British and American bands of that era were elaborating on, re-interpreting, or bringing to its’ natural minimal conclusion the work and styles of extant (or extinct) bands like the Stooges, Mott the Hoople, the Small Faces, the Who, the Dolls, the 13th Floor Elevators, Roxy Music, the MC5, the Sonics, the Velvets, the Crystals, and literally hundreds and hundreds of others.  New music of the initial punk era whose direct stylistic antecedents cannot be traced back to pre-existing (and to a degree, “approved”) reference point are so few and far between as to be statistically irrelevant:  there’s the Residents, Suicide, and the Electric Eels, all of whom (somewhat significantly) pre-date the “punk” era (and there’s a few who fall on the post-punk cusp, like Young Marble Giants, DNA, and PiL); BUT BASICALLY, despite the hype, EVERYONE WAS RE-SHUFFLING THE EXISTING GENE POOL.

Except for the Ramones.

The Ramones are so completely and utterly identified with the punk movement  that it is extremely easy to overlook their stunning artistic, sonic, and conceptual originality.  In fact, although they were socially part of the punk movement, the Ramones were doing something so extreme musically, so utterly distinct, that it is literally an art-crime to lump them in with Television, the Pistols, Blondie, and all the other (truly) wonderful bands of their era.  In true fact, the Ramones assumption of utter minimalism in the service of rhythm, melody, and energy can only accurately be compared to Kraftwerk, a group that appears dissimilar but was, in fact, radically similar; both bands composed the most utterly simple pop songs and unsophisticated chord changes, descended from bubblegum and the Beach Boys (and completely discarding the ubiquitous tradition of Beatles-pop), presenting them completely and utterly devoid of instrumental solos, and featuring bass (or bass-representing instruments) that never, ever deviated from the tonic note.  I am not entirely sure there had been a “solo-less” rock band prior to the Ramones (or a band whose bassist so religiously adhered to the tonic note); however, I am quite sure there had not been a rock band that performed exclusively songs that featured only bar chords, no single or multiple-string solos, and a bass that only and exclusively followed the tonic note of the guitar chord.  This formula is, without any doubt, as radical as the work of LaMonte Young (the drone pioneer whose work birthed the Velvet Underground), John Cage’s experiments with silence, or Satie’s explorations into maximum melodic minimalism.

In other words, Ramones is not just pure art; it’s RADICAL art, but not apparently so, since it’s married to the most simple, repetitive, and attractive melodies.

No rock band in the entire rock era  (I am now expanding parameters, I am talking ’51 to present, not just ’64 to present) created such a radical scene change as Ramones and Kraftwerk; no one “mainstream” artist, not the Beatles, not the Velvets, not Elvis, introduced such new and virgin and influential territory.  Kraftwerk and the Ramones literally created entirely new rules and an entirely new vocabulary, and they did so in a completely user-friendly fashion.  In fact, you have to go back to 1926 and Louis Armstrong and the Hot 5’s recording of “Heebie Jeebies” to find anything remotely comparable to the TOTAL but user-friendly scene change the Ramones and Kraftwerk engendered; and that both bands introduced such a similar scene-change at roughly the same time makes it, I think, essential to discuss both bands together.

Which not enough people do, which is just fucking stupid.  They are profoundly similar bands, introducing profoundly similar scene changes to the landscape of pop-rock.

The Ramones’ West German cousins,  Kraftwerk, were doing preciscely the same thing, only instead of using the bar chord exclusively, they invented the use of the synthesizer as a rhythmic, chordal device to replace tonic bass and bar chord.  In fact, Kraftwerk’s 1974 breakthrough, “Autobahn,” is so similar melodically and chordally to “Blitzkrieg Bop” as to be virtually a variation on the same theme.

Which is all to say…

Ramones is a work of art.  It is perfect, a word that (after 40 years of listening to, studying, making my living in, and being generally obsessed by pop-rock )I do not use lightly.  It is gorgeous, economical in its’ choices, luxurious in its power, seductive in its melody, lacking not one single unneeded moment, but never, not for one instant, seeming rushed or thrifty.  It is beautiful and powerful, wave upon wave of joy that raises the bar not just on the listeners’ expectations, but sets the bar for an entire generation.

The metronomic, absolute precise drumming of Tommy Ramone – powerful and broad but so deeply economic in its’ choices that it virtually adheres, though almost certainly not intentionally, to the “motortik” aesthetic of the Krautrock movement then extant in West Germany — is an absolute essential part of the realization of that album, not to mention Tommy’s role as co-producer; I cannot, ever, honor enough his achievements.

Other Ramones albums were brilliant – I am especially fond of Leave Home and End of the Century – but they never made another “perfect” album (much as the Beach Boys never made a second “perfect” album).  The alignment that created Ramones – the desire and willingness to create something absolutely, startlingly new, yet couple it to un-shocking melody and the pure seduction of 4/4 time unobstructed by drum rolls or syncopation – could never exist as pure in intent and magical in execution ever again; having done it once, not only would they and the world know it had been done before, but they would never have the ability (or lack thereof) to do precisely the same thing again (as the Buddha says, you cannot put your hand in the same river twice).   Every moment, every second, every bar, every element of the mix, every quirkless moment of production, is flawless, and it is ours forever, the gift of Tommy, Joey, Johnny, and Dee Dee to the world.

Now, all four of the gentlemen on the cover of that album are gone from this incarnation.  This is an almost incomprehensible tragedy.  We have lost our last living link to one of the only perfect albums ever made, one of the most important bands that ever existed.  There is no “up” side to this, no heartwarming, uplifting refrain; there is, however, the perfection of Ramones.  It is unfair to say that it birthed a movement, or influenced others; it is just perfection, in of itself, its own beautiful moment in time that remains perfect, to every listener hearing it for the 480,000th time, and every new listener.  Perfection.  Perfection.  Perfection.

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