tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-74355710457809087292024-03-13T23:18:41.123-07:00SPLINTER MUSICthe music writing of TED BURKETED BURKEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16610296721891201100noreply@blogger.comBlogger320125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7435571045780908729.post-23472165746055996732024-01-29T16:56:00.000-08:002024-01-29T16:56:19.091-08:00SOME NOTES ABOUT SOME THINGS: Greil Marcus, The Pretenders, The Rolling Stones, the Love of Music As We Age<p style="text-align: justify;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMTDW89sjQF-9D33tjGEqbIJIGWksHMGcyhwJ0W4Iw6dzXL3ZttOHLg-VyoN7pPMY4S8lKGLZGfM9pZoCsG5ITnvjkt0UR5dQ2xcafGRXO-0G6vGminT_M3rJfpQs4eM2LOjdofOxPZjdYN9rizk4qbWoXzCZQ9PT2voHqjkOF7MWaT_9Zy5KwYq_nU2kf/s4032/20240127_121028.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMTDW89sjQF-9D33tjGEqbIJIGWksHMGcyhwJ0W4Iw6dzXL3ZttOHLg-VyoN7pPMY4S8lKGLZGfM9pZoCsG5ITnvjkt0UR5dQ2xcafGRXO-0G6vGminT_M3rJfpQs4eM2LOjdofOxPZjdYN9rizk4qbWoXzCZQ9PT2voHqjkOF7MWaT_9Zy5KwYq_nU2kf/w241-h320/20240127_121028.jpg" width="241" /></a></div><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="background-color: white;">Of great interest to readers of rock criticism is a<a href="https://yalereview.org/article/greil-marcus-why-i-write?fbclid=IwAR3HGzRuobzFCB7LNfewd-jSGv2yVTGT3iSE7flTPHhYXBjEb-DeH91uyjE"> recent</a></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><a href="https://yalereview.org/article/greil-marcus-why-i-write?fbclid=IwAR3HGzRuobzFCB7LNfewd-jSGv2yVTGT3iSE7flTPHhYXBjEb-DeH91uyjE"> an essay by Greil Marcus </a>about why he writes criticism. Although the article mentions that Marcus is a cultural critic, one realizes he remains a rock critic fully invested in the thrill of first hearing the bold assertions of the Stones, Beatles, Dylan, always Dylan. Marcus mentions that he aspires to create something the equal to the music/art that inspires him, an interesting project that he's pursued for many decades. Towards the end he takes </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><a style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer;" tabindex="-1"></a></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;">up where Mike Bloomfield leaves off after the guitarist's is quoted that something in music or otherwise has to move him in very visceral way; the author takes the same route , insisting that some element, any element, in a work of art has to grab him the seat of his pants and throw him down the stairs. In essence , Marcus has been intellectualizing his raw responses, his method of euphoric recall, and the results, I think, are always intriguing but decidedly mixed. At his best, Marcus performs a kind of Magic, a Ken Burns style that captures period, sound, origins, emotions, and their connection to an overarching American aesthetic and spirit. At worse, it's not that his books are sometimes unreadable, but more that they are unfinishable ; the lack of stated thesis makes his accumulation of data merely an anecdotal stream that do more to detour and distract than reveal. Anyway, Mr. Marcus in his own words:</span></span><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span style="font-family: times;">_________________________________________</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;">1984 brought us the monumental L<i>earning to Crawl by the Pretenders,</i> which, to my mind, established Chrissie Hinde as belonging in the upper echelons of rock singer-songwriters. The songwriting is guitar based and tough, easily matching the esteemed Tom Petty for keeping riffs simple, effective and memorable, and the persona Hinde sustains through the songs is someone looking back with equal measures of regret, fondness and disappointment, but curious about the road ahead , </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><a style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer;" tabindex="-1"></a></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;">someone taking stock of what she's learned and willing, again, to make the most with the life she's yet to live. This makes her sound too much like The Boss, I suppose, so it's crucial to point out that her experiences, sung in that low, oddly inflected voice that effectively conveys drama, sadness, and a prevailing sense of irony, avoid Springsteen's impulse to make life on life's terms so operatically Spectorish. Hinde's writing is effectively terse, reflective but without wallowing, defiant sans without killing a mood or emotion with bathos and such effects. Not a little like the best of Hemingway, the songs retain an efficiently splintery edge--professional but hardly slick by any means--and the tales pour forth in lean, memorable lines . There is a grit here I find very fine, resilient and appealing through the decades that have past.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span style="font-family: times;">__________________________________________________________</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;">At the height of the Blues Revival, spearheaded by young white artists like Butterfield, Bloomfield, and Clapton and of course John Mayall, there formed an obsession among a sizeable chunk of the audience, it seemed, about what guitarist had the best chops and most outstanding speed. Everything seemed stalemated at the presence of Alvin Lee who, it seemed, exhausted the speed gimmick and turned white blues guitar into a gross parody of the form. Then Johnny Winter's second album, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><a style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer;" tabindex="-1"></a></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;">a three sided set called Second Winter, rewrote the rules of the game. His first Columbia album met with mixed reviews and bland receptions from the many who were expecting the next Jimi Hendrix. It was a good blues album, not the best, but not bad. Winter seemed like a continuance of what could have been an Al Capp caricature, a Caucasian albino playing the music of black people. Well ,they all laughed but weren't laughing for long , since the three sides displayed a blues virtuosity unheard of til this time. Winter showed that he had full absorbed the styles of those he considered his guitar masters-all three Kings, Buddy Guy, T-<br />Bone Walker , Chuck Berry, Luther Allison, Hubert Sumlin--mixed his influences together and created something unique and brilliant in its own right from what he'd borrowed. It was a genuine triumph, a nearly overwhelming demonstration of slick technique, rhythmic invention and rawbone energy. </span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span style="font-family: times;">-------------------------------------------------------------------------</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;">There's a difference about caring less about music and no longer loving music that provided the soundtrack of your youth. You may be simply tired of songs and albums that have been overplayed for decades. In that sense, it matters little if I ever hear any Pink Floyd records again, love them thought I do. And half the Led Zeppelin songs can also be consigned to </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><a style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer;" tabindex="-1"></a></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;">the dustbin. Well, maybe not half, but at least two album sides of tracks I no longer get a thrill from, or songs that were weak to begin with. When you get older, your heroes from yore are no longer bulletproof, considering that by the time I turned 71 I had experienced the situations, loves, traumas , celebrations and catastrophes our friends Dylan, Cohen, Mitchell, Young et al adroitly crystallized in their tune craft. Many of us in the day sat around dark bedrooms and dens with the lights off, stoned or unstoned, listening to the heaviness of the message and thought we were really learning something about life. Aging, though, is the great equalizer , a very efficient means of changing the status and emotional attachments untested youth had on their record collections. Gauged against a few decades of actual lived experience, some songs still resonate , while others pale with revisiting. It helps if you've been a music writer and critic , a habit and occasional part-time job I've indulged myself in over six decades: the unreasonable standards I bring , standards hardly set in stone, has allowed me to have a private canon I can rely on when mood and manners require an unsullied equivalent of the prevailing zeitgeist. Also, it's not necessarily a matter of being uninterested in new music artists as such, as its simply an issue that new music striving for the love of the masses are written for young people and , damn it, I am no longer young. But I do have a considerable record collection. Let it be said that it's a wonderful thing when I can add a new and younger artist to my collection , though the instances are rare.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span style="font-family: times;">________________________________________________________________</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The flip side of the Rolling Stones' bad-boy masterpiece 'Jumping Jack Flash" was a vexing yet alluring tune called "Child of the Moon". It was , if I recall , the band's final dalliance in a particular British Psychedellic Pop, an period they flung themselves headlong into with the Satanic Majesties Requests album, foremost of many a band's effort to produce their own Sgt. Pepper. Child of the Moon works perfectly well.A perfect paen to drug-addled mysticism, if you had to call it anything. Rather like that Charlie's drums are upfront and clamoring, maybe even a bit impatient, and the piano and organ work by Nicky Hopkins bob and weave between the hard strummed acoustic guitars. Jagger sounds like a wasted sage struggling to make a pronouncement to a room full of the equally wasted. The song is a perfect example of what the Rolling Stones have </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><a style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer;" tabindex="-1"></a></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;">done effectively for decades, which was to accentuate their supposed instrumental deficiencies and cut tracks that couldn't imaginably have worked in more "professional" versions. This song has the feeling of you coming into the practice room just when a meandering jam hits its groove and everything gels splendidly for a bit--the tempo has the feeling that it could go astray at any minute and the instruments , while locked in simple themes that produce an attractive audio, don't sound locked into their parts. It could all just collapse , but yet it doesn't , and the result here demonstrates the band's ability to achieve a high aesthetic while never losing that element of being stoned-ruffians with too much cash.</span></span></p>TED BURKEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16610296721891201100noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7435571045780908729.post-82892105727006067402023-12-10T11:07:00.000-08:002023-12-10T11:07:53.905-08:00CARE LESS ABOUT MUSIC?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0JiKTBYwamxb52S4sIkocbTpCsKwVOqB9CMl_4Imkf6a3DLBHiRTCpRyBq7vTXV9wdu4uoZ1Cpz34t2WyjZfPNSfN6z4ukI4W4WYjUWFRK8E3C-7enE1ueyrVavoqH4-sZbGvsIdBlLyS4BiJuwkQMDsBzj2sKDpiKoSxRebvF3AI26ig_wO1AbAEB10E/s3024/20231025_155459.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0JiKTBYwamxb52S4sIkocbTpCsKwVOqB9CMl_4Imkf6a3DLBHiRTCpRyBq7vTXV9wdu4uoZ1Cpz34t2WyjZfPNSfN6z4ukI4W4WYjUWFRK8E3C-7enE1ueyrVavoqH4-sZbGvsIdBlLyS4BiJuwkQMDsBzj2sKDpiKoSxRebvF3AI26ig_wO1AbAEB10E/s320/20231025_155459.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.7); color: #111111; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.7); color: #111111; font-family: times; font-size: 16px;">A recent </span><i style="color: #111111; font-family: times; font-size: 16px;">New Republic</i><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.7); color: #111111; font-family: times; font-size: 16px;"> article </span><a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/120293/psychology-music?utm_source=Facebook&utm_campaign=SF_TNR&utm_medium=social&fbclid=IwAR1ThaViswpcdSqtMA1yQbrrxRjJaQQhHt-6-ZqDHQsqJcYIVyzeo1yJMgs" style="font-family: times; font-size: 16px;" target="_blank">ponders if we are caring less about music than we had before,</a><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.7); color: #111111; font-family: times; font-size: 16px;"> and goes on (and on) investigating possible reasons, causes of the maybe make-believe malaise in the culture. Still, it gets you thinking, and in due course I did a minor bit of autobiographical cogitation to find out why I have a nearly nonexistent relationship with most music by younger artists that's been released in the last ten years. But lets stay away from the Bad Sociology of the issue and hardly mention , if at all, the intrusion of technology into the pleasure dome. Technology always intrudes into the pleasure dome. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.7); color: #111111; font-family: times; font-size: 16px;">There’s a difference between caring less about music and no longer loving music that provided the soundtrack of your youth. It may be that you’re simply tired of songs and albums that have been overplayed for decades. In that sense, it matters little if I ever hear any Pink Floyd records again, love them though I do. And half of the Led Zeppelin songs can also be consigned to the dustbin. Well, maybe not half, but at least two album sides of tracks I no longer get a thrill from, or songs that were weak to begin with. When you get older, your heroes from yore are no longer bulletproof, considering that by the time I turned 71, I had experienced the situations, loves, traumas, celebrations, and catastrophes our friends Dylan, Cohen, Mitchell, Young et al adroitly crystallized in their tune craft. Many of us in the day sat around dark bedrooms and dens with the lights off, stoned or unstoned, listening to the heaviness of the message and thought we were really learning something about life. Aging, though, is the great equalizer, a very efficient means of changing the status and emotional attachments untested youth had on their record collections. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.7); color: #111111; font-family: times; font-size: 16px;">Gauged against a few decades of actual lived experience, some songs still resonate, while others pale with revisiting. It helps if you’ve been a music writer and critic, a habit and occasional part-time job I’ve indulged myself in over six decades: the unreasonable standards I bring, standards hardly set in stone, have allowed me to have a private canon I can rely on when mood and manners require an unsullied equivalent of the prevailing zeitgeist. Also, it’s not necessarily a matter of being uninterested in new music artists as such, as it’s simply an issue that new music striving for the love of the masses is written for young people and, damn it, I am no longer young. But I do have a considerable record collection. Let it be said that it’s a wonderful thing when I can add a new and young artist to my collection.”</span></p>TED BURKEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16610296721891201100noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7435571045780908729.post-71801036906429907232023-11-28T11:09:00.000-08:002023-11-28T11:09:49.273-08:00SOME COOL OLD MUSIC<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/L-OEnyBwHrE" width="320" youtube-src-id="L-OEnyBwHrE"></iframe></b></div><b>I'm Only Sleeping --The Beatles</b><br /> <span style="font-family: times;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The best song about getting up at the crack of noon, only to go right back to sleep. Much is made of the backwards guitar break from Harrison, an accomplishment and innovation indeed, but it's the least interesting aspect of the tune, which as a suitably steady and toned down pulse of a rhythm, simulating, maybe, the measured breathing of someone in deep sleep. McCartney's basswork is superb here, and and at the half point , before </span><span style="animation-name: none !important; background-color: white; color: #050505; transition-property: none !important; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><a style="animation-name: none !important; color: #385898; cursor: pointer; transition-property: none !important;" tabindex="-1"></a></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;">the short Harrsion extravaganza, he takes while can be called a bass solo, his only one (unless I miss my guess). Lennon's singing of his lyrics is understated , again suitable in a song that praises laziness; he gets it right, I think, of the universal (?) experience of being awakened in the middle of a dream right before the dreamer gets to the anticipated payoff in the slumbering world. At that moment , in that instance, the world is raw, intrusive, an insane nest of busy body magpies. This is easily one of my favorite songs on a perfect studio release (<i>Revolver)</i>,</span></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: times;"><b>Ramblin Gamblin Man / Tales of Lucy Blue --Bob Seger System</b></span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: times;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: times;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pqFn55saf9Y" width="320" youtube-src-id="pqFn55saf9Y"></iframe></span></div><span style="color: #050505; font-family: times;"><br /><b><br /></b></span><p></p><p><span style="background-color: white; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: times;">This is disc got constant play when I lived in Detroit and got even more play after I moved the comparatively edenic San Diego. This 1969 is an earnest and brilliant example of garage band genius, the kind of thrashing primitivism of musicians who definitely not virtuosos who all the same howled, jammed and slammed in minimalist fury all the pent up teen rage of his Michigan fan base. Black Eyed Girl is a gloriously lumbering blues with prime Seger shouting/screaming/bellow, his rasp achieving an appealingly frayed high note, "Ramblin Gamblin Man" is a hard charging rocker with a simple and killer drum beat, all sorts of weird psychedelia , feedback, wah wah pedal orgies, lots of Seger rasping his lungs out. Down Home is a great companion to the home life portraits by the Stones ala Live with Me. Seger refined his approach over the years to mostly good occasionally great effect, but this album gave he idea that hard rock at ground level should sock you in the jaw and kick you in the head.</span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: times;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; white-space-collapse: preserve;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/NxyOhFBoxSY" width="320" youtube-src-id="NxyOhFBoxSY"></iframe></div><b><br /><span style="color: #050505; font-family: times;">Eight Miles High--The Byrds</span></b><p></p><p><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;">"Eight Miles High" by the Byrds, released in 1966, a brief and cogent combination of Imagist lyrics, unusual time signatures that alternate between 5/4 and 4/4, jazz and raga overtones and guitarist Roger (nee Jim) McGuinn's transcendent , Coltrane inspired solos. There was a lot of early experiments in mixing rock with other genres, specifically raga and jazz, and not a little hunt and peck improvisation happening during this period, the most succesful efforts being the </span><span style="animation-name: none !important; background-color: white; color: #050505; transition-property: none !important; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><a style="animation-name: none !important; color: #385898; cursor: pointer; transition-property: none !important;" tabindex="-1"></a></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;">extended Bloomfield excursions on East West, Larry Coryell's invention of fusion method in the Free Spirits band, and some others, but Eight Miles High was a radio hit of a sort, ranking at 14 in the Billboard 100. It was banned from some stations because of the (too) obvious association with drugs, but where I was in Detroit the tune was played an awful lot on our local AM and FM outlets. It was an unexpected surprise at the time, a song completely unique and ahead of its time that stands as one of the artistically succesful attempts at what would come to be termed fusion.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/NtxYtM5HMuw" width="320" youtube-src-id="NtxYtM5HMuw"></iframe></span></div><p></p><p><b style="color: #050505; font-family: times; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I Can't Make Love--Wall of Voodoo</b></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> </span><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505;">I witnessed Wall of Voodoo for the first time at the Urgh concerts in Santa Monica in 1980, sharing the bill with Pere Ubu, Dead Boys, Magazine,a wholly transformational encounter. The band applied the ticktock reductionist rhythms with a sense of apprehension. It was almost Hitchcockian, as in any scene when a nervous protagonist under duress hears an overly loud clock ticking away . </span><span style="animation-name: none !important; background-color: white; color: #050505; transition-property: none !important;"><a class="x1i10hfl xjbqb8w x6umtig x1b1mbwd xaqea5y xav7gou x9f619 x1ypdohk xt0psk2 xe8uvvx xdj266r x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r xexx8yu x4uap5 x18d9i69 xkhd6sd x16tdsg8 x1hl2dhg xggy1nq x1a2a7pz xt0b8zv x1fey0fg" href="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D8FyTfLAlASU%26fbclid%3DIwAR3PW-U-s3AHagYMUyEUmwzZneFk89qwFiWVn2-6kFMgk6h-9SBEE5CjIVg&h=AT2AD2fCEQvicFtPjXwy72Y3ZgGPRUF66Tu_UQiEVahd5yidSiEABwDfj1FfnG9msihT_8hilYs7USGSydqLkXiLMyg4QphqfAZQHTpcvDzwADfEwzfLfm8SqN9PgW6z3m3S4K6z6E7hJfPhyA&__tn__=-UK-R&c[0]=AT2RH33hw9RDUr5k5DWdqJR8WFMxAPW8GwuHpI7a5r0nF_4hthr_hQO0-3k2OabCplwR9KGi-1XcCwX45tYrWYoduaq7ut2x2VRo8iJCAMPwhOqWqxv1zPztZcFw5uR1KwRtyg-Kge4ktfOH8XTUinOCUTynbM6yDAROKJA" rel="nofollow noreferrer" role="link" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; animation-name: none !important; background-color: transparent; border-color: initial; border-style: initial; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer; display: inline; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-align: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; touch-action: manipulation; transition-property: none !important;" tabindex="0" target="_blank">"Ring of Fire"</a></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505;"> was masterfully drawn out, and Stan Ridgeway seemed to me the best talk-singer since Lou Reed , a flat, hardened monotone , leering and braced by a slight ironic tone, reflecting LA Noir no less than Marlowe. </span><span style="animation-name: none !important; background-color: white; color: #050505; transition-property: none !important;"><a class="x1i10hfl xjbqb8w x6umtig x1b1mbwd xaqea5y xav7gou x9f619 x1ypdohk xt0psk2 xe8uvvx xdj266r x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r xexx8yu x4uap5 x18d9i69 xkhd6sd x16tdsg8 x1hl2dhg xggy1nq x1a2a7pz xt0b8zv x1fey0fg" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtxYtM5HMuw&fbclid=IwAR2eQJfai526AWf-Ee6cLCg3tyAwmjjqjpEjU2SqyuWpooT1B5bNVnBeB0g" rel="nofollow noreferrer" role="link" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; animation-name: none !important; background-color: transparent; border-color: initial; border-style: initial; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer; display: inline; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-align: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; touch-action: manipulation; transition-property: none !important;" tabindex="0" target="_blank">"I Can't Make Love"</a></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505;"> was my takeaway from the entire night, an underrated lament of A loser, battered on both sides by the lure and dispatch of the affection he craves. This is a lament of someone so saddled with self loathing that he can't complete a sentence. The pleading refrain of "I'm a nice guy" as the song fades is stark and stripped of illusion, it is Lear without the poetry. The abject despair and self-pity that's revealed is equal parts moving and repulsive, which is a remarkable accomplishment.</span></span></p>TED BURKEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16610296721891201100noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7435571045780908729.post-6365142057447068702023-11-04T10:54:00.001-07:002023-11-04T10:54:49.957-07:00DWIGHT TWILLEY <p>Dwight Twilley, underappreciated and (sigh) gone too soon, RIP. I reviewed his single “I’m On Fire” and his second album “Twilley Don’t Mind” in the 70s and always wondered at the time why he and his lifetime music partner Phil Seymour’s earnestly rhythmic and affectless convergence of Mersey Beat melodicism and rockabilly swivel jive, replete with lapel-grabbing hooks, joyously confused vocals and sharp, popping guitar sounds never found a larger audience beyond the first hit and consistently high praise from well-placed rock critics. Office politics at the record company that released his one true hit delayed the release of their debut album, and the time lag sapped the momentum the artists had, but some of it might be that writers didn’t quite get a handle on how to categorize the Twilley Band: they were hailed, sloppily, as members of the “Tulsa Sound”, praised as creators of “power pop”, hailed as fathers of the post-punk New Wave trend, and other times, and more accurately, just called rock and roll. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_CVbf5NVUwQ" width="320" youtube-src-id="_CVbf5NVUwQ"></iframe></div><br />As the obit indicates, Twilley was annoyed at the messy attempts to place his music in a category in which it might be made commercially appealing. Just the same, the descriptions of the band’s rock and roll originals were on the money. Perhaps they needed a Jon Landau to write about them and declare that he had seen the face of rock and roll’s future to inspire a major media push for a worthy set of musicians. More likely, the Dwight Twilley Band’s moment had come and gone, with label mismanagement and shifting audience tastes at particular times being blockades. There remains some fine, eternally fresh rock and roll.”<p></p><p><br /></p>TED BURKEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16610296721891201100noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7435571045780908729.post-40169155620147104782023-10-06T11:00:00.002-07:002023-10-06T11:00:18.264-07:00<p style="text-align: justify;"> Well, yes, here it is, another brief plug for the hesitant and the unfamiliar to listen jazz-rock guitar godhead Larry Coryell, a wonderful musician who passed away in 2017. I've posted a fair number of articles, blurbs, and reviews on the musician's innovations and contributions to not have to go at length again on what makes him an essential addition to anyone's jazz library. <span style="font-family: times;">Coryell is thought of as a jazz guitarist primarily, but he (and John McLaughlin, separately) created what came to known as jazz rock (later) fusion guitar improvisation in the early to mid sixties. Coryell's work combined virtuoso jazz technique with a solid grounding in classical and Spanish traditions, which he melded with the raw power of rock, soul, and blues; his speed on the frets was incalculable, his energy unmatched, the course of his manic improvisations unpredictable. He raised the standard for rock guitarists, again for generations to come, and , I insist, he laid the groundwork for fusion and shred guitarists yet to appear. No Coryell (or McLaughlin), no Van Halen, no Malmsteen, no Holdsworth. A simplistic equation, yes, but it makes the point that Larry Coryell changed the way jazz and rock guitar gets played: he pushed the style a couple of light years into the future. Here's a sample of his careening genius. This piece is from an audition tape he and some bandmates made in the 70s, featuring a bright, rapidly paced, nearly reckless rendition of one of Coryell's finest compositions, "Good Citizen Swallow", a tune he contributed to the Gary Burton Quartet who, who he played for in the mid-Sixties . Those albums, <i>Duster,</i> <i>Lofty Fake Anagram</i>, and <i>Duster , </i>are often argued to be among the important releases that forged a path toward the creation of a new musical genre, fusion. The tune is named for Burton bassist Steve Swallow, a very fine musician and composer in his own right. Coryell's work on this demo tape is lively, unpredictable, with his solo at different stages seeming to channel his inner Keith Richard with some deftly placed split chord chunks, and other times suggesting that he'd listened not a little to James Burton. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;"><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MIbjUljRghg?si=UAEQ4ruzwPFd24Ch" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe></span></p>TED BURKEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16610296721891201100noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7435571045780908729.post-58667043690888681782023-09-09T18:37:00.006-07:002023-12-14T10:27:50.065-08:00THE ROLLING STONES ARE AND WERE GREAT AND AFTER SEVEN DECADES, SHUT THE FUCK UP AND ENJOY YOUR MONEY<p style="text-align: justify;"> <span style="background-color: white;"><span face="Segoe UI Historic, Segoe UI, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 28px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> </span></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span face="Segoe UI Historic, Segoe UI, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="color: #050505;"><span style="font-size: 28px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiqbLDsfgIeR8KPsQ6ASezV0mIirvrz2YSmQSSyUTJMQTkBWYCzKnZJ0HsPXNv3D1gM_xihKjZ2PxaYhd42_9blKEyFPzyxKGoLjsmqk4hjYY54DUGNVa_gmFhuOUBC_ZLbzzZHXk2_aCijSvlzA13HN32fAOptrZ26fDwaPf3b4bvutK3FUdcUbaSzpmf2" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="360" data-original-width="640" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiqbLDsfgIeR8KPsQ6ASezV0mIirvrz2YSmQSSyUTJMQTkBWYCzKnZJ0HsPXNv3D1gM_xihKjZ2PxaYhd42_9blKEyFPzyxKGoLjsmqk4hjYY54DUGNVa_gmFhuOUBC_ZLbzzZHXk2_aCijSvlzA13HN32fAOptrZ26fDwaPf3b4bvutK3FUdcUbaSzpmf2=w400-h225" width="400" /></a></span></span></span></div><span style="background-color: #f0f2f5;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><i style="color: #050505; font-family: georgia;">A Bigger Bang</i><span style="color: #050505; font-family: georgia;"> was one of those efforts where a legendary but lagging remains of a great rock band pooled what was left of their ingenuity, verve, and grit to patient fans, what, I thought, was a grand and wonderful parting gift. Then, it seems, the Rolling Stones as a creative entity ceased to exist, re-thinking themselves to be a forever touring road show . The goal there seemed only to pack as many stadiums and auditoriums before another one of them bought the farm. It was a canny decision on their part never to announce that they were retiring or that any particular tour or concert was their last dance, as it gave them pause to enjoy their wealth before going back to work. So now the Rolling Stones are releasing a new album , </span><i style="color: #050505; font-family: georgia;">Hackney Diamonds</i><span style="color: #050505; font-family: georgia;">, and a new single, </span><i style="color: #050505; font-family: georgia;">Angry</i><span style="color: #050505; font-family: georgia;">. As a reintroduction to music buyers of the RS as musical force, the new single is all things rote--the famed crossfire guitar work of Richard and Wood neither motivates me to dance, strut, or admire a forever punk attitude--it sounds merely professional, stylistically over-studied, something from a better than average stadiums as possible band. And Jagger goes for the yell-talk-shout style he's made good use of in the past, but his delivery here is no dramatization of a bad scene we can find nuance in; here he has the appeal of someone talking too loud on their phone in a subway car. Not impressed with this, and I can only hope the forthcoming album redeems the last men standing.But now let us consider some of their songs that are great and remain vital and certainly magical through the decades, the days before they became a road show rummaging through a massive songbook.</span></div></span><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #050505;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;"><i>Child of the Moon</i>:A perfect paen to psychedelic mysticism, if you had to call it anything. Rather like that Charlie's drums are upfront and clamoring, maybe even a bit impatient, and the piano and organ work by Nicky Hopkins bob and weave between the hard strummed acoustic guitars. Jagger sounds like a wasted sage struggling to make a pronouncement to a room full of the equally wasted. The song is a perfect example of what the Rolling Stones have </span></span></span><span style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; transition-property: none; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><a style="animation-name: none; color: #385898; cursor: pointer; transition-property: none;" tabindex="-1"></a></span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #050505;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">done effectively for decades, which was to accentuate their supposed instrumental deficiencies and cut tracks that couldn't imaginably have worked in more “professional” versions. This song has the feeling of you coming into the practice room just when a meandering jam hits its groove and everything gels splendidly for a bit--the tempo has the feeling that it could go astray at any minute and the instruments, while locked in simple themes that produce an attractive audio, don't sound locked into their parts. It could all just collapse, but it doesn't, and the result here demonstrates the band's ability to achieve a high aesthetic while never losing that element of being stoned-ruffians with too much cash.</span></span></span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> <i>Backstreet Girl</i>:I've always been struck by the fascinating disconnect between the folksy, sweetly textured sound of this ballad and all its implications of sublimely expressed dedication and the cruel , misogynist and entitled demands of a man instructing his mistress to know her place, to not contact him for any reason , to be happy with any attention he gives her at all, on his terms only. This works subtly and with a lack of the usual sexist </span><span style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; transition-property: none; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><a style="animation-name: none; color: #385898; cursor: pointer; transition-property: none;" tabindex="-1"></a></span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span>insults that occupy the Stones' more chauvinist material, and I suspect that it's an irony a canny Mick Jagger was working for and achieved. The music suggests Impressionist paintings of a Paris blvd. with the choice addition of accordions to the melody, likely reflects the narrator's attitude, his state of mind, that he's laying the law to a problematic "outside" woman in a manner that is gentle but firm, delicately laid out, even kind in his estimation. The lyrics tell a different story and have the effect of a perfect character sketch that might have been lifted from Dickens or Sterne</span><span>.</span></span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="color: #050505;"><span style="background-color: white; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Another lively character study comes to mind:</span></span><span style="text-align: left; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span style="color: #050505;">There's no bondage or misogyny in <i>Get Off My Cloud</i>, just the complaints of an impatient young man intensely aware of his awkwardness in the world. The genius here is that Jagger doesn't frame it as a protest song but as an immature rant. That element keeps this song relevant to human experience. Honestly, these songs of scaled-down experience, wicked or melancholic or satiric, are the songs that are the genius of the Stones reputation--that they've been able to rise to new heights from periods of so-so releases is one of the marvels of 20th century music history. But the grand statements--<i>Can't Always Get What You Want</i>, <i>Midnight Ramble</i>r, <i>Sympathy for the Devi</i>l--have always seemed arch , role-playing and not a little phony and pretentious. In general, I go with what Mailer said about <i>Sympathy for the Devil</i> when it was played for him during a Rolling Stone interview. His view, to paraphrase, was that it was all build up with no pay off. Mailer did, however, go on to say great things about "Live With Me", which he found a funny situation of a daft upper class British household. The Stones, when they cared to work brilliantly withing their limits, had the wit and craft of Wodehouse and Waugh.</span></span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span style="font-family: IBM Plex Serif;"><br /></span></span></p>TED BURKEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16610296721891201100noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7435571045780908729.post-81603719460668084772023-08-09T22:30:00.002-07:002023-08-11T20:02:54.439-07:00ROBBIE ROBERTSON , RIP<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Playfair Display;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Playfair Display;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhEMyAGntd_GTWCwK9PyIupt9X0yNTXg0kszObWzTRBho9IhruipmXZiz3SOQawaNuQwHY0bIcZkYSEIcZ094Bsk0-phhnDMNnfaLk7AG2mKlCJtvSu0y58IsnmiSGUIdSAP82mWjqIPgQQ8EWqn9XmRaRz_YAdpFjK4hTOh4IFG1UPNo9A6aPqQh_djAs5" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="474" data-original-width="616" height="308" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhEMyAGntd_GTWCwK9PyIupt9X0yNTXg0kszObWzTRBho9IhruipmXZiz3SOQawaNuQwHY0bIcZkYSEIcZ094Bsk0-phhnDMNnfaLk7AG2mKlCJtvSu0y58IsnmiSGUIdSAP82mWjqIPgQQ8EWqn9XmRaRz_YAdpFjK4hTOh4IFG1UPNo9A6aPqQh_djAs5=w400-h308" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: Work Sans;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: #f0f2f5; color: #050505; font-size: 21px;">Robbie Robertson was a rare bird, and it’s not likely we’ll see a comparable talent again in most of our lifetimes. As a writer, he drew from a deep and flavorful stream of musical styles–field holler work songs, </span><span style="animation-name: none;"><a style="animation-name: none; background-color: #f0f2f5; color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-size: 21px; transition-property: none;" tabindex="-1"></a></span><span style="background-color: #f0f2f5; color: #050505; font-size: 21px;">country blues, gospel, old-time jazz with hints of ragtime syncopation, country and western, classic rhythm and blues, and rock and roll–and shared with his splendid Band members the ability to cogently blend the styles into an unaffected, appealing organic sound.</span></div><span style="background-color: #f0f2f5; color: #050505; font-size: 21px;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #050505;">It’s been said before, but his best songs seemed beyond era, as Robertson could have written them one hundred years ago or two weeks ago. They were timeless, evocative, and put one in the center of what was a vividly and deftly portrayed idea of the American South, no less so than Faulkner or Carson McCullers. His lyrics, as well, were dually colloquial and surreal, presented in different guises of melancholy, a yearning for an idealized past, or which displayed an absurdist wit. The Weight is the prize example of Robertson’s talents–a rolling piano figure never far from gospel roots, the narrative details the oddness of small-town life and provides details that suggest hallucinations of religious fervor, incest, hidden insanity. It has the power of a storyboard from which a great novel or grand motion picture can be made. One can set up a half dozen songs by the late songwriter and notice a sublime variety of situations and emotional conflict, and notice Robertson's sure-handed use of first-person narrative, in a tone where someone was speaking about the contradictory elements of their life and how, somehow, the same said narrator was applying their shoulder to the wheel all the same despite the crushing circumstances that present little likelihood of abating. Aspirations, love, better fortunes, happier and more fulfilling years past, Robertson's tales were of the people who fell between the cracks when good times turned ill; often enough it seemed the only reason anyone of the frequently tragic figures in the songs carry on in the grim landscape not through hope or the illusion thereof, but from memory, a nostalgia for days when existence had meaning and a personal refusal to finally die a cipher in the bleak landscape. Robertson was an artist of great and delicate talents that was a large part of why The Band is one of the greatest bands of the rock and roll era. An</span><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222;"><span style="color: #050505;"> aspect of Robertson's years ago, that his interest was in characters who were from small towns but who had full lives and palpable experiences, speaking in their unique voices in unpretentious language that suggested full histories without an excess of grandstanding detail. </span></span></div></span></span><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-size: 21px;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: Work Sans;">His songs were monologues of a sort and were economical in the way people tend to be when recollecting the joys or heartbreaks of the lives they've lived. Robertson had a brilliance for a character sketch ; even his wordiest songs are spare, free of mood killing literary language. He could take himself out of the narrative and let his passion and concern for Southern lives come across in masterfully understated testimonials. His art is, of course, supplemented to no end by the superb contributions of his band mates--Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson, Rick Danko, Levon Helm-- and their astounding ability to incorporate so many hard-to-assimiliate genres in material that made a merging of gospel, old school blues, country music and ragtime into a natural and organic expression of musical emotion are the sort of things we can study for years to come, and there will likely remain debates as to the size of the contributions the other members made to the songwriting, but for the meantime I am content to acknowledge the profundity of Robertson's contributions.</span></span></span></p>TED BURKEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16610296721891201100noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7435571045780908729.post-70895806966859813232023-08-04T17:55:00.006-07:002023-08-04T23:38:00.153-07:00STOP GOING TO FUNERALS FOR THINGS THAT HAVEN'T DIED<p style="text-align: justify;"><span face="-apple-system, Roboto, SegoeUI, "Segoe UI", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, "Microsoft YaHei", "Meiryo UI", Meiryo, "Arial Unicode MS", sans-serif" style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.7); color: #111111; font-size: 16px;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMC9Hf20Z-zY5IHRM7gbz-MdvWxw3sLVfPk7IIlSoiMBigP8a26SOuYbR0atC6WS67Ruahkc4a3oJbWsBnS4mIiVlBtyxybHAHUg8LSh8E2Wc0s8Fw66zb60jfZlmNnHqj4L_PNg2_0ilB6D6MFIQHPPsT9abcJHcpgFW4bs0KQFiB_hPFqBkkNbnf0tYu/s367/image.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="262" data-original-width="367" height="228" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMC9Hf20Z-zY5IHRM7gbz-MdvWxw3sLVfPk7IIlSoiMBigP8a26SOuYbR0atC6WS67Ruahkc4a3oJbWsBnS4mIiVlBtyxybHAHUg8LSh8E2Wc0s8Fw66zb60jfZlmNnHqj4L_PNg2_0ilB6D6MFIQHPPsT9abcJHcpgFW4bs0KQFiB_hPFqBkkNbnf0tYu/s320/image.png" width="320" /></a></div> The Spectator (Australia) has wondered out loud if <a href="https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/are-rock-music-critics-extinct/?fbclid=IwAR1ZtyWzfepR1Uko-AfPcEj4hv6i8TPhLZQfQNn6Wek_ExVh8rCG6de6xkg">rock criticism, an intriguing and snarking subcatagory of journalism is all but spent.</a> They cite no less an authority than Ed Sheeran to suggest the waning days of music opinion mongering are in the late stages. Even so, this is more a matter of wondering what the interest in announcing something as officially deceased and irrelevant? These are the sort of pieces that get written late at night because they can be very light on hard facts supporting the assertion, can be allowed to be vague and irritatinging in their collective inability to really take a stance. It's a race against deadline and the assured result is sloppy thinking. Now and then a writer decides to pad his required number of articles he has committed to submit to his editor by taking the pulse of a cultural expression and opining whether the activity is dead. Is theater dead? How about rock and roll? Or jazz, really, is that still a thing? And painting, Christ, painting is as dead as a boot, no? Cinema is dead, we know, and movie theaters are going away?..You get the idea. Some things do, of course, seem to vanish, such as vinyl records and eventually CDs, though they have not completely been eradicated: both have made a comeback among noticeable consumer subgroups. But both things were quickly supplanted when digital formats and the internet trampled the established ways of acquiring music. We know, however, that declarations that specific art forms, from literature to the visual arts, are dead seem more wishful thinking , a hot take of cultural trends that often enough begins with provocative headlines but towards the end of the various squibs that take this tack end up with no conclusion other than sighing “…we will see.” What we have are areas where newer ways of expression, getting news, advertising , expressing oneself poetically , et al, have new ways of coming into being, something that does not mean a death sentence for whatever came before. So this issue as to whether rock criticism is dead or dying? Death and dying are strong and sloppy terms to apply to anything that is ongoing, and I would think that as long as people buy music, they will want to read about it and talk about it and have disagreements about musical artists and the relative qualities involved in ones preferred measures of the Big Beat. Someone will write about a new album or a concert and someone else will read it and the dynamic continues anew. For the diminished role critics play in influencing consumers, well…we will see…<p></p>TED BURKEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16610296721891201100noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7435571045780908729.post-41203901228848275182023-08-03T09:20:00.004-07:002023-08-03T09:23:49.924-07:00QUICK RECOLLECTIONS OF TWO 1969 BOOTLEGS<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEisKR6ZkQfwGt-JjsviYNkJLGhE_fc7j1YuWxAP1gY-rlDjHygmPz9G7V0AdYTBs80X4H4K9JvQjWMEj2Ly2060TIyaYW8VA9aKyiUlcxQMSa1xSj4IvFBCOsVhs5yZijP9_0QjQpORI4waABProBidq0xU2YjlS2ThNvNTjN3Lwd1GFugZCTjH3BTI3K28" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="554" data-original-width="575" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEisKR6ZkQfwGt-JjsviYNkJLGhE_fc7j1YuWxAP1gY-rlDjHygmPz9G7V0AdYTBs80X4H4K9JvQjWMEj2Ly2060TIyaYW8VA9aKyiUlcxQMSa1xSj4IvFBCOsVhs5yZijP9_0QjQpORI4waABProBidq0xU2YjlS2ThNvNTjN3Lwd1GFugZCTjH3BTI3K28" width="249" /></a></div><span face="-apple-system, Roboto, SegoeUI, "Segoe UI", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, "Microsoft YaHei", "Meiryo UI", Meiryo, "Arial Unicode MS", sans-serif" style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.7); color: #111111; font-size: 16px;">“</span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.7); color: #111111;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">The only two bootleg albums I ever bought were <i>lIVEr that You'll Ever Be </i>(1969) by the Rolling Stones and <i>The Great White Hope </i>by Bob Dylan<i> </i>(also released in 1969). The Rolling Stones one is entirely dispensable–there is a cult around their live albums that is pure fiction in my view. They have always been dicey in live performance, save for Jagger’s antics. Their legacy is their long line of studio albums. </span></span><p></p><p><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.7); color: #111111;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">The Dylan, though, is genuinely historic, a batch of diverse and wonderfully crafted tunes melodically and lyrically. I still don’t think he is a poet, but the lyrics here-- TEARS OF RAGE, THE MIGHTY QUINN, THIS WHEEL’S ON FIRE, TOO MUCH OF NOTHING-- are some of the finest and most subtle of his career, and his selection of covers are choice and reveal that Dylan, in his prime, could reinvent traditional material and make them relevant to an audience that was starved for something more than cocktails, drunk romance and songs that were thick with cliché and platitude. <i>The Great White Hope</i> has only gotten richer with time. I subscribe to the idea that the best rock poetry are the ones that show the art of what was almost said, which was what Dylan could do when he had all his pistons firing, a mix of idiomatic diction, biblical allusion, a sort of bucolic surrealism , along with a host of other lyric influences that sift through blues, country and such for the sort of mash ups he specialized in. I think we’re on the same page, that his best lyrics work not because they make sense in literal terms but that they give a sense of mood, temperament, whatever the prevailing emotional tone might happen to be for the song, joy, or despair.</span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.7); color: #111111;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> He does this in any number of ways–odd juxtapositions of physical items (lace=knot), cunning use of nonsequiturs to undercut encroaching cliché and sentimentality and suggest there are deeper levels to explore–but the fun in Dylan’s strongest songs-as-poems is the sort of oh-wow factor where you can’t believe he came up with one catchy couplet after another, a sensation similar to (in my mind) to listening to a Coltrane or Dolphy solo where the runs , riffs, and full on phrases exhibit a serial genius. This is my Bob Dylan.”</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="color: #111111;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.7);"><b>BARRY ALFONSO:</b></span></span><span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: #f0f2f5; color: #050505;">I certainly agree about <i>GWW</i>, Ted. Tackling the value and substance of Dylan's Basement Tapes songs is difficult because, I think, they involve a different standard that you might use for most song lyrics (or poetry, for that matter). There are lines in </span><a style="animation-name: none; background-color: #f0f2f5; color: #385898; cursor: pointer; transition-property: none;" tabindex="-1"></a><span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: #f0f2f5; color: #050505;">"The Mighty Quinn" and "This Wheel's On Fire" that are near-gibberish, akin to the silly wordplay in "Polly Wolly Doodle" or "Oh, Susanna." "If your memory serves you well/I was going to confiscate your lace/And wrap it up in a sailor's knot/and hide it in your case" -- this sort of thing has almost no conventional meaning worth treating seriously. It is almost the sort of nonsense you might write in a song if you are holding a place for what you might write later. (I did that in Nashville.) But the FEELING of it is clear -- it is sly and spooky and insinuating and begs you to try to untangle what it is saying. Add to this that the performance of these songs by Dylan and the Band is filled with wacky/ominous emotion. Scarcely any people can write and record stuff like that. I love those songs. Those are my favorite Dylan songs, in fact.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: georgia;"><span style="background-color: #f0f2f5;"><b>WILLIAM HAMILTON</b>: Breet, chitter, grelb.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: georgia;"><span style="background-color: #f0f2f5;"><br /></span></span></p>TED BURKEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16610296721891201100noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7435571045780908729.post-12136377521351135802023-08-01T19:01:00.004-07:002023-08-01T19:01:42.927-07:00Oh yeah?<p> </p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNxAKIkVOpgNy0U39T8B0YgqFBT-VWmuoMmIpAPGmXGC9NZo1w6iG4-WowynY1N4xvaMNU0hLKwh4M3PmPoqI7rUcmorjcOzojinn3k5q2GJ-S9DT7cCcJEVZGQ1mpmRLf1LJpzhpwcFeuXSC8mlPCFn5R4jPuMXm7_Fec15QNY78UxyhXZzq6/s460/ii.gif" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="422" data-original-width="460" height="368" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNxAKIkVOpgNy0U39T8B0YgqFBT-VWmuoMmIpAPGmXGC9NZo1w6iG4-WowynY1N4xvaMNU0hLKwh4M3PmPoqI7rUcmorjcOzojinn3k5q2GJ-S9DT7cCcJEVZGQ1mpmRLf1LJpzhpwcFeuXSC8mlPCFn5R4jPuMXm7_Fec15QNY78UxyhXZzq6/w400-h368/ii.gif" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;">The harmonies of the fabled Tremeloes stood out in a crowded field of 60s Brit Pop bands who were notable for their vocal arrangements. As we see here, the harmonies decorate, embellish, and enhance the fetching melody with colors , textures and tones of of the tongue that could have been easily transposed, I would guess, to regular instruments. Solo voice subtly joined by a chorus, combined harmonies seamlessly sliding up the <span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; transition-property: none; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><a style="animation-name: none; color: #385898; cursor: pointer; transition-property: none;" tabindex="-1"></a></span><span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;">scale rather than abruptly switching keyes. I overstate the case, perhaps, but I've always found their performance of this tune stunning.</span></span><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Brit-pop in the 60s was a wonderland of sterling harmonies and the Hollies, Graham Nash edition, were champions at musical hooks and vocal synchronization. This punchy little masterpiece grabbed me right away back when I was but a whelp, especially the chorus, a vocal traffic jam of different melody lines stacked atop one another, going in different directions, clashing and dissonant and structurally effective, the brief miasma </span><span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; transition-property: none; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><a style="animation-name: none; color: #385898; cursor: pointer; transition-property: none;" tabindex="-1"></a></span><span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;">brought together again with Nash's high note at the end.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: arial; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Neil Young's sci-fi junkie lament 'After the Goldrush" gets a harmonized rendition in this 1974 release. The lead vocal by Irene Hume reveals a slightly husky voice that characterizes the solo and chorus arrangement, with an appealing result that makes you think of a choir of Melanies . A perfect radio hit for the time, pleasant melody, depressed lyrics, alluring vocal craft. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span face="Segoe UI Historic, Segoe UI, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="color: #050505; font-family: arial;">John Lennonhad a grudge against bandmate Paul , a resentment he dutifully burnished until it was shiny like an acrylic turd, a brown and gleeming chuck of ill will. Of course <br /> he wrote a song about it , laying everything out except Sir McCartney's name. As an issue of disrespect, it's in a class by itself, but the howler of this whole enterprise centers around the most quoted lyric, "...the only thing you did was yesterday..." The longer view of the Beatles reveals PM's contributions to the creative surges was, in fact, profound, at which point it makes me consider the idea that McCartney would likely have been a pop star of some sort without Lennon. Lennon, always a raw dog who improved vastly as a tunesmith , singer and lyricist due to his association with McCartney, would likely have had a rougher go of it.</span></span></p>TED BURKEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16610296721891201100noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7435571045780908729.post-45725961089560666812023-07-26T22:06:00.004-07:002023-07-27T09:55:15.641-07:00CRAWL OUT YOUR WINDOW<div class="content" tabindex="0"><div class="ac-container ac-adaptiveCard"><div class="ac-textBlock"><p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgYcom_1Md2lnImZ9OX01c0qwzSJC1PATZS3uY0ggmTSFZUh1x7Njt1uMGhvUT7J-C68fKacfjb21I1uCIaHRd80KezPqHTE9nnf6_YPsAiiuTjlq1qGvShGe5kGz229JqyL1XbfSF9u55394mnm59i9KqBFkE8Ocz0Ych4gyles6omzt1PNvfi" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; clear: left; color: #993300; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-decoration-line: none;"><img alt="" data-original-height="306" data-original-width="466" height="263" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgYcom_1Md2lnImZ9OX01c0qwzSJC1PATZS3uY0ggmTSFZUh1x7Njt1uMGhvUT7J-C68fKacfjb21I1uCIaHRd80KezPqHTE9nnf6_YPsAiiuTjlq1qGvShGe5kGz229JqyL1XbfSF9u55394mnm59i9KqBFkE8Ocz0Ych4gyles6omzt1PNvfi=w400-h263" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background: rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 1px solid rgb(238, 238, 238); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1) 1px 1px 5px; padding: 5px; position: relative;" width="400" /></a></div>Irony isn’t dead. In fact, it’s a living yet intangible part of the odd vibes that abound after the disasters of the worst human assumptions being acted upon. It feels like some smirking ghost at the side of the road laughing at us while we scratch our heads wondering what happened to our best-laid plans. Occasionally, it takes decades for some ironies to become revealed, noticed, observed, as in what, I think, was some of a barely noted reversal of mainstream attitudes about the right and wrong ways of making music. In the early Sixties, around the time of the British Invasion, I remember all sorts of cartoons and jokes about citizens and music fans attempting to commit suicide when they were exposed to the vocal styles of Jagger, Dylan, or a good number of gruff, nasally singers in the pop world. I remember the Rolling Stones’ appearance on the old Hollywood Palace variety show on ABC in 1964.<p></p><p>Hosted by Dean Martin, who was either entirely drunk and on his fourth sheet to the wind or doing a brilliant impersonation of a stumbling sot, The Stones performed their songs for the first time to an American TV audience, an historic event enhanced by Martin’s slurred insults to the British band. There was a trampoline act at mid-show, I remember, a circus act that had a leotard-clad family doing impressive tricks of the bouncing variety. When they were done, Martin came on stage again and announced that the elder man in the troupe was the father of the Rolling Stones and had been trying to kill himself with this trampoline act for years. That was a real gasser. Why the hate? The answer was obvious. The Stones were reintroducing America to a native art, black music, that it had all but forgotten about and found the renditions by the Rolling Stones of classic blues and soul songs alien, offensive, immoral and dangerous. It wasn’t good singing and offensive to the idea of music! It wasn’t even music.</p><p><span style="clear: right; float: right; font-family: times; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="488" data-original-width="712" height="219" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiEB5PPT4_QKmf3QfaLp3qfUjHYaMcW-WEdpCBUmBqmmg2Iit4FdWvThlEyvJTH8AYgohgKyoQ29hkQaxEWa1yXjxlQ7MHdQbKCTr-c0fz5vt7dvGo-VyVYnwvnOuUGkhDwCHmLcIUyEYLGCeE7Js2gvtQweKEOPcBzDSzh9fzB6QkWPs_diR_i" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background: rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 1px solid rgb(238, 238, 238); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1) 1px 1px 5px; padding: 5px; position: relative;" width="320" /></span>Somewhere along the line all the stoned hippies and rebellious teens grew up, got jobs, had families, and in effect became both their parents and THE MAN, and the same gag now substitutes MOR performers like Dionne Warwick, Michael Bolton, Michael McDonald, and some others for the old guard. These folks can certainly sing but the kind of music they make is antithetical to the true liberating and expressive poetry of what REAL music is. Authenticity as criteria for judgment (an ever-vague and elusive concept) has advanced over technical competence and romantically “pretty” offerings. I have had this debate on both sides over the decades: first with my parents, aunts, uncles, and school teachers defending Dylan’s music and especially his singing; and through the decades arguing with young people that boy bands, pop tunesters like Dionne Warwick and slow jam funk were criminally commercial junk that was without conviction or soul.</p></div></div></div><div class="separator" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: #fff9ee; clear: both; color: #222222; text-align: center;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiEB5PPT4_QKmf3QfaLp3qfUjHYaMcW-WEdpCBUmBqmmg2Iit4FdWvThlEyvJTH8AYgohgKyoQ29hkQaxEWa1yXjxlQ7MHdQbKCTr-c0fz5vt7dvGo-VyVYnwvnOuUGkhDwCHmLcIUyEYLGCeE7Js2gvtQweKEOPcBzDSzh9fzB6QkWPs_diR_i" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; clear: left; color: #993300; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></span></div><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0;" /><br /></span></span><p style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222;"></p><p style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; text-align: justify;"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: #e7f3ff; color: #050505;"><span style="font-family: times;">.</span></span></p>TED BURKEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16610296721891201100noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7435571045780908729.post-54270558499825104052023-07-22T21:53:00.000-07:002023-07-22T21:53:22.387-07:00MUSIC I HEARD ON MY BIRTHDAY<p> </p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17.5px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Released in 1969, the <b>Rolling Stones'</b><i><b> </b>Let It Bleed</i> is the centerpiece of my round up of favorite albums. It's a grand crescendo of the styles, personas, and attitudes they've been developing in the years before this, easily displaying less a fusion of acoustic folk and blues traditions than an early Americanish "blend" of the plugged in and unplugged traditions. It's fair to say that every element of sound we hear sounds as if it's always been there, perfectly formed, waiting </span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; animation-name: none !important; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17.5px; transition-property: none !important; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><a style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; animation-name: none !important; color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none !important;" tabindex="-1"></a></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17.5px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">to be discovered. Jagger is in peak form as a vocalist--there seems little in the way of traditional and more contemporary styles at the time he couldn't make his own--and his lyrics were never better, subtler, wittier, more British eccentric oddball. In an interview some time ago in Rolling Stone, Mailer found fine writing in the lyrics of "Live With Me" when the interviewer played him this record, praising the baroque and telling detail, the scene shifting line to line, the quick outlines of an upper class family's secret insanity fully exposed. The only track that doesn't work is "You Can't Always Get What You Want", intended seemingly as a grand , showstopping statement with just bit of philosophy delivered in the chorus. Overwrought, drawn out, very slow, anticlimatic, Jagger's singing uncharacteristically falls flat here--he sounds winded --and the not-quite surreal gibberish he usually excels at suffers in a determination to be "poetic".</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17.5px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Theoretically the <b>Blind Faith</b> super group, comprised of Eric Clapton,Steve Winwood, Ginger Baker and Rick Gretch, should have worked, as they brought a demonstrated array of talents to the fold around instrumental chops, vocal strength and in songwriting especially. Though commonly felt by many to be a failure at the time of release, the lone Blind Faith studio release yielded an impressive number of all time gems--"Can't Find My Way Home", "Presence of the Lord", 'Well All Right". Even lesser material such as the structurally awkward "Had to Cry </span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; animation-name: none !important; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17.5px; transition-property: none !important; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><a style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; animation-name: none !important; color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none !important;" tabindex="-1"></a></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17.5px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Today" and Ginger Baker's everybody-gets-a-solo excursion "Dow What You Like" provide sufficient joy. The Baker tune especially is worthwhile for Clapton's guitar solo, which to myhears has him revealing , maybe, a bit of influence from Mike Bloomfield's solo on "East West". The reason for abandoning this project would seem to be the expected issues of drugs, egos, and most likely that their hearts just weren't into it. A shame, they could have been one of the best.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17.5px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Miles Davis </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17.5px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> is known as a man with great taste in highlighting the work of great sax players in his bands--Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Sam Rivers, Sonny Rollins. Add Sonny Stitt. Often derided as a knock off Bird, a grossly unfair charge, Stitt is shown here as lyrically expressive, technically sublime and engagingly melodic improviser for establishes his ideas of bebop chromaticism to the music's superb body of energy. Davis, in fine form here with his </span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; animation-name: none !important; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17.5px; transition-property: none !important; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><a style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; animation-name: none !important; color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none !important;" tabindex="-1"></a></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17.5px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">brief statements, quick , surgically inserted note clusters and his pure, nearly vibratoless tone --not to mention his genius use of space between his solos--has made it working habit to pare his minimalist expressiviseness against busier second voices like Coltrane and later John McLaughlin. With his band, with peerless support from alto and tenor saxophones, Wynton Kelly, piano, Paul Chambers, bass, and Jimmy Cobb, drums--we have Stitt in that position. His choruses are choice, crowded but not crowding. Recorded sometime during the 1960s, according to some vague notes on the CD.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17.5px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I went looking for a relevant live set by a great fusion band to post here and decided to post this very elegant and , yes, at times searing live set from the<b> Gary Burton Quarte</b>t , <i>IN CONCERT</i>, featuring an early appearence by the late guitarist Larry Coryell, who man consider the man most responsible for laying a foundation for the jazz fusion to come. In any respect, this record hasn't aged at all since it's its release in 1968--that are no ugly fuzz tones , fake sitars or </span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; animation-name: none !important; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17.5px; transition-property: none !important; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><a style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; animation-name: none !important; color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none !important;" tabindex="-1"></a></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17.5px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">faux poetic-philosophical lyrics one needs to rationalize about--but is , rather, a vivid statement of what a innovative unit had been up to that moment and being able to reimagine their inventions yet again. The rhythm section of Steve Swallow on bass and Bob Moses on drums, navigate a variety of musical ideas and rhythms, buoying the remarkable contrasts between primary improvisers Coryell and Burton. LC's blues intonations seamlessly merge with rapid fire bebop complexity and an unfailing classicist precision, the same no less from Burton, who makes his percussive instrument reveal tones, undertones, and shades in a rapid flurry that might make you think of the dense fabric of an Art Tatum solo. A band remarkable that helped clear the ground for a stretch of great jazz rock.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17.5px;">Side two of <b>Mountain</b>'s 1971 release <i>Flowers of Evil</i> is live for nearly forty minutes and is pretty much the Leslie West Show. West wasn't the most fluid of blues rock guitarists--nearly anyone else could play circles around him in terms of speedy cliches and such--but what he had was phrase, taste and tone and a killer hand vibrato , featured here oh so brilliantly on the Dream Sequence segment of the side: "Dreams of Milk and Honey" by Leslie West and Mountain, from the second side of their album </span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; animation-name: none !important; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17.5px; transition-property: none !important;"><a class="x1i10hfl xjbqb8w x6umtig x1b1mbwd xaqea5y xav7gou x9f619 x1ypdohk xt0psk2 xe8uvvx xdj266r x11i5rnm xat24cr x1mh8g0r xexx8yu x4uap5 x18d9i69 xkhd6sd x16tdsg8 x1hl2dhg xggy1nq x1a2a7pz xt0b8zv x1fey0fg" href="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FFlowers-Evil-Mountain%2Fdp%2FB0000028OZ%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR1sLuW_nngN7bZjYWyyZZUSdmvf_LsTaelASbakIp8GtXWOqRY1-6ExiCI&h=AT22jpn-WXMP858upIr21PHws2fh74F_A4_GEvT1b7jysGi_AXaddXGEZvxDkDvg0nlFQ1zbMAz54adRSJlLDrSa3dUwFacBa3TxaY4qx-P2na8HPuLGEpU6iUCYG3m2sQ&__tn__=-UK-R&c[0]=AT2xwXjzLRixzGdyWUBEhRMDxvUhvfKuOU3sP3DgeG_LOS8O-6LYs0g7OntmI3R41GjHB05BAaFvfxZKk58KFfgTR27NpFCza4UCTkNPGnpsjd672vF48iMtR4AASbjeIFAphhw2isSV9f5T0NrIh0XsMftzLkqWRX2etno" rel="nofollow noreferrer" role="link" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; animation-name: none !important; background-color: transparent; border-color: initial; border-style: initial; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer; display: inline; font-family: inherit; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-align: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; touch-action: manipulation; transition-property: none !important;" tabindex="0" target="_blank"><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; animation-name: none !important; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none !important;"><i style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; animation-name: none !important; transition-property: none !important;">Flowers of Evil</i></span></a></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17.5px;">, recorded at the Fillmore East in NYC in 1971. It is one of the great moments of Hard Rock guitar, with a great, lumbering riff that distorts and buzzes on the low strings with crushing bends and harmonics squealing at some raging pitch that might make one think of natural calamity, a force that cannot be withstood. West, never the most fluid guitarist, had, all the same, a touch, a feel, a sense of how to mix the sweet obbligato figures he specialized in with the more brutal affront of power chords and critically nasty riffing. The smarter among us can theorize about the virtues of amplified instrumentation attaining a threshold of sweetness after the sheer volume wraps you in a numbing cacophony, but for purposes here it suffices to say, with a wink, that is a kind of music you </span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; animation-name: none !important; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17.5px; transition-property: none !important;"><i style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; animation-name: none !important; transition-property: none !important;">get</i></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17.5px;"> and accept on its own truncated terms, or ignore outright. There is an aesthetic at work here, but it might as well come to saying that you had to be me, at my age, in 1971 when I was struck by this performance to understand a little of why I haven't tossed the disc into the dustbin. He is in absolute control of his Les Paul Jr., and here he combines with bassist Felix Pappalardi and drummer Corky Laing in some theme and variation that accomplishes what critic Robert Christgau has suggested is the secret of great rock and roll music, repetition without tedium. There are no thousand-note blitzkriegs, no tricky time signatures, just tight playing, a riffy, catchy, power-chording wonder of rock guitar essential-ism. I've been listening to this track on and off since I graduated from high school, and it cracks me up that my obsession with this particular masterpiece of rock guitar minimalism caused a number of my friends to refer to me listening yet again to my personal "national anthem."</span></p>TED BURKEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16610296721891201100noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7435571045780908729.post-25193482459315715612023-07-17T14:49:00.001-07:002023-07-17T17:22:51.464-07:00a CD review from 1976, the genuinely faddish Axe squats for the crowd<p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #727272; font-size: 10.5pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #727272; font-size: 10.5pt;"><b><i>IT'S A CIRCUS WORLD</i></b> -Axe (1976</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: justify;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg8A7-KnMUTwgI4tfO5XdgCdY_3OYTuPPQGIrrbhlYzz8MmSm18tO1DyvrIhlpAZxbUBBgjL8tSGw3wV8zdNOAqfV23UtIHPZJopRT6BxvsWwS92ezK598a_on8BlHqjhg2lsOsnszBgBaxQpMezaN_EoRPreszV3VKjTe90dw7NpsoNegjtEsf_j8gZyiX" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="886" data-original-width="1000" height="283" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg8A7-KnMUTwgI4tfO5XdgCdY_3OYTuPPQGIrrbhlYzz8MmSm18tO1DyvrIhlpAZxbUBBgjL8tSGw3wV8zdNOAqfV23UtIHPZJopRT6BxvsWwS92ezK598a_on8BlHqjhg2lsOsnszBgBaxQpMezaN_EoRPreszV3VKjTe90dw7NpsoNegjtEsf_j8gZyiX=w320-h283" width="320" /></a><span style="color: var(--cib-color-foreground-neutral-primary); font-family: -apple-system, Roboto, SegoeUI, "Segoe UI", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, "Microsoft YaHei", "Meiryo UI", Meiryo, "Arial Unicode MS", sans-serif; font-size: var(--cib-type-body2-font-size); font-weight: var(--cib-type-body2-font-weight); text-align: left;">Axe is a rare example of Sixties psychedelia that ranks with the best of the Blues Magoos, 13th Floor Elevators, The Music Machine, The Count Five, The Electric Prunes, The Seeds, The Leaves, The Ambouy Dukes, The Barbarians, The Peanut Butter Conspiracy, Frijid Pink, David Axelrod and other obscure bands that have been shelved with other rock arcana. Psychedelic music occurred in the late Sixties when drugs, most notably LSD and other chemicals that transfigured one’s perception into a parabola of surrealism, became the latest fashion among youth culture. Many young rock bands flirted with the effects of these substances, and in their need to make their music more than throwaway pop culture (a symptom from the release of Sgt. Pepper), looked to express their “insights” and “understandings” in song. The results were naive lyrics about love, peace, the search for inner essences, fantasies about hijacking starships, the effusiveness of nature, paens against violence and in general expressions about the need to escape from the bummer of reality. To amplify the themes and the art-consciousness of the music, there were guitar solos with fuzz tone effects, sitar playing, classical quotes, serious singing that sounds like the mewling of a spoiled kid and so on. Sixties psychedelia, for all its seriousness and cerebral assertions, was a time of innocence that’s been lost forever to history. Those bands’ efforts were the prattling of a child playing with advanced concepts that the child was incapable of understanding. Psychedelia hasn’t been lost completely. Axis, the former backup band for Rick Derringer, are on the surface one of the many competent but undistinguished heavy metal bands vying for Nugent’s spotlight, but lyrically they’ve placed themselves in a cosmic time warp, distinct from Nugent’s machismo or hard rock’s penchant for cock pride themes. On “Juggler,” lead guitarist/songwriter Danny Johnson sings: “Time is like a monster/ … .it can never be stopped/Turn it all around, turn it upside down/You just can’t break God’s clock.” Who else but a child of the Sixties psychedelic naturalism would have the gall to deliver a fractured sermon to an audience that expects its heavy metal lyrics to be as Hobbesian as the music itself? In " Ray’s Electric Farm” (a perfect title), Johnson posits the worn out notion that he can find an earthly utopia: "I’m going down to Ray’s electric farm/Where the nights last for days and/Guitars grow on the lawn … " Johnson is a visionary who thinks that rock and roll ought to be organic and free of bills. Presumably, all a rocker need do on the “electric farm” is plug into the nearest bush and let the music rip. Johnson has a subversive personality at heart, a mind that seeks to undermine the murder mentality nihilism that dominates hard rock and replace it with the cosmic effusiveness that rock audiences repudiated long ago in favor of either nostalgia or cynicism .Johnson is a dumb kid who has assumed the piousness of progressive rock bands like Yes and Kansas and is delivering the message in plainer language through a more understood motif. It probably won’t be long when Johnson and Axis will have their lyrics on the lips of hard rock fans. The thought of it should terrify all of us who’ve remained sane up to this moment.</span></div><div aria-hidden="true" aria-live="polite" class="hidden" style="color: #111111; font-family: -apple-system, Roboto, SegoeUI, "Segoe UI", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, "Microsoft YaHei", "Meiryo UI", Meiryo, "Arial Unicode MS", sans-serif; font-size: 14px; height: 1px; inset-inline-start: -2px; overflow: hidden; position: absolute; text-align: justify; top: 0px; width: 1px;">Received message. Here is a possible rewrite with half of the adjectives removed: Axe is a rare example of Sixties psychedelia that ranks with the best of the Blues Magoos, 13th Floor Elevators, The Music Machine, The Count Five, The Electric Prunes, The Seeds, The Leaves, The Ambouy Dukes, The Barbarians, The Peanut Butter Conspiracy, Frijid Pink, David Axelrod and other obscure bands that have been shelved with other rock arcana. Psychedelic music occurred in the late Sixties when drugs, most notably LSD and other chemicals that transfigured one’s perception into a parabola of surrealism, became the latest fashion among youth culture. Many young rock bands flirted with the effects of these substances, and in their need to make their music more than throwaway pop culture (a symptom from the release of Sgt. Pepper), looked to express their “insights” and “understandings” in song. The results were naive lyrics about love, peace, the search for inner essences, fantasies about hijacking starships, the effusiveness of nature, paens against violence and in general expressions about the need to escape from the bummer of reality. To amplify the themes and the art-consciousness of the music, there were guitar solos with fuzz tone effects, sitar playing, classical quotes, serious singing that sounds like the mewling of a spoiled kid and so on. Sixties psychedelia, for all its seriousness and cerebral assertions, was a time of innocence that’s been lost forever to history. Those bands’ efforts were the prattling of a child playing with advanced concepts that the child was incapable of understanding. Psychedelia hasn’t been lost completely. Axis, the former backup band for Rick Derringer, are on the surface one of the many competent but undistinguished heavy metal bands vying for Nugent's spotlight, but lyrically they’ve placed themselves in a cosmic time warp, distinct from Nugent’s machismo or hard rock’s penchant for cock pride themes. On “Juggler,” lead guitarist/songwriter Danny Johnson sings: “Time is like a monster/ … .it can never be stopped/Turn it all around, turn it upside down/You just can’t break God’s clock.” Who else but a child of the Sixties psychedelic naturalism would have the gall to deliver a fractured sermon to an audience that expects its heavy metal lyrics to be as Hobbesian as the music itself? In " Ray’s Electric Farm” (a perfect title), Johnson posits the worn out notion that he can find an earthly utopia: "I’m going down to Ray’s electric farm/Where the nights last for days and/Guitars grow on the lawn … " Johnson is a visionary who thinks that rock and roll ought to be organic and free of bills. Presumably, all a rocker need do on the “electric farm” is plug into the nearest bush and let the music rip. Johnson has a subversive personality at heart, a mind that seeks to undermine the murder mentality nihilism that dominates hard rock and replace it with the cosmic effusiveness that rock audiences repudiated long ago in favor of either nostalgia or cynicism .Johnson is a dumb kid who has assumed the piousness of progressive rock bands like Yes and Kansas and is delivering the message in plainer language through a more understood motif. It probably won’t be long when Johnson and Axis will have their lyrics on the lips of hard rock fans. The thought of it should terrify all of us who’ve remained sane up to this moment.</div><div class="content footer" style="align-items: flex-start; border-top: 1px solid var(--cib-color-stroke-neutral-primary); color: #111111; display: flex; flex-direction: row; font-family: -apple-system, Roboto, SegoeUI, "Segoe UI", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, "Microsoft YaHei", "Meiryo UI", Meiryo, "Arial Unicode MS", sans-serif; font-size: var(--cib-type-body2-font-size); font-variation-settings: var(--cib-type-body2-font-variation-settings); justify-content: flex-end; line-height: var(--cib-type-body2-line-height); min-height: var(--cib-type-body2-line-height); padding: 0px; text-align: justify; user-select: text; word-break: break-word;"><cib-turn-counter color-state="green" style="align-items: center; display: flex; flex-direction: row; flex-shrink: 0; gap: 6px; grid-area: 1 / 2 / 2 / 3; margin-inline-start: 12px; margin: 9px 14px;"><div class="text" style="display: flex; font-size: var(--cib-type-body1-stronger-font-size); font-variation-settings: var(--cib-type-body1-stronger-font-variation-settings); font-weight: var(--cib-type-body1-stronger-font-weight); gap: 3px; line-height: var(--cib-type-body1-stronger-line-height);"></div></cib-turn-counter></div><span style="font-family: Work Sans;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #727272; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></div></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><p></p>TED BURKEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16610296721891201100noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7435571045780908729.post-52941218998482399552023-06-29T11:07:00.002-07:002023-06-29T11:07:07.686-07:00WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN AND HOW IT TURNED OUT<p style="text-align: justify;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiujuaSm-mdftF7RQ6Tqqd9WFgyTR6Fqxn8w1TMC37mU5eaGbNEOdN4kpren48n7D12cuuhgxuGL33ORMrOsz5WS35hXQC6JLErpz3y4J8Nr2vb5X6_0Vy18fh7Aroxh167Tnn11JcAEOehj2vFGO6CbCJwxIYTaJ2p7DWriiYm5C2EEJ35sB1dJnUkMCUe" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="820" data-original-width="820" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiujuaSm-mdftF7RQ6Tqqd9WFgyTR6Fqxn8w1TMC37mU5eaGbNEOdN4kpren48n7D12cuuhgxuGL33ORMrOsz5WS35hXQC6JLErpz3y4J8Nr2vb5X6_0Vy18fh7Aroxh167Tnn11JcAEOehj2vFGO6CbCJwxIYTaJ2p7DWriiYm5C2EEJ35sB1dJnUkMCUe=w400-h400" width="400" /></a></div><br /> <span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 17.5px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Theoretically, the Blind Faith super group should have worked, as they brought a demonstrated array of talents to the fold around instrumental chops, vocal strength and in songwriting especially. Though commonly felt by many to be a failure at the time of release, the lone Blind Faith studio release yielded an impressive number of all time gems--” Can't Find My Way Home”, “Presence of the Lord”, 'Well All Right”. Even lesser material such as the structurally awkward “Had to Cry </span><span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 17.5px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><a style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit;" tabindex="-1"></a></span><span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 17.5px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Today” and Ginger Baker's everybody-gets-a-solo excursion “Dow What You Like” provide sufficient joy. The Baker tune especially is worthwhile for Clapton's guitar solo, which to my ears has him revealing, maybe, a bit of influence from Mike Bloomfield's solo on “East West”. The reason for abandoning this project would seem to be the expected issues of drugs, egos, and most likely that their hearts just weren't into it. A shame, they could have been one of the best.</span><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 17.5px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 17.5px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">+++</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 17.5px; text-align: start; white-space-collapse: preserve;">John Lennon had a gr</span><span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 17.5px; text-align: start; white-space-collapse: preserve;">udge against bandmate Paul McCartney , so he wrote a song about it , laying everything out except Sir McCartney's name. As an issue of disrespect, it's in a class by itself, but the howler of this whole enterprise centers around the most quoted lyric, “…the only thing you did was yesterday..." The longer view of the Beatles reveals PM's contributions to the creative surges was, in fact, profound, at which point it </span><span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 17.5px; text-align: start; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><a style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit;" tabindex="-1"></a></span><span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 17.5px; text-align: start; white-space-collapse: preserve;">makes me consider the idea that McCartney would likely have been a pop star of some sort without Lennon. Lennon, always a raw dog who improved vastly as a tune smith , singer, and lyricist due to his association with McCartney, would likely have had a rougher go of it.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ho3bwAm2QBI" width="320" youtube-src-id="Ho3bwAm2QBI"></iframe><span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 17.5px; text-align: start; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"></p><br /><span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 17.5px; text-align: start; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span><p></p>TED BURKEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16610296721891201100noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7435571045780908729.post-60068225420295883272023-06-18T22:26:00.004-07:002023-06-18T22:26:27.043-07:00GUITAR RIFFS<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhYHACIX9RWumOQlAc9R6WKQa7GbY_10cFH2jnl31PxS6uqiNHkX6cdD7vSYHImAbNngbK383LTXH99mT0VLrtyEeONPW3ZlfZVDQW_MCqdEwIcol-C9cSogtNPVUVEfq9gWs4_uGWcxj_NWbiom1VdE77MAcNCGd53iqUVnyfR_x3IPvFufNq2EVnpxabj" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="357" data-original-width="717" height="199" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhYHACIX9RWumOQlAc9R6WKQa7GbY_10cFH2jnl31PxS6uqiNHkX6cdD7vSYHImAbNngbK383LTXH99mT0VLrtyEeONPW3ZlfZVDQW_MCqdEwIcol-C9cSogtNPVUVEfq9gWs4_uGWcxj_NWbiom1VdE77MAcNCGd53iqUVnyfR_x3IPvFufNq2EVnpxabj=w400-h199" width="400" /></a></div><br /><span style="color: var(--cib-color-foreground-neutral-primary); font-weight: var(--cib-type-body2-font-weight);"><span style="font-family: Playfair Display;">Old guitar riffs do not die as long as I live, as they are the soundtrack of many routines and daily walks up the stairs to work, treks to the stores, adventures in scattered beach area parking lots, the journey to the forbidden and familiar knowledge behind a girlfriend’s front door. Or the entrance to a doctor’s office, for that matter. I had often joked that each of us requires a “signature riff”, a power chord mini-anthem ourselves that we have on constant mental standby as we go about our routine tasks and past times; I often imagine the open assault of “Mississippi Queen” commanding a room’s attention once I enter if only to perform the mundane obligation of paying a gas bill. The theme song changes, to be sure–there is no channel changing that’s faster or more assured than what goes on in the car radio dial of the mind–and there are those days when what I carry in my imagined soundtrack in my imagined movie are the genteel whispers of Paul Simon’s three-hankie whining, the grating, rusted scraping of early Velvet Underground, the guitar amnesia of Larry Coryell. It varies according to mood and what lies on the to-do list that day. (Not that I have a to-do list.)</span></span><p></p><cib-shared serp-slot="none" style="background-attachment: unset; background-clip: unset; background-image: unset; background-origin: unset; background-position: unset; background-repeat: unset; background-size: unset; border-radius: unset; color: #111111; padding: unset;"><div class="message"><div aria-hidden="true" class="content" style="display: flex; flex-direction: column; font-variation-settings: var(--cib-type-body2-font-variation-settings); font-weight: var(--cib-type-body2-font-weight); line-height: var(--cib-type-body2-line-height); min-height: var(--cib-type-body2-line-height); padding: 10px 16px; user-select: text; word-break: break-word;" tabindex="0"><div class="ac-container ac-adaptiveCard" style="display: flex; flex-direction: column; font-variation-settings: var(--cib-type-body2-font-variation-settings); font-weight: var(--cib-type-body2-font-weight); line-height: var(--cib-type-body2-line-height); margin: 0px; padding: 0px; user-select: text; word-break: break-word;"><div class="ac-textBlock" style="color: var(--cib-color-foreground-neutral-primary); display: flex; flex-direction: column;"><span style="font-family: Playfair Display;"><p style="font-variation-settings: var(--cib-type-body2-font-variation-settings); font-weight: var(--cib-type-body2-font-weight); line-height: var(--cib-type-body2-line-height); margin: 12px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; user-select: text; word-break: break-word;">It’s what I remember to get around to accomplish, get over with or finish from an earlier, half-hearted attempt. I am not so organized. I am a fifty-eight-year-old man, almost fifty-nine, who has the personal habits of, say, your average 17-year-old just in college, in his first off-campus apartment with a room of his own). That said, the last few days have been one of stupid-making idleness since I tripped in my apartment earlier in the week and ran my already-game knee into something hard and unforgiving. The last four days have been missed work, icing the swollen knee --no breaks or fractures, thank goodness-- and diving into an old record collection. Some of this stuff does not sound so bad.</p><p style="font-variation-settings: var(--cib-type-body2-font-variation-settings); font-weight: var(--cib-type-body2-font-weight); line-height: var(--cib-type-body2-line-height); margin: 12px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; user-select: text; word-break: break-word;">Robin Trower, for example; the former Procol Harum guitarist is very possibly the only Hendrix inspired fret specialist who fully established his own distinct approach to guitar melodrama while still maintaining the ethereal quality of his Mentor’s style. Twice Removed from Yesterday, his debut was a wonderful tone poem start to finish emphasizing mood and atmospherics by way of the dreamier parts of Electric Ladyland. His choice of Jim Dewar ex of Stone the Crows for a lead vocalist was inspired a gritty soulful belter whose lower register gravitas gave the core idyllisism of the lyrics something very solid to wrap around. “I Can’t Wait Much Longer” is that rare breed of power ballad that manages to make you feel the ache of heart that hungers for a love that won’t reciprocate.</p><p style="font-variation-settings: var(--cib-type-body2-font-variation-settings); font-weight: var(--cib-type-body2-font-weight); line-height: var(--cib-type-body2-line-height); margin: 12px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; user-select: text; word-break: break-word;"><i>Bridge of Sighs</i> veers from the mystical tone and lands on a hard rock style with a solid grounding in R&B grooves: solid riffs and rhythms charging solos very fluid guitar work. Where the first album was strong on thick overlays of guitar tones and coloration to produce a spaced-out elegance Bridge shifts more towards hard rock and rhythm and blues up-tempo hooky riffs and blockbuster vocals. Dewar and Trower are as fine match of lead singer and guitar hero as we’ve seen emerge from the cantankerous era of Sports Arena rock as finely twined on production and material on these two releases as Robert Plant and Jimmy Page were on Led Zeppelin’s entire body of work or more appropriately as Paul Kossoff guitar and Paul Rodgers vocals were in their seminal blues-rock band Free. The secret might be that the two of them are aware of each other’s strengths and weaknesses–they complement each other with nuance style a bit of emotional reserve that makes the tension of their best songs here–“Day of the Eagle” “The Fool and Me” “Too Rolling Stone”–continually satisfying. Trower is a blues guitarist at heart and knows the value of fluidity and restraint.</p></span></div></div></div></div></cib-shared><div aria-hidden="true" aria-live="polite" class="hidden" style="color: #111111; height: 1px; inset-inline-start: -2px; overflow: hidden; position: absolute; text-align: justify; top: 0px; width: 1px;"><span style="font-family: Playfair Display;">Received message. Here is the corrected text: Old guitar riffs do not die as long as I live, as they are the soundtrack of many routines and daily walks up the stairs to work, treks to the stores, adventures in scattered beach area parking lots, the journey to the forbidden and familiar knowledge behind a girlfriend's front door. Or the entrance to a doctor's office, for that matter. I had often joked that each of us requires a “signature riff”, a power chord mini-anthem ourselves that we have on constant mental standby as we go about our routine tasks and past times; I often imagine the open assault of “Mississippi Queen” commanding a room's attention once I enter if only to perform the mundane obligation of paying a gas bill. The theme song changes, to be sure--there is no channel changing that's faster or more assured than what goes on in the car radio dial of the mind--and there are those days when what I carry in my imagined soundtrack in my imagined movie are the genteel whispers of Paul Simon's three-hankie whining, the grating, rusted scraping of early Velvet Underground, the guitar amnesia of Larry Coryell. It varies according to mood and what lies on the to-do list that day. (Not that I actually have a to-do list. It's actually what I remember to get around to accomplish, get over with or finish from an earlier, half-hearted attempt. I am not so organized. I am a fifty-eight-year-old man, almost fifty-nine, who has the personal habits of, say, your average 17-year-old just in college, in his first off-campus apartment with a room of his own). That said, the last few days have been one of stupid-making idleness since I tripped in my apartment earlier in the week and ran my already-game knee into something hard and unforgiving. The last four days have been missed work, icing the swollen knee --no breaks or fractures, thank goodness-- and diving into an old record collection. Some of this stuff does not sound so bad; Robin Trower, for example; the former Procol Harum guitarist is very possibly the only Hendrix inspired fret specialist who fully established his own distinct approach to guitar melodrama while still maintaining the ethereal quality of his Mentor's style. Twice Removed from Yesterday, his debut was a wonderful tone poem start to finish emphasizing mood and atmospherics by way of the dreamier parts of Electric Ladyland. His choice of Jim Dewar ex of Stone the Crows for a lead vocalist was inspired a gritty soulful belter whose lower register gravitas gave the core idyllism of the lyrics something very solid to wrap around. "I Can't Wait Much Longer" is that rare breed of power ballad that actually manages to make you feel the ache of heart that hungers for a love that won't reciprocate. Bridge of Sighs veers from the mystical tone and lands on a hard rock style with a solid grounding in R&B grooves: solid riffs and rhythms charging solos very fluid guitar work. Where the first album was strong on thick overlays of guitar tones and coloration to produce a spaced-out elegance Bridge shifts more towards hard rock and rhythm and blues up-tempo hooky riffs and blockbuster vocals. Dewar and Trower are as fine match of lead singer and guitar hero as we've seen emerge from the cantankerous era of Sports Arena rock as finely twined on production and material on these two releases as Robert Plant and Jimmy Page were on Led Zeppelin's entire body of work or more appropriately as Paul Kossoff guitar and Paul Rodgers vocals were in their seminal blues-rock band Free. The secret might be that the two of them are aware of each other's strengths and weaknesses--they compliment each other with nuance style a bit of emotional reserve that makes the tension of their best songs here--"Day of the Eagle" "The Fool and Me" "Too Rolling Stone"--continually satisfying. Trower is a blues guitarist at heart and knows the value of fluidity and restraint.</span></div><div class="content footer" style="align-items: flex-start; border-top: 1px solid var(--cib-color-stroke-neutral-primary); color: #111111; display: flex; flex-direction: row; font-family: -apple-system, Roboto, SegoeUI, "Segoe UI", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, "Microsoft YaHei", "Meiryo UI", Meiryo, "Arial Unicode MS", sans-serif; font-size: var(--cib-type-body2-font-size); font-variation-settings: var(--cib-type-body2-font-variation-settings); justify-content: flex-end; line-height: var(--cib-type-body2-line-height); min-height: var(--cib-type-body2-line-height); padding: 0px; text-align: justify; user-select: text; word-break: break-word;"><cib-turn-counter color-state="green" style="align-items: center; display: flex; flex-direction: row; flex-shrink: 0; gap: 6px; grid-area: 1 / 2 / 2 / 3; margin-inline-start: 12px; margin: 9px 14px;"><div class="text" style="display: flex; font-size: var(--cib-type-body1-stronger-font-size); font-variation-settings: var(--cib-type-body1-stronger-font-variation-settings); font-weight: var(--cib-type-body1-stronger-font-weight); gap: 3px; line-height: var(--cib-type-body1-stronger-line-height);"></div></cib-turn-counter></div>TED BURKEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16610296721891201100noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7435571045780908729.post-9055511589421882062023-06-18T10:08:00.002-07:002023-06-18T10:08:14.317-07:00SONGS OF SUMMER<p> </p><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-family: times;">Everyone hates the fact that summer is brief and fall comes upon us much too quickly. In 1966,The Happenings had something to say about that common complaint.' See You in September” is actually rather cheery, with a narrator who says he will pass this way again and enjoy another summer vacation with whomever he's talking to. The best bud, a girlfriend, or boyfriend, straight, gay or cordial, the specifics don't matter in this slight recitation because the background the lyrics set up is the wishful thinking optimism of an earlier time when some pop music was innocent intentionally and meant to shield a listener for three minutes or less against the cultural convulsions that were about to dominate the 60s.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7JQS6H2AXdM" width="320" youtube-src-id="7JQS6H2AXdM"></iframe></span></div><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505;">Unlike the Happenings, who took the end of summer as a matter of life and fully expected to have the same kind of fun in the summer still ahead of them. Fully optimistic and even cheerful with the farewells to the friend they will see again. The Doors, on the other hand, were grim, gloomy, moody, sullen and maybe a hint sexy for the 14-17 year olds so eager to see through the veil and get some truth. The end of summer was…the end. A recurring theme with these gentlemen. The</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505;"> Doors also rued the end of summer and the drowsily droned baritone, fashioned by Jim Morrison, wrote a song that made it seem as if this were the end of the world. Many have opined that this was a tune about the loss of youth and innocence and the eventual entrance into adulthood. Perhaps it is on some level, but the level is shallow and I say hooey. The end of summer meant a return to school, or that many teens would have to get jobs or move back in with their parents. Morrison was really decorating a banal displeasure with growing up with a sound that made it seem romantically apocalyptic.</span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4ZQWr7cF0eY" width="320" youtube-src-id="4ZQWr7cF0eY"></iframe></span></div><span style="font-family: times;"><br /><br /></span><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The intensely odd and self-concerned Arthur Lee of Love had seasonal matters on his mind as well in 1967. “Bummer in the Summer”, from their release </span><i style="color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Forever Change</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;">s, is a track both punkish and arty, nearly progressive in sound. It all works as Lee announces his discontinuous frustrations. A</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span style="font-family: times;"> summer fling that didn't quite work out. An odd and dynamic merging of Dylanesque talk singing and revved up chords that resemble Them's “Gloria,” this suggests the rap and hip hop styles that came years after it. If not rap, then “Walk this Way” from Aerosmith at least. The middle section with the piano pounding out chords that suggest a jazz inclination is among the many unexpected wonders on this brilliant record.</span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/UZCSJ317C8s" width="320" youtube-src-id="UZCSJ317C8s"></iframe></div><p></p>TED BURKEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16610296721891201100noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7435571045780908729.post-83165628168011500362023-06-16T11:18:00.003-07:002023-06-16T11:18:45.761-07:00LARRY CORYELL and MICHAEL URBANIAK LIVE<p style="text-align: justify;">I consider this a public service in posting this admittedly grainy YouTube feature of duets by two jazz masters who are beyond compare. It's a concert video of the late jazz guitar master Larry Coryell and the amazing Polish jazz-fusion violinist, originally released on VHS I believe that hasn't been released as a stand-alone disc. I pray someone will secure the rights and make it available. Coryell was a member of the original Super Guitar Trio with John McLaughlin and Paco de Lucia, and though his playing was frequently brilliant, he was often hobbled with flubs and miscues; it became obvious that LC's dependence on drugs and hooch lessened his skills, and he was replaced by the ever able Al diMeola. Coryell got clean and sober in 1981 and this effort, recorded in 1982, shows the difference. It's a remarkable performance, thanks in major portions to Urbaniak, whose skills as an improviser are second to none; his unhitched combining of styles ranging from Grapelli through Ponty and his mastery of idiom, technique and tonal nuance gives LC the colorful contrast. Urbaniak's improvisations are swift and melodic and, as with Coryell, seem without end in the configurations his long lines of notes form. Urbaniak as well, demonstrates he has a bass player's instincts and backs Coryell's ultra-virtuoso fantasias. Coryell at this time seems like a man with something to prove. Here the guitarist amply proves his point.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Gsr8bQGFntk" width="320" youtube-src-id="Gsr8bQGFntk"></iframe></div><br /><br /><p></p>TED BURKEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16610296721891201100noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7435571045780908729.post-66640326252825248522023-06-16T10:55:00.001-07:002023-06-16T10:55:15.611-07:00LET IT BLEED<div class="separator"><p style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqRAvPBXAvyHoHoxLUnhXkHE7kc0J0JwK1F-2AVyEtS_7JMtGQWuhFMlxKuIwdF8Fvef8kIH3CEzyEgPO_kpPsVKazPORS1BhFvePEzDEBYPdwKp9UoFLHL20wfgXrOKYp_8WqLXQbd0Ub3ThFspVJlvsnRhFJbUl8uW9PGyYnD20s_bRqP5icrESTsw/s447/LET%20IT%20BLEED.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="439" data-original-width="447" height="196" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqRAvPBXAvyHoHoxLUnhXkHE7kc0J0JwK1F-2AVyEtS_7JMtGQWuhFMlxKuIwdF8Fvef8kIH3CEzyEgPO_kpPsVKazPORS1BhFvePEzDEBYPdwKp9UoFLHL20wfgXrOKYp_8WqLXQbd0Ub3ThFspVJlvsnRhFJbUl8uW9PGyYnD20s_bRqP5icrESTsw/w200-h196/LET%20IT%20BLEED.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><br />Released in 1969, the Rolling Stones' <i>Let It Bleed </i>is the centerpiece of my round up of favorite albums. It's a grand crescendo of the styles, personas, and attitudes they had been developing in the years before this, easily displaying less a fusion of acoustic folk and blues traditions than an early Americanish “blend” of the plugged in and unplugged traditions. It's fair to say that every element of sound we hear sounds as if it's always been there, perfectly formed, waiting to be discovered. Jagger is in peak form --there seems little in the way of traditional and more contemporary styles at the time he couldn't make his own--and his lyrics were never better, subtler, wittier, more British eccentric oddball. In an interview, some time ago in Rolling Stone, Norman Mailer found fine writing in the lyrics of "Live With Me" when the interviewer played him this record, praising the baroque and telling detail, the scene shifting line to line, the quick outlines of an upper-class family's secret insanity fully exposed. He compared the song favorably with Evelyn Waugh's short stories. The remark that reveals another strand for Stones scholars to research, the bands' effortless merging of American blues with very British absurdity. The one track that doesn't work is "You Can't Always Get What You Want", intended seemingly as a grand , showstopping statement with just bit of philosophy delivered in the chorus. Overwrought, drawn out, very slow, anticlimactic, Jagger's singing uncharacteristically falls flat here--he sounds winded --and the surreal nonsequitors he usually excels at suffers in a determination to be “poetic”. Aside from the awkward presentation of this Big Statement, the idea of what was supposed to be the album's grand slam finale is based on a tired aphorism reminds us that even the sainted Rolling Stones can chase a bad idea as diligently as they can a good one.<p></p></div>TED BURKEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16610296721891201100noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7435571045780908729.post-50483010670960944472023-05-29T18:41:00.001-07:002023-05-29T18:41:24.067-07:00WAYNE SHORTER<p> </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEifCvjhJdKGt8wk4VhU8kJj5rRLlWDhO5kJ6FOFtlacWwwkn3k711y83AjAiMUa40chMCNEUE5xHiUu-3aODltJpsWmM2abr9g_-v7NH4X9aMWIG1DMM5y11UIMVURP-qbWGmhq1pOJPOkgJgWBLZu2EwsPw6SpHEhrVFdzU0bY9j90AejE33h6GNiafQ" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="529" data-original-width="549" height="617" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEifCvjhJdKGt8wk4VhU8kJj5rRLlWDhO5kJ6FOFtlacWwwkn3k711y83AjAiMUa40chMCNEUE5xHiUu-3aODltJpsWmM2abr9g_-v7NH4X9aMWIG1DMM5y11UIMVURP-qbWGmhq1pOJPOkgJgWBLZu2EwsPw6SpHEhrVFdzU0bY9j90AejE33h6GNiafQ=w640-h617" width="640" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p><br /></p><p>JuJu – Wayne Shorter (Blue Note)</p><p>Wayne Shorter – tenor sax / McCoy Tyner – piano / Reggie Workman – bass / Elvin Jones – drums</p><p>A 1964 session, sweetness, and light meet fire and deep-seated anxiety in seeming alternating breaths. Shorter is thoughtful, probing the moods of his ingeniously laid-out material with finesse that hints at more expressionistic playing to come–his tone always struck me as inner-directed–while the band delivers everything their names promise. Elvin Jones continues to be convinced that he is the greatest drummer in jazz history.</p><p><i>Sorcerer</i> – Miles Davis (Sony)</p><p>Sorcerer, the 1967 album from Miles Davis, has been in my CD player the last couple of days and, to pun badly, I have been more than a little entranced by how amazingly well these improvisers, all of whom are distinct and potentially dominating in ensemble efforts, work so cohesively as a group. There is a perfect kind of modal combustion here, with Miles Davis contrasting his spare and angular sense of improvisation with the formidable resourcefulness of this album’s principal ensemble, Wayne Shorter (saxophone), Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (double bass) and Tony Williams (drums). The music is an unusual combination of the unforced and the aggressive, resisting the temptation to either go slack in their pace or stray toward the harsh vicissitudes of anguished, strident experimentation, a pulsing course of off-accented rhythms, musical swaths of varying tones and colors, and ingenious interlacing between primary soloist Davis, Shorter and Hancock. Ensemble exploration at its peak, it seems, as the three of them actively listen to and anticipate each other’s ideas during the respective solo spots. This is what the great Davis groups did: find unexamined nuance and moods in the musical tones. Davis and Shorter offer up a few exquisite moments of dialogue as they answer, query, interrogate and respond to musical propositions put forth by the other. As great as the previous occupant in the saxophone chair had been, the redoubtable and effusively brilliant John Coltrane, Shorter was a better fit for Davis’s ideas for the ensemble at the time, 1967, when this disc was recorded. His solos are less galvanic than Coltrane’s were, more composed, filled with lithe and delicate phrases , wonderfully respondent to the rhythms and pulse Williams and Carter provided and the full range of ideas Hancock underscores and textures the sound with. Davis is at his best: lyrical, on the edge of atonal, bracing when needed; the tone of his notes isolated and longing.</p><p><br /></p><p><i>A Tribute to Miles Davis </i>– Wayne Shorter (saxophones) Wallace Roney (trumpet), Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass), Tony Williams (drums).</p><p>You need to bear in mind that this is not a dusty museum exhibition where the music of the late trumpeter and bandleader is dutifully eviscerated and mounted on a pedestal. Quite the opposite: Davis alum Hancock, Shorter, Carter and Williams, along with firebrand trumpeter Wallace Roney perform a few familiar tunes with vigor and intensity. Mere reverence is replaced with passion and a willingness to stir things up. Roney is a wonder and an inspired choice to fill the trumpet position; he has a hard-core virtuosity that rivals Freddie Hubbard, and yet retains a sublimely modulated, vibrato-less tone: clean and pristine. His register-jumping flurries on the live version of “So What” or the delicately etched readings are remarkable examples of pace and phrasing. For an instrument known for its uniformly declarative sound–with the notes as executed by the most superlative of players sounding sharp, full; hard bits of color sculpting whole structures of sound from the metaphorical block of granite–Roney had something else: the rarest of things in jazz trumpet; the ability to make his extemporaneous statements fluid; one note flowing out of the one before it and into the one that follows in a deceptively easy legato that made you think of the accelerated fluidity of saxophonist John Coltrane. Roney, I’d wager, is the obverse of Hubbard; in my life I’ve witnessed the glory of two of the most compelling jazz trumpet players: one, the skyrocketing lyricist Hubbard, for whom precision and speed were in the mastery of musical ideas that sped by in breathtaking forays; and the other, no lesser, Roney, whose virtuosity was in the service of seemingly unlimited ideas of restatement, reconfiguration, and reimagining of a composer’s written score.</p><p>And, square as it may sound, it is always great to have Hancock et al return from their wanderings in the fusion wilderness and apply their singular skills on material that requires the best of their improvisational genius. Shorter, for my money, remains the best saxophonist of the post-Coltrane generation, assembling his solos in abstracted sections and deliciously snaky tangents. Williams is, to say nothing else, an astonishing drummer: a continuous rumble of polyrhythms, rising and falling with the many sly turns of this music. Bop, ballads and casually asserted samba rhythms are highlighted with William’s strong, graceful stickwork.</p><p><br /></p><p><i>Both Directions at Once</i> – John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter</p><p>Incredibly, what comes to be a full-length album of mostly new, previously unheard material from John Coltrane has emerged lo these many years since the man’s passing, and it is masterful. What’s mind-boggling is that after decades of posthumous Coltrane releases that were previously unheard versions of familiar material --I haven’t done a precise count, but it occurs to me that there are enough live versions of Coltrane’s disassembly and reconstruction of the Rodgers and Hammerstein show tune “My Favorite Things” to warrant a series critical comparison in how the saxophonist and his collaborators adjusted their improvisations gig to gig-- but rather something wholly fresh: new compositions and ideas recorded when this ensemble was at their peak. </p><p>The story told as to why this album has surfaced on now comes from Wikipedia, which asserts that the band --Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones-- entered Impulse Records studio in 1963 to lay down the master tape of an album of new material for eventual release. Somewhere in the lapse between that recording and its 2018 release, the original tape was destroyed when the label decided to cut down on expenses regarding storage; what we have here is from a copy of the tape Coltrane had given to his wife. It’s not useful to dwell on the reasons for the delay and best, I think, to appreciate how profound this gift of music happens to be.<i> Both Directions at Onc</i>e, the title, comes from a discussion Coltrane once had with Wayne Shorter at some point, in which had come up the idea of starting their solos in the middle and working their ideas backwards toward a calmer section that would have been the casual, tentative build up; and then the other way: toward greater fluency, acceleration, intensity from the tenor saxophone’s horn; going “both directions at once.” You get what they were talking about in mere minutes; Coltrane’s playing is serpentine and advances effortlessly through the registers with rail-splitting chromaticism. </p><p>He darts, dodges, telegraphs and races along melodic lines he creates on initial choruses and subsequently rethinks and rewrites with each return to the song’s head; ideas brawl, embrace and interweave in swift, howling glory. The improvisations are as fine: searching and soulful as anything he released in his lifetime. On hand were the members of his Great Quartet: Elvin Jones on drums; McCoy Tyner on piano; Jimmy Garrison on bass. This is a quartet that has weathered time; circumstance; hundreds of hours playing together; with the sinewy yet agile polyrhythms of the ever-brilliant Jones and the no less skilled Garrison buoying and propelling Tyner’s color-rich harmonies and Coltrane’s thick sonic weaves. There is nothing tentative about his disc. It is quite a bit of music from this epoch-defining unit; there is nothing better than coming across Coltrane you’ve have not borne witness to yet.</p><p><i>A</i></p>TED BURKEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16610296721891201100noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7435571045780908729.post-60377574368930752202023-05-16T11:16:00.016-07:002023-05-16T11:20:32.484-07:00Vinyl<p></p><br /> <br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0KVYfjRqq4kET1Vjip7jDeDC4p8fduy7myPj9MVKX8bBfFRUhFRw43kFYiHPRnQu8s9mEcMjfSb2UNTL3WMzDh4uSf4QtSJvjvKX21q5uCNQXHsvPy76dE5_AHkQwA3LxH9cjB7_3Ksk6imKhDz15hIZ1U77hM4ANjTEWMEWzb08DkHnQiVOHDHDbcw/s284/this.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="284" data-original-width="260" height="284" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0KVYfjRqq4kET1Vjip7jDeDC4p8fduy7myPj9MVKX8bBfFRUhFRw43kFYiHPRnQu8s9mEcMjfSb2UNTL3WMzDh4uSf4QtSJvjvKX21q5uCNQXHsvPy76dE5_AHkQwA3LxH9cjB7_3Ksk6imKhDz15hIZ1U77hM4ANjTEWMEWzb08DkHnQiVOHDHDbcw/s1600/this.bmp" width="260" /></a></div><br />Nostalgia is something that cuts both ways across the generation divide. On the one hand, we have Boomers, those born post World War 2 who grew up with vinyl records, 45s and 33 and 1/3 RPM, who will insist that the original 12-inch releases of the <i>Abbey Road</i> or <i>Safe as Milk </i> had a clarity, depth, and warmth that later digital versions, marketed on the much-loathed Compact Disc format, ruined by making it flat and sterile. The cry was thus: CDs may not scratch and stand to last forever, but we sacrifice the genuine texture and sensuality of the music therein. The new versions are merely heard not felt. If by that they mean that the full force of Beethoven symphonies or the corrosive caterwaul of Ornette Coleman's extensions of Western jazz improvisational strategies are abrasive only to the degree to which they assault merely the nervous system and not the soul as well, then I am with the naysayers. Sadly, though, there is more to the "felt" description, which is surface noise, pops, hisses, clicks, clacks, the corrosive percussion of the damage and ware that attends the ownership of a vinyl record collection.<p></p><p> Because I had no interest i the hi-fi freak's compulsion to keep his albums pristine with a ritualized way of putting his albums on the turntable--holding the disk only on the edges with lightly pressed fingertips, wiping the disc with a clean dust cloth in a particular circular motion, no variation, setting the expensive needle on the disc gently, gently, gently, <i><b><span style="font-family: IBM Plex Serif;">GENTLY GODDAMNIT!</span></b></i> , repeating the process in reverse when the record was done playing--I just put my records on and just played them, whatever happened on the record surface. I took heed from my best friend, a bigger slob than I was, who shared, "I don't let my possessions possess me". It was an easy matter to accept the scratches, pops, and skips as part of the listening experience; I joked that the imperfections were bonus rhythm tracks, free of charge. Still, as used as I had become to vinyl albums, it was a matter of time before I had to acquiesce and purchase a CD player because it turned out, the record companies had stopped releasing albums in vinyl formats, save for some independent holdouts hither and yon. I was amazed at how fast I became a CD convert; the music sounded fine, it sounded clean, it sounded exciting. The digital age claimed another convert. It has become the case that saying that we should listen to vinyl only so we may "feel" the music better is like remarking that we should not have paved roads or modern cars because travel means nothing artistically unless we feel every pothole, puddle, rock and uneven patch of cracked earth on our long journey to some goddamned family holiday dinner. It was a dead argument made by grumpy white men who wanted it to be 1968 forever, without end. The only thing I miss about the vinyl experience was the "thingness" of an album--something to open, to read, stare at, take pride in as you put back in the sleeve and add it your large and varied record collection. </p><p>I admit vinyl was an inferior medium given the crystal clear digital offered , but there was a value-added quality, where the music on the disc was something I paid attention to, fell in love with or hated and argued passionately with other music fanatics and would be pop pundits about why such things were more important than sex. The vinyl album was something that contained music the way a book contained words that told a story, and you had to figuratively live with it for a period, so the glorious transformation of literature can have on our worldview could take effect. That is less the case these days, much less, as everything is digitized, stored in figurative clouds, seemingly every song ever recorded stripped of context, liner notes, album art, credits, and private jokes and turned into bits of code that one can turn on or off like a light switch, absent-mindedly appreciative of the ruthless efficiency in the retrieval of the music, but not moved to linger on lyric, to pause during a hooked up chorus, to move, shake. </p>TED BURKEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16610296721891201100noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7435571045780908729.post-51862689336774583232023-05-04T21:26:00.002-07:002023-05-04T21:26:17.823-07:00YO<p style="text-align: justify;">In his 1969 book <i>Rock from the Beginning, </i>corrosive critic Nik Cohn maintained that Dylan wrote his best lyrics when he was being mean spirited and out to settle accounts in his rhymes. I'm inclined to agree in part with that; the Dylan who wanted to slay dragons, deliver payback and indict the previous generations for the foulness of the world they brought him into is the Dylan that wrote the most memorable lyrics and are the foundation to claims for his genius. In many ways,<i> Like A Rolling Stone</i> was a prototype for what eventually became rap , where the talking blues tradition Dylan emulated early on morphed to the sardonic talk-sung bray of "Rolling Stone" . And of course, there are several Dylan songs from the time that would fit the same description, <i>Its Alright Ma, Masters of War</i>, <i>Gates of Eden</i>, <i>Desolation Row</i>. But I thought <i>Like a Rolling Stone </i>in particular begged for a hip hop rendition, to how Dylan's angst, anger and agitated rhymes would hang with different generation's beats. Here's an interesting stab at it.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XwsQYWObUOY" width="320" youtube-src-id="XwsQYWObUOY"></iframe></div><br /><p></p>TED BURKEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16610296721891201100noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7435571045780908729.post-15832398479626187642023-04-29T10:53:00.001-07:002023-04-30T10:29:49.329-07:00Short notes<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhyC06ODmJErv4xwn2LxcnqHhN5GF22utnR_eKsOtNpFAAVfFAOX4CDudmImFM7NDCgOAmlzVUgyL-r6RXw5VzHOfSRtQ7VgN9prXy3vtnlhcOfJet4A3uQGIqpiazyCLK0exJJ4fZvocWqxfwHiwaiqXlGPIXcO0LmPhHqNh3Pp_zHaw7J2DOff_OxHw" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="303" data-original-width="400" height="303" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhyC06ODmJErv4xwn2LxcnqHhN5GF22utnR_eKsOtNpFAAVfFAOX4CDudmImFM7NDCgOAmlzVUgyL-r6RXw5VzHOfSRtQ7VgN9prXy3vtnlhcOfJet4A3uQGIqpiazyCLK0exJJ4fZvocWqxfwHiwaiqXlGPIXcO0LmPhHqNh3Pp_zHaw7J2DOff_OxHw=w400-h303" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: #f0f2f5; color: #050505; font-family: times; font-size: 17.5px; text-align: left;">I witnessed Wall of Voodoo for the first time at the Urgh concerts in Santa Monica in 1980, sharing the bill with Pere Ubu, Dead Boys, Magazine,a wholly transformational encounter. The band applied the ticktock reductionist rhythms with a sense of </span><a style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: #f0f2f5; color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: times; font-size: 17.5px; text-align: left;" tabindex="-1"></a><span style="background-color: #f0f2f5; font-family: times; font-size: 17.5px; text-align: left;"><span style="color: #050505;">apprehension. It was almost Hitchcockian, as in any scene when a nervous protagonist under duress hears an overly loud clock ticking away . </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FyTfLAlASU"><span style="color: red;">"Ring of Fire"</span></a><span style="color: #050505;"> was masterfully drawn out, and Stan Ridgeway seemed to me the best talk-singer since Lou Reed , a flat, hardened monotone , leering and braced by a slight ironic tone, reflecting LA Noir no less than Marlowe. </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtxYtM5HMuw"><span style="color: red;">"I Can't Make Love"</span></a><span style="color: #050505;"> was my takeaway from the entire night, an underrated lament of A loser, battered on both sides by the lure and dispatch of the affection he craves. This is a lament of someone so saddled with self loathing that he can't complete a sentence. The pleading refrain of "I'm a nice guy" as the song fades is stark and stripped of illusion, it is Lear without the poetry. The abject despair and self-pity that's revealed is equal parts moving and repulsive, which is a remarkable accomplishment.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: times;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 17.5px; white-space: pre-wrap;">__________________________________</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 17.5px; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 17.5px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiHsNxpe1JZYibF3rT7TqjR68hZZuTOcEn9NunvtsXYu54F0RVHUrLLkyPEDYX_NxnCvZAWsLAkFq03lchjk6MlGcWeXSWvPMJIdfyD2_NYIo__e_kwglXvq4Ufcms3VbnZEpEd1rqQjTL0wZx8P96JA0vzYw4pcbbZv6KnKGWowABzZXVjWWwQRmW_Qg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="294" data-original-width="452" height="208" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiHsNxpe1JZYibF3rT7TqjR68hZZuTOcEn9NunvtsXYu54F0RVHUrLLkyPEDYX_NxnCvZAWsLAkFq03lchjk6MlGcWeXSWvPMJIdfyD2_NYIo__e_kwglXvq4Ufcms3VbnZEpEd1rqQjTL0wZx8P96JA0vzYw4pcbbZv6KnKGWowABzZXVjWWwQRmW_Qg" width="320" /></a></span></span></div><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 17.5px; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Band's rendition of <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMqJ2V6zOd0">Tears of Rage</a>,</i> cowritten by Bob Dylan and Richard Manue<i>l,</i> ranks as one the greatest interpretations of a Dylan lyric ever to meet the public ear. One of Dylan's most subtle, evocative, and melancholy lyrics. It exhibits every strength he possessed as a wordsmith when he was at the height of his power, elliptical, diffuse, surreal in the way it can be a snapshot precise in detail and yet remain elusive as to final meaning. Richard Manual's melody, a brooding, and morphing tone poem with quirky </span><span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 17.5px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; color: #385898; cursor: pointer;" tabindex="-1"></a></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 17.5px; white-space: pre-wrap;">shifts in emphasis and patterning and yet maintaining a gospelish flavor, and his vocal I find utterly heartbreaking in its suggestion of a rural family tragedy, incest, insanity. His singing is soulful and mournful , equal parts soul and country wail. He gives Dylan likely the best reading of one of his lyrics to grace vinyl.</span></span><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 17.5px; white-space: pre-wrap;">____________________________________</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 17.5px; text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: times;">In his 1969 book <i>Rock from the Beginning</i>, corrosive critic Nik Cohn maintained that Dylan wrote his best lyrics when he was being mean spirited and out to settle accounts in his rhymes. I'm inclined to agree in part with that; the Dylan who wanted to slay dragons, deliver payback and indict the previous generations for the foulness of the world they brought him into is the Dylan that wrote the most memorable lyrics and are the foundation to claims for his genius. In many ways,<i> Like A Rolling Stone</i> was a prototype for what eventually became rap , where the talking blues tradition Dylan emulated early on morphed to the sardonic talk-sung bray of "Rolling Stone" . And of course, there are several Dylan songs from the time that would fit the same description, <i>Its Alright Ma, Masters of War, Gates of Eden, Desolation Row.</i> But I thought <i>Like a Rolling Stone i</i>n particular begged for a hip hop rendition, to how Dylan's dread, anger and agitated rhymes would hang with different generation's beats. </span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 17.5px; text-align: start;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: times;">____________________________________________________</span></span></p><div dir="auto" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 17.5px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;">1998's Elvis Costello/Burt Bacharach collaboration <i>Painted from Memory</i> was a project that should have worked but tragically did not. It seemed like a sure thing, two pop music masters in a team up that ought to have been magic .Instead, the enterprise got stuck in a ditch, wheels spinning, engine roaring uselessly. There is an insistence on medium ballads or funeral march ballads, sadder-than-dead fish torch songs. There is merit to a good number of them, as Bacharach is the <span style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0;"><a style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; color: #385898; cursor: pointer;" tabindex="-1"></a></span>Beethoven of ageless heartache, but the melancholy turns into a stupefying torpor. It had been remarked on point that Bacharach found his perfect vocalist in Dione Warwick, a singer with range, timing, and tone who could seamlessly negotiate the deceptively tricky turn arounds in his melodies. Not so with Costello, who overestimates </span><span style="font-family: times;">his vocal abilities. Each song he sings, he attempts to hit the high notes at seemingly the same moment, as if he had a live magpie taped to his face. It's a horrible, piercing experience before long, and the rationale that it's a brave thing he's doing by using his limited apparatus for the lofty points on the sheet music won't cut ice. Bacharach, I recall, wrote a good number of spry up-tempo songs as well, and had a sense of humor. Perhaps he felt he needed to get serious now that he was getting some serious attention from critics because the acclaimed Costello deigned to work with him. Over time, the album is dour, gloomy, and utterly depressing; they should have canned half the songs and released only the truly memorable work. It would have been better if they remembered to bring their sense of humor to the sessions when they recorded this thing.</span></div><div dir="auto" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 17.5px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: times; font-size: 17.5px; white-space: pre-wrap;">A better album, much better, is an earlier EC disc from 1986, <i>King of America</i>. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 17.5px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: times;">Costello loves rummaging around in many genres, most of it being half-baked, over wrought, or atmospherically formless for the last decade. With country and western, his has been a case of trying too hard to get that stoically restrained emotionalism that is the genius of the truly great singers. This song, though, is where he gets it right. The melody is doleful , on the downbeat and yet brisk in tempo, the lyrics are a nicely constructed metaphor that sustains itself through each chorus, and Costello's singing is tuneful and free of the vocalistics he often mistakes for emotional dynamics. Here he sounds matter of fact, clear-headed, a little choked up as he admits the larger truth of a doomed love affair. The quivering near sob on the last lines is perfection.</span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 17.5px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 17.5px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;">__________________________________</span></div><div dir="auto" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 17.5px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div dir="auto" style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgb(59 130 246 / 0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 #0000; --tw-shadow: 0 0 #0000; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 17.5px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div>TED BURKEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16610296721891201100noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7435571045780908729.post-59819075144749269382023-04-28T17:02:00.016-07:002023-04-28T17:06:47.649-07:00ANOTHER BURKE FROM BEFORE TIME BEGAN<p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrbAjx7nLEH1lTX9f8JBkbehOsO4Pvjil79tst4C57Ylu3tLCJRR9oPtNyYY8RQZetxolTVECMYly06Z2eu3bddw6J2mb1UAHPzEAjYtb8NMCI2rPPAu6OXyRXGfEOd_U2NrNAgi07ynC0xSs0RX0XPo8DKQpZ9WaQj2AJIioMP6kD_dM6TL9WvBAF6A/s690/Screenshot%202023-04-28%20170343.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="690" data-original-width="519" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrbAjx7nLEH1lTX9f8JBkbehOsO4Pvjil79tst4C57Ylu3tLCJRR9oPtNyYY8RQZetxolTVECMYly06Z2eu3bddw6J2mb1UAHPzEAjYtb8NMCI2rPPAu6OXyRXGfEOd_U2NrNAgi07ynC0xSs0RX0XPo8DKQpZ9WaQj2AJIioMP6kD_dM6TL9WvBAF6A/w301-h400/Screenshot%202023-04-28%20170343.jpg" width="301" /></a> <span style="font-family: "Playfair Display"; text-align: justify;">Honestly, I love critics who are smart and love the sound of their prose so much that they soak their subject in overripe, purplish grandiloquence, which makes getting to their usually inane insights a fun adventure in well-managed if excessively mannered evaluations of popular culture. The present example is the photograph accompanying his piece, a review of an Elvis Presley album by a G.C. Burke, no relation, in the May 1957 issue of High Fidelity magazine. (My thanks to music writer Mark Miller, who posted this intriguing specimen in a Facebook group dedicated to music journalism.) </span></p><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Playfair Display;">Perhaps not so oddly, I feel some kinship with Mr. Burke and wonder if he’s a distant and likely belated relation. I read John Simon for years in New York Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, and The National Review, and often marveled at how a man of such obvious erudition and flawless prose ability could be so magnificently elegant in expressing amazingly pedestrian opinions of books, plays, films, and movies. His vitriol couldn’t elevate his sour takes on the arts from the routinely knee-jerk reaction. I wager that Simon’s vocabulary and acerbic virtuosity buffaloed his readers and editors with the flashy pyrotechnics of his word-slinging; what I thought of as Simon’s conspicuous ineptitude as a critic of cultural expression was summarily overlooked.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Playfair Display;">Burke obviously wants to consider himself a public intellectual, a mission much greater than being a mere record reviewer, and here attempts to pigeonhole the ill-making cultural habits of the times that are spoiling the rest of us. Sophistry itself, this amateur sociology and such, but what fun it is to read a smart person use every weapon in his arsenal to swat a fly. But again, honestly, quite honestly, quite vainly, G.C. Burke’s makes me think that those of us sharing the last Irish-borne surname share a genetic fascination for padded hyperbole. (Forgive me my indulgence if I’ve elevated myself to the likes of Edmund and Kenneth Burke, genius scribblers both.) Obviously, it would seem, that I’m inspired to indulge my verbal excesses after reading G.C. Burke’s energized dalliance with the philosophical broadside. Perhaps I can find a collection of his further thrashings of pop musicians of his time and become insufferable myself.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>TED BURKEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16610296721891201100noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7435571045780908729.post-20567515527088009902023-03-02T18:55:00.002-08:002023-03-02T18:55:14.571-08:00KIM FOWLEY IS STILL DEAD ( or is he?)<p style="text-align: justify;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhHbVkK-G3RV8ItC6DFn_rjc94oBbdwGjg5hSMLyYYH0vfisb4lTCAz5N-8BPWWLHXyTZkbh1l1WXqJQ2d_FoJ3ZULafXA9r63N2ZALMKfxWp_43onqwFvbo70GUvSR1r7ZlSfbxZYCZ6jc6WIfV5t-Zno_o-qe3F_h2K-pzKM8jcVKDY7pzlYqf6EwUQ" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="443" data-original-width="424" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhHbVkK-G3RV8ItC6DFn_rjc94oBbdwGjg5hSMLyYYH0vfisb4lTCAz5N-8BPWWLHXyTZkbh1l1WXqJQ2d_FoJ3ZULafXA9r63N2ZALMKfxWp_43onqwFvbo70GUvSR1r7ZlSfbxZYCZ6jc6WIfV5t-Zno_o-qe3F_h2K-pzKM8jcVKDY7pzlYqf6EwUQ" width="230" /></a></div><span style="font-family: times;"> "</span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: xx-small;"><i>Kim Fowley is such a ---shuck that he ought to be placed in a time capsule."--</i>Robert Christgau. </span><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: xx-small;"><i><br /></i></span><span style="color: #141823; font-family: times;"><span style="background-color: white;">That line has stuck with me and characterized Fowley for decades, and now it comes full circle where we have an opportunity to examine how the Sixties counter culture produced marginal sorts who were happy to have a niche somewhere in the music greatness of others, and those like Charlie Manson who wanted to change the world into a larger version of their insane selves. It was a crap shoot either way, and lucky for us, Fowley wasn't as crazy as he pretended to be. It's always been my impression that Kim Fowley preferred you speak about him in the past tense when you were in his presence, the closest and quickest thing he can have to his desire was to eaves drop on his own funeral. </span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #141823; font-family: times;"><span style="background-color: white;">Only a fool too fast of tongue or slow to truth would argue that Fowley didn't have some kind of observable genius in the happenstance of his life. He was an Ezra Pond sort of his era, someone with a smattering of talent themselves who had a more acute instinct for the large talent of others. It can be a tedious thing to hash through again, but it bears repeating that Fowley's greatest masterpiece was creating a series of performance oriented personas, all the extreme, gaudy, tacky, neurotic and rather desperate in their attempts to equal the art being produced by artists he was attracted too. Fowley was someone who, like thousands of others at the time, were trying to berserk themselves into genius who, despite hard work and an unblinking commitment to the mask he was wearing, never convinced anyone that there was anything there but an egocentricity that was oddly ingratiating Fowley, I suspect, knew that we were onto his game from the get go and let it remain as such. Fowley was someone who wanted to leave his mark on history and didn't quite much care what damage to his reputation he suffered in doing so. It wasn't damage at, I think he'd have explained to us, since this was a reputation he was reputation he was creating in place of one that didn't exist in the first place. What he wanted was to be known, to be creative, to be a part of the throng at the higher creative plane. He wanted to leave his mark on history, not change it, not destroy it, not change the course of things to come. He desired to be in the perennial now of whatever was intense at the musical time and space, and to have a sufficient version of his cover story to accompany. Likewise, he was a man who lived his life in the present tense.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #141823; font-family: times;"><span style="background-color: white;">What is remarkable is that he remained in the game as long as he did. Fowley was a fake, which was the source of authenticity. He decided to "act as if…" and never stopped acting. I regard Fowley's whole life as being something like Kafka's Hunger Artist; the man who refuses to eat draws a crowed around him, and it's that artist's job to keep the crowd distracted while maintaining his cover. Fowley kept the mask on, but remained an approachable anomaly. No easy thing to do.</span></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>TED BURKEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16610296721891201100noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7435571045780908729.post-14121540341738959782023-02-27T13:46:00.000-08:002023-02-27T13:46:29.817-08:00THE PHILOSOPHY OF MODERN SONG by Bob Dylan: Book Review<p style="text-align: justify;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjemJQQSE_iO5TWCsg60LgEoafMNz3qMrKntdBky6q2X_4CRBa3e4uiOIvyn7XxwqiFoQrb1iEV0dSS5ENBiiBR0U1Sj6ndGgj2UNEi0_nyeYqYhSjuL2WCGuGZiOXIQz4b-6rL3IYBcLqnrdxZQp3v-Wz15HaZIKfSOrCEyZnEy0HP1GgKYegDVjEIIQ" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="301" data-original-width="232" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjemJQQSE_iO5TWCsg60LgEoafMNz3qMrKntdBky6q2X_4CRBa3e4uiOIvyn7XxwqiFoQrb1iEV0dSS5ENBiiBR0U1Sj6ndGgj2UNEi0_nyeYqYhSjuL2WCGuGZiOXIQz4b-6rL3IYBcLqnrdxZQp3v-Wz15HaZIKfSOrCEyZnEy0HP1GgKYegDVjEIIQ=w309-h400" width="309" /></a></div><span style="font-family: times;">Bob Dylan won the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, an ironic designation if only because Dylan wasn’t a man of books, but rather a songwriter. The gist of the argument for the musician being awarded the prize was that his lyrics, in a brief span of time, evolved from clever imitations of the folk and blues artists he admired and imitated to become a rich libretto for his age. Surrealist nightmares, black humor, rhapsodic tone poems, acute observations of ingrained varieties of bad faith revealed in personal lives and in the political sphere, songs like “Like a Rolling Stone,” “I Want You,” and “Positively 4th Street” brought a new, serious poetry to the jukebox, leading the way for a generation of other songwriters. It was a common sight in nearly any graduate student’s apartment that Dylan discs like <i>Highway 61 Revisited</i> and <i>Blonde on Blonde</i> cozily nestled next to the typically dog-eared paperbacks of Pound’s <i>Canto</i>s,<i> One Dimensional Man</i> or a coffee table book about Max Ernst or Diane Arbus.</span><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;">As the songwriter’s lyrics became darker, more mystical, expressively abstract, the deeper the appreciation of the baffling brilliance of his work became—and soon enough the serious vanguard of modern American poetry—Ginsberg, McClure et al., counted the man from Hibbing as one of their own, a sage who could see beyond the flat appearance of the material world and provide glimpses of what’s behind the veil. Dylan née Zimmerman had a run of genius, the length of which wholly depended on how dedicated one is to the continuity of the songwriter’s brilliance. My interest is more about his earlier career, 1962 (<i>Bob Dylan</i>) through 1969 (<i>Nashville Skyline</i>). In my quizzical estimation, his work has been inconsistent since that time, occasionally animated with outbreaks of energy and verbal intensity <i>(Blood on the Tracks</i>). But Dylan zealots are a bright and well-read part of the listening population, and those who found worth, insight, and inspiration from albums from <i>Street Legal</i> or <i>Empire Burlesque</i> (two random selections from the years I call “the Great In-Between”) defend the later work with energy, solid thinking, and good writing. That’s the Dylan whose work and reputation provokes an alarming amount of cogitation. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;">An endless variety of books have been published about Dylan and his songwriting in the six decades since the release of his first album, some purely for pop music fans, others gossipy, and many that are a kind of interpretative analysis that approach the inscrutability of the maestro’s best stanzas. But Dylan, again, is a songwriter, not a writer of books in the main. His catalog of songs abounds with much of the most original, penetrating, and innovative lyrics of the 20th century, and many achieve the status of High Art, genuine and compelling poetry. “Visions of Johanna,” “Desolation Row,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” “Memphis Blues Again.” “Spanish Harlem Incident,” and the full version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” reveal a man in love with the varieties of idioms available to him; he loved language enough to ignore the formalities in front of him and merge the styles he loved in the simple melodies he often borrowed from others. He could rhyme, and his couplets were adroit and left you saying “oh, wow” as he finished each verse. This virtuosity didn’t carry over to books, as the pair he’s written up to now wind up head scratchers at best.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;"><i></i></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiz-tg_93pHC0P4RJX_KbV_CnHqrypcq5klGNGHg-xUh-9_ZtcoXnS0TzSqRqc3-wPyzYLApmMkiCSmEVdOpajtLYz81tliG2Mns5otcFufGaL7NqkEJQcZf53zMXeLlXFBU4V-AwVJF1LSTeQEL806VHGfEk-fXAvUpWtfL0NApI1-OoeEO9g7gFOHyQ" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="434" data-original-width="228" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiz-tg_93pHC0P4RJX_KbV_CnHqrypcq5klGNGHg-xUh-9_ZtcoXnS0TzSqRqc3-wPyzYLApmMkiCSmEVdOpajtLYz81tliG2Mns5otcFufGaL7NqkEJQcZf53zMXeLlXFBU4V-AwVJF1LSTeQEL806VHGfEk-fXAvUpWtfL0NApI1-OoeEO9g7gFOHyQ=w168-h320" width="168" /></a></i></span></div><span style="font-family: times;"><i>Tarantula</i>, an experimental prose poetry collection Dylan wrote between 1965 and 1966, wasn’t intended for publication, but its existence became an underground legend, and bootleg editions began to circulate. Tarantula was finally printed in 1971. The book wasn’t a coherent thesis but rather reflected Dylan’s method and influences, which characterized his most baroque and lyrics, similar in style to the “cut up” technique fashioned by William Burroughs in his novels <i>Naked Lunch</i> and <i>The Wild Boy</i>s: a major transgression against grammar and punctuation and notions of continuity, rough-hewn character sketches, in jokes, odd conflations of vernaculars that constitute Dylan’s most hallucinogenic writing. It remains a head scratcher even for the most faithful of his flock, although there are some rather striking and evocative tributes to a woman named Aretha, most likely Aretha Franklin. This lane-changing collection of idiomatic invention and deconstruction is, if nothing else, an odd and sometimes exhilarating landmark in on the Dylan bookshelf.</span><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgO-Mcaf5v1XpsJF4LQ8cZx4Zd606aBaGgAIylES0dPO87r7Y_Qy0EhBTjNTOXSakpThpUzuieINUfbBmq7W4_Y_lGDGDnOR34EmQUWigxDxP9fjtLPbTtXb5n6kRnRKbCKh5dsj7UQiycTWQ0cy1YDb644DyQa_06IxXZSP4Lgrbvzj5cAb6uUsYOzig" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: times;"><img alt="" data-original-height="372" data-original-width="332" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgO-Mcaf5v1XpsJF4LQ8cZx4Zd606aBaGgAIylES0dPO87r7Y_Qy0EhBTjNTOXSakpThpUzuieINUfbBmq7W4_Y_lGDGDnOR34EmQUWigxDxP9fjtLPbTtXb5n6kRnRKbCKh5dsj7UQiycTWQ0cy1YDb644DyQa_06IxXZSP4Lgrbvzj5cAb6uUsYOzig=w178-h200" width="178" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: times;">Dylan’s next book <i>Chronicles Volume One</i>, published in 2004, is said to have started as the author’s attempts to write liner notes for his then-forthcoming reissues of<i> Bob Dylan</i>,<i> New Morning</i>, and <i>Oh Mercy</i>. The project grew larger and became what is described as part one of a three-part memoir. While fascinating to read the usually opaque lyricist convene in readable prose, his recollections are limited to some worthy remarks about the making of his first album and then protracted memories of the relatively obscure <i>New Morning</i> and Oh Mercy. Chronicles spent four months on the New York Times bestseller list and was generally well reviewed, though there was disappointment in the matters he chose to talk about and not discuss. Worse, there were rumblings that Dylan had fabricated much of what he did bother to disclose. Clinton Heylin, a thorough Dylan biographer, who has published eight books on the singer in the last 30 years, has been quoted as saying that while he enjoyed reading Dylan’s book as a work of imaginative literature but that “… almost everything in the <i>Oh Mercy </i>section of Chronicles is a work of fiction…”</span><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;">So, we arrive at Dylan’s new book, <i>The Philosophy of Modern Song</i>. It’s a handsome, oversized tome that has Dylan bringing us a stream of brief essays that discuss an odd, seemingly random set of 66 songs that were popular throughout American history. As expected, the songs are a confounding selection of tunes, as he opts not to opine or analyze the landmark music of the last century or so but instead goes for a good many tunes that are painfully obscure and not necessarily worth dwelling on at length. From 2006 to 2009, the singer had Theme Time Radio Hour, a weekly, one hour satellite podcast where each program’s playlist centered around a theme instead of a specific genre. The song choices were unusual in large part—the odd, the quirky, the gorgeous, and the amazingly bucolic varieties of American music played to whatever the mood of the week was, the music on each program peppered with Dylan’s offhand remarks, jokes, anecdotes, historical trivia, and brief biographies of the musicians. The Philosophy of Modern Music appears to take the same strategy and avoids a traceable thesis through the essays where Dylan chats about the songs he’s chosen for elucidation. A fascinating assortment, including songs by the Eagles ("Wichie Woman"), Rosemary Clooney (“Come on a My House”), Johnny Taylor (“Cheaper to Keep Her”), Little Richard (“Tutti Frutti”), Cher (“Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves”), and other songs of far-reaching style, attitude, and subject that are, truthfully, perfectly fine, and often brilliant classics but that have little obvious connection apart from the Nobel Prize winner selected for a book.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;">The book is hailed in promotion materials as a masterclass in songwriting and refers to the essays, while being nominally about music, as being “meditations and reflections on the human condition.” “Essays” is perhaps too generous a term to describe what Dylan has written for these songs, as their lengths and depth of thought don’t particularly rise above an average blog post. What’s revealed is that Dylan is not really the philosophical sort to take apart concepts and deal with them critically in archly specialized language, and that he wasn’t awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature based on his prose. Anyone desiring weighty and eloquent clarity on the purpose of existence will find the book wanting, but for those who consider Dylan to be a gifted artist with interesting things to say about some musical landmarks that got and kept his attention, The Philosophy of Modern Song is an intriguing, frequently surprising set of remarks and musings from one of the 20th Century’s most enigmatic figures. The individual pieces are remarkably poetic and literate on their terms. What connects this wide swath of tunes is Dylan’s skill at putting himself in the narrative at hand rather than analyze the melody and lyrics for subtler inclinations and nuance or hypothesize how a hymn offers a critique of social relations; Dylan imagines cinematic scenarios, sees archetypes of modern myth negotiating their respective terrains, and finds the souls of errant knight of endless variation questing for a greater glory with what gifts or curses that mark their lives.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;">The lyricist hasn’t the prose polish of John Updike or James Baldwin, but his language is vivid, colorful, and skillfully emphatic as he delineates the dilemmas and joys each song undertakes to describe in a short expression. A theme does emerge as he runs through a host of the music, the notion of perseverance and persistence even in the face of hardship, heartbreak, and the cold inevitability of a certain fate. A random selection of the essays brings this. Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” has a strong feeling of a classic movie western as Dylan writes of the narrator—a lone cowboy at a border town to meet a challenge he cannot forestall, emphasizes the weight of loneliness of the gunslinger, an existence where every joy is fleeting, and the shadow of death lurks in every unlit corner. “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves” was a 1971 hit for Cher, a torrid bit of fanciful exploitation that was considered to be a cardboard pathos at best, but Dylan thought deeper on the matter and found resonance. It stretches credulity, but his insistence on this song makes for reading you can’t draw away from. He uses the pronoun “you” in writing about the title’s tawdry trio, the intended effect being to imagine yourself as a member of this wandering community, the only home being the wagon that carries you at the outskirts of every town. He lays it own a little too thick by essay’s end, with his penchant for stringing three or more adjectives together when one would have been just as effective, but he does what he sets out to do to give you a strong impression of what life at the edge of society would be like. To that end, it reminded me of my time as a carnival worker, going from town to town up the coast, selling chances to win dusty stuffed animals to townies who obviously held the orange shirted show folk in contempt. It was a rush of memory, a chill in the bones, and an adventure I consider myself lucky to eventually walk away from.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;">These are songs of perseverance and persistence are again short testimonials that crop up on the radio, in movie soundtracks and music videos of individuals of many origins, backgrounds, and varying degrees of stress, who are determined to stand their ground lest the final remains of what is truly theirs vanishes in self-loathing rituals of compromise and surrender. That seems what has found in 66 songs, wildly disparate in era, style, and sentiment; it’s the one tangible thread I’ve found. He is at his best when he gives vent to the full range of ironies contained in the Who’s 1965 proto punk rock anthem “My Generation,” with its famous line “I hope I die before I get old…” The singer and songwriter who brought us the line, Roger Daltry and Peter Townsend are neither dead and are, in fact, old reflects on the arrogance of youth. The stuttering youth of the song is barely articulate and has no idea of what he wants to do, has no idea about why he’s angry and impatient, and is happy to simply be that way. It’s a grand and immature f**k you of self-assertion, a declaration that shocked and inspired a generation of kids to think that things will get better when they take over after the last wicked adult dies. But Dylan writes that you’re in a wheelchair being pushed around to the places you need to get to—doctor’s offices, the bathroom, the community meal hall; your mind is alert, but the body fails in subtle and significant ways every day. You’re eerily close to whatever dying day will award you, and you hear noise and brash men having their own good clamorous time in the thrall of their youth. You’re annoyed, you’re sleepy, you fall asleep. Dylan’s writing is particularly effective in this essay that should have aged well. At 81, I suppose Bob Dylan hear what the lyrics declaim and vividly recalls being the speedy, in-your-face Dada King, who rarely missed a chance to confound and confront the Old Squares who didn’t get it, a character in full sympathy with the romantic tragedy of a genius poet’s early demise. But his musing takes him to the next thought, which is that he’s far older than he might have expected, his memories are fuller, richer, more far-reaching than he thinks he has any right to, and the songs he’s paid attention to aren’t merely audio postcards of long-ago places but rather a means to remain connected; he intends to live fully and well and on his terms, in his words. Meandering and off the wall and syntactically awkward as it is at times, The Philosophy of Modern Song is wonderful glimpse into how this perennial mystery man thinks.</span></p>TED BURKEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16610296721891201100noreply@blogger.com0