Family Gifts, Family Business: A Musical Autobiography, Part IV

After graduate school, I put a together a new band from scratch, careful to assemble a group of people with not only similar musical skills and interests, but also similar time, money, and goals to contribute to the project.  The Hacksaw Three played occasional gigs and recorded 4 albums in my friend Johnse’s basement studio.  I stand by 2 of these records—our 2^nd album entitled Pipe Dream and our last entitled Musical Chairs—as the proudest musical accomplishments of my life.  After about 6 years a number of personal and artistic forces converged to end the run.   Holly left The Hacksaw Three, leaving my old professor and I as just A Couple of Hacks.  We soldiered on, but lacking the versatility provided by Holly’s piano and with a notably more basic sound palette and limited range and repertoire, things stagnated.  The band was dying.

So it goes.

As noted earlier, however, I have come to regard playing in a band as a kind of need and entitlement.  I kept my eyes and ears open and before long came fortuitously upon a teaching colleague— Jen— with an affinity for country, rock and roll, blues, folk, and bluegrass music, a few guitar chops, a killer, professional grade, conservatory trained voice, and a love of red wine similar to my own.  I invited her to sit in with Patrick and I one Sunday afternoon.  Things fell quickly into place.  Christening the new outfit Off The Vine, we quickly built up a songbook of country, rock and roll, and bluegrass tunes, covers and originals, stuff pulled from previous bands, and stuff put together in this incarnation.  We play gigs at bars and coffeehouses around Chicago, and have returned to my friend Johnse’s basement to record an album’s worth of material so far.  Off The Vine is a very different ensemble than The Hacksaw Three—more tightly focused stylistically and sonically, with everyone’s role more clear and specific: Jen mostly sings and also provides a bit of background strumming, I play the bulk of the guitar parts (several kinds including some mando once in a while) including all the leads, and Patrick is the 1-man rhythm section on bass.  Patrick and I sing backup and take a lead vocal verse every once in awhile, but mostly our job is to support Jen, whose unbelievable voice is the main draw in the band.  My guitar playing has grown tremendously as a result of this focus, as has Patrick’s bass playing, and Patrick, Jen and I have all introduced each other to some wonderful songs which Jen now sings the hell out of.

BRANCHING OUT

Off the Vine chugs along, I keep a guitar and a mandolin in my classroom to use with my 3^rd graders, I continue to purchase music, play it at home constantly, and spend hours every week listening intimately as I walk for exercise, and I also continue to sit in on song circles of varying stripes, all of which make me very happy.  I have come to terms with the Great Gift of my parents and grandfather.  A couple of summers ago, with great ambivalence, I also joined Facebook (apparently I was the only person on Earth who had not done so), but while the pics people post of their kids every hour on the hour are cute, and reconnecting with some souls otherwise lost to me has been nice, I really do not find myself motivated to broadcast much in the way of my own family’s triumphs or tragedies.  As I joined the FB stream, I was, however, moved at various points to post musings on various musical stimuli, and found that I couldn’t resist replying to almost any musical tidbit that floated through my news feed, and thus I came to the realization that what I really wanted to do was have a place to publicly ramble on about music.  And so, in addition to all of my playing and listening, I have started walknroll— this humble music blog.  Mark (my writer friend and songwriting partner) says that really what I’m doing is writing a book with these postings, and who knows?  Maybe so.  In any case, sharing my musings, as it were, has been really fun and satisfying, and I have been surprised and gratified to realize that people actually read the thing.  Each week, a few comments on whatever I share come floating back, and they are invariably thoughtful, thought provoking, enlightening, funny, and / or touching.

Also as noted in passing here in this rambling musical autobiography and in some of my other postings, I have discovered in the last couple of years that sitting in on a song circle— a group of folk, bluegrass, country, or especially for me, rock and roll musicians sharing an informal musical experience on musical common ground for no other audience than themselves, usually in someone’s living room or around a campfire— can be a transcendent experience.  I have also learned, happily, that it also serves as a kind of exercise in musician networking.  After sitting in on a circle at my old friend and bandmate Banjo Mike’s house one night playing rock and roll standards last winter, one of the guys (also named Michael, funny enough) stopped me as we headed out to our cars at the end of the evening.  He explained that he had a standing gig at Phyllis’ Musical Inn— a venerable Chicago music bar in Bucktown / Wicker Park— on Tuesday nights, and invited me to stop in and join him if I was ever free on a Tuesday night.  I thanked him for the invite, truly flattered that I had presented in the Circle with enough musical game to spark his interest, but drove home without giving the matter much thought beyond that.  My hectic life continued, with lots on my plate at work, my son’s ballgames, my daughter’s dance competitions, Off the Vine band practices, blog postings, etc etc etc.  A couple of months later, however, Michael emailed me, saying that his regular Tuesday guitar player was not able to be regular anymore, and wondering if I could step in at least sometimes.  I couldn’t resist.  He sent me some sound files and song sheets with chords and lyrics of stuff ranging from bluesy originals to 60s R and B classics to rock and roll standards right in my wheel house, asked me for a few song ideas (predictably, I offered the Stones “Sweet Virginia” and Lowell George’s “Willin’” to start with) and I trooped down to Phyllis’s.

It was a blast.  The bar is usually nearly empty, and, although Tuesdays are nominally the open-mic night there with Michael as the “host,” usually somewhere between no one and 2 people show up to play the open mic, and so we just play most of the evening.  It’s music for its own joyful sake.   Michael has recruited a super singer, and some other great players who rotate in and out (the "regular" guitarist has a ferocious blend of rock, blues, and jazz chops that’s wonderful to groove with), and  I’ve had a chance to play some electric guitar, which I haven’t done in a band setting since my heavy metal days in high school, and also some electric bass, which has been much more fun than I can possibly express— a whole new way of looking at, conversing with, and contributing to a musical situation and a whole new set of responsibilities and options.  The cast of players has welcomed me warmly, and so I am turning over yet more new musical leaves even at this late date.  Indeed, the latest leaf, prompted by my electric bass explorations on Tuesday evenings, is a stand-up bass: for the holidays this past December, my wife set up a trial rental of an acoustic bass fiddle which I have taken to with quick joy (why have I been playing guitar all these years?!).  I’ve established some basic proficiency already, and look forward to adding this to the Tuesday night mix over the next few weeks.  Please come on down to Phyllis’ one Tuesday evening and check us out.

I am not a professional musician, though I think maybe I could have been.  I do regret never having given myself the chance to pursue some kind of musical career— even entering graduate school in elementary education, it somehow didn’t occur to me until after I was well into my course- and field-work that I could have pursued a graduate degree in music education, which seemed like a pretty fucking stupid oversight when I realized it.  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… that’s the one thing I wish I had done in this life that I haven’t.  But in some ways, the fact that music has never been my job, never been a business proposition for me has also been a blessing:  I’ve never had to rely on it to feed, house, or support myself or my family.  Music has only ever made me happy, more fulfilled.  It has never, ever let me down, and I can always count on it to get me through the toughest moments.  It doesn’t cause me stress, it relieves it.  It is a source of pure joy in my life, and to my bandmates Holly, Patrick and Jen, to Johnse who records me and my cohorts, to Michael who has invited me in to his Tuesday night thing, to Banjo Mike and his wife Irene and our friend Carol who invited me in to their family band, to Brook for showing me all the possibilities in music, to the Stones, Steve Earle, the Nature’s Table, and everyone else who has ever played me a record, taken me to a show, held a musical conversation, sat in a circle, put my band on a bill at the bar or coffeehouse, listened to me hacking and yowling, endured my desk tapping, read my blog postings…  I am grateful to all of you beyond words.  But most of all, I am grateful to my parents and my Grandpa Sam, who have bestowed this priceless, enormous gift upon me. 

CODA: THE REST OF THE GANG

The gift of my parents and grandfather, of course, has touched the lives of many people—not the least of which are the thousands of students they have taught over the years.  But other members of my family are also part of our great musical river.  My sister has continued the family’s violin tradition, teaching and gigging around Baltimore, and holding down a steady chair in the Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra. Her husband, Trent, plays in the Army’s prominent Herald Trumpets (frequently turning up in Super Bowl halftime shows and TV network New Year’s Eve broadcasts) and also plays in and is the historian for the Army’s Jazz Band.  My uncle Ron has had a career as a violist in Army’s prestigious White House Strolling Strings, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.  His wife— my Aunt Judy— as I noted served as the Artistic and Executive Director of Carnegie Hall from 1986 until her death in 1999, following a stint as an administrator for the Cincinnati Symphony— roles in which she sought to bring the finest classical music not only to the traditional well-heeled clientele of high end concert halls but also to people in small towns and school children of much more modest means and backgrounds. Ron and Judy’s son Eddie is a gigging cello soloist and chamber musician operating out of New York, but performing regularly all over the country.  Growing up with my father and uncle in Sam’s studio, their cousins Sheldon and Bob moved to California and have had long careers playing on movie soundtracks and on records by many of my favorite artists (I got a big thrill when I spotted Sheldon’s name on a Tom Waits album). 

My daughter Alex, has taken piano lessons from my mom since she was six.  Her first love is dancing, but she plays quite nicely— indeed, her playing can be breathtaking when she puts in the time— and, most satisfyingly, she has become a consumer of music.  Like myself, she listens constantly (“Alex, take your headphones off—I’m trying to talk to you!”), actively pursues new sounds, makes connections between things she hears, and appreciates a wide array of styles— from the roots traditions that her Old Man is steeped in to the newer pop stylings of Adele and Mumford and Sons to the dance grooves and Lorde to the classical greats her grandparents have passed on to her and beyond.  We don’t know yet exactly what lies ahead on her musical path, but she has received our Family Gift and is a worthy heir to our musical heritage.

 

Family Gifts, Family Business, Part III

You can’t become a rockstar at the age of 30.  Hell, if you’re 25 and not well on your way, it’s almost certainly too late.  Even if you just want to make a living as a player or give anything along these lines a shot, you need to be chasing it, running hard, all out sprinting, by the time you’re 20 or 22 at the latest. For many reasons, and despite the fact that I knew that really in the end nothing mattered to me as much as music, I lacked the guts and the confidence to take myself seriously as a musician when I would have had to do so to pursue this path.  I didn’t believe that I had the ability to make some kind of career out of my skills and passion.  No one had ever told me I couldn’t be a musician, but my own lack of discipline as a young child and my failure to recognize and give serious credence to a muse that was clearly calling to me as a teenager and young adult left me watching the train pull away as I entered adulthood.  The Depression had cheated my grandfather, my grandfather had cheated my dad, and I have cheated myself out of what each of us might have been.

So it goes.

ONLY ROCK AND ROLL COULD SAVE MY MORTAL SOUL

I finished college and have had a wonderful career in education and social services now spanning over 25 years.  I have taught high school, preschool, and community college.  I have helped people with mental illness and developmental disabilities in a variety of rehabilitation and vocational settings, and have found a wonderful professional home for the last 12 years in the 3^rd grade classroom.  I have raised 2 amazing children whose relationship with music is much different and much less central to their lives than my own but who love and appreciate it and endure my huffings and puffings about this “important album” or that “National Musical Treasure,” which is all I can ask.  And although I regret never trusting myself enough to pursue some kind of career in music, I am very proud and deeply gratified by my continued growth as a musician over the last 25 years.

As college wound down, I had a rock and roll revelation at a party one evening: someone put on a copy of Led Zeppelin II—which I hadn’t listened to perhaps since graduating high school—and Jimmy Page’s gut-grinding guitar riff and skin ripping solo on “Whole Lotta Love” shook the light fixtures in the room and ended my “jazz phase” in less than 4 minutes.  Jazz was nice (still is) but was too hard to play and lacked the raw power and frank clarity of rock and roll.  In the end, a jagged guitar riff and a backbeat driven by a rhythm section with some shake to it are the essence of beauty in the ear of this beholder. 

After college, I spent a lot of time playing rock and roll and blues tunes in the various living rooms of the various apartments I lived in.  I took great pride in my record collection and referred to myself as a musician and a guitarist, but began to feel like a poser: he who would call himself a musician should stand in front of people and play music, not just wank in his living room.  And so wanting to walk the walk, not just talk the talk, I began to play in front of people, toting my trusty acoustic guitar out to open mics—dozens of them—all over the north side of Chicago.  3 songs or 10 minutes was the rule of thumb.  The crowds were generally politely inattentive and chatty, and the sound systems usually crappy, but once in awhile place and performer would really click and share a moment of beauty.   The Abbey Pub had a great PA, the audience usually shut up and listened, and one Tuesday evening a harmonica player sat in with me on “Willin.’”  When we finished the song the place, I swear, went up for grabs.   Another night at a place called Weeds, a few drunk guys started doing the “hoo-hoo”s as I sang “Sympathy for the Devil” and by the last verse the whole fucking bar was singing and banging silverware and beer glasses in time.  My teeth were on fire with joy.  My favorite place to play was at Sheffield’s on Sunday night.  The Open Mic wasn’t even really an open mic: we played on a tiny stage with no amplification whatsoever—no mic or PA, nothing—in a back room, away from the bar.  The only people back there were the people playing the open stage and so everyone listened closely and, since it was a small affair, usually everyone got 2 or even 3 sets of 3 songs.  Coolest of all, a guy who played the didgeridoo showed up pretty often to spice up the folky vibe in the most wonderfully far-out way.  I kept a list of what I played,  and when and where I played it, and I played at over 100 open mics over a 2 year span.  By the time my son was born and I took a break for awhile, I had amassed an impressive catalog of songs I could perform and I really did feel like, at last, I was a real musician.

SAM’S LAST LAUGH

Space got cramped and time got short as a new parent—the guitar went into its case and stuck in a corner didn’t come out for awhile.  I was still listening, though, and had taken an interest in more country and bluegrass flavored rock and roll as a result of the alt-country movement sparked by Steve Earle, Uncle Tupelo, and their rich and myriad spawn.  About 15 years ago, reading one afternoon in a Sunday newspaper article that the mandolin—a staple of bluegrass and country palettes—was tuned like a violin and thus used the same fingering patterns, I thought vaguely that, given my history with the violin, I might get a kick out of trying a mandolin at a guitar store sometime.  About a week after reading the article, on a Sunday morning walk, my family and I wandered into a garage sale and there, for 30 bucks, was a mandolin.  “The room seemed to tip and its walls, ceiling, and floors were transformed momentarily into the mouths of many tunnels— tunnels leading in all directions through time.  I had a Bokononist vision of the unity in every second of all time and all wandering mankind, all wandering womankind, all wandering children.” *  I picked up the mandolin and suddenly, standing in that garage, my entire musical history flowed through my fingertips—the years of failed violin lessons, the thousands of hours spent picking the guitar, the lines of rock and roll, jazz, country, and classical music running through my life all converged on the fretboard at that moment.  Somewhere my grandfather, dead for 15 years, stirred—smiling or spinning in his grave.  By that evening I was wailing away on the mando with Steve Earle, Uncle Tupelo, and Del McCoury records, astonished at how Grandpa Sam was managing to have the last laugh. 

The mandolin I had picked up at the garage sale was an extremely humble, even crude, model, and so, now quickly hooked on the mandolin, I began lustfully eyeing snazzier models way beyond my playing ability or budget in guitar stores and music magazines.  Then I had a realization: despite the fact that I had been a contemptibly awful violinist, my parents had purchased a pretty decent violin for me when I was in high school.  The instrument had been sitting in their basement gathering dust and value for about 15 years.  I dug it out, hocked it for a pretty penny, and used the dough to buy myself one hell of a spiffy mandolin.  My parents were overjoyed that their musical investment was finally being put to worthy use, and I was inspired to a level of disciplined practicing to develop proficiency on the instrument that would have made Sam proud.  Indeed, I have named the instrument Sam in honor of my grandfather.  Without the years of seemingly fruitless lessons at his knee, I would never have been able to play the mandolin.

*from Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

PICKING SOME GRASS, SONGS BLOWING IN

Over the last 15 years, finally coming to peaceable terms with the immense gift and legacy of my family, I have had the privilege of participating in several bands.  As I picked up the mandolin, I had the sense that, while guitar players are a dime a dozen, mandolin players—even ones with very modest chops—are a relatively rare creature, and so I figured I might be attractive to potential bands.  Sure enough, within a couple of months of picking up the instrument, I struck up a conversation at a Friday Night YMCA family swim with another guy named Mike who, I learned as we chatted there in the pool amidst our splashing offspring, played banjo.  His wife was (and is!) a terrific singer, and they had a fledgling little bluegrass-folk outfit getting started that also included another family with small children.  I joined Banjo Mike and his band that Sunday afternoon, picking along competently with “Glendale Train,” “Blackberry Blossom,” and “Old Joe Clark,” and rounding out their sound nicely.  Although we changed names several times as we got things together (from The Dirty Diapers Folk and Bluegrass Ensemble to Past Forward, finally settling on The Grass Stains), musically we gelled quickly, practiced nearly every week, and were invited to play at a number of church, school, and charity functions over the next few months.  I remember our first “headline gig”— 2 full length sets at a Border’s Books on a Saturday night—with electric fondness.  By the time we got to Steve Goodman’s trainsong classic “The City of New Orleans” to wrap up the 2^nd set, with the audience singing along, my eyes were wet, I was grinning like a hyena on laughing gas, and my feet were 10 feet off the ground.  Although we hit a few bumps—our bass player had aspirations higher than Border’s Books and had a bit more time and money to devote to the project, and one of the couples in the band split, which sometimes resulted in some tension—mostly, we had a great time.  After a couple of years, I entered graduate school, though, and no longer able to make rehearsals regularly, I had to split.  I remain in contact with The Grass Stains' families, however, and still jam at Banjo Mike’s house with some regularity.  And I had been part of a band, which I had not been since high school—though a potential minefield of cross purposes and conflicting agendas, it had worked out pretty well, and playing with others was something I now felt was an integral part of my life, a need and entitlement as basic as food and water.

Also during this time frame, I tried my hand at songwriting.  Despite my literary training in college, I did not and do not seem able to generate song lyrics.  Period (see “A SLAP IN THE FACE” in Family Gifts, Family Business, Part II).  Since I first picked up the guitar, however, I have been able to generate riffs and chord changes as I noodle around with the instrument in my hands.  My friend Mark (a published novelist, he) was going through a pretty ugly divorce (there are no pretty ones, right?) around this time and had written some lines that he thought might be poems or might be song lyrics.  He and I got together one night, placing his lyrics, my guitar, and the two of us in a room.  I’ve heard many great songwriters say that people don’t really write songs in conscious or directed ways, but rather that songs write themselves or simply arrive, and I never knew what the hell that meant until that night.  I remember that a window was open in his living room and that the wind seem to blow through and push Mark’s words off the page and onto the fretboard with my fingers.  The songs seemed to come together quickly, and we certainly felt more like conduits than songwriters, but it worked quite magically for a brief spell.  Over a period of about 6 months we put together a set of 20 or so divorce songs which we called “Samsara—“ a Buddhist term which refers to the suffering one endures on the path to enlightenment.  A few of these songs—“Pipe Dream,” “Knock Me Down Flat,” and “Right On Time” in particular— I think are pretty damn good, and a few of them have entered the repertoires of the several different bands I’ve played in over the last 15 years.

THE HACKSAW THREE, A COUPLE OF HACKS

After graduate school, I put a together a new band from scratch, careful to assemble a group of people with not only similar musical skills and interests, but also similar time, money, and goals to contribute to the project.  The Hacksaw Three featured myself on guitars (standard acoustic, 12 string, and resonator / dobro), mandolin, and occasionally bass, my old college friend Holly on piano and bass, and Patrick—a grad-school education professor of mine—on guitar and bass.  Though no one had a particularly gorgeous voice, we all could carry a tune and our voices each had their merits and so we passed the singing duties around pretty evenly.  We were an organization of generalists—anyone might sing lead or play one of several instruments and take a solo as such on any song—and our repertoire covered a huge swath of musical acreage: from country to bluegrass to rock and roll to jazz to gospel to folk to blues. Our songbook included everything from Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited” to the country / bluegrass standard “The Race Is On” to Monty Python’s “The Universe Song” to R and B classics like “Dat Dere” by Bobby Timmons and “Crazy ‘Bout You Baby” by Ike and Tina Turner (I played bass on that one!) to Tom Waits nuggets like “Picture in a Frame” and “Take It With Me” to  Schoolhouse Rock’s classic “The Preamble” to original country, blues, jazz-pop, and rock and roll original material written by us in the band.  We played occasional gigs and recorded 4 albums (OK 3 full albums and one EP length half-album) in my friend Johnse’s basement studio.  Picking me up to go in for our first day of recording, I said to Holly, “This is the day I’ve been waiting for my whole life.”  And, indeed, it was.  The sessions went well, and a few weeks later, sliding the final version of the first disc into my car’s CD player for the first time, my hands shook and I couldn’t even speak as our version of Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues" tumbled out of the speakers. I stand by 2 of these records—our 2^nd album entitled Pipe Dream and our last entitled Musical Chairs—as the proudest musical accomplishments of my life.  After about 10 years a number of personal and artistic forces converged and ended the run, however.   Holly left The Hacksaw Three, leaving my old professor and I as just A Couple of Hacks.  We soldiered on, but lacking the versatility provided by my Holly’s piano and with a notably more basic sound palette and limited range and repertoire, things stagnated.  The band was dying.

So it goes.

RAGGED GLORY: A ROCK AND ROLL EXORCISM

I dunno what kind of black tar was coursing through Neil Young’s head or heart during the 80s but I sure can tell that it cleared the fuck out in 1990.  Like so many others dragged down into the swirling rock and roll cesspool of the 80s, NY churned out a bunch of albums that were all synthesizers and electronic drums and other such vomit during rock and roll’s darkest decade and although he’s since tried to explain that they’re legit pieces of artistic expression, he lies and they are not-- I think the basic story is that it all had something to do with him warring with his record company.  Whatever.

Actually, in 1990 I wasn’t a Neil Yong fan.  My bipolar tastes had led me, as of that time, to intimate relationships with jazz and art rock, balanced by hard and heavy rock and roll and metal.  To me, Neil Young was a guy with a long hippy dippy history followed by all that electronic puke in the 80s-- nothin’ doin’ for me.  One night in 1990, though, I went over to my buddy Mark’s house and he sat me down square in the middle of 2 big-ass speakers, told me to shut the hell up for a change, and unleashed Ragged Glory with the volume turned, as Nigel Tufnel says, “up to 11.”  Forget about plaster crumbling from the walls or ceiling— I thought the whole building, the whole block, the entire flipping city of Chicago was gonna come crashing down but I didn’t care.  I sat, wedged between those 2 big ass speakers, in heaven.  This blissful rock and roll nuke was the Voice of God, raging with love and vengeance all at once.  Whatever crapola had been clogging up Neil’s brain and heart for a decade or so and whatever crapola was clogging up mine at the moment was blasted the hell out by this massive sonic tsunami in a hurry.

Ragged Glory is a therapeutic masterpiece from end to end, with not a single note, word, or sound leaking energy, the experience of listening a visceral spiritual cleansing, leaving the listener with a sense of being tempered, purged, and purified by the rite as the final huge guitar and vocal chords of “Mother Earth” die down.  The guitar, gnashing out as “Country Home” opens, hammering relentlessly through “White Line,” “Love to Burn,” and “Love and Only Love,” wailing and screeching and screaming through “Fuckin’ Up,” bumping and grinding through “Farmer John,” feeding back throughout, and spreading out wide and high and gorgeous as a mountain with a giant orange sun behind it on “Mother Earth” is arguably the most overwhelming electric guitar sound ever captured on record (thanks here to the late David Briggs).  Apparently, Young had the soundstage where they worked on the album set up in the middle of some field in the middle of his property out west so that they could turn up as loud as they wanted, and the neighbors—more than 10 miles away—still complained about the racket.  Awesome— wish I coulda been there.  Neil’s solos-- gouging, slashing, ripping his black Les Paul until you can almost see blood in the sound-- are inspired, inventive, melodic, and elegant, while also completely primal, feral and out of control.  His singing is fiery and ferocious, raw and yet still precise on every track.  Even within the earthquake-heavy sonic palette, the songs are tuneful and get stuck in your head (“I’m thankful for my country home, it gives me peace of mind, somewhere I can walk alone and leave myself behind”).  The guitar riffs are unshakable, and the lyrics carry heavy truths and yet are not heavy handed (“why do I keep fuckin’ uuuuuuuuuuuuuuup?????!!!!”).  The band’s playing—from Ralph Molina’s jackhammering, relentless punishment of the skins, to Billy Talbot’s rumbling bass thunder, to Pancho Sampedro’s crunching, joyous reverence for the foundational rhythm guitar riffs behind Neil’s lead guitar wailing—is tight and sonically unified.  To say that the commentary that Young’s desperate, savage abuse of his guitar adds to the stories he tells (crying, teeth rattling wails weaving in and out as NY narrates that “In the valley of hearts there’s a house full of broken windows, with the lovers inside just a-quarrel all the time”) is profoundly moving doesn’t even come close to capturing the complete impact of this set on the listener.  This is rock and roll as exorcism— painfully, gloriously, raggedly purifying and cleansing.

In many ways Ragged Glory’s elemental purity served to wipe the slate clean for not only NY but rock and roll in general.  Banishing the spectre of its nightmarish near-death in the 1980s, NY was helping rock and roll had shake itself alive again, free itself from the soulless electronic, faux-punk haircut MTV bilious chains it had been shackled to and which had nearly killed it, and resurrect itself again.   With a little help from Reverend Neil, the Rock and Roll Phoenix had risen from its own ashes, and was ready for Nirvana and the rest of the new generation of guitar wielding, pissed off and full of love all at once rock and roll musicians to move it forward.

And Holy Crap 25 years later this record is still savage truth unleashed.  If it don’t leave your eyes rolled back into your head, if it don’t send your body into spasmodic convulsions of therapeutic joy, if it don’t leave you foaming at the mouth with your teeth on fire, pounding on the floor with joy and rage, if this music doesn’t exorcise your fucking demons then Jesus Christ himself couldn’t do so.  Play it loud.  Period.