I Don't Get It: Three Confessions That Will Get Me Kicked Out of the Cool Musician's Club

With every movement - religion, ecology, the Republican party - there exists dogma: third rails of thought that you simply do not touch. Music is no exception, especially if you are a musician, but I've lived the lies long enough (actually, not that long which may be part of the reason for my position). Herein lies my confession: I just don't get why these are such a big deal.

I'm sure there are musicians I revere that others scratch their heads at: The Grateful Dead, Frank Zappa, The Shaggs (especially The Shaggs) to name a few, but crane my neck as I may, I fail to see how the following wormed their way to the top of their respective pedestals:

The Velvet Underground:

By all rights I should dig VU. I love Lou Reed. I dig what I've heard from John Cale. Was Sterling Morrison such a drag on their talents? Brian Eno made the comment that though their first album sold only 30,000 copies, "everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band." I suspect that act was immediately preceded by the thought, "I can do better than that."

"Exile on Main Street":

Ranked 7th on Rolling Stone Magazine's All-time Greatest Album list. Why?? It's just another goddamn Rolling Stones album. There's what, 853 of the them? I guarantee you, if I put my car radio on 'seek' I'll find a Rolling Stones song playing at this moment in every metropolitan area in the US.

I may suffer from the handicap that I was too young to have this come out at a meaningful 'coming of age' moment in my life. I did not hear the whole album in one sitting until my 50s, but #7? All-time? Get real. I can name seven Van Morrison albums better than Exile. Hell, I can probably name seven better Steve Earle albums.

Django Reinhardt:

Tom Moon, how could you lead me astray? I'm into Volume 4(!) of Reinhardt's complete recordings. In a word: boring. This may be why non-jazzbos hate jazz.

Before Les Paul hit the scene (and, for many, after) this guy was the guitarist's guitarist. His sound is the touchstone for serious jazz guitarists (and non-guitarists), but I am praying there is no Volume 5. Maybe it's the boom-chick rhythm on every song, maybe it's invariant tone (granted, dictated by the recording technology of the time), but the guy sounds like his total career was a one day marathon recording session of the pop tunes of the day, each separated only by Reinhardt shouting "Next!".

Technically perfect guitarist - oui. Embodiment, if not creator, of the quintessential inter-war jazz sound - certainment. Musically interesting - alas, non.

There you have it. Ready for your rotten tomatoes.

Elton John - November 24, 2013

The voice has mellowed - richer, deeper - as has the man himself. No more the Pinball Wizard riding onto the stage on a live ostrich but more your Uncle Reg sitting down for a go at the piano (albeit in a purple English riding jacket festooned with sequins that coalesce across the back to form "Madman Across the Water").

But he's still the entertainer and put on one terrific show from the ominous wind of 'Funeral For a Friend' blowing through a darkened Chaifitz Arena to everyone signing along to 'Crocodile Rock' in the end.

Sir Elton stuck mostly to the 70s, following 'Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding' with the rest of side one of "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" (including a grooving down-tempo 'Bennie & the Jets') before bringing out the backup singers, one of which was Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Famer Rose Stone (as in Sly & the Family . . .). He tossed in a couple 80s songs, mercifully turning 'Sad Songs (Say So Much)' into a honky tonk number, 'Beleive' and 'The One' from the 90's, two from the new album "The Diving Board", and 'Hey Ahab' from his critically acclaimed 2010 album with Leon Russell, "The Union". (side note: Russell, who Elton called "my hero" in the song's introduction, was in town last week playing a much smaller venue).

The man still has a powerful voice - not the same voice: he let the backups take the high notes on 'Goodbye Yellow Brick Road', but he roars out the tunes with energy. Backed by long-time drummer Nigel Olsson and guitarist Davey Johnstone, he managed to 'play the hits' but make them fresh at the same time.

Criticisms? With a body of work that big, not everyone's favorites are going to show up. I could have heard 'Burn Down the Mission' but was just as pleased not to hear 'Little Jeannie'. Those of us in the seats could have done without the pre-encore autograph signing along the stage (though it did give Nigel Olsson time to slip into a Watford FC shirt, making two of us in the arena - Go You 'Orns!), and after two-and-a-half hours of being banged on by Elton John, any piano will be in need of a little tuning.

It may be partly nostalgia - these songs have been in my life longer that I can remember - or it may be the out and out professionalism, musicianship, entertainment, and grace of the man, but this goes down the best concert I've been to this year (sorry Jake).

• Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding
• Benny & the Jets
• Candle in the Wind

(joined by backup singers)

• Grey Seal
• Levon
• Tiny Dancer
• Holiday Inn
• Mona Lisas & Mad Hatters
• Believe
• Philadelphia Freedom
• Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
• Piano Intro/Rocket Man
• Hey Ahab
• I Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues

(solo)

• The One
• Ocean's Away

(w/band)

• Someone Saved My Life Tonight
• Sad Songs (Say So Much)
• All the Girls Love Alice
• Home Again
• Don't Let the Sun Go Down On Me
• The Bitch Is Back
• I'm Still Standing
• Your Sister Can't Twist (But She Can Rock 'n Roll)
• Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting

(encore)

• Your Song
• St. Louis Blues/Crocodile Rock

Mendocino * - Sir Douglas Quintet

If you want to know what I like about music, listen to this album.

My sum knowledge of Sir Douglas Quintet to this point:

1. "She's About a Mover"

2. Doug Sahm was in the Texas Tornados

3. and he lent his guest vocals on Anodyne by the boys from Belleville

Wikipedia has it right when they say "[o]verall, the quintet were exponents of good-times music". This is a bar band's bar band - nothing too original here, but such a genuinely fun take on the covers.

We've got "A Whiter Shade of Pale", "Mr. Pitiful" (with the wisdom not to try to sound like Gary Booker or Otis Redding), "Please, Please, Please", (ditto JB), fellow Tornado's "Wasted Days & Wasted Nights" and two hoary chestnuts made fresh: "Night Train" & "Kansas City".

Top that with a handful of originals including "Stoned Faces Don't Lie" (forget your Rainy Day Women, this should be the stoner National Anthem), the title track, and the aforementioned "Mover" and you have a party album sure to please everyone waiting on burgers in the back yard this summer.

I stumbled onto to this thanks to Tom Moon's 1,000 Recording You Need to Hear Before You Die. I've worked my way back from Tres Hobres into the S artists, limited only by Spotify's catalog. It's not all diamonds though - I also listened to Slayer's Reign of Blood yesterday. Yuck. Still I'll be happy to share any other hidden gems.

* The Mendicino listed in Wikipedia does not match the one on Spotify. This seems more of a Greatest Hits. I'm sure the original is wonderful too.

Write On, Songwriters, Write On

I heard this old Jackson Browne song at a show by my friend Al's band Rockin' Chair and decided to steal it for my solo set (and by 'set' I mean I'm up to three songs, generally two more than I'm actually allowed to play before being asked to 'move along').

Let me say upfront - this is a fantastic song and great lyrics, at once simple & true, personal & universal - but . . .

But . . .

Get to the third verse and you find one of the oddest and most wonderful rhymes in music:

"These days I sit on cornerstones/And count the time in quartertones to ten my friend"

Physics be damned! Browne is so intent on that cornerstones/quarter tones rhyme, he leaves the listener grasping for mental imagery. You can sit on cobblestones, yes - cornerstones, however, are embedded in a building and provide the, well, cornerstone to its physical structure. And counting time in quarter tones?? What the what? It would be like smelling 'magenta'. Makes no sense.

But go for it Jackson. Most of us pay no attention anyhow (I just realized after 42 years, I had the third line to "Won't Get Fooled Again" COMPLETELY wrong). And dammit, it's YOUR song.

Let this be a lesson to you would-be and still-are songwriters: don't over-think this stuff. Here's my list of odd and tortured lyrics:

• "Slip Kid" - Pete Townsend for The Who - He manages to rhyme "war" with its palindrome "raw"
• "All I Have to Do Is Dream" - Felice & Boudleaux Bryant - #1 hit for the Everly Brothers - "The only trouble is/Gee whiz!" OUCH!
• "Good Times Roll" - Ric Ocasek for The Cars - "Let them leave you up in the air/Let them brush your Rock 'n' Roll hair" - I'm pretty sure no one had ever used the adjective 'rock 'n' roll' for hair in a song before and there's a damn good reason.

Let me know. What are your favorite/most-hated rhymes in song? How does Jay-Z stack up against Paul Simon? Cole Porter vs Schubert?

Remembering Julie

We paid our last respects to a dear friend Wednesday.

That is such an odd statement because none of us will fail to respect the person she was or cherish the lessons she taught us for as long we live. The theme throughout yesterday’s service and gathering was love. Repeatedly I heard, “Julie loved everyone and everyone loved Julie”. Not a platitude – a fact. I have never met anyone so positive and at the same time so genuine in my life.

I’ve known her husband Al for over 30 years; Julie less than five. Our group from school, like most established clusters of friends, can probably be a fairly intimidating bloc to approach as a new girl/boy-friend. We spoke yesterday of how Al at the time hoped we would cut this new girlfriend some slack. There was no need to worry.

Two pictures in the gallery that attends the reminiscences of anyone’s death these days caught my attention, the first taken at a high school football game in 1979. If a ponytailed girl in a poodle skirt is the symbol of the 50s, this photo of a radiant, smiling eighteen-year old in Florissant, Missouri has to be the model of an All-American girl in the late 70s. A girl who loves her friends, her family, her hometown – loves life.

Thirty-four years later she still did.

The second photo was a white board, I would guess at her room in a hospital, with her name spelled out and things she loved for each letter. In addition to her friends, family, husband Al and daughter Carly, she lists her job by name. Your brain screams out, “C’mon, who loves their job so much that it would make a list of the top dozen ‘things I love’ while you face serious illness?” Julie did. The last item on the list was rainbows.

Rainbows.

As if daring someone to make fun of her naiveté.

You’d be a fool to do so and everyone would know how big an idiot you were if you did. She was far from naïve, she was enlightened. She knew how to love what was given to her while so many of us scorn or ignore the gifts life lays at our doorstep every day.

I’ve buried both parents and a dozen or so aunts & uncles, but this is the first close friend I’ve lost as an adult – the first that many of us have lost from our peer group and we’re scared.

We look at our wife or husband and wonder what we’d do without them. We look at our children and worry how they’d manage without us. We look at each other and wonder who’s next.

Every cough is now potentially lung cancer in our minds; every mole, skin cancer and it will be like this for a while. I knew I was closer to the end than the beginning at this point, but this has made it real for everyone. Denial gives way to fear on a day like this.

Oddly enough, the one person who was never scared was Julie. She beat the cancer in all the ways that counted. In the end it had to settle for just killing her and beating the rest of us instead.

The large viewing room at the funeral home was packed. All the standing room was taken and the hallway outside was filled with people for the service. It would have upset Julie to see so many people dear to her filled with such grief, but pleased her to see so many of the people she loved in one place, loving each other.

Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell w/Richard Thompson - March 17, 2013

The Peabody Opera House still has that ‘new venue smell’ to it a year after its reopening and was a marvelous venue for three veteran performers last night.

Richard Thompson’s ‘Electric’ trio (Michael Jerome – drums, Taras Prodaniuk – bass) kicked things off with ‘Stuck On the Treadmill’ from the new album – a typically rollicking Thompson offering of post-industrial depression – to an enthusiastic cadre of RT fans and some Emmylou/Crowell followers who showed up early and got a very pleasant surprise. One enthusiastically asked me at intermission if I’d “ever heard of this guy?”

Point of fact, this probably exceed the price I’d ever paid to hear Thompson before by double and may have been the furthest away I’ve ever sat for a Richard Thompson concert (in fact, I was further away than I could have been and still been inside any of the other venues).

Thompson stuck to the new album in the hour he had with the exception of a seven-minute ‘Can’t Win’ tour-de-force, ’52 Vincent Black Lightning’, and the last song, ‘Tear-Stained Letter’, appropriately enough a Thompson-penned country Top 10 hit for Jo-el Sonnier and, later, Patti Lovelace.

Emmylou & Crowell, by contrast, dipped deeply in their own separate and joint catalogues as well as some of the lesser-known country standards before hitting up their new collaboration ‘Old Yellow Moon’ which has its fair share of country classics as well including the old Waylon Jennings hit ‘Dreaming My Dreams’.

The highlight of the evening was the Matraca Berg-written song ‘Back When We Were Beautiful’, an unsentimental take on the pain of growing old that breaks hearts when sung in Emmylou’s bright soprano.

I grew up with country music on the radio. My folks loved it so I hated it of course. I’m still not a big fan of modern country radio (I try to listen to my friend Mac when he’s on the air and usually make it about seven minutes), but have found my way back through alt-country bands like Uncle Tupelo and Blue Mountain and especially through singer-songwriters like Crowell, Steve Earle, and Townes Van Zant (who’s Pancho & Lefty the duo nailed last night).

Part of it too may be the old notion that ‘country music is for grown-ups’. Last night’s songs held a lot more spill than thrills and more heartaches than heartthrobs. It speaks to the 50-year old me in a way it couldn’t when I was seventeen.

The pair put together a top-notch band of old Nashville veterans and young guns from as far away as Adelaide, Australia that smoked through tunes like ‘Leavin’ Louisiana in the Broad Daylight’, another Crowell song, this one a hit for the Oak Ridge Boys.

Thompson rejoined the pair for Crowell’s ‘I Ain’t Living Long Like This’ and the two returned for an encore of classic duos: the Louvin Brothers’ ‘If I Could Only Win Your Love’ and a mournfully slow version of the Everly Brothers’ ‘Love Hurts’, before introducing the ‘road dogs’, making a pitch for local animal shelter adoption, and sending the crowd home as happy as they could be after a night of sad country songs.

Stan, Ike, and the (New) Old Men

I just spent three hours watching Stan Musial’s funeral on TV. I’ve never done this – not for presidents, not for Lady Di, not for Michael Jackson. Never.

I don’t have as good a Stan Musial story as Bob Costas (who does?) or probably even as good a story as you, Dear Reader. I managed to spend nearly 30 years in St. Louis and never met ‘The Man’.

I tried.

As most of you know, I grew up in a small town in southern Iowa in a household where, right after Lawrence Welk, Cardinal baseball was the main source of entertainment (fishing probably came third). Baseball on TV was limited to ‘The Game of the Week’, but I can’t remember us missing too many Cardinal games out of KBIZ in Ottumwa. I learned to talk listening to Jack Buck and, later, Mike Shannon. I was a baseball nut.

I was also a bit of a book worm and a stats geek. I spent a LOT of time with a book called the Baseball Encyclopedia (from the town’s Carnegie Library) where I found out all about this old guy Musial that kept getting talked about on the radio and by the other Cardinal fans in the family. I’ll be honest - I had little interest in this guy that was out of baseball before I turned one (my batting hero was Roberto Clemente and when I pitched tennis balls against the garage, I was Scipio Spinks – non-Cardinal fans are going to need to look that one up).

And then I found the record.

My dad worked for the local Chevy garage as the Parts Manager for 40 years and would occasionally come home with promotional items or sales rewards. In those days, LPs were common give-aways: we had more than a few Christmas albums handed out exclusively at Chevy dealerships, but the one I found was something called “Stan the Man’s Hit Record”. I popped that thing on the turntable and the first thing I heard was the broadcast of Stan’s 3,000^th hit.

I was confused. Where’s Buck? Who’s this Harry Caray guy? The rest of the album was Stan telling you how to hit a baseball which, to a gangly eleven year-old, was as helpful as watching Clean House is to getting your house clean.

Fast forward fifteen years.

I’m in St. Louis. I was probably always going to end up in St. Louis. I wanted out of Iowa and St. Louis was the BIG CITY (but not so big and scary a city as Chicago or New York). There was a job here, my college friends were here, and the Cardinals were here. I was working three blocks from the stadium and going to at least one game every home stand. I was also drinking a lot of beer and following sports a lot closer than I do now.

Those two hobbies occasionally met at a bar called The Wiffledome (so-called because they had a side room where you could play corkball and, yes, whiffleball) in South St. Louis. My friend Dan & I would go down once a week when a local radio show would broadcast live.

One week they announced that Stan the Man would join them, talking, meeting & greeting, and signing autographs. As luck would have it: 1) Father’s Day was coming up and 2) I was going home that weekend and could pick up the album. I was pretty sure my Dad would be the only guy in town with an autographed Stan Musial record.

Fate intervened. 

Stan got sick and had to cancel. I never followed up. My Dad passed away a few years later and now Stan is gone.

As regrets go, this is pretty minor, but today just reminded me of that generation slipping away. I attended my Aunt’s funeral Monday and heard stories of country kids boarding with town families, war brides, and the Greatest Generation there as well.

I’ve written often that men did not wear shorts when I grew up. Most people I know from that generation would have been ashamed to have still been someone’s ‘dependent’ on their health insurance or otherwise at age 26. Men and women were just that: adult men and women, even those that played a kid’s game like Musial.

So my hat’s off to the Old Men and Old Women like Stan and my parents (and probably yours). The stories of Stan’s genuine decency were everywhere this week; the same with my parents at their services.

I’m now approaching Old Man status myself and look around and wonder if my generation will live up to the example set for us. I hope so.