GoHah

2007-01-05T16:59:00.000-08:00

Music Review: Nellie McKay - Pretty Little Head

There's a lotta things that I'm proud of in this world
I got a pinch of Shirley Chisholm and a sprinkle of 'That Girl.'

Pretty Little Head

For sheer out-of-the gate gamut running, Get Away From Me, Nellie McKay’s dazzling and dizzying 2004 debut, displayed kaleidoscopic jazz-flavored pop smarts and well-wielded wit and wordplay embracing everything from cabaret, torch, biting hip-hop, and Doris Day-style dewy-eyed songcraft with a pinch of swing and a sprinkle of insincerity.

About all that didn’t get a try-out was yodeling, but McKay makes up for that oversight on her otherwise more uniform and long-delayed Pretty Little Head, which she ended up producing herself after a protracted dispute over direction and CD length led to Columbia letting her go. Releasing Pretty Little Head on her own Hungry Mouse label, a headstrong McKay showcases over two CDs 23 songs that, notwithstanding some diminishing returns, still put across an array of the expected eccentricities, self-effacing and acerbic quirks and vulnerabilities, and cause-related commentary.

But this time around, McKay, putting the first album’s precociousness behind her (when she was 19, or 21, depending on which conflicting facts you have at hand), has toned down the frenetic pace and constant pretty-little-head worry to an extent. Despite occasions in which someone is “coursing through my veins / Pulsing every pound / Panic on parade” (“I Am Nothing”), McKay realizes that she’s “supposed to have a laugh / And have a lot to say.” There's no cause for alarm, and after all, she sings languidly, “You’ve got a long and lazy river to your soul” (“Long and Lazy River”).

That may not be true for everyone, as the long and lazy river becomes at times a shallow tributary in which you’ll run aground. In the scathing “There You Are In Me,” McKay berates the “Selfish, stupid, so self-serious”:

The activist spirit within McKay escapes the trappings of sloganeering heavy-handedness, whether or not you agree with her stances, by being conveyed in oblique language and subtle gradations. Satiric jabs and gentle sarcasm marks the salute to gay marriage in “Cupcake,” while the acidic incisiveness in “The Big One” addresses commercialism and tenant’s rights with the help of some traces of hip-hop vocalizing.

In addition, the gorgeously rendered “Gladd” honors peace activist Gladd Patterson, but “Columbia Is Bleeding,” about allegations of animal cruelty at Columbia University, is more barbed, the most caustic song on Pretty. Allusions to those who “Generalize, proselytize, verbs were spillin’ out their sides,” and deadpanned pretexts that “They're just animals / Make good edibles,” put across the message with mordant humor that is as pointed and consequential.

Overall, however, Pretty Little Head, which gets assistance on a couple tracks from k.d lang and Cyndi Lauper, is not as consequential, consistent or as risk-taking as the brash and bolder Get Away From Me. There are some undernourished songs, lyrically and musically, and at the other extreme the voiceover excess on "Mama & Me" should've been excised.

McKay’s production on Pretty, though promising, doesn't always sit pretty and is a bit gawky at times, though she did have a hard act to follow: Geoff Emerick, who worked with the Beatles, produced and engineered Get Away, an album I can listen to straight through and still be bedazzled by - song after song.

That doesn‘t seem to be the case with the slightly disappointing Pretty Little Head, and I’m beginning to see Columbia’s point of view that it should’ve been more cohesively pared down to 16 songs on one CD.

Then again, let me give that yodeling song another listen…

2007-01-05T16:38:00.000-08:00

Vinyl Tap: Best Reissues of 2006

Pick your format. Remastered, Enhanced, Extended, Limited, Legacy, Deluxe, Dual Disc, Box Set, Special, Live, Essential, Best of, Anthologies, Greatest Hits, Retrospectives.

There's even "Sordid Sentinels."

I hope they're Assorted and Sundry Sordid Sentinels - somehow that would seem to make my list of 2006's best-revisited recordings something complete, and alliterative, to boot. Whatever the case, and whether in compilation or repackaged compact disc-incarnation, squeezed of all traces of once-ubiquitous vinyl, this special year-end edition of Vinyl Tap has by necessity RPM'd for present purposes into The Polycarbonate Plastic Tap Top 10:

1. The Pretenders [Original Recording Remastered]

Yes, they‘re the great Pretenders. “I was feeling kind of ethereal ’cause I’m precious…” Chrissie Hynde may have tongue in cheek and in check, but you don’t know the half of it. She declares on this 1980 release that “I Love Pretending,” but there’s not a lot of reading between the lines needed on one of the most absorbing and vigorous debut albums from anyone at any time, lyrically and musically. From the pointed “anger and lust my senses running amok” to the poignancy of seeking forgiveness from a child who doesn’t understand as “You’ve turned your head / You’ve dropped my hand,” Hynde runs an emotional gamut on the self-titled album’s widely-varying touchstones.

2. Al Green - The Belle Album

When Elvis Costello was once asked if he had ever had a religious experience, he responded, "No, but I have heard Al Green." Whether Costello was referring to Green’s early R&B hits or his later gospel-oriented songs, or both, the transitional Belle from 1977 could be a contender for either view. Coming along at a time of Green’s personal problems and religious re-conversion, this 1977 album bridges the gap from the sinewy sublimity of the soulful Willie Mitchell-produced recordings to albums more in line with his emerging role as an ordained pastor of the Full Gospel Tabernacle. As it turned out, the tracks on Belle comprise the best of both musical worlds.

3. Matthew Sweet - Girlfriend [Original Recording Remastered][Special Edition]

Love lost and love lumbering and lurching toward new possibilities makes for a bittersweet emotion that finds musical expression in the inherent tensions of Sweet’s most fully-realized album, a crisp and commanding poptopian masterwork. Irresistible harmony-bedecked vocal melodiousness lands fab foursquare in a Big Star-light, star bright soundscape, set off against the assertive bite and crunch of the front-and-center guitars of Richard Lloyd and the late Robert Quine.

4. The Byrds - There Is A Season [Box Set]

So you want to be a rock 'n' roll star? “Then listen now to what I say / Just get an electric guitar / Then take some time and learn how to play…” They make it seem so easy. Chances are, however, you can’t do it half as well as one of the most preeminent American Bands, the Byrds, musically or harmonically, in whatever of their incarnations. This 99-song box set chronologically sequences the history of the Byrds from their folk-rock flights to their influential countrified landing, and whether you’re hearing an old favorite that really never grows old, or a new-spin of an outtake or oddity, a Byrds’ LP or CD never seems too out of season for another turn, turn, turn.

5. Lucinda Williams - Car Wheels on a Gravel Road [Original Recording Remastered]

As alternately sensuous and venomous as it is ever-vivid and evocative, the conscientious Williams’ remastered dual-disk deluxe edition of her masterfully crafted 1998 release, itself a laborious consequence of a revolving door series of producers, cities, and studios, almost seems like too much of a good thing, as if she’s out-perfected perfection - and in grand and glorious fashion.

6. Fats Waller - If You Got to Ask, You Ain't Got It! [Box Set] [Original Recording Remastered]

And if, after three discs and 66 songs of instrumental swing and striding and sly vocals, you still got to ask, you never will get it.

7. The dB's - Like This

The heart-surging “Love Is For Lovers” and the brooding “Lonely Is (As Lonely Does)” highlight a 1984 power-pop confection, Southern-style.

8. John Lee Hooker - Hooker [Box Set]

A comprehensive, career-spanning four-disc box set. For breadth and depth, things don’t get bluesier than this.

9. Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys - Legends Of Country Music [Box Set] [Original Recording Remastered]

With dance-floor style Western swing and its embrace of blues, jazz, country, and pop standards, this four-disc anthology shows why Wills distanced himself from the limitations of the “hillbilly” label.

10. Spoon - Telephono & Soft Effects [Enhanced]

Long lost Pixie-lated punk-pop from ‘96 and ‘97, jagged and jarring yet accessible and melodic.

Honorable Mentions:

Bangles - We Are The '80s

Beach Boys - Pet Sounds 40th Anniversary CD+DVD [ENHANCED] [LIMITED EDITION]

Captain Beefheart - Doc At The Radar Station [Original Recording Remastered]

The Cure - Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me [Original Recording Remastered]

Los Lobos - Wolf Tracks: the Best of Los Lobos

Roy Orbison - The Essential Roy Orbison [Original Recording Remastered]

Pavement - Wowee Zowee: Sordid Sentinels Edition

The Replacements - Don't You Know Who I Think I Was?: The Best of the Replacements

Sebadoh III

T Bone Burnett - Twenty Twenty: The Essential T Bone Burnett

That's Entertainment [BOX SET] [SOUNDTRACK]

2007-01-05T16:35:00.000-08:00

The Early Word: New Books for the Week of January 1, 2007

With most of the bookstore shelf-stuffing timed for the seasonal shopping crowd that has pretty much come and gone by now, January is usually slim pickin’s for new releases, the first week even more so. But for those bound and determined to exchange those bound, indeterminately-given gifts, there are a few notable titles available this week that may fit the bill, especially for fiction.

Fiction:

The Cat Who Had 60 Whiskers by Lilian Jackson Braun

Cats may have nine lives, but you may be forgiven if you think they have more, and more whiskers still, as Braun’s 29th entry of her popular The Cat Who… mystery series chronicles a returning James Qwilleran and his novelistic felines, Koko and Yum Yum.

The Hunters: A Presidential Agent Novel by W.E.B Griffin

The Hunters marks the author’s third installment in his timely series. International intrigue abounds as U.N. oil-for-food bureaucrats and armed, black-clad "Ninjas" figure. So go figure.

The Sweet Potato Queens' First Big-Ass Novel: Stuff We Didn't Actually Do, But Could Have, and May Yet by Jill Conner Browne

Promises some big-ass chick-lit empowerment and ribaldry of the page-turner variety.

When Darkness Falls by James Grippando

A tense hostage crisis in Miami drives the action in Grippando's sixth thriller to feature criminal defense lawyer Jack Swyteck. This one centers on hostages, hush money, and the ever-present Miami vice.

Non-Fiction:

The Proper Care and Feeding of Marriage by Laura Schlessinger

For those whose New Year's resolutions included subjecting yourself to browbeating sanctimony…

2007-01-05T16:27:00.000-08:00

BOOK REVIEW: Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra

“Do you like detective movies?” The main character in the audacious and sprawling Sacred Games asks another. “Only Hollywood movies. Our Indian ones are so badly made,” comes the answer. “But sometimes the Indian ones get things right also.”

That goes for novels as well. While there may be no hurrays for Bollywood forthcoming in Vikram Chandra’s newest work of masterfully crafted fiction, and though it may resemble, on the surface and in sense, an outsourced American-style police procedural, there is much more going on. The multi-layered strata of characters and details are only hinted at in the first drop-in-the-bucket chapters of this gritty and grounded epic, reminiscent of voluminous and character-rich nineteenth-century serial literature as much as modern day hardboiled crime capers.

Still, this tale of modern-day gumshoes and gurus is, in some regards, a departure for Chandra from the magical realism of his heralded 1995 debut, Red Earth and Pouring Rain. The A Thousand and One Nights-style storytelling -- 1997’s Love and Longing in Bombay collection of interconnected stories is framed by its own Scheherezade -- is pervaded with an impressionistic fusion of Indian myth, Hindu gods, fantasy and the workaday world. But Chandra has cast off any phantasmagoric flights of fancy in Sacred Games, retaining the nuanced intricacies, wide-ranging plotlines and high-definition characters in a cohesive and down-to-earth realization of Sacred Games’ kaleidoscopic and episodic style and structure.

In the book’s intertwining accounts of a seemingly jaded Sikh police inspector and a notorious Hindu gangster, it’s an all-encompassing realization, too, with ambiguities and events centering on a multitude of sins and incidents from cat-and-mouse games to a potentially catastrophic cloak-and-dagger gambit with no clean breaks or exit strategies. After all, as one Intelligence officer says on his deathbed, "The game lasts, the game is eternal, the game cannot be stopped, the game gives birth to itself."

The central game, the core storyline of Sacred Games, is set in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) and unfolds with our introduction to detective Sartaj Singh, alternately cynical and romantic, past forty, divorced and world-weary. Moreover, because “Justice had sometimes to be manipulated into being properly blind,” he is resigned but still ambivalent to the system of institutionalized bribery and police brutality.

With such pragmatism -- or rationalization -- in tow, Sartaj gets an anonymous tip that leads to the hide-out of the notorious underworld gangster Ganesh Gaitonde, a Hindu Bhai who "dallied with bejeweled starlets, bankrolled politicians" and whose "daily skim from Bombay's various criminal dhandas was said to be greater than annual corporate incomes."

In a rather bizarre scene, Sartaj confronts Gaitonde as the mob boss sits inside an odd shell-like bunker, presumably impenetrable - that is until Sartaj, tired of chewing the philosophic fat and the back-and-forth taunting, calls for a huge bulldozer that doesn’t have a lot of problem gaining access. Gaitonde barely has time to commit suicide, after also killing a mysterious woman who was also, unknowingly to Sartaj, inside the bunker.

The mystery of the woman's identity has possible links to and sets in motion a long and at times meandering series of events with twists and turns that have their own twists and turns, and that ebb and flow along with disparate and sometimes relevant subplots. Meanwhile, Sartaj also juggles more mundane but personally profitable domestic disputes, blackmail, thievery, and other lesser crimes and misdemeanors.

But the actions of Gaitonde, detailed in interposed chapters, can’t remain too long on the back-burner - and the retelling of his power-grabbing ambitions and more benign and humanizing endeavors does more than fill in the narrative gaps. Gaitonde's rise within organized crime -- his arms dealing, infiltration of Bollywood and relationship with a movie star, his confrontations with his Muslim rival and associaton with a crafty guru bent on an apocalyptic calling -- all serve a larger purpose.

In addition to his bunker-mate’s feasible connection to “rabid extremists promising annihilation,” such undertakings also leave a trail that points to Gaitonde’s knowing, or unwitting, involvement with terrorist activity and big-scale bombing plans.

As Sartaj is pulled further into Indian Intelligence investigations of a portending disaster “that didn‘t announce itself and act in predictable ways,” so is the reader. Not only to the sequence of events and low-boil suspense -- Sacred Games is too expansive to be an all-nighter page-turning potboiler -- but also to the emotional and psychological toll taken on Sartaj as life, love, and career increasingly converge with a dead don’s plans that too slowly emerge at a rate outpaced by the race-against-time dread and apprehension.

“In this Gaitonde affair,” Chandra writes, “there would be no justice, no redemption. There was only a hope for some partial explanation of what had happened, and this creeping fear. Sartaj was afraid now, he truly was.”

And really, the attempts at solution and accounts of free-floating trepidation barely scratches the surface of a full-bodied and multifaceted story. With 900-pages (in need of some discerning editing), Sacred Games is a story with a lot of breathing room for the capaciousness of well-considered and deliberated delineations and subtleties, replete with uncertainty and doubt, happenstance and hope. Such breadth and depth allows Chandra to link the novel to a wide array of societal issues and philosophic observations, including the inextricable relationships to caste and religion, poverty, and the entrenched criminal element.

It’s also a true-to-life complexity reflecting, as Chandra declares in an interview, the author’s emphasis on “the grey areas between ‘good’ and ‘bad’” and his interest in “the incidentals, in the texture and mood that is revealed when somebody is narrating his or her own life as they see it. Often the lies they tell us are as revealing as the truths they are willing to reveal to you.”

In regards to characterization, Chandra also perceives the intriguing and often paradoxical Sartaj Singh, the detective who first made an appearance in one of Love and Longing’s stories, in such an extensively dimensional fashion, as a vehicle for further exploration and insight. “He’s cynical and reflective and yet hopeful,” the author says, “And a policeman is an interesting protagonist; he allows you to move across a culture sideways and vertically.”

Such novelistic latitude and attention to detail is not only employed to flesh out the warts-and-all characterization of Sartaj and the not-all-warts depiction of Gaitonde. While the conscientious care Chandra takes in Sacred Games may be business as usual in the aim to explicate the complexities of the main characters -- the poignancy of the once-dashing Sartaj’s regrets and sense of lost opportunities is effectively conveyed -- it is more unusual for that same craftsmanship to be applied to the many secondary characters. Going beyond any shorthand stereotyping or safe-target caricatures, Chandra presents, for example, an ultimately sympathetic portrayal of an affluent, pampered wife cheating on her husband. And the outward animosity displayed toward Sartaj by the son of his slain partner is unflinching, Sartaj's rumination unsparing.

Not that Chandra -- with the resonance and elegance and, at times, economy of his writing -- needs to belabor or expend too many words to put across the full vulnerability and humanity of his characters, and the challenges of the lives they lead. At one point, Sartaj thinks about “how uncanny an animal this life was, that you had to seize it and let go of it at the same time, that you had to enjoy it but also plan, live every minute and die every moment.”

Actions may speak louder from time to time, but Chandra’s words cut to the heart of many matters as they, too, “get things right.”

2006-12-16T03:39:00.000-08:00

Vinyl Tap: Mott The Hoople - Brain Capers

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #32:

Bowie!? We don’t need no stinkin’ Bowie!

It’s an affirmation of sorts that -- with such classics as Mott and The Hoople -- was certainly evident in the post-All The Young Dudes era of Mott the Hoople’s career after the invaluable David Bowie-orchestrated commercial resuscitation got them back on the radio and record store radar.

But in 1971, a year before Dudes, the group realized the zenith of their early period with the rough-edged and raucous Brain Capers. With no trace of sonic flat-lining anywhere amid the jolting spittle and spirit, the wailing snarl of Ian Hunter’s vocals contends with -- and tries not to get drowned out by -- the front-and-center instrumentation comprised in a big boost of energized Blonde on Blonde-style organ and Mick Ralphs’ propulsive and bristling guitar.

As the madcap chaos and ferociousness of the lead-off “Death May Be Your Santa Claus” promises, if not threatens, the resultant nothing-to-lose push-and-shove sounds like each Mott-top was “Really mad at this outrage” as they advance an unsettling and all-embracing outlook “From the good to the bad to the ugly change.” And it's not a question of if - but when: after all, “How long, how long ‘fore you realize that all’s strange?”

Not that life has to be without healing and solace, as Mott The Hoople takes a detour with seemingly surprising covers of Dion’s “Your Own Backyard” and the Youngbloods’ “Darkness, Darkness,” with the plea to “Fill the emptiness of right now.”

Which Hunter & Company themselves proceed to do -- and then some -- when they get especially back on track with a couple of Full Motty, and foreshadowing, tracks. The nine-minute keyboard-driven “The Journey” prefigures, structurally and thematically, such anthemic grand statements as “Ballad of Mott The Hoople (26th March 1972, Zürich),” and “Ships,” from Hunter’s stellar solo work from 1979, You're Never Alone With a Schizophrenic.

On a more celebratory note, the manic and swaggering “Sweet Angeline” recalls Mott’s “All The Way From Memphis” as much as it does Dylan. But lyrically, it's capable of belying such joyousness; when Hunter entreats, "Oh rescue me or bury me, for I care not what you do / There is just one thing that I want to say, am I really you?" - it evokes one of Hunter’s most poignant songs (also from Mott), the gorgeous and melancholic “I Wish I Was Your Mother.”

Much more ominously, the penultimate “The Moon Upstairs,” suggesting Chuck Berry as channeled by Deep Purple, relates some unhinged episodes of insanity when “I hated them and they hated me and I hated everything," so “they let my body go / But they locked away my brain”:

But let the two-minute toss-off that closes the album, “Wheel of the Quivering Meat Conception,” be Brain Caper’s epitaph as it succinctly, if in slapdash fashion, sums up the preceding listening experience, whether expressly or in sense:

2006-12-14T01:24:00.000-08:00

Vinyl Tap: Paul and Linda McCartney - Ram

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #31:

The wondrous new Beatles-inspired and inspirited Love album, by virtue of George Martin’s production, escapes most charges of a "Hooked-on-the-Beatles-Classics" medley misstep (although I think “While My Orchestra Gently Weeps” would lend itself better to, oh say, a guitar!). The mash-ups and snippets intermingled with some of the Beatles best, both early and late era, for the most part work to great effect. I can see the resourcefully imaginative Martin relishing the idea of this project, perhaps having, in addition to the doubtless serendipitous impulses that cropped up, some of those resultant musical concurrences in mind for years.

Though the segue-heavy Love may conjure up for some Martin’s studio wizardry on Sgt. Pepper or the sweeping clearinghouse second side of Abbey Road, I can’t help but also make kaleidoscopic comparisons, though of a lesser sonic sheen, with Paul McCartney’s second solo album, Ram. The 1971 release is ear candy all the way, sometimes silly love songs for certain as McCartney enjoys the rewards of a happy family life on that Scottish sheep farm deep in the “Heart of the Country” (“Want a horse, I want a sheep / I wanna get me a good night's sleep” -- and with a bouncy confection like this, who would begrudge him that one-time contentment?).

But even though there are no profound lyrical statements being made on Ram, the sheer fun emanating from the grooves is infectious, whether it be found in the tuneful two-minute snippets (“Ram On,” “Dear Boy”) that wouldn’t have been out of place on the ramshackle first solo LP, or discovered amid the mini-suite pop gems such as the hit "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey.” The more full-bodied and produced rockers, furthermore -- such as “Smile Away” and “Monkberry Moon Delight” -- finds McCartney giving his myriad vocal intonations a helter-skelter work-out.

It is Ram’s exhilarating first and last songs -- “Too Many People” and “Back Seat of my Car” -- that bookend this classy and classic album and most imbue it with the many-moods and extra textures that pre-figure the accessible experimentalism of Love. “People” alternates a punchy pop-rock attack, guitar’s a-blazing, with a wistfully eerie rumination as the lyrics parallel the musical dynamics with a thematic shift from modern-day exasperation to one of romanticism and resignation:

The “She‘s Leaving Home"-style morality tale of “Back Seat” skimps on lyrical substance, but more than makes up for that lack with a more wide-ranging musical adventurousness that wraps up its moments of poignancy in a build-up of orchestral grandeur. Still, it doesn’t lapse into the sappy excess that McCartney fell into down the road with such songs as “My Love” - just as Ram overall retains the kind of singular vision and Beatles-esque inventiveness that later abates from time to time when McCartney tries on some ill-fitting trends such as disco and takes a departure or two in reggae and synth-heavy new wave.

McCartney’s trademark and seemingly effortless pop-rock majesty, as exhibited in abundance on Ram, is his saving grace, however - even in the nooks and crannies of his songs’ hooks and canny resonance and warmth. Show me someone who decries, say, “Silly Love Songs,” and I’ll show you someone who most likely turns up the volume full blast when the song comes on the radio - if only to hear that amazing and melodic bass line.

And "what's wrong with that, I'd like to know?" Smile away, indeed.

2006-12-14T01:20:00.000-08:00

The Early Word: New Art and Photography Books (in Song)

Got to hurry on back to my hotel room,
Where I've got me a date with Botticelli's niece.
She promised that she'd be right there with me
When I paint my masterpiece.

My writing about some of the more notable and quirky art and photography books out there this holiday season will never be misconstrued as a masterpiece, but Bob Dylan’s music-meld of art and commerce wherein he’s “Sailin' 'round the world in a dirty gondola / Oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!” got me to thinking of appropriate songs for some of the books I stumbled upon. Well, that, and plus the fact that I had the headphones on and a whole lot of CDs and LPs within inspiration’s reach.

Monkey Portraits by Jill Greenberg, Paul Weitz

Feeling a bit anthropomorphic lately? You would’ve thought Chuck Berry said it all:

Blond haired, good lookin' - tryin' to get me hooked.
Want me to marry - settle down - get a home - write a book!
Too much monkey business. Too much monkey business.
Too much monkey business for me to be involved in!

But with 76 emotion-ranging photos, Jill Greenberg displays some surprising images of monkeys and apes, many of whom have appeared on film or in television shows. Maybe she found them more disciplined than the Hollywood celebrities she used to photograph for major publications.

My Secret: A PostSecret Book by Frank Warren

As the Beatles once implored:

Listen,
Do you want to know a secret?
Do you promise not to tell, whoa oh, oh.

Closer,
Let me whisper in your ear…

Or just mail them to Warren for this follow-up to the bestseller, PostSecret, his 2005 exercise in community art in which strangers mailed him anonymous postcards with their innermost secrets. This time around Warren has personally selected never-before-seen anonymous postcards created by teens and college students from across America with such hilarious and off-the-wall messages as:

"My friends think I was homeschooled. I spent high school in juvi."
"I am avoiding you because you are socially below me."
"I know the truth to the lie my parents tell... "

A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005 by Annie Leibovitz

The Kinks once sang:

People take pictures of the Summer,
Just in case someone thought they had missed it,
Just to proved that it really existed.
People take pictures of each other,
And the moment to last them for ever,
Of the time when they mattered to someone

Many photographers have taken pictures of the celebrities and scenes documented by Leibowitz in her career with Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and Vogue. With shots of such famed figures as Johnny Cash, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Keith Richards, Michael Jordan, Joan Didion, R2-D2, Patti Smith, Nelson Mandela, Jack Nicholson, William Burroughs, and George W. Bush; and scenes from the siege of Sarajevo in the early '90s, and distinctive landscapes and ad campaigns -- many collected in this volume -- Leibowitz brings her own style to “the moment to last… forever.”

The Private Lives of the Impressionists by Sue Roe

Ray Davies also sang as an “Art Lover”:

Pretty little legs, I want to draw them,
Like a Degas ballerina.
Pure white skin, like porcelain,
She’s a work of art and I should know
I’m an art lover.

Manet, Pissarro, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, Sisley, Morisot, and Cassatt. Private Lives constitutes a rich illustration of these revolutionary artists known for their atmospheric landscapes and candid depictions of everyday life - paintings as much valued now as they were disdained then. For a full portrait, Roe provides more biographical breadth and depth than you get in most art books.

Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life by Linda H. Davis

Sure he’s “Mysterious and spooky, all together ooky” - he was, after all, fascinated by "the aberrations of life." But is he “Neat. Sweet. Petite?” Find out as we “ get a witch's shawl on / A broomstick you can crawl on" to pay a call on the darkly-humored New Yorker cartoonist in this scintillating biography which includes previously unpublished artwork, photographs, and personal drawings.

Shelter Dogs by Traer Scott

Tom Waits sings of their canine cousins:

Inside a broken clock
Splashing the wine
With all the Rain Dogs
Taxi, we'd rather walk.
Huddle a doorway with the Rain Dogs
For I am a Rain Dog, too.

In photographer Traer Scott’s empathic and poignant portraits of fifty beautiful shelter dogs -- some of whom eventually found good homes, others not so lucky -- Scott raises awareness of animal rescue causes, and especially the need for more adoptive homes for abandoned dogs.

Other intriguing finds:

Postcards from Mars: The First Photographer on the Red Planet by Jim Bell

The Rejection Collection: Cartoons You Never Saw, and Never Will See, in The New Yorker

Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, and Health-Inspected Cartoons, 1978-2006 by Roz Chast

The Architecture of Happiness by Alain De Botton

An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories by Ivan Brunetti (Editor)

Life: The Platinum Anniversary Collection: 70 Years of Extraordinary Photography

Presidential Doodles: Two Centuries of Scribbles, Scratches, Squiggles & Scrawls from the Oval Office by Cabinet Magazine, David Greenberg

Ocean by Robert Dinwiddie, Louise Thomas, Fabien Cousteau (Foreword)

Deadwood: Stories of the Black Hills by David Milch

The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles by Martin Gayford

Robert Polidori: After the Flood by Robert Polidori, Jeff L. Rosenheim (Introduction)

Lincoln's Assassins: Their Trial and Execution by James L. Swanson, Daniel Weinberg

Shoes: A History From Sandals to Sneakers by Giorgio Riello (Editor), Peter McNeil (Editor)

Museum of the Missing: A History of Art Theft by Simon Houpt, Julian Radcliffe (Foreword)

Born to Run: The Unseen Photos by Bruce Springsteen, Daniel Wolff (Introduction), Eric Meola (Photographer)

The Radio City Rockettes: A Dance Through Time by James Porto

The Anime Encyclopedia, Revised & Expanded Edition: A Guide to Japanese Animation Since 1917 by Jonathan Clements, Helen McCarthy

Factory Records: The Complete Graphic Album by Matthew Robertson

Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock (A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts) by Kirk Varnedoe, Earl A. Powell III (Foreword), Adam Gopnik (Preface)

2006-12-14T01:17:00.000-08:00

BOOK REVIEW: With Amusement For All - A History Of Popular Culture Since 1830 by LeRoy Ashby

It’s Dumbo, on the home front, and to the rescue…

The attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and Germany’s declaration of war a few days later may have understandably knocked the endearing elephant star, Walt Disney’s newest cartoon creation, off the front cover of Time magazine, but that wouldn’t last long. As detailed in the voluminous critical compendium of all things Pop Cultural, With Amusement for All: A History Of American Culture Since 1830, Americans, as focused as they were on the unfolding events of World War II, ultimately didn’t make a insurmountable distinction between entertainment and reality.

And neither did Time, who sensed a collective clamoring not for all-out escapism as much as for enlistment of all forces in times of trouble. And so the weekly featured in their December 29 issue a well-received article on the enormous-eared cartoon character, gauging the underdog-turned-hero star of Dumbo -- in an aptly recognizable and paralleled plight against injustice and attack -- as “the most appealing new character of this year of war.” Indeed, “Among all the grim and forbidding images of A.D. 1941,” Time speculated, “Dumbo’s “guileless, homeless face is the face of the true man of good will.”

As author LeRoy Ashby notes in this pertinent chapter on “Building a Wartime Consensus in the 1940s and 1950s,” the entertainment industry bolstered throughout World War II and into the Cold War a “victory mystique” that provided temporary respite in a bleak world, and “profoundly influenced Americans’ perceptions of themselves and their country.”

In this regard, it is much too simplistic to assert the purely diversionary aspect of popular culture, and Ashby doesn’t acquiesce to the easy temptation to provide a mere trivial pursuit and or produce a piling-on of hit-and-run factoids as he chronicles -- with analysis that couches his topics in incisive sociological and historical terms -- the advancement of such fixations and affairs as radio, comic books, movies, music, and sports.

You’ll find elsewhere in this engrossing and ambitious 600-plus page book (with copious notes and bibliography), the oft-mentioned fact that movie-going during the Great Depression increased - period, end of story. But it wasn’t so much that poor folk found a fantasyland refuge in watching carefree cosmopolitan dandies like Fred Astaire trip the light luxurious in top hat ‘n’ tails, or in a Busby Berkeley extravaganza-for-the-sake-of extravagance -- though there is that escapist aspect. Ashby digs deeper in mining other explantions - the economic factors at play, say, that led to real life gangsterism and crime movies which “tapped into a growing vein of public anger and disillusionment.” Or the moral climate among the public and producers that led to sensationalism in the “sin-ema,“ before the censorship clamp-down constituted in the Production Code and the Hays office.

Similarly and more recently, in the chapter “Popular Culture and 1960s Ferment,” Ashby’s systematic exploration of the Beatles’ overwhelming popularity goes beyond the standard right-time right-place reasoning which posits that, in coming along in the wake of President Kennedy’s assassination and national mourning, the group struck a much-needed chord. True, the author agrees, “Timing was important in the Beatles’ explosive impact in the United States,” but in addition to the bracing music and refreshing personalities that complemented such welcome optimism and energy, the fab foursome's emergence also coincided, we are reminded, with the post-war baby boomers coming of age in the mid- ’60s.

Moreover, Beatles manager Brian Epstein was certainly instrumental, carefully orchestrating the Beatles arrival in America with various promotional pushes that had gotten “the American media to turn the Beatles’ U.S. arrival into a major event.” Great first impression, and the rest is history - and not just pop cultural, considering the Beatles as an ongoing galvanizing catalyst for many social, political and artistic changes.

But these seemingly disparate forces are inextricably linked. As Ashy contends, pop culture cannot be considered strictly and discretely in isolation from these other considerations. The celebrity of the Beatles, for example, may have started out with a considerably commercial side to it, but that is what, in part, defines pop culture. “What separates it,” Ashby notes, “from noncommercial neighborhood and family games, for instance, is that its creators and/or disseminators seek to profit from it; they are in the business of merchandising entertainment.”

This has been the case in the United States at least since the mid-19th century when the 1830s saw the burgeoning of blackface minstrel acts and the rise of P.T. Barnum’s circus. But popular culture has been and continues to be malleable and resilient as such impulses as new technologies, economic and political conditions, changing values and demographics alters the business and its products.

This impetus transforms the enterprise in unpredictable ways, too, as popular culture both reflects and shapes the larger
society, as Ashy points out:

It can refract as well as mirror, breaking the larger society into a wide range of images and meanings. It can follow well-worn paths and set new directions. American entertainment has never comprised a neatly homogenized set of diversions. Instead, it is full of contradictions and speaks in many voices, some louder and more influential than others. Its messages can be liberating and confining, reassuring and unsettling.

For a good taste of this complex subject’s multifarious nature and potentially visceral impact, you need go no further than the pop culture fever dream that is With Amusement’s index, consisting of 35 pages of wide-ranging subjects from Hank Aaron to Adolph Zukor. It's all here -- sports, movies, music, television, comics, pulp fiction -- and everything in between, subjectively favorable or not.

Ashby, with With Amusement For All, has written an invaluable interpretive history and comprehensive reference tool, good for methodical types to immerse themselves in page by page, cover to cover - or for the more restless to flip through or plunge in purposefully or randomly. Either way, you’re going to get an education and some history, and a lot of opinion and perspective.

2006-12-14T01:15:00.000-08:00

Liner Notables #9: Dave Alvin - West of the West

Not an old album this time. I dragged myself kicking and screaming into the CD age for a spell to share some new-fangled liner notes from a favorite recent release. Liner Notable #9:

“While California doesn’t quite have the deep indigenous folk music traditions of Mississippi, Texas, or Georgia, it does boast a rich history of jazz, blues, R&B, country, surf, and early rock and roll. California has also produced more than its share of damned good songwriters.”

Paying tribute and playing interpretive craftsman to the hilt, California native Dave Alvin’s West of the West is a beautifully realized collection of songs -- with liner notes more than up to a systematic task -- from California-born or raised artists who’ve "at least had their first kiss or broken heart here.” But Alvin brings an American roots element to many of the songs, not only bringing in an amalgam of that “rich history,” but altering some songs beyond recognition; I didn’t quite recognize Jackson Browne’s “Redneck Friend” until about halfway through the bluesy revision.

Which kind of tells you that this year's West of the West, with its infusion of blues, folk, R&B and country, is not your quintessential coastal car-cruise music, SoCal style. No, this has more of an inland intrigue, perfect musical accompaniment for driving through the Central Valley or along the Eastern Sierras to Bishop and beyond. Yes, Brian Wilson’s “Surfer Girl” is represented here -- in an exquisite gospel-tinged cover -- but so are songs by John Stewart (San Diego), Tom Waits (Pomona), Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo and Louis Perez (Los Angeles), and the Bay Area’s Robert Hunter and John Fogerty, among others not so expressly linked to an overarching fun-in-the-sun Golden State sensation. And how about Bakersfield's Merle Haggard and under-the-radar Fresno folkie Jim Ringer? Reason enough to pop in West in the CD player as you're driving through the farm communities and oil towns of Highway 99.

With such an array of talent and artistry, Alvin admits to an initial difficulty in “Considering who to choose for the CD, from the famous and obscure deserving songwriters.” As a prime example of modern-day liner note writing, wherein the artist -- not the promo copywriter -- is free to introduce and expand upon how they decided what they decided, West's commentary alludes to Alvin's painstaking and fascinating methodology to such free-rein musical madness, while at the same time touching upon his vast knowledge of musical Californiana and arcana.

The choice of "California Bloodlines," the first song on West, was no-brainer, though: "One afternoon in 1969, my mother and I were eating lunch at the kitchen table and watching a local L.A. daytime talk show on our black and white TV,” Alvin begins. “The host introduced a young singer/songwriter named John Stewart…” Alvin, in his "infinite 13-year old wisdom," fakes indifference to the Monkees' Stewart-penned “Daydream Believer,” but he really takes notice in a couple other songs:

But then he did 'July, you're a Woman' and he sang the line, 'I have not been known as the Saint of San Joaquin.' My mother smiled and said, 'He's singing about where I'm from, the San Joaquin Valley. Then I paid closer attention. The TV host asked Stewart questions about songwriting, his time in The Kingston Trio and about growing up in California. I don't remember his answers but when he sang 'California Bloodlines' at the end of the show, I do remember my mother telling me, 'That's what you have, just like him, you've got California bloodlines.' Maybe that was when the idea for this CD first entered my mind."

Most of the other selections were filtered from a lifetime of diverse musical saturation and the encyclopedic knowledge garnered throughout his career with the roots and rockabilly-centered Blasters, a brief stint with punk upstarts X and Alvin's solo work. Indeed, the writers he’d been drawn to have “helped me define myself as a songwriter and as a Californian. I first heard their songs on jukeboxes and Top 40 AM Radio when I was a kid and on folk and underground radio as a teenager while others I heard sung live in smoky bars as an adult.”

The net result for the recording of West is compilation of songs by writers "shaped by California’s mix of cultures, beliefs, and attitudes, as well as by the oaks and redwoods, the cities and farmlands, the highways and barrooms, the ocean, mountains and deserts and the eternal hopes and disappointments of growing up in a mythical promised land.”

But it doesn’t stop there. One of the benefits of modern-day liner notes is that, in an effort to fully communicate from the heart as well as with cold hard facts, they so often come in the form of personal ruminations from the artist. Alvin writes with passion and inspiration about the road taken to get him to the recording of West of the West, but he also acknowledges the evolved and ever-developing nature of society and, by extension, music.

“The landscape,” Alvin notes, “that shaped these songwriters have vanished or changed drastically.” But whatever the outcome in forms or genres, he is optimistic about the range of possibilities that stem from such variegated potential:

Right now, whether on a guitar or with a computer, on a cattle ranch near Alturus or in a garage in Orange County, in a shack in the Mendocino woods or a one room Hollywood apartment, or sitting somewhere at a kitchen table, somebody is writing the next generation of songs with California bloodlines.And so that "California heartbeat in my soul" John Steward wrote about keeps beating on...

2006-12-12T23:20:00.000-08:00

2006-12-12T23:12:00.000-08:00

The Early Word: New Non-Fiction Books (an O.J.-Free Zone)

How many shopping days 'til Christmas? Don't know. You do the math. All I'm here for is to feature, in this installment of The Early Word, some non-fiction titles for your perusal and amusement.

BIOGRAPHY

Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler. Gabler takes full advantage as the first writer to have gained access to Disney’s archives to write with great biographical breadth and depth. From Disney’s bleak upbringing to the development of a rich imagination that led to unimaginable success in film, television, theme parks, music, book publishing, and merchandising, this richly detailed 880-page tome has it all. Including some of the names originally considered for the dwarfs in Snow White: Deafy, Dirty, Awful, Blabby, Burpy, Gabby, Puffy, Stuffy, Nifty, Tubby, Biggo Ego, Flabby, Jaunty, Baldy, Lazy, Dizzy, Cranky, and Chesty.

Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw. Forget Disney. Do I even have to tell you how richly detailed this book is?

Things I Didn't Know: A Memoir by Robert Hughes, esteemed art critic, biographer, historian, polemicist, television commentator, and now memoirist.

Mandela: The Authorized Portrait. A sumptuously illustrated and comprehensive tribute to the South African statesman’s life and work.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir by Bill Bryson. A memoir and follow-up to the humorist’s A Short History of Nearly Everything.

Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell by Karen DeYoung. Soldier, and especially in this comprehensive look, much more.

HISTORY

The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson. The subtitle clues you in, but even knowing that this book is The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How it Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, doesn’t do it justice. The author of Everything You Know Is Wrong has provided not only a compelling step-by-step historical account of the worst cholera outbreak in 19th-century London, he traces the pathways to solutions that revolutionized the way we think about disease, cities, and science. Ultimately, the work of foresighted health pioneers who mapped out the disease's spread resulted in efficient public waste disposal systems, and disease control measures that saved millions worldwide.

Lincoln's Assassins: Their Trial and Execution by James L. Swanson and Daniel Weinberg. Praised as the definitive illustrated history of Abraham Lincoln's assassination, this unique work contains over 300 documents, portraits, memorabilia and arcana.

The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism by Paul Kengor. Here’s the rest of him. Especially in the 40th President’s role as a Cold War victor.

Dangerous Nation by Robert Kagan. Far from any notion of the United States as an historically isolationist power, the Washington Post columnist and bestselling author (Of Paradise and Power) argues that a policy of aggressive expansion was always the aim and has been inextricably linked with liberal democracy.

OTHER NON-FICTION TITLES

On Truth by Harry G. Frankfurt. In an extended essay, the author of On Bullshit offers a sequel. "A society,” Frankfurt says, “that is recklessly and persistently remiss in [supporting and encouraging truth] is bound to decline." No bullshit.

Home: The Blueprints of Our Lives by John Edwards. Apparently the former senator had some time on his hands, so he compiled this coffee-table book about home and its comforts. Hey, ex-Prez Jimmy Carter knows something about building homes! But, for what it's worth, he decided instead to put in his two cents with Palestine Peace Not Apartheid.

Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century by Alex Steffen. Apparently there’s hope for the planet, according to this feel-good resource. But don’t wait until the last minute of Christmas Eve - there’s lots of assembly required, and probably some missing parts.

Next up in The Early Word - New Books of Note: Gift Books, perhaps. Haven't thought that far ahead.

2006-12-12T23:08:00.000-08:00

Vinyl Tap: Sam Phillips - The Indescribable Wow; Cruel Inventions; Martinis and Bikinis

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #30:

No, not the Sun Records one. But the Sam Phillips we’re talking about is outwardly sunny on her 1988 record, The Indescribable Wow. This unabashed pop masterwork, Phillips’ first secular release after a time as a Christian rock artist under the name Leslie Phillips, does indeed wow 'em musically with ‘60s girl-group and folk-rock appeal merged with ear-candy melodies and harmonies.

Lyrically, incisively-expressed poignancy and self-doubt, usually centering on love gone wrong or relationships gone on too long, emerges amid the smart popcraft. “When faith went blind she found the truth/but lost her nerve,” Phillips declares in “She Can’t Tell Time.” And whatever abstract philosophic corner she paints herself into, Phillips walks on eggshells with more delicate fragility each time she makes her way back to a human touch, to that irrational pull to the “The Flame” with which she bobs -- “Why do I dance so close to you?” -- and weaves: “When fires rise the shadows fall/Over the edges where we crawl…”
Indeed, Phillips doesn’t merely want to fall in love with the idea of love, or just "be in love with love" (“I Don’t Want to Fall In Love”), but she does realize the real thing is a shaky proposition, and if attained, prone to a delusion or two poking through the threadbare grandeur.

In marked and darker contrast, Cruel Inventions' striking but often disturbing imagery comprises no proportionate twenty-foot-tall answers. Though also, like Wow, produced by Phillips' husband T-Bone Burnett (and aided here and there by such luminaries as Elvis Costello and Van Dyke Parks), this 1991 release not only offers less salvation and solace throughout its sonic gravitas, instrumental sparseness, and Phillips’ de-Laupered lower and sultry vocal register, it kicks up the vulnerability and trepidation a few notches, sweeping up some psychological and societal ills along with the interpersonal ones.
Even the moody infectiousness that wouldn’t be out of place on Wow bites back. The hooky-as-hell title song talks of dying dreams and bleak prospects in “a world of elevators with music like magazines" where the beat generation all departed on the morning train and "left me at the station/Breathing dust from hopeless rain." In the hypnotic and otherwise lovely “Standing Still,” the dance floor becomes a place for “thinking I‘m standing still” and where “I want them to think I’m dead.” And the humor and wordplay in “Now I Can’t Find The Door” -- recalling a Chrissie Hynde-like bittersweet where's-my-sandy-beach timbre -- becomes free-floating apprehension with the recollection that “Love is what I leave for.”
These are not the same tuneful Phillips ditties you hear now and then as incidental music throughout The Gilmore Girls. Furthermore, the cryptically elliptic noir of “black Niagara of control spilling down to culture mock” extends throughout Inventions even to some shadowy high-contrast cinematic sleeve photos (Phillips’ Garbo-mannered femme-fatalistic looks even landed her a Die Hard role).

Inventions' thematic irrationality, imbalance, emotional paralysis, and cosmic discombobulating in “tripping over gravity” abound in a hopeless state: the sweetness and light of the title song is belied by the exercise in futility that we can “Un-invent the wheel of endless greed.” Moreover, in the propulsive “Raised on Promises,” there’s little refuge to be had in retreats “to the furnace for shade to the dust for a drink / Logic’s mad and shame doesn’t care what you think… It’s only a phantom that you fathom.”
In the gorgeously eerie “Private Storm,” the mercurial artist warns that whatever plot of land you stake out is little more than shifting sand and dirt, sure to disturb whatever metaphoric mental breadcrumbs are painstakingly left behind:

A reassuring new dawn and an anticipatory glimmer does emerge, however, in the last lines of Inventions' last song, “Where the Colors Don’t Go,” in which Phillips ultimately discloses “I want your eyes to color my world/And see your endless longing.” Buoyed by Van Dyke Parks' orchestral arrangement, the forthright punch-up and fade-out suggests “Penny Lane” and foreshadows the Beatle-sonic nip-and-tuck of Phillips’ next album, Martinis and Bikinis.
A splendid time seems to be guaranteed for all: “Come and join the dream that never ends,“ the 1994 album cordially invites; “God will grant us all our wishes/Martinis and Bikinis for our friends.” On top of the Fab Four flourishes, the shaken-up and stirring Martinis also comes with a distinctive dose of solo Lennon thrown in for good measures, some song structure, intonation, and upfront blisters-on-me-fingers guitar. And though it doesn’t come to a full boil, a simmering, seething primal-reverb cover of “Gimme Some Truth” is as effectively pointed as the original.

T-Bone Burnett again produces, as Van Dyke Parks gets a little more work here with aural auras of George Martin’s knob-twirling wizardry groove-by-groove with chunky-style White Album wallops. Though this is truly an overarching Phillips effort, especially in lyrical content and melodic surety, the musical nuances and intimations may evoke what a true songwriting collaboration might have sounded like from Lennon, McCartney and Harrison together. Or give you ideas of what, say, “She’s A Woman” might have sounded like if written for Revolver.
“I got myself so tightly wound I couldn’t breathe/I could feel the fire burning underneath,” Phillips avers in “Signposts,” and you might think she is referring to a little too much self-absorption in The Indescribable Wow and the edgy restlessness in Cruel Inventions. Inspired by the realization that “I need love, not some sentimental prison/I need God, not the political church” (the lilting Harrison-tinged “I Need Love”), and by such ruminations as “The Same Rain” falling on “the holy man…the liar’s hand…and me,” Phillips comprises Martinis as indeed a logical extension of wanting and needing to give in to that rudderless wanderlust, that inclination to get outside yourself and explore other psychological and philosophic worlds, other societal and environmental perspectives. As she says in "Signposts," "I wanted to get lost and love the questions there/Beauty and the truth I could breathe like air/Then I finally found the signposts in a strange land.”
From the signposts for personal accusations -- “You try to tell the world how it should spin/But you live in terror with the hollow men” (“Baby I Can’t Please You”) -- to the portentous “Black Sky’s” indictment of “diggers, drillers, and sellers” stealing away the future, Martinis' all-embracing concerns may not constitute all the right approaches, but it does mark a self-assurance and confidence in Phillips that was lacking one or two albums previous. Consider the assertions made in the exquisite McCartney-esque “Strawberry Road”:

The singer who was once too busy trying to hold on to the earth and who stated “Love is what I leave for” is starting down that road “Where our hearts break into love.” Now that's an indescribable wow. Martinis and Bikinis all around!

2006-11-25T07:06:00.000-08:00

The Early Word: Calendars - Far Side is Back! Stitch 'n' Bitch, Retro Lemony, Ying-Yang, Miro Miro, Bice Bice Bo Bice, Speed! Lust! Madness! Hey Lady!

This installment of The Early Bird - New Books of Notes becomes New Calendars of Consideration as we catch up with the 2007 items that will let you know when you've been where you've been and will need to be. But be advised: the most popular of these sell out before Christmas. You can be sure that the revived-for-now Far Side calendar will be sold out long before then. And if you hurry, you still may be able to get, in a most, most unfortunate event, a two-year-old Lemony Snicket calendar.

In any case, here's some wall calendars, page-a-day desk calendars, engagement books, and diaries that caught my eye:

Art and Photography

Salvador Dali Engagement Calendar. Because you can’t always rely on the persistence of your memory.

Edward Hopper Diary. Dear Diary: Gosh, forget that darned old malt shop - I met the most interesting people down at the diner tonight!!

Retro Modern Wall Calendar. Ah, Ye Olde Retro Calendar is not just horse and buggy thinking anymore. Oh, wait - it’s the 1960s we’re talking about, not the 1860s…

Monet Wall Calendar. Monet. It’s what you want.

French Impressionism Wall Calendar. I know this one French impressionist who does an impeccable Jerry Lewis.

Miro Wall Calendar. Miro, Miro on the wall, who's surrealist one of all?

Metropolitan Opera Wall Calendar. Kill the wabbit! And no, it does not contain a centerfold of the Fat Lady.

Celebrities and Icons

Beatles Wall Calendar. That should be ‘nuff said.

But I know, I know - this is yet another Beatles calendar. And I realize this is totally subjective, but nobody needs yet another calendar of Elvis Presley or Madonna (one of whom died on my birthday, the other sharing my birthday -- I’ll leave you to sort out who is who). Speaking of repeats: I don’t Love Lucy, and even more so, Coldplay leaves me cold, but you should know there are still tried-and-true calendars out there, and upstarts untried and trying to be true.

I will, however, broach the subject of American Idol contestant and now calendar boy Bo Bice only because I can’t think of him without thinking of the old Shirley Ellis hit, "The Name Game": "Bice, Bice, Bo Bice / Banana fanna fo fice / Me my mo mice / Bo Bice…" (Forgive me if this is a well-worn gag - I never really watch AI beyond the early stages of the tuneless clueless.)

Children

Yin Yang Cat 2007 Wall Calendar. With Japanese-inspired art and hints of Manga and Anime, this calendar promises to pass along such qualities as love, appreciation, patience, determination, and faith.

Which you may need if you attempt to purchase, for the less discriminating child, say, Lemony Snicket's 2005 -- yes, 2005 -- Calendar of Unfortunate Events: Thirteen Alarming Months! (A Series of Unfortunate Events) currently being featured by Amazon.

I don't really know what's going on here, but I thought the idea of offering a two-year outdated calendar pertaining to Unfortunate Events was an apropos joke -- a very funny one to my barely grown-up mind -- but come on Amazon! Our children are the future (so I've heard again and again and again), and even hinting of putting them two years behind themselves, so to speak, seems most alarming and unfortunate, indeed. And they probably haven't learned what caveat emptor means, yet.

Dogs (As a member of the He-Man Cat-Haters Club, I won’t be featuring anything but Canine Calendars.)

Bad Dog Wall Calendar. If they’ve been really bad, this is also great for rolling up and chasing.

For the Love of Golden Retrievers Deluxe Wall Calendar. I’m not sure what makes it so “Deluxe” -- maybe because it started in April 2006, much longer than most 15- or 16-month Calendars. You might want to ask your Golden Retriever -- they’re pretty smart about these things, or you could at least send him or her out to retrieve the information.

William Wegman Puppies Wall Calendar. "Mom, this calendar followed me home - can I keep it?" Okay, lame joke. But are you going to tell me you can resist this calendar? These are puppies, puppies! What kind of monster are you?

Humor

The Far Side Gallery 2007 Off The Wall Page-a-Day Calendar. Our long national nightmare is over. The Far Side Calendar, after a five-year absence, is back. Sort of. An "encore edition" of Gary Larson’s best seller has been released, featuring the same cartoons as The Far Side Gallery 2001 Off-The-Wall Calendar, which collected the most popular comic panels in the strips memorable run. Still, whether new to you or familiar, this is hands-down the only humor calendar you will need for 2007 -- no Far Side wannabe calendar or comic strip has even come close since Larson retired over a decade ago.

Furthermore -- and in keeping with Larson’s wildlife concerns -- all of his royalties from the sale of this 2007 calendar will go directly to fund Conservation International (CI), a nonprofit organization that works to protect critical habitats worldwide.

Which reminds me, just to digress a bit, I’ll never forget the time I went to see an exhibit of Larson’s cartoon art at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum in the late ‘80s (Far Side has always been popular with natural scientists). As the many patrons of the comic strip arts snaked through from framed enlargements to framed enlargements, I of course had never heard such hearty laugh-out-loud responses from museum-goers. Not a shhh! or stuffy moment to be had.

Sports

NASCAR Facts - Box Calendar. Speed! Lust! Madness! A Hot Lap in your lap! Or better yet, on your desk.

And for the golfer, Lost Balls Wall Calendar: Great Holes, Tough Shots, and Bad Lies.
No Speed! No Lust! No Madness!

Other mentionables

Monster Movies Wall Calendar. It’s Alive! With lively posters of everything from Dracula to Dr. Jekyll, King Kong to Mothra to Village of the Damned.

Lonely Planet Diary/Day Planner. Lonely, eh? Well, at least you're still a planet. Do you want to end up like Pluto? There's no calendar for Pluto!

Dogs Playing Poker Wall Calendar. Alas, not in velvet. But consider the Psychedelic Posters Wall Calendar. You’ll not only convince yourself it's velvet, if you stare at it long enough you'll see dogs playing poker, too.

Antique Maps Diary. For your antique husband who refuses to ask for directions. Glove compartment-sized to go with the maps he can’t make sense of though he pretends he does.

Stitch 'N Bitch Page-A-Day Calendar: The Knitter's Calendar. Includes a “yarn of the week” and “knit wit” that’ll keep you in stitches. And for the tragically industrious, patterns and new techniques.

Speaking of industriousness, the next Early Word will be out next week. What it will cover, I don't yet know. I said I was industrious, not organized.

2006-11-25T06:16:00.000-08:00

Vinyl Tap: The Dukes Of Stratosphere - 25 O'Clock

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #29:

Tune in, turn on, drop dead; the road to hippie hell is paved with good vibrations. Brown acid and brain damage combine with blissed-out bacchanalian love-ins and cosmic consciousness teeters into full-totter bad karma and choking-on-your-own-vomit bummerdom. Before you know whether it's tomorrow or just the end of time, the Woodstock nation's freak flag is at half-mast and you've helter-skeltered into your own private LSD-is-groovy-kill-the-pigs Altamont.

But with the EP 25 O’Clock -- somewhat anachronistically and curiously released April 1, 1985 -- the sonic ecstasy of the Dukes of Stratosphere ensure that freak-out pop and flower power never flounders. These trippy avatars of the hip ‘n’ happening ever-high did more than mine pure nuggets of British psychedelia -- they mixed in delectable pop reverb and resonance for an aural amalgam evoking everything from the Beatles to Pink Floyd, Barretted and Barrett-less.

The title song even stoops for a salute of psych-out sorts by merging into its Floydian soundscape an American "artyfact" invocation from the Electric Prunes’ “I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night),” setting the latter’s lament that “Comes the dawn / Then you were gone…” against the Dukes' temporally anticipatory hope that “The ticking seconds hear them call / My spell of hours will make you fall.”

While the lyrical and musical shapes of happenings in “My Love Explodes” conjures up the over-under Yardbirds in a sideways-down Antonioni movie, “What In The World” is even more waywardly adventurous. For a for full-on mid-sixties sensibility, the Dukes here add an unmistakable Ray Davies-tinged vocal inflection while also recalling Revolver-era Beatles -- think the “Tomorrow Never Knows” shriek-fest loopiness backwardly and barely masking a melodiously propulsive McCartney-style bass pattern in your ears and, it seems, in your eyes.

"Cannabis in tea / What in the world, acid is free,” indeed.

Speaking of the Kinks, “Your Gold Dress” is really “something else” in going back and forth between its influences instead of fusing them for a seemingly effortless blend. Just when you think you’re in for fuzz-toned eastern mysticism-enwrapped days of future droned, promising “a thousand melting Dali guitars… dripping slowly down,” up pops a poppy harpsichord-backed Kinks-size assurance in a pocket-symphonic surety of “Vibrations coming my way / When you’re floating on by.”

The Lennon-esque last song, “The Mole From The Ministry,” is the total trip in your mind and back in time, Sgt. Pepper- and Magical Mystery-style. This becomes clearer as things get fuzzier with the double-meaning wordplay, the Strawberry Fields-insinuations and druggy references to day-in-the-life “Holes appearing on the lawn,” and Lucy-in-the-allusions of walking flowers and a garden that “starts to rearrange / From perfect lawn to mountain range.”

Beyond the lyrical bent, the “Mole’s” overall musical and sonically psychedelic cast is enhanced by the ending, replete with "Walrus"-ian incantation -- a smokes-pot smokes-pot certainty set in a hear-the-colors see-the-sounds psychical framework.

Otherwise, in this song and a few others, there’s a more modern power-pop quality that creeps in from time to time that I can’t quite pin down except to say I sometimes hear and see the colors and sounds of something else, someone else...

2006-11-24T01:53:00.000-08:00

Liner Notables #8: The Rutles

Why, it seems like only yesterday [cue harp and wavy, out-of-focus visuals] when you could pore over an album's liner notes and not have to squint to garner an embarrassment of riches and a treasure trove of tidbits...

The Clash once sang “Phony Rutle-mania has bitten the dust!” Or something to that effect.

Not so. The only band that doesn't matter may have started out wanting to hold our hands (“yeah yeah!”) and declaring themselves more omniscient and omnipresent than God (thereby giving themselves the power to hold each and every hand in the world at the same time).

But in short order the Prefab Four wrote really important stuff while on acid that no one understood -- unless you played it backwards or happened to be Bob Dylan -- things such as “Bible-Punching heavyweight / Evangelistic boxing Kangaroo / Orang u tang and anaconda / Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse / Even Pluto, too (yeah yeah!).”

And it seems like only yesterday we plopped down in front of the TV for the Ed Sullivan Show to watch that creepy mouse puppet and that plate-spinner guy. Oh yeah... and to see the Rutles perform and get acquainted with them early on in their career. We got to know the cute one, the quiet one, the funny one, and the “sorry girls - he’s homosexual” one.

As the The Rutles' liner notes and interviews look into the glass onion, the commentary in this, um, anthology from 1978 brings back that magic, starting with the group's beginnings at 43 Egg Lane, Liverpool, where Ron Nasty and Dirk McQuickly first bumped into each other: “Ron invited Dirk to help him stand up. Dirk, merely an amateur drinker, agreed and on that spot a legend was created - a legend that will last a lunchtime.” Soon enough they found Stig O’ Hara, “a guitarist of no fixed hairstyle,” but it took a while to discover drummer Barry Wom hiding in their van.

The Silver Rutles, as they were called at the time, learned more musical ropes in Germany, “far from home, and far from talented.” It was also here that they picked up a fifth member, Leppo ("Sorry girls, he's dead"). As the chronicle notes: “For five hungry working class lads there are worse places than prison, and the Rat Keller in Hamburg is one.” But it was here where Dirk, Nasty, Stig, and Barry sharpened up their act and got some silly haircuts that got them booted out of the Reeperbahn and sent back to England.

An interview with Mick Jagger serves to pick up the story from there as the Rolling Stones’ front man notes the first-meeting anxieties:

Mick:

Question:

Mick:

Of course, the Rutles eventually made their way to the United States after finally getting good directions out of Greenland. An interview with Paul Simon gives an American perspective, including his impression of the watershed Sgt. Rutter album:

Paul:

Sgt. Rutter

Question:

Paul:

Later in the interview, Simon, asserting that “it’s probably easier to place them sociologically as a phenomenon than to judge them at this point musically as to where they’ll stand," expands on the overall historical significance of the Rutles:

Paul:

Question:

Paul:

As an added extra, The Rutles LP comes with a booklet of further commentary and photos. And who knows? Maybe that superfluous glut of minutiae will get its own Liner Notables feature.

Then again, might be more trouble than it’s worth. Oh hey, look - lunchtime's over.

2006-11-24T01:49:00.000-08:00

Book Review: Golem Song by Marc Estrin

“…One Saturday night, when he was a differently-abled teenager, Oedipus and his buddies were tooling around in the limo, and they decided to take in an oracle. So up to Delphi and guess what?”

You can most assuredly guess that you will never hear a more hilarious account of Oedipus Rex than you will encounter in Marc Estrin’s trenchantly voltaic third novel, Golem Song. But it may also be the most disconcerting, too, as the main character — with unthinking Freudian relish in the embellishment — tells the story to his mother. On Mother’s Day. With a Snoopy card.

But Alan Krieger is not your standard-issue 35-year old emergency-room nurse with a brilliant, non-stop mind and mighty mouth. For one thing, he still lives with oedipal ma in a sixth-floor New York apartment that, “floor-to-ceilinged” with scholarly tomes, ominously reminds him — and us — of the Texas Book Depository. Often endearing but just as often infuriating, tossing off bonmots and potshots cavalierly quickly, Alan is more than one of those people you either love or hate effortlessly and uncritically. Once more, with intensity: You love to hate him or hate to love him; friends and family seem to enjoy pursuing that extra effort it takes to submit to the voodoo-that-you-do, or to push in more pins.

But with Estrin’s character-driven comic touch, you will come for the foibles but stay for the foils in this 1999-set novel. Alan’s self-sabotaging and manic antics may undermine him but it is the hell of other people — adherents and adversaries alike — that helps define him, especially and increasingly in the degree with which they accede to his strong stance on Jewish theology and its legacy.

“I’m sick to death of Jewish patheticness,” he rails. “Exemplary victims, weak, passive, cowardly, timid and downtrodden, limp Jewish rags soaked in repulsive silent suffering…” It’s a mindset Alan uses in his lifelong standoff with his pacifist brother over the issue of Israel, and an outlook that buttresses his stance against converts to Judaism he encounters, including a black acquaintance: “What, you haven’t suffered enough?”

Despite Alan’s neurotic edges and perceived extremism, though, he's affable with his ER co-workers of the rank and file stripe, and patient to a point with the patients. He fancies he has the pick of two girlfriends, one an out-of-his-league psychiatrist and the other of the levelheaded soulmate variety, understanding and comforting. Though she may have her limits, too.

Further complications testing Alan's people-person skills crop up during a night when a senseless city-wide gang war turns the ER into a “stitch-em-up factory,” and a garrulous Farrakhan-inflamed Anti-Semite GOMER (“Get Out of My Emergency Room” regular) pokes and prods Alan to the point where contention is construed as racism - but only on Alan's part. Ultimately and however arguably justified, Alan’s better judgments and attempts at poetic but un-PC justice — the denigration of affirmative action in confrontaion with his African-American supervisor doesn‘t help — leads to the loss of his job.

A latent fanaticism fanned also signals the advent of a new and unstable phase, tinged with tension and dark humor, that comes as Alan deludes himself into believing he’s been “chosen” to deliver America from Anti-Semitism. Indeed, as one character says, he’s become enslaved “to your own rhetoric, to the flight of your ideas.”

If Alan has become a Frankenstein of sorts, it’s all the more a Faustian connection rooted in the folktale of the Golem, the animated being of clay that defended the Jews in 16th Century Prague. It’s a theme that pops-up repeatedly in Estrin’s ever-arresting novel; Alan remembers reading as a child about this “cross between the Jolly Green Giant and the Pillsbury Doughboy.” His mother used to call him a golem, too (perhaps just a twisted term of oedipal endearment, though).

But now, as Alan prepares for a retaliatory plan of cultural attack, it is more befitting to remember that in Hebrew, the word golem equates to “shapeless matter.” “Something,” Alan is told, “that has potential but is not yet formed, not yet there.”

Nothing ratchets up the riveting anticipation and the anything-can-happen possibilities more than putting them under the command — or utter lack of control — of a man who is himself still an unfinished works-in-progress.

2006-11-24T01:40:00.000-08:00

Liner Notables #7: Chuck Berry - The Great Twenty-Eight

Why, it seems like only yesterday [cue harp and wavy, out-of-focus visuals] when you could pore over an album's liner notes and not have to squint to garner an embarrassment of riches and a treasure trove of tidbits...

“Dance! says Chuck Berry, reel and rock, around and around! ‘Move on up and try for further.’ This rock ‘n’ roll that’s blowing fuses around the world would set Beethoven spinning in his grave and ‘deliver us from the days of old.’”

The duck walk may not be quite as smooth these days, but having just celebrated his 80th birthday, Chuck Berry is still a smooth “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man.”

Chess Record’s The Great Twenty-Eight double-album from 1982 is not only a fantastic best-of collection in quantity and quality of tracks, it also matches that excellence in its liner notes. Straightforwardly no-nonsense yet poetically celebratory -- reflecting Berry's songs' musical accessibility in rhythm and rhyme-scheme -- the insightful commentary fulfills the commemorative need for a matter-of-fact overview combined with an expressive tribute befitting rock ‘n’ roll royalty.

The all-embracing yet cohesive notes by Michael Lydon start out simply enough: “Charles Edward Anderson Berry grew up a bright kid in black St. Louis, Missouri.” Lydon then briefly sketches out Berry’s influences in Louis Jordan and Nat “King” Cole, and his introduction by an impressed Muddy Waters to Leonard Chess. Hearing a dub of “Maybellene,” Chess signs up Berry for his label and guides him to the themes of “the big beat, cars, and young love.”

Lydon, as much as anyone can convey a sonic sensation, deftly encapsulates the appeal and the immediacy of a Chuck Berry song:

Ah, the triumph of Chuck’s Ford catching Maybellene at the top of the hill! The poor coup de ville left behind like a ton of lead! The fast lane tempo, the clanging chorded guitar with its howling break, the wild piano, slamming drums and bass -- ‘the highway sound’ -- urged on the listener a mood flamboyantly dramatic, rebellious, and free.
Onstage, Berry was a bit rebellious and free himself, as Lydon describes this charismatic marvel - good looks, duck walk and all. And though Berry "had no kick against modern jazz," he quickly proved to be a prolific songwriter and record maker of catchy and clever rock 'n' roll gems, able to capture the “teen feel” again and again in such smashes as “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Rock and Roll Music,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Johnny B. Goode,” “Carol,” “Memphis,” “Back in the USA”…

Putting Berry in historical perspective, up there with Elvis Presley and above Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins, Lydon concisely explains what Berry did with the subject matter -- youthful turbulence and yearning -- shared with these other artists:

No wonder he went on to influence the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Beach Boys, the Who, the Kinks, T. Rex and “every group of kids who’ve gotten together in somebody’s basement to bang out rock ‘n’ roll.” After all, Lydon continues, Berry’s “been the outside voice that’s awakened the inner voice of all these hopeful young artists and given them that indispensable ‘you can do it’ shove.”

In addition, there’s a timelessness to that sense of awakening and discovery as Lydon stirringly affirms, “These are twenty-eight great records, as crisp and tangy as the day Chuck laid them down.

"It still amazes me how good they make me feel… Rock on, Chuck Berry!”

And Hail! Hail! Happy Birthday!

2006-11-24T01:36:00.000-08:00

The Early Word: New And Upcoming Children's Books, Plus One $150 Doorstop

In last week's Early Word I squeezed in a mention of the just-released finale from Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events - Book 13: The End, noting that the publisher would like us to know, and I quote, ahem: “The end of THE END is the best place to begin THE END, because if you read THE END from the beginning of the beginning of THE END to the end of the end of THE END, you will arrive at the end of the end of your rope.”

In that spirit, and because this is the start of a selected compilation of Children’s Books being released for this holiday season, we will begin the beginning Children’s Christmas selections with the titles that have already been released so that we may end THAT END and start anew.

Quickly, though -- we have a long ways to go before we come to the beginning, so let’s catch-up with some titles already on the bookstore shelves: Artemis Fowl, teenage criminal mastermind, figures, it figures, in The Lost Colony (Artemis Fowl, Book 5) by Eoin Colfer. Mommy? is by Maurice Sendak - shouldn’t that be enough? Peter Pan In Scarlet, by Geraldine McCaughrean is the first-ever authorized sequel to J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan -- shouldn’t that be more than enough?

Is There Really a Human Race? asks Jamie Lee Curtis. I guess all those years in Hollywood can keep you a little too much out of touch. Gloria Estefan gets into the act -- the magic act -- with Noelle's Treasure Tale: A New Magically Mysterious Adventure. And to the manners born is Whoopi Goldberg with Whoopi's Big Book of Manners, while Joy Behar has a different view of things in Sheetzucacapoopoo: My Kind of Dog.

Did you somehow miss International Talk Like A Pirate Day a few weeks ago? Then Pat Croce’s Pirate Soul: A Swashbuckling Voyage Through the Golden Age of Pirates! might just be up your gangplank; brush up on your buccaneer skills with one of the world's foremost pirate-artifact collectors and authorities - Arrrrhh! In more otherworldly escapist fare, Jack and Annie are off on another Merlin Mission in Mary Pope Osborne's Blizzard of the Blue Moon (A Stepping Stone Book).

The following title alone should be enough to grab ya, but if not, I'll need to tell you that Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich by Adam Rex, contains illustrated poems describing the lives of well-known monsters, including -- one hopes -- hair care secrets from the Bride of Frankenstein.

YA YA YA! For the Young Adult crowd, Wintersmith is the bewitching third entry in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld story. More bothersome is the "Gossip Girl" world portrayed in Would I Lie to You? by Cecily von Ziegesar, while there’s no escaping the bewildering social whirl of college in Glass Houses: The Morganville Vampires, Book I (The Morganville Vampires) by Rachel Caine.

That was then and this is now: We're caught up with what's in the stores, and can take up where we left off with upcoming up ‘n’ comers for up-and-coming Young Adults. And what better way to start than with Terrier, the first installment in the Tortall trilogy, the latest Tamora Pierce nether worldly series -- it has that new carcass smell! -- introducing law-enforcer Beka Cooper, whose knack for communicating with the dead tips her off to the vast underworld conspiracy. But this time it’s personal! (due Oct. 24.)

Come to think of it, the following mystery wrapped in an enigmatic appellation o’ verbosity looks like just the job for Tamora... No, it’s not the matter-of-factually sassy Reckless (The It Girl, No. 3) by Cecily von Ziegesar (Nov. 1). I’m talking about The Mislaid Magician Or Ten Years After: Being the Private Correspondence Between Two Prominent Families Regarding A Scandal Touching The Highest Levels Of Government And The Security Of The Realm. It’s by Patricia C. Wrede. ‘Nuff said? 'Nuff intended (Nov. 1).

Of course, any hero or heroine is going to need a dependable reference for those dastardly situations with which a villain or two may ensnare, those dastards! DK Publishing’s The Marvel Encyclopedia, containing more than a thousand of Marvel Comic’s characters and their superhero characteristics, is a marvel of a resource tool (Oct 16).

Or, if geography gets ya not knowing if your coming or going, get your bearings with Our 50 States: A Family Adventure Across America by Lynne Cheney. Maybe she'll pinpoint some of our nation’s great undisclosed locations (Oct. 24). Or, at the very least it will help one little girl find her way in Eloise in Hollywood, by Kay Thompson, Hilary Knight, J. David Stem, and David N. Weiss. Which two of those authors do you suppose refused to ask for directions to Tinseltown in the writing of this book? (Oct. 24.)

Kid-tested, mother-approved: Fans of Jan Karon’s bestselling Mitford Years series might find their pre-schoolers delighted with Violet Comes To Stay. In this tale inspired by Karon’s character Cynthia Coppersmith, Father Tim’s wife, writer Cynthia Cecka fashions a story about a wayward white kitten who finds hospitality and comfort in a bookstore. Well, who doesn't? (Oct. 19).

Everybody talks about the Weather Fairies, but no one does anything about them! Here’s your chance to pick up an ideal stocking-stuffer with Evie The Mist Fairy (Weather Fairies), by Daisy Meadows (Nov. 1). At the other end of the size spectrum is a fascinating book about a fascinating subject -- neither of which can be considered ideal stocking-stuffers -- Elephant by Steve Bloom. A title simply put, but after 12 years in the making, this is a book with a tightly-packed trunk full of details about our pachydermic pals, in words and often surprising photographs (Dec.1).

Compared to such ginormous jumbos, you'd think the care and feeding of your sprites would come a little easier, especially after reading, um, Care and Feeding of Sprites (Spiderwick Chronicles) by Holly Black (Nov. 1). Perhaps you can placate them with Mouse Cookies & More: A Treasury, by Laura Numeroff (Oct. 24.) A Box Full of Lilly by 2005 Caldecott Medal Kevin Henkes might also make a nice gift, of the inedible kind, that is (Oct. 17).

So would Madonna’s The English Roses, Too Good To Be True. Or should you spring for that $150 Collector’s Edition Box Set of Madonna’s The English Roses/The English Roses: Too Good to Be True? (November-ish.) Talk amongst yourselves while I list some of the more notable and strictly Christmassy Christmas books:

Bah! Humbug? by Lorna Balian (Oct. 28)
Christmas Pop-up by Robert Clarke Sabuda (now available)
Christmas Toy Factory by Geronimo Stilton (now available)
Mary Engelbreit's A Merry Little Christmas: Celebrate from A to Z by Mary Engelbreit (now available)
Miracle on 49th Street by Mike Lupica (Oct. 24)
Pablo's Christmas by Hugo C. Martin (Oct 28)
Snowmen Pop-Up Book by Caralyn Buehner (Oct. 19)
This Is The Stable by Cynthia Cotten (Oct. 31)

This is the end, of both the end and beginning. For now.

2006-10-15T02:55:00.000-07:00

Book Review: The Black Dahlia Files - The Mob, The Mogul, And The Murder That Transfixed Los Angeles by Donald H. Wolfe

Amazingly enough, The Black Dahlia Files’ subtitle -- The Mob, the Mogul, And The Murder That Transfixed Los Angeles -- doesn’t quite say it all. The alliteration and the intimation are there, but the breadth and depth of the book's implications are barely alluded to in an unsolved 60-year old case that took in many elements and considered varied personalities from Bugsy to Bumstead -- Mob boss Bugsy Siegel to the Blondie movies’ Dagwood, Arthur Lake, that is.

In retracing that transfixing story behind the murder of the would-be starlet Elizabeth Short -- the subject of a recent Brian De Palma screen treatment of a James Ellroy novel -- Donald H. Wolfe delved into recently unearthed case files that had been buried in the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office since the black-haired beauty's bisected body was found January 15, 1947 in a vacant lot. Or, to be more precise, found in a symbolically ritualistic manner in what may have been more than just a randomly selected dumping ground.

This is just one of a multitude of findings, one layer of an intricately interlocking set of circumstances discovered as the investigative Wolfe draws on personal knowledge and delves into those “catacombs of money, power, and influence.” The outcome constitutes an ultimately convincing and level-headed account, and casts a substantial net, from the coast to coast travels of "The Black Dahlia" and, within Southern California, her wanderings from Santa Barbara to San Diego.

What helps make Wolfe escape conspiratorial crackpot charges, and what makes Files so credibly convincing, is that he uses some of Southern California’s usual suspects in mid-20th century sleaze and open secrets -- the corrupt police department on the take, organized crime, movie industry sordidness, and a sensationalistic press that will look the other way when it serves them to -- as springboards for substantiations of collusion and cover-up.

If you didn’t before know the extent of the inextricable and historic links between crooked L.A. cops at all levels and the Syndicate, and how the newspapers and film studios fit into this deceitful web, Wolfe presents a seamless case. Moreover, the author shows how all these forces kicked into cooperative overdrive when Short, her Tinseltown dreams turned into a nightmarish call-girl existence, finds herself pregnant by the most powerful man in the city, the Los Angeles Times’ publisher Norman Chandler.

As a man who can control the editorial and news slant of his leading newspaper, who influences which shady politician is elected mayor or which minion police commissioner, and who determines the course of contending mob wars and violence, Chandler wields overwhelming command over the fate of the city - a domination that can’t be jeopardized by a scandal that could trigger outcry from competing newspapers and opposition from an unaware public.

In providing explanations of why LAPD officials were actually railroading innocent “suspects” and how the newspapers purposely published misleading stories, Wolfe names names -- including that of the murderer -- and details the particulars of the murder itself. Taking his incisive analysis beyond the speculative realm, the author uses and cites a barrage of documented proof -- and many of these archival photographs, investigative reports and news clippings make it into the body of the book or are included in the abundant appendixes.

While the demoralizing "fact that the Black Dahlia case had been handled by the enforcers of the city’s vice-ridden underworld was a confidential manner hidden from the public for more than fifty years,” it is nonetheless a relief that there were a few heroes and principled institutions. Wolfe makes sure these honest detectives, journalists and newspapers are duly acknowledged, even if they faced demotion or retaliation at the time.

In addition to Wolfe’s expressive page-turner style that successfully conveys Short's ever-edgy sense of terror and desperation, this kind of attention to detail is another indication of Wolfe’s comprehensiveness and conscientiousness as a writer, marking a cohesive and riveting read and assuring The Black Dahlia Files its likely status as the most definitive book on the subject to date.

2006-10-15T02:53:00.000-07:00

Vinyl Tap: Vanilla Fudge

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #28:

The few seconds of technical gibberish at the start of Vanilla Fudge ends with a promise: “Ultra-Sonic Operating Level - Set Pleasance Control.”

In “All You Need Is Pretension” ‘67 that could mean just about anything. With Vanilla Fudge it mostly meant slowed-down psychedelic-sludge cover songs sustained at times beyond endurance and identification. The group first got notice and radio airplay with their 7:20 minute version of the Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hanging On,” and with their self-titled debut album they also take a similar diversionary tack with the Beatles, Curtis Mayfield, Sonny and Cher, and the Zombies.

Sandwiched in between tracks of ham-fisted and heavy-icious style -- if not necessarily substance -- are Fudge’s original cacophonic-calliope of confections, “Illusions Of My Childhood,” that total slightly over a dispensable minute of out-dated freak-out filler.

The Beatles songs that open and close Vanilla Fudge, “Ticket To Ride” and “Eleanor Rigby” respectively, comprise a different and contrasting kind of filler that won‘t make you forget the Carpenters or Ray Charles - let alone the fab four themselves. Except for the brown-acidic and bloodcurdling flying-monkey screams at the end, "Ticket" sounds not unlike the Rascals on lithium (or as you might imagine that would sound). This relatively straightforward approach is refreshingly put to better blue-eyed soulful use on the Impressions’ “People Get Ready” and the Jackie Ross/Evie Sand hit “Take Me For A Little While.”

The stoned-out eight-minute “Eleanor Rigby,” on the other hand, is too fragmented and disjointed to be effective, especially when it verges in earnest on William “Golden Throats” Shatner-style histrionics and melodrama, such as in the highly-wrought and sibilantly whispered aside, “No… one… wasss… savedddd…”

Maybe it is “nothing to get hung about” -- as Fudge sneak in a little “Strawberry Fields” snippet -- but the same kind of fussy elaboration mars Sonny Bono’s “Bang Bang” just as the In-A-Gadda-Da-Hammond-heavy noodling of “She’s Not There” takes all the fun out of a great pop tune.

Even so, “You Keep Me Hanging On” still sounds pretty tantalizing all these years later - but in a little-goes-a-long-way manner. Though the group began to merge some original material into their hit-and-miss work, there seemed little need to belabor the long-drawn-out covers-conceit over the course of a few more albums.

Vanilla Fudge can, however, be cited as a precursor to heavy metal and they went on to other career highlights, including touring with Jimi Hendrix and also headlining with an early-on Led Zeppelin as their opening act. A couple members also formed a short-lived power trio with Jeff Beck -- Beck, Bogert, and Appice -- in the early '70s.

But Vanilla Fudge's time-lag miasma of sonic molasses just keeps me hanging on and on a little too much.

2006-10-15T02:50:00.000-07:00

The Early Word: King, Koontz, Connelly, Harris, Hiaasen, Hillerman, Steel, Sparks... Snicket!

It’s always nice to bump into promising books, but the bruises you may incur as you literally collide into the high stacks of the following new and upcoming blockbuster titles in the bookstore may not be what you had in mind. Also included here are a few potential or semi-blockbusters that’ll be in shorter stacks -- just the inconspicuously right height for tripping over and landing flat on you’re face. Let's be careful out there this holiday season!

And be careful to not stay up too late at night with the chill-inducing masters of horror. Then again, in Dean Koontz’s latest you’ll always have Odd Thomas to keep you company, except Koontz’s much-loved character in Brother Odd has holed up in monastery in California’s High Sierra with a killer running loose (due Nov. 28). More in the much-reviled category is the title character in Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Rising. This is essentially “Hannibal: The Early Years,” wherein we see him become the youngest person ever admitted to medical school in France -- and see him evolve with the help of a little extra-curricular education of a more invidious and insidious sort (Dec. 5).

You never know in which literary direction the prolific and versatile Michael Crichton will go. With Next, he merges foreboding fact with frightful fiction as he extends to plausible possibilities the truth and consequences of our genetic world (Nov. 28). To allay any fears Crichton may cause, of course, we can always count on a soothingly escapist love story from Stephen King. Um, well... there is toned-down terror and a tender and transcendent side to Lisey’s Story of a coping widow. But do expect the expected supernatural element as Lisey feels strangely drawn to pursue otherworldly -- and healing -- clues to her husband’s disturbing past (Oct. 24).

For love and romance of the more traditional variety, Daniel Steel rolls out the red carpet for H.R.H., and considers: How ya gonna keep her royal highness down in the imperial palace after she’s seen Berkeley? A restless Princess Christianna, despite her father’s stern wishes, takes her American education and awakened social consciousness to the far ends of a suffering world, determined to make a difference. And in the process, of course and incidentally, find true love (Oct. 31).

But with a title like Dear John, you might expect the road to ultimate ardor to be a little rocky in Nicholas Sparks' new novel. And, with a storyline about the mutual attraction between an opposites-attracted couple, you’d be right (Oct. 30).

In the suspense realm, the requisite heroes are far-flung where roads are always rough-going. In David Baldacci ’s The Collectors, the four-man conspiracy-centric Camel Club battles a threat to national security (Oct. 17). Irreverent detective John Corey, in Nelson DeMille’s Wild Fire, has bigger fission to fry in dealing with a scheme to set off nuclear bombs in two American cities, with the aim to trigger a world war of unthinkable proportions (Nov. 6).

And in slightly smaller, but still somehow unthinkable scale, the pages within the audacious Treasure of Khan by Clive Cussler brings us Dirk Pitt battling a threat to the global oil market posed by a Mongolian mogul out to reinstate the grandeur of the dreaded Genghis Khan himself (Nov. 28).

If you love mystery and police procedurals, there’s a good assortment of whodunits and why-fors for your wish-list. A first-rate candidate for the top of anyone's list would be anything by the consistently dependable Michael Connelly, but Echo Park looks especially compelling. Harry Bosch is back with the LAPD as a member of the Open-Unsolved Unit, providing him with the opportunity to tackle the one that got away - an old case that’s been haunting him for years, and one that brings him face-to-face with a psychotic killer (Oct. 9).

In a much lighter vein -- let’s face it -- in another sure-to-be hilarious laugh-out-loud mystery, Carl Hiaasen’s Nature Girl has, as usual, colorful characters-on-parade and twists and turns that have twists and turns. Just to clue you in a bit, I can tell you, however, that it involves half-Seminole failed alligator wrestler Sammy Tigertail and members of the First Resurrectionist Maritime Assembly for God waiting for the Messiah to make landfall. Jocularity, jocularity! (Nov. 14.)

A time zone or two away from Florida’s swamplands lies the Navajo reservation in Arizona and New Mexico - the familiar Tony Hillerman terrain of The Shape Shifter; this particular caper updates the life of Lt. Joe Leaphorn as he takes on an old case he thought he had solved, and confronts a murderer he thought had died. In Boston, between the covers of Hundred Dollar Baby, Robert B. Parker's dogged detective Spenser also confronts the past when an old character, former teenage-runaway April Kyle -- now a madam protecting her call-girl operation -- seeks his help again (Oct 24).

With the gumshoe gambit at play in Born In Death, by J. D. Robb (Nora Roberts), PI Eve Dallas, in solving a gruesome double homicide, reveals the sordid secrets of some of the city's richest and most secretive citizens (Nov. 7). If you like adventure with a little analysis, psychologist Alex Cross, in James Patterson’s Cross, helps track a serial rapist in Georgetown, discovering in the process a link to the murder of his wife years ago (Nov. 13).

For something different from John Grisham, his first non-fiction work, The Innocent Man, tells of a trial built on junk science and jailhouse snitches that put a possibly innocent man on death row, while raising questions about the issue of capital punishment and the criminal justice system (Oct. 10).

And for the kids, this Christmas brings us, alas, a Lemony Snicket finale, A Series of Unfortunate Events - Book 13: The End. As the conclusion to the series, the publisher would like us to know that “The end of THE END is the best place to begin THE END, because if you read THE END from the beginning of the beginning of THE END to the end of the end of THE END, you will arrive at the end of the end of your rope.”

Which brings me to end of mine, in an unfortunate turn of events, for now. Next up in The Early Word: More Children’s Books!

2006-10-15T02:48:00.000-07:00

Liner Notables #6: The Jam - Dig The New Breed

“ELECTRICALLY RECORDED LIVE - play it on all phonographs” reads the cover of Dig The New Breed, a lovely parting gift from the Jam in the form of a career-spanning live LP of more substance than Style Council.

The instructional tip of sorts comprises a ton of tongue-in-cheek sanctioned sass sustaining the kind of flippancy found in a couple earlier ad campaigns for other artists. “The ’80s - We’re For It!” proclaims Devo without equivocation of their dawn-of-a-new-decade release, Freedom Of Choice. “20 New Songs - All Different!!!” touts Columbia Records for Elvis Costello’s Get Happy!!!” Furthermore, the logical extension of such impertinence saw titular tomfoolery in a Sugar album Bob Mould called File Under: Easy Listening.

Whatever the trend, by the time the Jam came along there was also a tacit, if not tranquil understanding that, in addition to the pan-phonographibility of an LP, one should play one's album loud. But could record commentary be read out loud? It would almost seem to be demanded with Dig The New Breed as main Jam man Paul Weller, in a three-part harmony of shared liner-notational endeavor by the trio, tries to set the tone with a spirited and fast-forwarded flashback and incantation:

A brief six years! Sweaty frantic Red Cow residency, 1st week 50 people, 2nd week 100, by the 4th week a queue around the block! SWITCH the Marquee with Shane, Claudio and Adrian dancing on stage to the confusion of the usual Marquee hippies! SWITCH the first tour, traveling in this red Cortina for hours and having to learn to walk again when you got out! SWITCH Dunstable and that hotel?! SWITCH QUICKLY! Making the first LP in 5 days or something, vocal tracks done in a lift! SWITCH Actually being on Top of the Pops!! SWITCH…

Now, that’s entertainment! Not so much, though, when it comes to the appreciative but prosaic stiff-upper-lip offerings from the other two members of the pioneering British -- and so very, very British -- punk band.

Bassist Bruce Foxton alludes to, in a generalized manner, memories and emotions running high, then goes on to virtually demand that the Jam be treated with RESPECT. Uppercase, almost Aretha-style R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Then, before offering his indebtedness and thanks to the trio’s long-time backers, Foxton declares that “Loyalty from the fans has always surprised and amazed me. Traveling around the world to give us the support we badly needed in places such as the States.”

Drummer Rick Buckler proves to be even more a master of fractured and fragmented sentence structure. In arguing that Dig gives more than “‘just an account of songs played live,’” or is a “‘Greatest Hits’ type album,” he discloses that “I have never been a great fan of live albums that try to emulate a studio recording with a cast of thousands, but instead a more basic and honest account.”

Um, let’s make the…

“…SWITCH the Sound Effects tour. SWITCH ‘81 was a ‘orrible year for songs! SWITCH cracking up over the GIFT LP, I wanted it perfect, but settled for good, oh well! SWITCH the noise those Japanese kids make, fantastic! SWITCH Chicago gig, brilliant! SWITCH What have I learnt? BELIEF IS ALL!”Thanks Paul, though we believed all along, it's good to hear commitment so vigorously and distinctively expressed, and see doubt and apprehension succumb to the "beat surrender" with such steadiness. After all, "as it was in the beginning, so shall it be in the end."

2006-10-15T02:45:00.000-07:00

Vinyl Tap: Sparks - Kimono My House

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #27:

It was pure pop, but it just wasn't for now people, as Nick Lowe would phrase it. Sparks, as oddly anachronistic as main songwriter and keyboardist Ron Mael’s catatonic Charlie Chaplin facade, came along much too late for the Gilbert and Sullivan-style comic operas their work suggests, and a few years too early for the first ripples of skinny-tie new wave, which might have fully embraced the Los Angeles-based band.

So leaving behind the vicissitudes of the fickle glam fandom in America to logically take their infectious and witty Brit-beat confections to the land of the 19th-century British music hall, Ron and, incongruously, his seemingly standard-issue golden-god vocalist brother Russell, found a home and waiting arms in London. It wasn’t long before they formed a new band and success came along with their 1974 recording of the quirky Kinks-some Kimono My House, sparked with a potent, if unlikely, combination of wily wordplay and big dumb fun.

The lead-off cut, a big hit in Britain, fulfills that complexity -- but with an American twist. While retaining an operatic kill-the-wabbit Euro-aura that showcases Russell’s acquirable-taste of a soaring falsetto, “This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us” nonetheless lyrically presents a western horse-opera chorus replete with rifle blasts to complement the gunslinger bravado. In addition, a Walter Mitty-esque fantasy element plays throughout, further cementing -- even in the most mundane of circumstances -- a sense of rugged and individualistic American heroics:

“It’s a lot like playing the violin / You cannot start off and be Yehudi Menuhin,” sums up an ode to adolescent lust, the whimsical and wistful “Amateur Hour.” The song summons up the Kinks, not only in the invocation of “Waterloo Sunset”-style background harmonies, but lyrically as well. Then again, as “Amateur Hour goes on and on / When you turn pro you know she'll let you know,” consider it The Village Green Preservation Society gone relatively wild:

In another, the appropriately histrionic and hilariously over-the-top “Here In Heaven,” a Romeo ponders plans gone awry, lamenting his fate and the consequences of “Second thoughts, for eternity, for eternity, for eternity...”:

These three samples of the cornucopia of melodious smarty-pants pop smarts that comprises Kimono My House are just on the first side. Other songs include one about a narcissist “falling in love with myself again,” a boy genius “scribbling things, genius things,” and a complaints department sales clerk threatening to “dive off the mezzanine if one more points at crooked seams.”

Travelers take center stage in the doom-bluesy “Equator,” wherein the narrator, seemingly ditched by his love interest, still harbors hope, though “All of the gifts are now melted or dead.” And in "Hasta Manana Monsieur" a naïve traveler is in over his head as he contends with an unexpected foreign affair: “You mentioned Kant and I was shocked... so shocked / You know, where I come from, none of the girls have such foul tongues.”

Foul tongues, sharp tongues, silver tongues -- a variety of situations and circumstances from the everyday to the exotic take shape and are expressed in the gamut-running words and music of the Mael brothers. Sparks would eventually move back to America and continue on in different incarnations with varying degrees of success, but one of the heights so far in their career lies in their invitation to Kimono My House.

2006-10-15T02:42:00.000-07:00

The Early Word: Lehane, Francis, Le Carre, McCarthy, Frazier

It’s beginning to look a lot like crowed aisles in the bookstores this holiday season. With an unusually sizeable number of big-name books in the publishing pipeline potentially drawing in ever-more book buyers, it's almost a matter of a good thing gone awry.

According to Michael Cader, founder of Publishers Lunch, a book industry website, “There’s a legitimate question whether this is too much at once, whether the market can handle it. There are just so many of them.”

That’s where I come in. Over the course of the foreseeable future of ever-dwindling shopping days ‘til Christmas, I’ll be offering -- weekly if not more frequently -- a selective assortment of suggestions in fiction and non, from scratch ‘n’ sniff children’s books to “Outhouses of the World" coffee table tomes, to scratch 'n' sniff “Outhouses of the World” publications too, perhaps.

In any case, we have some catching up to do. Before we get to Grisham and Pynchon; Atwood and Allende; Crichton, King and Koontz; we should take note of some titles that have hit the bookstore shelves in the past few weeks.

In a change of pace for the always gripping Dennis Lehane (Mystic River), Coronado offers five stories and the titular centerpiece, a two-act play based on Lehane’s short story "Until Gwen." Take a hustler father, a son just out of prison, mix in an uneasy reunion and some missing loot and you have the makings of some volatile intensity. Indeed, as the lead-off story would have it, "a small town is a hard place to keep a secret."

After an absence of six years, Dick Francis, in Under Orders, is not only back with another racetrack caper, he’s bringing back popular series character Sid Halley, once a champion jockey, and now a gumshoe out to solve the murder of jockey - in a case that gets a little too up close and personal.

John Le Carre keeps going strong, too, bringing a lighter, comic touch in The Mission Song, a story of an idealistic and earnest British interpreter, Bruno "Salvo" Salvador, whose expertise brings him steady work that soon enough spirals into covert government assignments and no lack of hot water and trouble.

The Road is a departure for Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses), but is nonetheless a masterwork of a vividly harrowing post-apocalyptic epic, rendered in multi-layered and majestically evocative prose. A father and son, survivors of an end-times holocaust, plod on aimlessly through the ashen wasteland, beset by the elements, marauders and “Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”

If that isn’t dark enough for you, you might relish the fantastical escapism courtesy of the short story collection, Strange Candy by Laurell K. Hamilton, author of the black-humored Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter novels. Something similarly wicked this way comes with the territory surrounding the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, where Christine Feehan’s Dark Celebration: A Carpathian Reunion takes place. The 17th in Feehan's Dark series (and the first in hardcover) features the blood-drinking and shape-shifting Carpathian clan as they gather for what many may not consider the most traditional of Christmas celebrations.

Also in stores: from the author of Tuesdays with Morrie and The Five People You Meet in Heaven, comes Mitch Albom’s eagerly-awaited For One More Day. That particular hoped-for day in the novel is one of solace and peace for an anguished son distraught by and guilt-ridden over the death of his mother.

And finally, in a brief early word about an even more highly anticipated work (available Oct. 3) Charles Frazier brings us, a decade after the award-winning Cold Mountain, Thirteen Moons. Epic in scale, the novel starts before the Civil War this time, following the life of the narrator from the time he is sent to run a trading post in the wilderness of Indian territory.

Next up in The Early Word: the stacked-up blockbusters you’ll be tripping over in the bookstores.

After that: select titles on the shelves behind the stacks of blockbusters you’ll tripping over in the bookstores.

2006-10-15T02:39:00.000-07:00

Vinyl Tap: Graham Parker And The Rumour - Squeezing Out Sparks

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #26:

“No one's going to illuminate you / All the odds are stacked against you."
---"Nobody Hurts You," Graham Parker

Anger is an energy, and anger can be power, as Public Image and the Clash would have it, but Johnny Lydon and the late Joe Strummer have nothing on Graham Parker when it comes to bristling with bile and bite -- and discharging devastating energy and pessimistic power in precise and snarling articulation deep into every album groove.

Graham Parker was not just Squeezing Out Sparks in this 1979 masterwork. He’s seething with spittle and spite that variously belittles the world and betrays his own weaknesses -- though it’s often hard to detect vulnerability when such barbed lyrics are embedded in such searing and stinging vocals. It's an on-edge singing prowess ably matched by other former pub-rock Brits, like Parker, who make up the Rumour - whose propulsive sonic assertion features the scorching guitar work of Brinsley Schwarz.

The thematic ambivalence is part and parcel of a complex and all-too-human ambiguity, an emotion-driven and at times numbingly treacherous terrain Parker unflinchingly faces. “I try to straighten out but I'm too wrapped up to see / I don't know how it's supposed to be,” he sings in the mental anguish of “Love Gets You Twisted.” But overweening bravado, false or not, is countervailed in the misanthropic belittlement of small-minded provincialism in the almost perversely infectious “Local Girls,” in which a strutting Parker announces, “Yes I'm aware of exactly what I'm doing / Making everything a mystery / Don't bother with it, it don't bother me…”

In between such extremes of confession and bluster lie a myriad of seemingly insurmountable and psychological defensive barriers to be hurdled, obstructions tossed up on both sides of any relationship. “You try to reach a vital part of me, my interest level's dropping rapidly / It's all excuses baby, all a stall, we just don't get excited,” Parker sings in the frenetic “Don’t Get Excited.” And moving from the state of apathy to one of deadened desires, Parker admits in the heartrending "Passion Is No Ordinary Word": "'Cause this is nothing else if not unreal / When I pretend to touch you, you pretend to feel."

In the same song Parker cavalierly contends “The world is easy when you're just playing around with it” -- a stark contrast to what life becomes when tough decisions are to be made and cold reality confronted. The rationalizations and regrets of abortion are explored with brutal candor in the acoustically spare “You Can’t Be Too Strong”:

"Can't Be Too Strong" may be the most blatantly honest and straightforward deviation from Parker's tendency to "wear a blank expression to conceal my real impression," as the reggae-fied “Protection“ puts it. But it joins the other tracks from Squeezing Out Sparks whereby, ultimately and always -- in the words of "Discovering Japan” -- “some kind of truth emerges" from its rich stratum of vigor and vitriol - whether in the between-the-lines insinuation and scorn, or by the by note-perfect denotation, bitten off and chewed. And sometimes spat back out.

2006-10-15T02:36:00.000-07:00

Liner Notables #4: The Zombies - Odessey And Oracle

There’s no all-out fury in some of the minor-key moodiness of the Zombies, perhaps, but the sound of organ-laced hyperventilating intensity emanating from the lower-profile British Invaders in their swan song psychedelic-tinged Odessey And Oracle from 1969 at least signifies something Bardic: “Sound, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not./ Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments/ Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices.”

Due attribution and acknowledgment is extended in the mixed-use liner notes to an accommodating and blurb-worthy “Will" Shakespeare -- the “not flatmate of [bass player] Chris [White] -- for his contribution to the sleeve note.” One Terry Quirk, it may as well be noted -- who actually is the flat mate of Chris and not, say, of the long-dead playwright -- created the paisley-esque flashback happening of an album cover for the fondly remembered hit-makers of “She’s Not There,” “Tell Her No" - and, after a lull in the Billboard action (despite never-wavering productivity), one other unexpected big-time late-breaker single that was definitely not too little, though certainly too late.

But who had time for Top 10 trivialities, rife with lowest common proclivities? This was the time of Rock Music As Art, and Beatles songs displayed, according to one Deadly Profound New York Times critic, such Mahler-ian features as "major tonic sevenths and ninths built into their tunes, and the flat submediant key switches, so natural in the Aeolian cadence.”

Who knew? The Zombies acknowledge with chagrin such high seriousness to an extent, then sexy-sadie it out the studio door. Some A&R guy stuck a pen and paper under head Zombie Rod Argent’s nose and he came up with this Mission Statement of sorts:

Really music is a very personal thing; it’s the product of a person’s experiences. Since no two people have been exactly alike, each writer has something unique to say. That makes anything which is not just a copy of something else worth listening to.

But then, going for broke as the Zombies go for a baroque-pop masterwork, he makes such high-falutin’ pronouncements palatable with a bit of drollery in briefly recounting how the group, “laden with gifts of fruits and nuts from the Orient,” confronted the CBS suits and “with smarm and charm extracted, astonished, the finance necessary to, compose, arrange, perform, produce and cover an LP ourselves, with no outside help or interference.”

Well, except for a little unlikely boost from our next liner-note luminary, the Renaissance rock musician and producer Al Kooper. At this time the renowned keyboardist for Bob Dylan and the leader of such groups as the Blues Project was a CBS producer himself, and even though he was deeply-steeped in blues and R&B, Kooper took a musical and promotional interest in the Zombies, who with their nuanced pop sensibility, were a decided exception to the R&B-based school of British Invasion bands.

“While in London recently,” Kooper adds to the liner note hodge-podge, “I acquired forty British LPs. Upon listening to them, the tuneful and trippy Odessey “stuck out like a rose in a garden of weeds.” Moreover, in giving a brief rundown of some of the wide-ranging cuts' subject matters -- from the girlfriend coming home from prison to a World War I battlefield story -- he finds the Mellotron-infused music “so original in thought” with “melodies incorporating well-timed diminished chords leaping through warm melodic tapestries.”

“With this album, the Zombies establish themselves alongside the royalty of rock,” Kooper sums up. Indeed, they are “very much alive.”

That might’ve been a little wishful thinking on Kooper’s part. The of-late hit-less but always prolific Zombies, contracted with CBS only for this one final release before disbanding, went their separate ways. Rod Argent took his distinctive, jazz-flavored keyboard skills to his new group Argent, and vocalist Colin Blunstone continued a solo career with some success in Britain.

Not even the surprise monster hit from Odessey and Oracle, the classic oldies staple "Time Of The Season" could get them to get back together.

"The Isle is full of noises," Shakespeare two-cents it. Yes, but with a little less in the way of sound and sweet airs that give delight.

2006-10-15T02:35:00.000-07:00

Book Review: An Alchemy Of Mind - The Marvel And Mystery Of The Brain by Diane Ackerman

---Bob Dylan, "Desolation Row"

When Albert Einstein died in 1955 of a ruptured aneurysm of the abdominal aorta, his brain was secreted away by Princeton pathologist Thomas Harvey, who cut it into 240 blocks for study. Nothing in the noggin’ immediately jumped out and sang “I am genius, hear me roar” and so Einstein’s brain -- after being plunked into two mason jars of formaldehyde -- was placed in a Costa Cider cardboard box collecting cobwebs and virtually forgotten about as it sat under a beer cooler in Harvey's office. (The adage about preferring a bottle in front of me over a frontal lobotomy seems somehow apropos here, but I don’t know how.)

[ADBLOCKHERE]Eventually, renewed interest among various scientists and neurologists meant Einstein’s gray matter mattered once more and so Harvey took it out of mothballs and passed it around rather casually at times to in-the-know know-it-alls all over. At one point it was tossed into the trunk of a Buick Skylark for a cross-country road trip - which might make for a good buddy movie ("Dude, Where's My Cortex?").

In fits and starts of theory and inquiry, notes Diane Ackerman in the scintillating and enticingly all-embracing An Alchemy Of Mind, the 240 poked-and-prodded blocks went on to endure some flawed studies and unexpected conclusions. Public interest was stirred for a while, notes Ackerman, "with many of us picturing his glia as a sort of golden mucilage, the pith of brilliance.”

But the path to Einstein's brilliance, it was ultimately determined, may have stemmed from a missing Sylvian fissure, a fold running through the parietal lobes. Without that division, the consequent ease of connection and communication between neurons corresponded to Einstein’s contention that his mental functions didn’t involve words; he thought in images and took a mathematical approach to problem-solving. With such a unique brain formation, Ackerman suggests, no wonder Einstein “symbolizes genius” -- though his affability gives it "a farouche human face surrounded by electric hair.”

From such a summing-up most stopping points are made. But Ackerman not only goes the extra meditative mile to concisely yet incisively ponder such potential imponderables as the consequences of anatomical mistakes, evolutionary flukes and even “the zeitgeist of the era” - she gives free rein to her non-academic imagination.

She muses about the incidentals that usually fall through the scholarly cracks. Between beers, for example, did the self-styled keeper and curator of the great scientist’s brain “sometimes peer into the jars and turn them gently like snow globes, talk to the brain, commune with it?” Did Harvey “entertain dreams of glory, of solving its mysteries?”

As may be indicated here, Ackerman has the gift of stylistic gab and poetic resonance with which to better precision-toss the substance of her insights. With such a word-perfect emphasis and almost playful sense of language, it is no wonder that Alchemy’s epigraph consists of an e.e. cummings poem that evokes the book's mingling of cold hard fact with the gradation and shade of allusion-rich expression.

Alchemy's seven sections hit such topics as the evolution of the brain, its physical structure, memory, the self, emotions, language, and consciousness. Meanwhile, some of the more intriguing discussions in the book's 34 chapters chip away at absentmindedness and multitasking, Alzheimer’s and the aging brain, the role of dreams in memory, artistic and mathematical minds, the spiritual brain, animal minds, and “How Shakespeare’s mind was different.”

So, like slings and arrows or, to quote cummings again, “sharp fatal tools” and “sensual chisels,” Ackerman -- in the same way others use charts and graphs and tables -- benefits from the gentle nudging of determined and determining words to unravel the marvel and mystery of the brain.

2006-10-15T02:32:00.000-07:00

Vinyl Tap: The Beach Boys Today!

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #25:

With summer now turning into fall, it’s never a smooth seas-to-leaves transition here in Southern California. I yearn, perhaps too perversely much, for the autumnal melancholy - when I can brood with abandon. Something’s gotta wipe this summertime smile off my face.

I must, however, wait out the fits-and-starts of my meteorological mindset. Today, a few days after 100 to-the-nth degree conditions, it’s refreshingly overcast and cool - and 20 degrees cooler. But it’ll get hot again, and cool then, and hot yet more as the thermometer’s wigged-out mercury gets all mercurial and all but bursts from its seemingly ceaseless careening.

Come to think of it, though, in a fitting reconciliation of record-breaking temps to successful record-making attempts, I have a one-album-fits-all-temperaments LP that should do the one-stop mood-shopping trick and get me through the five-day forecast flip-outs. At the start of this season, I aptly and gladly Vinyl-Tapped for another moment in the sun, Endless Summer, the quintessential compilation soundtrack for warm-clime lollygagging.

Now, as I "feel-flow" into fall-time free-fall, the perfect accompaniment, I'm thinking, is the Janus-faced Beach Boys Today! Side A is tethered to the trademark and traditionally infecto-pop Beach Boys thrills, but it's a whole new story on the innovative other side, which spotlights Brian Wilson’s largely unexpected foreshadowing of Pet Sounds-style sonic sublimity. Though perhaps much to the consternation of a perennially perplexed Mike Love, Today covers all facets.

I, on the other hand, am going to be more selective here. For the sake of this review I'm dispensing with the first side’s consistent string of familiar hook-filled songs to focus on the more anticipatory autumnal second side, mostly comprised as it is of a seamless sequence of warm, relaxed-fit but still anxiety-ridden ballads complexly arranged with orchestra-bolstered production.

So, like Brian dove into the experimental deep end at first opportunity, I’m going to jump right into the five-song untried-but-true tunes Brian felt compelled to, and given liberty to, write and produce after having quit the concert tour circuit to concentrate on studio work.

The first song on this particular first shot of production freedom pays off bigtime. It may be a little jarring to flip the platter from the joyous frug-worthy excitations of “Dance, Dance, Dance,” which closes side one, to the affecting, heart-on-sleeves “Please Let Me Wonder.” But the soothing melody of “Please” will capture and enrapture you right away, as lyrics implore (though not seeking answer quite yet!), “Please let me wonder / If I'm who you're dreaming of.” Palpitations and trembles and walking on air is enough for now. Please let me continue to be smitten…

In the musical makeover “I’m So Young,” a gorgeously rearranged and intricately harmonious cover of a ‘50s doo-wop song -- graced with Brian's transcendent falsetto -- finds a love-struck couple ready to take the next problematically marital step. But the honeymoon may be over for the quarrelsome twosome in the piercing “Kiss Me Baby,” as -- in bewitchingly harmomic splendor -- the songs builds in its exuisite reminiscence of the thematic teenage apprehension at the core of “Don’t Worry Baby":

Elsewhere, other mixed-up match-ups, instead of having “thought it out,” fight it out instead. “I treat her so mean I don't deserve what I have,” bewails a clearly bothered Brian in “She Knows Me Too Well,” a standout and poignant track lyrically suggestive of Pet Sounds in its emphasis on a troubled relationship - this one burdened with immaturity. Though “she can tell... I really love her," nonetheless “When I look at other girls it must kill her inside / But it'd be another story if she looked at the guys / 'Cause she knows me so well…”

Furthermore, the sophisticated instrumentation, soaring vocals and all-embracing harmonies pack a punch in their own visceral way that is on par with anything from the hits-on-parade of Side A, such as “Good To My Baby” or “When I Grow Up To Be A Man.”

Moving on, the soul-shattering "In The Back Of My Mind,” is unique in featuring Dennis Wilson's soulful solo on a heartrending vocal, expressively conveying some of Brian’s most personal and ultimately self-doubting lyrics:

This idiosyncratically haunting song also features some orchestral and percussive instrumentation that will find echo not only in Pet Sounds, but in Brian’s “pocket symphony,” “Good Vibrations.” But for Today‘s “Back Of My Mind,“ the coda features an abrupt and discordant crescendo suggesting a “to be continued” open-ended promise of better things to come.

Though not necessarily real soon, that is, except for Today's clashing and disposable comic-relief ending cut. “Bull Session With The ‘Big Daddy,’” is of mildly-amusing interest upon first listen, but otherwise it mars the spirit and creativity at work in The Beach Boys Today!

At this point, the group, if not re-trenching in response to Capitol Record's assembly-line pressure, at least went into an enjoyable-enough holding pattern with the next two albums, Summer Days (And Summer Nights), and Beach Boys Party.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, a masterpiece was being created by a mastermind. And no, it wasn't Mike Love.

2006-10-15T02:29:00.000-07:00

Book Review: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Like “genius” or “hero,” the word “reinvention,” lately waylaid by artistic lightweights, has been devalued and is increasingly a cliché in literature, arts and entertainment. Whether it’s a has-been actor turned reality show never-was, or a vapid va-voom starlet famous for being infamous who yearns to write an “as told to” tell-all, everyone -- though keeping one foot in the door -- wants an out. The rest, seeking a different stint in the same trade, will be all those washed-up actors who really want to direct.

But sometimes it's not the klieg-light acclaim, but the off-stage immaterial accrual that somehow constitutes a tenuous tie to perceived artistic growth. Madonna affects a British accent and myopically chases Kabala-rooted spirituality like a trend-on-a-stick, and - at the drop of a new CD or another concert curtain - proclaims herself transformed, like a virgin no more. Again.

If, to ratchet up the gravitas considerably, any novelist deserves a Reinvention Booksigning Tour of his or her own, it would have to be Cormac McCarthy, who could most certainly reinvent reinvention once again if he had to, restoring back to its former glory the golden substance beneath the stylistic glitter.

With the beginning of his writing career as a Rhode Island transplant to rural Tennessee in 1965, McCarthy distinguished himself as a Southern novelist with a mean Faulknerian streak. But after having moved to El Paso a decade later, McCarthy invented himself anew as a Western writer, marked by touches of Melville and Conrad. With the publication, in 1985, of his dark masterwork Blood Meridian, Or The Evening Redness In The West -- a violently Peckinpah-esque retelling of the Davy Crockett legend -- McCarthy decidedly descended into an American-ingrained exploration of thematic and visceral force.

The inconsistent but often striking '90s-spanning Border Trilogy that brought to McCarthy both book awards and mass appeal -- All The Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities Of The Plain -- toned down the cinematic brutality by affording, in these affecting coming-of-age stories, more of a John Ford flavor. And last year’s modern-day No Country For Old Men trades in a little literary cache and rich characterization for a more accessible and entertaining capper to his Western phase - at least for now.

With The Road, McCarthy makes a full-tilt departure with a bleakly picaresque post-apocalyptic epic. Though presumably America, the unnamed land of deprivation and “cold autistic dark” here is not only not a country for old men in the Western or even Yeatsian sense, it is, in effect, a no-man’s land unfit for anyone and anything.

But some, bloodied and often bowed, have chosen to subside, if not thrive, in the ill-boding badlands that stretch on seemingly ceaselessly. With his keenly-focused study of resolve in the face of such desolation, McCarthy follows the travels and travails of a father and young son, "each the other's world entire." The pair -- determined to survive after the suicide of the family's wife and mother -- slowly plod on, scavenging with cart in tow and revolver in hand, heading south to the sea to escape in aimless flight the increasingly cold climes and bleak setting of an ashen-skied wasteland.

Destroyed cities and burned-out countryside are devoid of all wildlife and virtually uninhabited, and many of the befallen few who’ve lived to tell a harrowing tale become, if not “creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a fever land,” then too-willingly amenable to a cannibalistic desperado existence as Mad-Max-style marauders and looters.

Beyond the comforting charade that the pessimism-driven but perceptive and understanding father displays for his son -- that they are the "good guys" who “carry the fire" as they run from menacing raiders -- there are, even within the truly horrifying events witnessed and among the wretched souls, madmen and prophets they cross paths with, no specific villains to name. And little of value to point to amid many shades of gray merging with the dust and smoke.

And besides an allusion to a corollary devastation constituted in a "long shear of light and then a series of low concussions," the exact cause of the end-times holocaust is never explained. Then again, no too-little-to-late consideration of fire or ice, bang or whimper really needs to be reflected upon when confronted with the ineffability of "the frailty of everything revealed at last,“ and “old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night.“

But The Road is not a book you will be plucking from the SciFi/Fantasy shelves in your bookstore. There are no plot-driven devices at play here, and though it is not the chronicle’s destination that matters - neither is it the journey, perilous as it is, fraught with injury and illness, and rarely, relatively, rewarding.

Furthermore, the overriding genre-busting literary recompense of The Road is also not just comprised in the stylistic matter of McCarthy’s multi-layered, commanding and majestically-evoking poetics, broken here and there with spare, circular and at times droll Samuel Beckett-like dialogue. Neither is this the case of McCarthy merely building upon and extending -- though there is that facet -- the edge-of-the-frontier themes undertaken in his previous Western or Southern works.

In concerns more geared toward present-day political and military issues, whatever allusions to specific global-power saber-rattling and its potential consequences may be read into the novel -- and perhaps justified to an extent -- there is indeed a limit to such forced speculation. McCarthy’s at-times cryptically under-wraps economy in word and meaning belies any clear-cut conjecture here, though it may be presumed that he is addressing such topics obliquely, with universality and timelessness in mind.

That's not the case when it comes to characterizations, especially when each emanation of analysis, appreciation and gut-instinct authority lies in conveyances directly derived from the actions and reactions of the father and son, whose personalities are indelibly marked by contrasting natures.

The father’s emptiness and ever-guarded suspicions extend even to his dreams, whether unsettling or comforting - because “the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and of death.” The child, probably no more than ten years old, is too ready to trust and empathize with others in such times, in such “Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”

Both fundamentally fragile and vulnerable in such dire circumstances, they may be able to survive, “Slumping along, Filthy, ragged hopeless,” but only one will endure the “sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular.” That such a grim and undaunted a rumination on ruination and depravity may possibly allow a glimmer of redeeming affirmation and love speaks to McCarthy’s masterful command and precision in this profoundly moving story.

And that someone, anyone, in such formidable conditions could “raise his weeping eyes and see him standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle,” speaks volumes about McCarthy's capacity for humanity, heart, and ultimate hope.

2006-10-15T02:23:00.000-07:00

Liner Notables #3: The Velvet Underground And Nico

“You’ve never really known life until you’ve fucked death in the gallbladder.” It isn’t immediately apparent how this warm and fuzzy homily from the crap-and-camp film Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein is related to such music in which the figure of one song, as Lou Reed would have it, "started dancin' to that fine fine music / You know her life was saved by rock 'n' roll."

But if anyone can put a death-mask on celebratory vigor it would be the avant guardian who splattered a soupçon of soup-can consumer culture on canvas and called it art. Indeed, as Andy Warhol produced them on their 1967 self-titled debut, the Velvet Underground and Nico -- way before death metal and goth -- stuck out from the Summer of Love like a Winter of Discontent.

With songs such as "The Black Angel's Death Song" and lyrics that deal matter-of-factly with the slipstreaming surrender to "nullify my life" while "closing in on death" ("Heroin"), the dark realism of a group who brought their tried-and-true brand of experience and experimentalism to this innovative album extends to the liner notes as well.

Those observations came in the form of newpaper excerpts from chomping-at-the-bit arts and music reviewers bending over backwards and soundboards to wallow in Warhol's mixed-media/performance art ensemble, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable -- a psych-out extravaganza designed to introduce VU to a potentially waiting world. As it turns out, the all-boffo commentary prominently featured in The Velvet Underground and Nico overstates a wide variety of preening pretentiouness as creative juices overflow.

Some writers stick to the expected hyperbole for the times, and concern themselves with the show-bizzy rock particulars. "At the Plastic Inevitable it is all Here and Now and the Future." One, more taciturn, takes his turn with "Three-ring psychosis"; perhaps "like Berlin in the decadent '30s" fits the bill; or "fused together into one magnificent moment of hysteria."

Meanwhile, the music of the Velvet Underground is described by one twisted wordsmith as a combination of "Sado-Masochistic frenzy with free-association imagery... the product of a secret marriage between Bob Dylan and the Marquis de Sade." Another frets that, by comparison with the "far out" headliners, the "great, groovy group which opened the show sounds passe."

But, getting back to the Frankensteinian philosophy of life and internal organs, other liner note contributors display an intimate fascination with dying and danger. You would not have thought death had undone so many...

"Not since the Titanic ran into that iceberg has there been such a collision as when Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable burst upon the audiences at the Trip Tuesday." Embellishing this notion of watery graves, another reviewer opts for "these flowers of evil... in full bloom". To experience this menacing assemblage "is to be brutalized, helpless -- you're in any kind of horror you want to imagine, from police state to mad house."

Is the late Nico, the Velvet Underground's resident Teutonic "Chanteuse" (as she is billed), a "beautiful, flaxen-haired girl," as one writer puts it -- or, as another attests, "another cooler Dietrich for another cooler generation"? A little less sweetness and light comes when a somewhat obsessed Dante wannabe plunges head-first into the inferno: "Nico, astonishing -- the macabre face -- so beautifully resembles a memento mori, the marvelous deathlike voice coming from the lovely blond head."

He might be a little head-over-heels for a Necro-Nico persona, but at least he's not gaga over gallbladders.

2006-10-15T02:21:00.000-07:00

Vinyl Tap: Aztec Camera

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #24:

Elvis Costello knows a thing or two about deserving left-of-the-dial artists and promising up-and-comers, from Robert Wyatt to early-day John Hiatt, who was introduced onstage once as “America’s best-kept secret.” So when Costello lavished praise upon Roddy Frame, the Scottish leader and sole mainstay of Aztec Camera, for being one of the best songwriters he had ever heard -- this after only the 1982 debut album, the superb High Land, Hard Rain -- you had to take more than a little note of this acoustically-driven and folkish pop-rock outfit, and of the finely-tuned craftsmanship of Frame's biting and biding romanticism.

By the time of the third release, the self-titled EP Aztec Camera (1985), the wunderkind Frame was also an accomplished live performer, as this five-song release attests. This collection of bipolar love songs for the bloodied but unbowed were -- except for one "mad impetuous fool"-type departure -- recorded in concert at the Dominion Theatre in London on October 16, 1984.

"The Bugle Sounds Again" may comprise the lone sliver from the debut LP, but it remains one of Frame's most richly melodic songs, couched in whisper-to-a-scream dynamics complementing the thematic restlessness and cold-feets-don't fail-me-now equivocation. The Romeo inclined toward the "nighthawk call" to "meeting after midnight like we do," is the same rambler whose fleeting notions of settling down is torn ablunder by the nagging call to "Grab that Gretsch before the truth hits town."

But then, "How come when I'm gone I get the blues?" In "Backwards and Forwards" from the too-polished Mark Knopfler-produced Knife (1984) - the rougher-edged and stronger-voiced live EP showcases Knifes' songcraft much more affectingly - the narrator seems to be swaying back again, bent to "the essence of my peers / Handshakes, hellos and golden years."

Is this the beginning -- as Aztec's second slice of Knife would put it -- of "The Birth Of The True"? As one line of this jaunty tune would aver to be ever thus: "I'd sack the world and make a second start," but moreover, in the realm of a more interpersonal affirmation: "Don't wipe your eyes over lies / Just let them shine their blue / On every whisper that welcomes the inconceivable / And the birth of the true."

In other words, "you've got to roll with the punches / to get to what's real." Which makes the inclusion here of a cheeky studio cover of Van Halen's precious-moments ultra-romantic song of endless love, "Jump," some kind of sense. In any case, it's a bit of deadpan fun to have Frame laconically invite us all to -- decidedly lower case and strictly optional, mind you -- "jump... you might as well..." (checks his watch) "jump..." The only thing really declarative and imperative is Frame's feedback-drenced but anti-Eddie guitar solo.

Nevertheless, as Frame sings in the EP's wistful original "Mattress Of Wire," "when you speak, I still hear the fire." That could apply to scorched-earth instrumental breaks, but it most certainly has implications for listeners of Aztec Camera. When Roddy Frame speaks - when he sings his own indelible and incandescent words and music - we always hear the fire.

2006-10-14T23:57:00.000-07:00

Vinyl Tap: Cheap Trick - Heaven Tonight

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #23:

If Cheap Trick’s assaultively exuberant Rockford from earlier this year is rightly considered a return to feisty form with its successful recapturing of the group’s late ‘70s gritty and giddy heyday, it’s worth a wayback-machine revisit to the power-pop pinnacle of that era, 1978’s classic Heaven Tonight.

So surrender, surrender – your post Dream Police heavy-handed-osity and insipid power ballad bombast have no powers here.

Actually, the triple-treat opening songs on Heaven Tonight, a trifecta of infectiousness replete with nooks and crannies of seemingly effortless hooks and handily executed songwriting craft leave you no choice but to acquiesce. “Surrender,” “On Top Of The World,” and “California Man” coalesce into swooning Beatle-esque duck-and-cover calls-and-response between lead singer Robin Zander, the backing vocals, and the solid guitar onslaughts and embellishments from the Huntz Hall of rock ‘n’ roll, Rick Nielsen.

Cheap Trick displays not only a deft canniness in covering “California Man” by the under-appreciated '60s U.K. band the Move – the immovable anti-Invasion group having resisted the force to tour America – they are playful enough to tuck in a couple sluggish riffs from the heavy metal-ish sludge-pit Brit hit “Brontosaurus” before moving on a couple songs later to the hard-edged blitzkrieg pop of “Auf Wiedersehen.”

Things verge on the menacing in the turgid and churning title song with its cautionary admonition that “you can never come down.” But close on the heels of this unsettling word to the unwise is the sassy smack of jagged effrontery of “Stiff Competition” in which – even though it’s a world where “I screw you, you screw me, they screw us” – we “have so much fun, so much fun / When we’re together.” Further along the pendulum swing is the almost toe-tappingly jaunty musical question “How Are You?”

To which tuning into the tuneful “On The Radio” may provide an answer. This marvelous bite of ear-candy – which fades out in ragged Small Faces-style glory with the not-so-dulcet tones of the Real Don Steele urging you to “go with it, go for it, go nuts, go completely wild!” – is not only a salute to “All of the rock ‘n roll DJs” who “play the songs that make you and me feel so good.” It also offers a little solace with each palliative pop pulsation that soothes with just the asking: “Hey, mister on the radio / Please play my favorite song / The one where she didn’t go away.”

An entreaty that could be as easily made to Cheap Trick, with similarly obliging and heartening consequences for a sublime slice of pop-rock heaven tonight.

2006-10-14T23:52:00.000-07:00

Liner Notables #1 - Steely Dan - Can't Buy A Thrill

Why, it seems like only yesterday [cue harp and wavy, out of focus visuals] when you could pore over an album's liner notes and not have to squint to garner an embarrassment of riches and a treasure trove of tidbits...

"The superlatives commonly found in liner notes are often as empty as the music they applaud. This is not the case on your new Steely Dan album."

Congratulations on your purchase. But how is one to ultimately construe this hyperbolic, damning-with-faint-praise insinuation from the liner notes of Can’t Buy A Thrill, Steely Dan’s 1972 debut album? Judging from a closer reading of the blurbal essence on the cover -- surely, any caveat emptor inapplicability strictly related to books, right? -- the PR-putsch as advertised is not as vacuous as the end product it heralds.

Whichever way your promotional bread is buttered, we’re not exactly talking high praise here, and some mischievous or misguided copywriter must certainly be out of a job. How do you ask such a question and still come out not smelling like it’s not all a ruse?

With the jazz-rock group Steely Dan, you don’t. These sly words, written by an apparent unknown and unusual suspect named Tristan Fabriani, are dubious in more ways than one. For one thing, it’s 1972 we‘re talking about, largely a time of liner note limbo. We’ve got a ways to go before the advent of the compact disc wreaks compacted squinty-eyed visual havoc with attempts in trying to decipher on a CD the credits and song titles, let alone any frills and flourishes.

And we’re beyond the ‘50s and mid-‘60s heyday of hoopla and hucksterism in which liner notes graced, or disgraced, albums with inartistic overstatement, a far commercial cry from today’s more subdued incarnation in artist commentary, usually on anthologies and retrospectives.

So when the expressed “crisp and exacting music of Steely Dan” was released during a transition from one promo-less era to another -- from one of late-'60s concept albums and overly-serious post-Sgt. Pepper pomposity, to faceless and polished corporate rock seen in groups like Journey and Foreigner (who didn’t even put group photographs on their albums' front covers), record buyers took notice. The sudden and audacious appearance of crassly and overtly promotional prose on their release of the up and coming pop-rock purveyors of “Do It Again” and “Reelin’ In The Years,” stuck out like T. Rex at a tea party.

The parodic tip off for all but the most cursory skimmer of record text might be the first line in the liner notes which states, “It has been said many times and in many ways that what the world needs now is another rock and roll band. This could very well be the one of which the pundits spoke.”

If the gullible or careless came through that conundrum intact, thinking it matter of fact, he or she may cluelessly wade through the what seems to be standard if slightly awry (the “illustrious ‘Ultimate Spinach,’” anyone?) group member introductions and credits, including those of the core founders and mainstays, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen.

Then there’s this stone wall of a not-too-idle boast, antithetical to the previous claim of anonymity: “As is so rarely the case, the whole of Steely Dan is greater than the sum of its parts, and the newly formed amalgam threatens to undermine the foundations of the rock power elite.”

Oh my. Pretty arrogant for a group we've never heard of before, and one with just Thrill barely in the record bins. Moreoever, because “tradition and experimentation reign side by side,” Steely Dan’s versatility, as the off-kilter commentary continues, tends “to run the gamut of musical expression” from “pastoral lyricism” to "urban Sturm and Drang" to “frank, industrial-grade polish.” “And so on,” of course.

Promises all executed with such aptitude, too -- but you can just about feel about your own tongue lodge in-cheek with the eyes-wide-open exclamation, “dig those startling high-register bass effects on the final cadence of ‘Heartbeat!’”

"Thus treads heavily the titanic Steely Dan, casting a long shadow upon the contemporary rock wasteland," concludes the over-the-top remarks, nonetheless topping all that came before, "aspiring to spill its seed on barren ground, and at the same time, struggling to make sense out of the flotsam and jetsam of its eclectic musical heritage. With a solid first album under its belt, and with an ever-expanding reputation as a dynamic performing group, it would appear that the Dan's place on the American musical scene is assured."

Well, that's how it turned out to some extent, save the expectations as a performing group, dynamic or not And it also turned out that Tristan Fabriani, the liner notes' writer -- or better yet, perpetrator -- was Fagen himself, using a pseudonym from his days as backup musician for Jay and the Americans in the '60s (Becker was Gustav Mahler). He and Becker still aren't averse to raising a little fuss and ruckus when opportunity breaks down the door, as shown recently on Steely Dan’s website by some facetious allegations against a new movie. Sometimes you just can't pass up those thrills.

2006-10-14T23:44:00.000-07:00

Liner Notables #2: The Best of Love

Why, it seems like only yesterday [cue harp and wavy, out of focus visuals] when you could pore over an album's liner notes and not have to squint to garner an embarrassment of riches and a treasure trove of tidbits...

I guess if you’re going to pontificate and opine about the late Arthur Lee and Love, it may be more de rigueur to delve into the 24 pages of commentary that accompanies the 2001 expanded "deluxe" reissue of Forever Changes from 1967, a classic blend of psychedelia-tinged folk-rock.

Trouble is, I don’t own a copy. But moreover, any Love album that doesn’t have the great and sonically astounding pre-punk adrenalin rush that is “Seven and Seven Is” calls attention to the fact that it doesn’t have the great and sonically astounding pre-punk adrenalin rush that is “Seven and Seven Is.” That it is, therefore, too unrepresentative and lacking.

That "Seven"-graced album of note would be Da Capo, from earlier in ‘67. But since The Best of Love incorporates that earlier synapse-singeing single with songs from Forever Changes and from such other albums as the self-titled 1966 debut (with its tragically catchy oldies staple, a cover of the Bacharach/David’s “My Little Red Book”), I’m going to go with the liner notes from the 1980 Rhino compilation, the one-stop Love shopping LP that addresses most of my multi-album needs.

The liner notes of The Best of Love are comprised of contributions from a few Love connections, plus Lee himself. First up, Bruce Botnick, engineer of most of Love’s first three albums and producer of Forever Changes (originally planned with Neil Young as co-producer) gets right to the heart of Lee’s eccentricities and their effects on the band and the music. “He was real unusual,” notes Botnick, “on acid 24 hours a day. In fact, everybody is the band was out of it.”

Botnick goes on to recount a psychological ploy he used to get the undisciplined and increasingly unfocused group motivated during the Forever Changes sessions, including but not limited to the move of bringing in prominent studio musicians such as Hal Blaine and Billy Strange. Before this strategy got too entrenched, however, Love rallied: “The band was so shocked, so put out, so hurt, that it caused them to forget about their problems and become a band again.” Stoned and spaced-out rock stars need love, too.

Unfortunately Botnick eventually came to see the band's decline, the lack of “the craziness and rawness” that was Love as their passion disintegrated to the point where Lee “eventually formed a new Love.” But Botnick did get in more than a few fondly-remembered Forever flourishes while he could, such as is described in his declaration that the mariachi feel on Bryan Maclean’s distinctive “Alone Again Or” was a carry-over inspiration from Botnick’s work with the Tijuana Brass.

Then Botnick concludes with an apt summary of those impulsive, make-it-up-as-you-go-along times:

At that time there weren’t any precedents for anybody. There weren’t your star musicians of rock ’n’ roll that everyone felt necessary to conform to. So everybody just played. It was music from your brain, from your heart.That’s why it was so great.It’s the kind of experimental, impromptu spirit that led to “Seven and Seven Is,“ which, as Botnick remembers, was a “hellish thing to play,” capped off toward the blues-based end with “an atom bomb blast which a friend of mine recorded in Nevada.” Jac Holzman, president of Elektra who first signed Love, goes on in his portion of the liner notes to recall other "Seven" innovations and problems, not the least of which was the unheard-of belief that “the song had almost too much energy.”

(It also had its share of surreal but evocative "float downstream" lyrics: "Through a crack of light I was unable to find my way / Trapped inside a night but I'm a day and I go
Oop-ip-ip oop-ip-ip, yeah!" But whatever quirks of the song and snags in recording, it was well worth the painstaking effort, and such a frenzied and frantic execution, unusual for the era, must be heard to be believed.)

However, such a casual musical camaraderie as Botnick describes can turn quickly competitive, as Holzman points out in his contention that more than a little resentment started to eat away at “the charming and uncommonly smart” but enigmatic Lee when he perceived other groups, such as the Doors, the Leaves, and the Music Machine, co-opting Love’s style and going on to have bigger hits.

But as Lee himself expands upon the notion, there were a lot of indoor fireworks causing Love to tear itself apart, and whatever success they gained was soon lost of their own accord, or disaccord, as it were: “After we started making money, the more we made, the less we worked, the less we were a unit, and Love deteriorated.”

The inevitable downward spiral kicked in when “People’s personal habits started to come before the music.” Big egos weren't left at the studio door, material possessions weren't left unimagined or unattained -- but Lee didn’t merely fingerpoint and leave himself out of the fray and fraying remnants: "Money spoiled them -- it spoiled me too. It was a strange time. I thought I was gonna kick the bucket. But you still gotta keep on.”

Something the erratic Lee did with uneven and sporadic results until dying of leukemia August 3.

2006-10-14T23:42:00.000-07:00

Vinyl Tap: Tom Waits - Rain Dogs

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #22:

People who live outdoors. You know how after the rain you see all these dogs that seem lost, wandering around. The rain washes away all their scent, all their direction. So all the people on the album are knit together, by some corporeal way of sharing pain and discomfort.

Back in the mists of time -- the '80s -- I was entering the lobby of the Wiltern Theater one of the five nights Elvis Costello and the Attractions were putting on their “Spinning Wheel” concerts. The shows comprised full-on festivities with all the festooned trimmings, as go-go dancers in cages frugged away amid a carnival-like atmosphere in a bright, colorful setting replete with props -- the main one being a giant spinning wheel with a considerable assortment of Costello-penned song titles radiating out like rays of angry-young-man angst, alienation, and smart pop perfection.

A hands-down bar-none Barnum fun zone, a splendid time was guaranteed for all -- especially since there was to be surprise celebrity moderators to randomly draw audience members’ names from a big drum. Where she stops nobody knows, but when she stops, the luckily picked pickee comes up onto the stage with much hoopla and confetti.

Anyway, when I walked into the lobby of the Wiltern, there was Tom Waits surrounded by some orbiting and over-zealous fans. As it would turn out, he was to serve as the evening’s master of ceremonies, in more of a carnival barker mode -- a perfect choice, given the crass hard sell huckster persona he assumed in Small Change’s “Step Right Up,” in which he promises all sorts of unlikely miracles and marvels, though inevitably, “The large print giveth and the small print taketh away”: "That's right, it filets, it chops/ It dices, slices, never stops/ lasts a lifetime, mows your lawn..."

Waits didn’t look especially happy about the surround-sound mini-mob. I wanted to meet him but I also didn't want to be just another jerk taking up his time -- I wanted to be the only jerk taking up his time. But before I kept walking on, he noted my hesitation and caught my eye, subtly nodding his head as if to invite me over. Emboldened and feeling a bit brazen as I was seemingly being summoned, I walked around to the other side and he took this occasion to turn from the crowd to greet me while the other fans got the hint and dispersed.

Needless to say, I was flummoxed and faltering: Waits reached out and shook my hand, and I slack-jaw-yokeled something aw-shucks-like about being a big-time fan -- duh, yup yup -- and he said in his gargling-with-gravel-and-ground-glass mellifluousness, "Thanks, man." I would like to think, and there was reason to believe, that he was also thanking me for extricating him from loitering lingerers and malingerers -- audiophile philistines all!-- but I'm not sure.

I did get the impression I could've probably stayed to talk with him -- maybe we could have not only talked about the weather but we would’ve hashed out some solutions on what to do about it, dammit. But I was so flustered that what passes for a thought process within me shut down all communication skills. My brain seemed to have imploded -- an entire synapse grid shut down. Whatta maroon!

At least Waits didn't turn away from me as a newer batch of fans approached him from the other side...

Anyway, I brought that same kind of circumspect wariness to my initial listen of 1985’s Rain Dogs -- 19 songs and 54 minutes seemed daunting in those pre-CD days -- but it wasn’t long before Waits’ music, like the man himself, had pulled me into the welcoming gravitational pull.

In any case, I knew to expect again the unexpected once more. The surreal soundscape was part and parcel of the admirably drastic and wholesale transition signaled two years earlier by his idiosyncratically fractured and startling Swordfishtrombone, which marked Waits’ complete transformation from Beatnik barfly to Beefheartian partisan, lyrically wry and musically haunting.

Waits’ great leap inward was further and more fully realized with Rain Dogs -- alternately harrowing and heartfelt, colored with quirky creativity throughout, but dotted with some relenting poignancy here and there. Furthermore, Waits’ uniquely inventive and imaginative fever-dream evocation is fueled by his ever-stellar melodic sense and rhythmic pulse, and by the heady impulse of the stream-of-loquaciousness lyrics sung. Or, in the case of the narrated "9th and Hennepin," spoken:

She has that razor sadness that only gets worse
With the clang and the thunder of the Southern Pacific going by
And the clock ticks out like a dripping faucet
'til you're full of rag water and bitters and blue ruin
And you spill out over the side to anyone who will listen...
And I've seen it all, I've seen it all
Through the yellow windows of the evening train...

Some of the credit for the power and cohesiveness of such songs, and the particular brand of insinuating but accessible cacophony, is due to the addition this time around of guitarist Mark Ribot, his angular and spiky punctuation perfectly complementing the quirky intonations and backbeats of Rain Dogs.

Packing a subtle counterpunch, Ribot helps Waits set the album’s tone right away in the first song, “Singapore.” Set against otherworldly percussion, an adventurous and escapist mood permeates within and beyond the confines of the track itself:

We sail tonight for Singapore,
we're all as mad as hatters here
I've fallen for a tawny Moor,
took off to the land of Nod
Drank with all the Chinamen,
walked the sewers of Paris
I danced along a colored wind,
dangled from a rope of sand
You must say goodbye to me

Such insidious intent, of the poetic and visceral kind, encroaches on the three-ring sonic- hell circus of the next two songs, “Clap Hands” and “Cemetery Polka,” as it does elsewhere on Rain Dogs.

As enthralling and perversely disturbing as these kind of potentially claustrophobic Munch-ian psyche-screamers can be, Waits varies his approach with diversionary but captivating songs. Blaring, bluesy and blowsy raucousness drives “Union Square” and “Big Black Mariah,” and in the swaggering “Walking Spanish," “even Jesus wanted a little more time/ When he was walking Spanish down the hall.”

“Blind Love” is a country-ish crying-in-your-beer lament that wouldn’t sound out of place in the big, hundred-year old roadhouse in Northern California which Waits frequents (I was never fortunate to see him when I lived in the area -- you know, what with the restraining order and all).

Now the street's turning blue, the dogs are barking and the night has come
And there's tears that are falling from your blue eyes now
I wonder where you are and I whisper your name
The only way to find you is if I close my eyes.

Waits slows down even more with the most accessible and affectingly melodic songs on Rain Dogs. Rod Stewart had a hit with the wonderfully resonant and romantic “Downtown Train,” but Waits brings an extra touch of insistent yearning and melancholy in his plea, "Will I see you tonight on a downtown train?"

The stark and forlorn "Time" showcases again Waits' strength as a lyricist who can be as poignant as he can be provocative, even when it comes to simply words on a page, with no music.

Well the smart money's on Harlow and the moon is in the street
And the shadow boys are breaking all the laws
And you're east of East Saint Louis and the wind is making speeches
And the rain sounds like a round of applause.

Of course, as evidenced by the lovely and wistful "Hang Down Your Head," Waits is enough of an accomplished and careful craftsman and truth-seeker to find and express the perfect emotion, the ideal blend of both words and music.

"Hush, you're in a story I heard somebody told," the singer in "Hang" says. And he or she could be talking about something written by Waits, who would know the tale to be true and know it by heart. Especially one recounted in this 1985 release. "For," Waits sings in the title song, "I am a rain dog, too."

2006-10-14T23:02:00.000-07:00

Satire: Steely Dan Have Tongues Surgically Dislodged From Cheeks, Proclaim "We're More Popular Than The Beatles!"

"It just couldn't be / And only a fool would say that..."

The 2000 Steely Dan album Two Against Nature might constitute a bit of a misnomer. After a scandalous and health-related in-your-face brouhaha today that saw the jazz-rock group all-too-publicly proclaiming they are “more popular than the Beatles” -- this incident quick on the heels of recent allegations made on Steely Dan's website against a new, perceived 'Dan-centric' movie -- perhaps a more suitable album title would have been Two Against Human Nature.

With the onset of medical complications following surgery that separated each of their congenitally conjoined cheeks and tongues -- a lifelong tongue-in-cheek affliction that nonetheless helped shape and infuse their perverse personalities and archly ironic songs -- Steely Dan main men Walter Becker and Donald Fagen showed the world they still had some surprises in store.

But to their fans and anyone familiar with their reclusive and standoffish ways, the writers of such hits as “Peg” and “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” and the core musicians responsible for the albums Pretzel Logic and Aja, the last thing anyone expected from Becker and Fagen was a lot of stentorian lung power and unexpected athletic prowess. Which was about the nicest things to be said when the two uncharacteristically -- and seemingly in astounding earnestness -- sprinted through Boston's crowded Logan Airport, blissfully and, to many, blasphemously proclaiming again and again, "We’re more popular than the Beatles! We’re more popular than the Beatles!"

Chaos at the airport ensued as people scrambled for cover, parents shielded their children, security personnel took early lunches, and shoe-bombers boarded planes.

Word quickly spread more publicly, with heated reaction close behind, about the new and not-quite-improved -- and definitely delusional -- change in the hitherto cynical and malcontented mainstays who comprise the Grammy-winning jazz rock group. A firestorm of controversy ensued as radio station programmers refused to play any Steely Dan songs, more Beatles songs taking up the sonic slack. One popular disc jockey broke all copies of Steely Dan’s records and CDs live on the air, saying, "This Steely Dan must be banned!"

TV personalities organized "Bonfires of Vanity" and “Vinyl Resolutions” inviting the community to “pack up all your cares and woe” -- all Steely Dan music, books, videos, DVDs -- and “perish all thoughts” by casting “the has-beens from the cut-out bin to the ashbin.” There seemed to be special interest in watching the incineration of Steely Dan's most recent album, 2003's Everything Must Go. "You mean 'everything must go…up in smoke!'" was heard more than a few times.

In addition, a local elementary school principal called on parents and teachers to collect from their children and students all Steely Dan records "so we can fan the flames of Fab Four-dom forever by fouling the air with the a Steely stench"; in an unprecedented move, the Environmental Protection Agency authorized a pollution waiver, issuing a statement contending that “A variance in the name of Beatle-hood is no vice, and compliance in the name of Steely-Danism is no virtue.”

Rounding out the onslaught of activism, protesters were also quick to form picket lines in front of Reprise Records, the label for which Steely Dan records. In a hasty counter-maneuver, the chagrined but scrappy company reminded the picketers of Reprise’s “close association” with the estate of the company’s founder, Frank Sinatra, intimating an “organized and continuing legacy” and “connections in regard to certain elements of society who could still get certain things done…if you get our drift.”

Subsequent monitoring of the picketers showed a dwindling force, but the ones that stayed displayed an added determination as they held aloft such signs that read “Any Major Dude Will Tell You: You, Sir, Are No Beatles!” and -- in an allusion to a song off 1975's Katy Lied -- “Are You Crazy, Are You High?”

Getting Nowhere, Man

Clearly, Becker and Fagen are no longer, as the song expresses, "ordinary guys." Well, they never really were in the first place, even when they performed with Jay and the Americans in the 1960s. And of course, that weekend at the college didn't turn out like they planned.

What did happen, though, since they've never left their eccentricities at the studio door -- or any other door -- for the matter, is that now they’re being viewed as, in the words of one TV self-help wag, "differently-unordinary." They're rebels and they'll never ever be any good, but that doesn't mean that the ultimately vulnerable Becker and Fagen are impervious to a few societal salvos to the system, jolts that, according to their physician, Dr. Wu Wu, denote "a profound psychological change that is at the heart of the current turmoil."

In an unusual coincidence, Wu elucidated, “both of these musical artists had been burdened since birth by a congenital affliction in which, lacking new technology, their tongues were virtually fated to stay permanently planted in their cheeks." However, with the advent of new surgical techniques, the miracle of modern science has come "to the rescue of wise guys and smart-asses everywhere," including Becker and Fagen, who underwent the operation last week and were released from the hospital three days ago.

But why did Becker and Fagen have such a bad reaction? Why the over-the-top, erratic behavior, overweening arrogance and ecstatic delirium? "The trouble stems from a maladjustment and insufficient recuperation,” Dr. Wu explains. “These particular patients prematurely abandoned the needed bed rest for libations, sensations that stagger the mind, and to see if their hotel room trashing skills were still intact."

As Wu goes on to detail, "When the recovery period is rushed, as it was in this case, an imbalance of precious bodily fluids occurs as the new burgeoning sense of earnestness and an irony-impaired outlook rejects or conflicts with the gradual release of the over 50-year build-up of contents-under-pressure -- if you will -- fear, loathing, neurosis and low self esteem." It's a sad state of demon-wrestling affairs, Wu pointedly asserts -- they're really just the shadows of the men that we once knew.

"This may be the year of Steely Dan’s ‘expanding man,’ whatever that is," Wu days, "but the expanding man must take baby steps. Otherwise it’s a baby man taking expanding steps, which is tantamount self-deception and thinking they’re better than the Beatles. And that’ll get you nowhere, man, just -- you know, sitting in your nowhere land, making nowhere plans for nobody. Put that in your pipe dreams..."

Sinners In The Hands Of Four Angry Rock Gods

Clearly, a shocked and bewildered public reaction over this fab four faux pas signals the uneasiness and conflicting feelings of Americans confronted by this breach in the time-honored separation of the powers of Beatle-dom and “Every Other Musical Artist Or Group On the Face Of The Earth” (in a blanket 1967 Supreme Court ruling, all British Invasion pop/rock groups were granted amnesty whether they wanted it or not -- and subsequent legal citizenship, though the United States has been “a bit too busy” lately to tell England, and is still “looking for the right time, okay?”).

Adding to the complexity of the issue, according to the wildly popular Blogcynics.com website, many in the record-buying public largely prefer their intake of Steely Dan sardonicism “straight up, no chaser,” but are nevertheless fans of both groups. That is, says another completely objective and impartial industry observer (“no really, some of my best friends are ’Dan fans”), as long as “these Steely Dan people know their place.”

Burgeoning tensions aside, the blatant and audacious nature of Becker and Fagen’s assault on the delicate sensibilities of many Mop-Topians has triggered swiftly-marshaled and widespread resistance that begs for corrective measures to tip back the musical scales to its traditional Beatle-favored position. Stemming from Steely Dan’s perceived potshot heard ‘round the world, this delicate and now-disturbed balance of power pop-rock, especially vulnerable in this in-one-era-and-out-the-other dearth of compelling or sustaining musical movements, demands the perspective and proactive impetus afforded by the community of Beatle know-it-alls and Merseyside movers-and-shakers, aided by the rational guidance and expertise from authoritative music historians and scholars.

Then again, emotionalism and venting is good, too: “Our Guitars Not-So-Gently Weep over this mockery,” states local Beatles Fan Club president Carrie Thatwate when disdainfully discussing Becker and Fagen, “whoever they are and whatever a Steely Dan is! Sounds like something they made up -- self-serving nonsense that serves no functional purpose whatsoever!”

Climaxing her comments, this avowed “Beatles Fan’s Beatles Fan” passionately continued on, and though almost getting off topic now and then, she ultimately spent a disproportionate amount of time on her central concern, with special emphasis, on what is Uppermost in the Uppercase mind of one who Tends To Talk In Caps: “These Sinners In The Hands Of Four Angry Rock Gods Are Sullying The Beloved And Sacrosanct Beatles Soundtrack Of My Life And Many Other’s Lives…undermining the Beatles’ status as spokes-group -- minus Ringo, naturally."

The attempt to come to terms with the various strands of connotations and convolutions triggered by the unseemly sight of psychotically happy yet arrogant bastards full of the milk of human kindness -- after thirty on-and-off years of sourly crying over spilled milk -- may not be for the faint of heart. And to be sure, “Any World That I’m Welcome To (Is Better Than The One I Come From)” is a great Steely Dan sentiment as well as song -- one of their best -- but there seems to be growing evidence that Becker and Fagen's "new" sensibilities are blinding them to a growing consensus among the stonewalling public who are setting up obstacles to impede any inroads the "new" Steely sensibilities might allow them to seek. The welcome wagon doesn't stop here, boys, you are no longer freeway close to your once-adoring fans.

Becker and Fagen need to understand that going from a down-with-people world to a full-on "Up With People" one is not a good career move for the un-dynamic anti-duo. There wasn’t even an intermediate stage -- a Fed-Up-With Uppity-People stage -- that would’ve made for a more tolerable and gradual transition to buffer the blow.

"They were smiling, but in a weird Uncle way..."

As far as the particulars of the events leading to the rock ‘n’ shock felt worldwide, details are still being pieced together from eyewitness accounts. According to Boston postal worker Clifford C. "Cliff" Clavin, Jr., at the airport to pick up his mother and another mail order bride, "The chain of events, you see, caused what you would call your lapsus calami to become lapsus linguae, and with other calamitous controversies evidently falling into the lapsus of...hey, where're you going? -- I'm not finished!

One nine-year old girl, Vera Chukandave, was frightened to tears. "They were smiling, but in a weird Uncle way -- it really creeped me out!” Business traveler Quando Paramucho sat at a bench shaking after the Dans had earlier passed by. "It reminded me of Richard Simmons, or that old Wham! video -- you know, 'wake me up before you go-go’”?

Paramucho shuddered as he followed up, “Please tell me we won‘t be seeing Donald Fagen and Walter Becker blubbering and dressing in tank tops and shorts, or that they‘ll end up like Michael George, touring the world's public toilets instead of concert halls.” With added emphasis he pondered, at a loss: “More popular than the Beatles? Why in the name of all that is good and true and not the Rolling Stones would they say such an awful thing?”

Why indeed? We took our soapbox and hit the road.

Steely Dan T-Shirt or Corporation T-Shirt, Stupid Bloody Tuesday?

"Well, I’m the biggest Steely Dan fan in the world, or, well… I used to be. Hell, I don’t know -- I just don't know what to think," says truck driver Sawyer Filmtuday. "Oh Boy," he goes on, "this is such a kick in the teeth. I even belong to a fan club, too, if you can believe that -- 'the 'Danatics,' we call ourselves. Got the Steely Dan T-shirts, too -- but hey, who didn't"?

It did indeed seem like every fan of the jazz-rock smoothies Steely Dan had been there and done that and got the T-shirt. Or actually, would've been there and done that if the leisurely lollygagging studio-bound creatures-of habitual OCD perfectionism hadn't stopped being everywhere and doing everything for years at a time. Still, Filmtuday is hanging in there for now, until it becomes more comprehensible as to how this crisis of confidence will play out -- perhaps there will be a better indication later in the day after a scheduled news conference by the so-called “terrible two.”

In the meantime, Maxwell not only has his Steely Dan T-shirt, he has dozens of Steely Dan T-shirts, including the lucky Steely Dan T-shirt he’s wearing now, the one depicting the cover of Aja, which is virtually all black. And since what little color there was at one time on the shirt has since run together, it looks just like an ordinary black T-shirt. That costs twice as much. And which may end up being cast into one of the many bonfire infernos raging across the city with increased intensity and greater frequency.

"Well, at least I like the Beatles, too," Filmtuday adds. "And who knows, maybe I’ll be wearing one of their shirts in solidarity. I have one that packs a Walrus-wallop with ’Corporation tee-shirt, stupid bloody Tuesday’ emblazoned on the front. And tomorrow’s Tuesday. This better get sorted out before then, or I won't know who to wear."

“Our children are the future,“ says one outraged father, Maxwell Edison, as he braves the smoke and fumes at one of the “Bonfire of Vanity” confab conflagrations, wielding a silver hammer to smash scores of old eight-track tapes; among the splintered and shattered cartridges one can make out such classics as Countdown to Ecstasy, Katy Lied, and Pretzel Logic.

Maxwell continued, "We have to protect any and all kids -- well, maybe not those snotty show-biz kids making movies of themselves. I hear they don’t give a f**k about anybody else -- those kind are not the future. But we need to shelter the ones we don't kill from the likes of these so-called jazz-rock vermin who can't even decide if they're jazz or rock. I mean, come on -- pick a genre and stick to it, guys!

Just then, Maxwell's wife Polly -- you could say she’s attractively built -- along with daughters Athena and Pam, creeps up from behind. "Or, better yet," Polly interjects, "they should just break up and take that long winding road to oblivion so our children can have a future -- did you tell him about that, Max? -- without the likes of these so-oh-oh-oh lazy bums who take fifteen years to release an album, and then when they do, they put out like three within eight years! You can't tell me there's no drugs involved -- some role models for our kids, who, I hope you know, are the futu..."

The rumble of a big Warner Bros./Reprise Records truck drowns out Polly’s voice. The driver gets out to unload the "writing on the wall," so to speak -- Steely Dan albums, tapes and CDs, pallet after pallet, carton after carton. “Meet the new box, same as the old box,” he quips quite cheerfully, although the company he works for is taking a considerable hit -- a problem that may jeopardize his job.

Can he afford to be so happy? "Oh, sure. Everything will work out fine. Those guys, Becker and Fagen, have been around for over thirty years of disbanding and solo releases and reuniting time and again. They go 'round and 'round and they always come out better than ever.”

Lowering his voice, he continues to confide, “This whole mess is just a bump in the road, a misunderstanding -- but it'll make 'em better than ever. You'll see, the Dansters are gonna be having a press conference later on that'll clear it all up -- they'll explain, apologize, and land on their feet, just like the hep cats they are."

Do Steely Dan have more lives in them, though? Only time, and forthcoming updates will tell…

2006-10-14T22:59:00.000-07:00

CD Review: Fiona Apple - When The Pawn... - A Look Back

As if bursting from the CD jewel case, the musical and sonic marvel and melancholy of Fiona Apple’s second release spills over to the official 90-word poem-turned title:

When The Pawn Hits The Conflicts He Thinks Like A King
What He Knows Throws The Blows When He Goes To The Fight
And He'll Win The Whole Thing 'Fore He Enters The Ring
There's No Body To Batter When Your Mind Is Your Might
So When You Go Solo, You Hold Your Own Hand
And Remember That Depth Is The Greatest Of Heights
And If You Know Where You Stand, Then You Know Where To Land
And If You Fall It Won't Matter, Cuz You'll Know That You're Right

Cue the go-with-yourself idiosyncratic and independent spirit variously but resiliently shadowboxing with reality and relationships, while other forces try to shout down self-doubt. But there's a little more to it here, more dimensionality than was found on Apple's 1996 debut album, Tidal, which, while featuring some compelling songs such as "Criminal" and "Sleep To Dream" -- couched in beyond-her-years sultry vocals -- was marked by some over-reaching lyrical preciousness. All part and parcel to being wide-eyed and 18, but all the more remarkable for it.

Tidal, then, constituted the advent of a promising career for the prodigious, piano-pounding talent. The quantum artistic leaps and bounds displayed only a few years later on 1999's When The Pawn were enormous and largely unexpected, marking a cohesive gamut-sprinting breadth and depth and a sophistication perfectly complemented with the elegant and multi-layered production of studio wiz Jon Brion (Aimee Mann, Rufus Wainwright, David Byrne, the Eels). With a drop in comparative sales, however, When the Pawn made for a commercial disappointment; the sophomore jinx held in that regard. But, to quote Apple from last year's long-awaited superb straggler Extraordinary Machine: "Oh Well." I suspect the early fair-weather fickle fans, unable to handle a rewarding challenge, were not much missed.

Thematically, When The Pawn, as an absolutely stunning album of assorted and sundry tales of love formed and torn asunder, emerged from the one-note sullen-girl sulk-fests to embrace a fuller emotional spectrum while sustaining the visceral confessional facets of Tidal. In the tempo-tossed "Fast as You Can" (niftily exemplifying "To Your Love's" word-picture "chugging along to the song that belongs to the shifting of gears"), Apple avers that “I’ll drown in the wonders and the was,” assuring us that not only can the introspective titular (about 59 words in) Depths indeed be the Greatest of Heights, this is one artist unafraid to strap on wings and ascend to the sun -- an Icarian image suggested by "Fast's" allusion: "And for a little while more / I'll soar the / uneven wind, contain and blame / The sterile land."

Displaying wit even in her woe, an incisive and often paradoxical Apple survives and lives to tell the tales with poetic, passionate intensity in quirkily unconventional and evocative language. From "To Your Love": "My derring-do allows me to dance the rigadoon / Around you / But by the time I'm close to you, I lose / My desideratum and now you..."

This kind of recklessness also sees Apple's finely-honed songwriting craftsmanship somehow -- it's a subtle circumvention at play here -- eluding for the most part any pervading insinuation of forced affectation or mope-and-cope shoe-gazing surrender. Apple won't be pinned down and pegged: She can implore that the object of her disaffection not "be down when my demeanor seems to disappoint / It's hard enough even to be civil to myself" ("To Your Love"). But a few songs later, she's almost gleefully acquired "a taste for the well-made mistake," as she rallies and moves on in a refreshingly cavalier and carefree fashion: "I'm gonna fuck it up again / I'm gonna do another detour / Unpave my path."

But no matter how much you may want to cover your tracks, that new path might be as circular as it is scenic, leading you back to square one. In When the Pawn's powerfully propulsive first cut, "On The Bound," the more metaphoric first cut runs deepest in an unflinching tone that seemingly makes up Apple's default tenor: "It's true, I do imbue my blue unto myself / I make it bitter" -- and by the last line we've hit rock bottom as an apparent defeatist defines herself abjectly, wearily and warily intoning, "Baby say that it's all gonna be alright / I believe that it isn't."

Sometimes, nevertheless, the bitter is sweet, if short lived, and this sense of contrariness and pessimism sounds nothing like the blithe pop spirit of "Paper Bag," with its infectious, lilting melody set to a shuffle rhythm, and topped with wistful but ultimately dashed hopes for a new love "whose reality I knew, was a hopeless to be had." With "Paper Bag's" bleak outlook hemmed and hawed to perpetual impasse -- in "The Way Things Are" Apple bemoans that "I wouldn't know what to do with another chance / If you gave it to me" -- it doesn't take too long for self-fulfilling prophecies to profit not:

Tough nut to crack, and this is only the emotive pendulum swing at mid-stroke. "All my life is on me now, hail the pages turning / And the future's on the bound, hell don't know my fury," Apple ferociously sings in "On the Bound." And you believe her when she warns, "My pretty mouth will frame the phrases that will / Disprove your faith in man" (Fast As You Can.)

But this woman scorned can take it to the limit — and we're not talking about merely being careless with a delicate man. In the scathing powerhouse "Get Gone," Apple sends the guy packing — no doubt he deserved it — but if she is the one left with cares and woes, her dignity's intact: "There's nothing left to grieve / Fuckin go- / Cuz I've done what I could for you, and I do know what's / Good for me..."

Good for her. Not so good for the miscreant in in "Limp." This little ditty of anti-mellow derision is not your mother’s school of confessional singer-songwriter sensitivity. It's a different kind of touchy-feelie emotion, more menacing and venomous, as Apple bristles:

Ah, good times, good times...

On a much different note and slower-paced, the wondrously tender ballad "Love Ridden" engenders from separation and regret a resonance that lingers long after the last tender tendril of misgiving falls away: "I want your warm, but it will only make / Me colder when it's over." The expressive emotion in Apple's voice conveys as much heartbreak as the words, gradually recounting and revealing a scenario wherein "I stood too long in the way of the door / And now I'm giving up on you."

The last song on When The Pawn is the torchy and transcendent slow-crawl "I Know." "So be it, I'm your crowbar / If that's what I am so far," Apple begins, as if she personifies some Donne-like metaphysical conceit. But as this highly affecting song, and the album in general, is reflective of true-life troubles and transitions going on in Apple's life at the time, any artifice soon gives way to realities: "Baby — I can't help you out, while she's still around." Entreaties and expressions of solace and sorrow fill in the picture as Apple avows that "you can use my skin / To bury secrets in / And I will settle you down."

Little comfort, perhaps, as an absolutely heart-melting and poignant — almost ineffably melancholic — melodic twist at the end signals disenchantment writ large, writ loved and lost: "And if it gets too late, for me to wait / For you to find you love me, and tell me so / It's okay, don't need to say it."

Another one "gets gone," leaving Fiona Apple stronger and more stoic than ever, "sitting singing again, singing again..." And that can be extraordinary.

2006-10-14T22:57:00.000-07:00

Vinyl Tap: The Beatles - A Hard Day's Night

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #21:

For something that was such a no-brainer, Beatlemania wasn’t always an instantaneous phenomenon. I played a little hard to get in 1964, but only for a little while.

The first inkling of something fabbish and four-ish flourishing in the proximity of my nine-year old consciousness came in the mail with Life magazine’s cover story of strange beings from planet Liverpool -- whatever that was -- coming to America to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show (to be squeezed in, no doubt, between Senor Wences’ creepy blonde-wigged hand-puppet act and yet another plate-spinner performance). I hadn’t even heard their music yet, but I was making uninformed, hasty judgements: Just the sight of this group -- vaguely menacing, somehow -- with the outrageously long hair and carefree air they assumed, provoked me to mar the mag and by extension deface the music as I picked up some colored markers to embellish with Groucho-style glasses, mustache and nose and such, Life's photos of these...these...so-called Beatles. And what kind of name is that, anyway?

I wasn’t alone with this knee-jerk sense of disdain and perplexity. The reaction from most adults I knew, including my parents, grandmother, and other family friends and neighbors, ranged from bemusement to uptight trepidation. And so it was easy to excuse my well-meaning mother when she bought (for 88 cents at the supermarket yet!) what she thought was a Beatles album, but was in actuality a deceptive rip-off LP by the Buggs (small print) playing songs with -- BIG BOLD PRINT -- “The BEATLES Beat!”

And it was equally amusing to poke fun at the two teenage girls at the end of our cul-de-sac who made a daily practice of sitting in their T-Bird convertible with the top down (the car’s top, alas), blasting the car radio to full Spinal Tapian volume whenever a Beatles song came on. With three Los Angeles AM pop stations from which to pick and choose -- KRLA, KFWB and “Boss Radio” KHJ -- it wasn’t surprising to tune into a Beatles song every few minutes (“KRLA Exclusive…KRLA Exclusive…” came the whispered but unmistakable clarion call announcing newly-released singles).

Between listening in on these certain-to-be high school hellion's requisite top-of-their-lungs Beatlemania scream fest, and my own incipient radio listening (even surreptitiously under-covers at night), I got a good taste of the ear candy changing the face of the pop-music world. Though I didn’t much take to the sweets of “I Want You Hold Your Hand” and even the better-yet “She Loves You,” I was immediately converted when I heard the wallop-packing “Please Please Me” -- which actually pre-dates the aforementioned singles. That was the clincher for me: the infectious tune, the harmonies, and the wordplay that always attracted me, then as now.

The floodgates were now open as recalcitrance turned quickly to capitulation; brilliant song after song sonically sapped all resistance as I willingly started to swim with the manic pop tide: “All I’ve Got To Do,” “Hold Me Tight,” “Not A Second Time,” "All My Loving," "Thank You Girl," "You Can't Do That," “It Won’t Be Long"...

And it wasn’t too long until the Beatles’ first movie, A Hard Day’s Night, came to the local Corbin Theater. Thirty-five cents gave a jam-packed haven-full of kids and teens right of way to a cinematic slice of pop heaven. The movie kicked off in a sudden and loud thunderbolt as the lights dimmed and the title song’s opening guitar chime by George Harrison (the quiet one -- hah!), burst forth, with a resultant rush of exhilarating immediacy sweeping over me and every single true believer in the theater. Furthermore, I swore I could single out among the cheers and screams my cul-de-sac teen contingent of burgeoning Beatlemaniacs.

The generously music-filled comedy simply triggered some of the most horripilating glee I’ve ever experienced in a movie -- I can still get goose bumps just thinking about it. And I also firmly believe the notion that the advent of the Beatles helped to assuage for many Americans the painful loss that had occurred just months before with President Kennedy’s assassination. The contrasting memory was an extreme one for me: I often compare the sudden anguish stemming from the November 22, 1963 announcement -- I was home alone, out sick from school and watching a Ritz Brother’s comedy on TV -- to the palliative pendulum swing afforded by A Hard Day’s Night's celebrative sight and sound.

I’m not going to review the movie here and, despite my original intention, I’m not going to review my abridged American sliced ‘n’ diced soundtrack album -- this time not by Capitol Records, but by United Artists -- that I promptly bought, playing it at full blast in a dueling-Beatles Jumilla Street harmonic convergence with the T-Bird Teens across the street.

My unplanned meandering into tangential memories here caught me up in the spirit of times past, I guess, and I think outside the mention of a few favorite songs -- “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Tell Me Why,” and “I’m Happy Just To Dance With You” -- I don’t really need to analyze, comment, and pick apart; if you're newly curious, do yourself a favor and buy the records -- otherwise I'm mostly preaching to the converted at this point. And there’s not much adding or adorning I can do to what you no doubt already know and feel about the ineffable incandescence of the music and personalities of the quiet one, the cute one, the funny one, and the “Sorry Girls -- He’s Married” one.

These particular Sullivan-style screened appellations do remind me, however, of a pop-culture calamity that nearly traumatized me for life. My family -- including my brother, a Rolling Stones fan! -- went out to visit some relatives on one of the CBS Sunday night utopian mop-topian appearances. It was my fervent hope that we would either leave for home in time enough to catch the show, or that we’d linger around late enough to turn on the television there and catch the historic event.

I should have known better. At 7:55 pm the folks decided we were leaving for the hour-long drive home. No amount of whining and pleading and reasoning -- I threw in the parental scoff-worthy historic angle -- would get them to budge on their most irrational and senses-leaving decision. Were they insane?

I barely forgave them for that lapse in no-brainer understanding, that fab four faux pas. And now that I think of it, I do have a bit of a grudge about that 88 cent empty promise that was that Buggs album, "Beatle Beat" or not. I have a feeling, therefore, that I’ll be self-indulgently brooding and dwelling on such long-ago sins of scarring omission -- for at least a few hard day’s nights, that is.

2006-10-14T22:56:00.000-07:00

Vinyl Tap: Todd Rundgren - Faithful

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #20:

Not the real thing and not really an incredible simulation, side one of this melodic funhouse gem from 1976 comprises a mania of the imitable kind from an inimitable artist. Faithful may err a bit on the south side of a misnomer, but Todd Rundgren’s endeavor to reach beyond the cover song grasp by re-creating, note-for-note, a little ‘60s pop heaven, sends in enough cloning embellishments to do right by the original artists.

Fortunately, the result is more gloriously sloppy than slavish, more hit than miss. Rundgren is a proficient enough guitarist to tune in and turn on to a couple of pre-Altamont archetypal psychedelic freak-outs. The Yardbirds' criminally overlooked acid-rock flashback “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago” comes off spot-on in a hear-the-colors see-the-sounds replication from the group’s Jeff Beck/Jimmy Page dueling-leads incarnation.

Jimi Hendrix’s “If Six Was Nine” is slightly less triumphant. Although the guitar work constitutes the quintessence of blissed-out Bacchanalian cosmic consciousness, Rundgren seemingly abandons all hope of reproducing Hendrix’s vocals, even to the point of supplying only a half-hearted, barely-there spoken aside when it came to singling out “Mr. White Collar Conservative, pointing his plastic finger at me.” Sure, the tangent sounds campy and dated now, but you can’t leave your freak flag at half-staff. Bummer.

Of course, the road to hippie hell was paved with "Good Vibrations," and while there’s no way anybody can improve on the Beach Boys' original, Rundgren’s attempt, after faltering a bit on capturing Carl Wilson's sweetly soulful singing style, is game enough – tremolo-ing theremin and all, intricate vocal harmonies and all. Rundgren seems to have a little more fun on Bob Dylan’s “Most Likely You Go Your Way And I'll Go Mine,” with a spirited, if wavering, Blonde-On-Blonde-era Dylanese complementing the brassy oom-pah loopiness of the winning instrumentation.

Knowing the Beatles are in the details, Rundgren’s nuanced craftsmanship of the Lennon-led “Rain” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” is perhaps the most triumphant on the "faithful" side of things. Vocally, Rundgren – more so than on the album’s other intonation affectations – is pretty pliant in handling the sting of John’s mid-period singing style, even on the songs that relied (to an extent) on studio-bred experimentalism and augmentation.

But Rundgren also has a healthy respect for the impulsiveness and the spontaneity the Beatles threw into their work. And so accordingly, he helter-skelters into a little free-form fun and apparent improvisation, whether adding a snippet of "She Said She Said" into the concluding backward swirl of the sonically hallucinogenic “Rain,” or intimating within the lysergic whirlwind of “Strawberry Fields Forever” – not that Paul is dead or a mention of cranberry sauce recipes – but something else even more cryptically indecipherable.

In going from oldies to other goodies, it is immediately evident that there’s nothing cryptic or enigmatic about the equally tuneful side two of Faithful, however, as Rundgren reverts back to his trademark mode of power-pop, blue-eyed soul, and wistful ballads, evoking such earlier works as his classic 1972 Something/Anything? double album.

Rundgren covers a lot of stylistic ground across these six songs, from the lush Philadelphia Sound of “The Verb 'To Love’” to the Foghat-boogie of “Boogles (Hamburger Hell).” But the hook-filled highlights – and among the best songs Rundgren has written and recorded – are the blistering and hard-edged rocker “Black And White,” which is as cynical as the warmly infectious “Love Of The Common Man” is humanity-filled, heartening, and hopeful.

Whether paying homage by playing favorites, or creating his own brand of pop-rock treasures, Rundgren is not only faithful to his ever-changing moods and whims, he is, indeed – as another album title would have it – both a wizard and a true star.

2006-10-14T22:52:00.000-07:00

Book Review: The Dead Beat - Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries by Marilyn Johnson

The 1962 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia I grew up with was short and to the point about the death of Daniel Boone: “He died at the age of 86 from eating too many sweet potatoes.” That’s it -- no embellishments and no other explanations after four pages detailing Boone’s amazingly adventurous and legendary life of frontier exploits, explorations, hunting, fighting Indians and blazing trails. Facing danger at all times and at all turns during his life… only to loosen his belt a notch at the supper table and keel over before dessert.

Although it was probably more correct to say that Daniel Boone died at the age of 86 because he was 86 -- and this at a time when 86 really meant something! -- there is indeed confusion over the cause, with other biographies mentioning heart failure or “undetermined causes,” and if a few mention anything about sweet potatoes, they take pains to suggest unwise eating habits as a contributory factor.

The 1962 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia more than suggests otherwise, and while I always marveled at and was amused by the rather unprofessional mischievousness of their Boone biographer, a William O. Steele by name -- who no doubt delighted in seeing his gustative-skewed gaffe slip through the cracks while subsequent editions dropped such tome-foolery like a hot potato -- I somewhat empathize with the desire for diversion, and I have always harbored a hope that Mr. Steele was able to land on his proverbial feet after his no-doubt job termination. As for the cessation of his life, I've also harbored a hope that he hasn’t kicked the proverbial bucket from eating too much humble pie.

But I've yammered on digressively so. For having read about the marvelously macabre and enthralling life and work of obituary writers contained in The Dead Beat, I can see a true calling for Mr. Steele, a perfect bounce-back in the obituary biz, relishing the opportunity to silly-putty the prose on, for example, the obit for the founder of Matchbox cars, who “for several decades after World War II was the world’s largest automaker.” Or to wax rhapsodic about those we may lean on for support:

Selma Koch, a Manhattan store owner who earned a national reputation by helping women find the right bra size, mostly through a discerning glance and never with a tape measure, died Thursday at Mount Sinai Medical Center. She was 95 and a 34B.

Death isn’t always funereal fun and games, of course, and if recent years have seen a cultish trend toward mixing some whimsy with welcome celebratory salutes to notables and Ordinary Joes alike, it hasn’t been at the expense of well-considered compassion and thoughtfulness. The Dead Beat, then, is more than a compendium of death notices designed to tickle your fancy-free sense of cheek and irreverence. Marilyn Johnson has admirably taken a systematic, cohesive, and comprehensive approach to the subject - from attending the Sixth Great Obituary Writers’ International Conference that was, um, fortuitously capped off with the “harmonic aspect to its timing” of Ronald Reagan’s death (“Forgive us, but this is what we live for”), to the irreverence of internet afterlife in “Googling Death,” a “messy frontier” tantamount to Grand Central for ghouls, rumor-mongers and professional journalists.

But before we reach that online horizon, Johnson gives us a deft historical overview of obituaries as they have traditionally evolved in newpapers, noting that, like poetry, they’ve had their flowery period, a bleak epoch, and modern era -- the latter age a time that fortunately for the most part left some of the 19th-century gruesomeness behind: “Within the short period of a year she was a bride, a beloved wife and companion, a mother, a corpse!” But since then, morbid-mania has gripped the United States and the United Kingdom after a shake-up in the 1980s when “the equivalents of Elvis and the Beatles rose up" to write today's tributes. Due to this time of dynamic expansion, innovation, and yes, entertainment, “a boring, moldy form has sprung to life.”

In addition to and in the course of chronicling the form the obituary has taken in such American newspapers as the New York Times and the Washington Post and in the UK’s essential “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" -- The Times, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and the Independent -- Johnson provides an analytical methodology to the study of the today's more go-go forward-looking obituary, the structure of which consists of such intriguing elements as the phrase, the tombstone, and the song and dance, none of which are to be overshadowed by the necessity of colorful quotes sprinkled throughout.

More than just padding out an obit, quotes exist to communicate the quintessential and crucial inner workings of the dearly or not so dearly departed. “Imagine a round table,” Johnson explains, “and the people who knew the deceased standing up, rapping on their glasses with a spoon, and saying something that fills in the blanks, directly or indirectly.”

And imagine how these people might also tip-toe around the pushed-up daisies with euphemistic circumlocution, although the days of calling a crashing bore a “tireless raconteur,” or a chronic alcoholic “affable and hospitable at every hour” are being left behind by some newspapers in favor of directness couched in understated mock-delicacy: “Miss [Hermione] Gingold had an endearingly individual approach to life. In New York she was regularly seen rummaging through other people’s dustbins.”

In a more sober vein, and in more focused and poignant studies, Johnson examines the effect 9/11 had on obituary writing. Confronted with such an unprecedented calamity and death toll, the New York Times’ Portraits of Grief really grew spontaneously, rising up out of the rubble. Though some would argue that they were more vignettes than obits, or “so goddamn sunny,” or comprised the “anti-obituary,” these memorial sketches filled a need, one obituary writer noted, for poetry: “In times of crisis... What we want to hear is a human voice speaking directly in our ear.”

Though some may not have seen it as poetry, that sense of humanity burst forth consistently in the down-to-earth obituaries of Jim Nicholson of the Philadelphia Daily News. Nicholson had the ability to zero in and precisely convey the personality of the deceased -- and sometimes that meant, if he was writing an obit of a plumber, including a practical tip like how to unclog a sink. “He figured out a way,” says Johnson, “to make the obit porous and let some of the real world leach into the strict borders of the form.”

Nicholson is telling true stories of the individuals he writes about, and in similar fashion, Johnson, in her extended interview and visitation with the retired Nicholson at his home as he tenderly cares for his Alzheimer’s-stricken wife, lets a lot of the real world -- with all its compassion and humor -- into The Dead Beat. This all-encompassing consideration colors her careful approach and articulated execution.

Moreover, this profound respect for the tradition and development of obituary-writing serves a profound purpose not entirely or necessarily at odds with the more lighthearted slant some obituarists take, a tack still in the service of exemplification and remembrance perfectly expressed. "The better the obit," states Johnson, "the closer it approaches re-creation. It's an act of reverence, a contemplation of this life that sparked and died..."

2006-10-14T22:50:00.000-07:00

Vinyl Tap: The Beach Boys - Endless Summer

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #19:

Since the confines of the 4th of July holiday this year are being stretched by many into a four-day weekend and neighbors have begun to set off fireworks, which in turn sets off my pooch, the traditional “The Playing Of Pet Sounds To Placate My Neurotic Dog” started a little early this year.

No, this isn’t some kind of weird “Son Of Uncle Sam” ritual in which I’m taking musical requests from Gus, but the Beach Boys seem to do the trick for him. This year, however, I thought I’d mix it up a bit, and start off with the 1974 compilation Endless Summer, which has endless resonance for me.

In 1964 I was ten-years-old and my musical world revolved around the Beatles and the Beach Boys, but since the surfing sensation pre-dated the British Invasion, it was All Beach Boys All The Time for a while. The first album I owned was Beach Boys Concert, recorded live in Santa Monica, my birthplace. I also was to find out later that the Wilson brothers, Brian, Dennis, and Carl, were raised just a few blocks from where I grew up in Hawthorne, on a street where they crudely but effectively recorded the squealing-wheels intro to "409," burning rubber and burning up the neighbors.

(Incidentally, the house they lived in, Hawthorne’s main claim to fame, was demolished a while back to make room for yet another freeway -- so L.A. When I got a look at the de-construction scene, it seemed like the freeway could have been moved over about 80 feet to salvage the home; houses across the street were unaffected.)

Despite the Southern California connection, I think, like many, I would’ve still been a fan. After all, the Beach Boys, for a time, were more popular in Britain than the Beatles, who apparently were more popular than -- well, let’s not get into that.

But, to take the road less gaffe-filled, I first heard the Beach Boys when a friend played his copy of Surfer Girl. I was immediately hooked by the alternately lively and gorgeous hooked-filled harmony-drenched songs of be-all and end-all teenage angst-land and extra-curricular elation, served up post-war suburbia-style. I couldn’t get enough of the melodically questing and dreamy title song, the coastline craze described in “Catch A Wave”; the bragging rights that apparently come with owning a “Little Deuce Coup,” (“one more thing, I got the pink slip, daddy”); and especially the melancholic and poignantly haunting “In My Room” where “Now its dark and I’m alone / But I won't be afraid.”

Indeed, the song, capped off by Brian’s heavenly falsetto, is not only somewhat prescient in foreshadowing Brian's increasing reclusiveness and urge to retreat to a world where “I lock out all my worries and my fears,” but perhaps reflected a little bit of my own head-in-the-clouds refuge-seeking as well -- though I stopped short of putting a sandbox in my living room.

Such introspection would ultimately be harnessed to the 33-1/3 degree with 1966’s stunning Pet Sounds. While I love that classic work's eccentrically layered production and thematic maturity, I also cherished, in a more inconsistent way, many of the subsequent late-‘60s and early-‘70s commercially flat-lined albums such as Smiley Smile, Wild Honey, Friends, Sunflower, Surf’s Up and Holland.

The older songs from the early-to-mid-’60s that Endless Summer showcased, however, were always within humming recall and turntable reach, regardless of the Beach Boys’ un-hip status or despite Jimi Hendrix’s contention that “there’ll never be surf music again.” Their three-minute fantasies in word and music, evolving as they did from surfin’ safaris and “this car of mine” to more pensive leitmotifs, were as much a quintessential encapsulation of American youth as Chuck Berry’s savvy pulse-of-America songs (and then some: the tune of “Surfin’ USA,” lifted from Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen,“ ultimately led to a songwriting credit for the rock legend).

These decidedly un-guilty pleasures -- hey, the bad guys know us and they leave us alone -- remained unashamed delights as, jumping ahead 10 years, I found myself in a dream job of working in a record store, and with the release of Endless Summer, having the unexpected satisfaction of seeing others sharing this pleasure. With accessible songs of such snap and crackling pop infectiousness that didn’t pummel you with schmaltz or pretension, the album was an immediate hit with the rest of the staff, becoming a frequent in-store play item, and with the customers. Rare was the time when we did not sell extra impulse-item copies when the album was playing.

Everyone with ears seemed to respond to the appeal of genial and timeless vocals and music, including a considerable number of sonic-centered youth -- whether unabashed open-minded new believers or a new batch of begrudging, furtive fans -- among the garden variety nihilistic nay-saying too-cool-for-the-room auricular philistines.

For rediscovering adults there was, of course, the instant nostalgia triggered by songs about “cruising to the hamburger stand now” (Mike Love’s crowning achievement in the group was adding “now” to every other line, now). We would sometimes see these customers again soon enough, bringing back the album and complaining of defects because “Help Me, Rhonda” faded in and out toward the end. Most of these customers accepted the explanation that this was intentional, that the particular version on Endless Summer was the original Today! version, not the single version they were no doubt accustomed to. One man, however, was not content even after I tore into a couple other copies for comparison‘s sake. Finally, we came to a mutual decision that he should go to our competitors down the street and bother them.

In short, Endless Summer became a huge, chart-topping hit, giving the Beach Boys a higher commercial profile than they’d had for years. And why not? Contained within the double album were 21 tracks, including the knockout punch of their first number one hit, the dizzily delectable “I Get Around,” driven with swirling harmonies and propulsive energy. Its 45-form flipside, metaphorically and literally -- comprising one of the greatest back-to-back hit singles ever -- is also here in the soothing, absolutely sublime “Don’t Worry Baby,” with its plaintive expression of teen vulnerability and apprehension.

Some of the hits on Endless Summer, familiar as they are, do not need much comment or extra praise heaped upon them -- including the territorial neener-neener travelogue of sorts, “California Girls,” with the majestic instrumental build-up. "Fun, Fun, Fun” is, well, fun. And the road to Billboard Gold is paved with “Good Vibrations” -- the “pocket symphony” of applied innovation and inspiration (listen to the Pet Sounds box set to get an idea of Brian Wilson’s masterful perfectionism as a producer in the studio).

Other under-the-radar but essential tracks that might give you excitations include the ever-shifting “Let Him Run Wild,” a single release of vulnerability and competition that lyrically takes a stand (“Before he makes you over / I'm gonna take you over”), but with its foretaste of Pet Sounds-style rhythms and patterns and a radio-unfriendly instant of dead air, it also takes a musical stance as a captivating try-out that didn’t pan-out.

“Girl Don’t Tell Me,” as a single, was also a low-show on the charts and features an affecting vocal solo by Carl -- his first as a lead vocalist, with a trace of the sweetly soulful sound that would later grace such great songs as "I Can Hear Music" and "Darlin.'" "Girl Don't Tell Me" unusually but effectively eschews any background harmonies to tell a tale of the capriciousness of summer love: “But this time I'm not gonna count on you / I'll see you this summer / And forget you when I go back to school.”

Never released as a single was “Warmth Of The Sun,” one of the most melodically and lyrically beautiful and poignant Beach Boys songs ever, written by Brian and Mike Love on the day President Kennedy was assassinated. In lush, angelic harmonies featuring Brian’s soaring falsetto, the moving, impressionistic commemoration couches the emotional shock in more personal terms, conveying the sense of heartrending loss while solace is sought:

What good is the dawn
That grows into day
The sunset at night
Or living this way...

...The love of my life
She left me one day
I cried when she said
"I don't feel the same way"

Still I have the warmth of the sun
(Warmth of the sun)
Within me tonight
(Within me tonight)

I'll dreams of her arms
And though they're not real
Just like she's still there
The way that I feel

My love's like the warmth of the sun...

Though it was no doubt difficult to make track choices for this kind of an LP anthology, it is disappointing to note some glaring oversights for avid Beach Boys fans. The wonderfully manic missing-in-action go-go of “Dance, Dance, Dance” puts it up there with the best of the Beach Boys' up-tempo thrills, while “Breakaway” somehow broke away from the pack as a strong and polished burst of encouragement, surprisingly written for the most part by the feared and abusive patriarch, Murry Wilson. And to undercut any excess of positive-thinking that might have arisen, a perfect counterargument for self-doubt and insecurity could’ve swept in with “When I Grow Up (To Be A Man).”

These songs would show up in the 1975 follow-up collection, Spirit Of America, as does a track, “Please Let Me Wonder,” from Brian’s testing-the-waters departure and precursor to Pet Sounds, side two of Today!

It's unfortunate, then, that at least one of these less sprightly but more deeply evocative songs, perhaps “Kiss Me, Baby,” “She Knows Me Too Well,” or “In The Back Of My Mind,” -- the latter featuring the vocals of Dennis Wilson and a jarringly odd yet striking ending -- could not represent on Endless Summer the peerless imagination of Brian Wilson. If room could be made for a post-Pet Sounds track, “Good Vibrations,” (no tracks from Pet Sounds made the cut), then something from an earlier time of experimentalism could and should have been allowed.

Oh, there I go again -- harshing my own mellow, probably harshing my long-placated dog’s, too. I can just about see my endless summer coming to a finite end and feel the endless resonance dissipate to airy nothing. Shouldn’t be too hard to recapture the spirit though -- all it takes is a turntable and sides one to four of Endless Summer, and soon enough we’ll be catchin' a wave of euphoria and "sittin’ on top of the world."

2006-10-14T22:47:00.000-07:00

Vinyl Tap: Warren Zevon - Stand In The Fire

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #18:

“Don't it make you want to rock and roll / All night long…”

Ten years after the recording of this 1980 live and lively Warren Zevon album, I saw him in concert on a bill, oddly but wonderfully enough, with X, which I thought of as the perfect Soft Dark L.A. Underbelly Show. The only out-of-place anomalousness of this L.A.-osity was that I was seeing it in Phoenix, where I was living at the time (imagine the pervasiveness, though: "Los Angeles -- Have Soft Dark Underbelly, Will Travel").

But whatever the state of my geographic discombobulation, I was witnessing a marvelous teaming of the so-called California Mafia and SoCal Punk -- although I would argue that the sardonic and cynical Zevon was too dark and edgy ever to Take It Easy, and he could indeed run on empty forever without falling behind, or so it seemed at the time.

But I digress -- though accidentally, like a martyr. Stand In The Fire, however, never deviates, staying the course from beginning to end as a ferocious and fiery concert album of fervor and fun, with selectively cherry-picked cuts (“The dog ate the part we didn’t like,” states the liner notes). Not only was it “recorded live at the Roxy” in L.A., but it was recorded at a time when Zevon was at a peak performance level, trailing clouds of big-hit glory with radio staples like “Werewolves Of London” and “Excitable Boy,” and garnering critical kudos for such songs as the poignant “Carmelita” and “Tenderness On The Block,” and the punchy “Poor Poor Pitiful Me.”

A representative sampling from his early albums up through Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School is backed with a stellar band featuring blistering, controlled-chaos lead guitar from David Landau. Zevon proves himself a commanding, expressive performer, and a strong personality adept not only at striking up the band but in revving up the crowd. At one point in the often gruesome “Excitable Boy,” during the point when our highly-string titular psycho “dug up her grave and built a cage with her bones,” a blood-curdling Hollywood-style scream, off in the background, can be heard -- right on cue.

In addition, a rollicking and raucous version of “Lawyers, Guns, and Money” leaves little doubt that “the shit has hit the fan” for a down-on-his-luck globe-trotting adventurer caught between a rock and a hard place: “Dad, get me out of THIS ONE!” Furthermore, “Werewolves Of London” especially showcases Zevon’s zeal; as he describes how a “Little old lady got mutilated late last night” (which disturbingly rolls a little too trippingly off the tongue), he deliciously alters a line that should send shivers down the spine of sensitive singer-songwriters everywhere:

He's the hairy handed gent who ran amuck in Kent
Lately he's been overheard in Mayfair
Better stay away from him
He'll rip your lungs out, Jim
And he’s looking for JAMES TAYLOR!

Later in the song, when he gets into the more tonsorial elements of werewolf-dom and recounting how he “saw a werewolf drinking a pina colada at Trader Vic's,” Zevon delivers the next line -- uttered in the studio version in a dryly sardonic tone -- with a lot of attitude here, becoming jealously, royally pissed-off at his hirsute adversary. "HIS HAIR WAS PERFECT!" he screams as he huffs and growls off to the end of the song like Lon Chaney, Jr. chasing after the queen.

Once you hear these live versions of some of Zevon’s best known songs, it's hard to go back to listening to the relatively tame originals. You might even find yourself sneaking a listen to Stand's “Mohammed’s Radio” just to hear the call-and-response, outdated reference though it may be, between Zevon and the girly chorus: “Even the Ayatollah has his problems”/ “What a cry-baby!” But it’s a close-call when it comes to “Poor Poor Pitiful Me,” another solid rocker here but, to make way for on-stage tomfoolery, my favorite lines (up there with the "Waring Blender" ones) get all messed up and muddled:

Well, I met a girl at the Rainbow bar
She asked me if I'd beat her
She took me back to the Hyatt House...
...I don't want to talk about it.

I miss hearing that sheepish admission, “I don’t want to talk about it.” But there’s not too much else I regret about Stand In The Fire as it closes with the raucous drive of “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” and a propulsive rave-on cover of “Bo Diddley’s A Gunslinger.” Live albums can be hit-or-miss affairs, and since this one has consistency on its side you can’t help but think of the coulda-been inclusions like "Hasten Down The Wind," “Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner” (both of which made it onto a later live album), and "Carmelita."

All in all, though, Stand In The Fire -- though a reminder of how much Warren Zevon is missed -- is still a sumptuous treat. You'll enjoy every sandwich.

2006-10-14T22:17:00.000-07:00

Book Review: A Disorder Peculiar To The Country by Ken Kalfus

“Love is such a disappointment…” notes a character in an early Ken Kalfus story, “Rope Bridge.” “It becomes another measure of age, of the passing of time," she continues. “Your gums recede, your skin dries out, your love gets overused. It requires maintenance, compromises. Eternal love, my ass -- it’s the most ephemeral thing in the world. In the end, it diminishes into just another responsibility.”

If you’re lucky. But if you just get enough germs to catch pneumonia or only get lies and pain and sorrow, this vaguely Bacharach-ian option is much safer than the black heart of combative separation, jihad style, central to A Disorder Peculiar To The Country, where the versatile Kalfus, the Audubon of all albatrosses, can put you. Getting out of those chains that bind you and cutting your losses is much preferable to, as it so happens in Disorder, being bound in explosives and blasting caps held intact with two dry cells, wiring, alligator clips, and switches bought at Radio Shack.

Sometimes though, despite your best efforts, this Suicide Bomber of Lost Love approach -- certainly not covered in How to Do Your Own Divorce -- backfires, even with some help that borders on neurotic erotica:

Despite the audaciousness of being set against the background and aftermath of 9/11, Kalfus’ satire does have a psychotic-Roadrunner vs. sadistic wild-eyed Wile E. Coyote cartoonish quality -- not only in an exceedingly dark tone along the lines of the outrageous “Itchy and Scratchy” from The Simpsons, or Spy vs. Spy, but in the sense that there are no real people -- you hope -- who act in such a desperate, War of the Roses manner. Don’t expect the humanity and hope that emerged from Jay McInerney's recent The Good Life, which mined similar territory. No, regardless of some sympathetic personal traits incisively depicted, the redemptive qualities in Disorder come elsewhere.

In this departure from Kalfus’ notable earlier works of wide-ranging realism and the fantastical -- the remarkable all-over-the-thematic-map and eclectically unstuck-in-time collection of stories, Thirst, and the Slavic-centric story collection PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies, and the novel The Commissariat of Enlightenment -- you may feel free to hate the lead characters, the divorcing Joyce and Marshall Harriman, with impunity. None of this “love to hate them” or “hate to love them” qualification -- you’ll just hate them.

But this black comedy is so subtly sly and nefariously inventive, and you’ll be so filled with anticipatory curiosity and so engrossed by the machiavellian mind games, you’ll be too preoccupied with the sickening plots in the thickening plot, and find yourself diverted by the weapons of matrimonial destruction, delighting in the on-target accuracy of each Acme Anvil hitting its mark.

It’s not hard to not like the Harriman’s right off the bat as they witness and are close-call victims in the World Trade attacks of 9/11, and secretly and self-servingly take delight in what dreams may come true for them. Joyce, thinking her husband, who works at the World Trade Center, dead -- has a perverse reaction, feeling something "erupt inside her, something warm, very much like, yes it was, a pang of pleasure, so intense it was nearly like the appeasement of hunger. It was a giddiness, an elation.”

As for Marshall, who survives and walks out alive and well, he believes Joyce -- who actually missed her flight intended for a San Francisco destination -- was on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. He, among the horrible scene and “the flood of refugees: filthy, dazed, grieved, bereft” and amid those whose “faces had gone as blank as the indifferent sky,” stood out: “Marshall went among them and headed for the bridge, nearly skipping.”

But the rude awakening and visions of sure things gone wrong means a return to an anything-but-peaceful coexistence in a a coveted Brooklyn Heights apartment that each refuse to give up while divorce proceedings get uglier and incidents seem to very loosely parallel the early-stage events -- from spying to psychological warfare -- in the repercussions of 9/11 and the incipient War on Terror. Marshall sends what may be an anthrax-laced letter to Joyce’s office and taps her phone. Joyce engages in complex campaigns of deceit, seduces Marshall's best friend, and befriends a bumbling, defensive FBI agent. Marshall elaborately conspires to sabotage his sister-in-law's wedding: Mission Accomplished.

The war in Afghanistan, the economic and stock market vicissitudes, Abu Ghraib and the clash of cultures all form backdrops for the shock and awe marital strife. Even their two children “play 9/11” which consists mainly of jumping off tables and simulating dead bodies as they fall. The absolute highlight of effrontery, or low point, as it may understandably be perceived, comes in the wickedly mordant and matter-of-fact scene in which the increasingly unstable Marshall straps on the explosives in a serious attempt to eliminate his woes and half a block: “God is great” he announces, touching the alligator clips, to no avail.

The consequent and impromptu fix-it project ironically becomes a family affair in an off-kilter anti-Norman Rockwell setting, a terrorist-drenched travesty tableau with his young son “resting against his father with one of his tiny hands on a dynamite cap.” “This is how the family once looked to the outside world,” Kalfur goes on, “how it had once been: a compact unit, loving and intimate.”

Though Kalfur is careful and deft enough not to draw exact and falsely forced correlations, he can’t help but tweak our expectations with a little grapefruit-in-your-face impudence before moving onto a twist ending every bit as surreal as The Commissariat of Enlightenment’s surreal conclusion. Watching the TV images of the celebrating Iraqis as they pull down the forty-foot statue of Saddam Hussein, Marshall feels compelled to protest, perhaps too much, that there is no comparison between him and the deposed Iraqi leader. “You think it’s symbolic, don’t you?...There’s no analogy here!" he implores. "I gave up more of my basic human rights than you did. I was the one who was oppressed!" Ah, but the strawberries...

Kalfus alludes a few times in Disorder to the immediate post-9/11 world-to-be of a unified earnestness, now that irony and humor was dead -- a sea change of transition that was pompously pronounced over and over. Did anyone with any real understanding of human nature and partisan political proclivities truly believe that this was the case? That people wouldn’t return to form and forgetfulness, let alone to the point that little professors profess nonsense and paranoid conspiracy crackpots question patent realities, and to the extent that politics would not go back to being divisive, let alone become polarized and largely gridlocked?

The United States, as resilient in the face of these unexpected pendulum swings here and overseas in the war, has seen numerous books, and increasingly, movies, that deal critically with the seriousness and heroics of 9/11 and the war issues. Without undermining or detracting from the gravity of the issue, and really without overt commentary or resorting to unnecessarily scabrous tactics, Kalfus skillfully and healthfully pries away at a little piety and a lot of foibles -- gently here, bubble-bursting there -- but with welcome humor, both escapist and insightful.

EXCERPT:

He approached in slow, steady steps, his hands heavy with electrochemical potential. She had picked up a carrot and was peeling it over the sink.

"God is great," he announced. He took a moment to inhale and brought the clips together.

She looked up, annoyed that he had spoken to her, apparently without necessity. It was against their ground rules.

"Since when?" she snapped.

"God is great," he repeated, again touching the clips. He opened one and clipped it around the other, but it slipped off. He then squeezed both clips and snagged one in the other, jaw to jaw. They held.

"What are you doing? What is that?"

"A suicide bomb."

His bathrobe had opened and the explosives wrapped around his midsection were visible. She raised an eyebrow. "Really?"

"I made it myself. I have enough dynamite to blow up half the block. God is great."

He put the two clips between his thumb and forefinger, squeezing hard. He imagined, for a moment at least, that he could feel a tickle of a shock.

"Why doesn't it work then?"

"I don't know," he said, irritated. "The wiring is tricky."

"Did you follow the instructions?"

"They were in Arabic. But there was a diagram."

She put down the carrot and the peeler and sighed wearily. "Let me see."

"I can fix it myself," he declared.

"Don't be an asshole."

"Too late."

She said, "Do you want me to look at it or don't you?"

He grimaced and shook his head. But he said, "If you want to."

2006-08-06T05:31:00.000-07:00

Vinyl Tap: Television - Marquee Moon

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap
#17:Marquee Moon is upsetting my dog. It’s the first time he’s heard it, although since it’s after 3am – not so much in the wee small hours of my soul as in the quotidian demeanor of my neighbors’ nocturnal mattress-cide slumber sprees – he’s not hearing it to full advantage.

Instead of catching some Zzzzs, I'm latching onto some CBGB ambiance with new headphones on – and this is an album that demands the full Nigel Tufneleven ear-bleed increment. I don’t have headphones for my dog, didn‘t even give him my old ones – call PETA if you feel this falls under the rubric of unethical treatment, though I’ve already told them the only rights animals have is the right to be medium rare – so he’s only hearing filtered full-frontal sonic seepage spillover. And while I’m listening to Television’s innovative and monumentally-maniacal 1977 masterpiece, poetic and punkish with-a-twist more riveting than raw, I'm wondering how I’m ever going to find words to do it justice (and realizing quite well that I’m going to come up very, very short, thank you very much).

Gus is getting nervous and going into omni-directional semi-woof mode, distracting me from what is hands-down the best and most intense album side ever, soundscape as off-the-scale earthquake: side one of Marquee Moon, alternately crook-and-nanny angularity and sinuous energy – no bumper-guitar bombast here – with the dazzling and cleanly interweaving lead guitar careening of Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd.

Suddenly Gus, looking up at me, has focused in on his prey that is, in turn, preying on his fraying nerves. I seem to be the source of his canine cogitation – or more specifically, and as oddly as it sounds, the Television emanating from my head, as oddly as that sounds to him. The fidelity is not for Fido, so fine. But I rub a couple synapses together and spark a thought: Gus is kinda like that old "His Master's Voice" RCA Victor dog, Nipper, in front of that Victrola, perked ears and tilted head, amazed at the early 20th-century sound revolution he’s witness to.

Only my mutt isn’t nearly as iconic-looking, and it loses some impact to have him perturbed at a pair of headphones. And besides, he doesn't seem amenable to accepting this particular revolution-per-minute album as the revolutionary music that it was, and the always refreshing aural sensation it remains. And "his master's voice" isn't going to persuade him otherwise.But instead of discontinuing my listen altogether to tend to the delicate sensibilities of man's best spoilsport, or constantly interrupting it with mid-track cue-stick nips and tucks, I begrudgingly decide to stop between tracks. In between, say, the slippery wig-out "See No Evil" and “Venus” mix of the instrumentally majestic but lyrically droll, a song about a surreal “Tight toy night,” featuring a hilarious call and response between lead singer Verlaine and the boys in the background vocals: “Didja feel low? No, not at all. Huh??? / I fell right into the Arms of Venus de Milo” – the punning not as funny as the underpinning incredulity, “Huh???” But more than not allowing Gus to divert my rapt attention from the absolutely frightening and tightly manic guitar frenzy of the aptly-titled “Friction,” there was no way I was going to let him keep me from total enjoyment of the essential 10-minute title track’s non-stop flight of imagination and perfect amalgam of crescendoing instrumentation and evocative lyrics:

I rememberhow the darkness doubledI recalllightning struck itself.I was listeninglistening to the rainI was hearinghearing something else.Life in the hive puckered up my night,the kiss of death, the embrace of life.There I stand ‘neath the Marquee Moon Just waiting,Hesitating...I ain't waiting…The sense of intuitive seeking and heightened anticipation is more than paid off in the interplay of Verlaine and Lloyd’s mesmerizing lightening-striking-itself guitar build up, a heady brew that simmers and gradually comes to full boil and even to a boiling-over point.

Speaking of things coming to a boiling point, as “Marquee Moon” wanes, I look out the window and see Gus barking furiously, and no doubt waking the neighbors. He wants back in. Has he completely forgotten I'd done him a favor by letting him out, or has he had second thoughts? Maybe he can get into the dog-friendly second side of the album, which is just as good but not so tightly-compressed – there are even some exquisite and graceful moments in "Guiding Light" and "Prove It."

He can have my old headphones.

I'm now feeling kind of good about having the opportunity to teach an old dog new tricks with some classic, trailblazing tracks. On the subject of tracks, though, I stop in mine. With my luck, he's probably going to want to listen to Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. All four sides. Again.
Come to think of it, that dog never did have good taste in music.

2006-08-06T03:42:00.000-07:00

BOOK REVIEW / Gordon Hauptfleisch
Double Lives: American Writers' Friendships by Richard Lingeman

Friendship, friendship, sure, but despite what the old song says - not always the perfect blendship. Especially when it comes to writers - a sensitive, moody lot, the quintessential practitioners of the tortured artist effect in which virtually every nuance of affability and falling-out is wrung out in Richard Lingeman’s insightful and incisive Double Lives: American Writers' Friendships. From a pat on the back to the stab in the back, an assorted and sundry sampling of interpersonal reinforcement and mutual you-scratch-my-ego admiration, literary assistance and professional feedback, and friendly rivalries and short-fused feuds are captured as he traces the kith-centric chronicle from early misery-loves-company artistic alliances that marked “The Puritan and the Pagan” companionship of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, to the problematic misery-loves-anything but “Three for the Road” camaraderie of Jack Kerourac, Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady.

Going beyond the interrelationships themselves, Double Lives also affords an engrossing exploration of the cultural and societal landscape in which these friendships were pursued, impressing upon the reader how the temper of the respective times has a bearing on the friendships fashioned and finished-up. In this regard, the early- and mid-19th century must be understood in the distinctive light of the newly emerging American Renaissance identity - the effort of relatively few serious writers to sever national literary ties to English dominance.

As this movement is significantly marked by the publication of Moby-Dick and The Scarlet Letter, Lingeman appropriately begins with a focus on the friendship of Hawthorne and Melville not only in the narrow sense, but also in more broader terms that, by extension, serves as a bookish benchmark by which the considerations of literary friendships and cultural concerns for the subsequent 100 years are measured. Hawthorne, then, though aloof by nature, not only took a big step merely by his out-of-character acceptance of an invitation to a momentous social and literary gathering -- thereby solidifying his relations with Melville -- he also sensed and was spurred on by a larger need for “intelligent, cultivated companionship.” And similarly, Melville, driven by his desire to further develop an idiosyncratic American literature, mixed the personal with the idealistic as he “hungered for literary companionship - a soulmate. And he invested in Hawthorne, 15 years older, his thwarted filial need for his own dead father.”

Lingeman does not, refreshingly, delve too much into psychobabble-skewed analysis, but his social perspective does shine a strong light needed to fully illuminate discussions of such questions as homosexuality -- issues, he takes pains to explain, that need to be considered in the context of their era. Far from the later gay-tinged accounts of Henry James, Willa Cather and Sarah Orne Jewett, for example, and certainly distant from the promiscuousness that marked the relationships of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Cassady and other Beats, the homoerotic language used by Melville toward Hawthorne -- language many scholars have construed as love overtures -- need to be understood in the expressions of “transcendent oneness” suitable for the mid-19th century. “It seems more logical,” Lingeman notes, “that the flowery rhetoric, typical of the times, was meant as effusive thanks for Hawthorne’s gift of understanding, so deep and complete that Melville considered them to be separate hearts beating in a single body.”

In a more strictly literary and professional vein, when the main purpose is professional betterment, the road can get rocky. Though H.L. Mencken championed Theodore Dreiser’s books in the beginning, and both were initially drawn to each other in common enough cause -- artistic freedom and German sympathies during World War I -- the chapter title “The Believer and the Skeptic” points to an essential philosophical difference, and indeed, their ever-increasing disputes put to rest a sustaining and deep friendship. On the other hand, the friendship of Henry James and Edith Wharton, “to the Jamesian manner (and subject matter) born,” evolved from tenuous ties and James’ mentoring status while Wharton developed her own voice, and they both eventually benefited from a more equitable association with mutual morale boosting and writing advice.

Bringing the pair more platonically close, and bringing the rarefied “Master and the Millionairess” lofty perch more amusingly down-to-earth, is an account, in one of the book’s highlights, of James and Wharton taking joyrides-of-sorts -- chauffeur-driven ones, of course -- in a newly purchased and new-fangled motorcar. In one particular instance, they get lost and, seeking guidance, Wharton becomes “perhaps the first woman in that dawning auto age to tell a man to ask, for heaven’s sake,” for directions. Which James eventually does, in typically longwinded Jamesian fashion -- Lingeman reprints Wharton’s recollection, from A Backward Glance, of James’ inquiring encounter. Every polysyllabic word in every needlessly convoluted run-on sentence is uttered, only to be tersely answered that he’s already on the road he’d been looking for. It may have been these kinds of good-times extra-literary activities and quirks that led Wharton to comment upon James’ death in 1916, “We all who knew him well know how great he would have been if he had never written a line.”

As related in "Poor Scott, Poor Ernest," F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway also mixed business with pleasure until relations soured, and while Fitzgerald was helpful in launching Hemingway’s career and advising him on writing and editing matters, it wasn’t much of a two-way street -- especially after the success of The Sun Also Rises. The novel, Lingeman says, “acted like steroids on Hemingway’s ego. The apprentice was taking over the shop.” Lingeman is thorough in his recounting of the many ways the ingrate Hemingway denigrated Fitzgerald -- lies and distortions that Hemingway even repeated in A Moveable Feast.

There was a breaking point for Fitzgerald, though, at which point he “now considered the friendship in its dying fall. Scott was through with playing the eternal patsy in a sadomasochistic duo.” Hemingway wasn’t content, however, even after Fitzgerald’s death in 1940: Writing to the publisher Charles Scribner, he contends “Scott was a rummy and a liar and dishonest about money with the inbred talent of a dishonest and easily frightened angel.” “It was to be” Lingeman concludes, “a rivalry unto the death.”

On a more satisfying note, and in the most deeply affecting portrait of Double Lives, Lingeman discusses the friendship of “The Westerners,” Mark Twain and William Dean Howells, “a model of such relationships between two authors. It ran for forty years with some bumps but without serious breakdowns.” The start of the alliance came when Howell, as assistant editor and then editor of the Atlantic Monthly, began an effort to recruit more Western writers, and Twain was his big catch, a highly valued prospect who, Howells astutely assessed, had more potential beyond his abilities as a mere comic writer. “Howells,” Lingeman notes, “provided the sympathetic editorial encouragement Clemens needed to break the mold of vernacular humorist and grow into historical chronicler and, ultimately, novelist.”

As Lingeman describes it, it didn’t take long before this professional bond expanded into the personal realm. Despite the minor squabbles here and there, overall there was an understanding, sensitivity and responsiveness between the two men, a humane and humanity-filled consideration for the thoughts and feelings of each other, even as Twain grew more pessimistic in life -- having formed the Damned Human Race Club -- with Howells never wavering from a more sanguine sensibility.

Especially touching and telling is the comfort they took in each other upon the deaths of family members, until they were, as Twain put it, just “a pair of old derelicts drifting around now, with some of our passengers gone & the sunniness of the others in eclipse.” Upon the death of Twain’s daughter, Howell -- who had lost his daughter, Winnie, seven years earlier -- wrote Clemens, as Lingeman relates:

…he had thrown himself upon on Winnie’s grave “and experienced what anguish a man can live through.” ...He recalled Clemens’s kindness. “You came in one day when we were bleeding from the death of Winnie, and said to me, 'Oh did I wake you?’ because I suppose my heavy heart had got into my eyes, and I looked sleep-broken. I have never forgotten just how you said it, and the tender intelligence you put into your words…” There was not much more he could say...

Even for writers, words sometimes fail, but it doesn't matter in the face of true friendship and the tacit understanding that takes over in the silence of bigger moments and inexpressible alliance. Indeed, it's the kind of personal bond found in the "perfect blendship," as the songwriter would say or, as Lingeman reminds us of Rilke's words, in the bond of "two solitudes [who] protect and touch and greet each other."

2006-08-06T03:36:00.000-07:00

Vinyl Tap: Matthew Sweet - Girlfriend

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #16:

The guy can dream, can’t he? Just because 1991’s Girlfriend was inspired by the break-up of his marriage doesn’t mean that Matthew Sweet can’t entertain anticipatory fevered-brow fantasies of a rendezvous or two with the likes of a winsome Tuesday Weld-type, as suggested by the cover shot, or go ga-ga over a pre-scofflaw, rockstarry-eyed Winona Ryder, of whom, in "Winona," he shyly and in a go-for-broke major-label manner inquires, “Could you be my little movie star?”

Love lost and love lumbering and lurching toward new possibilities comprises a bittersweet emotion that finds musical expression in the inherent tensions of Sweet’s third and most fully-realized album, a snap cracklin’ Poptopian masterwork. Irresistible harmony-drenched vocal melodiousness lands Fab Foursquare in a Big Star-light star bright soundscape, set off against the assertive bite and crunch of the stellar front-and-center guitars of the late Robert Quine (Richard Hell, Lou Reed) and Richard Lloyd (Television).

The crisp instrumental assault is especially ferocious and commanding on the title song and “Divine Intervention,” while coming into the angular fray in the bridge of the Jules Shear-style “Looking At The Sun." And just as a responsive give and take punctuates “I Wanted To Tell You,” the squeal and squelched discordancy of “Don’t Go” makes for a controlled chaos. In addition, a bluesy fluidly -- and traces of Robin Trower -- marks “Day For Night.”

Of course, none of this would matter if there wasn’t a solid musical structure or enough melodious hooks upon which to instrumentally suspend. Fortunately, Sweet’s songwriting craftsmanship is solid throughout, with all the infectious power-plus pop-rock -- running tough and tender -- you could ask for.

Lyrically, Sweet runs the gamut of love’s conventional trials and tribulations. In the glow of the warmly gorgeous “Your Sweet Voice,” Sweet convinces us that, indeed, “all my earthly cares might fade away / If you hold me in your warm hand that way." But he can still humorously startle, as in “I’ve Been Waiting,” where he shows how accommodating he can be:

The secret on your lips
That nobody knows
Gentle in your eyes
You can wear my clothes.

Or maybe his new girlfriend Winona could pick up some next time she’s in Beverly Hills. Apparently, she gets some kind of discount.

2006-07-04T23:12:00.000-07:00

Vinyl Tap: Elvis Costello - Get Happy!!

I get a new turntable and dust off some old albums. Vinyl Tap #15:

One of my favorite advertising slogans centers around Get Happy!! -- Elvis Costello's fourth studio album: “20 Songs -- All Different!” was not only amusingly pithy and startling in the pre-CD era where the standard-issue LP rarely reckoned beyond the dirt-cheap dozen, but it alluded to the kaleidoscopic gladdening and maddening crowd of blue-eyed surging soul-raves and Motown bass-backed manic pop-rock thrills, peppered with a little poignancy here and a little country twang there.

On the lyrical and thematic side, Get Happy is a wonderfully sloppy sketchbook, bursting out of the bulging binding and tattered covers with ideas, cynicism and bliss, wordplay of the clever, non-sequitur and quotable kind -- all anchored to Costello’s innate hook-filled melodic sense and his explorations of emotional relationships that pass in the night or of the longer-lasting love-lashed kind replete with hand-wringing entanglements and recriminations.

We can find “Lovers laughing in their amateur hour” in the booming Gordy Records-glory of “High Fidelity,” but communications soon break down with “signals indistinct." In a larger sense, as outlined in “Temptation,” the marital rigmarole from courting rituals to court proceedings finds “You’re just itching to break her secret laws / As you go from claws to clause.” Leaving you, as sung in the ska-punched “Human Touch,” in a state in which you’re “Left with just a house to hold / Drinking your way to drydock.”

In the well-crafted and perfectly-honed 1986 album King Of America -- in many ways the polar opposite anti-Get Happy!! album -- Costello mentions, in “Our Little Angel,” someone who is “so contrary / Like a chainsaw running through a dictionary.” The same song also cites “the place where I made my best mistakes.” Both qualities -- the prodigious, prolific and all-over-the-map hyperdrive, and the experimental self-assured chance-taking that produces the goods and the goofs -- infuse Get Happy!! and make it a rough-edged and raw happy accident classic.

Costello’s aim is equally untried and true. Some tracks are just more equal than others, and you’ll only have to wait a couple minutes for a proper pendulum equilibrium. If, for some reason, you find in the propulsive “5 Gears In Reverse” that “All of this acceleration is driving you to death,” or the rapid-fire “Beaten To The Punch” commands you to “better get out now because you’ll never go the distance,” -- just wait a couple minutes and the gorgeously lilting “New Amsterdam" will crop up, or the soothing textures of the death-shuffle melancholy of “Secondary Modern” will grab you with its sinister sibilance that prefigures the insidious tone of “New Lace Sleeves” and “Watch Your Step” from Trust. As "Secondary" asserts, “Nobody makes me sad like you / Now my whole world goes from blue to blue.”

Indeed. Don’t, despite the many jolts of joy Happy sparks, expect that you’ll ever really really Get Happy here. Even in the most seemingly blithe-spirited song, there’s a catch with each catch of the throat. There's insecurity lurking everywhere, and nobody’s sending in the clowns -- “Clowntime Is Over”:

     Almost too good to be true
     Who do you? why do you? what do you do?
     While everybody’s hiding under covers
     Who’s making lovers lane safe again for lovers?

Love "starts with a face and ends up a fixation,” as Costello sings in “Black And White World,” but the obsessions also see the fantasy become physical “as you feel the fingers' friction.” In “B Movie” we’re not going to get slapstick or an on-the-cheap Western or Romance…well, not any of those sticky valentine Romances with a happy ending:

     B movie, that’s all you are to me
     Just a soft soap story
     Don’t want the woman to adore me
     You cant stand it when it goes from real to reel
     Too real too real
     You cant stand it when I throw punch lines you can feel…

There’s enough blame to go around these days when “Forever doesn’t mean forever anymore”: In the torch-song intensity of “Riot Act,” Costello posits “Instead of all this dumb, dumb insolence / I would be happier with amnesia” -- a psychologically tormented mission statement from hell, delivered in an amazingly vein-popping angst-ridden declaration. As the passion pours from every pore, you believe him and believe in him. He doesn’t take these things lightly, and he expects the same from others: "Don’t put your heart out on your sleeve / When your remarks are off the cuff.”

“There’s no need to be evasive / Money talks and it's persuasive,” Costello bites in the bitterly and infectiously melodic tonic “Possession,” as perfect an encapsulation of Get Happy’s wordplay legerdemain and moods for moderns:

     Now you’re sending me your best wishes
     Signed with love and vicious kisses
     You lack lust, you’re so lackluster
     Is that all the strength you can muster...

     ...Even when we are out of touch
     Now I know that I’ve seen too much...

     ...So I see us lying back to back
     My case is closed my case is packed
     Ill get out before the violence
     Or the tears or the silence.

“Forget your troubles and just get happy / Ya better chase all your cares away” goes the mood-brightening Harold Arlen song from the 1930s. There was a worse and different kind of Depression going on at that time. But try telling that to a starcrossed contrarian with pointed insights -- and visions of chain-saws in his own inner lexicon of love and what comes after.

2006-07-04T23:10:00.000-07:00

Vinyl Tap: Bob Dylan - Planet Waves

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #14:

The underrated Planet Waves orbits from a Country-Gentlemanly New Morning to Blood On The Tracks-style yearning and bitter loss. “Hold on to me so tight / And heat up some coffee grounds” begins the first track, the affable and welcoming “On A Night Like This.” But there’s a little blood on these tracks, too, as the last line of the last song “Wedding Song,” prepares us for the reflections and recriminations to come on the later album: “And I could never let you go, no matter what goes on / 'Cause I love you more than ever now that the past is gone.”

The 1974 Planet Waves, tossed off in a three-day recording spate -- and sounding like it, too, with raggedly refreshing results -- constitutes, then, a rough-hewed and ramshackle bridge from Bob Dylan’s post-crash laid-back country-rock period, to 1975’s pointed and poignant Blood On The Tracks, in which the break-up of his marriage haunts his dreams to poetic and expressive affect.

In Planet, these night visions are equally tender and tough: In “Never Say Goodbye,” Dylan sings of his dreams “made of iron and steel / With a big bouquet / Of roses hanging down / From the heavens to the ground." This back and forth bonhomie and melancholy plays throughout the release, which appropriately finds a dualistic Dylan in fine voice, alternately biting and genial.

And if you’re going to hastily record a rickety down-home and downcast, overlooked and undercooked work that depends on nuance over bombast, the go-to guys are The Band, at their Basement Tapes best. Robbie Robertson’s responsive guitar dynamics and Garth Hudson’s swirling organ ebb and flow mark particular musical marvels throughout the LP, evoking a recent past -- and one as perhaps a prelude to long-ago memories...

"Thought I'd shaken the wonder and the phantoms of my youth / Rainy days on the Great Lakes, walkin' the hills of old Duluth,” says Dylan in the pensive and questing “Something There Is About You.” He's in an introspective mood, and the subject of youth and the passing of time crop up repeatedly in Planet, and not just in the album’s best-known song, the resonant and lovely “Forever Young,“ with its earnest wish: “May you build a ladder to the stars / And climb on every rung / May you stay forever young."

In “Going, Going, Gone," Dylan is more distractedly resolute and rudderless, as we sense that Planet Waves may indeed signal a bridging, a transitional time for Dylan, looking back but still seeking an ill-defined fairly-formed change musically and -- not incidentally -- personally: “I'm closin' the book / On the pages and the text / And I don't really care / What happens next. / I'm just going / I'm going / I'm gone.” In “Wedding Song," his aimlessness take on a more ritualistic and anticipatory but still indistinct form as “I've said goodbye to haunted rooms and faces in the street / To the courtyard of the jester which is hidden from the sun / I love you more than ever and I haven't yet begun.”

All Dylan knows for sure is that it’s time for his boot heels to be wandering, and in this more carefree “Mr. Tambourine Man” frame of mind wherein he can “forget about today until tomorrow,” Dylan displays a little Maggie's Farm fun in the album’s punchiest and jauntiest song, the colorful “Tough Mama” where a self-deprecating Dylan -- in dire circumstance and in weather that “was a-hotter than a crotch” -- rolls with rollicking instrumental punches that could’ve been thrown from The Band:

      I'm crestfallen
     The world of illusion is at my door,
     I ain't a-haulin' any of my lambs to the marketplace anymore.
     The prison walls are crumblin', there is no end in sight,
     I've gained some recognition but I lost my appetite.
     Dark Beauty
     Meet me at the border late tonight.

If anything is going to bring Dylan back down to earth, to serious purpose and that detected Blood On The Tracks mindset (as manifested perhaps in that elusive “Dark Beauty”) it is the aptly-titled “Dirge,” a stark and dark tale made even more so by the late Richard Manuel’s somber piano punctuation, and by Dylan’s emphatic vocals -- vocals that nearly see him spit out Idiot-Winded spite and self-loathing: “I hate myself for lovin' you and the weakness that it showed / You were just a painted face on a trip down Suicide Road.” It’s a wonder that we still know how to breathe, indeed. And it’s a wonder the singer of the song can even live with himself:

     There are those who worship loneliness, I'm not one of them,
     In this age of fiberglass I'm searching for a gem.
     The crystal ball up on the wall hasn't shown me nothing yet,
     I've paid the price of solitude, but at last I'm out of debt.

     Can't recall a useful thing you ever did for me
     'Cept pat me on the back one time when I was on my knees.
     We stared into each other's eyes 'til one of us would break,
     No use to apologize, what diff'rence would it make?

     So sing your praise of progress and of the Doom Machine,
     The naked truth is still taboo whenever it can be seen.
     Lady Luck, who shines on me, will tell you where I'm at,
     I hate myself for lovin' you, but I should get over that.

He won’t get over that. And at the end of Planet, in the deeply-felt and expressed “Wedding Song,“ Dylan, in a clarion call of sorts to an open-ended and messy, unpredictable and imperfect life, acknowledges a resignation to his conflicting feelings that have overtaken him and that he’ll never escape.

And moreover, in admitting that “It's never been my duty to remake the world at large / Nor is it my intention to sound a battle charge,” Dylan goes on to pledge: “'Cause I love you more than all of that with a love that doesn't bend / And if there is eternity I'd love you there again” -- expressing an emotional intensity that, just as Planet Waves has built to this pinnacle and passion, will be, by extension, further built upon and carried over with more cohesion and coherence the following year in the indelible and deeply-ingrained Blood On The Tracks.

I concede that I may be reading too much into a musical, lyrical or thematic progression from Planet Waves to Blood On The Tracks, unwitting and intuition-driven though it may be on Dylan‘s part. But the earlier album and the speculation does lend itself to some pattern of interpretation and analysis, which is more that can be said for other quickly-conceived and recorded Dylan albums.

“What’s the matter with me? / Ain’t got much to say” Dylan admitted once in “Watchin’ The River Flow.” So be it. But he just seems to be too restless in Planet Waves to be going with the flow. There’s something else around the bend.

2006-07-04T23:04:00.000-07:00

Vinyl Tap: Bruce Springsteen - Darkness On The Edge Of Town

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #13:

Not to detract from the expansive, all-embracing ambition of The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle or the often-breathtaking magnificence and revelatory grandeur of Born to Run, but Bruce Springsteen's fourth release, Darkness at the Edge of Town, stands the test of time for me as his best album musically and lyrically.

The escapist romanticism of Born to Run, where “It’s a town full of losers / We’re pulling out of here to win,“ is enthralling and full of longing you can almost touch. But, in addition to the encouraging artistic sign that Springsteen wasn't releasing “Re-born to Re-run”, I ultimately embraced the grittier realism that marks the darkness of the town left behind, nestled in a bleakness “where no one asks any questions, or looks too long in your face.”

After all, there may be a surprise or two lurking in the shadows, as reflected by "In Candy’s Room,” wherein Springsteen sings “in the darkness there’ll be hidden worlds that shine," and, in the title song, where he’ll gladly pay the cost “for wanting things that can only be found / In the darkness on the edge of town.”

Three years after the 1975 Born To Run classic in which he contended “I want to guard your dreams and visions,” Springsteen shatters those kind of hopeful, almost precious dreams as he revisits in Darkness, his roots, in effect coming back home. Indeed, in addition to its many metaphors of darkness and defeat, the album is permeated with considerable references and allusions to broken dreams or the futility of blind expectation. In the Spector-esque Wall of Born-to-Run, “Prove It All Night" (Big Man!), you can hope for the fat chance, but best prepare for facing facts: “If dreams came true, oh wouldn’t that be nice / But this ain’t no dream…"

The powerful one-two counterpunch that begins Darkness, “Badlands” and “Adam Raised A Cain,” comprises a give-and-take of will and fate. In a resolute “Badlands,” Springsteen almost sounds like he, indeed, “Got a head-on collision / Smashin’ in my guts, man.” Regardless, he’s a man on a perhaps overzealous mission to “spit in the face of these Badlands” and set things right.

I don’t give a damn for the same old played out scenes
I don’t give a damn for just the in-betweens.
Honey I want the heart, I want the soul, I want control right now.
You better listen to me baby:
Talk about a dream, try to make it real.
You wake up in the night with a fear so real.
You spend your life waiting for a moment that just don’t come.
Well don’t waste your time waiting…

“Talk about a dream, try to make it real.” No assurances here, not even with the emotively restorative insistence that “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.” You can be sure that that kind of positive outlook is nowhere to be found amid the anguished and propulsive call-and-response passion of the next song, “Adam Raised A Cain,” driven by Springsteen’s vocal fury and stinging and searing guitar work. Fate intervenes, belying the willfulness of “Badlands,” and caps it off with mention of a more insidious variety of dream, one more in line with the title song’s evoking of “Lives on the line where dreams are found and lost”:

In the Bible Cain slew Abel and East of Eden he was cast
You’re born into this life paying for the sins of somebody else’s past
Daddy worked his whole life for nothing but the pain
Now he walks these empty rooms looking for something to blame
You inherit the sins you inherit the flames
Adam raised a Cain

Lost but not forgotten from the dark heart of a dream
Adam raised a Cain

There’s got to be a middle ground between foolhardy bridge-burning -- the wheel-spinning urge to spit upon and spurn your circumstances -- and sins-of-the-father destiny. In the reflective, mid-tempo “The Promised Land,” the narrator is anxious and antsy but assumes a deeper maturity that may signal enough strength and determination to put his restlessness to work for him, to help him find a way out of the darkness.

“Mister," he sings with conviction, “I ain’t a boy, no, I’m a man / And I believe in the promised land”:

There’s a dark cloud rising from the desert floor
I packed my bags and I’m heading straight into the storm
Gonna be a twister to blow everything down
That ain’t got the faith to stand its ground
Blow away the dreams that tear you apart
Blow away the dreams that break your heart
Blow away the lies that leave you nothing but lost and brokenhearted.

Maybe this time, he is the one with the faith to stand his ground, and the will-do desire to finally see the “dark heart of a dream” blow away.

2006-07-02T04:12:00.000-07:00

Vinyl Tap: Game Theory - Tinker To Evers To Chance

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #12:

Game Theory is an acquired taste. Lead vocalist and songwriter Scott Miller has an exaggeratingly self-deprecating “miserable whine” of a voice, and writes intelligent if cryptically personal lyrics of hit-and-miss wordplay and evocation.

Here’s the big “but” -- and it’s a deal-maker: the man has an unerring melodic gift -- he can write seemingly effortless hooks you can hang your heart on. Tough but tender power-pop of buoyant infectiousness and aching poignancy will sink into you, and unless you have ice water in your veins, the songs will make you a believer.

Don’t be the one that got away. I was immediately pulled in as a record store manager in the 1980s casually giving a listen to new promo LP, Big Shot Chronicles. In a rarely used practice, I bought up everything I could and kept my eye out for new releases.

Tinker to Evers to Chance is a “Best of” compilation and testament to the Northern California group’s off-the-radar brilliancy since they had emerged from the fringes of the early ’80s Paisley Underground pseudo-psychedelic movement. Pulling 22 songs off of four early EPs and four studio albums, including the sublime Chronicles and the ambitious, all-over-the-pop map 2-LP set Lolita Nation, the 1990 Tinker is a superb representation of Game Theory’s varied tastes-great no-filler sound before Miller broke up the band to form the similar-sounding Loud Family.

It might be a ‘nuff-said argument for Game Theory’s on-target instincts to cite a couple of stellar songs they chose to cover on the first full-length LP, Real Nighttime: prime influence Big Star’s “You Can’t Have Me,” and Todd Rundgren’s manic pop thrill “Couldn’t I Just Tell You.” Those selections are unfortunately not here, but there are enough original gems on Tinker to go around and make up for the loss.

Highlights include the soaring “24” and the lilting warmth of the rich, mid-tempo “We Love You, Carol and Alison” which is followed by an all-out rocking and almost-college hit “The Real Shiela.” The delicately atmospheric “Like a Girl Jesus” meets its match in the gorgeous, harmony-laced "Regenisraen," so heart-melting -- and brain-melding, too, for anyone trying to get the melody out of his or her head.

“None of the soaring flight we dreamed / Is any closer to perfection,” sings an apparently defeated Miller in the rollicking “Throwing The Election,“ the last song on Game Theory’s last album, 2 Steps From The Middle Ages. But judging from the career and careful craftsmanship of Game Theory, I don’t see how much closer to perfection they could have gotten.

2006-07-02T04:09:00.000-07:00

BOOK REVIEW: GreenLit: An American Haunting - The Bell Witch by Brent Monahan

GreenLit. It's the fiction that led to the fade-in. These are the "at a theater near you" books — the literature whose adaptations got the greenlight to production and projection on to your neighborhood silver screens.

Ah, the obligatory Sacred Indian Burial Ground - the reason all haunted houses are haunted is because they are built upon ancestral and sanctified Native American land, of course. Ho-hum. You don’t even shudder to think it any more, and what should be a frightful story might instead become a tale of misery and no imagination. The reader goes harumph in the night, and rolls his eyes.

I exaggerate for effect, of course, just as An American Haunting may stretch what purports to be the truth - the book is, after all, a gussied-up, ghosted-out memoir that “fell into the hands” of the re-teller, novelist Brent Monahan. But since the legend of the Bell Witch of Tennessee, one of the most famous and heavily documented cases of a violent haunting in American history (though not without its detractors), enticingly entails so many of the supernatural elements we hold so shakily near and dear to us -- poltergeists, apparitions, disembodied voices, multiple personalities, witches -- it perhaps also calls for a myriad of possible explanations, including the one about disrupted deep-sixed Chickasaw and Cherokee riled and rising up, their hunting grounds become haunting grounds.

I don’t know how such ghoulish opportunities for Central Casting and the Prop Department plays out in the current movie version of the book -- lukewarm reviews, poor word of mouth and prohibitive ticket prices are enough to scare me off -- but in the book there is the time and cohesive circumstance to fully consider such Indian graves as “had been found in woods on the Bell property when more land was being cleared for crops.”

And who were the Bells? They were the farming family of John Bell, who had settled in the early 19th century in Robertson County, and who had got the upper hand in a land dispute with an eccentric neighbor, Kate Batts. A vengeful Kate vowed upon her deathbed that she would get even with John, and indeed the haunting began on this occasion in 1817.

Starting with “supernatural visitations," such as a large black animal and a girl in a green dress swinging from a tree, events evolved soon enough into poltergeist activity, but not of the merely mischievous kind. Snatching blankets off of sleeping family members and clawing at walls became more intimidating with incoherent choking and strangling noises, loud shrieking and cursing.

Then after gaining vocal strength to the point of being able to converse, the spirit confirmed suspicions and announced herself as “Kate Batts’ Witch.” She also took her haunting up a few more notches, slapping and pinching people, mostly those she took a disliking to. By this time “Kate” had branched out beyond the Bell family, also targeting neighbors and visitors (including future President Andrew Jackson).

Indeed, Kate could travel for miles around, and haunt and taunt two people at the same time - an ability facilitated by the “fact” that a “family” of spirits emerged, calling themselves Black Dog, Jerusalem, Mathematics, and Cypocraphy, each with a different personality.

All of these episodes, though often presented matter-of-factly, as befits a detailed documentation, are eerily evocative and make for a solid -- if not supreme -- scare, mostly from being ostensibly rooted in events at least believed real. There are some goofs and gaffes, such as an occasion where there was a diversion set up “whilst the ’witch’ was busy entertaining strangers” - this distraction made despite the evidence previously established for Kate’s ubiquity and omniscience.

The most successful parts of An American Haunting -- effective perhaps for its dichotomous clash -- concerns the latter years of the haunting into 1821 when the bizarre multiple personalities had diminished from the scene. Kate emerges more as a fully realized lone spirit, one that could discourse about theology but who also, like a psychotic housewife, in hum-drum dreary tones “droned on with its usual prattle, alternating gossip with vicious verbal barbs at John.”

Indeed, it’s a contradictory development that could be the antithesis of a spooky story if it were not for some increased torments, physical and mental. These assaults rained down increasingly upon John -- by this time Kate has reiterated and spelled out her death bed threat that she will “get even” by killing him -- and upon, almost inexplicably, his adolescent daughter Betsy.

The ending, not to be divulged here, is a mixed affair. A startling development, but one that seems attuned more to modern insights, neatly but nonetheless disturbingly ties up the loose ends, wrapping up in almost anachronistic fashion the disjointed parts of a haunting whole.

2006-06-30T04:34:00.000-07:00

BOOK REVIEW: Chronicles - Volume One by Bob Dylan

Now the rainman gave me two cures,
Then he said, "Jump right in."
The one was Texas medicine,
The other was just railroad gin.
An' like a fool I mixed them
An' it strangled up my mind,
An' now people just get uglier
An' I have no sense of time.

Dylan goes eclectic! But before discussing the free-range assorted and sundry unstuck-in-time ruminations of Bob Dylan in word, I’d like to discuss one of the first times that he had gone electric in front of a restless contingent of smug Mr. Jones-style British folkies who couldn’t quite grasp the something that was going on.

In Bob Dylan Live 1966: The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert (The Bootleg Series Vol. 4, actually recorded in Manchester) the audience participation portion of the program saw increasing restlessness as a good size of the crowd made their displeasure known over the plugged-in Dylan and his band (The Hawks, featuring most members of what would become The Band).

In a contentious culmination of biblical proportions of sorts, a fair-weather fan yells out “Judas” and you can hear Dylan -- in a retaliatory strike as he strikes up the band -- instruct the musicians to “Play this fucking loud!” as they launch into a blistering version of “Like A Rolling Stone.” But in another occurrence just as compelling a couple of songs earlier, after "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box,” the unruly mob is disruptively clapping in rhythmic, taunting disapproval.

In a speechifyin' masterstroke, Dylan starts jabbering away in a low-key non-sensical manner that could be -- and was -- misconstrued by the straining-to-hear audience as him addressing them in some coherent manner. The malcontented “folk snobs” soften their clapping, finally stopping altogether as Dylan speaks the only words that make any sense: “If only you wouldn’t clap so hard,” which was very well received by the more open-minded and receptive members of the multitude.

Though I never would consider myself a mildly ill-mannered folkie by any stretch of the imagination, I felt a little like a boorish Dylan devotee as I started reading Chronicles: Volume One. I knew beforehand that this long-anticipated autobiography played fast and loose with time, that there was nothing chronological about these chronicles that starts off with Dylan’s early New York ventures then backtracks to Minnesota, to Hibbing and Duluth and his days in Minneapolis before fast-forwarding to the 1980s and the recording of “Oh Mercy” after he drifted down to New Orleans and before heading out to the East Coast and early days again.

“Time is a Jet Plane, it Moves too Fast,” he once sang -- suits me, I didn’t want any stopovers or connecting flights of fancy, anyway. I was a stubborn and clueless Mr. Jonesian who wanted no-frills reading and expected a Volume One to be what it should be -- Dylan’s youth, education, first guitar, first big breaks, and so on. I wanted the traditional autobiographical build-up, the “it all started” step-by-step aspirations, the connect-the-dot progression, an index, the photos, clap, clap, clap, “Chronos!” Or, at least, that’s what I thought I wanted.

As it turns out, even though Dylan in a way “seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor” -- a characterization he applies to enigmatic bluesman Robert Johnson -- Chronicles, as meandering and roundabout as it might get, nevertheless imparts a reassuring sense as Dylan paints a masterpiece on page.

The tone is conversational, the style accessible and full of insight and humor, the subject matters fascinating with plenty of unexpected delights -- this is not the Renaldo and Clara of autobiographies -- and if a highlight or two is skimmed-over or a topic isn’t in this first volume, or at least foreshadowed or alluded to, there’s a good chance it will be in the second.

And, ultimately, if it’s not, that’s okay, too - 25 pages in, I had stopped resisting and halted my antsy mental clapping and clamoring enough to pay proper attention and listen, to let a literary “Judas” speak his mind. I of course would still like a full account of his meeting with the Beatles, conversations with Woody Guthrie, his feelings about how his “going electric” played out, or the post-Blonde on Blonde motorcycle accident that changed his course and gave him a much-needed break -- but such matters don’t seem as imperative as they once were.

I should’ve realized there are so many other incidents and thoughts we never had hint of, that never made it into the considerable number of Dylan biographies: his inner feelings about his first real love, family life, the particulars behind his name change, recording session tensions, admitted Self-Portrait commercial sabotage, a fleeting notion of quitting his recording career to run a wooden leg factory in North Carolina, Dylan’s meeting with John Wayne and the wrestler Gorgeous George, his admiration for Barry Goldwater and Ricky Nelson, his friendship with Bobby Darin -- plus we’re along for a Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride on a motorcycle to soak in the local Louisiana color.

Is this -- as Dylan refers to himself in self-deprecating don’t-follow-leaders amusement -- the “Big Bubba of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest, the Czar of Dissent, the Duke of Disobedience, Leader of the Freeloaders, Kaiser of Apostasy, Archbishop of Anarchy, the Big Cheese”?

No, they are the deeds and traits of a fully human individual and musician who considers himself “more a cowpuncher than a Pied Piper,” one whose mercurial complexity, resoluteness and vulnerability constitute the core of his wide-ranging songwriting artistry. If anything is to comprise a cohesive and consistent -- and often enthralling -- theme in Chronicles, it is the music itself, and musical breadcrumb trails and clues in relation to impulses and influences, future songwriting craftsmanship, performing methods, and recording techniques -- which may or may not be followed up on in Volume Two.

Going from folk to rock, his Christian album period, the ever-altering song structures - events and actions we may have seen at the time as expect-the-unexpected impulsiveness, as abrupt or radical change, may have actually had their seeds planted early on. “Little things foreshadow what’s coming, but you may not recognize them,” Dylan says at one point, “but then something immediate happens and you’re in another world, you jump into the unknown, have an instinctive understanding of it - you’re set free. You don’t need to ask questions and you already know the score.”

Some of this foreshadowing we might be able to surmise, though we never realized the intensity or depth of Dylan’s emotions. A lot of his post-divorce anguish pours out (“like it was written in my soul from me to you”) in 1975’s Blood On The Tracks, but Dylan takes convincing pains in his autobiography to explain how much more his family meant to him than his career. And we think we know the appeal of common-man folk music to a small-town upper mid-westerner like Dylan -- and we get a nuts-and-bolts description of how Dylan gained an encyclopedic knowledge of this music that was “all I needed to exist” -- but in Chronicles we get explicated some philosophical underpinnings to the genre that was “more true to life than life itself”:

Folk music was a reality of a more brilliant dimension. It exceeded all human understanding, and if it called out to you, you could disappear and be sucked into it. I felt right at home in this mythical realm made up not with individuals so much as archetypes. Vividly drawn archetypes of humanity, metaphysical in shape, each rugged soul filled with natural knowing and inner wisdom

.
At the same time, Dylan, feeling that much of folk music was out of date with “no proper connection to the actualities, the trends of the time,” felt impelled to write songs, new songs of a socially conscious slant, songs of protest.

He would go on to make his mark in writing and performing these newer songs, and he vividly recounts the dizzying, surreal spin he was in as he elatedly gets signed up by Columbia and starts his recording career. More tellingly, perhaps, is his sense of priority on the day he signed the contract: having also been given an advance record by the then-rediscovered Robert Johnson -- Dylan rushes to a friend’s house, but instead of crowing about the record deal, he excitedly plays Johnson's record while barely containing his enthusiasm about this unburied 1930s-era blues treasure.

The influential Johnson also figures in Dylan’s evolution as a lyricist, though latently so. In the early ‘60s, still a folk singer, Dylan -- so enamored of the blues legend’s compositions, which “seemed to come out of his mouth and not his memory” -- started “mediating on the construction of the verses, seeing how different they were from Woody’s.”

Indeed, Dylan was taken with the free association and allegorical nature of many of Johnson’s lyrics, with their “big-ass truths wrapped in the hard shell of nonsensical abstraction.” Furthermore, Dylan was also fascinated by the ballad “Pirate Jenny” from a Bertolt Brecht-Kurt Weill musical, and did a similar deconstruction on its lyrical content and aspects of free association -- again, still a few years before any stream of his consciousness imbued “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and Highway 61 Revisited.

In addition to having an intuitive grasp of disparate back-burner inspirations for possible later use, Dylan is resourceful in the face of setbacks, taking full advantage of serendipitous happenstance and tapping into long-ago lessons. In the late ’80s, for example, Dylan -- looking for ways to keep playing guitar after a bad hand injury, draws upon a different technique shown to him 20 years earlier by an old jazz and blues great, Lonnie Johnson -- methods that have implications for the way Dylan restructures the playing of older songs. You may think the modifications of songs performed in concert or the barely-recognizable “Masters of War” he performed on an awards show on TV a few years back was just because he has a healthy art-for-art’s sake reverence for on-your-toes perverseness. It could be that, or there could be more practical reason.

Dylan also revitalized his singing style about the same time when, taking a break in a frustrating rehearsal, he happens to stop into a bar where an older singer in a jazz band -- who seemingly “had an open window to my soul” -- triggered with his vocalizing style something “revelatory” that revitalized Dylan to a point where “because of the different formulaic approach to the vocal technique, my voice never got blown out and I could sing forever without fatigue.”

Regardless, however, Dylan was contemplating quitting music altogether -- that wooden leg factory in North Carolina was looking better and better, I guess. Of course, we all know that none of that happened, and that Dylan still shows no sign of slowing down. But at the time, though the re-emergent good fortune allowed him to continue his tour with Tom Petty, the shows became “monotonous,” to the point where “I’d see the people in the crowd and they’d look like cut-outs from a shooting gallery, there was no connection to them, just subjects at random."

Things got better for Dylan again, fortunately, but I must admit to some mixed feelings: I was at one of those Bob Dylan/Tom Petty shows, having luckily attained front-row center seats. Thought there was a tight connection there somehow -- I swear we made eye contact! -- but turns out... I was just another faceless, random sitting duck. Betrayed.

“Judas!”

2006-06-30T04:31:00.000-07:00

Vinyl Tap: The Replacements - Tim

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #10:

It was Elvis Costello who once announced that he wanted to bite the hand that feeds him. But the Replacements made a meal of it, and it had nothing to do with the time I saw them live -- and intermittingly upright -- in a not untypical and increasingly drunken performance that ended up with a presumably satiated Paul Westerberg flat on his back singing “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy I Got Love In My Tummy.”

Even with Tim, the 1985 major label debut that sported enough throwback indie attitude and rough-around-the edges raucousness of its own, the band didn't go the traditional route when it came to showcasing their new material. They certainly didn‘t endear themselves to Sire or MTV with their impishly-conceived video for “Bastards Of Young” -- which consisted of a single sustained shot of a stereo speaker playing the song. It didn’t necessarily bear repeat viewings but it was good for an appreciative guffaw or two for just the idea alone -- and I don’t think the Replacements were looking for heavy rotation, anyway.

With Tim, the band expands upon the versatility and promise of its previous release, Let It Be --exemplified as it was by Westerberg’s running-it-up-the-flagpole songwriting range and its raw, loose-ends execution -- and solidified that power and passion in the newer release with a more cohesive and coherent end result. The fleshing-out of the poignancy of the aching “Sixteen Blue,” the despair that rings true in “Unsatisfied,” the accessible pop-rock elements of “I Will Dare,” the celebratory and gloriously slop-fest rave-up that comprised “Favorite Thing” -- it is not so much that the musicianship, thematic sensibilities and insight found in these songs match-up and find parallel expression in counterpart tracks on Tim.

It's more that Tim spotlights Westerberg’s ever-emergent development as a song craftsman, musically and lyrically, on this production by former Ramone Tommy Erdelyi -- who cleans up the sound without sacrificing too much of the sonic slapdash immediacy of earlier Replacement albums. Westerberg's artistic growth is evident throughout, and so an aptly intentional “why don’t you all f-f-fade away” frustration at the heart of the earlier “Unsatisfied” finds clearer, more articulate expression in Tim’s “Bastards Of Young”:

God, what a mess, on the ladder of success
Where you take one step and miss the whole first rung
Dreams unfulfilled, graduate unskilled
It beats pickin' cotton and waitin' to be forgotten.

We are the sons of no one, bastards of young
We are the sons of no one, bastards of young
The daughters and the sons.

The ones who love us best are the ones we'll lay to rest
And visit their graves on holidays at best
The ones who love us least are the ones we'll die to please
If it's any consolation, I don't begin to understand them.

“Time for decisions to be made” contends Westerberg in the equally hard-driving and earnest “Hold My Life,” and though he will salute the band’s survival, hard-living and its place on the indie fringes in songs such as “Left Of The Dial," with the “Weary voice that's laughin', on the radio once / We sounded drunk, never made it on,” he senses that life and career can’t always continue to be conducted in such a cavalier fashion.

Even in the same song, the melodically lilting “Swingin’ Party,” Westerberg may love a party where he can "Pass around the lampshade / There'll be plenty enough room in jail.” But in almost the same breath he admits to a vulnerability and allows for an introspective frame of mind: “If bein' afraid is a crime, we hang side by side / At the swingin' party down the line.”

If not also allow for the downright depressive outlook, as vividly displayed in “Here Comes A Regular,” undergone at a place where everybody may know your name but there’s nothing to cheer about:

Here comes a regular, call out your name
Here comes a regular, Am I the only one who feels ashamed

And even alongside old sad eyes, who says
"Opportunity knocks once then the door slams shut"
All I know is that I'm sick of everything that my money can buy
A fool who wastes his life god rests his guts.

Of course, Westerberg being somewhat of a begrudging romantic at heart, a Replacements album wouldn’t be complete without songs of love, and Tim's note-perfect notions surpass in imagery and poignancy anything recorded before -- love found, as in the charming gem “Kiss Me On The Bus,” and love on the losing end, as in “Little Mascara”: “For the kids you stay together / You nap 'em and you slap 'em in a highchair.” It's certainly not the domestic dream where “All you ever wanted was someone to take care of ya / All you're ever losin' is a little mascara.”

In a lighter vein that also bespeaks the quintessential Replacements album, Westerberg, as in previous Twin Tone postpunk delights like "Seen Your Video" ("...the phony rock 'n' roll"), “Androgynous” (“Now, something meets Boy, and something meets Girl”), and “Color Me Impressed” (at “Everybody at your party / They all look depressed / Everybody dressin' funny…) -- here, too, takes a few amusing personal and social swipes. On Tim’s “Waitress In The Sky,” Westerberg, in apparently unfriendly skies, has a few issues:

It’s always refreshing when an artist can grow and hone his craft, but still hold on to a few snotty attitudes and a sense of sarcasm to get through life -- and help us get through it, too. In that regard, Paul Westerberg has that healthy sense of cynicism to complement his affecting sensitivity. And Tim is the all-purpose album of no muss no fuss brilliance from the Replacements. Accept no substitutes.

2006-06-30T04:25:00.000-07:00

Happiness Is A Warm And Fuzzy Song: My Top 11 Feel Good-Enough Records

Bruce Springsteen, just to lighten up the darkness at the edge of town a bit, once wrote, "It Ain't No Sin To Be Glad You're Alive." Well, let's not get carried away...

There's nothing definitive about this list of feel-good songs, or more precisely, good-enough songs. After all, my goal in life is just to muddle on through somehow. Anyway, I tried to assign an order to this collection, but that got to be problematic - the end result being that while I can confirm that my number one chosen song is indeed my favorite, all the others comprise a ten-way tie for the number two position. There, that's a compromise of sorts that'll make me somewhat happy enough, or what passes for it, I guess. Speaking of a qualified happiness...

11. “Happy Boy" -- The Beat Farmers
Okay, um, there’s no way this song should make me, or anybody for that matter, happy. But a chipper little ditty about a dead dog is such a perverse toe-tapper I couldn’t resist. And Country Dick Montana, who died in 1995, put such spirit into it in concert. So, in memory of Country Dick and Buddy Blue, who passed away earlier this month:

10. “I’m Down” -- The Beatles:
While we’re on the subject of paradoxical songs with lyrics so at odds with the music, consider this rough and raucous rocker from Paul McCartney. A great call ‘n’ response of a shouter -- with backing vocal moral support from John and George -- that totally belies the notion he’s all depressed and moody and thinking about how yesterday love was such an easy game to play:

9. “Pump It Up” -- Elvis Costello:
Remember that pump in Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”? The one that didn’t work because “the vandals took the handle“? Costello recovered the missing part and got it going again, setting it to a rapid-fire adrenaline rush accompaniment:

8. “Badlands” -- Bruce Springsteen:
Sure he’s miserable now. There’s trouble in the heartland and he’s caught in a crossfire he doesn’t understand and there’s a head-on collision smashin’ in his guts, man, but one day he -- and we -- are gonna get out. So this song of grit, determination and inspiration is “for the ones who had a notion, a notion deep inside / That it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.” If this sense of resolve to turn your life around doesn’t hit you in a visceral manner with tooth and nail ferocity and passion, then you have ice water in your veins.

7. “This Old World” -- The Beach Boys:
A short gem of a song -- wondrous, resonant melody. Simple without being simplistic:

6. “Victoria” -- The Kinks:
It’s not so much that I harbor Victorian ideals or that I’m a royalist enamored of the good old days of Queen Victoria when “Long ago life was clean / Sex was bad and obscene / And the rich were so mean.” Besides, I'm American. This celebratory tongue-in-cheek anthem of sorts just strikes a chord with my inner acquisitive and power-mad imperialist -- either that or I just love the infectious exuberance with which the dubious sentiment is conveyed:

5. “Hey Bulldog” -- The Beatles:
What makes me think I’m something special when I smile? I always smile when I hear mindless fun and John, Paul, George and Ringo barking like mad dogs and, well, Englishmen.

4. “I Get Around” -- The Beach Boys: This one resonates with the native Southern Californian in me, and it sounds fantastic on a cranked-up car radio. Sure “I’m gettin’ bugged driving up and down the same old strip” and “I gotta finda new place where the kids are hip,” but what really sends me are the trademark Beach Boys' soaring harmonies and upbeat melodic propulsion. The backing instrumentation without the vocals (and it is available on the Good Vibrations box set) is impressive, too - as remarkable as the realization that “the bad guys know us and they leave us alone.”

3. “Beat Surrender” -- The Jam:
It has a good beat and you can dance like a dervish to it, but if you can‘t “fill [your]heart with joy and gladness” after living “too long in shadows of sadness,” maybe the glass-half-full lyrics will get a response:

2. “Dance, Dance, Dance” -- the Beach Boys:
“After six hours of school I've had enough for the day / I hit the radio dial and turn it up all the way.” Okay, after six hours I did have enough of school, too, but I didn’t commence to dancing. In my mind, however, I was on American Bandstand or Shindig or Hullabaloo making a dancing’ fool of myself:

Yeah!

1. “Jackie Wilson Said” -- Van Morrison:
Silly and sublime: What "Jackie Wilson said" was that what was, and shall ever be, is reet petite, amen. Here, the love interest (for lack of a better term of endearment at the moment) always causes me to feel like “I’m in heaven when you smile” and makes “my heart go boom-boom-boom” -- punctuated here by big bass drum. In this 1972 hit, Van tells it simple and true, and because he also knows about “the inarticulate speech of the heart” -- I’ve seen him in concert in one of his trance-like states where he seems to be calling up an inner force or invoking the muses -- you know these aren’t empty words. So when Van tells you, as he does in this song, to “let it all hang out,” he means this in a, well, a spiritual sense. Okay, I'm doing a lousy job explaining this. Best thing to do is to listen to the song when you can -- I dare you to harbor any negative thoughts -- but in the meantime, you can read the lyrics right here, including the "ding-a-ling-a-ling-ding" part:

Suddenly I feel wired up. Don’t need no coffee in my cup, either.

By the way, did I forget to mention any other songs?

2006-06-28T07:00:00.000-07:00

Vinyl Tap: Mike McGear - McGear

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #8:

Must be nice being a brother to a Beatle when it comes to hand-me-downs. Not only do you get the usual pants and shirts - when you’re older you get some famous coattails to latch on to. Oh, and a recording contract and one of the best songwriters in the world to write or help you write songs and a record deal for an album that might otherwise not see the light of day.

But perhaps I’m being too harsh about McGear by Mike McGear. After all, there is one non-Paul McCartney song kicking off this 1974 album, “Sea Breezes” -- by Brian Ferry of Roxy Music -- and McGear did change his name for this project so as to escape a nepotistic link. And then there’s…okay -- enough about those half-hearted evasive measures: a cursory glance at the album cover tells us that Paul also produced it, he provides background vocals and he’s brought along Linda and a contingent of Wings to help create a decent enough pop-rock album.

The result is just too much of an uneven work to, well, work - which, come to think of it, is a McCartney-eque trait in and of itself, so they’re keeping this inconsistency thing in the family. But they also keep and convey on a few cuts that unerring melodic McCartney trademark for highly infectious tunes you can’t get out of your head, even if the lyrics turn out to be a slapdash effort.

“Leave It,” one of the exclusive McCartney-penned song, and perhaps not coincidentally, the best song on McGear, is one of those upbeat, seemingly effortless tunes that may have been inadvertently swept under the studio carpet during the Band On The Run or the Red Rose Speedway sessions (at least we didn't get some surplus and incessant “wo-wo-wo-wos” from “My Love Does It Good”).

While “Leave It,” along with “Rainbow Lady” falls somewhere between the silly-love-song and Beatle-esque ends of the Macca spectrum, “Giving Grease A Ride,” is the best T. Rex song not written and recorded by T. Rex -- it’s a lot of fun, a stellar track that features some hard-driving guitar work from Denny Laine and Jimmy McCullough.

Turning from Bolan to Bowie, a melody that haunts a celestial reverie can be found in “The Man Who Found God On The Moon,” a slower-paced, but more ambitious song that incorporates the voice of astronaut Buzz Aldrin and evokes Ziggy Stardust while it sustains its story-line odyssey of a Space Oddity.

It may also evoke Groucho Marx, too, when in response to the line “I found God in my spacesuit,” you may be tempted to add, “What God was doing in my spacesuit, I’ll never know.”

Hiding his coattails, I suspect.

2006-06-28T06:51:00.000-07:00

Hey, That Sounds Like... My Top 11 "Tribute" Records

In rock music, imitation is the sincerest form of thievery. If the recording artist -- of the no-original-bone variety -- can fake that sincerity and adopt derivativeness as their musical mission statement to the extent that they can base their career on it, they have it made.

But no matter how successful, the Goo Goo Dolls are no substitute for the Replacements, Bush deserved to be bashed, Creed had no cred, Rancid just clashed with everything and everybody -- it must be tough to grow up in America with American parents and sound so helplessly British. The where-are-they-now Kingdom Come was doing pretty well before they came crashing down like a lead zeppelin, while John Wesley Harding got by for a while out-Costello-ing Costello. Julian Lennon has an excuse, but Chris Isaak doesn’t in his wicked game of emulating Roy Orbison.

The following list does not consist such rip-off records. Each of the eleven entries is more of a one-shot homage from the artist in a respectful nod to a major influence, or constitute happy accidents from solo performers or groups who impulsively or unwittingly -- in a “My Sweet Lord”/ “He’s So Fine”-style of channeling -- fell into a vat of veneration and swam with the tide. I’m allowing for a lot of gray areas, as you see. There’s nothing written in stone here, it’s my non-scientific list, in strict order according to rock-solid whim and finger-in-the-air decisiveness and whatever sprung to mind at the time -- and whatever margin of error there is depends on your contributions and suggestions. So -- phase one, in which Doris gets her oats:

11. Todd Rundgren -- Side one of Faithful:
Remember that shot-by-shot remake of Psycho a few years ago? This is kind of like that. On the first side of this release, the multi-tasking Rundgren attempts to cover six classic songs to note-by-note perfection. Or close to it: He’s a little shaky on Dylan’s “Most Likely You Go Your Way And I’ll Go Mine” and Jimi Hendrix’s “If Six Was Nine.” I don’t mind, I don’t mind, because he does a great pre-fab foursquare job on the Beatles’ “Rain,” and “Strawberry Fields Forever,” and on the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations.” This 1976 album is one of those cases where I’m stretching the rules here, getting away from my original conception that these tributes be original songs. My recalcitrance might be due to Rundgren’s trippy remake of the Yardbird’s unsettling and psychedelic “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago,” which gave me such a flashback that the kitchen appliances expressly told me to Question Authority. Even my own.

10. Meet The Buggs -- Meet The Beatles:
Cheating again -- sorry. You probably wouldn’t know about this particular obscurity, but here's the story: when I was ten years old and a committed Beatles fan in 1964, my mother thought she was doing something really special for my brother and sister and me in buying from the supermarket -- for 88 cents! -- what she thought was a Beatles album. It was designed to mislead of course, with the ersatz lads in the same pose as the Beatles on their first album, and with “The Beatle Beat” in huge letters, and in much, much smaller lettering, “with the Buggs.” We never let her hear the end of it, but she ultimately had the last laugh: the LP is now a collector’s item. And of course we don’t have it anymore.

9. Wilco -- “Nothing’s Ever Going To Stand In My Way Again”:
I’m probably the only one who thinks this -- hell, for all I know, Wilco doesn’t even think this -- but huge chunks of this Summerteeth cut sound like something that could’ve been taken from the Kinks’ Face to Face or Something Else. A great song from an under-appreciated album.

8. Green Day -- “Warning”:
Warning: Title Songs On Green Day Albums May Be More Kinks-Like Than They Appear. You can’t tell me that Green Day was unaware that this song is practically a Kinks clone of “Picture Book.” Remember, guys, it's The Village Green Preservation Society, not The Village Green Day Preservation Society. What American idiots.

7. John Fogerty -- “The Old Man Down The Road”:
Well, I guess if you’re going to steal, it’s best to steal from yourself. The courts may not have seen it that way, though -- I can’t remember what the upshot was of the case in which Fogerty revived his Creedence Clearwater Revival classic “Run Through The Jungle” note-by-note. Did he think we wouldn't have caught on?

6. Sheryl Crow -- “If It Makes You Happy”:
It mostly makes me happy when Crow gets all Rolling Stonesy, replete with Keith Richard guitar riffs, like she does on this song. Otherwise…

5. Elvis Costello -- “London’s Brilliant Parade”:
Costello, in answer to an interviewer’s question about this ruminative song from Brutal Youth, acknowledged that it was purposely written as a salute to the Kinks -- and it really is immediately evocative in that sense, in melodic tenor and especially with Costello’s Ray Davies-like vocal inflections and expressiveness. But moreover, the Kinks’ distinctive British sensibilities emerge in a travelogue of sorts as the local sights are taken in, and as Costello invites:

4. Paul McCartney -- “Let Me Roll It:”
On-the-ropes and on the run: This John Lennon-like cut from Band On The Run sees McCartney playing around with the dynamics and production a bit in an apparent, and successful, effort to mimic his former songwriting partner. Echo-tinged vocals on the verge of something primal compete with sharp and punctuating up-front guitar reminiscent of the sound on Plastic Ono Band -- seemingly saying, in response to Lennon's earlier musical rebuke, he sleeps just fine and what’s it to ya?

3. The Sunrays -- “We All Live For The Sun”:
There’s a good reason this 1965 hit and its follow-up, “Andrea,” sounds so much like the Beach Boys. It was produced by a bitter Murray Wilson, father of Brian, Dennis, and Carl, after Brian had fired him as the group’s manager -- I should say, rather, the group’s meddling and tyrannical manager.

2. The Beatles -- “Back In The USSR”:Hey, if ya can’t kid your enemies, who can ya kid? Am I right or am I right? The quintessential All-American Beach Boys (as channeled via the equally all-American Chuck Berry) bring a little sunshine to the Cold War with witty words and soaring vocals. You can have those California girls -- just come and keep your comrade warm:

1. The Knickerbockers -- “Lies”:I was fooled, and so were many others. Anybody who has ever heard this 1966 hit thinks it is the Beatles. It’s uncanny, and the song itself -- a fast-paced done-me-wrong Lennon-style rocker, can stand beside many early Beatles’ compositions. The Knickerbockers might have gone on to be serious competition, but they didn’t write “Lies” (hippy, dippy “Summer Breeze" Seals and Crofts did!) nor many of their other songs, and they didn’t have a cute one and a funny one and nobody really cared if another was a “Sorry Girls, He’s Married” one. After a couple other minor hits they went back to playing frat parties in New Jersey.

Well, there it is, flawed and kind of spur-of-the-moment as it is -- and I'm sure I'll be kicking myself later for what I've forgotten. So you are cordially invited to tell me where I went wrong, and to add a few suggestions of your own to make it all right again.

2006-06-28T06:48:00.000-07:00

BOOK REVIEW: Madame Bovary's Ovaries: A Darwinian Look At Literature by David P. Barash and Nanelle R. Barash

It’s Alive! Or not. Just because a highly intriguing, informative and amusing book -- in its Darwinian take on fiction -- merges science and literature, doesn’t mean that biologists analyzing belles-lettres has led to the creation of a literary Frankenstein. Neither are evolutionary biologists, sociobiologists, behavioral ecologists, Darwinian anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists -- like angry villagers raising reading lights aloft and storming University English Department ivory towers -- going to be demanding the replacement of Derrida texts with DNA tests in their efforts to explore the nature of human nature.

“Our intent,” notes authors David P. Barash and his daughter Nanelle R. Barash of Madame Bovary's Ovaries: A Darwinian Look At Literature, "is not to sweep away any current literary theories in favor of science,” but to provide “a useful tool to add to each reader’s kit.” In a twofold manner, they extend the concept that people are biological creatures sharing a universal, evolved nature - and add to this premise the principle that evolutionary psychology, in discovering a wealth of information about human behavior, offers much in the way of gratifying and worthy insights into the world of fiction as well as fact.

In their accessible, conversational style and straightforward approach to a new and, as they admit, a controversial study, the Barashes’ aim is to describe some key ideas in modern Darwinian behavioral biology and explain how they apply to and thrive in literature. Furthermore, main chapter topics on such writers, titles and characters as Othello, Jane Austen, Gone With The Wind, Madame Bovary, The Godfather, Cinderella, The Three Musketeers, Catcher In The Rye, Portnoy’s Complaint, and Of Mice and Men are used as springboards to segue into similar and other relevant subjects -- creating a diverse and widely-encompassing work.

In illustration of this branching-out, the examination of sexual selection, or choice of mates, starts off centering on Jane Austen, “poet laureate of female choice,” whose novels, such as Pride and Prejudice, explore “universally acknowledged” truths about single men in want of a wife and the jockeying of social and material positioning that goes on in the name of hypergamy, or “marrying up.” The Barashes maintain that the young ladies in Austen’s novels look for a husband with much the same criteria as female animals do in their seeking of a mate. “Call them,” the authors state, “the three goods: good genes, good behavior, and good stuff. In other words, looks, personality, and money, although not necessarily in that order.”

In the interest of further explaining “what women want, and why,” the Barashes, in noting Charles Darwin’s proposal that female choice is the motive force behind sexual selection, point to the naturalist’s citation of the elaborate tail feathers on the male peacock as attention-getters -- chick magnets, if you will -- and extend this concept of poultry-in-motion male competition to humans as they expand on the subject:

Add to the mix of physical characteristics such other traits as intelligence, generosity, and “control of resources,” which in all-too-human terms translates into wealth and social standing. The authors not only provide details to such complexities, they also go on in the chapter to parallel hypergamy as it pervades such other similarly themed works as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love In The Time Of Cholera.

And just to top it off, Barash and Barash, while making connections with our more animalistic compatriots, also discuss female-female competition, the “bad boy” attraction, the “madonna/whore” complex, and the ever-popular high school sport of going gaga for someone once he is identified as being popular. The latter BMOC phenomenon is illustrated with “guppy gals”!

In other highlights of Madame, the subject of adultery is taken up with a look at Gustav Flaubert’s Emma Bovary herself, who, as the Barashes put it, “heard a subliminal Darwinian whisper that ticked her ovaries.” But first the Barashes look at some less-than-loyal animal behavior in the affairs of such fine feathered but unfaithful friends the blackbird, the swan, and the European cuckoo, from which we derive the word “cuckold.” The authors are led to a conclusion which asserts that a “dollop of biology” sheds light on Madame Bovary and her paramours:

What have also found their way onto the printed page with great success are adventures of friends and family, kith and kin. And in the chapters devoted to these subjects, all creatures four-fooled and creepy-crawly take a curtain call as test-tube biology or more abstract evolutionary and genetics studies are cued. Only to tell us, however -- in case we didn’t already suspect -- that we often act worse than animals, especially made apparent as Barash and Barash explicate issues of reciprocity and friendship in regards to such “Buddy” stories as The Three Musketeers and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice And Men. Fleshing out the sour-milk-of-human-kindness contention so at odds with notions of “all for one and one for all” altruism, the authors stem their findings in the notion that “Even though virtue is reputed to be its own reward, the evolutionary process has a hard time rewarding virtuous behavior unless it is directed toward genetic relatives, either offspring or other kin.”

And what about that kin? Well, as it pertains to parent-offspring conflict, the battle stations are all part and parcel of a wider-spread Police Action, if not an all-out familial World War, with no home front. In looking through the “evolutionary spectacles,” there’s not so much a generation gap (to use an almost quaint term) -- there’s a generational gaping chasm that seems insurmountable. The authors offer the insights of evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers, and indulge in a little psychobabble of their own, as they tie this trangenerational collision course to the lack of genetic identity between parent and offspring, a clash that sees only a 50 percent probability that any gene present in a parent is also present in the child. The outdated perception of the child as an appendage to the parent makes way for the conception that he or she is a separate being with his or her own strengths and weaknesses -- and plan of action (or inaction), which often doesn’t include mom and dad.

As the authors reiterate that “there is a parent-offspring genetic glass of DNA that is half empty,” they make the potentially pessimistic claim that while “shared genes result in shared interests, unshared genes result in conflicting agendas and even outright conflict.” Grim news for human relations, maybe, but a boon for literature about disaffected youth, “bad seeds" and youthful indiscretions.

The literary implications are impressive, and Madame goes on to reference and delve into the character of Holden Caulfied in The Catcher In The Rye, who, though “an absolute jerk,” feels trapped on “the other side” of life as he pictures himself a protector of children. And the titular protagonist of Philip Roth's ribald Portnoy’s Complaint is used to illustrate the point that “the evolutionary theory of parent-offspring conflict tells us that parents seek to manipulate children in their own ways and for their own ends, whereas children can be expected to resist.” A good example of sense of independence can be found in Huck Finn, cited for his decision to “light out for the Territory” and for his heel-digging resistance to anyone’s attempt to “sivilize me.”

The casual reader of Madame Bovary’s Ovaries will find that any initial resistance to what may seem like an off-putting book quickly diminishes in the course of this entertaining and enlightening work. You need not be a trained biologist, the authors are quick to reassure -- indeed, to a detriment, there is no hard scientific methodology at play and no footnotes to be had -- and though some of the lively discussions seem forced, you can take comfort in the fact that in another page or two, a compelling new subject will be coming your way.

That is, if you can take comfort in, say, a discussion of siblicide and how this kind of sibling rivalry taken to an extreme is seen in embryonic sharks -- who begin their predatory ways with an early flurry of devouring each other as they swim about in utero before being born.

Then again, maybe you can take relative consolation in discovering the applicable literary correlations instead. Whatever the case, you can be sure that you’ll never read East of Eden or King Lear or the biblical story of Cain and Abel in quite the same way again.

2006-06-28T06:01:00.000-07:00

Vinyl Tap: Roxy Music - Country Life

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #11:
Oh here it comes again
That old ennui
I hope it won't stay long
Well it's every-man to his own thing
And every singer to his song…

In Country Life, lead Roxy Music man and cosmopolitan love-drugged singer Bryan Ferry, wringing every nuance of bon vivant passion and sultry melancholy he can muster out of his song -- at times kitschy tongue-in-cheek melodrama without the campy artifice aftertaste -- sings his song to great evocation and effect.

Despite the wide-ranging instrumental muscularity of Country -- a full-bore force that sees the swirling torrential psych-out “Out Of The Blue,” the stately, harpsichord-imbued baroque of “Triptych,” and the rollicking ‘50s-style rock of “If It Takes All Night” -- what mainly marks this edgy and alluring 1974 album as one of the best of the ’70s and Roxy Music’s best album of all, is the consistency of Ferry’s songwriting and his alternately commanding and tremulous vocal prowess and intimacy.

That isn't the kind of prowess and intimacy uppermost in ladies' man Ferry’s mind, however. Whether it’s wailing exultation in head-over-heels love or woebegone wee-small-hours bemoaning over ardor gone awry, Ferry has only one thing on his mind. In the wigged-out fevered fervor of “The Thrill Of It All,“ Ferry displays the courage of his obsessive convictions in an assurance: “I will drink my fill / Till the trill is you.”

On the other end of the passion pendulum swing and not quite so restraining order-ready is “Casanova,” in which Ferry, in sorting out some troublesome relationship issues, punctuates the lines in uncharacteristic fashion: “I know my place / Is here with you / Tonight / But not together.” After which he utters a self-questioning and amusingly expressed “huh?” as if he can’t believe he just said something so foreign and outlandish.

“Bitter-Sweet” is more the acidic former than the latter, Ferry not only brooding in world-weary slit-wrist self-pity -- “Well this is such / A sad affair / I've opened up my heart / So many times / But now it's closed” -- but when the song lapses into German, evoking 1930s-era decadence-drenched Berlin, the quasi-cliché is complete.

As credible as Ferry makes that minor-key melodrama-rama, however, his desire to be a Texas cowboy, even a wannabe cowpoke -- even in duds on a dude ranch -- isn’t so convincing in “Prairie Rose.” But considering the sought-after Prairie Rose in question is his lady love at the time, Texas model Jerry Hall -- before she came under the thumb as Mick Jagger’s beast of burden -- we might begrudge him an honorary status, ten-gallon hat and all.

Moreover, in the emphatic every-singer-to-his song way he warbles “All I Want Is You,” perhaps we shouldn’t be so hasty in questioning his seriousness and dismiss him as a spur-spurning city feller:

Don't want to learn
About etiquette
From glossy magazines
Why should I try
To talk correct
Like they do
In another scenes
Say no more
About imagery
You're starting to confuse
Just make an offer
Of more romance
Of course I can't refuse
All I want is you
Oo oo I'm all cracked up on you.

He certainly sounds sincere. But uh oh -- here it comes again, that old ennui…

2006-06-28T05:57:00.000-07:00

Vinyl Tap: Roxy Music - Stranded

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #9:

Regrets? He’s had a few…

After having reviewed Siren last week, I find myself still in a mood for Roxy Music -- the Bryan Ferry edition -- especially for the essential mid-‘70s albums. So indulge me, please, as I delve into the delights of Stranded from 1973 -- as I will beg your indulgence next week with 1974's Country Life.

The ambitious, at times overreaching, Stranded is the most stylistically varied and inconsistently executed of the three, with sultry melodramatic moodiness cheek and jowl with frenetic and frantic Roxy-style rave-ups, but it also contains the best songs of the LP lot. It’s as if Ferry, unleashed from -- for good or bad -- the tension that marked the first two albums under the shared tutelage of Ferry and the by now-departed Brian Eno, was out to prove a musical mettle of great breadth and depth. Indeed, lead singer Ferry, more so than on Siren or Country Life, pours every ounce of apt expressiveness and inflection into every song, along with a dose of sly humor.

It’s a wide-spread thematic scale too, as he ranges from, at one extreme, the ruminative “end of another affair / An open engagement with gloom” introspectively and despondently probed in the mid-tempo “Serenade.” And in the mournful “Song of Europe,” an even more world-weary Ferry bemoans “Though the world is my oyster / It’s only a shell full of memories” before lapsing into a barely-restrained meltdown amidst bewailing saxophones and lamentations in French that manages to fall just short of kitsch and cliché. It’s a wonderful tightrope act.

On the other hand, Stranded sees a celebratory seizing of the day in the rousing “Street Life,” wherein the social swirl cynicism not only takes precedence, but is drolly reiterated as the expressed city scene excitement is set against the affected and jaded been-there-done-that eye-rolling insouciance of background vocalists flatly deadpanning “Street life, street life, what a life...” as if they couldn’t be trifled by such bothers; you can almost hear them filing their nails, or sense them doing a crossword puzzle in between stealing looks at the clock and droning on the downbeat. Life of the party Ferry, however, can’t be swayed by such pooper pretenses:

Such a dichotomous mood swing between sorrow and stimulation finds perfect expression in one song, the disjointed and schizophrenic “Mother of Pearl,” which starts off in a chaotic fever-pitch frenzy marked by clashing two-part disharmony and increasing disorientation and confusion:

And it continues to be a crazy scene instrumentally as well as vocally until a culmination is reached and breached and our disheartened Don Juan is, literally as well as metaphorically and emotionally, singing a new tune in a different tone:

Did Ferry find that "something [he's] always wanted"? If so, perhaps he's stranded no more. And that’s “really something.”

2006-06-28T05:54:00.000-07:00

Vinyl Tap: Roxy Music - Siren

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #7:

The ol’ ennui never sounded so good than when coming from the dapper dandies Roxy Music, the arty-glam purveyors of languid and intense ultra-romantic despair and affairs of the heart.

I haven’t heard Siren, from 1975, in a least ten years, and the minute I spotted it I knew I had to play it right away, remembering how I almost wore out the grooves on this and the other post-Brian Eno, Brian Ferry-led Roxy albums, Stranded from 1973, and 1974’s Country Life. And I damn near committed such vinyl-cide again as I played Siren -- with all its heart-tug melodic melancholy, steadfast and fast-paced hope against hope, and emphatic lush-life lyrics -- three times in a row with more to go, reliving my mad impetuous foolhardy days of love and loss and love and loss and second verse same as the first.

Leading off with the seize-the-night hit, “Love Is The Drug” that’s “got a hook on me,“ the world-weary but ever-expectant vocals of Ferry announces: “Late that night I park my car / Stake my place in the singles bar / Face to face, toe to toe / Heart to heart as we hit the floor.” Or, as he declares later in another song, “I will dance the night away / Living only for today / Both ends burning while you're counting sheep” ("Both Ends Burning”). But by the reflectively resolute last song, “Just Another High,“ our commitment-phobic fop of a ladies man, tired of the singles scene and one-night stand-offs where “Playing at love was another high,” changes his tune as dire circumstance becomes dare-to-be realization:
Singing to you like this is
My only way to reach you
Though I'm too proud to say it
Oh how I long too see you
Shattered my dreams by your goodbye
Scattered my hopes -- they fill the sky
Desolate am I
Just another crazy guy
Playing at love was another high
Such a crazy high
Maybe I should start anew
And maybe I should find someone who
Will maybe love me like I love you
Maybe I'm too stuck on you
Maybe I got stuck on you.

What happens in the tracks between, mixing the bitter with the sweet, is Ferry trying to resist -- but not too much -- the appeal and the peril posed by the siren song of entrancing infatuation and tender traps. The mournful and wee-small-hours melodrama of “End Of The Line,” in which he’s “Reached the point of no return” and where “The more I see the more I stand alone,” seamlessly segues musically and thematically into the second thoughts and introspective struggles that infuse the sinuously plaintive and increasingly propulsive “Sentimental Fool”:
Surely you cannot be leading me on?
Well if that's so,
Oh never again will I love
How could I believe again?
How can I hold on?
Sentimental fool
Knowing fate is cruel,
You ought to forget it.
Yes, I know it's true,
I've seen what love can do
But I don't regret it.
Oh, you silly thing
Can't you see what's happening?
You're better without it.
No, that's not the case
If you were in my place,
Then you wouldn't doubt it.

The hard-driving “Whirlwind” is a telling indication that, protestations and claims of sophistication aside, Ferry yearns for a force that’ll bowl him over so that “I'll change / Let me start again.” “How far is Shangri-la from here / And is it this way?” he eagerly asks, looking for the fast-track to happiness, but knowing the bewitched and bothered bewilderment entailed, the self-assurance no longer assured -- as he admits in the jaunty “She Sells” wherein “She sells country and modern / Ancient western song / Of oriental confusion / You so right, me so wrong.” And while he’s casting off every shred of delusion, he must confess that it’s “getting rough / When my old world charm isn't quite enough (“Could It Happen To Me?”).

When the “Nightingale,” in a song alternately delicate and vigorous with determination, comes along, Ferry is no longer fooling himself as his heart-on-his-sleeve affinities take firm hold with recognition and revelation: “Shall we, nightingale / Duet all through the night / A pair of souls for sale?” The awareness hits, but he can barely believe his good fortune with the new and desired direction his life has taken:
What is this I hear?
I recognise that song
Sweet little nightingale
I knew you'd come along.
Soon when the morning comes.
We will both be gone
So sing pretty little nightingale
Lead -- I'll follow on.

And Ferry follows on, ending his quest as he finds an answer to his question, “How far is Shangri-la from here, and is it this way?”

Upcoming in Vinyl Tap: Roxy Music’s Stranded and Country Life.

2006-06-26T18:09:00.004-07:00

Vinyl Tap: Elvis Costello - This Year's Model

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #6:

Giving you the 33 and a 3rd degree with spittle and spite on every spin and revenge and guilt in every groove, Elvis Costello's aim is true. But with This Year’s Model, his breathtakingly bristling and audacious quantum leap of a second album, he aims to displease and pass along a little free-floating anxiety. Well, more than just a little.

For those pump-it-uppity handwringers who bemoan the wide-ranging ambitiousness of Elvis the side-show Attraction, and who curse the Fates that he has not somehow evolved into some pigeon-holed Johnny-one-note angry middle-aged man, and who forever rue the day that this prodigious prodigal son strayed from the path of righteousness -- about the time that he Got Happy, I’m guessing -- rejoice as we wallow in what once was, in your mind.

Never mind that Costello has continued his biting and bitter ways -- in songs like hard-crusted breadcrumbs strewn for the easily misguided -- on albums such as Blood and Chocolate, Spike, Mighty Like A Rose, Brutal Youth and When I Was Cruel. If he’s ever been mellow (to answer the musical questions: “Have you never tried to find a comfort from inside you? / Have you never been happy just to hear your song?” ) it was on the relatively laid-back, taking-it-easiest, keep-on-truckin’-ist King of America, but he still expressed a healthy appreciation for being "so contrary / Like a chainsaw running through a dictionary.”

Good way to harsh your mellow. In any case, you could make a convincing case that This Year’s Model, all pent-up scorn and damning sneer, just by itself contains three decades worth of mismanaged anger-can-be powerful rage rolled into one glorious -- verging on vainglorious -- pissed-off righteousness. At first listen, the 1978 release may sound like one big misogynistic tirade -- and it is to an extent -- but there’s a considerable number of misanthropic and self-loathing strains coursing throughout, facets he will expand upon in Armed Forces, wherein he interfuses more societal and political rants that justify the LP’s original title, “Emotional Fascism."

And, in further attesting to the fact that the man's an equal opportunity hater of the world and everybody in it, Costello would go on to pen his most scathingly vitriolic song in 1991’s “How To Be Dumb” in which his raised hackles exacts the most contemptuous musical retribution of his career not on a love disinterest, but on another man -- a traitorous where-are-they-now tell-all Attraction with a “new occupation” in which “Every fleeting thought is a pearl / And beautiful people stampede to the doorway of the funniest fucker in the world." That’s Mr. MacManus, if you’re nasty.

But I digress, though Costello doesn't. “I don't wanna be a lover, I just wanna be your victim,” he says in “The Beat,” and there’s many insecurities, mixed emotions, crossed signals and interpersonal bluffing and feinting going on in this album to ensure that Model's thematic concern remains largely focused on the hell of other people, relationships that pass in the night or true love gone bad. There’s an awful lot of done-wrong Costello, then, bloodied but unbowed, neither deviating nor dissuaded, who gets right to the matter at hand on the first track of the album, staying the main course where revenge is still a dish best served cold: “I don't wanna kiss you. I don't wanna touch / I don't wanna see you 'cause I don't miss you that much.” “No Action,” indeed, but perhaps he protests too much.

Just in case such a romantic magic of the moment dissipates over the course of the first side -- which includes “This Year’s Girl's” berating of a man with “fancy manners” and “English grammar” because “you don't really give a damn about this year's girl -- Costello is on the ball at the start of side two (that would be “Hand In Hand” for those of you following along on CD) with a little bit of a reminder that “you can’t show me any kind of hell that I don’t know already,” and moreover: “don't ask me to apologise, I won't ask you to forgive me / If I'm gonna go down, you're gonna come with me.”

Not exactly a passport to paradise. But in Costello‘s conception of heaven, “everyone in paradise carries a gun,” as conveyed in a song in which he also declares “I don't like those other guys looking at your curves / I don't like you walking 'round with physical jerks” (“Living In Paradise”). But Model is more than an opportunity to “Listen to the propaganda, listen to the latest slander” ("Pump It Up”); or a chance to bite the hand that feeds while the “Radio, Radio” is “in the hands of such a lot of fools tryin' to anaesthetise the way that you feel”; or an occasion to hurl a side-swipe censure that “You're easily led, but you're much too scared to follow” (“You Belong To Me”).

There’s more deep-seated troubles being revealed, gadfly-on-the-wall observations, and close-to-the-bone accusations bandied about that belie Costello’s claim that “Lip Service is all you’ll ever get from me” (“Lip Service”). The sinister and unsubtle tones of the “Night Rally” tolls a bell about “deeds done in the darkest hours,” and “the sort of catchy little melody to get you singing in the showers.” In the most caustic and telling song on Model, encompassing the nothingness of being and the numbing of feeling, Costello, in “Lipstick Vogue,” extends the personal to the fatalistic nothing-matters-and-what-if-it-did apathetic black hole, setting up for the fall an existential domino effect of sorts:

Now there’s your downward spiral, big time: Ladies and Gentlemen, Elvis has burned down the building!

Note: This review comprises the American and British versions of This Year's Model. I have both. Never could make up my mind.

2006-06-26T18:09:00.003-07:00

Vinyl Tap: 'Til Tuesday - Everything's Different Now

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #5:

Swan song and springboard, 1988's Everything’s Different Now was the third and last 'Til Tuesday album for a group who couldn’t match the commercial success of their first hit single and album, Voices Carry, three years earlier. At the same time, Everything also showcased just how far Aimee Mann, digging in her heels at joining in on the formulaic ’80s synth-pop parade passing by and into oblivion, had come in the development of her ever-promising songwriting craft. It comprised a trajectory that would take her to points beyond with her rewarding solo career - marked by impeccable, precise lyrical richness and with a harder-edged and alternately infectious and starkly dark melodic sensibility.

The strength of Everything lies in its melancholy and pointed, bittersweet poignancy. The title song perfectly encapsulates the emotional pendulum swings when love and loss so color our world, but Mann gets more to the heart of the matter in “Rip In Heaven” with her to-the-skies declaration that the “present must contain a future where both of us can fit.” And you’ll soon know if the sentiments are ill-suited:
So long and sorry, darling
I was counting to forever
And never even got to ten
So long and sorry, darling
When we found a rip in heaven
We should have just ascended then.

Envious of those people who can seek and attain solace with “bourbon or God,” (“Why Must I”), Mann touches upon such either/or extremes with her confessional portraits -- personal, intimate songs some may call soul-baring, others self-indulgent. In “'J' For Jules” Mann fixates upon her break-up with musician and songwriter Jules Shear, wearing her sorrow on her sleeve:

You know I'll miss you
and thus it begins
but I'll release you
and thus it continues --
Someday we'll be happy again
Someday we'll be happy again
Someday we'll be happy again...

As if wishing could make it so. In “(Believed You Were) Lucky,“ Mann is just as visceral in the incantatory power with which she reiterates the anguish of separation and the futility that comes from "pushing, when it's all uphill." And you know for certain, after a parting that is more bitter than sweet sorrow, that she questions whether she'll indeed be happy again:

I wish you: Belief in Life
Belief in Fate
Belief you are lucky
and worth the wait
'cause life could be lovely
Life could be fucking great.

The woulda shoulda coulda sense of possibility that marks the devilishly lilting and wistful “The Other End Of The Telescope,” written with Elvis Costello, sees the poignancy packing a punch as the vicissitudes of hope springs tenuously eternal, and such wishes and beliefs become a gamble, but with a glimmer:

Shall we agree that just this once
I'm gonna change my life
until it's just as tiny or
important as you like
and in time, we won't even recall that we spoke,
Words that turned out to be as big as smoke
like smoke, disappears in the air

Yet as Mann in the same song ponders the what-if of it -- will "the head and heart of it finally elope“? -- she considers the quandary and poses a clue: “The answer was under your nose / but the question never arose.”

A query the 'Til Tuesday leader almost dutifully asks and answers -- in almost the same breath -- on the upbeat last song of Everything’s Different Now -- “How Can You Give Up?” “You ought to know love is hard to find,“ she tells herself, but there’s no doubt she’s up to the task. It’s a predictable course of action, of course, a burst of affirmation in line with the best of American pop-rock. But, after all the turmoil and misgivings, when we know where Aimee Mann’s head and heart is, it gives us heart and hope.

2006-06-26T18:09:00.002-07:00

Vinyl Tap: Brute Force - I, Brute Force - Confections Of Love

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #4:

Cabbages, limes, grapes of green,
Everything young and in between:
My brush is my mind,
My paint is my soul,
And I’m a driveling jellyroll blue
Of question marks
Over you.

Food for thought. Extra on the silly, hold the high seriousness, please.

The 25 cents I paid for this absurd and very eccentric 1967 album, I, Brute Force: Confections of Love, was well worth it. After stumbling across it at a library sale -- initially attracted by the odd title -- it turned out to be a happy accident, an intriguing discovery. And a weird, weird record.

[ADBLOCKHERE]Not that I can exactly describe this head-scratcher. I acknowledge the usual touchstones, but with a little variation: Brute Force, then, is akin to Weird Al, Harry Nilsson, and Jonathon Richman all rolled into an off day. I much prefer to go with my first instinct, however, in which I see the Brute that smacks of Eric Von Zipper singing Jimmy Webb - the MacArthur-Park Jimmy Webb. And I know it’s only a conceit of mine that has the resident leather-jacketed comic-relief leader of the pack in all those 1960s Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello Beach Party movies singing not the sublime songs like “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” or "Galveston," but crooning about such subject matters that melt in the dark with all the sweet, green icing flowing down - and all because “Someone left the cake out in the rain.” Apparently the anguished Webb can’t bear the torment since “it took so long to bake it / And I'll never have that recipe again / Oh, no!”

Oh yes - there you have it: Brute Force, the anti-Richard Harris, if you will (and even if you won’t). Backed up by an orchestra and a girly chorus, the Columbia Records artist captured and sustained on vinyl the moment when Jimmy Webb got liquored up and decided his true genius lay in getting in touch with his inner Nipsey Russell and confounding the public with whack-job songs - many concerned with the digestive tracks of all creatures great and small. How else do you explain “The Tapeworm of Love” that was “eating my heart over you” or “Brute’s Circus Metaphor” wherein, even though the “circus tent is folded now and our love must be too,” you “still won’t bring me the cotton candy of your love.” But moreover, consider Mr. Force’s “To Sit on a Sandwich,” in which the concept of "comfort food" is expanded a bit:
Sandwich, To sit on a sandwich.
Nothing could be finer, nothing could be better.
Nothing could be nicer, nothing could be wiser
In this day and age
Of such advanced civilization
Than to pounce
And sit on a sandwich.

More fun with food. And fun with words, too, because that’s what really distinguishes this odd duck of a disc, in inconsistent fashion alternately striking and cringe-worthy with a high quirk factor. “I had a dream in which I dreamt that you were dreaming / And we awoke and found ourselves awake in dreamland. / We kissed and found that love was stuffed with kisses and stuff…” (“No Olympian Height”).

Stuff ‘n’ nonsense, perhaps. But that’s not all - there's stories, too. He, Brute Force, is full of them, such as the love story found among the greasy rags and auto parts of “Jim’s Garage,” where the owner “may be greasy and dirty, but that’s just a mark of his honesty.” And in “The Sad Sad World of Mothers and Fathers,” we hear the loudly played televised baseball game being watched by the heedless father while his jezebel daughter is getting a little “paradise by the dashboard light” with the local ne'er-do-well riff-raff punk of a boyfriend just outside in a parked car. The same old story, it seems. What, meat loaf again?

There’s a story behind Brute Force, of course, of course. Brute was born Stephen Friedland in New Jersey, and after playing guitar and keyboards for the Tokens, he became a songwriter, penning songs for such artists as Del Shannon, the Chiffons, and the Cyrcle. After Confections, which he called "a paradigm of being far ahead of its time” (nice way to rationalize its out-of-prints status, too) Brute released his notorious single “The King of Fuh” -- or the “Fuh King” -- in 1969, which was released on the Beatles’ Apple label after being acclaimed by George Harrison. Quick on the heels, Brute came out with Extemporaneous, a sought-after live recording of comedy songs, political potshots and improvisations performed before a small audience.

I like to picture the audience members sitting on sandwiches. Nothing could be finer.