Elvis, The Beatles, The Sex Pistols, Nirvana, and...Anyone Else?

I teach 3^rd grade and I love it.  One reason is that, in addition to teaching reading and writing and math and history, I get chances to teach kids about culture and, especially, music. Some girls in my class were recently referring to the current teeny-bopper flavor-of-the-month band One Direction as “the new Beatles.”  “No,” I said. “They are not the ‘new Beatles.’” “Whhhyyyyy?  What do you meeeeaaaan?” the girls whined.  “Because they sing very nicely, but they aren’t gonna change the world.  The Beatles CHANGED THE WORLD!” I pontificated, pounding a desk for emphasis.  In the entire history of rock and roll, I think, really, only four rock and roll artists can be said to have done this.  Many great ones have changed music in general and rock and roll in particular, but only four have really CHANGED THE WORLD.

ELVIS

Yes, we all know he was a poor white kid with a great voice who had absorbed white and black southern musical traditions and was able to stir them up in a magical and wonderful kind of way.  But he was more than a just a musician: Elvis was a hurricane that tore across our entire culture.  His hip-swiveling appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in September of 1956 didn’t simply announce the invention of a brand new musical genre.  In one fell swoop it both electrified and terrified the entire country and world: Elvis’s game pushed issues of sex, gender, and race to the fore, proclaimed clearly that these things were on young peoples’ minds, and demonstrated that the giant group of young people electrified by his performance was destined to challenge and, indeed, dynamite, traditional mores along these lines and many others.  Indeed, he was the first to galvanize these forces.  Elvis changed the world.

THE BEATLES

The rock and roll explosion set off by Elvis triggered a flood of great music in its wake: Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins, Bill Haley, etc etc etc.  The questions about racial integration and teen sexuality raised by the music terrified the Establishment and most adults hoped rock and roll was a fad that would just go away.  Apparently beginning to fulfill these hopes, the music had started to stagnate early 1960s.  Marketing forces diluted the sound by placing toned down rock and roll songs—with edgy blues rhythms and melodies and suggestive lyrics filtered out— into the hands of more palatable bland crooners like Pat Boone.  In truth, as of 1960, rock and roll lyrically had never really moved beyond the “girls and cars” phase.  Bob Dylan hitchhiked to New York City from Minnesota and burst upon the folk scene in Greenwich Village in 1961 with songs that raised Woody Guthrie’s songwriting ethos to another level and into the political causes of the times, but Dylan’s folkies in NYC wanted nothing to do with rock and roll and were a niche music market, rather than a mainstream cultural force, anyway. 

The Beatles, however, were something else.  John Lennon got a lot of crap for saying “The Beatles are more popular than Jesus,’ but he was pretty well spot-on.  Bouncing, once again, onto Ed Sullivan’s stage in February 1964, the world shook at their feet.  While lyrically, the early Beatles songs generally hewed close to traditional subjects (“I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” “Please Please Me,” “Can’t Buy Me Love”), musically the band was crafting more complex song forms and moving beyond the blues based chord and melody structures of early rock and roll.  They were ubiquitous— their records dominated the radio and covered record store racks and walls, of course, but their faces also appeared constantly on TV, newspapers, magazines— and their look, with their hair creeping ever closer to their shoulders, raised a clear middle finger to the establishment, which once again began to get nervous.  By 1966, their songwriting had completely exploded the definition and scope of rock and roll, lyrically and musically, and in the process transformed the role of not only the music but of the people who create it and listen it.  By the time “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” was released, rock and roll songs could address pretty much any topic, idea, issue or question—  social and political commentary, addiction, old age, war, peace, education, parents, children, etc etc etc.  These songs gave voice to ideas and feelings in many young (and older) people’s hearts and minds and thereby empowered them to come together (!) and act on these feelings and ideas.  The Beatles transformed rock and roll from a quaint musical fad or genre to an art form and a vehicle for social change, and also expressed the outlook of an entire generation and empowered that generation and generations of young people ever after to stand up for their ideals.  The Beatles changed the world.

THE SEX PISTOLS…

…only existed for about 15 seconds, but they also changed the world.  Once again, despite the unbelievable explosion set off by the Beatles in the 1960s, mainstream rock and roll had become bloated and stagnant by the mid 1970s.  Some wonderful records were made during that stretch—indeed, many of my favorites (“Exile on Main Street,” anyone?)—but the sense that music or young people could or would change the world had given way to simply a “let’s party” mentality.  Rock stars staged mammoth tours and were worshipped like gods by stoned suburban kids flocking to giant arenas to see them, and all the while record companies raked in millions of dollars.  It was a business, a gravy train—running just fine, but not really a force for cultural  change. 

Then onto the scene, from the depths of depressed corners and backalleys of London, come the Sex Pistols—an unholy mess of safety pins and fury.  Flipping the bird at absolutely everything and ripping out of the radio with raging guitar hooks which frame lyrics bearing social commentary way more iron fisted than anything Bob Dylan ever wrote, the Pistols instantly gave voice to the forgotten underclass and scared the hell out of everyone else (their famous first TV appearance was, like the Beatles’ and Elvis’s, a cultural landmark moment, though for very different reasons).  They made, really, one album (yes, a few people have managed to cobble together a few other odds and ends, but they made one album, really) and imploded by the end of their only tour across America.  However, by the end of that tour, the forces of punk had been unleashed on the culture.  Underclass kids in the UK, USA, and elsewhere had been ignored and trod upon for a long time, were mighty pissed off about many things, and had been so for awhile, but now had a voice and were demanding to be reckoned with.  These people, somehow previously hiding or lurking or waiting in the shadows to come out, were suddenly everywhere—you couldn’t and still can’t walk down a street without seeing palpable traces of the punk ethos and experience: spiked hair, leather boots or jackets, piercings, body ink, etc all expressing a sense of disconnection with the stifling conventions and socioeconomic inequalities of the dominant culture.  Dozens of great bands followed in the Pistols wake—the Clash, the Dead Kennedys, etc etc etc—but it was the Pistols who, in just a few seconds, opened the door and gave voice to a whole generation of forgotten and overlooked people.  The Sex Pistols changed the world.

NIRVANA

By now you know the cycle:  after a ground-shaking cultural change set off by a world-changing trailblazer and followed by many other strong artists, rock and roll stagnates.  The 80s were the ultimate in rock and roll stagnation.  Punk had been stolen out of the hands of angry misfits and underclass rebels and turned into electronic pap performed by people who spent more on their “spiked” hairdos and pre-torn t-shirts and jeans than on their instruments.  Hell, most radio songs through the 80s didn’t even have a drummer—just some casio drum machine thing like you hear on cheezy organ store demos.  The music had no grit or grind, didn’t threaten anyone in any way, addressed no real issues lyrically, and was mostly like white bread soaked in milted vanilla ice cream—bland blah blech.  Yes, there were occasionally musical signs of life (thank god for the Red Hot Chili Peppers!).  Yes, there was Live Aid and “We Are The World,” which were nice one-offs but mostly rock star PR photo ops in the end—not really movement starters. And yes, U2 purported to have a social conscience, but I’ve gotta say that Bono lost me when, after paying $15 for the Rattle and Hum CD and $10 to get into the movie, I watched him on the screen in front of a football stadium of 75,000 people who had paid $50 or so per ticket and $20 for t-shirts sermonize about TV priests milking money out of people—what a load of crap.  If rock and roll wasn’t dead as a music and as a cultural force, then the priest was there in its room administering the Last Rites. 

And then, seemingly out of fuckin’ nowhere comes Nirvana.  On my walk this afternoon, I listened to a bootleg of them at Chicago’s legendary Cabaret Metro recorded just weeks after Nevermind was released, right at the very beginning of the time the record, and thus the band, were starting to break.  The document is one of the most arresting recordings I’ve ever heard—imagine a B52 revving its engines at the beginning of a runway before takeoff.  They were on to something much larger than themselves and they knew it.  The band had a new, raw sound which grabbed you by the throat, inward and outward looking lyrics which articulated a significant set of experiences, reactions, and observations common to a new set of young people in ways that were new, funny, painful, frank, and keenly insightful, and a general aesthetic—jeans, flannel shirts, a kind of modest, understated  regular look— that placed the emphasis on their work and disposed of all the idolatry and outward appearance crapola that had become more important than the musical or lyrical ideas expressed by purported punks, hippies, and other rock and roll musicians.  Like Elvis, the Beatles, and the Sex Pistols, Nirvana had a new musical vision that articulated and established a voice for a whole generation of young people.  The door now open, many great artists followed shortly—Pearl Jam, the Smashing Pumpkins, Liz Phair, etc etc etc. Again, suddenly not only was the music everywhere (and wow, was that music something—pure, intense, respectful and inclusive of traditions that it was also altering or even blowing up, honest, unapologetic, witty, literate, and completely unlike anything ever heard before), and not only was Nirvana on every radio and TV station, newspaper, magazine, and T-shirt, but suddenly the concerns of the entire generation they were speaking for—raised on consumerism, surrounded by scary, creepy news stories, etc etc etc—had to be reckoned with.  Like Elvis, the Beatles, and the Sex Pistols before them, they had not only pushed rock and roll music into new territory, but had also brought an entire group of people’s feelings and concerns to the fore.  Nirvana changed the world.

ANYONE ELSE…???

There are dozens, hundreds, perhaps even thousands of other great rock and roll artists, but I think all of them were able to do what they did because these four opened doors, blazed new territories, established legitimate audiences on large scales, and remade not only the musical but the entire cultural landscapes of their times.  These four are on the top shelf, methinks, all by themselves.  One Direction is NOT the new Beatles.  I challenge you, dear readers, to make a case for anyone else in rock and roll.

I think, also, a similar “world changer” statement might be made about one or two hip hop / rap artists, but I’m not familiar enough with the field to know for sure which one— Public Enemy, Run DMC, The Beastie Boys, or____________???—was really the world changer.    Please edify me as you see fit.

Thanks for reading.

Peace, Love, and Rock and Roll

mk

Opening Doors: Singles, Jukeboxes, and a.m. Radio

Dug into the Eagles Greatest Hits (’71-’75) on my walk this evening— “Already Gone,” “Lyin’ Eyes,” “One of These Nights,” “Take It to the Limit,” etc. all unbelievably compiled before Hotel California, the first side of which is a career’s worth of greatest hits that most bands would kill for by itself-- and it got me thinking about singles.  Singles (45s for old schoolers out there) constitute the “in” door to rock and roll in many ways.  Generally, I’m more of an album guy meself (sometimes I’ve been know to pooh-pooh singles—shame on me), but the importance of individual radio friendly tracks in the life of us music consumers cannot really be overstated.

Let’s start with a definition of what makes a good single.  First, it’s gotta have a hook—a guitar riff, a melody, a chorus or refrain-- that sinks deep into your flesh, draws blood, and won’t let go: you can’t get the damn song out of your head (think Keith Richards’ guitar riff on “Satisfaction”).  Really,  the song has to have something you can sing along with, and so a great melody and some killer clever or heavy lyrical turns of phrase are also pretty much requisite (try listening to “Silly Love Songs” by Macca and Wings without singing along—I dare ya’).  Vocal harmonies are a big plus (these are what really make that Eagles GH record, I think). Next, it’s gotta sound great LOUD even or especially when blasted out of crappy, tinny, lo-fi speakers (the horn break on Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke”).  It’s also gotta be pithy: you’ve got 3 and a half minutes tops and so every second has to count (“American Idiot” by Green Day knocks you out lead-pipe-cold in 2 minutes and 56 seconds).  Sounds simple and basic, and when done right it’s elegant and also beautiful, but, of course, it ain’t easy.

A friend of mine was recently mourning the loss of a jukebox that was kept in her folks basement.  When she was growing up, the jukebox was stocked by kids’ purchases from the local record store, and was downstairs with a classic 70s wet bar and a couple of pinball machines, making that basement, most definitely, Downtown Coolsville.  She recently emailed a bunch of people who had shared evenings, weekends, and summers downstairs with her asking them to name songs that they remembered were on the jukebox at one time or another.  Here’s a sample of the old Wurlitzer’s offerings:
-Changes - David Bowie
-Fly Like an Eagle - Steve Miller
-Magic Man - Heart
-Love Will Keep Is Together - Captain & Tenille
-You're the One That I Want - Olivia Newton-John & John Travolta
-Crocodile Rock - Elton John
-Respect - Aretha Franklin
-Bad, Bad Leroy Brown - Jim Croce
-The Logical Song - Supertramp
-Do You Feel Like We Do (yeah, the short version) - Peter Frampton
-Lola - The Kinks
-A-B-C-1-2-3 - The Jackson 5
-Stuck in the Middle with You - Stealer's Wheel
-Cold as Ice - Foreigner
-S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y Night! - Bay City Rollers
-Summer Breeze - Seals & Crofts
-Walk on the Wild Side - Lou Reed
I dunno for sure, but I bet you’re smiling and / or running to wherever / whatever medium and place you store your music to put some of this good stuff on…

I started buying music—albums— when I was 11, but how did I know what albums to buy, which musical branches were growing on my tree?  I had already spent hundreds, maybe thousands of hours listening, absorbing, growing musical roots I wasn’t even aware of, and these songs were the songs that developed them.  Blasted out of car dashboards, transistor radios, and buzzing through door of my friends older siblings, at the beach, at the campground, at the pool, being driven around by my folks, and, of course, pouring out of jukeboxes and everywhere else, these songs, unbeknownst to me at those moments were pulling, welcoming me through the “in” door to rock and roll. 

a.m. radio, indeed, is synonymous with rock and roll for many people.  While Elvis and the Beatles first pinged onto most people’s radar screens with their appearances on Ed Sullivan’s TV show, it was their presence on a.m. radio—with several of their songs being broadcast to millions of people every hour on every major pop music station in the country-- which made them, and rock and roll, a ubiquitous bedrock staple of American culture.  a.m. radio was the place where hits lived (and, I think, still is, to some degree).  This ubiquitous-ness had a snowball effect. What had started out as a wild and extreme bit of youthful musical craziness with a few far-out practitioners and followers drew more and more attention ‘cuz it was everywhere and easily accessible on the airwaves, and so more and more people— listeners and creators— fell under its sway and jumped on for the ride.  Singles on the radio were the entry point for these folks, who have been on the bandwagon ever since hopping aboard.

Once onboard, singles and a.m. radio continued to be important ways for people to pursue their listening interests.  Singles are rock and roll musicians way of introducing themselves and of introducing their latest albums—this is what we’re about and this is what this latest set of songs is about.  Queen’s “Killer Queen” is a great example: “Hi. We’re a band that features hooky melodies, richly layered vocal harmonies, a unique guitar sound, a big role for the piano, and lyrics which mess with a bit with traditional sexual mores and roles.  Pleased to meet you.”  Pleased to meet them, indeed.  A good way to know if you will be interested in a band, in general, is to check out their singles.  If none of them grab ya’, then you probably should spend your dough on something else.  While internet radio doesn’t work exactly the same way—you can create radio “stations” based on your own, known-to-you tastes which are likely to wind up playing stuff which you have a higher likelihood of enjoying than a.m. radio, broadcasting the same stuff to everyone, did in the past—they still serve a similar purpose.  Tell Pandora enough about what you like to listen to, and it will play single songs and bands that you haven’t heard but do dig.  I have bought dozens of albums as a result of single songs flitting through my Pandora mix, and am almost always happy with the results of these pursuits.

While I stand by albums as a richer and more intimate medium—musicians can spread out, experiment, expand, develop, and take more musical and personal risks than they can in a single 3 and a half minute song—singles are the door in.  In a general sense, they are what introduces many people to rock and roll (or country, hip hop, r and b / soul, bluegrass, or any other popular musical idiom, for that matter), and they are also the best way for people to meet new artists and musical paths to explore.

What singles do you remember blasting from jukeboxes, car radios, etc?  What singles have opened doors for you?

Vinyl Snobbery vs. The Disgrace of Buying Used CDs vs. Downloading Directly to Devices

Buying music has always been a sacred ritual for me.  I go into a record store with a list of possible album-targets in my head, find those targets, and, as I look through the racks for them, get other ideas about what I maybe want to buy.  I spend 30-60 minutes in this mode, and wind up with an armload of music.  Then I look at how much money I’ve got to work with and start the heartbreaking process of whittling down.  Once I’m inside my cash money window, I pay up and hustle home to chow down on the new tunes.  The ritual has been the same, essentially, since I was 11 years old.  I remember making my first album purchase-- Elton John’s Caribou (does anyone remember “The Bitch Is Back?”)—in precisely this way at Laury’s Records in Evanston.  From Laury’s, Big Daddy’s, Vintage Vinyl, and the Record Exchange growing up in Evanston to Record Service and Record Swap at college in Champaign to Second Hand Tunes, Val’s Halla Records, Laurie’s Planet of Sound, Reckless Records, and dozens of other places in and around Chicago as an adult, I repeated the same ritual with a hallowed kind of joy.

I now have roughly 2,000 records in my living room, and  I spin ‘em pretty regularly on a medium grade Dual turntable run through a audiophile warm-sounding but slowly dying Harmon-Kardon receiver and out to still fat bottomed, gorgeous McIntosh speakers inherited from my dad.  I spent many years pouring every spare cent I had into purchasing record albums , and so I am a longtime connoisseur of album art and lyrics, and I take pleasure and pride in knowing who played what on which tracks, where and when things were recorded, etc.  Covers, inner sleeves, lyric sheets, liner notes, and black discs still coat the flat surfaces of my home.  Album sides provide a wonderful kind of format and structure for a wonderfully satisfying sized musical meal, every bit as varied and refined as Symphonic movements, and musicians’ careful sequencing of tracks to fit this structure is an important element in their artistic expression.  I love vinyl.  I have been entertained to see that new albums are now often released on vinyl as well as other formats and gratified that old-fashioned record stores are making a resurgence, at least around Chicago.  Folks found in these stores are My People—music lovers who grew up performing the same sacred music acquisition ritual in the same way as myself.  There is now, however, a palpable retro-purist snobbery many of these folks exude—somehow records or the fact that they continue to purchase them are superior to CDs, downloads, and / or the purchase thereof.  T-shirts, magnets, and other merch emblazoned with pictures of records and phrases like “Vinyl Rules” or “Side With Me” is peddled alongside used and new records in these stores.  I suppose some of this is attendant to any nostalgic phenomenon or retro-fad and is also fueled by a related anti-technology backlash, however…

 …this is an elitism to which I cannot subscribe. Records are swell, very swell indeed, but, like all technologies, imperfect—they scratch, skip, and degrade, you can’t listen to them on the go (while walking, for goodness sake!), you do hafta flip them over every 20 minutes which is sometimes a drag, you do always hafta listen to songs in the same order, and they take up huge amounts of space.  When CDs came on the scene, I switched over, and so…

…I also have probably 500-700 Compact Discs.  They are also fine, swell, dandy—compact (as their name suggests), easier in some ways to work with than albums (you don’t hafta flip them, it’s easy to mess with track order for kicks and giggles, and you can put ‘em in a Walkman type device—that’s what we old folks used before iPods—and listen to ‘em on the go), and they still include cool visuals, lyrics, and liner notes and performer info in their packaging (though as I get older, my weakening eyeballs have more and more trouble reading stuff on the tiny CD booklets—truly a format for young people).  Though they are not what I was raised on, I like CDs just fine, too.  Interestingly, CDs weren’t around long enough, however, to accumulate much nostalgic history, and so, while used CDs are available in retro-style music record / music stores, they are clearly given second-tier status.  They don’t get first billing in window and in-store displays, don’t take up much shelf space in the stores, and there is no merch for elitist nostalgians to purchase to broadcast their CD-lover pride.  I actually feel almost embarassed to go into a music store and buy CDs now, sensing silent disapproval from the vinyl purists in the aisles.

As we know, in recent years, CDs have been going the way of the Dinosaurs, too.  New CD retailing has rapidly evaporated.  iPods and other music storage devices have made it possible to carry tens, hundreds, even thousands of albums worth of music around for easy access when walking driving, at work, or anyplace else.  You can’t really access cover art or lyrics or find out who played bass on which track or where and when something was recorded as easily, but you can store a simply mind-boggling quantity of music in a device that fits in the palm of your hand and access it with just a few finger strokes.  There’s a certain snobbery to downloaders, too.  “I’m over it—I don’t need to own the material object,” a friend of mine pontificated not too long ago.  As a longtime lover of album paraphernalia in either vinyl or CD format, this kinda bugged me, too…

…and so my position is this: all of these formats are great and have their place.  Walking and listening is now a central part of my life, and, indeed, the ability to listen while walking has been a big personal triumph for me, unfortunately not discovered until recently:  it has put me back in closer touch with my listening muse, allowed me to get some LONG needed exercise, and prompted me to start this little blog, and so, while I was raised on vinyl, love records, and still often listen to music the old-fashioned way at home, I do not believe vinyl is in any way a superior way to consume music.  I also love CDs, and actually used CDs are my most frequent record-store targets because they are CHEAP and I can easily save them to my computer and portable iPod device, but also still access the print media and information attendant to the albums (let’s be frank here—yes, you can digitize music from vinyl now, too, but it’s a much more messy, time consuming, tedious, and deeply flawed process than it is moving stuff from CDs).  And downloading is fine, too—if you don’t wanna know or look at all the visual and printed crap that I do that’s connected to an album, that’s fine—the music is really the thing.

Please just get your music however you want and save the ‘tude—it’s kinda rude.

Sacred Circles and the Difference Between Bluegrass and Rock and Roll Ones

I plugged into some hot bluegrass for a walk on this very cold day— the Del McCoury band’s “Cold Hard Facts,” followed by the 25^th Anniversary album by Chicago hometown bluegrass standard bearer Special Consensus.  The blazing picking and warm vocal harmonies did a nice job of melting through the New Year’s chill, and got me thinking about some of the bluegrass and rock and roll jams—Sacred Circles of pickers and singers-- I have had the privilege of sitting in on over the last few years.

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine with whom I had once played in a bluegrass band (he on banjo, myself on mandolin) invited me to a party at his house on New Year’s Day and told me to bring my instruments.  I hadn’t seen him in several years and had never been to his house for party of any sort, so I wasn’t sure what to expect.  Gathered around his fireplace that day were roughly 15 people, every one of them with an acoustic  instrument.  There were several guitars of varying varieties (standard wooden 6 strings, dobros, 12-strings, etc), a few banjos and a few mandolins, a couple of fiddles, and a bass.  One guy (a former member of the Special Consensus, it turns out) appeared to be the unofficial emcee of the proceedings, calling tunes or selecting other people to call them, shouting out chord changes, pointing out different people to take solos, deciding on what key different tunes would be played in, etc.  I hadn’t played much mandolin or bluegrass since leaving the band I had played in with the host, so I was excited to get my bluegrass on.  I eagerly pulled out my mandolin and sat down.  Tunes were called, chord changes were shouted, soloists were pointed to, and I quickly found myself fumbling and embarrassed as the pickers around me shot out lightning fast licks and belted out clear, precise, multipart vocal harmonies which I could not, in my wildest of mandolin dreams, have possibly kept up with.  More confident on guitar—my first instrument— I put the mandolin back in its case and traded it for my standard and trusty Martin 6-string.  I hung in admirably for the rest of the evening, following chords to tunes familiar and unfamiliar bluegrass with the aid of my capo, taking the occasional modest solo (just play the damn melody, Mike, no need to play Fast Pick Derby with this crowd!), and even calling a tune or two (“Willin’” by Lowell George / Little Feat worked well, thank you!).  I left with my feet several feet off the floor (as it were), having been a part of a Sacred Circle ritual of musical co-participation dating back decades and, in one form or another, centuries and millennia.

Over the next few months, I was graciously invited to return to the Sacred Circle convened at my old friend’s house for several evenings of pickalong.  Mostly, the same experience was repeated, and joyfully so— intoxicating evenings of musical co-participation with a group of skilled, passionate, and well-versed musicians.  I left each time with the same feet-not-touching-the-ground musical buzz.  I am not, however, a chopsmith, even on guitar.  I can pick a little bit-- render a melody, even spit out a spiffy sounding few runs and riffs—but am more of a Keith Richards rhythm and song player than a Jimmy Page or Eddie Van Halen lead player.  Knowledge can, in certain situations, be a sadly inhibiting or even humiliating force, and as I sat in on yet more of these Sacred Circles, I found, much to my horror, that I was becoming inhibited and embarrassed by my relatively modest guitar chops as I jammed along with accomplished players capable of laying down solos which left me choking on the dust kicked up by their flurries of rapid fire notes.  One evening, I was shocked to find myself just putting the damn guitar in the case and listening, and then graciously declined a couple of invitations to come and jam in the weeks that followed.  Please note: no one in these circles said or did anything unkind or which in any way suggested that I was unwelcome, disrespected musically, or unequal or incompetent in any way.  Indeed, the folks in the Circles were unfailingly gracious, warm, kind, respectful, and encouraging (several times, knowing I do a nice job with the tune,  other people called “Willin’”).  The problem was that the bluegrass crowd’s musical skills, and as a result their values, are tilted heavily towards the virtuosic, and I am, for sure, no virtuoso.  If, like my friend and his gang, you have been a more disciplined picker than myself and so have developed playing skills fast and furious enough to run with the Big Guns, then these are your circles, and they are Sacred celebrations, indeed.  For me, however, while these Circles were nice places to visit, I did not feel at home.

However, I now had a grasp of what a Sacred Circle is—a group of musicians sharing an informal musical experience on musical common ground for no other audience than themselves—and of the heady effect participating in such a circle can have when it works out well.  Aware of the phenomenon, I had also deliberately cultivated (manipulated!) a few situations at parties to create a similar effect, placing myself in role of leader, but, rather than calling bluegrass tunes featuring blazing solo breaks, I had emphasized rock and roll standards which fostered audience singalongs.  Singing along with “The Weight” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” by the Band never failed to raise entire roomfuls of people several feet of the floor, and other tunes, at different moments with different crowds, had similar effect.   Many of these songs were familiar to people with only a casual relationship with music, and rock and rollers as well as non-playing folks who knew the songs and could simply singalong hopped on for the ride.  These were sacred circles, indeed, and I did felt powerfully at home in their warm embrace.  Happily, lurking in the shadows of my buddy’s lightspeed bluegrass jams were a small number of rock and roll players with more modest chops but extensive catalogs of rock and roll standards and deep album cuts in their bags, and we had spotted each other through the haze of notes around his fireplace.  One night, my buddy called only these folks over to his house, and we played long into the night, rolling through the entire first side of the Stone’s “Beggars Banquet,” Allman Brothers jams, the Band catalog, Beatles songs, blues standards, and more.  Melodies and hook lines were the coin of the realm, rather than blazing solos, and kids and significant others floated in and out of the Circle comfortably as familiar bits and pieces of songs surfaced.  The Sacred Circle of rock and roll is built around songs, rather than musical virtuosity, and this Circle, in the end, is my home.  Come sit and sing or pick along for awhile, taking a load off Annie (or is it “Fannie?”), scraping the shit right off your shoes, rambling on, or simply na-na-ing to Jude with the Band, the Stones, Zeppelin, or the Beatles.  You don’t need to pick particularly well or even have a big record collection.  You just gotta wanna rock and roll.