My L.A. Takeaway

May 3, 2018

In the spring of 1997 I visited California for a rock filled vacation with my brother. We were ostensibly going to visit our roommate Cole who was recording an album in Los Angeles with his band Sweet Water. The trip started with a stop in San Francisco where we met up with some friends and saw the Screaming Trees for my birthday.  This was the first (of many) shows I saw on the Dust tour, and the first time I saw Josh Homme, who even as a touring guitarist, seemed like a bona fide rock star. The show was to be the first of two club shows in San Francisco, but the next day Lanegan was arrested for possession. But by that time we were already in LA.

Sweet Water was working on their third album, titled “Suicide” and produced by Dave Jerden. The band had recently been signed to the Enclave, Tom Zutaut’s new label. Zutaut had signed Guns N Roses and Motley Crue when he was in A&R.

When the band wasn’t in the studio we experienced all that Hollywood had to offer: taking in rock shows at The Troubadour, The Key Club, and Hard Rock Café, as well as a benefit show at the Viper Room. Adam, the singer from Sweet Water, had run into David Cross at a hardware store. And after chatting for a while Cross recommended checking out this new comedy duo called Tenacious D. Tenacious D was one of the acts at the Viper Room so we decided to go. Mike McCready was in town and came along with us. Consequently we were immediately led to the green room where Tenacious D waited. They were supposed to be going on in 30 minutes, but their set kept getting pushed, so they bided their time chatting with us.

As it turned out we weren’t the only ones there to see Tenacious D. So many people had shown up to see them that they ended up headlining the show over Beverly D’Angelo. A year later I would move to LA, and after seeing Tenacious D again, I would tell Mike about their new set and songs. Pearl Jam was going to be touring soon behind the Yield Album and he thought it’d be cool to have them open for them in LA. A few months later I would see them open for Pearl Jam at the Forum. But that’s another story.

This was obviously a great trip, with a lot of great music, but what has really stuck with me all these years is that this was also the trip that I was introduced to the band Sloan.

Sloan is a band from Canada and was also signed to the Enclave, and their CD “One Chord To Another” was sent to Sweet Water along with a bunch of other albums by Enclave artists including Fluffy and Belle and Sebastian.

What struck me about this album was the variety and the diversity. In certain ways it reminded me of two of my favorite power pop bands, Big Star and Badfinger. Like both of those bands, Sloan is comprised of four singer-songwriters, each with different tastes and very different voices which blend perfectly together.

I recall sitting around the Oakwood Apartments in Burbank listening to the record and thinking it was the coolest record I’d heard in a long time. There were power pop songs, rock songs that sounded kinda like the Stones, as well as songs I didn’t really know how to describe other than either “Indie” or “alternative”.

When Cole got back to Seattle I intended on copying the CD, if not outright stealing it from him, but somehow he hadn’t ended up with a copy. Two years would go by and I’d keep thinking about how great that album was and wishing I had a copy. But I could never find it at any of the local record stores. It wasn’t until being back in Seattle for the holidays that I managed to find a used copy. There wasn’t a price on it and the owner had no idea who they were or how the CD got into his store. He questioningly asked if $3.50 sounded like an ok price.

Once back in LA the album was on heavy rotation. Even though I couldn’t find “One Chord to Another” their other albums were available at my local record stores and I quickly snatched up their follow up, “Navy Blues”.

Navy Blues sounded nothing like “One Chord To Another”, although it was just as eclectic. Instead of Stones influenced songs there were riff rockers similar to AC/DC as well as Queen-like piano ballads. But also in there were songs with tempo shifts and key changes. In certain respects it was a much more commercial sounding record, but at the same time it still had a lot of quirks.

The more I dug into the band the more their individual personalities became obvious. Both the Stones and AC/DC influence seemed to come from lead guitarist Patrick Pentland. The moodier, artsy-er, and almost avant garde songs, came from drummer Andrew Scott. Bassist Chris Murphy tended to write the more Power Pop songs, although his real signature is his tongue in cheek lyrics. And rhythm guitarist Jay Ferguson tends to favor Beatle-esque pop.

They followed Navy Blues up with “Beyond The Bridges” which at the time was their most current release.  Beyond The Bridges was a concept album, and their first record where songs flowed directly into one another. But being a concept album, there wasn’t the same quirk to it. Instead it was just a great classic rock album. Unfortunately, Sloan had already toured through LA behind this album, so I would have to wait a little longer to see them live.

With 2001’s “Pretty Together” I finally fell in sync with the band. It was their first release I was waiting for, and consequently I got to see them live at the Troubadour in LA. “Pretty Together” was their first record where all four members of the band contributed an equal number of songs, and it was also a leap artistically. There were acoustic ballads and even some jazz tinged songs.

Between their distinctive voices and the variety of genres and styles they all write in, a Sloan album is never what you expect, and as they’ve gotten older they’ve become more adventurous. Their 2006 album, “Never Hear the End Of it” was a double disc with 30 songs, most of which ran into one another, only stopping at what would be the end of each of the four record sides.

In fact, their least popular album, 2003’s “Action Pact” suffered from this lack of variety. The band had hired Tom Rothrock to produce and allowed him to choose what songs made the record. He chose the most commercial songs, leading to 5 songs apiece by Murphy and Pentland, 2 by Ferguson and no songs by Scott. The album if filled with great songs, but they all feel too similar. They’re either rock or power pop, and while a good collection of songs, one of their least interesting albums. In fact, I don’t think they even toured the states behind this album. I know I didn’t see them, and until recently had only heard one or two songs performed off this album.

But that recently changed when they played three songs off the album – one each by Murphy, Pentland and Ferguson - while supporting their latest album, 2018’s “12”. The songs were a nice addition and fit in well with the rest of the set as they were dispersed throughout the set.

Sloan is definitely an album band. Their singles alone don’t do them justice. In fact, there have been a few times where the singles were my least favorite songs on the album. But they’re a band where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. I don’t know how these four ended up together and striking this balance, if balance is even the right word. They all have such different tastes and sensibilities that they all bring something unique and different to the table that makes one another’s songs better, whether it’s the part they’re playing on a song, harmonizing on vocals, or duetting as a counterpoint on one another’s songs. And while it’s obvious who the song writer may be on any given song, and that the song most closely echoes their personal sensibilities, it’s also obvious how the others contributed, added and augmented the song in the studio.

Tales From the Front Line

February 14, 2018

1981 was the year music came to the forefront for me and my friends. Specifically, the fall of 1981 when MTV launched. Prior to the launch of MTV my friends and I all loved the Beatles, the Stones and the Kinks. Pink Floyd, Super Tramp and The Cars were also on our radar, but for the most part it was popular music or music passed down from our parents or siblings. But in 1981 our horizons drastically broadened, along with those of the rest of the worlds. It was like going from black and white to color. Bands I’d only heard on the radio I could now see on my tv.

My friends and I would discuss new videos that had just aired as well as older videos we’d just seen for the first time. We were enamored with the fashion and the technology behind this new art form as much as the new acts from around the world.

One of the artists that spoke the most to me and my group of friends was Adam and The Ants. Adam Ant was made for MTV. He was young, good looking, and dressed as a swashbuckler. He wore leather pants, make-up and gyrated his hips like Elvis. His music style was part glam, part punk, and because he had two drummers there was an African tribal feel to it. It was unique and very visual. It’s no surprise so many of his videos were in heavy rotation back then.

I recall a sleepover at my friend Michael Clark’s house where he had a VHS tape dedicated to Adam and the Ants videos and concerts. There were probably 12 of us wrapped in sleeping bags around the television waiting for Mike to pop the tape into his top loader VCR. While it wasn’t the first time we’d seen these videos, it was the first time we’d seen them all at once. From “Ant Rap” to “Stand And Deliver”, from “Ant Music” to “Prince Charming”. As a bonus, he had also recently recorded the video for Adam’s first solo single “Goody Two Shoes” which many of us, myself included, had never seen before.

While the music was different without the twin drummers of The Ants, and Adam was eschewing his makeup, I was still hooked. Once the album was released I picked it up. In fact, despite a massive purge to my record collection I still somehow retained my original copy of “Friend or Foe”.

Fast forward not quite a year later and I was at a new school, trying to fit in and make new friends. While I was entrenched in New Wave acts like Adam Ant, Split Endz and U2, the rest of my class was into Van Halen, Def Leppard and Billy Squire. I was a fish out of water. I remember talking to Tom Maider in gym class about U2 in hushed tones, as if we were afraid of being overheard and ostracized. “Under A Blood Red Sky” would debut on MTV later in the year, but it would be another year before they would find mainstream success with “The Unforgettable Fire”.

Now when I went to friends houses it was to watch an Ozzy Osbourne concert. Slowly my New Wave leanings started to erode. Hard Rock was all around me and soon I was listening to the Scorpions, Iron Maiden and Judas Priest with my friends, while posters of U2 and Adam and the Ants remained on my bedroom wall.

By my senior year of high school U2 released “The Joshua Tree” and was everywhere. Although for the most part my friends and I listened to Led Zeppelin, the Cult, AC/DC and The Steve Miller Band. Although on occasion my friend Dan would make us listen to Asia. I was unconvinced about Dan’s music taste (I still am, truth be told). He seemed a little out of step with the rest of our group (he still does, for that matter). Until one night the two of us snuck away from our girlfriends at a birthday party so Dan could chew. As it was a cold night in Seattle we hopped into Dan’s car, and to my amazement Dan had been listening to Adam Ant. Turns out he did like some good music – “some” still being the operative word.

By college my musical tastes were all over the map. The Rolling Stones had re-entered my world with a vengeance, but Steely Dan was also in heavy rotation, as were the Stone Roses, Van Morrison and Badfinger. And occasionally, very late at night after too many beers, the Adam Ant came out.

By the time college was over the Seattle music scene had exploded and I’d begun playing guitar again. Occasionally I’d play with friends and try to convince them we needed to cover “Stand and Deliver”. And while the idea was always greeted with enthusiasm, it for some reason never came to fruition. It wouldn’t be until 2015 that I would sit down and cover the song on my own.

When I heard Adam Ant was coming to LA I decided I had to go see him, so I purchased a pair of tickets and waited patiently for the date to arrive. As it turned out this would be our busiest week of seeing music. On Monday we would see Tom Petty at the Hollywood Bowl. On Wednesday we’d see Alison Moyet at the Fonda Theater. And on Saturday we’d go to the Greek to see Adam, sans the Ants.

The set started off with “Beat My Guest” before Adam proceeded to play all of his hits. The only song that was absent was “Ant Rap”, which probably made sense as the Ants were no longer with him. Adam sounded great and ran and danced across the stage. He even got thunderous cheers and applause when he shed his jacket. Go see him if you ever get the chance.

As I danced and sang along to all the songs a thought occurred to me that perhaps a part of why his music still resounds with me to this day is because it was once a tether to my past life. I didn’t want to switch schools and leave the friends I had had since kindergarten. If I’m being completely honest, I really didn’t want to leave Lori Fitz-Gerald who I was crushing on at the time.

While I don’t doubt there’s some truth to all that, I think it’s really because I found his music when my friends and I first started to define who we were musically. When we were first given a variety of options and allowed to choose our own musical tastes and identity.

Adam Ant wasn’t a hand me down. He was a discovery.

And this makes sense, because I have a similar affinity for U2 to this day, even though they sound nothing like they did when I first discovered them. There are other bands I’ve connected with in this way over the years. Bands which I discovered early on, before they became household names, and bands which should be household names, but didn’t make it for some reason. Bands whom I will buy anything they release, or see whenever they’re in my vicinity. Bands I know will be with me for the rest of my life, and bands I hope are with me for the rest of my life.

Apple/Spotify vs. Neither: I Don't Stream

January 17, 2018

I’m a believer in evolution. Specifically, my evolution in how I relate to music. Growing up in the ‘70’s it started with records, which were great when you were at home. Then came the 8 track, which was portable and we could listen to them in our car. They sounded good, although you sometimes got 8 tracks with different track listings from the LP(if you’re lucky) or else, sometimes in the middle of a song it would end abruptly as it switched tracks only to then resume mid track. Ok. That was a major flaw, no argue about it.

I loved cassettes. I used cassettes up until probably 2010 or so. I still have a few random cassettes I refuse to part with, even though I have no way of playing them. Most of them are from local Seattle bands and are irreplaceable, now.

As much as I loved vinyl growing up it was not easy to care for in my household. So, records quickly became warped or scratched. That’s what happens when you have a brother who has no regard for personal property and doesn’t understand the value of things. A brother who doesn’t see the issue in reading someone else’s $8 comic book in a steaming hot bath tub.

But I digress. The point is, this primed me for CD’s. I was the target market. No more scratches and they’d last forever (if properly cared for). I can do that! Cd’s only got better when it became affordable to buy blank CD’s and you could make your own compilations of music. This was a game changer in ways I wasn’t even aware.

The by product of being able to make my own CD’s is that I stopped listening to the radio. I didn’t – and still don’t – see the point. This is when I adopted my new life motto: “Life is too short to listen to bad music”.

Making a mix CD or even a mix tape had given me control over the music I listened to in any given situation. I no longer had to constantly switch channels when a song came on I didn’t want to hear. I was now able to maximize my listening time, and only hear the music I was in the mood to hear. This is also why I love my TiVo.

I embraced the iPod. Literally. Taking it on runs, to the gym, to work and anywhere else I went. I filled it with different playlist for when I wanted to run a short distance quickly or a long distance slowly. And I tweaked and perfected the flow of the playlist, ad nauseam, until it was perfect.

Initially I loved the shuffle. There were so many songs I’d never expected would work together, but somehow did! Who knew that you could go from “Walk On By” by Isaac Hayes to “Fade to Black” by Metallica to “Sabotage” by the Beastie Boys. It was another game changer. At least for a while.

Even though I had put all the music on the iPod, sometimes a song would shuffle by that didn’t work, or just wasn’t what I wanted to hear, despite how much I liked the song. Shuffles can be great, but they’re unreliable.

These days, the main place I listen to music is in my car. Until recently that was on CD, and I traveled with over 100 CD’s, primarily of my own creation. When I got a new car, however, it didn’t come with a CD player and my entire world changed. It was time to adapt. Time to evolve.

The car came with a one-year free trial to Sirius XM. It was fun to explore and discover new channels. And while I was listening to a lot of First Wave for a while I ended up listening to more Howard Stern than anything and even that didn’t hold my attention that long. Satellite radio is still radio and I’m back switching channels and hearing songs I couldn’t care less about.

So, I bought a 64Gb Micro SD card and loaded it up with as much music and as many playlists as it’d take and stuck it in my phone. I’ve used Microsoft Groove and Google Play. I don’t care so long as I can import my old iTunes playlists into it. Now I have my music with me wherever I go.

I often consider streaming music. I do. And I suppose I technically do, as I play my playlist from my phone via Bluetooth to the car. But I’m not into any of the streaming services. I tried Pandora years ago, listening to an 80’s station in hopes of hearing a long-lost song that I didn’t know the name for, any of the actual lyrics, or even the band, just the sound. But even that felt like work. Sure, there were some songs I’d forgotten about and was happy to rediscover, but then there were songs which I still didn’t like 20 plus years later. It was a case of diminishing returns. And I still haven’t figured out that damn song!

I’m sure I could discover something new I’d like on Apple Music or Spotify, or Sirius XM, but finding new music has never been that great of an issue for me. I’m constantly hearing about new things from my friends. Sometimes it’s something they think I would really like, other times it’s just something they really like. I also discover a lot of music without even actively looking for it: on television, in films, at a restaurant or grocery store. Hell, I’ve discovered new music just walking down the street. I sometimes even discover music at work.

I discover so much music inactively that I don’t need to do it actively. And to me, that’s the main point behind streaming. You choose an artist you want to hear, and you get a bunch of artists some computer algorithm has decided are similar and that you may or may not know.

But I don’t need a service for that. Nor do I need to listen to music I’m not interested in. Like I said, life’s too short to listen to bad music.

The Time Of The Season

November 22, 2017

Growing up I loved the music of the seventies: The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Kinks, The Who, Pink Floyd, The James Gang, David Bowie, Queen, Badfinger, The Clash and The Jam were all favorites, along with a host of lesser known bands that all flitted in and out of my stereo. There was other music as well. U2, The Cars, Adam and The Ants were all integral to my youth. But the seventies were my era. I even love a lot of disco!

I suppose it’s because it was music my entire family could agree on, despite having disparate tastes. My father loved country music, my mother listened to a lot of female artists – which thankfully included a lot of Diana Ross and The Supremes. My sister preferred heavy metal and my brother closely followed the current trends in black music, from Michael Jackson to Grand Master Flash and The Sugarhill Gang. There was a lot of variety for me to choose from. And, of course, both MTV and my friends exposed me to lots of other styles of music. Most all of which I still love today.

Despite being a fan of all the aforementioned genres, the 70’s held fast as my favorite era. The 60’s were groovy, and the 80’s had their charm, but it was the 70’s I knew best and found a deep vein to mine, from Power Pop to hard rock, from punk to glam.

I like the fashion, the music, the culture of the 70’s. I can’t say that about any other era of music. I’ve always believed if I were ten years older I’d have been a mod during the 70’s, Vespa and all.

But a few weeks back I had to admit this wasn’t actually the case. This revelation came in a few stages. The first was the rebuilding of my vinyl record collection. There’s music representative of every era, from the 1950’s through the 2010’s. There’s heavy metal, Motown, punk, classic rock, indie-pop, new wave, country and Americana. But upon a deeper look, my collection isn’t primarily from the 70’s, but rather it’s overwhelmingly from another decade.

The ironic thing (or pathetic, depending on how you look at it) is my girlfriend constantly pointing out this fact. And for my part, I constantly disagree and argue the fact, convinced my era was the 70’s. But the facts didn’t support that argument. Not by a long shot.

Instead they testify to the fact that my favorite musical era is the 90’s. While those who know me may not find this news, I have to admit it was a shock to discover. After all, my hair is half the length it was back then. I have half the facial hair I had then, and I wouldn’t be caught dead out in public wearing a pair of shorts atop long underwear. Seriously, no chance. And I doubt I’d still have a girlfriend if I did. Emotionally and psychologically I couldn’t be further away from the 90’s. It’s fashion and culture have never held sway over me the way that of the seventies did. So how can this be?

Despite listening to a wide variety of music throughout my life, despite my connection to the seventies, the nineties is when my relationship to music changed and was cemented. Living in Seattle in the 90’s I had friends in bands, began photographing and directing videos for local artists and spent three nights a week minimum out at clubs seeing live music. I picked up the guitar again, after 8 years, after listening to Temple Of The Dog. The music of the era, whether from Seattle or not, was much more personal to me. I was connected to it, unlike I’d ever been before. I was in the middle of a movement as it was happening. It was the soundtrack of my life in a way the music of the 70’s couldn’t be. I might wish I had been a mod in the 70’s, but I never would be.

The nineties, however, I have a tangible connection to. I was a part of a community, watching friends and people I knew get signed, record albums, tour and sometimes even appear on Letterman. I didn’t read about it years later, or watched it from the sidelines on MTV. I was in the thick of it with all my friends, experiencing it in real time. I saw bands in small clubs, not vast arenas. Sometimes other local musicians were at the same shows, checking out the same band I was. Sometimes I saw a band before they had an audience or a record deal. And while I may no longer connect to the fashion or culture of the nineties, the musical connection will never go away. In fact, it’s likely to grow stronger with nostalgia the older I get.

Case in point: Despite being roughly the same age and living mere blocks from one another in high school, my girlfriend does not have the same connection to the 90’s as I do. She, on the other hand, loves 80’s music. Especially dance music. In her teens during the 80’s she was out most nights at dance clubs. So she formed her ultimate connection to her music in the 80’s. That is the place she always returns to.

Our favorite music is often tied to a certain time period of our life. When we experienced music first hand as it was created, as a community. When the music the bands were producing echoed the experiences we were going through simultaneously. The politics, the culture, the trends which we know all too well. They are an authentic voice to our thoughts. It wasn’t music of the time, it was music of our communal time. It’s music that we connect to not just emotionally, but spiritually. The music that is literally a soundtrack to you and your friends lives.

Buying an Electric Guitar

August 30, 2017

I got my first guitar some time in the early 80’s. I can no longer recall if it was ’80, ‘81 or even ’82. But I know I had it in ’82.  I take that back, by ’82 I had what I consider my first guitar. But truth is, there was a six-month period in there when I had a ¾ scale acoustic which I rapidly outgrew.

I hadn’t wanted an acoustic guitar. I had wanted an electric. At one point, I had wanted an all-black Fender Stratocaster like I’d seen The Edge play on U2 Live at Red Rocks. But I’d also wanted a Gibson Explorer like Dez Dickerson played in the videos for Little Red Corvette and 1999. Those would all post-date my acoustic. So, I’m not sure what I actually wanted instead of an acoustic. But I swore to my parents if I got an electric I’d practice every day, but, alas, it was not to be. An acoustic is what my parents got me, telling me I if did well at my lessons we could think about an electric down the line.

But I didn’t do well at my lessons. Not only was my guitar an acoustic, but it was a nylon string acoustic: a classical guitar. And the neck was beefy! My instructors wanted to teach me fingerpicking and to play while sitting with my left foot propped up on a little stool. It wasn’t rock and roll, even if they did concede to teach me “House of the Rising Sun”.

So, needless to say, the lessons didn’t take and the guitar sat in a closet for years.

It wouldn’t be until 1991 that I got my first electric guitar. A friend of a friend had enlisted and was heading to fight in the Gulf War and was selling his electric guitar and amp for cheap. I was at college in Seattle. If ever there was a time I needed an electric guitar it was then.

Since that time, I have purchased close to twenty electric guitars and borrowed another ten for extended periods. I’ve also read books on maintaining and modifying guitars, the history of certain brands and models and often go to music stores to test drive new and vintage guitars. I have replaced pickups, rewired jacks and done a lot of other crazy experiments with the guitars I’ve owned, from flipping around the control plate making the tone and volume knobs closer, to reversing a pickup so the pairing was no longer in phase. I’ve even had a guitar made for me since I wanted something that didn’t exist. Another reason why i modify all of my guitars is it makes them more identifiable and more recognizable. Should one of my guitars get stolen, it will be easier to describe them to the police and pawn shops and easier for them to spot. Some people believe that the more unique looking a guitar, the more likely it won't be stolen in the first place because it's too easily recognized.

Consequently, I’ve been asked a few times for advice when it comes to buying an electric guitar. For the sake of full disclosure, my opinions have evolved over the years, but I’ll get to that later…

Buying an electric guitar – especially your first electric guitar - can be a daunting task. There’s a lot that can come into play: the body style, is it a solid body or hollow body?  The wood, poplar, ash, alder, maple or something more exotic (and expensive). The pickups, single coil or humbuckers. And how many pickups? One, two or three? How many strings? Six, seven, eight, ten or twelve? And then there’s color and price. While there are infinite combinations, the truth is short of having something custom made, it’s highly unlikely there’s a guitar in existence that will be perfect for you right off the shelf. That’s not to say you can’t come close, or that you can’t opt for a guitar that’s versatile and will cover a lot of bases. But short of a vintage, road worn guitar, it’s unlikely you’ll find a guitar where all the working parts are exactly what you want them to be.

The reason being is that it’s impossible to purchase a guitar for yourself without some kind of pre-conceived notion of what you want. The guitrs I remember wanting first are guitars I saw somebody playing and I either liked the sound they were making, or I liked how they looked, or both. Either way, you’re interested in the guitar either because you’ve heard or seen someone play it already.

When I purchased my first “real” electric guitar, a Mexican Fender Telecaster (which I still have), I purchased it because Tom Petty, Keith Richards, Bruce Springsteen, Chrissie Hynde and a host of other guitarists I admired played one. And to me at the time, that was the sound of Rock and Roll. I remember getting it home and plugging it into my amp and feeling like I was finally hearing the sound I wanted.

Choosing a guitar by how it sounds is probably the most common way of selecting a guitar. Want to sound like Hendrix or Stevie Ray Vaughn? You want a Fender Stratocaster. Want to sound like Jimmy Page or Slash? You’ll need a Gibson Les Paul. Or perhaps you like the jangle of the 60’s and need a Rickenbacker. If you’re more alternative, a Jazzmaster or Jaguar might be the ticket. Plan on being a shredder? Try a Dean, an Ibanez or an ESP. Want the great rockabilly sound of the ‘50’s? Get yourself a Gretsch.

The other reason this is the most common practice for people purchasing a guitar is that ultimately what they’re after is a sound or tone. It’s what they’re going to respond to immediately. They plug it in, play a chord and perhaps like the clarity or sustain. or they like the crunch and the bite. The body style and materials might all play a factor, but you’re really listening to the pickups, the electronics and the amp.

The problem, however, is that when you test out an electric guitar you’re testing it through an amplifier at a store. In other words, an amp that likely isn’t the same model, make or brand of amp you own. So, in that regard, the way the sound you heard in the store may not be the sound you hear when you get it home. Unless you’re buying the amp you test drove it on. This is why neither my first electric guitar or amp lasted with me for more than a year. They were great at the time. They made a lot of noise, and there was a novelty to that at first. But as things progressed – as I progressed - their limitations became more and more obvious. The sound wasn’t actually what I wanted. So soon the amp was gone for something better (a Fender Champ I should have held onto) and then eventually the guitar followed suit.

I would eventually buy a second guitar. A budget friendly Gibson called a Sonnex. It was heavier and beefier and offered a much different sound to the twang, brightness and clarity of the telecaster. It was fun for a while, but there was something about it that didn’t quite work for me. Perhaps it was the weight. Perhaps it was the wrap around style bridge. Or the Humbucker style pick-ups. Bottom line, it wasn’t the guitar for me.

After almost a decade of playing electric guitars I purchased my first semi-hollow electric guitar. These guitar bodies have chambers, as opposed to being a solid chunk of wood. While the solid body offers more sustain (especially with certain types of wood), it also adds to the weight of the guitar. Full hollow bodies – which are essentially an acoustic guitar with a pickup, however, can be too resonate and prone to feedback. So, the semi-hollow body split the difference for me nicely. Although I didn’t know it at the time, my first semi-hollow body would become my favorite guitar. I would also discover a certain aspect of it which would guide the way I buy guitars today.

The guitar in question is a Gretsch Sparkle Jet which were made for a year or two in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. There’s a lot of confusion about these guitars to this day because some had headstocks that read “Synchromatic” while others read “Electromatic” while otherwise being indistinguishable. Synchromatics cost a couple hundred dollars more and typically had a Bigsby vibrato system on them, although there were some Electromatics, albeit rare, with a Bigsby. And not all Synchromatics had a Bigsby. To further confuse things, even though the Synchromatic was the more expensive line at the time, it eventually died out, while the Electromatic line remains to this day. So many assume the Synchromatic is the lesser of guitars as the line no longer exists.

In the following years, I would buy an array of guitars: a budget friendly Gretsch, A Japanese SG knock off, an Epiphone Casino, a Gretsch Electromatic, another Epiphone Casino, a Stratocaster, a professional's’ player Gretsch and an Orpheum Steel resonator.

But I’d also do many modifications to the guitars I owned. My Mexican Telecaster bears little resemblance to the guitar I bought in the ‘90’s. After realizing the guitar would stay in tune better if the strings went through the body instead of the back end of the bridge plate I drilled the necessary holes. I’d later replace the plastic nut with one made of bone, and attach a Hipshot b-Bender to it. The pickups, however, remain the same, as in the ‘90’s in Mexico they could use different ore to wind the pickups which result in them being much hotter than their American counterparts. For as cheap a guitar as she was when I bought her, and for all the cosmetic changes and damage I’ve done to her over the years, she still sounds and plays great.

My Sparkle Jet would also see a number of mods. The original pickups weren’t all that great, so I pulled them, replacing the bridge pickup with a Seymour Duncan Dynasonic and the neck pickup with a Lollar P-90. While the original pickups were humbuckers I tend to favor single coils and the mix of the two provides me a lot of tonal variety. I also replaced the tune-o-matic bridge with a Compton bridge which helped stabilized the tuning and added sustain.

Making these modifications wasn’t always cheap. Especially as I realized I was getting in over my head. I also realized that after certain modifications the guitar would need a professional set up and it’d just be cheaper to have someone do the mods and the set up.

As I said before, short of having a custom guitar built, it’s unlikely a guitar straight off the shelf is going to be the exact guitar you want. Some mods are simple like different gauge strings, while replacing the tone or volume knobs, pickguard, truss cover or tail piece are often cosmetic, just so your guitar doesn’t look exactly like all the others you saw at the store.

But others can range from tweaking the poles in your pickups, or adjusting their height, or changing the action. To replacing the pickups or bridge completely. Or in extreme cases even the neck of the guitar.

There are two lines of thought about guitar modifications. One camp believes that all original or stock guitars appreciate more than modified, non-original guitars, and this is definitely true of the guitars of the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. But in the 80’s many guitar manufacturers made cutbacks and the quality of their brands went down. This gave rise to after market parts, which many guitarists used to enhance their guitars. So, while it’s true certain guitars have and will appreciate better if they remain untouched and original, not all guitars will. And considering a guitar as an investment does little towards making it playable or a useful tool. Just playing live, under hot lights, while sweating in a smoky bar will cause some wear and tear on your guitar, and unfortunately, accidents are inevitable. My Mexican Telecaster has been dropped more times than I care to remember, but the dings, nicks and cracks give her a nice character I’ve come to appreciate in retrospect.

Keith Richards go-to guitar, a 1953 Fender Telecaster known as “Micawber” has been heavily modified over the years. John Lennon had the varnish on his Epiphone Casino sanded off with the intent of repainting it, but decided he unfinished guitar had a “more woodsy” tone which he preferred. And there’s a reason Eddie Van Halen’s guitar is known as “Frankenstrat”. Guitar modifications are so common that every guitar manufacturer offers “artist series” guitars so consumers can purchase a replica of their heroes’ guitar. From Brad Paisley to Slash, from David Gilmour to David Murray. All have signature models.

Because of all my experimentation and research, my brother asked me to help his in-laws buy an electric guitar for their daughter. I spent an hour at Guitar Center putting every imaginable guitar within their price range into her hand. She test drove them all on the same amp with the same “clean” setting so she could hear the differences that all the guitars had to offer, and then I left for a meeting. My brother later informed me that he’d convinced his in-laws to buy a Gibson Les Paul that was twice their original target price because it was the best sounding guitar and would appreciate in value. The fallacy of this is that it being the best sounding guitar is his opinion. The second fallacy is that he’s 6’2” and weighs nearly 200 pounds while she was half that weight and 5’5” and the average Les Paul weighs between 12 and 13 pounds.

While I’m sure she still owns that guitar, I doubt she plays it often. It never seemed like the right guitar for the music she was writing (I thought an Epiphone Casino or something similar made more sense) and there are plenty of male guitarists who find it uncomfortable to play a Les Paul for an entire concert. As good as the guitar may have sounded, it’s not the most playable guitar for her.

It was my Orpheum resonator, though, that brought this fact into relief for me. I love the sound of resonator guitars, and had been wanting one for ages. I even had a Fishman pickup installed in it so I could play through an amplifier and use it for recording. But as much as I loved the sound of the guitar, there was something about the neck that never sat right with me. There was something about it that made it uncomfortable. Necks come in a variety of profiles, U, C, D and V. I never checked, but I suspect it was a U. All my other guitars are either C’s or D’s. meaning they have a rounder and more shallow profile.

I had hoped that if I kept it at my office I would play it more and get more use out of it than just the occasional recording, but even when I had downtime at work I didn’t pick it up. It just lacked playability. And even when I forced myself to sit down and play it, it lacked a comfort which I couldn’t get over. So eventually I realized it needed to go. What was the point of owning a guitar I avoided playing?

So, I took it into my local guitar store for a trade in. And while there I stumbled upon a Gretsch Center Block guitar. Like the Sparkle Jet, the Epiphone Casino and a different Gretsch Electromatic I’d once owned, all the guitars were built in Korea and all of them had the exact same neck profile. Like those others before, the Center Block felt good in my hand. And this is when I realized what I’d already knew, but hadn’t made conscious. If the guitar isn’t comfortable to play, you’re not going to play it, despite how good it may sound.  And the guitar that’s the most comfortable to play is likely the one you’re going to not only practice on, but be inspired by when writing music. I’ll pick up a guitar and noodle around on it but after a while I’ll discover a riff or chord progression I like. From there I’ll plug into an amp to see what it really sounds like. Then maybe I’ll be inspired to add an effect pedal or two and before long I’ll have the germination of a song and how I think it should sound. But this doesn’t happen on an uncomfortable guitar. Uncomfortable guitars get put away long before you discover a cool riff.

So, despite conventional wisdom. I’ve come to realize that playability and comfort are what really matters. The weight of the guitar, it’s neck profile. Everything else can be changed. These days there’s most certainly better pickups available than the stock ones in a guitar off the shelf. And while such modifications aren’t cheap, the truth of the matter is the longer you play guitar, the more you’re going to discover what you do and don’t like. The more you’re going to hone in on what you want to sound like. Invariably you’re going to discover that the sound you thought you wanted isn’t exactly the sound you want, and some modification is necessary. I don’t know any guitarist who hasn’t done some sort of modification to their guitar. Getting a guitar that is comfortable and that you enjoy playing will ultimately serve you better in the long run than a guitar that sounds great, but isn’t as comfortable.

Creative Differences

July 12, 2017

It’s pretty cliché to say the opposite of creation is destruction. But when I think about the bands I love, and the songs I adore, I often think that juxtaposition is at the heart of it.

As an aspiring songwriter, the problem I find with my own material is it’s too me. There’s no yin or yang. There’s no push and pull. Everything is always exactly what I would do. It all falls (or fails) to my sensibilities.

There’s creation, but no destruction. There’s no counterpoint, no devils advocate. No opposing view point.

This is why many of music's most successful songwriters have been teams: Lennon/McCartney, Jagger/Richards, Leiber/Stoller, Holland/Dozier/Holland.

Now, I’m not saying that an individual can’t write a great song. After all, it’s been done too many times to count. Merely that collaboration often elevates a song from good to great. Take for instance “Getting Better” by The Beatles. Imagine what it would be like if it were just McCartney’s optimism of “It’s getting better all the time”. What makes the song – to me at least – is the juxtaposition of Lennon’s pessimism (or realism, depending on how you look at things) in the line “It can’t get no worse”.

There are many more examples of the Beatles collaborating like this, and it’s one of the reason’s they’re considered by many to be the world’s greatest pop band. Add into that the talents of George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Sir George Martin and Billy Preston and you have a recipe for greatness – and the reason why none of the four Beatles solo works live up to their group efforts.

The band Badfinger was signed to Apple Records, named by John Lennon, and their first hit was written by Paul McCartney for a film starring Ringo Starr. George Harrison also co-produced one of their albums. Like the “Fab Four” all four members wrote and sang. But some of their most memorable songs are the ones in which they collaborate, such as “Without You” which was a number one hit for both Harry Nilsson and Mariah Carey. “Meanwhile Back at The Ranch/Should I Smoke” and “In the Meantime/Some Other Time” are two of the more memorable songs off their album Wish You Were Here and were only fractures of songs when the band entered the studio, but with the help of their producer, Chris Thomas, parts were combined to great effect. When the songs switch gears and a new singer takes over mid-song, you can’t help but recognize the unexpected and the clash of different personalities.

Memphis’ Big Star toured with Badfinger, and are another example of a band with four distinct songwriters, and whose best work were written in collaboration. Their debut album, #1 Record was primarily attributed to Bell/Chilton, while their follow up introduces collaborations with bassist Andy Hummel, and drummer Jody Stephens.

In more modern times, Canada’s Sloan is another example of four disparate songwriting voices: guitarist Jay Ferguson tends to favor Beatle-esque pop, while drummer Andrew Scott takes a more artful approach, even incorporating sound effects from time to time. Guitarist Patrick Pentland favors a hard rock approach while bassist Chris Murphy is more straight forward rock. Their albums consequently are extremely varied, from shoe gaze to power pop to blues rock to avant garde. And it’s all to the listeners benefit. In fact, their least popular album, 2004’s Action Pact is a record where they brought in an outside producer and allowed him to choose what songs made the album. He opted for the more commercial work of Murphy and Pentland and forsook all of Scott's songs all together. And while there are some great songs on the record, it feels the most one note of their eleven album catalog. Similarly, their 2014 album, “Commonwealth” suffers from a similar problem. This time, however, each band member was given a full album side to do with as they want. Andrew Scott chose to make one 23 minute song of mini suites, while the others each composed four or five songs. Despite many good songs, listening to a collection of songs from Jay, then Chris, then Patrick then Andrew doesn’t hold one's interest as well as when their songs are interspersed amongst each other. Back to back they lack the push and pull and variation the other members offer. Forcing one to wonder how much more enjoyable this album would have been if sequenced differently.

Perhaps the most famous example of art out of adversary is Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. At the time, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks had broken up, as had Christine and John McVie, all of whom were in the band together. Simultaneously, Mick Fleetwood’s marriage was falling apart. But out of all the emotional turmoil came a platinum selling record, and one of the most beloved records of modern pop music.

Tanya Donelly of the Grammy nominated band, Belly took this approach a step further with the “Swan Song Series”. A collection of 31 songs which she co-wrote with over a dozen other musicians and authors. According to Donnelly, “the main idea was just to do a bunch of collaborations with people that I’ve admired and who I thought would be a good fit – or even not a good fit, because sometimes a better song comes out of a mismatch.”

The songs range wildly, and the writing process was “all over the map” as some songs were written remotely and other songs came from just a scrap of music or lyrics.

But song writing isn’t the only place in music that can have conflict. There are also bands where, while one member may be the primary or even sole song writer, there are other alpha personalities within the band which lead to conflict. The Who is a great example of this. While Pete Townshend may write the majority of the songs, all the members contributed their own parts and the friction amongst them – particularly Daltrey and Townshend resulted in some of the greatest music of the ‘70’s.

Oasis is a similar band where there constantly seemed to be friction between lead guitarist and song-writer Noel Gallagher and his brother, vocalist Liam Gallagher.

And while this conflict can lead to great music, it can also eventually take its toll on a band, leading to “creative differences” and a need to go separate ways. A double-edged sword for sure! But as they say, it’s better to burn out than fade away.

Unsung Singers From Seattle

June 20, 2017

What separates a good song from a great song, or makes a song stand the test of time, is that every element works in perfect harmony: the arrangement, the mix, the instrumentation and the lyrics have a cohesion that’s undeniable. But if one of those elements falls short, you often walk away wondering what could have been if only.

A while back I wrote an article about Bob Dylan and my inability to connect with his music due to his voice. This is the element that falls short for me in all his music. But hey, that’s me, and all music is subjective. Still, however, it only seemed fair to single out a singer or two whose voice does work for me.

As a native Seattleite, a music lover, and someone who spent three nights a week in the early 90’s seeing pretty much every local band there was, I take the Seattle music scene pretty seriously. With the exception of Nirvana I saw all the major bands of the era in theaters, if not clubs. I saw Alice In Chains, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Mad Season and Temple of The Dog. I was once tasked with babysitting Mud Honey at Bad Animals Recording Studio while they recorded a cover version of the Bill Nye the Science Guy theme song. Kim Thayil popped in to raid the beer fridge and see what was going on. We were told he did that most nights.

But I saw lots of other bands, including “Uncle Duke”, which would morph into Candle Box, and Green Apple Quick Step which played on Late Night with David Letterman. I saw hundreds of bands that at the time all seemed like they were poised for greatness, whether they were playing grunge, roots rock, or funk.

So it’s probably no great surprise that on any given day I vacillate between which is my favorite Seattle band and who has the best singer. While most people – Seattleite or not – would probably go with one of the big four bands, Alice In Chains, Pearl Jam, Nirvana or Soundgarden, my favorite bands to come out of Seattle (or Washington) at the time, are The Screaming Trees and Brad.

It’s likely most of you have heard of The Screaming Trees, as they were frequently on MTV at the time and had a song on the soundtrack for Cameron Crowe’s “Singles”. But Brad is likely a much more obscure band. Brad is a side project of Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard. It features Reagan Hagar of Malfunkshun on drums, Shawn Smith of Pigeonhed and Satchel on piano and vocals and Jeremy Toback on bass. Brad was not the band's original name. Originally they called themselves Shame. But it turned out someone else owned the name Shame and when they discovered someone from Pearl Jam was looking to buy the name he asked for an exorbitant sum to sell it to them. So instead, they took his name for the band.

I can’t lie, this is the kind of story that can endear me to a band. The Stones did something similar when their contract with Decca was expiring and they were forming Rolling Stones records. Wanting to cash in on their continued success, Decca informed them they owed them one more song, so Mick went into the Studio and recorded “Cocksucker Blues” a song which fulfilled their commitment, but which Decca could never release or profit from.

And while I love that story about Brad, it’s not actually why I love the band. Released in 1993, their debut record, Shame, is nothing like what was being put out at the time. The music was soulful and had a groove. Many of the songs are piano based, with the guitar taking a backseat. But what really makes this album work is Shawn Smiths voice. Smith is a huge Prince fan, often performing “Purple Rain” as an encore in his solo sets. It’s the soulfulness of his voice that sucks you in.

In 2014 “Shame” would place sixth on Alternative Nations list of the “Top 10 Underrated 90’s Alternative Rock Albums”. “Interiors” their 1997 follow up would have their biggest hit, “The Day Brings” that to this day I still hear in the most random places, like grocery stores and movie theaters.

The Screaming Trees fit more in line with their more famous grunge era brethren. But what sets them apart are the vocals of Mark Lanegan. Lanegan has a whiskey-soaked voice perfect for their brand of blues. His voice has the same lived-in quality of Jim Morrison’s, circa “LA Woman”. Lanegan often sounds like he just spent the night drowning his sorrows with whiskey and cigarettes.

Since the dissolution of The Screaming Trees, Lanegan has been busy with numerous side projects. He’s recorded new vocals for an unfinished Mad Season song, released several solo albums and recorded with Queens of The Stone Age. He and Josh Homme (who was the Screaming Tree’s touring guitarist) also wrote the theme song to Anthony Bourdain’s new show, “Parts Unknown”.

Both singers have great rock voices, but it’s the slower songs where their voices really shine. Both have voices that suck you in, albeit for very different reasons.  While Lanegan’s voice may be gruff where Smith’s is smooth, both sound weary but hopeful. Both voices are strong but there’s a vulnerability to them. Both are authentic and relatable. And both have range.

Lanegan’s solo records lean towards acoustic blues that highlights the weariness in his voice even more. He and Kurt Cobain were good friends and Lanegan’s 1990 cover of the LeadBelly song “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” was clearly a source of inspiration for Cobain’s version on Unplugged in New York.

Smith’s solo work tends to be more piano based and soulful. But whether solo or with a band, you believe every word they’re saying. No, scratch that. You feel every word they’re saying.

In certain ways I think Lanegan is the voice of my heart. There’s hardship, exasperation, heartbreak and pleading to it. It’s the voice of someone who’s lived their life and seen a lot. And while it hasn’t been easy, they continue to persevere. He’s a survivor, and this resonates with me, my past and things still unresolved or unsaid.

Smith’s voice, on the other hand, is like a balm to my soul. It soothes and heals me. Even when he’s singing about heartbreak there’s a catharsis to it. There’s somehow still a light at the end of the tunnel. You just have to make it that far.

Bob Dylan's Voice

May 2, 2017

In the early 1990’s I used to frequent a bar in Seattle called the Knarr Shipwreck Lounge. Most people wouldn’t have considered the Knarr to have been walking distance from my home, but I would frequently walk there and back. The Knarr was one of those bars where before I would even make it to a stool the bartender would be putting my beer down on the counter. I don’t know if they knew my name, but they sure knew what kind of beer I drank. The Knarr also had two pool tables, one of which was usually available, as well as an awesome jukebox, stocked with everything from classic rock to the most recent grunge releases. The Knarr was often filled with bikers, their motorcycles proudly displayed out front as they enjoyed a few beers and some tunes.

An open pool table and a great jukebox. What better way for friends to spend an evening?

One night in particular I was shooting pool with my friend Jay. We’d stuffed the jukebox with $5, so we had around 20 song selections. We lost track of the time joking about things, drinking beers and one upping one another on the pool table. Eventually our selections ended and one of the bikers took the opportunity to put on some music.

The first song up was “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” by Bob Dylan. I suppose I felt comfortable, but I turned to Jay and said, “How weak is this? Someone’s already covering Guns N Roses.” Knowing my sense of humor, Jay played along: “So weak!”

At this point, a biker who would have looked at home on the set of Sons of Anarchy had to intervene. “Guns N Roses didn’t write this song. Bob Dylan did.” “You’re crazy” I responded. “Everyone knows Slash and Axl wrote this song”.

“No” The biker persisted, “Bob Dylan wrote it in the early seventies”.

“Who?” I asked.

“Bob Dylan.”

“Not ringing any bells”

“Bob Dylan. Mr Tambourine Man?”

“That’s a Byrds song.”

“No Bob Dylan wrote that.”

“Uh huh.”

“And he wrote All Along The Watchtower ….”

“I think you’re thinking of Jimi Hendrix”

“No! That’s a Bob Dylan song!” He also wrote Like A Rolling Stone …”

“Pretty sure that’s the band.”

“…Blowing in The Wind”

“Peter, Paul and Mary”

This went on for a few minutes, with me countering every song he threw out and him eventually catching on when I tried to claim “A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall” was really written by Edie Brickell and possibly a New Bohemian or two. He chased me around the pool table until the bartender intervened. I guess some bikers just don’t have a sense of humor.

To the biker, Dylan was a musical genius. But the underlying truth to what I had said to him was that I preferred the cover versions of Dylan songs better than his originals. Any song of his that has been covered, I think is done better by the other artist.

I know many out there will think that’s blasphemy. Many of my friends especially. I know a lot of people who think of Dylan as a god and I suppose he is in the sense of being the creator. He’s a brilliant song writer. There’s no denying that fact. His lyrics are incredible. I mean, there’s a reason why so many of his songs have been covered and why he won the Nobel Prize for literature.

Dylan is music’s equivalent of Shakespeare. Not only because of his brilliance with words, but both seem to be a rite of passage. While young actors will cut their teeth on Shakespeare’s soliloquies, so will buskers and street musicians with Dylan’s songs. I mean, what’s more natural than playing a Dylan song on an acoustic guitar? The way Dylan himself did it all those years ago in Greenwich Village.

Those were halcyon days.

But listening to his work, specifically the years where he had taken on a band and gone electric, he seemed to be going through growing pains. It was one thing when it was just him and an acoustic guitar, but that was in an era when sometimes the music seemed to be secondary. Perhaps the most famous part of “Like A Rolling Stone” is the organ refrain in the chorus, and that was improvised by Al Kooper. In fact, that part is so famous that most people think of Kooper as an organist, but at that point in his career he was actually a guitar player.

I’m not the only one who feels at times that Dylan’s instrumentations and arrangements are an afterthought. And his vocals, for that matter. More than anything, that’s where Dylan loses me.

The songs are undeniably good, as are the musicians behind him. Where I stumble is with Dylan himself. Sometimes Dylan’s cleverness with lyrics seems to overshadow everything else in the song. And then you couple that brilliance with a singing voice only his mother could love.

And I know people will argue that he doesn’t have a classic pop star voice, and that’s his charm. But the same could be said of Lou Reed, Keith Richards and Tom Waits, and I like all of their voices. I like their gruffness, the gravel and the whiskey soaked larynxes’. There’s an authenticity in their voices. Their voices resonate with me. Dylan’s doesn’t.

No matter how much I listen to him, I just can’t latch on to his voice. It doesn’t suck me in, it doesn’t seem well traveled, weary or wizened. I will listen to his songs and I’ll like the composition. I’ll like the arrangement. I’ll like the production. I’ll maybe like a guitar or piano riff or a bass line. I’ll like his lyrics. But despite liking all those elements, I won’t like the song itself. It will fail me on the most basic and most primal level: the singing voice. Connecting with his words becomes that much harder when I can’t connect with the voice behind them.

Instead of coming off as someone offering sage advice or a different perspective, his words seem rote. It’s like he, himself, just memorized them before singing the song, and isn’t completely sure of their meaning or how he relates to their message.

But then, upon hearing the same song by Hendrix or Clapton or Johnny Cash or even Beck, it will invariably be like a lightbulb has gone off in my head and it will have achieved everything I thought it could. The sum of the parts will finally add up to the conclusion I expected.

Perhaps this is an issue of expectations. Because I can enjoy the extended musical passages of a Led Zeppelin or an Iron Maiden or a Metallica. I can get sucked into the guitar interplay, the virtuoso playing and the changing time signatures. I can enjoy them on a purely musical level, while feeling the vocals are melodramatic or in some cases, hokey.

But those aren’t things Dylan is about. You don’t listen to Dylan for his guitar playing. You listen to him for his lyrics. You listen to him because he is a poet. You listen to hear what he has to say. And to hear what he has to say, you have to listen to his voice.

Just as the eyes are said to be the gateway to the soul, the voice is often the gateway to a song. Certainly to understanding and connecting with it on an emotional level. When I think of the bands I love, and the songs I have a connection to, it always comes down to the voice of the singer. It’s the guide through the journey. A voice you have to trust and believe in, otherwise, why take that journey?

Modern Country Music

April 12, 2017

Today my girlfriend and I went to the dentist to get our teeth cleaned. We had back to back appointments, so it meant we were there for an hour and a half – the most excruciating hour and a half of our lives. No, we didn’t get dual root canals or have our wisdom teeth pulled. It was far worse. Instead of the typical classic rock played in the office, someone had opted to play modern country music.

Before you say anything, let me be clear, I like country music – or rather “traditional” country music. The Everly Brothers, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Hank Williams, Patsy Cline. I can’t get enough of it. I’ll even take some Dolly Parton, Eddie Rabbitt and Glenn Campbell from time to time. But modern country music bears little resemblance to its forefathers.

First off, all the music we heard seemed to be of the same vein. Every song mentioned drinking, if not specifically beer. Every song included a reference to how big a truck the narrator drove. And all the women wore short skirts and or cowboy boots. It was like painting by numbers. And as a result, none of it seemed genuine. It all seemed contrived. I myself wrote a country song which included all those elements. But that was back in the late 90’s. And the song was a farce making fun of those clichés. Almost twenty years later and the same contrivances are still widely being used. Where’s the growth and evolution? Any innovation to the genre seems to have come from Taylor Swift and are we really calling what she’s doing country music?

But what I don’t understand is how country music has risen in popularity over the last decade when the format is so staid and generic. If the hour and a half of modern country music I listened to is an accurate sampling, then it seems like there are no individual voices to it. In fact, at times the music sounded so similar I wondered if we were listening to an album and not the radio. All the songs regurgitated the same message, like a well-rehearsed story no one is interested in enough to scrutinize.

Once upon a time, country music was about heartbreak (Dolly Parton's “Jolene”, Hank Williams’ “Your Cheatin Heart” and “Why Don’t You Love Me?”) or pledges of fidelity (Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line”) and sometimes even lust (Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire”). While the narrator of those songs – particularly when male – may have been hurt, they still seemed to revere their significant others. In “Jolene” the narrator doesn’t want to lose her husband, even though he’s likely cheated on her. In “Why Don’t You Love Me” Williams questions the dissolution of his marriage. He still loves his wife and wonders what’s changed.

The music I was captive to today was the opposite. One song told the tale of a man whose girlfriend was the envy of every guy. Everywhere the couple went, men would stare at her and wish she were alone. But rather than being proud of the woman he was with, he resented her. He resented the attention she got and that other men didn’t think he deserved her. Somehow she was to blame.

Another song spoke of a woman who other men would take to fancy restaurants downtown. But our narrator was going to take her into the corn fields and then catch her catfish for dinner. And while there’s something to be said about being different when wooing someone, it didn’t come across as much as an effort to show the woman who he really was, but rather what the narrator felt she needed. She needed someone authentic like him. Not a poser or drone like her other boyfriends. Somehow, without their having ever gone out before, the narrator knows what’s best for her.

Other songs were similar: she should love me because of the size of my truck, or because I drink beer. For music that’s supposed to be down home, there was an innate pretension to it. Eating in a fancy restaurant is pretentious and inauthentic as is drinking anything other than beer, or driving anything other than a pickup truck. If you’re not living the prescribed cliché of the country lifestyle you don’t deserve a pretty woman on your arm. But the unwritten sentiment is, you’re not a true American.

And this is where country music fans have been sold a false bill of goods. When twenty songs in an hour and a half all mine the same vein, there’s no originality, no freedom of thought or expression and no individuality. It’s a Pavlovian brainwashing: a simplistic ideology repeated over and over until reinforced in the subconscious.

Country used to be the music of the heartbroken and forlorn. Now it’s the music of the jilted and petty. Where once it was so lonesome I could cry, now it vengefully asks how do you like me now? And the answer is, not much.

And this is when it occurred to me: This is how we ended up with Trump as president. This is how we got to where we are. Because women are to be desired, but men still know what’s best for them. And no woman should ever eclipse her man. That’s not her place. Just because women can think for themselves, doesn’t mean they should. This is the message of modern country music. As told in the most simplistic, generic and trite way for ninety minutes.

And this is what millions of Americans have come to believe through the singular narrative of modern country music.

Unfortunately, drinking wine isn’t pretentious. Nor is driving a Prius. The pretension is believing that your way is the only way of doing things, or at least the best way of doing things. Refusing to drink anything but beer doesn’t make someone more of a man. It proves they’re a coward unwilling to try something different, unwilling to step out of their comfort zone and learn about something they’re unfamiliar with. It shows a need to fit in and a willingness to do whatever everyone else is doing. They can’t think for themselves. This is the dumbing down of America. Drive a truck and drink beer like everyone else. Don’t try new things. This is the new American way.

Going to an Ivy League school doesn’t make you pretentious. Believing you’re better than everyone else because you went to an Ivy League school does. But believing you’re better than other people because you didn’t go to an Ivy League School is the same thing. It’s an elitism of its own.

While I find the values pushed by these songs un-American, what bothered me most, what irked me beyond rationality, was how bad the lyrics and music were. How derivative, unoriginal and uninspired it all was. And that musicians, producers and engineers went to the trouble and took the time to record what to me, is nothing more than propaganda. That was the truly painful memory I will have from my visit to the dentist.

Amnesiac

March 15, 2017

In 2001 I was living in Los Angeles when a film producer I occasionally worked for called asking for a favor. He was working on a commercial in San Francisco and needed some props driven up from Burbank the following day. He wanted to know if I could do it. He’d pay me mileage, my day rate, per diem and he’d arranged for me to stay the night with a mutual friend.

I had a pretty flexible work schedule that week so I agreed to do it.

The next morning I packed an overnight bag and headed to Aaron’s Records on Highland. The drive from LA to San Francisco was six hours depending on traffic, and I was on hold until the props finished being fabricated. I was going to need some new tunes for the ride and this was the perfect excuse to finally pick up Amnesiac by Radiohead.

I can’t recall what else I picked up. I was listening to a variety of music at the time. Some country rock by the Flying Burrito Brothers,  and some Everly Brothers. Possibly Brit Pop by Embrace and some indie-rock by Sloan too. The Kinks and The Stones also often played heavily into my road trips.

What I do know is I filled up my 5 disc carousel and got ready to make the drive.

As it turned out the props weren’t ready until almost 4pm. By the time I loaded them into my car and made sure they were secure, it was almost 5pm. I was about to head into some brutal traffic on my way out of LA.

For the first few hours the drive went without a hitch. It was slow going with all the traffic, but that was the worst of it. Soon however, the sun began to sink and the conditions started to get dicier.

Then it happened. With the sun completely gone I hit a fog bank. Visibility was down to 10 feet, and traffic was stop and go.

It was an intense drive. I’ve never been one to white knuckle drive, but I was this night. It was isolating to have such limited visibility. You might crest a hill and finally see hints of distant red tail lights littering the horizon. And this would be the only sense you had of the course of the road up ahead.  If cars were moving. If there was an accident. If there was life on Mars.

But the majority of the time, all you could see was the sudden hazy glow of headlights in the opposite direction, or the brake lights directly in front of you. But other times, you saw neither, but knew inevitably those brake lights would come on, and hopefully you were far enough away and had enough time to stop.

I was cocooned in a surreal limbo, inching along the freeway with limited visibility. This was how I first experienced Amnesiac.

I say ‘experienced’ because I can’t really claim to have listened to it – at least not actively. Before the sun sank below the horizon and the fog rolled in I was likely singing at the top of my lungs and dancing as much as possible while seated and buckled in. But that had all changed by the time Amnesiac came on. Music had been relegated to the background. I was no longer actively listening to it, there were too many other things demanding my attention.

For the next 44 minutes Amnesiac was the soundtrack to this surreal drive. I can’t say I managed to distinguish any of the songs at the time. But because of my surroundings and the type of music that inhabits Amnesiac I had an experience unlike any other while listening to music. I often couldn’t distinguish if a sound effect was a part of the music or something happening outside the car. Was that noise the squeaking of tires? A distant horn? A siren moving in the opposite direction? Or a multi-processed guitar effect? I still don’t really know.

Because I was so focused on the road I forfeited my ability to differentiate between the music and the outside traffic noise, or at some times, the lack thereof. This album lends itself better to such an experience more than a regular pop album with a basic sonic palette of drums, bass, guitar and vocals. Hearing the album for the first time, I didn’t have the knowledge that a sound effect was a part of the song and not a part of my environment. It was kinda like being in my own sensory deprivation tank.

But these weren’t really things I was in any way conscious of while listening to the music. But everything intensified. I sat further forward in my seat, leaning over the steering wheel steering into the oncoming void, unaware of what I was really seeing and hearing. I won’t lie, not knowing the source of all the weird noises made me a little paranoid.

It wasn’t until after the album finished that my shoulders relaxed, and my breathing became more regular and I leaned back into my seat and got comfortable again.

While this may not have been the best way, either physically or mentally to listen to an album, it was ultimately an incredible experience I will always remember, and hope to never repeat.

What Is Punk?

January 31, 2017

At some point in the early 2000’s my friend Jay informed me that I “wasn’t very punk”. I’m not sure exactly what precipitated this declaration. We hadn’t been discussing my punk credentials, as I’d never claimed to be a punk. At various times in my youth I might have said I was a “Waver” or a “Rocker”, but I’d long stopped using such labels by this point. Yet by modern definitions, I agreed with him. I wasn’t very punk.

The first time I heard a punk song I was at a dance in either sixth or seventh grade and someone had put on “Holiday In Cambodia” by The Dead Kennedy’s. I liked the song and danced to it with my friends, but I didn’t own it, nor did I listen to it on my own. After all, the song was at least two years old at that point, and New Wave was on the rise.  Or rather, a lot of what were once considered Punk Bands were now New Wave bands such as the Pretenders, The Talking Heads, The B52’s, Blondie, The Go-Gos, The Police, Patti Smith, The Only Ones and Television.

Many people reading this will probably be scratching their head at that list. The B52’s? The Talking Heads? Blondie? “Heart of Glass” Blondie? Punk? Wha?

Back in the mid-seventies all these bands were considered Punk acts, when Punk was an underground movement rather than a genre. The style of music didn’t matter so much as the attitude and intention. Punk was giving a voice to the disenfranchised and disillusioned. There’s a reason why the origins of punk lie in London, New York and Detroit, where 17 minute prog-rock synth solos or tales of Mordor were neither relevant nor relatable to everyday life.

In 1979 when Margaret Thatcher became the Prime Minister of England there was a lot of unrest amongst the youth of England. The nuclear arms race, the cold war and unemployment were persistent realities in everyday life. London was still war torn from World War Two and much of the youth were reduced to squatting in bombed out buildings in order to survive. With a questionable future ahead of them, much of the youth connected with the aggression and ethos of British punk music. It spoke directly to the young, their lifestyle and their concerns.

While most would consider The Jam musically to be a mod band, lyrically they mine the same territory as their punk peers at the time. To me, they are as punk as The Clash.

New York in the late 70’s and early 80’s wasn’t doing much better than London the only difference being the lack of bombed out buildings. Meanwhile, in Detroit, a failing automotive industry left many youths with little hope.

But once upon a time, Punk music was more than just three chords and an attitude. It was just alternative music before it went mainstream. “Punk” wasn’t as marketable a term as “New Wave”, so by the early 80’s punk bands with a more radio friendly sound decamped from the scene and became New Wave.  Remaining was the more aggressive bands that personified “Three chords and an attitude” and modern punk was born.

This is why I say I’m not very punk by modern definitions. My favorite punk bands are The Clash, The Jam and X. I know people who will argue that they aren’t even punk. None of the band fits the “Three Chords and an attitude” directive. While all three bands have attitude in spades, they are also  more musically adept than just three chords.

But to many, Punk is the Sex Pistols, The Dead Boys, The Ramones, Generation X, The Germs and Green Day. Bands which played aggressively and favored an economy to the music they played. This is why many early punk songs eschewed a solo: it was frivolous and unnecessary. If it didn’t make the point it wasn’t needed. The urgency of the message or the aggression behind the message was what was important and in those cases, less was more. The briefer and more direct the message, the better the chance it wouldn't be misinterpreted. The simpler the better.

But everything can’t always be said in two and a half minutes. Sometimes being direct is the least effective way of making your point. Sometimes to convince, to win over the hearts and minds to your side, finesse is necessary. Time is necessary. Detail is necessary.

To claim that “Three chords and an attitude” encapsulates all of Punk rock is akin to saying one particular song is indicative of the entire album. It gives no room for nuance, different tempos, different stories or different points of views. It’s homogenization. Distilling Punk down to a genre, as opposed to a movement. A movement that the Rolling Stones arguably first tapped into in 1968 with the release of “Street Fighting Man” and then again in 1978 for “When The Whip Comes Down", “Lies” and “Respectable”.

Lyrically, Ray Davies has always been a punk. His keen insights into the classism of British society has literally filled records. There’s a reason his songs were covered by both the Pretenders and The Jam. But in the late 70’s and early 80’s the Kinks truly embraced punk, blending the guitar fury of “You Really Got Me” with the societal hangover of Thatcherism.

Punk is born out of youthful angst and rebellion. It’s protest music at its core. It’s Woody Guthrie with a Les Paul Jr and a Marshall half stack. Distilling it down to Three Chords and an Attitude does it a disservice. It’s honest and truthful and not sugar coating the world the way pop music so often does. One has to wonder what new punk music we have to look forward to over the next four years.

Pearl Jam & The Rock And Roll Hall of Fame

January 18, 2017

Seattle in the 1980’s was a mere shadow of the Seattle we all know today. There was no Microsoft or Starbucks to speak of. No Amazon. The most Seattle had to offer besides Boeing was an NBA championship in 1979, a retailer named Nordstroms that was growing in popularity and a football team that was forever the bridesmaid, but never the bride.

It was a big deal when bands came to Seattle. We were so far north of Los Angeles, many bands didn’t think it worth the expense to make the journey. But those who came found sell out shows and rabid audiences. Iron Maiden’s first sold out show in the States was in Seattle at Hec Ed Pavillion, back when they were still fronted by Paul D’ianno.

I knew a little about Seattle’s music scene at the time. I knew about TKO and Rail, and the Battle of the Bands that went on in a roller rink across Lake Washington. But for the most part the local bands played heavy metal, and at the time I was more into New Wave like Adam and the Ants, U2 and the Cars.

In 1983 Rail would win MTV’s basement tapes and later a band called Shadow would appear on the show. I knew of Shadow because of my 7th grade Art teacher, Mrs. McCready. Her son, Mike was in the band. Also in Shadow were the Friel Brothers. Chris and Rick, who lived in our neighborhood at the time. While I’d never seen Shadow, or even heard their music, seeing them on Basement tapes made it seem like maybe Seattle had something to contribute to the music scene and possibly even the world.

But that hope proved to be short lived – not that I had any great steak in it. By the late 80’s Shadow had relocated to LA and then back to Seattle without ever landing a record contract.  But that was okay, because new bands were starting to make national waves. Bands like Queensryche, Soundgarden and Mother Love Bone.

Mother Love Bone came on my horizon via some kids I went to grades school with. They were in a band called SGM and frequently played with Mother Love Bone. The guys in SGM were slightly older than me, but I remember hanging out on Capitol hill with my friend Mike Lawson and running into Paul Uhlir and the two talking about when their first practice would be. Eventually they’d put out a record. And while I was aware of it, I wouldn’t buy it for many years to come. At that point in my life, if it wasn’t Led Zeppelin it wasn’t worth listening to.

But that all changed on March 19th 1990 when Mother Love Bone’s singer Andrew Wood died, four months before the release of “Apple”, their major label debut. Even though I had neither heard nor seen Mother Love Bone, I, like most of Seattle was profoundly affected by his loss. And that loss became even more tragic once “Apple” was released and we all discovered how brilliant Andy had been.

“Apple” turned out to be my gateway drug. My old Schoolmates in SGM had become Sweet Water, and they had a cassette for sale at Tower Records. I picked it up and wore it out playing over and over to anyone who would listen. Then came Temple of the Dog, the tribute record to Andy. The album changed my life. Listening to it I found myself saying “If I were in a band, this is the kind of music I’d want to be playing.” A few months later I bought my first electric guitar and started getting serious about playing after six years of not touching my nylon string acoustic. Music had always been a huge part of my life up until this point, but now it was everything to me.

In the Spring of 1991 I turned 21 and could finally start seeing so many of the bands I’d been listening to: Soundgarden, The Screaming Trees, Mud Honey and Alice In Chains. I would go out three nights a week with my friends to see bands we’d heard or read about. Sometimes there were only 15 people in the room besides the band.  But that would all change by the fall.

Amongst my friends and I, “Ten” was highly anticipated over that summer. Perhaps it was my familiarity with Mike, or maybe it was that two fifths of the band came from Mother Love Bone. Perhaps it was because in the early days they would share the bill with Sweet Water. Perhaps with MTV playing Soundgarden and Alice In Chains it all just seemed like a matter of time. In August Pearl Jam would release Ten and in September Nirvana would release Nevermind. Over night the clubs began selling out regardless what kind of music the band played. The grunge explosion had arrived in Seattle, although not the rest of the world.

The Seattle music scene continued to thrive over the next three to four years with Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Soundgarden, The Screaming Trees, Alice in Chains, Candlebox and Queensryche all on the international stage. During that time I put on a few shows, directed a few music videos and worked a number of concert shoots as a Production Assistant, Heart and Mad Season amongst others.

Shortly after the Mad Season concert Mike McCready and Baker Saunders started hanging around with my group of friends. I was in pre-production on my first short film and one night asked Mike if he’d had any interest in composing music for it. A few years later Baker would do the soundtrack for my second short film.

Mike’s soundtrack would end up being the best thing about my debut film, which even now I have trouble watching all the way through. But the collaboration was incredible. Mike composed some specific songs for key scenes in the film and then on Neil Young’s advice we recorded two passes of Mike playing guitar to the entire film. Mike’s playing was phenomenal and some of the musical sketches probably should have been developed more. I think there would have been some fantastic songs in their own right.

As Christmas neared that year I was trying to think of a present for Mike to say thanks. I wandered into a local guitar store named The Trading Musician because I’d become quite the gear nut by this point. The place was empty. And then I heard voices coming from a back room and out came two employees and Eddie Vedder. Pearl Jam was about to begin recording what would become “No Code” and Eddie was looking for an amp or two to bring to the studio. I knew Eddie could be weary of fans, but as we were the only two customers in the store I approached and asked if he’d mind if I asked him a question. He was hesitant at first, I don’t know if he thought I was going to ask about why they didn’t make videos or about their fight against Ticketmaster. But once I told him I was looking for advice on a gift for Mike he relaxed. We chatted for a couple minutes and he gave me a lot of great ideas. Eventually he told me that he had bought a bunch of things for Mike and if I couldn’t come up with anything I was welcome to come by his place and raid his surplus. It was an incredibly generous offer, but I’d already felt like I’d intruded on his time enough.

As a result of my friendship with Mike I would eventually direct a music video for another one of his side projects, the band $10,000 Gold Chain. I’d also end up receiving a backstage pass when Pearl Jam played Seattle in support of No Code. I have consequently seen them on almost every tour with the exception of the Backspacer tour.  Thanks to Mike’s generosity I even saw Pearl Jam play four shows in five nights. What was eye opening about this, was that every night was a different set list which the band decided on just prior to the show. And every encore was constructed after the main set. All the songs were decided by how the band was feeling that night and the vibe they were getting from the audience, and the encore would only begin once a set list was decided upon and it could be distributed to all of their tech’s.

After one show I remember remarking to Mike that this was the first time I’d seen them open a show with the song “Release”, a song they’d often used to end shows when they were first starting. Mike remarked that while they didn’t do it often, shows that started with “Release” always seemed more special, almost cathartic for both the band and audience. While other bands will play the same set list for every show on the tour, Pearl Jam crafts a new set list every night of every tour in order to perform their best for the audience and why they have cultivated a Grateful Dead-like fan base.

Unlike many of their contemporaries, Pearl Jam never broke up, they remained one of the only real fixture of the Seattle music scene. Because of this, it is a point of pride for Seattle-ites to have Pearl Jam inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, for they are the quintessential Seattle band. While Nirvana was a Washington band, it wasn’t a Seattle band. That’s not to say Seattle-ites didn’t like Nirvana, we did, and their importance can’t be overstated. But Pearl Jam’s roots are in Seattle, and they remain there to this day. While other Seattle musicians such as Jimi Hendrix, Quincy Jones, Ray Charles, Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart, and Duff McKagan of Guns N’ Roses have topped the international charts, all of them had to leave Seattle to find success. But by staying, Pearl Jam has seeped into Seattle’s collective conscience and even its DNA. All of the members have charities they are heavily involved in and are often playing benefits in support of their causes, from Rock the Vote to Free the West Memphis Three to Habit for Humanity. Their side bands can be seen in the small clubs and record stores of Seattle, or playing the national anthem at sporting events. Seattle is as much a part of them, as they are of Seattle.

Worst...Job...Ever

October 18, 2017 

One of my least favorite jobs is ironically the one I look back on the most fondly. While the job was tedious and left me with back problems for years afterwards, it was a period where my tastes in music evolved the most. And I owe that to my manager at the time, Dave Gunderson.

Dave was five or six years older than me, and was a huge music fan. He had been playing bass in local bands in Seattle for a number of years and had a fairly eclectic taste in music. We both shared a love for a lot of classic rock: Zeppelin and the Stones were in constant rotation on our portable cassette radio. Because of my love for the Stones he introduced me to Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers.

I knew a little about Gram from his stint in the Byrds. But I’d never listened to his post Byrd’s band (Gram Parsons and the Fallen Angels) or his solo material. Gram is my favorite country artist. I eventually introduced my father to Gram’s music. His love of Willie Nelson, Hank Williams and Johnny Cash was the basis for my own appreciation of country music.

For my part, I turned Dave onto Badfinger. He knew of the band of course, but hadn’t listened all that much to them. Whereas I had pretty much everything that was available at the time by them. The two of us went through a pretty heavy Badfinger phase. Dave told me that if I liked Badfinger I should check out Big Star. I’d never heard of Big Star. So, Dave brought in a tape one day and after that I was hooked. After leaving that job Dave and I remain friends and he has turned me onto a lot of great music over the years. It seems like every time I see him he’s got something new to listen to.

A number of years ago he gave me “Special View”, a best of CD by a band called The Only Ones. I knew nothing about them, but Dave thought it was something I’d dig. So, I took the CD home, copied it into iTunes and from there to whatever mp3 player I had at the time.

The first time I actually listened to the CD, however, was in my car driving around L.A. And I didn’t get it. There was one cool poppy-punkish tune on it. But past that it didn’t really resonate with me. And the CD went into storage, more or less.

Some years later I was going for a run, and as was my habit at the time I put my player on shuffle.  Somewhere along the way a song called “Another Girl, Another Planet” came on. And I couldn’t figure out who it was. Running along thinking “Who the hell is this?” I didn’t recognize the song at all. But I loved it.

When I got back from my run I scrolled back through the playlist to see who the song was by. It was The Only Ones. How had I missed this gem of a song? I immediately went back through my library and listened to the whole album. Dave had been right, I loved it!

I happened to talk to Dave a few weeks later and mentioned how much I was enjoying the album. He recommended I buy their second album, “Even Serpents Shine” which he felt was their masterpiece. A lot of the songs from “Special View” were on it, but a lot of great songs weren’t.

I tracked down the CD and loved the album, which prompted me to buy their self-titled debut album. Again, incredible. Eventually I tracked down a double CD called “Darkness and Light” which contained their complete BBC recordings. This album was a revelation. There were songs I’d never heard, as well as early versions of songs I knew and loved. Within a matter of months, The Only Ones were my favorite band and I was playing their music to a number of close friends who I thought would like them.

When I started buying vinyl again I went to great lengths to track down their records for my collection. But what’s always struck me as odd – and this isn’t a new phenomenon for me in any way – is how I missed this the first time around. While it’s not uncommon to hear a catchy song you initially disliked, but later discover has grown on you after repeated listens – or for that matter, the inverse, a song you loved initially you grew to dislike after hearing it so many times – but this was different. It’s much rarer to discover a song or band that initially made no impression at first, but then you came to love.

I wish I could recall what was happening in my life during that first listen. I tend to put new CD’s on during road trips or otherwise long drives so I can listen to them without distraction. And if that were the case, I wonder why I didn’t connect with it? Were there other things going on in my life at the time that caused me to be distracted and inattentive? Was I somehow not emotionally ready for the album, or had my musical tasted not matured or evolved to where this made sense? Or was it a matter of expectations? Because I was told I’d like them, was I expecting to be blown away from the first note? Were my expectations too high to be fulfilled from the start? And then, once that expectation had dimmed over the years I was able to hear it with new ears and no pre-conceived notions?

Admittedly, The Only Ones are an acquired taste. After playing them to my friend Jay he told me he didn’t like it because the singer was “Too English” as he sings with an unmistakable accent. But I’ve listened to plenty of other bands with English accents and that’s never affected me. They’re an obvious influence on the Libertines and Baby Shambles, both of whom I’d gotten into in that intervening time. Had I needed to hear them to prepare me?

It’s a mystery to me why some music affects you instantaneously while other music you need to learn or grow to appreciate. That sometimes, no matter how great a song or band is, we just aren’t receptive to them at that point for some reason. Is it the difference between having a visceral versus an emotional or intellectual connection? I don’t know. But I suppose if we didn’t have discriminating tastes, we also wouldn’t have an appreciation for music. Worse yet, if we all only liked the same music we wouldn’t get the pleasure of discovering new music to share with each other. 

Musical Evolution

March 15, 2018

I’m a believer in evolution. Specifically, my personal evolution in how I relate to music. Growing up in the ‘70’s it started with records, which were great when you were at home. Then came the 8 track, which was portable and we could listen to them in our car. They sounded good, although you sometimes got 8 tracks with different track listings from the LP to make the songs fit the tracks (if you’re lucky), or else, sometimes in the middle of a song it would end abruptly as it switched tracks only to then resume mid track. Ok... that was a major flaw, no arguing about it.

I loved cassettes. I used cassettes up until probably 2010 or so. I still have a few random cassettes I refuse to part with, even though I have no way of playing them. Most of them are from local Seattle bands and are irreplaceable now.

As much as I loved vinyl growing up it was not easy to care for in my household. So records quickly became warped or scratched. That’s what happens when you have a brother who has no regard for personal property and doesn’t understand the value of things. A brother who doesn’t see the issue in reading someone else’s $8 comic book in a steaming hot bath tub. Anybody know someone like that?

But I digress. The point is, this primed me for CD’s. I was the target market. No more scratches and they’d last forever (if properly cared for). I can do that! CD’s only got better when it became affordable to buy blank CD’s and you could make your own compilations of music. This was a game changer in ways I wasn’t even aware.

The byproduct of being able to make my own CD’s is that I stopped listening to the radio. I didn’t – and still don’t – see the point. This is when I adopted my new life motto: “Life is too short to listen to bad music”.

Making a mix CD or even a mixtape had given me control over the music I listened to in any given situation. I no longer had to constantly switch channels when a song came on I didn’t want to hear. I was now able to maximize my listening time, and only hear the music I was in the mood to hear. This is also why I love my TiVo.

I embraced the iPod. Literally. Taking it on runs, to the gym, to work and anywhere else I went. I filled it with different playlists for when I wanted to run a short distance quickly or a long distance slowly. And I tweaked and perfected the flow of the playlist, ad nauseum, until it was perfect.

Initially I loved the shuffle. There were so many songs I’d never expected would work together, but somehow did! Who knew that you could go from “Walk On By” by Isaac Hayes to “Fade to Black” by Metallica to “Sabotage” by the Beastie Boys. It was another game changer. At least for a while.

Even though I had put all the music on the iPod, sometimes a song would shuffle by that didn’t work, or just wasn’t what I wanted to hear, despite how much I liked the song. Shuffles can be great, but they can be unreliable.

These days, the main place I listen to music is in my car. Until recently that was on CD, and I traveled with over 100 CD’s, primarily of my own creation. When I got a new car, however, it didn’t come with a CD player and my entire world changed. It was time to adapt. Time to evolve.

The car came with a one-year free trial to Sirius XM. It was fun to explore and discover new channels. And while I was listening to a lot of First Wave for a while I ended up listening to more Howard Stern than anything and even that didn’t hold my attention that long. Satellite radio is still radio and I’m back switching channels and hearing songs I couldn’t care less about.

So, I bought a 64Gb Micro SD card and loaded it up with as much music and as many playlists as it’d take and stuck it in my phone. I’ve used Microsoft Groove and Google Play. I don’t care so long as I can import my old iTunes playlists into it. Now I have my music with me wherever I go.

I often consider streaming music. I do. And I suppose I technically do, as I play my playlist from my phone via Bluetooth to the car. But I’m not into any of the streaming services. I tried Pandora years ago, listening to an 80’s station in hopes of hearing a long-lost song that I didn’t know the name of, any of the actual lyrics, or even the band, just the sound. But even that felt like work. Sure, there were some songs I’d forgotten about and was happy to rediscover, but then there were songs which I still didn’t like 20 plus years later. It was a case of diminishing returns. And I still haven’t figured out that damn song!

I’m sure I could discover something new I’d like on Apple Music or Spotify, or Sirius XM, but finding new music has never been that great of an issue for me. I’m constantly hearing about new things from my friends. Sometimes it’s something they think I would really like, other times it’s just something they really like. I also discover a lot of music without even actively looking for it: on television, in films, at a restaurant or grocery store. Hell, I’ve discovered new music just walking down the street. I sometimes even discover music at work.

I discover so much music inactively that I don’t need to do it actively. And to me, that’s the main point behind streaming. You choose an artist you want to hear, and you get a bunch of artists some computer algorithm has decided are similar and that you may or may not know.

But I don’t need a service for that. Nor do I need to listen to music I’m not interested in. Like I said, life’s too short to listen to bad music

Devaluing Music

May 9, 2018

I love discovering new music. Once upon a time, my main source for this was MTV - obviously this was many, many, many years ago. I’d often go to the record store with a song I’d seen in mind and check out the album that begat it. More often than not, if the CD was for sale for $9.99 I’d buy it if I liked the single enough. For some reason, that was my sweet spot when it came to new bands, if a CD was $11.99, I’d likely pass until I heard more music off the album. $9.99 had a decent ROI. $11.99 risked diminishing returns.

I discovered a lot of great music this way, including the band, SuperDrag which became one of my favorite bands of the ‘90’s, and Nudeswirl. So the marketing worked. Replacing my vinyl collection was acceptable at anywhere between $12.99 and $15.99 for a CD. But $17.99 for a CD was a rip off, which is Ironic since I’ll now spend literally twice that on rebuilding my vinyl collection provided its 180 gram.

But I digress.

Now, of course, no one buys CD’s. Heck, most people don’t buy music at all. They merely stream it, which, I guess is the equivalent of renting – provided, of course you pay for a service, but I doubt most people even do that. Use the free tier, hear a few commercials. It’s just like listening to the radio. 

Perhaps it’s all radio’s fault. We’ve gotten used to having music provided to us for free. Now we feel we’re entitled to all music that way, not just the singles that are released and are supposed to spur on sales of the album, but the album itself.

And yet, in 2014 when U2 released “Songs of Innocence” for free to reportedly 500 million iTunes users, only 81 million people could be bothered to listen to it in it’s first month. Instead people were more concerned by the fact that the album automatically appeared in their iTunes library and there didn’t seem to be a way to delete it. I don’t know how many complaints I heard about this. People seemed to hate the album on principle. Most wanted it gone, without ever hearing a note of it.

Personally, I thought it was one of their better albums in recent years. In fact, I even bought a vinyl copy of the album when it was on sale, and it got me interested in their music again. Now I’m listening to their follow up “Songs on Experience”. But had I not gotten it for free, I likely wouldn’t have bothered to listen to it. Oh, hell, if I’m really being honest, I probably wouldn’t have even been aware of it had it not arrived in my library enshrouded in controversy.

Similarly, in 2007 my interests in Radiohead had begun to wane. I had purchased “The Bends”, “Ok Computer” (multiple times and in multiple formats, to date), “Kid A” and “Amnesiac”, and “Best of”. While I love their music it’s not as accessible as I once found it. Though it eventually pays off, for me, it does take repeated listens, and sometimes I want music that I intrinsically react to, that I get a visceral reaction to, as opposed to music that grows on me, or that reveals its richness with repeated listens.

Consequently, I couldn’t muster the same excitement for “Hail to The Thief”. Perhaps part of that has to do with how I first experienced “Amnesiac”, but that’s another story.

When Radiohead released “In Rainbows” and allowed consumers to set the price they’d pay for the album, it seemed like a worthwhile spur of an investment for $5. Over the years the album has not only grown on me, but rejuvenated my interest in the band. It got me going back through their older records and checking out the albums I’d previously skipped over.

However, I recently watched a television show on Radiohead, in which a music journalist stated that by choosing to allow consumers to set a price on “In Rainbows” they had devalued the music on the album.

How does that make sense? I mean, I get how it makes sense, because as with “Songs of Innocence” it seems like many people assumed since the album was free it had to be bad. Why would a band as big as U2 give away a good album they could make millions from? It had to be some last ditch effort to rejuvenate their fledgling career. Right?

Why do we, as consumers, assume free music by a major artist equates to bad music? Isn’t it hypocritical? People won’t pay for the music they like, preferring to listen to it for free on YouTube or Spotify, but jump to the conclusion an album they can have for free isn’t worth having at all. If this isn’t a case of having it both ways, I don’t know what is.

Most people will blame the state of music on the record labels, and I agree, they’re partially responsible. A part of the reason I felt paying $17.99 for a new CD was a rip off was because at the same time the price of blank CD’s dropped to around $0.10 apiece while prices for CD’s with music rose from $15.99 to $17.99. Sorry, but that’s just greed. And it’s a good reason the music industry is in the shape it is currently.

But as consumers aren’t we also to blame? Everyone I know speaks about how music enriches their lives, got them through hard times, makes them nostalgic or comforts them. For as much as music enriches our lives, it’s odd how low a premium we put on it.

If you ask me, Radiohead didn’t devalue their music, we consumers, did.

Peloton and its Bike, bring songwriter's rights to exercise

March 20, 2019

Last year around Thanksgiving my girlfriend and I purchased a Peloton exercise bike. Spinning was never really my thing, but the idea of having 24/7 access to a piece of exercise equipment seemed to make sense to us as we get older. The bike has made a huge change in my life. I ride it most days and have taken advantage of their strength and yoga workouts. I exercise more frequently, am getting in better shape, all while listening to a lot of great music.

Music is integral to the Peloton experience. As soon as you start a class (spin, yoga, run, strength, stretch) music is playing while an instructor introduces and explains a few things. When the class starts so does a curated playlist. Sometimes the music sets the mood, slow and steady for an endurance ride, or fast and dynamic for intervals. Then there are themed rides based around genres, artists or albums. I have discovered some great new music in the process, which also has fueled my addiction. Equally addictive is the fact that you can do a live class or an on-demand class, meaning that every class is recorded and can be taken at your convenience. Don’t want to get up at 6:30am for a Brit Pop ride? No problem it’ll be on Demand within 24 hours. On demand classes also post the playlist, so you can see what music is on the ride. On live rides you can’t preview the playlist, and just have to go by what you know about the instructor and their taste in music. This allows you to pick your class based on the music/ What do I want to hear? What will make this more enjoyable? Will I work out harder to Enya or The Clash?

But then on March 19th a lawsuit was announced against Peloton and the use of music. Facebook forums have been a buzz with speculation of the lawsuit, with people claiming Drake and Lady Gaga are suing Peloton over the use of their music, while others jump to conclusion that the greedy music industry is trying to gouge Peloton’s $4 Billion IPO.

First things first, from what I have seen of the legal brief, the suit alleges that while Peloton has entered into license agreements for much of their music, they have also been using unlicensed music. The suit is brought on behalf of the artists who have had their music used without a licensing agreement. So, that’s not about a greedy music industry seeing dollars and wanting a piece of the action. It’s more akin to backpay: compensating those whose music has already been used.

Most people, however, seem to have only read the headlines and never got further than “Drake and Lady Gaga”, who are a part of the suit. However, I want to address what I’ve seen in the forums about people being apathetic to millionaire musicians making more money, because that’s neither the point, nor what’s really at stake.

In the pre-digital age, the music industry thrived off the sales of records, whether it was a 45, an EP or an LP, and artists got a percentage of the sales. However, artists only got a percentage after they paid back all the money the record label shelled out for the recording and the promoting of the album and sometimes even the tour and the merchandising. If an album was only a modest success it could take 2 years before the musicians made any money. When sales were bad musicians ended up owing the label, and never profiting from their music, and sometimes not even owning their own recordings, and unable to reissue their music because the label still owns it.

The bright side to all this back then, was that labels had tent pole artists. For example, the Beatles are Apple Records tent pole artist. They were successful enough that they paid the Apple Corp staff and covered the overhead. They could also sign new artists and provide them with an opportunity to be heard. They could also sign acts they thought should be heard and would be appreciated by a small group but would never be stars.

Major labels often had more than one tent pole artist, and this allowed greater opportunity for new bands. Sometimes bands were allowed to make three modest selling records in search of their sound. Almost every artist out there benefited from being under the tent pole of a larger artist. Jimi Hendrix was able to make weird and experimental records because he was on Frank Sinatra’s label. The Eagles were able to go from “Witchy Woman” to “Hotel California” because they were on The Doors label.

As the digital landscape has evolved all of this has changed in scope, but not practice, meaning a new artist might be allowed to make a single album under the tent pole of a more successful artist, but they are no longer nurtured by the label or given the time to grow. At least not like bands were in the ‘70’s.

Still, the music industry remains an ecosystem, with the larger artists opening doors for newer, smaller artists. Without those millionaire musicians you don’t have the independent or new artists. But also, a more modest band would neither have the clout nor the money to make a case like this headline news. In fact, I only today discovered David Lowry of Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven had sued Spotify, despite reading his blog at least 3 years ago about his situation. He’s just not as news worthy as Gaga, and if you want to enact real change you need the public to be aware of the situation and on your side. Drake and Gaga aren’t in the headlines because they want or need the money. It’s because there is no headline without them, no news, no interest.

But more to the point is that it’s we, as consumers, who suffer in this situation. Living in Seattle in the early 1990’s I have a lot of friends who are musicians. Some found success, some still struggle to get their music out there, some have transitioned into other aspects of the music business while others gave up completely. I saw the hard work and long hours they put in on their craft. I watched them listen to label executives and A&R people who didn’t get them but needed a Seattle band on their label to cash in on the grunge phase. I experienced their pride and joy when they were signed, I saw their heartbreak when they were dropped. I watched them try to make sense of it all and what it meant for their future.

Many of my friends would have given me a copy of their album had I asked for it, but I never did. I almost always bought the album for myself. I could support them for $10, after all they’d been through. Today I don’t own a CD player, but I still have CD’s where I’m thanked in the liner notes, or a photo I took was used as art work, or someone took the time to sign it for me.

I still have numerous friends who are making great music, not as frequently as I’d prefer, because they now have day jobs and have to pay for studio time themselves. Their music comes out in drips and drops, spirts and stops. Some have started their own labels or are distributing their music on-line themselves. But there’s no guarantee they’ll get carried by services such as iTunes or Spotify, so only their most loyal fans will be aware they are still making music.

Meanwhile the major labels push generic music written by the same three writers and made by the same seven producers all autotuned within an inch of its life. The only nuance to it is J-Lo singing or Selena Gomez? Is it Justin Timberlake or Justin Bieber? It’s catchy, got great hooks, but is reminiscent of so much other music currently out there. It’s a formula that no one strays from, because it’s a formula that works. At least in the short term.

But it isn’t organic, and it’s not meant to last. It’s the flavor of the month. The reason certain songs are classic and have stood the test of time is because they weren’t formulaic. They changed tempo, were in weird time signatures, shifted keys and had both loud and soft parts to them. Bohemian Rhapsody has stood the test of time because of these things, as has Stairway to Heaven, Layla and Sympathy for The Devil to name only a few.

The craft of music has been replaced by a factory line and most consumers either don’t realize it, or don’t care. But unlike movies, which suffered similar growing pains, a three-minute song is a lot more disposable than a 90-minute film. The film industry had to right the ship if they wanted to keep theater seats filled. The music industry can just trot out another song after another song until we forget how bad the first one was. Like cotton candy, it might taste good at the time, but ultimately it fails to satiate or resonate. The bar gets lower and lower each year and we wonder why we cling to the music of the past with such nostalgia.

But if there’s one thing I know, it’s that things will continue to change. How we listen to music is an evolution, there are new outlets and it’s becoming increasingly easier to take our music with us wherever we go. Streaming makes this even easier, but it’s also where musicians receive the lowest return.

So, let’s talk about mechanics. If I write a song, I get publishing rights. If I co-write a song, I share those rights with the other co-writers. We each get a percentage of the royalties. If I record the song, I get performance rights. Those are also shared with anyone else who plays an instrument on the song, and possibly the producer. I can’t say exact numbers, but they’re not a lot, as they can be spread out over a number of people.

To further complicate things, the amount varies on its usage, if it’s in a movie, commercial or TV show, on the radio or in a public setting such as a bar or restaurant. The fees for movies are expensive as it has to include the fact the song will be seen in theaters, on pay television, through a movie subscription service, on regular television and the internet, numerous times. It’s much cheaper to licenses music for your boutique store or restaurant. But these are also one time only instances, and typically there’s a blanket cost that is built into the fees if you use a service like Muzak.

Because streaming is such a new evolution in the way we listen to music, Spotify has been able to dictate the terms as the premiere streaming service. For most artists they offer a pittance, where you might need to have one million plays before you make one cent. This last Christmas Mariah Carey song “All I Want For Christmas Is You” was streamed 10.8 million times, setting a record. For each play she was paid $0.006 which amounted to $66,000. Now, obviously that’s a huge amount of money, but it’s nothing compared to what she’d have made if those songs had been purchased at the going rate of between $0.99 and $1.29. Also, that $66,000 was split between various rightsholders, including co-writers, producers, label executives and publishers.

As an upper echelon artist, Mariah Carey gets a higher rate per song. For independent artists there are a few more zeroes between the decimal point and a digit of any substance. So, a one hit wonder is going to make a lot less money over a much longer time period. This is passive income to them, and nothing that can be counted on as it’s such an inconsequential sum.

In fact, musicians make so little money these days, and so few people buy music (as opposed to subscribing to a streaming service or using the free tier) that some bands no longer see the point in recording new music at all. Fleetwood Mac has decided it’s not worth the time and effort to record anymore. They have a large enough back catalog that they can make a decent living off touring. But do you actually get that? The Return On Investment for creativity has become so devalued that it’s no longer worth it.

Let that sink it.

And now ask yourself how long it will be until other bands decide the same thing. Back in the golden age of popular music artists routinely put out multiple albums a year. Today, there are bands who have been around longer than The Beatles with less than half the albums to show for it. The return is so low on writing music that it’s in decline. If you’re lucky an artist puts out an album every other year, but the mean is likely closer to an album every four years. And sometimes, they just weren’t worth the await. Too much time has passed and they’re not the same they once were.

Couple that with, as I said before, it’s harder to find new music by new artists and where does that leave us? Musicians aren’t incentivized to create, and even if they are, consumers can’t find it without doing a huge amount of work. And even then, is the investment in time worth the return?

I know many people believe they are supporting musicians by paying for a subscription to Spotify or Pandora or Shazam or iTunes. But you’re not supporting the musicians. You’re supporting the music industry and that’s different. It’s only bands like AC/DC, Taylor Swift and The Beatles who’ve had the leverage to demand higher licensing rights from Apple and Spotify for use of their catalogs. For everyone else, they have no choice, but to accept the scraps they’re offered, because something is better than nothing. But artists receive more money from a song that is purchased than for a song that is essentially rented. The $9.99 you pay for unlimited streaming from your service provider of choice is spread out over a lot of different artists and songs. Not to mention that a chunk of that $9.99 is being used to keep the lights on and the rent paid in Spotify’s Manhattan high rise offices. Each month they pay between 1.38 and 2.77 million dollars (sources vary) for space in the World Trade Center. Don’t kid yourself that that subscription supports the artists.

If you want to support musicians, however, and show them you appreciate the music they make and the time they put into their craft, consider buying directly from them. Go to their website and buy your song, album, CD, whatever from them or their label. If you buy a record from an artist or their label more of the profit goes to them. They purchase an album at cost, mark it up and that markup allows them to keep making music. It doesn’t go to pay for a view of New York’s skyline for some executive. It’s that simple.

Now, I don’t think Peloton was trying to get away with something. I don’t believe for a minute they were trying to get one over on anyone. But they have built their brand off the music on their playlist. I doubt anyone knew back in 2012 what their impact would be and neither they, nor the music industry could have predicted it. Peloton currently has 25 instructors across four different disciplines that each curate their own playlist for their class. The likelihood is that instructors found an obscure song that fit perfectly with what they wanted to achieve in class, but just wasn’t licensed by the company. I don’t believe it’s malicious on anybody’s part. In fact, I believe that the instructors were just trying to give their subscribers the best class they could and were completely unaware of what they’d inadvertently done.

Unfortunately, I think that this has become another example in a long line of musicians not getting their proper earnings, of not being treated fairly, of having to resort to litigation to get what’s rightfully owed them. Their history is fraught with being screwed over by managers and agents, being ripped off, or having their publishing rights swindled from them. The Rolling Stones don’t own most of their 1960’s catalog. The members of The Beatles only recently got the rights to their music back. Many jazz and blues artists never saw any money from their record sales. There are plenty of musicians littered throughout the recent past who died penniless despite having number one songs. It’s such a problem that there’s a company called Bug Music which got its start chasing down unpaid royalties for artist or their estates.

Is Peloton responsible for any of this? Of course not! I’m not here to point fingers or asses blame. But there is a bigger picture here than just Peloton, the music industry and slighted musicians. The true concern is what happens as more musicians realize there’s no value in creating new music? When commerce wins out over art and we listeners are only able to hear music by the same few artists, who have no reason to challenge themselves and grow? Who are content with sticking to the formula as long as the money rolls in?

Ultimately the issue is about artistry over commerce. But what’s at stake is our musical culture. The culture behind bands like Queen, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles and the Rolling Stones versus the culture behind Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, Dr. Luke and Icona Pop. Where music doesn’t need to be great it just needs to be good in the moment. Where songs aren’t meant to stand the test of time, but rather to fill time.

So, what’s the answer? Honestly, I don’t know. I’m not sure this can be fixed, or that people even want to fix it. And maybe that’s what’s the saddest of all of this whole mess..

The Creative Impulse: Does it exist in today's music business?

March 13, 2019

Once upon a time, musicians recorded albums. In fact, they often recorded a lot of them. Back in the 1960’s there are a lot of bands that put out two albums the same calendar year. The Beatles routinely put out two albums a year. They released two albums in 1963, 1964, 1965, 1967, and 1969. Every year from 1963 to 1970, they released a record.

The Rolling Stones also put out two albums in both 1965, and 1967. In fact, the Stones released 12 albums between 1964 and 1974, releasing at least 1 album a year with the exception of 1970 when they released no new music.

Similarly Led Zeppelin’s first two albums were released in 1969, their third in 1970 and their fourth in 1971.

Queen also put out an album a year between 1973 and 1978. They, too, released a pair of albums in 1974.

The Beach Boys, however, take the prize, releasing 18 albums in 10 years. They released at least an album a year, but some years actually released 3 albums, as they did in 1963, 1964 and 1965.

Of course theses aren’t the only bands to rapidly release albums. But back in the 1960’s and 1970’s that’s how things were done. The money came through album sales and in the interim you’d tour in the hopes that people would buy more albums.

Fast forward to the 2010’s and it’s completely the opposite. A band will tour for over a year, take some time off, record an album, for another year and then finally release it. Which essentially has the effect of artists putting out less music. Most newer bands are further into their career than the Beatles with far less albums to show for it.

But in addition to having a lower output of music, one has to wonder what the toll is on their creativity. Nowadays, you wait years for a new album to be released by a band you like to be disappointed. It took two years to make this? Why isn’t it better?

The Stones had a pretty great run between 1968 and 1973, releasing Let it Bleed, Beggars Banquet, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Mainstreet and Goats Head Soup. The Beatles had a run of Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sargent Peppers and The White Album, while Zeppelin had albums 1 through four.

These bands capitalized on their creativity, consistently delivering album after album of great music. They remained in songwriting mode, they remained in creative mode for as long as they could. It wouldn’t be until later that the albums would come with more and more infrequency, as new inspiration was required.

But modern bands have the luxury of making all their money by touring. Even older bands can tour off their back catalogs and not have to create new music. But how does this benefit anyone? Artists stagnate creatively earlier. Audiences get less new music, and since tours tend to be longer, It can still be years before we get to see we  our favorite artists in concert again.

In 1983 Def Leppard declared it’s better to burn out that to fade away, but these days it seems like it’s the exact opposite: sporadically produce a lot of middling music in the hope of some sort of career longevity, and when you can sell out arena’s book casino tours into your golden years.

Muse: A person or personified force who is the source of inspiration for a creative artist.

March 6, 2019

Taylor Swift is the queen of the shady breakup song. She pretty much single-handedly created and perfected the genre. Airing couplet upon couplet of dirty laundry to set records straight, point fingers, or otherwise deliver someone their long over-due comeuppance. And in the process immortalizing all the petty squabbles and feigned offences that no one would know, or care about, had she not put pen to paper, rhyme to rhythm, berate to beat.

Truth be told, this isn’t new. A post-Beatles John Lennon wrote a scathing missive about Paul McCartney called “How Do You Sleep”. Ray Davies took aim at a former protégé whom he discovered was really a poser in “Prince of The Punks”. It’s suspected a few early Foo Fighter songs are rebukes of Courtney Love. Courtney Love, in turn, is rumored to have written diss tracks about both Billy Corgan and Trent Reznor. Even Bowie isn’t above it, penning a scathing rebuke of Gary Numan.

For most artists, it’s a one off: an exorcism of toxic anger, that once said, required no further discussion or thought, allowing them to return to creating the music we know and love. But no one has done it so often, with such regularity and consistency as Ms. Swift. It’s as if she can’t help herself,  has nothing else to say, or worse, doubts anyone would be interested if she strayed from the formula.

But once upon a time, musicians had loftier intentions for their music than a passive aggressive missive: pleas to long lost loves or lovers who lost interest. Promises of eternal love and fidelity. And then there were declarations of unspoken feelings and attempts to finally give voice to the deep-seated emotions the artist had hitherto been unsuccessful.

Pattie Boyd has had a staggering eight songs written about her, four by George Harrison and another four by Eric Clapton. Some of the most beloved music of the 60’s and 70’s is about the love these men had for her. Songs like “Layla”, “Wonderful Tonight” and “Something”. Yeah, the song Frank Sinatra called “the greatest love song of the past 50 years”.

But for all the bravado of Layla, Clapton’s plea of unrequited love, or the beauty of Something, neither of these relationships lasted. In fact, it’s rare that any relationship that starts with a song last. More often than not, it is the song that goes the distance, not the relationship.

Let’s look at some examples: “My Sharona” by the Knack. Doug Fieger and Sharona Alperin’s relationship lasted only four years, although those years are considered Fieger’s most creative period.

 Steve Perry wrote three songs for girlfriend Sherrie Swafford: besides the obvious “Oh Sherrie”, he bookended with “Open Arms” and “Separate Ways”. Which when looked at chronologically, gives insight into the course of their relationship.

Some other songs that outlasted the relationship they sparked: “50 Ways To Leave Your Lover” By Paul Simon. Simon’s marriage to Carrie Fisher only lasted a year.  “Uptown Girl” by Billie Joel. Joel and Christy Brinkley’s marriage lasted just shy of a decade. “Sweet Child O’ Mine” by Guns and Roses. Axl Rose and Erin Everly’s relationship lasted 5 years. “Day After Day” by Bad Finger. Pete Ham and Dixie’s relationship lasted roughly two years.

Now, this isn’t to say there haven’t been love songs written in which the couple lasted. John Lennon has a few songs he’d written for Yoko Ono, and Paul McCartney has a few he’s written for Linda Eastman, but they weren’t written to woo. They were written in the midst of the relationship, not at the start and not to spark.

No, it’s rare that a song used to woo proves to be successful in the long run. The only one I can come up with is “I Walk The Line” by Johnny Cash.

The reason all these relationships ultimately failed is because they could never live up to the hype. The romanticizing of the relationship established unreal expectations on both sides. And this is because the songs are ultimately more about the artist who wrote it than the muse that inspired it. The songs are an excising of intense emotions, feelings of desire, lust and longing that eclipse reciprocated and domestic love. But once these intense emotions are satiated, and reality set in, it eventually becomes unsustainable. Feelings subside, and what once seemed like a Herculean task, in retrospect becomes benign. In other words, the thrill of the chase is greater than its own success.

Sadly, this is a universal truth. The more romantic, the loftier, the greater the pleas, the greater the hype, the more to live up to, the larger the obstacle, the greater the odds. It’s a recipe for failure, and expectations no one can ever meet.

Maybe Taylor has it right, finally giving a voice to the other side of the coin. Dispelling the myth behind these love songs from a woman’s perspective, offering a dose of reality to all the romanticism, and debunking what male artists would like women to believe.

And as necessary and as helpful as that may be, somewhere one wonders what song would come should someone introduce T Swift to Pattie Boyd.

Bobby Keys

February 27, 2019

The other night I was watching a documentary on saxophonist Bobby Keys and learned an interesting fact. Something that wasn’t even mentioned in his biography, which was that “Brown Sugar” didn’t originally have a sax solo on it. Instead, the track had been cut and was being prepared for release when at a dual birthday party for Bobby and Keith Richards that the song was performed (along with Eric Clapton on guitar) that Bobby played the lead. The Stones’ producer Jimmy Miller thought it was so great that he convinced the Stones to have Bobby overdub the part.

The rest, as they say, is history.

This got me into a Bobby Keys phase, and I started building a playlist of the songs he’d played on: Lots of Stones, of course, some John Lennon, a little Harry Nilsson, some Joe Cocker and lastly some George Harrison.

When I think of Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass”, the thing I most associate with the album is that Bad Finger was his backing band. What I don’t associate with that album is Bobby Keys, and that’s because there aren’t many memorable Bobby Keys moments. In fact, there isn’t a single sax solo on the record. And listening to it, it felt wrong. That is, after listening to numerous Bobby Keys solos, and then going to a record with no Bobby Keys solos, they felt missed. But more than that, I felt they would have actually elevated a couple of the songs.

Harrison is, of course, an incredible slide player, and pretty much played slide wherever he could. But for the first time, and in the context of this playlist, that made the album seem a little one note to me. It was too expected, too obvious. Sure, his playing was great, but it kept the songs staid. Suddenly the album lacked variety and texture.

Harrison was heavily influenced at the time by The Bands “Music from Big Pink” and Bob Dylan, and was clearly making a rootsy record along the same lines. In that regard, the slide guitar more than gives it that feel, however, a sax solo, especially on a track like “Hear Me Lord” would have given it more soul.

As much as I love “All Things Must Pass”, it pales next to the Stones’ “Exile on Mainstreet” and I think it’s for exactly this reason. Jimmy Miller and the Stones embraced those around them and gave them the opportunity to shine and elevate their music. They were a group of musicians working towards a common goal, as opposed to a solo artist recording an album that reflected the music they were currently listening to.