SOME COOL OLD MUSIC

I'm Only Sleeping --The Beatles
 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 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 (Revolver),

Ramblin Gamblin Man / Tales of Lucy Blue --Bob Seger System

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.

Eight Miles High--The Byrds

"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 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.

I Can't Make Love--Wall of Voodoo

 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 . "Ring of Fire" 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. "I Can't Make Love" 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.

THE WHITE ALBUM RECONSIDERED (sort of)

  

So, what is the lasting value of “The White Album,” alias The Beatles? value is that while it lacks the thematic line that many critics have insist is needed for a record to be considered having a timeless and inexhaustible quality, The White Album has a high ratio of songs that are well crafted, ingenious, lyrically sound, musically diverse. It's been said that this is less an album by a band than it is three solo albums where the artists use each other as back up musicians for their individual endeavors, something that indicates that the members had done as much as they could with each other as creative partners and would soon enough branch off as solo artists. This precisely at the time when the song craft had matured and the songwriting personality of the three principal contributors, Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison, became fully apparent and distinct. It's a grab bag of styles, attitudes, personal expression, a harbinger of future ex-Beatles to come.

 I go along with the idea that even the minor songs on this album are minor only in the sense that they aren't quite up to the level of pop masterpiece standards the Beatles themselves established. Meaning that they fall short compared to other compositions in the band's canon, but not against pop music in general. Even reputedly trivial or whimsical efforts like “Honey Pie” or “Goodnight” , “Don't Pass Me By”, or “Obla Di Oba Da (Life Goes On)” reveal a remarkable grasp of diverse song styles and craft; all the tunes have the expected Beatle signature touches, and it's remarkable that it is these trademarked stylistics that keep their dalliance in non-rock or r and b pop styles from sounding like parodies or nostalgic.  What The Beatles (White Album) and the follow up release Abbey Road reveal is the band's skill at brilliantly being able to move across the timeline of popular genres and make music that remains, as Shakespeare does, modern, relevant, and resistant to fad and fancy. It could be said that one of the great Missed Opportunities in rock history was that the Beatles at their most fruitful never wrote their own "rock opera", a real and sustained narrative in musical form. Or even the music and lyrics for a Broadway musical. Listening to this record again makes you daydream of what might have been.

THE BEATLES AS GUITAR HEROES

My view, of course, but I would argue resolutely that the opening of the Beatles  1965 hit "Paperback Writer" is one of the greatest intro guitar figures in rock history. I doubt I'm alone in this view: this tune prefigures a lot of non-metal hard rock that came after it. It's easy enough to imagine Van Halen or Dixie Dregs easily refitting the song for even more guitar slam-dunkery. And beyond the guitar-rock bona fides, it has the additional advantage of being quite literate. McCartney and Lennon are said to have written the lyrics together, and it's remarkable that the subject of the song is a hack writer who maintains he can compose any sort of pulp fiction, on demand, for a fee. I was attracted to it because I was reading numerous novelizations of TV shows and popular films at the time, cheap paperback spinoffs, and I wondered who these folks were that scribed this stuff. I wondered how, in my mid-teens, I could get in on the action.

What I particularly like about how these verses work is that the character is allowed to tell his story. Just the way he describes what he's able or willing to do to get the job reveals a personality in a few deftly stated details. This is much better than, say, "Nowhere Man", an attempt at a "message" song ala Dylan ; I never liked that tune principally it was a ham-handed handed attempt to "tell it like it is". Who the narrator is, certainly not the nowhere man himself, is caustic, critical, judgmental, with none of the faults outlined being convincing in any regard. And the turn around, that little "twist", the "Isn't he a bit like you and me?" line where we learn that we all share the same vanities and inanities of personality, was a hokey, easy and dumb sounding morale of the story as has ever been conceived by major songwriters. "Paperback Writer", though, is a minor masterpiece, and is effective for the same reason an Elmore Leonard crime yarn is: character driven, personality revealed through dialogue, no authorial intrusion instructing a reader (listener) what to think. The song shows, it doesn't tell, and it rocks.

MY LYRICS CAN BEAT UP YOUR LYRICS

 

In a feature in the current issue of Slate, Jack Hamilton adds some lighter fluid to the controversy slowly boiling over who was the better wordsmith for the Beatles, Paul McCartney or John Lennon. Not coincidental with the release of the pricy two-volume, slip-cased set The Lyrics where McCartney describes his authorship of  150 songs both for the Beatles and other projects, Hamilton, as one could expect, bucks conventional wisdom and argues that Sir Paul was the superior lyricist. Do you remember any time in your younger life when you wax incessantly, continuously, and oppressively about one album, one particular album, was the greatest album ever made and that super-great album is a work of art unlike any other we've ever seen as a species and the likes of which we will ever seen again? Do you remember forgetting about that extra-fantastic disc and then listening to years , maybe decades later, and then realizing it hasn't traveled through the ages as well as you claimed? And remember what you said at the time? 

I remember my hyperbolic tantrums arguing the genius of many records I have since abandoned to resale shops long ago. That is what Hamilton's defense of McCartney's lyrics for the Beatles read like, a gushy mash note. Of course, the man had a way with words, but...please calm down... Like anyone else obsessed with what the Beatles have accomplished and how it was that they created a body of work without peer, I've dived into the weeds to determine who had the more outstanding mind and pen, John or Paul. After much scrutiny, cogitating, late nights scanning lyric sheets wearing headphones while the Beatles blared loudly and made my hearing even worse than it was, my conclusion is that it's a draw between the two. 

As for songwriting partners and as lone authors of single songs while in the Beatles, Lennon and McCartney seemed an evenly matched pair as lyricists, with McCartney having a substantial edge for composing engaging and deceptively simple melodies. Lennon, to be sure, could write a lovely song as well and do so throughout the band's lifetime, but  McCartney has the advantage. As Beatle lyricists,  one can strongly argue that the two were equal for fluidity and agility of expression. Their distinct personalities gave the metaphorical Beatle Universe (with some exemplary additional contributions from George Harrison) a remarkably fresh and finally unpredictable take on the human experience.  McCartney was a fine lyricist with the Beatles, and I'd even agree brilliant at times. Still, I believe the old saw that Sir Paul's best abilities as lyricist and melodist may well have remained dormant if Lennon hadn't become such a significant presence in his creative undertakings. And yes, I would agree Lennon might have remained yet another Rocker doomed for inevitable anonymity if he hadn't made McCartney's acquaintance.  This will, without doubt, be argued about till the end of time.  Notably, McCartney has been showing concern over his legacy as he approaches his final curtain, wanting the world to realize the weight of actual contribution to the Beatles' longevity, perhaps even a desire to take Lennon's reputation as the superior lyricist and intellect down a peg or two. 

'Though fueled by resentment, I suspect,  there is no getting away from the fact that the solo efforts by Lennon and McCartney, including struggles with Plastic Ono Band and Wings respectively, are depressingly substandard considered against the work they'd done for the Beatles.  Of course, both bodies of post-Beatles music have pockets of the old magic, charisma, wit, and melodic bite. Still, Lennon had descended from the ranks of an artist to becoming merely a Professional Celebrity, an amazingly clueless personality whose lyric acumen was now little else but sloganeering no more subtle than a bumper sticker. McCartney, in turn, couldn't seem to write a cohesive song anymore; his song structures were erratic, jarring, disjointed, too often coming less well than office buildings abandoned during construction. His lyric writing was gibberish, and those who want to defend the words he wrote for Wings are doomed to come off as foolish wishful thinkers. 

Banking on The Beatles

Banking on The Beatles

The marketing of the Beatles continues with undelayed urgency, with the advent of Beatles Rock Band video game, and now the remastering of many Fab Four recordings in a flashy, bulky, expensive package. I cannot see myself having my history sold to me yet again; my memories ought not be what breaks the bank account.I was born in 1952 and was , more or less, a perfect wwitness to the Beatle phenomenon as it happened. From here , I'll the dulling recollection of what they meant to me and my generation and will not wax on their dually over rated and under appreciated qualities--few popular bands have ever been subject to the kind of exaggerated elevations and damnations than these guys have--and instead cut to the quick; the subject of the Beatles bores me stiff. We gone through an endless series of repackagings of their music since their 1970, none of which has made their great tunes sound any greater, nor made their slightest songs gain any more credibility. I refuse to live up to Tommy Lee Jones' groaning admission in Men In Black ; I will not buy the White Album songs again, no matter how crisp and clear the new versions are promised to be. I'm fine with my copies of Yesterday and Today, Revolver, The White Album and Abbey Road ; this was their finest string of albums, brimming with new melodies, wonderfully elliptical lyrics and wholesale genius in the vocals. To get these albums again would make me a mere fetishists, not a fan. But a fan I remain, and in the time since the rise of the Beatles and my tour of duty as a working music critic for several Southern California publications, my tastes have changed. Not "matured", not "improved" or "gotten more sophisticated", just changed. I remain a rock and roll fan, a Beatle fan, an encourager of loud guitars and passion, but the point of being interested in arts , as the cliche goes, is to broaden one's world, not to continually spend cash money on refurbished tunes in an attempt to relive what is past. I don't want to shut the door on the past, of course. I'm just annoyed that someone my age is expected to go out and buy again the music that I already own.

SGT.PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND

Like it or love it, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is among the most important rock albums ever made, one of the most important albums period, and forty years after it's release, it is time to assess the album free of the globalizing hype and mythology it's biggest supporters have honored it with, and to veer away from the chronically negative reaction those less in love with the Beatles and the disc have made a religion out of. It is, in my view, important for any number of reasons, production, and songwriting among them, and for me it's not just that Lennon and McCartney have set the standard on which such things would be judged against from now on, but that they've also given us the examples with which rock critics, paid and unpaid, by which we can tell who is being pretentious, phony, unfocused, incoherent, just plain bad. Sure enough, the best songs have survived--"A Day In the Life, "Getting Better", "Good Morning, Good Morning", "Mr.Kite", but sure enough the less accomplished songs, all manner, pose, nervy and naive pseudo-mysticism and intellectuality as in "Within You Without You" and "She's Leaving Home", are hardly played anywhere, by anyone, unless one turns to an XM satellite station where the playlist is all things Beatles, without discrimination. What the Beatles did with the songcraft, the central genius and downfall of much of Pepper's legacy are that they've introduced thousands of forthcoming arty rockers to new levels of sophistication and fantastically dull pompousness. I love the Beatles, of course, that's the standard qualifier among us all, but this is the album with which rock criticism was finally created. Lovers and Haters of the disc finally had a rock and roll record that might sustain their liberal arts training. Sgt. Pepper also gave us brilliant and much less brilliant rock commentary. Here you may pick your own examples. The reasons Beatle fans in general (rather than only) "hipsters" prefer Revolver to Sgt.Pepper is for the only reason that really matters when one is alone with their CD player or iPod; the songwriter is consistently better, the production crisper, the lyrics succeed in being intriguingly poetic without the florid excess that capsized about half of Sgt. Pepper's songs, and one still perceived the Beatles as a band, guitar bass, and drums, performing tunes with a signature sound that comes only after of years of the same musicians performing together.