Almost Famous And A Box of Tissues, Please

I have been weeping more or less continuously for the last 3 and a half hours.  It is 2:30 a.m. on a work night.  I have been watching Almost Famous. It’s taken me three and a half hours to get through this two hour and 5 minute film, gasping and sniffling and replaying scenes, hunching wracked with sobs over the computer desk where I sit watching.

I don’t know if this is the greatest rock and roll movie ever made.  Probably it is not.  Come to think of it, that’s a fun bucket list to contemplate – Rock and Roll Movies You Gotta See Before You Die: Gimme Shelter, The Filth and the Fury, Woodstock, The Other F Word, I Ain’t In This For My Health, The Wall, The Last Waltz, Sid and Nancy, Austin to Boston, Let It Be, Kurt and Courtney..,.hell, even Rattle and Hum, and a gazillion others (reply or comment with suggestions, PLEASE!).  Sorryass sap that I am, I am prone to weep at frequent moments during any of these flicks.

But this one, this gift to all of us from Cameron Crowe — well this tale, in this telling, operates on another order of spiritual, psychic, deep-center-of-marrow magnitude altogether…

It’d been several years since I screened the flick – maybe 5 or 6.  I have no idea how many times I’ve seen the film, not because I’ve watched it all that many times, but because even if I’d only seen it once, every sound, sight, and scene — an relentless tear-blurred swirl moving from music to family to friends to sex to rock and roll to writing to love— every fucking thing in the film, is tapped so cuttingly into such fundamental parts of my own brain and heart that they are not so much carved into my psyche as seem to spring from it.  I’ve always been a hot mess for this flick.  But this time around-- at age 51--  even moreso.  And now, finally, here at 2:30 a.m. a weeping mess as William walks through the airport defeated—his story falsely denied by the band, humiliated, exhausted, alone— I understand, specifically and in a single word, why this movie squashes me so:

longing.

This is not first and foremost a movie about rock and roll or being famous or not being famous or writing or love.  This is a movie about longing, which uses all of other those things to explore, express and convey that feeling, viscerally, overwhelmingly.  We all long for something, and methinks this movie hits me so hard because I long for more than I realize or care to admit.  In the end, at 51, I’m longing for many of the same damn things as the people in this movie, even though they’re all terrifying number of years (numbers of decades!) younger than me.  At 2:30 in the morning, I feel like I have been watching these people run around naked—totally exposed— for hours while they have been run through a grueling, heartbreaking ordeal trying to sate their various longings—for art, for acceptance, for companionship, for meaningful relationships with people in their lives.  Because music— rock and roll music—  is so central to the film and also so deeply rooted in my spirit and because it is also the thread that binds all of these people together and pulls the story along, I feel like I have been run naked through the same ordeal.  No wonder this one crushes me.

I gotta go to bed.

SHAKE: Rock and Roll’s Secret Sauce

The thing that makes your ass shake, your arm thump, your leg pulse, your head bob and weave to a great rock and roll song isn’t just the heavy hammering 1-2-3-4 of kick and snare drums, it’s not the grindy guitar riff (though that might be the thing you can’t get out of your fuckin’ head days later), and it’s not even that funky ass bass line, though that helps-- as long as our secret ingredient is in the mix. The real secret sauce, the specific kind of sound that presses the Primal Button in the base of the skull is some kind of 8^th, 16^th, or 32^nd note swishy rattly thing made by a maraca, shaker, high hat, brushed snare, tambourine, etc.  The sound hearkens through what Jung referred to as the collective unconscious to memories evoking tribal dances, trances, and rituals.   Given rock and roll’s roots in African-descended, African-American musical traditions, the pervasive presence of “shaking”-type sounds certainly isn’t surprising—their lineage traces back to Africa, cradle of Lucy’s homo sapiens, Mother to us all, originally.  But because those big, heavy 1-2-3-4s, grindy guitar riffs, and funky ass bass lines are usually more prominent in overall band presentations than the swishing and shaking sounds buried farther back in the mix, taking a moment to notice and consider said swishing and shaking is worthwhile.

And so: a brief, off-the-cuff, probably full of shit at some points, and certainly woefully, pathetically, inexcusably incomplete sampling / survey of important early chefs in the history of the Secret Sauce in Rock and Roll:

BO DIDDLEY: other early rock and rollers—from Elvis to Chick Berry— had plenty of hard, bawdy punch, and the Bo Diddley beat featured those same pelvis pounding thrusts upfront in the mix, but behind them were those maracas, fast and even, like heavy breathin’.  Oh man.  Enough said.

CHARLIE WATTS: Keef Richards’ll be the first one to tell ya’ that we all owe more to this man’s wrists than we could ever repay.  Swirling swinging jazz sensibilities in with those elemental primal thumps, Mr. Watts (Keef can call him Charlie, but I think Mr. Watts is more respectful from you n me) manages to do all of that while somehow also simultaneously coaxing shake out of a high hat which your whole body or some part of it is ultimately powerless to deny.  Vastly underappreciated Steve Gorman of the Black Crowes, inspired by Watts. works in similarly rich, thick ways.

JIM KELTNER: dunno exactly where he appeared first, but the rock and roll rhythmic vision this man lays down on Mad Dogs and Englishmen with Joe Cocker was a template which set the bar high for rock and roll rhythms which made you not simply wanna fuck, but spend an evening singing and drinking and dancing and talking and making out with the one ya love before doing so. Hell, beyond that, Mr. Keltner (same deal here) also established the drummer as a legit contributor to musical conversations, rather than as simply a timekeeper or bump-and-grinder.  Keltner often shocked other session players by asking to see lyrics for songs on which he was playing.  A studio rat for decades, Keltner’s work appears on hundreds, probably thousands, of records.  Tom Petty thinks he’s on Damn the Torpedoes because, even though Keltner’s name isn’t on the credits anywhere, Petty recalls him running over repeatedly from a studio down the hall while TP and Co. were recording to say and demonstrate how “you just need to add some shakers to this tune!”  As with the Stones’ Watts to the Crowes’ Gorman, Keltner’s influence turned Petty’s drummer Stan Lynch into a guy with some formidable shake of his own.

THE ALLMAN BROTHERS: first off, the ABB rhythm section features no one named Allman.  Rather, Jaimoe and Butch Trucks have served the ABB as the first and best double drum combination in rock and roll history.  Both of these guys are not merely drummers on kits but percussion virtuosos, and the layers of shake they provide drive and explode the rest of the band’s intricate jammery.  Kreutzman and Hart of the Grateful Dead work in similar ways, but the ABB’s Trucks and Jaimoe combo has been a breathtaking miracle to behold for the band’s entire career (spanning over 40 years) and, with all due respect to the Dead guys, are the Best. Period.

Once you’re on the lookout for it, you notice it everywhere.  Zeppelin’s Bonham’s foot-pedaled high-hat shake was actually more important to the band than his legendary thunder.  Brady Blades shake, with a bit of help from the echoey atmospherics of Daniel Lanois guitar, morphed longtime country star Emmylou Harris and her band into real rock and rollers with World Beat influences.  Meg White didn’t have no shake which is why the White Stripes sometimes never quite took off like you felt they might (and I still think this is why Jack ultimately closed that show down), but Jack White—well, whoa: that dude shakes like a motherfucker on the drums with The Dead Weather.  “Poets” by the Tragically Hip is driven from the opening by the shake...

You also miss it when it’s not there: dry drumming can suck life from a great band or record.  Petty’s Wildflowers is a pretty fucking good record, but would be great if Stan Lynch were back with Tom, ‘cuz new guy  Steve Ferrone ain’t got no shake.  Uncle Tupelo lost steam fast when the very shaky Mike Heidorn was replaced by the very clean, very dry Ken Coomer.  UFO might've been a great band but gawd their drummer was shakeless and dry as a bone (well, actually, thinking about it, no they couldn't have been a great band anyway, but the drummer- Andy Parker- was particularly lame).

It’s a funny little thing, but it’s primacy is undeniable. Humming or tapping a toe to a tune is nice, but if your head is bobbing, your fist is pounding, your leg is twitching, your butt is swaying, well then that’s something more powerful and it’s all in the Shake—the Secret Sauce of Rock and Roll.

That’s brief and crude and incomplete and I’ll think of a dozen more examples of great shakers and shakeless fops in the next few days, but I’d rather hear examples from you all.  Where and wo do you hear and dig with that primal shake?

The Local Opener: The Difference Between Professionals And Amateurs, And The Sublime Joys Of This Sweet Spot On The Bill

We learned 2 lessons the hard way one evening about 12 years ago at the Red Line Tap:  playing as an opening band there, we’d drawn a pretty respectable crowd of friends and relations, and so were asked to headline next time.  A newly formed bluegrass outfit—Tangleweed— was slated to open for us.  We had a nice little acoustic band going—The Hacksaw Three we were called—and did a fine job playing a wide range of covers with a handful originals tossed in for good measure.  We mixed up guitars, piano, bass, and even occasionally mandolin or snare drum and covered everything from the Rolling Stones and Tom Waits to Schoolhouse Rock and Monty Python. We were, by no means, however, professionals— neither the band nor anyone in it supported themselves or made a dime really, apart from a few free drinks at the bar, from making music.  No one had blazing chops, we rehearsed once a week for a couple of hours at most, and no one was a great singer: we were (and still are) advanced amateurs.  Tangleweed were pros, however: highly skilled and schooled virtuosic musicians who were good enough to and DID support themselves by playing in a variety of settings around town, and what they were coming together to play in this setting was bare white knuckle, lightspeed bluegrass.  They not only were virtuoso players, but sang in harmony, tossed a few killer ballads into their set to make you weep, wrote terrific songs, and, if that weren't bad enough, they were also kind, funny, humble, gracious, and appreciative.  They played an intense, high-energy, tight, flawless, jam packed 50 minute set that left people slackjawed with awe and / or screaming for more.  Then we came on with our moderate tempo covers and satisfactory but definitely amateur level chops, plain old voices, and sometimes rattly arrangements and, well… let’s just say we learned in a deep way:

1.    that a chasm of difference yawns between professionals and us (and other advanced amateurs) even on our best night, and

2.    that, in simplest terms, you never, ever wanna have a band that’s better than you open for you.

Still, sometimes my head gets swelled because I’m fortunate to have many opportunities to play these days and I get to thinking I’m better than I am.  I have a weekly gig playing bass with a jam band at a bar, am in an acoustic band who rehearses weekly and gigs every so often, and I live in a house filled with instruments and have many other chances to jam with friends and interact musically often with my very musical family— most of whom are, in fact, professional musicians.  After a week or two that’s gone particularly well musically in these various settings, I can start to lose perspective of where I stand on the spectrum (at advanced amateur, and no farther along-- period), and start to think that I'm pretty hot shit.  Then something happens which sets me straight-- the lessons of the Tangleweed debacle have taken deep enough root in my musical psyche to pay some benefits.  First: no matter how swelled my head gets, my bandmates and I are always very careful to make sure no one whose chops will blow ours away plays before us on a gig.  This usually means we try to play first on a multi-band bill, which is also good because our crowd (older now, like us) are not generally late-nighters.  This has also put us in the role of the Local Opener several times recently, and this, I have come to realize, is a role with a sublime and powerful beauty.

What do I mean by a “Local Opener?”  Simply: we are a local band who opens for a band or musician from out of town who is touring.  Our role is to set the musical table for the evening (usually openers work in similar musical styles or genres as the touring musicians) and to add some additional local folks to the audience who might stick around and enjoy the national performer…

I walk in to the bar about 6:15 on Thursday evening this week schlepping my guitar cases and Aldi bag full of cords, stands, and other crap, excited though a bit flustered to have an extra weeknight gig.  We’re the opener, starting at 8. The national headlining band— The Appleseed Collective, 4 guys— is onstage holding their instruments, already set up: an acoustic guitar, a mandolin, and stand bass, and a washboard with cymbals and a few other percussive odds and ends.  We introduce ourselves, shake hands, and the Appleseed guys ask if they can have the stage for another 20 or 30 minutes to rehearse some stuff.  No problem for us, we reply— we’ll just get a drink, start to unpack and tune up and set up out front, and then just carry our stuff—tuned and set up— on to the stage when they’re finished.  Some banter and noodling between the Appleseed guys onstage, then… layers of rich tenor harmonies, intertwining fiddle, vocal, and guitar lines, shaking grooves from that washboard and standup bass all come rolling off the stage in waves… and then… whoa… I’m weeping.  They’d spent the afternoon working out the harmonies as they drove, and now were adding the instrumental parts to the chorus of a new song, and.. well holy crap the voice of God was pouring out of these 4 guys out on the road making music together and it was a joyful and breathtaking sound to hear.  These fellows were not amateurs.  They spent dozens of hours every week honing their craft, had devoted and given over their lives to the pursuit of beauty, had chops and vision and battle-hardened stage savvy, and executed with skill and precision and clarity that clearly demarcated the difference between the pros and the amateurs.  I grinned, happy and honored to be in the role of the Local Opener, and thus privileged to be able to witness the Real Deal at work firsthand.   “And so basically you just drive around every day, and then do that at night?” I asked from the floor as they put their stuff away.  A smile, a chuckle, “Um yeah, basically.”  Wiping my eyes, I drop to one knee, bow my head, and doff my hat.

On The Passing Of Rock Stars

Neither David Bowie nor Glenn Frey / the Eagles nor Lemmy Kilmister have made a great or important record in years.  Some good ones, perhaps, but no one in their right mind would argue that any of these musicians were anywhere near their creative prime when they departed.  I never knew any of these people personally, never met them.  So why was I weeping over the news of Frey's passing on Monday evening when I picked up daughter from her dance class?  Why are so many of us so genuinely and deeply saddened when a rock star dies?  Listening back through the Bowie and Eagles catalogs (both of them vast-- on the Bowie side make sure to get past Ziggy Stardust to get to Scary Monsters, and on the Eagles side make sure to get past Hotel California to the Long Run and Deperado), I've concluded that 2 things drive the very real sense of mourning that music people feel at moments like these.

First, we feel, in simplest terms, like we've lost a friend.  Dictionary.com defines a friends as:

-a person attached to another by feelings of affection or personal regard

-a person who gives assistance

-a person who is on good terms with another; a person who is not hostile

-a member of the same nation, party, etc.

-(initial capital letter) a member of the Religious Society of Friends; a Quaker.

-a person associated with another as a contact on a social-media website

I might also add something along the lines of "a person who enjoys spending time and shares interests in common with another person."  In any case, all of this sounds precisely like my relationship with musicians and their work-- right down to my sense that music functions as a religion for some folks, and to the fact that many people connect and "follow" musicians via social media.   Over my 4 dozen plus years here on this earth, I have spent thousands of hours, in every life situation imaginable, with these people.  Music is playing at almost all times in my home, car, classroom, bar, restaurant, grocery store, street, sidewalk-- absolutely everywhere.  And when it's not being played out loud, it's ALWAYS playing in my head.  Though never there in corporeal terms, of course, Mr. Bowie, Mr. Frey, Mr. Kilmister and all of these artists have, in a very authentic way, been through everything with me: when I was being bullied (indeed my love of Elton John in Middle School made me a target), when I finally found some actual friends in high school (indeed, our connection over music often defined our friendship, was the foundation upon which it was built), when I went to class, when my kids were born, when I fucked up, when I was happy, when I was sad, when I was confused, when I was pissed off, when I had been dumped, when I was horny, when I ws broke... Music has been an active participant in every significant moment of my life, and most of the insignificant ones, too.  It has provided me solace, counsel, therapy, strength, empathy, reassurance, celebration, confidence, ecstasy...  And so, from very early on, I not only felt that the recordings-- the music itself-- functioned as my friend, but by unconscious extension, that the people creating the music were also my friends-- that they knew and understood me, my feelings, my situations-- and that I could always rely on them to get me through good times and bad.  And, unlike the friends who I did know personally, these folks never, ever let me down.  When things are shitty, I can put on "Sweet Virginia" and Keith and Mick always come through, every time.  Well I know that many rock stars-- including every one named so far in this little post-- have been and / or are insufferable assholes, or at the very least mighty difficult to live with in literal terms, to the people in their own lives.  As a mere consumer of their work, however, they have been the most reliable friends I've ever had.  And so, when they pass-- especially in bunches as seems to be the case right now-- I think many of us feel, quite authentically, like we have lost close friends.

The second reason people feel the loss of these musicians so acutely, I think, relates weirdly to a bumper sticker I saw awhile back that set me thinking.  The bumper sticker reads "Be the person your dog thinks you are."  I'm not a dog person (at all), but the line to me simply suggests that people should try to live up to their own ideals.  I have sometimes translated it as "Be the kind of person you wanted to be when you were young."  Rock and Roll, as an ethos, has always valued a youthful spirit.  The art form is driven forward, most often, by performers between the ages of 18 and 30.  While a growing number of artists have continued to make strong contributions at later ages, proving that rock and roll is not just kids stuff, the truth of the matter is that these records rarely change the face of the genre or our culture in the same way as records by more youthful musicians.  This is largely because people in that age range are old enough to see what's wrong with the world and have clear ideas about how it should look which they can articulate through their art, and young enough not to have been deterred by the harsh financial, cultural, medical, political, familial, and other realities of life that can grind away idealism as one gets older.  Indeed, records by more mature rock and rollers often point to the difficulty of staying true to youthful ideals as one ages.  Whatever creative decline afflicts most rock and rollers as they age, the recordings they've made and the songs they've written don't change and thus serve as reminders to us of the people we'd hoped to be.  The term "Classic Rock" points to this reality-- it's only a classic if many people have enjoyed it for a long time.  These records and the people who made them remind us of what we want, in our hearts, the world to look like, and so when they pass, we feel that a bit of our soul, our dream, our vision for the future has also died.  In an almost literal sense, we've lost some hope.

And so, like so many of us, I've been spinning a lot of Bowie and Eagles records (Lemmy's Motorhead records, too, but not as much 'cuz those are harder for my family members to take, even if I am in mourning).  For my regular Tuesday night gig at the bar, I threw together covers of Bowie's "Moonage Daydream" (yes, from Ziggy-- the Scary Monsters songs are too fuckin hard for me to play solo acoustic) and the Frey-Jackson Browne penned Eagles classic "Take It Easy."  Glorious singalongs ensued, more Bowie and Frey tunes were called, and tears flowed like at a good, sad but also celebratory funeral.  The trite but wonderful immortal miracle of our age is that while David and Glenn have departed, their records and the songs they wrote have not and will not.  Ever.

When is a Musician, or Anyone Else, a Hero? Steve Earle and How and When to Separate the Achievement from the Achiever

The adulation and worship of famous people has always been problematic.  Examples of athletes, artists, politicians, and others who excelled at their craft but were dreadful humans long predate the so-called “modern” era (emperors, kings, popes are easy targets, but there are more—can you name a few?  Please share!).  That being said, however, the phenomenon does seem to be exaggerated more by the mass media and marketing machine that drives so much of our culture, especially because that machine is so often directed at young people—from the 8 year old 3^rd graders in my class up through high school and college kids working through various phases of idealism before arriving at varying degrees and flavors of jaded wisdom about the people in the world at adulthood.  And the phenomenon doesn’t really end then, either: now at 50 (*%*W@#*!!!), I still struggle with how to interpret achievements in relation to their achievers when an achievement— most often musical, occasionally literary, cinematic, political, baseball related, or otherwise— really strikes a chord in me.  Does the fact that someone has made a great record make them a hero?  If I conclude that someone is a jerk, how should that impact how I respond to their work and how I respond to their presence in our culture?  What of use can I take from any knowledge I have of how they came to excel at their craft? Are any of these people really heroes?  And what is a hero anyway?

Let me begin to answer these questions with a statement: Steve Earle is a hero.

In support of this statement, I offer my own crude and informally gathered (from sources—interviews, film / video, record sleeves, magazine articles, etc etc etc etc— too myriad to recall and enumerate over the last 18 years or so) summary and interpretation of his biography (and my sincerest apologies to my hero for any factual errors or other offenses I commit in the process of offering this up): 

Steve Earle grew up in Texas absorbing as much of the Great American Musical River as he could while cultivating a fiercely independent personality streak which resulted various kinds of turbulence and (mis)adventures growing up.  He made his way to Nashville as soon as he could, to enter the songwriting clique in which his idol Townes Van Zandt was a Player.  By the age of 19 he was rubbing elbows and writing songs there in Music City with Van Zandt and some of the other heaviest country songwriting hitters of the day—Guy Clark, Rodney Crowell, et.al.  A few of his songs were recorded by other artists (most notably Carl Perkins), and eventually he wound up with a recording contract of his own, with 1986’s Guitar Town the first in a string of records (including Exit 0, Copperhead Road, and The Hard Way) which set off a meteoric rise to country-rock fame and fortune.  The records are impressive in many ways—brilliant, vivid narrative songwriting tales featuring identifiable characters in a wide variety of familiar and moving dire straits, performed on a gritty guitar-bass-drums-piano palette devoid of the cheesy electronic sounds that poisoned almost all records of the era, executed by a tight, dynamic, fiery band (The Dukes), and supported by relentless, impassioned touring.  Earle’s own story, however, was classically, predictably tragic: suddenly rich and famous, he became a dope fiend fuckup.  His addiction to hard drugs led him to not only chemical-abuse excess but a life of street crime to support his habits, and all of this while he had a young son growing up, often in his house.  His life came crashing down around him with a drug and weapons bust that came a hairsbreadth from a much more serious charge and tragedy: as he narrates the event, while in the process of being arrested, a loaded pistol was dislodged from his belt, falling to the ground, discharging, and narrowly missing officers in on the arrest.  Despite his achievements—a string of phenomenal and successful records—this guy was not a hero.

He spent 60 days in jail, then completed an inpatient drug rehab program, followed by one of the most remarkable creative and personal rebirths in history.  Immediately following his discharge, he entered the studio to record an acoustic record—mostly of songs salvaged from his early days in Nashville—which is, in my humble opinion, the finest acoustic rock and roll record ever, bar none (Train A Comin’).  This was followed by a set of records which included 3 straight-up rock and roll albums with a reconstituted Dukes (I Feel Alright, El Corazon— I’m happy with this one and nothing else on a desert island— and Transcendental Blues).  I first saw Steve Earle live on the El Corazon tour, and the show was the most moving performance I have ever seen: a man desperately grateful for the second chance he had been given and determined to make the most of it.  He closed his 3^rd encore—at the end of nearly 3 straight hours—with a cover of my favorite song in the whole world: the Stones’ “Sweet Virginia” (his intro: “Thank you Chicago—I love any town where I can sell records and get good Mexican food, and this is the last song tonight because the tacos are on the bus.  I got me a habit of collecting British hillbilly songs, and this is one of ‘em.  Hope you like. G’night”).  He led the tune on mandolin, an instrument which I had just taken up meself.  I thought my head was going to explode— I leaned over and said to my wife and my closest friend who were with me: “Lord take me now.  Everything else will be downhill from here.”  Also woven into this creative nuclear burst was an album of bluegrass originals done with the legendary Del McCoury Band (The Mountain), followed by a searing post-9/11 political record (Jerusalem).  The songs on Jerusalem — most famously "John Walker's Blues," but really the whole damn album— implore a post-9/11 America convulsed with jingoism and xenophobia to move beyond its loathing and fear and face hard truths about itself.  For this he was castigated by persons of all stripes in American life, including no less a figure than the elder George Bush, to which he said, essentially, "Say what you want.  I have the strength of my convictions and I'm on a mission to try to make people think differently."   He has been politically outspoken and effective since his release from prison / rehab on other fronts, as well: as a fierce opponent of the death penalty he has not only written songs about the issue, but worked closely with political leaders on several fronts to achieve substantive change.  Now clean for about 20 years, he is raising a son with autism, and is active in advocating for people and families facing challenges related to autism. He has written novels and plays, appeared in televisions and films, taught classes in songwriting (here at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music!), and subsequent albums (The Revolution Starts Now, Washington Square Serenade, et.al.) have been critical and commercial successes.  He works relentlessly at his craft, has fallen as far as one can fall without dying as a result of personal mistakes, learned from his grave failure, turned himself around, and now leads a life not only of high creative achievement, but of conviction and dedication to improving the lives of others and the world in general.

In this biography, we see not only achievements to be enjoyed and celebrated (some of the greatest rock and roll albums ever, creative success in many artistic media), but also heroism: a willingness to work ferociously hard not only to achieve, but also to improve as a person and to improve the world as well.

A great album is a great album, period: John Lennon’s Imagine, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, etc etc etc.  Achievement is achievement: Tiger Woods mile-long list of golf championships, John F. Kennedy’s management of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Picasso’s Guernica.  These achievements are worthy of adulation.  And the people who did these things did so because they were singularly devoted to, driven by, and disciplined in their work.  This kind of dedication is also worthy of celebration: nothing great is achieved without this kind of hard work, an instructive lesson to everyone. But, like so many people who achieve fame and fortune, these people were and are also famously difficult, unkind, disrespectful, or even abusive to the people around them—unrecovered addicts, adulterers, and tyrants whose personal foibles hurt many of the people around them terribly.  Most of us are flawed in similar ways (myself included for sure!), and so my position is NOT that these people should be reviled or castigated for their flaws, but merely viewed as human, rather than heroic.  When I see kids saying that their idols are famous athletes or musicians, and that they want to be like them when they grow up, I try to remind kids (and myself) that I don’t really know these famous people or know enough about them to know if I want to be like them, that we should all enjoy their work, but reserve judgment about them as people unless we really know more about their lives.

Rare is the person who can achieve greatness and also conduct themselves personally in a way which is exemplary and worthy of celebration.  Steve Earle’s biography helps me understand the difference and separate a person’s work from their life.  I enjoy Dark Side of the Moon no less because I have concluded that Roger Waters isn’t a hero, but I particularly appreciate the likes of the Steve Earle’s of the world when they come ‘round.

THE BEAT AND THE GROOVE: THE RESPONSIBILITY AND POWER OF LIFE IN THERHYTHM SECTION

Dear Readers, before proceeding with this entry, I must offer a FULL DISCLOSURE NOTE ABOUT MY LAST ENTRY: when I first posted the U2 piece a couple of weeks back, I did not attribute the "SCOW" (Social Conscience Of the World) moniker hung on Paul Hewson (a.k.a. "Bono") in the piece to my good friend Tony O, who coined it in a conversation after we had seen the Rattle and Hum movie together.  I have now edited the post to attribute him within the piece as the creator of the moniker and also am doing so here with this note.  My apologies to Tony for the oversight and my thanks to him for his pithy, on-target wit, and his understanding:).  We now return to our regularly scheduled post about my new Life in the Rhythm Section...

After 30 some odd years towards the front of the band-- playing guitar and singing-- I moved into the rhythm section about a year and a half ago.  I LOVE my new home at the back of the stage, but it sure is a different place, with a very different set of responsibilities and rewards.

I wasn’t planning on moving-- it just kinda happened.  I’d been invited to sit in on Tuesdays with a 2 guitar and voice combo for a guitarist who was going to be out of town for a little while, and that went just fine-- I could follow the rock, blues, r and b, and country tunes and pick a respectable solo-- but then the out-of-town guitarist came back into town, and I became extraneous, a 5th wheel: unless you’re Lynyrd Skynyrd or the Eagles, 3 guitars is just a silly lineup-- too many notes, redundancy, and / or wankery.   At the time, however, we had no proper rhythm section-- neither a bass player nor a drummer-- and so whoever was playing rhythm guitar also was the timekeeper.  This worked OK, but there’s no substitute for someone with a big-ass rumbly sound making sure that “ONE” punches down firm and strong and even every bar (and “TWO” and “THREE” and etc for that matter!).  I’ve had a cheap bass guitar lying around my house for years, and so, wanting to find myself a useful role, offered to bring it down to the bar the next Tuesday.  “Yeah, that’d be great,” came the reply.

Like, I suspect, many guitarists, I’ve had a bass player fantasy for years-- the low lying lines and chest thumping wallop intrinsic to the instrument, the rhythmic pulse and grooves it can create, its long, skinny profile (I'm kinda short and round meself, and so have always liked the look of things long and thin...), and its understated but vital importance to any performance’s sound… damn, that always looked like fun-- and so this was, literally, a dream come true.   

Getting my bearings took me a little while: I needed to play individual notes ALL the time-- no chords ever, really-- and though my left hand was familiar with the layout of the neck (the bass is really the bottom 4 strings of a guitar tuned an octave lower), the spacing was larger and so I needed some practice finding my way around smoothly.  We had song sheets with chords for some of the tunes, but not nearly all-- maybe less than half-- and so I was often following things by ear and missed the timing of changes or broke for the wrong note because of my unfamiliarity.  I guess I worked out these issues fairly efficiently, though-- the band kept asking me to coming back with the bass-- and I now feel joyously at home at the back of the band.  In recent months, we’ve also been joined by a handful of drummers who frequent the bar where we play, and so I’m usually not alone back there.  With their percussive assistance, I have come to understand 2 vital Truths about Life in the Rhythm Section...

First (and this seems obvious and I always knew it but in a secondhand sort of way which is very different from living it): the first, last, and primary job back here is to keep the Beat: ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR, ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR, ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR, over and over relentlessly until the song is done (or, as the case may be, ONE-TWO-THREE, ONE-TWO-THREE, ONE-TWO-THREE, or etc etc etc).  Once the song starts, the pulse has to lock in and NEVER change, NEVER stop, NEVER hiccup, NEVER speed up, NEVER slow down.  PERIOD.  It’s like putting your quarter into a rocking horse pony: once you start it, it goes like it goes until it’s done, and it can’t be stopped.  All other Rhythm Section Truths flow from this reality, and a failure to meet this primary responsibility results in nonmusic, noise, sonic barf.  ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR, ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR: making sure everyone knows where these are is our first job back here and if we don’t do it, everything falls apart in a hurry.  As a converted guitar player (and especially a lead guitar player!), I had (and still fight) a tendency to want to play too many damn notes.  First of all, these can get in the way of keeping that pulse vice-grip locked in time and pulsingly present in the overall sound, and second of all, my bass chops ain’t that sharp so I try to remember to not get my head out over my skis anyway. When in doubt: just play the notes on the beat. Funny enough, as I have now also begun experimenting with the stand-up bass, I find staying focused on this job easier than with with bass guitar because the stand-up is harder to play so keeping it simple is, uh, simpler.

Second: as keepers of the Beat, we are the foundation of the Groove in the rock and roll band.  The Groove-- usually composed of the aforementioned steady beat, a little bit of percussion shake (hi hat, shakers, etc), a bass line locked in to the beat maybe syncopating it a bit, but in granite firm time that wiggles your hips, and maybe topped off by a rhythm guitar riff with some grind-- is what gets in your ears and head and won’t leave, sometimes for days or weeks.  It’s like a drug that takes over first your body and then your mind.   Building the Groove properly doesn’t necessarily take a lot of notes, it just takes the right ones: the right pulse with the right shake, a bass line kneading the beat or foreshadowing or framing the chord changes or melody, a guitar riff that reaches down into your guts and won’t let go can drive a tune, can open up vocal and instrumental possibilities which can take a song anywhere.  The Allmans and the Grateful Dead have always known this about the Groove, which is why they have 2 drummers (one to lay down the beat, one to add the shake).  Even a flaccid, weak song can spring to glorious, feral life when the rhythm section finds the right groove to put behind it, and a great song can flop flaccidly without a well-constructed groove.

Thus the Beat and the Groove constitute the awesome Responsibility and the awesome Power of the Rhythm Section.  Life at the front of the band can still be fun: a haunting melody, a truth-encapsulating lyric, a blazing guitar solo can all be stunning to take in as a listener and teeth-igniting to offer up as a player, and living in the limelight up front does have its charms and allure.  But life here at the back is a Big Deal, too, and a glorious one, at that.  I’m digging my new home very much, very indeed, and have no desire to move in the near future.

A Casual Fan’s History of U2 Through Achtung Baby

U2 passed through town a couple of weeks ago.  I didn’t see the shows (my relationship with Big Concert Events is a complex enough topic to merit its own post another day), but the splash in town and the various clips posted online did prompt me to go back and listen and reflect…

I’ve always had a kind of complex relationship with U2.  I was in high school when they first broke, with the Boy, October, and War albums tumbling out in rapid succession, followed up shortly by a live document, the arresting and inspiring Under a Blood Red Sky.  Their sound was unique and cool (loved that echoey guitar and giant voice) and it fought against the tsunami-tide of 80s music which was composed of electronic sounds and devoid of grit, grind, or substance so I liked them alright, but some things kinda put me off: singer Paul Hewson’s and guitarist Dave Evans’s self-dubbed nicknames—“Bono” and “The Edge”—felt kinda put on, self-puffing, and pretentious (I feel the same way about Gordon Sumner christening himself “Sting”), and the kinda holier than thou politics the band so loudly espoused felt kinda pontifical and rubbed me the wrong way.  And so: I thought they were alright, but I wasn’t really a big fan.

I was a big Brian Eno fan, though— I gobbled up hundreds of hours of his work with art rock professor Robert Fripp, his “ambient” soundscapes, his legendary 3 album partnership with David Bowie, his solo classic Here Come the Warm Jets (Fripp’s guitar solo on "Baby's On Fire" is a brilliant combination of savagery and intellect), and many of his other experiments and collaborations— and so I snapped up the Eno-produced The Unforgettable Fire the week it came out my sophomore year in college. Dave Evans was quoted in interviews as saying that this was how the band was always supposed to sound, that this was the sound they had been driving at all along, and I agreed.  Eno and fellow soundscape sculptor Daniel Lanois had developed Evans’s noted echoey guitar sound into a tool capable of painting richly textured aural pictures while still also crumbling walls with blitzkriegs of rage.  The songs were lyrically heavy— “In the Name of Love” and “MLK” were fitting tributes to Dr. King, “Elvis Presley and America” nicely drew a picture of the King as a metaphor for much of what’s good and much of what’s bad about our country and the American Dream, and the narration and cascading musical rises and falls in “Bad” authentically limn the sadness of someone watching a friend struggle with depression or addiction—  but they’re somehow not quite as Moses-From-The-Mountain preachy as some of the earlier songs.  The album was a huge critical and commercial success, again especially impressive coming as it did in the middle of Rock and Roll’s darkest hour.  Surrounded on the charts, radio, and MTV by the soulless drek of 80s synth pop, The Unforgettable Fire stood virtually alone in every respect:  sonically composed of real instruments— guitar, bass, and drums—rather the sounds of a Pong game, lyrically serious and poetic, and the band, pompous nicknames aside, presented in jeans, t-shirts, and a distinct absence of krazy-glued hair spikes or dye.

Then, The Joshua Tree— a perfect album from beginning to end.  I've listened to it front to back a half-dozen times in the last week, and I can’t find a place where interest or energy leaks out anywhere.  From the windblown opener “Where the Streets Have No Name,”  through ballads  of love and / or self-reflection (“With or Without You”), paeans to land and laborers “Red Hill Mining Town”), political anthems both thunderous (“Bullet the Blue Sky”) and meditative (“Mothers of the Disappeared”), and beyond, every track is a killer.  The lyrical ideas and opinions, while every bit as socially and culturally on-point as anything on “War,” are expressed more artfully.  The sound is enormous and gorgeous.  The songs, with Hewson’s booming baritone carving out soaring melody lines and potent ad libs between Evans’s alternately delicate and ballistic echo-driven guitar riffs, and undergirded by Adam Clayton’s muscular bass lines and Larry Mullen Jr.’s rock solid and sensitive drumming, are arranged impeccably to maintain interest and maximize impact by Eno and Lanois.  The Joshua Tree shows were Rock and Roll Revivals on a massive scale, leaving concertgoers with a sense not only of joining in an event of musical communion, but having been exhorted to higher purposes by the band’s fiery fusing of politics and rock and roll.  Arguably, the band had reached a place in Western Culture to which no one had been since the Beatles: commercially successful on a scale almost impossible to comprehend—record sales in the 10s of millions, globe and calendar spanning tours of the largest arenas and football stadiums— but also with a cultural impact transcending mere rock- or pop-stardom.  Not merely unabashedly outspoken on issues such as apartheid, the IRA, and world hunger, the band was an active leader in fundraising for those causes, and also willing and able to use their stature to take their commitments to the top, lobbying and conversing with political leaders around the world.

A clarifying note here: no one, NO ONE, I repeat NO ONE—including U2 has ever had the musical and cultural impact of the Beatles.  In all probability no one ever will—they changed the world musically and culturally forever.  Everything that U2 has done has been possible because of the Beatles, and so when I say “the band had reached a place in Western Culture to which no one had been since the Beatles” I do NOT mean that they had the same impact or have the same long-term importance as the Beatles.  Rather, I am pointing out that no band since the Beatles had become both musically important and culturally and politically forceful on a global scale, especially relative to their peers.

And so U2 was Mighty Big, Mighty and Big, indeed. Heads swelled, expectations swelled, ambition swelled: the next step was a double album (a mixture of live takes from the Joshua Tree tour and new studio recordings) and major motion picture— Rattle and Hum.  Here’s where things kinda went south for me.  Rattle and Hum contains a number of excellent cuts: the opening reading of the Beatles’ (!) “Helter Skelter” stands at least shoulder to shoulder with the original while adding to, if not radically re-interpreting, it, “Van Diemen’s Land,” featuring a haunting vocal by Evans, details the impact of a little known Irish political activist, the gospel-chorus recasting of “I Still Haven’t found What I’m Looking For” is electrifying as is the band’s take on Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” and “Silver and Gold” is as vivid a portrayal of the desperation in Apartheid South Africa as could be written.  But energy leaks in many places: the Bo Diddley knockoff single “Desire” is merely eh, the bleating and wanky “Hawkmoon 269” doesn’t really go anywhere, and the band’s attempts to converse with American Blues—“Love Rescue Me” and “When Love Comes to Town” (featuring a cute but unremarkable cameo by B.B. King)—fall flat, as do most of the rest of the tracks.

Most troubling of all, Hewson launches into an ad lib diatribe decrying greedy TV Preachers during a concert performance of “Bullet the Blue Sky.”  Sitting in the movie theatre watching him performing this song in the Rattle and Hum film, the following occurred to me: this guy in the movie is up on stage in front of a football stadium filled with roughly 75,000 people who each paid around $20 each, selling t-shirts for another $20 apiece, trying to get people to buy the Joshua Tree record album at $10 apiece, turning the show into a movie which people pay another $10 apiece to see, and also putting the show on a new album mostly moving in the form of CDs, now at $15 piece, and he’s monologuing about a TV preacher “stealing money from the sick and the old????”  What the fuck?  This guy is more full of shit than a septic tank.  Why is what he’s doing any less a type of brainwashing hucksterism than any TV preacher’s spiel, and who’s to say that the feelings people get from watching and sending money to TV preachers are any less legitimately uplifting than the ones people get forking over cash to listen to and see U2?  I mean, I hate the kind of religious moralistic diharrea that Jimmy Swaggart and his ilk spewed (and continue to spew) as much as anyone, but everyone is entitled to like what they wanna like, say what they wanna say, spend money on what they want, and do what they want in pursuit of a dollar, and that includes TV preachers, rockstars, and anyone else.  Mr. Hewson was making a mighty phat living as the Social Conscience Of the World and had a lotta nerve casting stones at anyone else making phat dough from his glass mansion built with money from people (who might well be described analogously to Swaggart's fan club members as "young and innocent") who chose to believe in him.  “Bono” my ass—my new nickname for him was SCOW (FULL DISCLOSURE NOTE: when I first posted this I did not attribute the "SCOW" moniker to my friend Tony Oakson, who coined it in a conversation after we had seen the movie together. My apologies to Tony for the oversight and my thanks to him for his pithy, on-target wit:)) .

And so I was done with U2—couldn’t take them seriously anymore.  They were a joke, a self-caricature.   Their egos and ambitions had turned them into hypocrites.  I believe that you can combine rock and roll and political activism, I believe that rock and roll really can change the world or at the very least metaphorically (or even literally) save the lives of people who feel strongly about it, but you have combine the two very carefully and you have to know and walk carefully amongst the mines that your own ego and the business and industry of rock and roll lay in your path.  Having walked that line, having danced through that minefield successfully for a long time, U2 had become unable to do so anymore.

I picked up Achtung Baby, spun it a few times, and that was it.  Maybe because SCOW had blown the bloom off the rose for me and maybe because I just didn't like the songs and sound as much-- whatever the case, the record never grabbed me, musically or lyrically.  After that I didn’t care.  The band, of course, has soldiered on, and impressively so (how they have done so without my support I can’t imagine, but they seem to have gotten over itJ).  Their records and tours—Zooropa, Pop, All That You Can’t Leave Behind etc etc etc—  have continued to sell millions and garner critical acclaim.  They remain more relevant musically and socially than any band approaching the 40 year mark in their career, regularly selling recordings and concert tickets to people born long after they began playing.  They continue to effectively leverage their celebrity to make positive impacts on social causes (AIDS, 3^rd World Debt, etc etc etc).  More power to them.  Me? I’m gonna go back and listen to Under a Blood Red Sky, The Unforgettable Fire, and The Joshua Tree again.