“I’m Still...Willin’”

It’s been a crushingly hectic Spring, but now I’m back— thanks for tuning in again.  I have a thick backlog of musical musings stored up in my head that I want to share, and some are too heavy to tackle right away as I try get back into my humble blogging groove, but it’s gonna be a looooong summer, and I’m looking forward to working through the pile, including the meatiest topics on my list: my musician parents and their gift to me, the gift of Emmylou Harris to all of us, the origin of the Great River of American Music: Amazing Grace, and more.  I hope y’all will join me for the ride.

I wanna start with a reflection on Lowell George’s “Willin’”— ostensibly a truck driver’s meditation, but really it’s a song about everyone and everyone’s lives.   If ya’ don’t know it, here’s a link to a pretty magical live version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txX-kPn3h6s    

There’s so much to say about this tiny little piece of pure fucking genius— the original version clocking in several seconds under 3 minutes—  that I’m not sure where to start, but sometimes I think this is the only song in the whole world, or the only song I ever want or need to listen to, or the only song that matters, anyway.  Perhaps feeling kinda the same thing, Linda Ronstadt once said that in a year where she played over 250 arena shows (250 arena shows in a year— can you imagine that?  Whew!), the only song she still looked forward to singing every night was “Willin’.”  On her Heart Like a Wheel album, Linda offered up the song as the back half of a kind of medley, coupling it with “When Will I Be Loved:”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_1Q2SeJ5oA      
A few other people have recorded cover versions of the song, countless rock and rollers—from Bob Dylan to the Black Crowes to Phish—do it live, and nearly everyone who sits in on any kind of a jam session—from rock and roll ones to bluegrass ones to country ones to folkie ones—knows it and will jump in eagerly when it’s called by someone in the circle.  Heck, as a staple of introductory guitar classes and lessons, almost anyone who’s ever messed with a guitar knows it.  What’s the deal with this song?  What makes it the sacred and universal text that it is?  Maybe a walk through the thing from start to finish— a Rock and Roll Explication de Texte as it were— will help explain its grip on people, and give us all a greater appreciation of what Lowell left us with this one…

The song opens with an elegant, simple but haunting set of chord changes that winds up with a nifty and cool, easy to play but hard to think of, step up and step down guitar hook / riff.  The chord changes evoke a sleepy, beautiful and yet painful sensation of awakening.  This mixture of pain and beauty, as well as happiness and sadness, loneliness and connection, trouble and triumph, are at the heart of the songs’ gripping pathos and are what make it more a song about people and life than about just truckers. The song, changes, and hook / riff are easily reachable to guitar players of all skill levels and stripes.  The opening of the Ronstadt version, with the misty changes emerging from the longing closing vocal harmonies of “When Will I Be Loved,” creates a kind of miraculous wood-and-steel evocation of dawn rising over a lonely highway that, if it doesn’t raise goosebumps on you, you must be deaf or dead.

“I been warped by the rain, driven by the snow, I’m so drunk and dirty, don’t ya’ know, but I’m still…willin’.”
The line of the melody falls as it’s sung but turns up a bit at the last line, shadowing the lyric’s portrayal of someone who has taken punches from life but hasn’t been knocked out.  Simultaneously, the narrator is self-deprecating but also kinda proud of his or her survival and persistence.  Pain and beauty, humility and pride all vividly painted in a precious few words.

“Out on the road late last night I seen my pretty Alice and never hit a light,* oh Alice—Dallas Alice…” 
Here the mixture isn’t beauty and pain but loneliness and connectedness, the joy of motion and the joy of pausing, all at once— a similar blend, no less potent, and heartbreakingly poignant.  The narrator drives by himself every night but has people, especially ladies, for whom he feels genuine fondness and whom he stops to see, in many places.  *Post-posting P.S.: one perceptive reader points out that the lyric actually reads "in every headlight"

And then that guitar hook / riff again—so gorgeous, so simple and accessible, and so sinking deep into your flesh and not letting go.

“And I been from Tucson to Tucumcari, Tehachapi to Tonopah, driven every kinda rig that’s ever been made, driven the back roads so I wouldn’t get weighed…” 
On the live version especially, the richly layered vocal harmonies on the chorus deliver a kind of sky-openinig, voice-of-god effect.  The lyric once again reflects a kind of self-effacing pride from a narrator who has seen a lot, who has done some things that weren’t quite right (but yet not too terrible), but who has not let those mistakes stop him (or her!).  Again, a delicious, touching, and familiar mixture of good and bad—the trucker’s life is all of our lives. 

And then everything stops.

“And if you give me…”

Now 3 long gorgeous notes, drawn out with pauses between ‘em that deliver a stomach-dropping, breath-stealing  falling sensation.
“…weed, whites, and wine…”

Now back in rhythm…
“…and you show me sign, I’ll be willin’ to be movin…”
While modern statistics and sensibilities related to driving under the influence certainly prevent current listeners from embracing or endorsing the lyric’s celebration of a driver hauling an 18-wheeler while loaded up on any of these substances, the narrator’s brutal frankness highlights a powerful truth about all of us: we’re all hooked on something—money, competition, art, drugs, nature, power, technology, something— and whatever it is we’re hooked on can, for better and for worse, motivate and help us to accomplish goals.

The chorus closes with the hook / riff and then most versions feature a solo—piano, picked or slide guitar, harmonica, whatever— exploring the melody of the verse.  Melancholy but not sad, persistent but tired, the melody itself, like most great melodies, sounds not so much like it was written or consciously guided by anyone, but rather like it has existed since time began.

Then the lyric moves into some edgy political territory…
“I been kicked by the wind, robbed by the sleet, had my head stoved in but I’m still on my feet and I’m still…willin’…”
A sense of larger, malevolent powers— Mother Nature and also criminals and / or perhaps even anti-labor / union forces— are now operating against our humble narrator, with economic, medical, and spiritual implications.  Once again, this is a sensation we all know well in one way or another— the world grinding us down.  Our narrator, of course, remains inspiringly undaunted—he’s still standing and plugging along.

“Well I smuggled some smoke and folks from Mexico, baked by the sun every time I go to Mexico…but I’m still…”
And now: ethics.  Smuggling controlled substances, immigration and immigrants.  A guy trying to do the right thing but for the wrong reasons?  Or the right reasons?  Or the wrong thing for the right reasons?  Some of the above?  All of the above?  None of the above?  Yes to all, of course-- it’s a mess, and we all face these kind of mixed up, messy–as-hell dilemmas and are operated on by these kinds of levers and forces every day.  I guess I observe a fondness for the folks he’s smuggling in, underscoring the narrator’s basic good nature, and a willingness to put himself at risk, whatever his reasons.  But it’s not easy—he’s feeling the heat, literally, of course, but metaphorically too.  A good, flawed man, doing his honest, self-aware best.  We should all aspire to this standard.

After this harrowing, revealing journey, we run through the chorus again, the song closing with the refrain “…and I’ll be willin’ to be movin’…”

Lowell George broke in to the music business playing with Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention.  One story (possibly apocryphal, possibly true) has Zappa kicking Lowell out of the Mothers when Lowell played the fresh-off-the-pen “Willin’” for FZ, with FZ saying something like, “You don’t need to be in anyone else’s band anymore, you need to be the leader of your own band now.” And, indeed, Lowell left FZ and the Mothers to form Little Feat and his playing and his songs graced records by Linda Ronstadt, Bonnie Raitt, and many others.  A lady I once knew actually cut a college psychology final to see Lowell and Little Feat on what, unbeknownst to her at the time, was Lowell’s last gig.  He died of an overdose 2 days later.  Lowell left us Little Feat classics such as “Sailin’Shoes,”  “Roll ‘um Easy,” “Fat Man in the Bathtub,” and "Dixie Chicken," a glorious solo record which contains, among other wonderful nuggets, another heartbreakingly incisive and pithy gem called “20 Million Things To Do,” and many other treasures.  But even if he’d left us nothing but “Willin’,” we’d all owe him a tremendous debt.  He knew us all, somehow, and captured the world and all of us in it in less than 3 minutes with this elegant piece of perfection.  Wherever he is, I think Lowell hopes that we’re all still, whatever it is that we do, willin’.

The Joy of Discovery: Oasis and Other Revelations

I kinda live under a musical rock.  Although I spend hours every week, every day listening and have a constant hunger for new sounds, I’ve never been much of a radio guy-- lots of commercials, other people deciding what hits my fussy ears, predictability, and more singles than album cuts are the most prominent reasons.  Instead, I get connected with new musics in other ways.  I use Pandora as it works around some of the stated radio objections nicely, friends turn me on to new tunes, I study album covers, sleeves, and liner notes, and then make connections, I read about stuff in magazines and newspapers, I take chances on interesting looking things in record stores, etc.  This mode of operation means I have often come to bands after they’ve already crested in terms of creativity and / or popularity—from the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd on through to Nirvana and the White Stripes I frequently “discover” bands and musicians long after other people have done so (true story: I bought my first White Stripes record and the next day they announced they were breaking up).  But whenever I find someone new—whether they’re at the peak of their powers at the time I first hear them or whether I first hear them years after they have come and gone—the sensation is electrifying, and best articulated by the Late Great Lester Bangs:

“I saw myself… varooming off… in anticipation of the revelations waiting in thirty-five or forty minutes of blasting sound soon as I got home, the eternal promise that this time the guitars will jell like TNT and set off galvanic sizzles in your brain ‘KABLOOIE!!!’ and this time at least at last blow your fucking lid sky-high. Brains gleaming on the ceiling, sticking like putty stalactites, while yer berserk body runs around and slams outside hollering subhuman gibberish, jigging in erratic circles and careening split-up syllables insistently like a geek with a bad case of the superstar syndrome.”*

It’s like discovering gold or hitting upon a great new invention, except better— you’ve come upon something very valuable and gorgeous, are not sure where it might lead, but the roads ahead are exciting to contemplate…

This week, 20 years after they arrived, I discovered Oasis (again true story: Rolling Stone notes this week that the band is about to release a 20th Anniversary Edition of it's first album, Definitely Maybe). On Tuesday, an Esquire blurb flitted across my radar screen which featured a list of “The Hold Steady's 10 Rock Albums Every Man Should Own.”  Of course, I’ve never heard of The Hold Steady (apparently a current NYC rock and roll band—maybe they’re on the radio?) but the first record on their list was the Stones’ Exile On Main Street and so I took the list seriously from the get go.  3^rd on the list was Oasis’s Definitely Maybe (I had at least heard of Oasis, but never actually heard them, if ya’ know what I mean), and the blurb included a link to a cut from the album: “Supersonic,” which grabbed me immediately.  Promptly marching over to Laurie’s Planet of Sound, I found a copy of Definitely Maybe in the used CD racks and varoomed home hoping for the described Bangsian Revelations.  And sure enough: the plaster and masonry crumbling guitar riffs and wailing and shrieking guitar leads, the seismic rumblings of bass and drums, and the dry, acerbic lyrics delivered via snide vocal sneerings and leerings left me rolling on the floor with my eyes rolled back into my head, foaming at the mouth, teeth and nerve endings ablaze, gloriously gasping for breath.   And so now the happy process of assimilation begins.  Who’s in the band?  Where did they come from?  When was this recorded?  Who do they connect to and how?  What’s the band’s history?  Are they still rolling?  And, most exciting of all, what other albums do I now need to get?   Digging through the album packaging, Rolling Stone blurbs, and other web notes, I learn that Oasis is a creation of a pair of typically volatile rock and roll brothers, providing a kind of British answer to Nirvana starting in the mid-90s.  Their history is classically rife with strife, melodrama, and abuse, but I am overjoyed to find that they have rich back catalog that I can work my way through (already digesting copies of Be Here Now and Dig Out Your Soul).  Again, I’ve found something very valuable and gorgeous, am not sure where it might lead, but the roads ahead are exciting to contemplate.  This process calls to mind other thrilling discoveries I’ve made over the years…

8^th grade— I think her name was Pam.  Me and my friend Eddie met her and her friend, Jenny, at the mall for an afternoon of futile, inept flirtation— department stores, clothing shops, ice cream, whatnot.  It would amount to nothing, except: while passing through Marshall Fields I did stop and buy  Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon from the dorky record department there. Though I knew of the album and had seen the ubiquitous cover, it was another thing for this 13 year old geek to hold it in his hands, eyeball it up close and personal, have a copy for his very own.  I remember unwrapping the thing there on some benches at the mall, pulling out the stickers and the poster, reading through the lyrics in the gatefold.  The clue that the date itself would amount to nothing was that the girl was utterly uninterested in my purchase.  No loss there.  At home, though, I slapped the platter down on my turntable as soon as I walked into my room and…  wow.  Holy shit.  Never heard nothing like that before.  The doors were blown off.  Anything was possible.  Rock and roll could take you anywhere, be about anything, and include almost any kind of sound.  Dark Side and the rest of the Floyd catalog helped shepherd me through the trials and travails of adolescence.   A gold strike, for sure.

As a senior in high school, I started hanging out with some guys who were into jazz.  Mostly they were players themselves— drums, sax, trumpet.  They listened to Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Pat Metheny.  One night my bass player friend John sent me home with his copy of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. His directions were to put on some headphones, close my eyes, turn out the lights, and listen.  The intimate communication and interplay between the 4 musicians, the complex harmonics, rhythmics, and melodics of their playing, the passionate, fervent, persistent, painful, searching, focused, mesmerizing, and triumphant flow of the composition— all delivered instrumentally and acoustically— represented a type of journey upon which I had never embarked before.  I spent the bulk of my college years exploring musical roads that ranged out from A Love Supreme: the solo piano improvisations of Keith Jarret, the big band swing of Ellington and Basie, the avant-garde howlings of Ornette Coleman and beyond.  I’ve since returned to the rock and roll mainstream, but the journey that started with the discovery of A Love Supreme has paid more dividends than can be expressed and leaves me a more informed and appreciative listener of all musics.

And so the process of discovery never gets old: from Floyd to ‘Trane to Oasis and everyplace between and beyond, I still troll the racks in search of that thrilling moment when I hear something unlike I’ve ever heard before, which, to paraphrase Iggy Pop, grabs me by the throat and punches me in the face with its power and beauty.  The joy of The Chase, indeed. What are some discoveries that you remember in particular, that have been important to your ears?

*from the book Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung by Lester Bangs

The Church of Rock and Roll

I spent today’s sunny Sunday stroll with my favorite album: Exile on Main Street by the Rolling Stones.  Starting my walk in a kind of brain dead, crabby haze (too much grading of papers and writing of report cards!), by the time I returned I was alive, exhilarated, my head clear.  My soul and spirit had been raised and cleansed.  “Exile” was, as it always is, a religious experience: a statement which I make in very literal, very serious sense.

I don’t go to church.  The truth is, houses of worship give me the creeps, as does religion in general, particularly all the large, organized varieties.  The iconography, the incense, the ritualistic superstitious supplication, the handing over of control of my own present and future to some unseen force, the notion that going through some elaborately choreographed  set of words, gestures, or songs somehow makes me a better person— none of this has ever rung true for me.  I don’t think any supreme, sentient being is looking down, guiding, judging, or paying attention to our tiny little rock or me in any way, and even if some as yet undetermined, undefined force or being does exist, I certainly don’t think any religion or any person here on earth has ever got a clue as to what such an entity is up to at all.  If you’re a believer and religion helps you makes sense of things, that’s fine with me, but it doesn’t for me and I stay away from those places.

However, I do believe that some phenomena within our human experience do defy rational or scientific explanation.  A few years back my family had just returned from a blissful 2 week vacation.  We had visited relatives, camped, hiked, taken in ballgames, toured historical sites, and had a wonderful time in general, all at the height of summer.  We returned on a Sunday afternoon and were NOT looking forward to the harsh return to work and the weekly grind on Monday morning.  While I was certainly not faced with any tragedy or terrible hardship, I was certainly on a buzzcrash—my mood, as it was this afternoon, was bleak, unpleasant.   As Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, “My soul seemed as foul as smoke from burning cat fur.”  I took my kids for a walk by the lake while my wife made dinner.  The Chicago Park District stages concerts by local ensembles at parks around the city throughout the summer, and on that particular evening my kids and I encountered a local gospel ensemble—a chorus backed by organ, drums, and bass—in full flight.  Tragically I forget the name of the outfit (I believe it was Bobby Rush’s Praise Ensemble, but I’m not sure), but I’ll never forget the lady singing a solo in front of the band with her eyes closed and clapping her hands, her voice rich and throaty, melodious and gritty all at once.  She was oblivious to everything in the Universe except the music coursing through her at that moment, and she appeared to be merely a conduit for this current, though one able to conduct the current because she had spent a lifetime in convocation with it.  We caught the last 20 or 30 minutes of their set, and by the end, like this afternoon, I had been turned around: my head was clear, my outlook was now positive, my soul and spirit had been raised and cleansed.  The music had been a religious experience—defying not only rational or scientific accounting but also any straightforward mental health explanation whatsoever.  No conflict had been resolved, no therapeutic epiphany reached—the music had simply fixed me up.  It was at this moment that I realized that music is my religion and that I am a member of the Church of Rock and Roll.

And so what does this mean?  “I belong to the Church of Rock and Roll” sounds like some hamhanded, trite, clichéd movie script crapola, and in some respects it is.  But for me, and, I suspect, for many others, music—not church—is where we go, what we turn to when we’re lost or bleak, what we rely on to bring us back around when everything and everyone else has failed us, the way church and religion does for people who believe in these institutions.  And so yes, in all seriousness and absolutely: music is my religion and I am a member of the Church of Rock and Roll.  Music has the power to raise and cleanse me, to exorcise my soul and brain of my own personal demons, to remind me what is really beautiful and important in this world.  The phenomenon defies rational explanation, but is undeniably real.  While on that particular afternoon, I came to this revelation through music that would be classified as “gospel,” the music which speaks particularly to me, my own personal denomination of the Religion of Music, is Rock and Roll—that raw, crass, mutt of a genre, born of a fusion of black, white, gospel, blues, jazz, folk, and country influences whose first prophet was Elvis, that crazy boy from Tupelo, Mississippi.

Religions encompass a set of ethos, of values, codified in a set of “sacred” texts.  So it is with Rock and Roll: the music has traditionally valued a youthful spirit, passion, racial and cultural diversity and equality, a questioning of authority, a respect for nature, a sense of political and civic duty, peace and love, a celebration of sexuality and bacchanalia as a response to the stresses of modern life, a self-mocking, dark kind of humor.  While not exactly the same as the values laid down in the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, or any other “sacred” text, they’re not far from them, and certainly represent a modern conversation with them. 

These values are embodied in a set of sacred texts: records.  I don’t have a fuckin’ bible.  I have a record collection (here broadly defined as any music I have access so—vinyl, CDs, stuff I’ve downloaded, whatever).  This is where I always turn, always have turned when I’m lost.  Hooks from these records limn the way I live.  From Exile on Main Street: “…the sunshine bores the daylights out of me…” “…you got to scrape the shit right off your shoes…”  That, ladies and gentlemen, is the way I roll, a credo, fer sher. 

Religious folks spend time praying—communing with their values using scared texts as a basis for conversation with some higher being—every day.  Music plays in my house and in my head without stopping for a minute ever.  It fills me up and makes me think, every minute of every day.  Yeah, I pray—every time I put on a record, I invoke a power larger than myself, something which defies rational or scientific explanation—and I pray every day, all the time.

And so: I consider myself a pretty spiritual guy, despite the fact that I’m not religious at all, and am somewhere towards the atheist side of the agnostic-atheist spectrum.

Unlike many (though certainly not all) folks who do subscribe to more conventional, organized religions, I don’t think my own beliefs are “right” or appropriate for anyone else.  They’re right for me, and my bible—the colossal, dynamic body of recorded music, in particular of the rock and roll variety—allows me to have a very personal and individual set of religious beliefs, that won’t even be the same for everyone in my particular “church.”  Actually, anyone with a particular artistic bent—painting, writing, dance (my daughter)—is likely to have their own personal religion and church in an analogous way.  This is a powerful and beautiful notion: that bodies of artistic work constitute a set of sacred “texts” which articulate the human experience and transcend scientific explanation by raising and cleansing the souls and spirits of individuals who come to know these bodies of work intimately.  “You got to scrape the shit right off your shoes.”  Rock and Roll is my scraper and, thus, my salvation.  Amen.

Runnin’ On Empty and My Only Regret

I’ve certainly screwed many tons of things up in my life, and there are also many cool things that I might or could have done but didn’t, but I don’t regret any of these things except one: I never trusted myself as a musician and so never had the opportunity to go on the Road.  In later years, I have at times, perhaps quite delusionally, gone all Marlon Brando on myself: “I coulda’ been somebody.  I coulda’ been a contender.”  Maybe yes, maybe no—in all likelihood, I would have amounted to just another guy in just another band who wanted to make it and didn’t.  But I’ll never know, and I’ll never have had the experience of taking it on the Road to find out.  This is my one and only regret. 

To live a life in which the whole point of your day is to get to the stage and play for an hour or even 2, to arrive at a point as a part of a band where the act of performing becomes routine enough that you are so focused and comfortable in the act of creation that you aren’t really aware of the audience but only what you and the band are playing…that’s  the one thing I wish I had done in this life.  The feeling a band gets when they truly enter a groove—it’s better than any fuckin’ drug, sex, love, french fries, or any other damn thing in the world, and the only way you get to that point, that groove, is by performing together every night.  The Road Life--  much romanticised and also much maligned—that constitutes the pursuit of this place is the subject of Jackson Browne’s “Runnin’ On Empty.”

And so: I took a walk today with Jackson Browne and the Section (a group of LA musicians who backed dozens of classic albums in the 70s and 80s) as they hit the road with Runnin’ On Empty, and, as it always does, the album left me pretty shook up by the time the band walked offstage after “The Load Out / Stay.”  The album documents the Road experience as clearly, completely, complexly (just made that word up right now, heck yeah!), viscerally, and beautifully as anything ever recorded.  The band sound is enormous—David Lindley’s lap steel and fiddle work takes a lot of the foreground, but Leland Sklar’s bass, Russ Kunkel’s backbeats, Danny Kortchmar’s rhythm guitar, and Browne’s smooth and precise vocals all are equal elements in the palette.  The tracks—recorded onstage, in rehearsal rooms, motel rooms, on the bus— vivdly document, implicitly and explicitly, the band’s love for their musical work, but also the loneliness and boredom of the Road life, and also pay homage to the hard work and cruel ironies of the life and roles of roadies, bus drivers, audience members and other non-performers involved with the Show every night.

The album opens with the title track overviewing the magic of Road Life—driving and playing and living out The Dream-- driven by a straightforward but unshakable guitar riff, mid-tempo backbeat, and soaring lap steel lead work by Lindley.  “The Road,” documenting the ironic loneliness of a performer’s full-yet-empty romantic life, is next.  The tune’s first verse is actually recorded, appropriately enough, in a motel room, and then cuts to the stage for the last 2 verses.  The nearly silent moment when the listener sails from motel room to stage in between verses, cued only by the faint hoot of an audience member, is like running off the end of a cliff and starting to fall, and eerily evokes what must be the performers sensation as he leaves partners in one town and moves to play another show in the next before repeating the same cycle over and over.  “Rosie” is a heartbreaking testimony to the jealousies of roadies, and Danny Kortchmar’s “Shakey Town” studies the peculiar and complex relationship between the guys in the band and the tour bus and truck drivers in the Road Culture.  The cover of Reverend Gary Davis’s “Cocaine”—well, that’s pretty straightforward, but it’s a hell of a rendering of the tune and that part of the Life.  By “Nothin’ But Time,” actually recorded on the tour bus and describing the phenomenon of leaving one show to go to the next, the listener knows the band loves to play and is glad for the chance to do so but also knows that the Road Life is not simply a bed of roses.

The record closes with “The Load Out / Stay,” which the band had never performed and had only run through once very quickly the afternoon of the gig on the recording.  They had to listen very closely to each other to make the damn thing hold together onstage, and the intimacy of the band’s musical moment on this number, ironically delivered in front of a packed auditorium, is a helluva thing to hear.  “The Load Out” celebrates the hard work of the road crew, the love and devotion of listeners who attend shows, and Browne’s deep appreciation for them both as well as for the opportunity to live the Road Life.  The simple piano and haunting melody which frame the song are genuine and moving and never fail to remind me of my only regret. “Stay” is a warm bit of wishful thinking that any one show could go on forever.

I don’t regret not being a rockstar, but I do regret never having the chance to live the Musician’s Life on the Road, in pursuit of that dream.  Runnin’ On Empty’s real gift to me is that it takes me there and lets me live that life in all it’s glory and loneliness, if only briefly.  Thanks, Jackson.

Judging By Covers: Love and Respect for the Art of Playing Other People’s Songs

Someone (was it you?) once said to me that a good cover of a song either does the song differently or does it better than the original version.  While that isn’t really the whole conversation about covers, it’s a good way to start.  I spent an hour walking with “Sail Away: The Songs of Randy Newman” this morning, and many of the cuts on this record pass this simple test in one or even both respects.  To the “different or better” question, I would also add some other ideas to consider as one contemplates cover versions of songs: first, how a given song stands up to cover-age is a test of the song itself— if people can have engaging musical conversations with the song, bend it their own way, make it say something new, cast it in a different light, then it’s probably a good song in and of itself, whoever is playing it.  Most Randy Newman songs also pass with flying colors here.  Cover versions are also a kind of crucible or benchmark test for musicians—a successful or unsuccessful cover version can say a lot of different things about a performer.  Finally, I’d say that musicians’ decisions about what songs they cover and how they cover them constitutes a legitimate musical artistic vehicle and art form—whether or not those musicians write songs of their own— potentially giving “cover bands” every bit as much musical legitimacy as bands playing “original” material.  Indeed, as a musician who spends much of my own musical time as a player / performer covering songs of other people, I am hereby moved to offer a defense, nee a celebration, of the role of cover songs in this world which, post-Beatles /  Bob Dylan, places a distinctly higher value on musicians who write their own songs than those who cover other people’s songs.  As you read along bearing my modest musings in mind, I humbly ask you to sweep the corners of your brain for your own favorite covers and be ready to share when we’re done, boys and girls…

Tim O’Brien’s cover of “Sail Away” opens the Newman tribute.  O’Brien trades the lush orchestral sonic palette of Newman’s original rendering of the song for country fiddles, strummed guitar, pedal steel / slide, and mandolins— sonic elements more closely associate with the South than the orchestral palette or even the solo piano Newman has used to offer the song up when performing by himself.  The song— voicing in typically razor-sharp ironic Newman fashion the huckster perspective of a slave trader kidnapping Africans into slavery in the South—is, in many ways, brought home or made more authentic by these Southern sonic elements in O’Brien’s version, directly evoking the pastoral southern landscape the trader is trying to make sound appealing (the genius of Newman’s lyric is that it begs the question “does he believe his own line or is he trying to make it sound appealing to himself or to his victims to salve his conscience?”).  O’Brien’s cover, at first blush, doesn’t sound all that different than the original—the melody, tempo, and arrangement are all intact— but  upon further consideration of the sonic palette O’Brien uses, it might well be argued that it’s both different and better.  In any case, O’Brien’s cover certainly underscores the satirical power and beauty of Newman’s songcraft—a celebration of the song and songwriter, as well as the performer, and the art of both songwriting and covering all in one.  Nicely done, Tim, nicely done, indeed.

I really dislike Joan Baez records.  I find the singing generally shrieky and yet also somehow flat and lacking immediacy, and find the songs generally preachy and precious.  One of my favorite covers of all time, however, is of Judas Priest covering Baez’s “Diamonds and Rust,” and it’s great for many reasons, not the least of which is that it sifts the song from the muck of it’s original delivery.  Baez’s lyric portrays an ex-lover addressing her ex about why or how one shouldn’t stay lost in the past.  In her original version, the tone is pedantic, preachy, and lecturish, and also lacks a hook or chorus that digs into your flesh and can’t be shaken.  Baez’s singing (as ever) is shrill and lacks any real ferocity.  In the hands of the Priest, however, the song suddenly becomes something much more savage and appealing: Rob Halford’s narrator is snide and angry, the arrangement pulls a refrain from the lyric that is not in Baez’s original rendering—“we both know what memories can bring, they bring diamonds and rust”—that sticks in your head and gut, and the wailing guitar lines and thunderous chords running around and underneath the melody suddenly make the song a much more engaging and desperate piece of expression.  Different and better, hell yes and for sure, and it also does a great job of showing the song at its best, maybe even improving it.

Sometimes straight ahead cover versions illuminate performers in revealing ways.  The Black Crowes teamed up with Jimmy Page for a Zeppelin fest some years back.  “Live at the Greek” documents the adventure.  The Crowes being the unapologetic 70s hard rock throwbacks that they are, certainly no one was surprised that they found the opportunity to cover the Zeppelin songbook with Page himself irresistible, and the renderings of the classic Zeppelin catalog are all good, clean, straight ahead, live fun—certainly not different, and not really better, in all frankness, but a fun set to stroll through, just ‘cuz you know the Crowes were living out a dream.  The outing does provide a chance to compare the players involved head-to-head, and the results are revealing both from the Zeppelin side and the Crowes side: the Crowes’ Rich Robinson goes toe-to-toe, guitar-to-guitar with his Master and comes out ahead, laying down song-foundational guitar riffs and firing off bone rattling solos with much more facility and ferocity than the aging Page, who stumbles kinda lamely through his own songs.  Chris Robinson, however, doesn’t fare so well: I love ya’ Chris, I really do, but we can all hear, after listening to this, that you really are no Robert Plant.  The singing is forced and out of tune, and Robinson doesn’t have the technical or emotional range of his forebear.  Sorry dude.  The covers outed ya’ here.

Near the end of the Newman tribute, Marc Broussard offers up a reading of “You Can Leave Your Hat On” which is as delicious as it is straightforward.  Newman’s lyric narrates a sexual encounter which has been interpreted by performers and critics in various ways— from simple passion (Joe Cocker’s rendition) to sexual disorder or deviance (as articulated in various analyses offered up by critics and listeners of varying stripes).  Newman’s own rendering of the song is curiously neutral— certainly lustful, but yet not particularly passionate or malevolently lascivious.  Broussard’s version on the tribute album is really a deliciously straightforward r and b paean to hormonal infatuation.  From the funky bass and drum driving the tune, to the smoky lead and soulful backing vocals setting the scene, to the sleazy horns, the listener is in the room and feels what’s going on here— a narrator who is VERY pleased to be spending the evening with someone he is VERY fond of.  The song stands up to this and all of the varying interpretations and allows listeners and performers to bring their own lenses to what’s, uh, laid out.

Finally, I have played in “cover bands” for many years.  Yeah, I’ve written or co-written a few songs which aren’t half bad, but I ain’t no Bob Dylan and have no delusions about this fact.  However, I sure as hell know a great song when I hear one, and take pride in my ability (and in my bands’ abilities) to have a musical conversation with a great song—to recast it using different tempos, harmonic structures, instrumentations, and stylistic approaches, and also to respect its primary melodic, harmonic, and lyrical ideas.  Kurt Vonnegut once said that he wouldn’t mind being placed in the “Science Fiction” drawer if so many people didn’t mistake that drawer for a urinal, and I feel the same way about playing in “cover bands.”  My own bands have covered everything from the Stones’ “Sweet Virginia” to Monty Python’s “Universe Song” to Bobby Timmons’s “Dat Dere” to George Jones’s “The Race Is On” to the gospel standard “Wayfaring Stranger” to “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” and way the hell beyond. I have a particular version of “Amazing Grace,” recast in a minor key and narrated by an unconverted unbeliever that I’m mighty damn proud of, and I’ll wager that none of the renditions we have offered of any of these songs sound like any other renditions you’ve heard and also will wager that most of them will knock your bloody socks off.  I think the songbook we’ve amassed—I can and will play any of these tunes for you on command—is a pretty wonderful thing to listen to, defines a really clear musical aesthetic, and says a lot about me and my compadres as musicians.  I also bet almost any other musician you’d wanna hear could lay out dozens of covers which would render you, dear listener, speechless and which would also lend you powerful insight into that musician’s musical heritage and passions and would probably also inspire you to check out some things you’ve never listened to.

Covers are an unheralded but powerful and joyous rock and roll tradition.  They provide glorious conversations with familiar and great songs, illuminate songs and performers in important, meaningful and revealing ways, and constitute an art form in and of themselves.  Go hear the cover band opening for the big national act at the bar down the street this weekend, and holler at that Big Act for them to do a cover or two while you’re at it.  Here are a few more of my own favorite covers:

·       Devo’s version of “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones (on “Are We Not Men?”)
·       Uncle Tupelo’s version of “No Depression” by A.P., Hardy (on “No Depression”—heck,
      this one touched off the whole “alt-country” movement)
·       Linda Ronstadt’s version of Lowell George’s “Willin’” (on “Heart Like a Wheel”)
·       Nirvana’s version of Leadbelly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” (on “Unplugged”)
·       Jane’s Addiction’s version of “Rock and Roll” by Lou Reed (on “Jane’s Addiction,”
      their first record which, interestingly, is a live one)
·       Two classical cellists version of “Thunderstruck” by AC/DC (I swear to god, this link
      just came through as I was writing this blog entry and it is CRAZY:
      http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/83896505/ )
What are some of yours?

Dan Zanes and Raising Kids with the Right Musical Ethos

Took a walk this evening with Dan Zanes’ Parades and Panoramas.  My children were not with me.  Often placed in the kids sections of music stores both online and on the street, Dan Zanes does not belong there.  His records, Parades and Panoramas among them, while accessible to and appropriate for kids, are NOT children’s albums.  They are folk music for people of ALL ages, and folk music in the truest, purest sense of the word, drawing on musical, cultural, and historical strains from all over the world—from Africa to South America to the USA and beyond.  Dan Zanes is a hero and an inspiration— pure love and guts— to anyone who loves rock and roll and folk music.

Zanes first appeared on the musical radar screen as the leader of the Del Fuegos, a real plain old guitar, bass, and drums rock and roll band slashing and hammering their way through the 80s, when it was almost impossible to be a real plain old guitar, bass, and drums rock and roll band.  Their records are savage, raw, and desperate (“Nervous and Shaky” will set your teeth a-rattling in the first 8 bars), but  alas, as we know, not many folks bought records like this in the 80s and so the band, despite critical acclaim (and even some help from the likes of the Band’s Rick Danko!), fizzled and, uh, disbanded.  Zanes then moved to New York, recorded “Cool Down Time” in 1994—a wonderful but unnoticed rock and roll gem—and started a family. 

 

Now a father, he put together some folk bent sessions with friends and relations around town, which eventually gelled into a truly magical series of albums: Rocket Ship Beach, Family Dance, Night Time, House Party, etc.  These were marketed as “kids music,” and while this marketing strategy helped the records sell and helped Zanes resume life as a working musician, it didn’t really accurately describe what was afoot here.  Zanes was really making folk music, of which the late Pete Seeger or Woody Guthrie would be very proud, and which was accessible and engaging not just to kids but to anyone and everyone.  The records combined American classics like “Wonderful World” and “The Sidewalks of New York” with international folk songs such as “Siyahamba” and “Jamaica Farewell” and gorgeous, hooky, and / or rocking originals such as “Night Owls,” and “House Party.”  This was really folk music— friendly, fun, upbeat, funny, danceable, singalongable— for everyone, including kids. 

 

Don’t get me wrong: good records directed specifically at kids should and do exist (please go buy a Justin Roberts record or the Bloodshot Records “Bottle Let Me Down” compilation classic immediately), but the term “Kids Music” mostly conjures up the kind of saccharin sweet sanitary drek so often pushed off on kids (Raffi, et. al.), which sane adults raised on rock and roll can't bear to listen to without upchucking. Sensing that he was somehow bridging this gap with his magical brand of all-ages accessible folk music, Zanes recorded a pair of albums not really too different in feel from the "kids" albums but marketed as "traditional" music-- an album of sailors' ballads and riverboat chanteys called Sea Songs, followed by Parades and Panoramas, a collection of songs pulled from Carl Sandburg’s iconic American Songbag.  Sandburg's Songbag is a collection of about 250 American Folk Songs transcribed by Sandburg for piano sketching the first 150 years of our country’s history in song, published in 1927.  This record is really Zanes’s finest achievement in my opinion. 

 

Someone (his wife, I believe) had given Zanes a battered copy of the Songbag as a present, and he (not reading music) had taken the book to the music teacher at his daughter’s school.  The music teacher recorded every one of the 250 songs into a cassette recorder for Zanes, who then culled 25 of his favorites and arranged them for his folk band to be put on Parades and Panoramas.  This is REAL music, about real lives and real people, performed by real musicians with real musical lives which EVERYONE in your house-- ages 0 to 100-- will dig deeply. The songs on Parades and Panoramas— American roots classics, all of them— are tuneful, the recording elegant and gorgeous, the playing and singing sublime, and the arrangements clever and engaging at all turns.  From the opening, longing plea of “Wanderin’” through the rocking trains rolling through “Railroad Bill” and "The Railroad Cars are a-Comin,'" on to the desperation of “Willie the Weeper,” past the Mexican air “Lo Que Digo,” and along the travels of “Across the Western Ocean” and “The Colorado Trail,” the album touches every folk music tradition in our country’s history, traces important parts of our history in ways poignant and personal, and seems to express every emotion in our collective psyche at some point or another.

 

Covering this breadth of material in ways this engaging to all listeners, it's simply not right to call it a kids album.  It's worth noting that one online reviewer felt that it wasn't a kids album because it includes songs with bawdy or darker lyrical themes, but I disagree.  While I don't think it's JUST for kids-- again it's a folk album for everyone-- I DO think its appropriate for kids.  Kids of all ages eat it up and don't get spooked or embarrassed by the songs on edgier topics because the songs about the noted potentially dodgy topics are presented with love, humor, honesty, naiveté, and innocence (my wife and I have kindergarten and 3^rd grade students who go crazy for the thing and it has played endlessly in my home and car with and without kids of varying sizes around for the last 10 years). Indeed, the songs, along with Zanes's and excerpts from Sandburg's notes about them, provide a real education about American history and life over the past 150 years that is likely to be much more insightful, informative, interesting, and exciting than what is presented to kids in school. But, again, it's not a kids album because grups will wanna put it on even when their kids are not around-- 10 year later, I still spin the thing endlessly meself, and my own rock and roll band has pulled several tunes off the record and presents them in settings and arrangements that have NOTHING to do with kids. 

 

Perhaps the only reason to classify this, and all of Zanes’s records, as “kids music” is that they are instructive to kids about what, at best, music and art in general can and should be: beautiful and edgy, old and new, funny and serious, and accessible to everyone, all at once.  This is an ethos and aesthetic worth passing on.

 

And so: the vision and courage Zanes shows in presenting such a collection, rough edges, grup themes, and all in the context of music for FAMILIES -- kids AND their parents-- is truly heroic. This is a record for the ages. Buy it for your kids, buy it for yourself, buy it for your parents and grandparents, buy it for the whole darn family, and for goodness sake, go see the Dan the Man and his Band perform if they get within a hundred miles of wherever you are.  This is a real American treat.

On the Importance of Unpluggeds

I believe that great Rock and Roll (and great music in general) incorporates:
-skill as well as passion
-subtlety as well as bombast (this could also be phrased as understatement as well
 as hyperbole)
-tradition as well as innovation, and
-great songs, period. 
I spent an hour walking with Nirvana Unplugged this afternoon, and as the final, chilling chords of Cobain and Co.’s cover of Leadbelly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” faded in my ears, I got to thinking about what an incredibly dramatic and wonderful reshaping of the rock and roll landscape in reference to these values Unplugged records represented when Nirvana unleashed this one on the world.

When Bob Dylan outraged his kum-ba-ya chanting minions by “plugging in” and going electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, he built a bridge between folk music and rock and roll—a fusing of subtlety and bombast, a clear and wonderful combination of tradition and innovation, and a prodigious demonstration of both skills and passion from one of the two most accomplished songwriters in history (I count Lennon-McCartney as one).  As a result of this bridge, rock and roll of the late 1960s and early 1970s—from the Band to Joe Cocker to Joni Mitchell to Van Morrison to the Rolling Stones to even Lynyrd Skynyrd—revered, respected, and clearly incorporated elements of acoustic music with folk and traditional blues lineage and sensibilities.  By the 1980s, however, bands like (ugh, gag, RETCH!) Soft Cell and the Human League, which barely had anyone who could play any instrument, electric or acoustic, were selling millions and filling arenas.  Electronica—drum machines, synthesizers, and computer treated voices-- dominated the airwaves.  No tradition, no subtlety, no skill (and, for that matter, no passion either).

In 1989, however, MTV—like it or not, the Tastemaker of the day—started airing “Unplugged” segments, featuring  established stars performing stripped down arrangements of well-known material in front of small, live audiences on a set which looked and felt like an old-fashioned folkie song circle.  Early MTV Unplugged guests ranged from Jethro Tull to Bon Jovi to Paul McCartney, and were well received, though more in the spirit of  quaint diversions than as serious musical offerings.  That all changed n 1992, however, when Eric Clapton rescued his career from a bland fadeout and stormed back into relevancy armed with only a Martin acoustic guitar and his voice. Clapton’s Unplugged set, in retrospect, is a flawed piece of work: stuck in mid-tempo from start to finish and often lapsing into smooth adult contemporary blah well-suited to shopping malls or elevators. 

 

However it does showcase a few kinds of things which had not been popular for many years in powerful ways.  First of all, the unplugged setting lets you hear the man sing.  While I have always felt that Clapton is an over-rated guitar player—come on now, let’s be frank: lots of rock and roll guys play the blues in ways more interesting and arresting than he does—I have also always felt that he is an under-rated singer, and the Unplugged set makes my point nicely.  His voice is rich and warm yet also steeped in grit and gravel, and his singing is clear, precise, and musical.  Listen to him sing “Nobody Knows you When You’re Down and Out,” “Before You Accuse Me,” or “Malted Milk,” and if you don’t get the shivers, well geez, ya’ must be deaf, dead, or soulless.  Without the bombast of his own screaming Stratocaster and a full blown, electrified  rock and roll band blasting away, this voice suddenly comes to the fore, and it is a wonder to behold.  Second of all, yeah—he’s a damn fine (although over rated) guitar player.  His guitar work had become predictable, however—“Clapton plays the blues on his Strat” again and again and again, from tour to album and back ‘round again.  Really, he hadn’t played anything that really sounded new or different, arguably, since leaving Derek and the Fuckin’ Dominos.  The Unplugged record, however, has that Old Dog turning some new tricks, and the stripped down setting lets you really hear it.  The fingerpicking on “Nobody Knows You,” the slide work on “Rollin’ and Tumblin’”—that’s yummy stuff and way more interesting than endless noodling on electric versions of “Cocaine” or "After Midnight” that he’d been playing ad nauseum for years, decades even.  Skill and subtlety as well as passion and bombast right there for ya’.  And the song selection and reworking of old material—covers of Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, et al as well as dramatic recastings of his own original works like “Layla” and songs like “Nobody Knows You” that he has covered already-- provide a delicious combination of tradition and innovation as well as a buffet of some of the finest songs ever written.  The Unplugged format was a new kind of conversation that spoke directly to these values and the fact that the record sold roughly a gazillion copies reflected the fact that the rock and roll audience at large was ready for something Big to happen along these lines.

And then: Nirvana.  Well Holy Crap and Flaming Mother of God with her Hair on Fire.  As noted in this posting and elsewhere, by the early 90s, although rock and roll seemed to be on its deathbed, it still had a heartbeat (those first 2 Jane’s Addiction records are as much of a musical defibrillator as you’ll ever hear, methinks, even if they didn’t sell gazillions).  Nirvana’s Nevermind—  loud,  electric, passionate, and desperate-- roused the sleeping giant.  In addition to the raw bombast audible in the guitar, vocals, and drums, the songs themselves-- “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Come As You Are,” “Polly,” “Breed”— were fuckin’ unbelievable: melodic, irresistible, funny, insightful, and pressing on issues on the minds of young people everywhere.  The album and band took off like ballistic missiles.  To listen to Nevermind, however, with its screaming vocals, thunderous drumming, and wall crumbling guitars, one would not expect that the natural next thing to do would be an acoustic set.  WRONG!  

Nirvana Unplugged, following close on the heels of Nevermind, is one of the greatest albums of all time, and, as a result of the record, the values of
-skill as well as passion
-subtlety as well as bombast
-tradition as well as innovation, and
-great songs, period
were resoundingly re-established.  First: Cobain’s voice was just one part of the gigantic sonic steamroller that rolled over you as you listened to Nevermind.  In an acoustic setting, however, his voice, like Clapton’s, emerges as a specific instrument of staggering power and skill.  From the plaintive “About a Girl,” to the desperately confessional “Pennyroyal Tea,” to the threateningly eerie “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” Kurt Cobain’s singing is both skilled and  passionate,  subtle as well as bombastic.  Again, if his voice on “Lake of Fire” doesn’t give you the Willies, then geez, ya’ must be deaf, dead, or soulless.  It’s all in tune, it’s understated at least or more often than it’s overstated, and it’s all incredibly musical. The set recasts many favorites from Nevermind (and the at the time unfinished In Utero) in remarkable ways – “Come As You Are,” "On a Plain," “Pennyroyal Tea”— making clear that the songs are outstanding compositions, not just successful because of their viscerality or topical timeliness but capable of holding water, and lots of it, in many different settings.  And the band offers breathtaking and inventive renditions not only of their own songs but of contemporaries (like “Lake of Fire” by the Meat Puppets), predecessors (like “The Man Who Sold the World” by David Bowie), and musical ancestors (like “Where Did You Sleep…” by Leadbelly)—tradition and innovation all rolled into one.

Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Unplugged-style albums have followed.   Indeed, if I were on the proverbial desert island,  I could probably be happy with any of a number of these offerings:  Steve Earle’s Train A-Comin’, Uncle Tupelo’s April 16-20, 1992, Chris Whitley’s Dirt Floor, or even The Rolling Stones Stripped.  Yes, without any doubt, the format has, by now, become formulaic and obligatory, and so is no longer really innovative or, in some cases, even interesting or entertaining.  However I feel that it remains a useful exercise and the fact that it has become de rigeur and a rite of passage is good, healthy: if what you’re doing doesn’t sound good in an acoustic setting, then maybe it’s just smoke and mirrors, hot air.  If you’re gonna be someone now, you better be able to do what you do with only the basic tools: voices, acoustic guitars, and not much else.   You’ve gotta show that you have:
-skill as well as passion
-subtlety as well as bombast
-tradition as well as innovation, and
-great songs, period.
If you don’t, then you’re not really a Big Deal.  Period.  If you do, then maybe you’ve really got something.  Indeed, there are MANY musicians—Bruce Springsteen, Jeff Tweedy, heck, even the Rolling Stones-- who I would rather see in this kind of setting than with their whole damn band.  Brought to you by MTV, Eric Clapton, and Nirvana (quite a triumvirate!), Unplugged sets have made the rock and roll landscape a richer place.