CHICK COREA, RIP

photo by Tore Saetre (c)

 I had the amazing luck to have seen Chick Corea five times, three times with Return to Forever, a dazzling and powerful jazz-fusion band fueled in major portions by Corea's protean skills as a composer. Let be known that it wasn't just Corea alone that drove RTF to fusion greatness, as the work of guitarists Bill Connors and Al DiMeola, bassist Stanley Clarke and drummer Lenny contributed in large measures to elevating brain-scrambling virtuosity to something highly, creatively musical. But it was Corea's vehicle overall, his compositions deftly bringing in the warring genres of classical, Latin-jazz, bop, blues, and progressive rock bombast into a coherent and cohesive whole.

There were hard time signatures and severely rapid changes in tone and attack. Still, Corea had a true composer's sense of pacing, structure, linking various moods and colors into contiguous wholes that continually and (seemingly) organically morph into new shapes. There was a sense of the storyteller, the saga, the musical journey in his finest work in RTF, and his ceaseless solo albums and projects. I was additionally blessed to see Corea as well in two other contexts, one in which he shared the stage with fellow Miles Davis keyboardist Herbie Hancock for an evening of inspired duets, and with the Chick Corea Acoustic Trio at the now-gone Elario's in LaJolla, two experiences that impressed for no other reason than that I haven't witnessed a better improviser at the piano.

As you might expect, his long career has seen him take many fruitful and some not-so-fruitful turns, and that his body of work is simply too massive to comment on cogently here. But let us remember that Corea was firmly wedded to the jazz tradition. His mastery of the instrument was absolute; his attack was crisp, fiery, elegant, resonating, endlessly inventive. However, his Avant guard bona fides with Anthony Braxton and Woody Shaw, or his eventual crossover appeal to rock and pop audiences. Some time ago, he recorded a tribute album to the late pianist and protean composer Bud Powell with a select group of young jazz Turks. It is a wonderful tribute and will end with a post of my review. Take off your hat, bow your head, and have a good thought; we have lost a great artist.

a rant for the MC5

 

This is important shit , folks: To this day , the MC5 are not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame despite the impressive argument that they have been one of the most influential and , ergo, most important rock and roll bands in history. In any event, here is a choice cut not discussed much even my 5 aficionados , James Brown's "It's a Man's World". Agreed, the song is more than patronizing and winds up placing women on the damnable pedestal and back in the kitchen at the same time, but you have to hand to these guys for their odd choice. They loved black music and their choice of a song only JB could pull off is a classic punk gesture: "Fuck you guys, we're gonna play this goddamned song because WE WANT TO." Vocalist Rob Tyner did not, as has been remarked around a trash can full of burning rubber, give a FLAT FUCK if he sang worse than a horse thief gagging at the end of a dirty rope of justice. Rob Tyner sang like a man who had his head wrapped in a thick sheet of bubble wrap and then had his noggin stuffed into a burlap bag that reeked of diesel stained wagon timber and mildewed hemp. He sounded like he'd swallowed his fist in a freak accident that might have occurred when he he was chewing on his knuckles in macho-mechanical panic while watching an asteroid streak a fiery, smoky path to Cobo Hall. When he wrapped his crackling squawk to  It's A Man's World, satellites stopped broadcasting and Gabriel drove over his trumpet in a huff of overriding despair. His was the voice of percolating whiteness, personified grieving love handles with a microphone. There was a time when an attitude like that would inspire otherwise stoned and clueless teens , all of them too late for the absurd counter-culture vanities of Haight Ashbery and Greenwich Village, to yell "fuck yeah" and babble their rendition of dumb cliches about offing the pigs and serving the people. So yeah, the MC5 were really punks, macho black bad boy wannabes and crazy mofos in their right who were willing to stick it in your eye." Hah. Hit me again." The rest of the guys crammed their guitars into the cones of their amps and ground their strings against the microphone stands.The drummer, Dennis Thompson, rattled on over the snare, performed an encyclopedia's worth of imagined sexual amnesia drills over the head of the snare drum and punched a hole in the base drum with nothing other than a random disease he picked up for kicks at the last Room Temperature Ale House he was located  within. Some one in the middle of what was left of the audience that wasn't yet unconscious, bleeding or deceased hooted. "SUCK MY DICK" countered Tyner, "GAG ON MY GOODNESS, JARHEAD." After that, it started to get weird.

Bob Mosley of Moby Grape

Moby Grape: Bob Mosley, center

 A concert in the UCSD Gym with the Electric Flag and Moby Grape, two better bands to come out of the San Francisco era. They had broken up for several years but now were regrouped for what seemed at the outset to be a historical event but turned out to be a has-beens weekend. The Flag was incredibly lame, going through the motions of trying to resurrect the old fire. The highlight of the effort was guitarist Mike Bloomfield’s stomping off stage in disgust while drummer Buddy Miles did an impromptu vocal cast in the Otis Redding mold on why he needs his baby. But where the Flag at least managed some fake emoting, Moby Grape looked like they were being held up by guide wires. The playing was dead, the expressions uncommitted, and the air smelled of formaldehyde. Bassist Bob Mosley once hailed as the best white blues singer for the shot-from-cannons bellow he had in the Sixties, sang in a slightly inflected drone. He looked as if he were trying to hide behind his beard and microphone.

Spending New Year’s Eve in National City’s Harold’s Club wasn’t my idea of a good time. Packed elbow to the torso with servicemen who danced with cigarettes jutting from their lips and the West Pac widows who sat on barstools with moist Bud bottles in their hands and staring off into the club’s smokey red-tinted atmosphere, I spent the entire evening safe in my seat rubbing knees with those I came with. I felt like a vegetarian in a steakhouse. After a while, I started paying attention to the band Gopher Broke, a group that rattled off dispassionate versions of current chart-toppers. The bassist looked familiar, and after some squinting, I remember who it was, Bob Mosley. His demeanor wasn’t much more animated than when I saw him at UCSD, but he seemed comfortable at least, cracking a smile now and then and taking healthy swigs from a drink between numbers.

Bob Mosley, a native San Diegan now resettled in his hometown after ten years on the road, loads a corn cob pipe, flicks a butane lighter and puffs hard on the pipe’s stem to generate smoke. He rubs his chin slowly, fingers running through a neatly trimmed surfer blond beard, and answers a question in a measured, matter-of-fact tone. 

“The Grape reunion last year was really weird, just plain freaky. To me, it was a matter of getting the money and get out, and pray to God that you don’t go crazy before you get paid. I got out of that scene. Now I’m real cautious about the offers I get. I just don’t like to get freaked out.” 

The reunions were unfortunate because they produced only a poor facsimile of one of the best rock bands from the Sixties. Like that of the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield, Grape’s sound had been a melting pot of American musical genres. But unlike the Byrds, who were merely eclectic at best, or the Springfield, who sometimes go further than their abilities, Moby Grape had guts, a certain graininess that lent the band a deeper emotional base. Their first two albums (now out of print) remain two near-perfect gems, covering hard rock, country, soul, blues, and folk ballads with the requisite grit in their vocals and instrumentation that goes beyond affectations. The band’s primary fault, in fact, was that they were too stylistically varied to be salable to a public larger than a small group of cultists. Columbia Records gave the Grape a hard promotional push, with a massive ad campaign and five releases on singles from the first album simultaneously, sort of in the vein that one of the tunes would click. Even so, Grape remained relatively unknown, and the band’s spirit reached ebb tide. The five releases following Wow were void of the earthy magic that had made the first two such constant joys.

Moseley loaded his pipe. “It was over after the first album, really,” he says laconically. “By the time Wow had come out, the band had moved to Santa Cruz to get away from all the trendy scene makers that were just crowding San Francisco so much that it got to be too much. San Francisco was something. You could walk down streets, smile at people, not feel uptight, you know everyone. It was like being at home. But all the attention focused on it by the media caused everyone and this brother to come up and hang out. It was like having a horde of people just move into your home. You wouldn’t dig it, would you? It just blew me away. The move to Santa Cruz on the band’s part was an attempt to get away from the meth and smack that were going down heavy in San Francisco, but by that time, my feeling had gone from the band.” His pipe burns out, and after an attempt to relight it, he places it on the coffee table in front of him.

How had Moby Grape formed? 

Mosley laughs. “Kind of a long story. Early on, I was working with a three-piece band that included Joe Scott Hall and Johnny Barbetta (drummer for the Turtles and now for the Jefferson Starship) and a girl singer. A guy on the organ was asked to join the band. I didn’t like organ at the time; I liked the trio sound, with a driving lead guitar, a solid bass, and a drummer who knows all the chops. The organ just filled up the band’s sound too much for my taste, so I quit. The last couple of nights I played with them, two guys from Seattle came down while working at the San Francisco International and asked me to join their band. They were a jazz/rhythm and blues group, and they needed a bass player who could sing. Those two boys were futures Grapes Jerry Miller (lead guitar) and Don Stevenson.

“When the job was up, I went to Los Angeles in mind to find a folk-type musician, someone who can do all that fancy picking stuff. I got a hold of Peter Lewis, who I found out later was Loretta Young’s son. I thought, ‘oh boy, now’s my chance to get in the Hollywood scene … “ Mosley laughs. “Anyway, he, a dude named Matthew Cates (later Grapes’ manager, along with Quicksilver and It’s A Beautiful Day), a drummer named Skip Spence who was just fired from the Jefferson Airplane, and I all went up to San Francisco, where we met Miller and Stevenson. We formed Moby Grape there, and through various means available to us, we found clubs and places to play and built up a big local following.”

Do you ever long for the old days when you were back up there?

“Not really. The only time I get anything like deja vu is when I play the old Grape records. I listen to those songs, and think about the early days, the times on the road, the people I’ve met, the situations I’ve had to sing all those songs under. Things like that. I have this hunger to get back on the road.”

What caused the group to split up?

“Well, Skip Spence left the band. He was the main focal point of the group. He was exceptionally talented in the songs he wrote and how he played his guitar; he was real flashy to watch. The Grape went on the road for two years without him. The whole feeling the band originally had was dead, and eventually, everyone went their own way.”

In the wake of Grape’s demise, Mosley returned to San Diego, worked in high schools as a janitor, and later joined the Marines. 

“I was a janitor in every high school in the city. I worked as an alternate, working for a service. I’d get a call saying where I was to go, and I’d hop on the bus and go to work.”

What made you decide to go into the Marines?

“I wanted to straighten myself out. I had gotten into a heavy scene with the music thing. I got tired of trying to be hip and shooting the bull and such. I thought the Marines could help me be more the person I wanted to be. They’re strict, and they gave me a set of conditions I could live with. I figure that you can do anything you want within limits. Once you feel your way around those limits, you can get along just fine. Anyway, they did do a lot for my brother. They helped him to cope with things, anyway, in a straight-ahead manner, without getting hung up in a lot of childish games.” He picks up the pipe again and scrapes the spent tobacco from it, stuffs more into the mouth, and lights it, this time puffing harder, making his cheeks look like the face of a stuffed chipmunk. 

“Right now,” he goes on, “I’m just playing bars, six nights a week, usually at Harbor Club at the Crossroads in Spring Valley. It’s an easy gig, and the money is pretty good, about $250 a week. It pays the rent and buys the food. I’m just glad to work as a musician because I know that many of them aren’t working. Doing this bar thing is the first time I’ve been off the road for a year, and it’s made me lazy. I’ve gained ten pounds, and between being married working steady, I don’t get the exercise I should. Life for me is sorta the happy homeowner thing. Sometimes it gets hard for me to even write songs.” 

What sort of things do you write? 

“Here, I’ll play you some.” He gets up, leaves the room, and returns with two cassette tapes. He pops one into his machine, plays certain parts tentatively while grimacing at the sound of his own voice, and then advances the tape for snippets he thinks are better examples of his work.

“Some of this stuff is done real trashy,” he says finally and lets the tape roll through three songs. The first is a ballad with tight, interworking harmonies with Jerry Miller’s guitar work weaving jazzy, quicksilver lines throughout. 

The other two are rockers with country blues tinges. Mosley’s singing on them is expressive and laid-back in a positive sense, not so mellow that it becomes a work to discern the easy peaceful feeling.

But enjoy as I might, Mosely fidgets in his chair, shakes his head contemptuously, and snaps a button on the cassette, butting the music. “These were recorded over a year ago up in L.A. with some great musicians, but his performances rub me the wrong way. Like the singing. On one song, I wanted a soulful sound, but I came out crooning, sounding dead. I got tons of tapes in my room that I won’t play for anyone, friend or foe. The songs are good, but I have to get them worked out the way I want.”

What does the future hold? 

“Well, I had the possibility of getting a recording contract with Warner Brothers through the Doobie Brothers. Their contract was up with them, and they were trying to negotiate a package deal where I could get an album done. I know those guys from Santa Cruz, and Pat Simmons, who was really impressed when he met Skip Spence, was doing his best to give some of the old Grape a break. Anyway, Warner Brothers said no, which leaves us all free to pursue other possibilities. I’ve got more time to write songs and put something together. 

“What I really want more than anything else is a hit record, to have a gold record I can hang on my wall. My old San Diego band, the Misfits, recorded an album, and we had a hit song, ‘This Little Piggy' (Hog For You Baby). When that thing reached that high, I was in seventh heaven. A hit record is the first thing I’ve wanted since I first played professionally. I’d like to get that old feeling back, the energy and enthusiasm of making music. I look for the old feeling whenever I play, and sometimes I find it. I don’t know how many people are shooting for a hit. It must be everybody who plays professionally. I just hope I can come up with a combination that clicks.” 

He places his pipe back on the table. His eyes glaze at the carpet. A motorcycle roars full steam up the street. The sound of grinding metal seems to interrupt Mosley’s train of thought. He shakes his head and seems to sense that the conversation has run its course; he politely says that he has to pick up his wife.

(Originally published in The San Diego Reader.)

Arthur Blythe, John McLaughlin capsule album reviews from 1980

 Lenox Avenue Breakdown- Arthur Blythe  (Columbia)

Blythe. a saxophonist who's done time with drummer Chico Hamilton's group and the New York jazz scene is the most interesting player of the instrument around. Where most saxists make the choice of the kind of music they want to play and seldom, if ever, stray to other styles, Blythe's sound is an engagingly eclectic mixture that he bonds together with the self-assurance and personality of his playing. His tone is as firm and spritely lyrical as either Joe Farrell or Phil Woods, yet he can, when need be, brandish the pyrotechnical verve of Sonny Rollins, the gruff, full-bodied harmonics of early Pharaoh Saunders of Gato Barbieri and the sweet-natured lilt of Charles McPherson. One shouldn't think that Blythe sounds like any of these players, though. Blythe sounds like Blythe alone, and the different ideas he uses to assemble a perfectly coherent style. With Blythe on Lenox Avenue Breakdown are drummer Jack DeJohnette, bassist Cecil McBee, guitarist James Ulmer, and several others. They provide the firm yet malleable bottom that Blythe requires for his extravagant solos, with their own sorties adding distinctive color and contrast. The title track is the best example of this, a wildly shifting terrain of rich sounds and multi-leveled rhythms interspersed by Blythe's brilliant gymnastics. Lenox Avenue Breakdown is rough, raw, bristling with ideas, and should be bought by anyone tired of the oversweetened contrivances branded as improvisational music.

 

Electric Dreams

- John McLaughlin and the One Truth Band - (Columbia)

When last seen and heard in concert in San Diego. guitarist McLaughlin had assembled a unit called the One Truth Band, and from the evidence, there was little reason to feel hopeful. The performance was atrocious. A poorly mixed and badly played din of electronic flash. With McLaughlin and the band undertaking a pointless, random cacophony of speedy riffs that never jelled. The concert lacked even the callous cleverness McLaughlin has become known for. Well, surprise. Electric Dreams, the One Truth Band's 'first release with McLaughlin, is everything their concert wasn’t. The six musicians - McLaughlin. L. Shankar on violin, Stu Goldberg on keyboards, Fernando Saunders on bass, Tony Smith on drums, and Alyrio Lima on percussion - have consolidated their skills into a fully integrated unit and display a distinct musical identity. 

McLaughlin, the principal composer here, has taken on a new maturity as a composer as well. Where much of his writing in the past seemed to be little more than tricky unison parts. employing Indian and neo-classical modes with little substantive guts underneath the dizzying dexterity, Electric Dreams material cuts a wider swath. The band's unified character gives the variety of approaches -Basie blues, poly-tonal funk, Coltranish chases - a coherence that last year's recipe hodgepodge, Johnny McLaughlin: Electric Guitarist lacked. Unlike Electric Guitarist, a session where McLaughlin employed different musicians on each track, Electric Dreams has a central character. This album is by recipe hodgepodge Johnny McLaughlin. Electric Guitarist lacked. Unlike Electric Guitarist, a session where McLaughlin employed different musicians on each track, Electric Dreams has a central character. 

The high points on the album are many, but especially exciting is "The Dark Prince," a fevered stretch of extended bop acceleration,  where McLaughlin fuses the melodic sense and chordal strategies of Coltrane and Parker with the quirky meters of his Mahavishnu period. Though the purist elements of the jazz audience might dismiss this track as mere facile Clash and showboating for its own sake. McLaughlin’s solos are nonetheless crisp. Concise. Elegantly phrased and to the point. The closing guitar keyboard shootout between him and Goldberg is an enthralling example of two musicians pushing themselves to their respective creative limits. "Miles Davis " (so named. as a return compliment to the trumpet player who named one of his songs "John McLaughlin" on his Bitches Brew  is heartburn with musical  notation after a delicious but over-spiced meal. At this point, I turn off the music and walk into the sunlight of the spirit.

from 1980:capsule reviews of mahogany rush,gentle giant,Peter alsop

 What's Next-

Frank Marino and Mahogany Rush (Columbia) T

The story goes that a young Frank Marino freaked out on bad acid some years ago, and after being given a guitar by his doctors as part of his recovery therapy, he was soon playing exactly like the deceased Jimi Hendrix despite the fact that he had previously never touched the instrument. Marino said in ea rly interviews that he believed the spirit of Jimi had entered him during his recovery, and that he had been changed from being just another teenage doper into someone who would carry on what Hendrix had begun. So the story goes. What you can say about Marino, whether you swallow' that crock or not, is that he does sound like Hendrix. But instead of "carrying on" the guitar stylistics and advancing the art of electric guitar, Marino's playing is somewhere in the late 60s, fast and furious, full of echo, feedback , and, unlike Hendrix 's occasional moments of bluesy lyricism, utterly graceless. The problem is singular: Marino and Mahagony Rush are incapable of writing a decent riff, a failing that results in Marino ejaculating pud-pounding solos over the material like a meat and potatoes slob drowning the most expensive plate at the Top Of The Cove in a comeuppance of ketchup. Although one has to concede Marino's adeptness, his style becomes wearisome. In the end, What's Next,their newest record, seems aimed at the audience who've turned Hendrix into a deity and refused to admit that better guitarists have come along. 

_____

Civilian -

 Gentle Giant (Columbia)

Back in the days when classically-derived rock was all the rage among the small enclaves of pop dilettantes, Gentle Giant set themselves apart from the pack with the unusual continuity and stringent formalism of. their playing. In recent years, though, Giant has been changing their sound, gearing it toward a more commercial appeal so that they might attract a larger audience who might otherwise dismiss them as mere technical tricksters.- Unfortunately, what they sound like on Civilian, their latest record, is merely a watered down rendition of their old self, bordering almost on self parody. "The material stays safely within the limits of what the average tolerate - there is little risk-taking here - and except for some pleasant ensemble bits here and there, nothing really gels moving. Also, Derek Shulman's singing - a distraught, emasculated whine - has never been my idea of great crooning, and the lyrics, trapped in the aprioric existential murk of alienation and all, amount to nothing more than in articulated pout. Words such as these are enough to make one want to give the linger, incessantly mewling about a world he didn't ask to be born into, a good swift kick in the pants. And not necessarily in the seat. 

_____

Draw The Line -Peter Alsop (Flying Fish)

 

If this were 1967, al an anti· war or Civil Rights march, and if I were 17, 'dad in khaki, stoned beyond what's reasonable in public, and still believing we could have world peace through the right mixture of drugs and indiscriminate sex, I would think that folkie Peter Alsop . was a totally bitchen guy. But this is 1980, and though my politics haven', changed all that much, I think most of us learned the lesson that the world won't be a better place through wishful thinking and pamphlet politics. Alsop , though, seems to exist quite happily in an airless vacuum . He 's what used to be called a  "topical" songwriter, and though the things he chooses to sing about - the innate greed principal of capitalism, the horrors of nuclear energy,  labor songs, feminisms' liberation of males from the breadwinner role - you find him to be so politically "correct" that you'd like to punch him out. Not that I find anything particularly disagreeable with Alsop's world view. Rather, Alsop gets on my nerves because of his expression, which is didactically self righteous , s hallow and humorous to only an audience of like-minded politico who already know the punchlines. And as a propagandist, he lacks the needed ability to turn up with the stirring turn of phrase . This man is not Phil Ochs, not Dylan, not Dave Van Ronk, not Buffy St. Marie. He is Peter Alsop, an insufferable little snit, a profoundly depressing experience. What else can you expect from a man who probably won't play in any state that hasn't ratified the ERA? 

(Originally in The UCSD Daily Guardian)

EMOTIONAL RESCUE by The Rolling Stones (capsule review from 1981)

 Emotional Rescue --The Rolling Stones

Although Some Girls was a wide improvement over the phoned-in raunch-rock the Rolling Stones came to specialized in  after Exiles on Main Street, I never thought it was really that good. There were no songs on the par with "Satisfaction," "Sway," or "Backstreet Girl" (to choose three from a sizable collection of classics). Still, I didn't think that the Stones would go as slack and indifferent to their legacy as they sound on Emotional Rescue. Might it be that they’ve become so world weary that their sense of cruel irony, which was always a refreshing bracer against the worst collective delusions and naivete of major b ands that wanted to be relevant in turbulent times, has been dulled to the degree that they’re reduced to the status of cranky uncles at the family Christmas table. They don't sound angry or outrageous, they sound as though their feet hurt.

 Maybe they’re jaded, maybe they're tired, maybe they're just burned out by the stress of being the "world's greatest rock and roll band." but whatever the cause, the symptoms are apparent and irritating. Keith Richards and Ron Wood charge through Chuck Berry riffs like drunks stumbling through plate glass, Charlie Watts drumming has never sounded more uninteresting, and Bill Wymans' bass work sounds resembles nothing so much as sleepwalk proficiency. Jagger is the only one who sounds as though he's having any fun, but I suspect its fun for the wrong reason: he knows precisely what he can get away with throughout the songs he sings With a leering, mocking contempt.

 The problem is that the contempt is aimed not at any of the sacred cows the audience likes to see slaughtered as a matter of routine. Rather, the smug superiority of persona and derisive disgust seems aimed toward the audience, the the front row to the cheap seats.  This is to say that the cynicism that comes easily and too convincingly for the Stones signals a flatlining of their imagination.  Living up to your reputation isn’t the same as creating something a few of us would so preciously  term art. 

(Originally seen in the UCSD Daily Guardian).

2 capsule record reviews from 1981

 Directions - Miles Davis (Columbia)

 Like last year's Circle In The Round, Directions is another double record anthology of previously unreleased Davis material from 1960-70, and it's neatly divided between the coaly lyrical post-bop styles and the period when the trumpeter led his musicians into the wilds of polyrhythmic jazz-rock. For my part, I prefer the latter of the two styles on the fir t two sides, highlighting Davis' sharp, pointillistic brassiness and several swinging performances from Wayne Shorter, Hank Mobley, Ron Carter, and others. The fusion material tends to drift too far afield, lost as it is around funk riffs that are annoyingly stationary while improvisations, by Davis. John McLaughlin , Wayne Shorter and Steve Goodman, lack anything to say save for arbitrary utterances. One jam, "Willie Nelson ," do 1' , however. transcend the hit-and-miss method of the style t with superlative bassist Dave Holland elevating a simple figure into truly propulsive  groove that in turn inspires McLaughlin to give his best guitar work-out on the four record set. Still, the fusion sessions are stiff and unmotivated, and one wonders whether Davis himself would have allowed these tracks to see light. Sides one and two, though, are quite fine, and well worth the price of the package.  

Intensities In Ten Cities - Ted Nugent (Epic) 

I once thought  Ted Nugent was a  guitarist of singular style who would one day drop the meat-eater stance and make music well the equal of his instrumental skill. Well, I still think that Nugent i a good guitarist, but I’ve abandoned all hope that he might garner some dignity as a musician. Primarily, dignity and class are elements Nugent has no interest in, nor use for. Yes, he can play guitar well and one respects him for that, but he’s also a freak show, a performer, a loud and grotesque figure of masculinity who has no problems selling out arenas and moving vinyl. Intensities in  Ten Cities is more of what he' been serving up the last . ix years or so: songs in major keys using major chords with lots of screaming guitar work and plenty of lyrics that display no more odal conscience than a back alley brawl. Nugent is obviously very happy to remain where he is, his audience seems more than happy to be typified as bone heads of the first order, and presently I'm more than happy to ignore this me . Give the audience what it wants and then wash the blood off your hands

(Originally published in the  UCSD Guardian).

LESLIE WEST, RIP

 Leslie West, guitarist for Mountain , has passed away, age 75. The musician  was at the center of the  since my high school senior year, circa  1971 , which makes this especially sad.  His playing on the song "Dreams of Milk and Honey", the live version from  their  ' 71 Flowers of  Evil album, was a I track I    listened to obsessively , all  20 or so minutes of it, for years to come.  Suffice to say that I  pretty well had the performance memorized, every note, every phrase, every transition from one  theme and variation to another, each change in tempo, each down beat and  uptick in volume. Or so it seemed at times as I remember miming West's guitar work in the dresser mirror while the song blared . It seemed I could write a bit of memoir, autobiography let us  say, to each five minute segment of this track and have enough writing to fill a book. I thought I would reprint this here, an appreciation of what I thought the song sounded like to me, something entirely subjective. Leslie West could play guitar.    

What song is going through my head? An old one, old, "Dreams of Milk and Honey" by Leslie West and Mountain, from the second side of their album Flowers of Evil, 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 no power could withstand. 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 rude riff slinging. 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 get and accept on its own truncated terms or ignore outright. His guitar work was a brick wall you smashed into at an unheard number of miles an hour and, staring up at the sky, you noticed the bloom of a lone flower, not to mention a halo of tweeting birds and la-la music. 

 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 masterpiece of rock guitar minimalism caused a few my friends to refer to me listening yet again to my personal "national anthem." This is the melodic, repetitive grind I wished life always were, endlessly elegant and stagnant, shall we say, in perfect formation of the senses, hearing, smell, taste, the arousal of dormant genitalia, all big and large and grinding at the gears that sing sweet mechanical song of intense love heavier than any metal beam you might care to bite into.  The combination of Felix Papalardi's whiny voice singing his wife's bullshit lyrics can ruin any buzz you have going for you. It's the live material that kicks it, with lots of fat, snarling Leslie West guitar work twisting around a punchy set of slow, grinding, distorted hard rock. Yes, arrangements do count, even in rock and roI might have even lit a Bic lighter for this tune. is something beautiful in that as well but, alas, the end result of that is the end waxing poetic. Alas. Sing it, Leslie.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

REMEMBERING JOHN LENNON

(Originally posted in 2018, it merits a reprint on the 40th anniversary of the singer's death.) 

This coming December 8th was the 38^th anniversary of John Lennon's assassination by that ignoble cipher Mark David Chapman, and as much as one wants to deny that they remain obsessed with the great glory of their fiery youth, a day of this kind makes me none the less like to meander around the old and overgrown ground of the past and wonder how things might have been different.   But the motives are selfish, as they always have been with me, and I am less concerned with the winsome utopia Lennon wanted to bring us to had Chapman not found his gun and his target, but rather with the decline of Lennon's music, post-Beatles. My position is simple and probably simple-minded; Lennon was a pop music genius during his time with the Beatles, collaborating or competing with Paul McCartney at the top of his songwriting and performer game. With the introduction of Yoko Ono into his life, we see a lapse into the banal, the trivial, the pretentiously bone-headed. Yoko Ono did much to make Lennon the worst example of wasted genius imaginable. Though he did make some great rock and roll during his post-Beatle time and wrote and recorded a handful of decent ballads, his artistry took a nose dive he never had a chance to pull out of. He was pretentious, head-line hungry, and cursed with egomania that overrode his talent. He stopped being an artist, and a rock and roller, and became the dread species of the creature called celebrity; the great work that made his reputation was behind him, and there was nothing in front of him except brittle rock music with soft-headed lyrics, empty art stunts, and drugs, drugs, drugs. A sad legacy for a great man. The fact of the matter is that Lennon's greatness was largely possible because of his collaborations, full or partial, with Paul McCartney. Both had native musical instincts that balanced each other: the proximity of one to the other kept them on their best game.

The sheer genius of the entire Beatle body of work versus the sketchy efforts from both Lennon and McCartney under their own steam bears this out. Lennon never found anyone to replace McCartney and certainly never had anyone who challenged her to do better, more innovative work. Yoko certainly didn't give him anything that improved his music, and her lasting contribution to his career gives him the errant idea that performing under your ability equals sincerity. It equaled excruciatingly inadequate music. What's impressive for an anniversary as seemingly monumental as this is the paucity of new insights, previously unavailable information, or especially interesting critical estimations of their estimable body of work. It is a topic that has been exhausted, it seems since scrutiny on all matters and personalities about the Beatles has been unceasing since their demise. Essentially, we have reruns of our own memories, repackaged, remodeled, sold to us again, and endless of things we already know intimately and yet consume compulsively because we cannot help ourselves. It cheapens the term, but "addiction" comes to mind.

There is nothing to add to the Beatles' legacy, except perhaps add our anecdotes to the ceaseless stream of words that seek to define their existence and importance even today. It's no longer about what the Beatles meant and accomplished in altering the course of history or manipulating the fragile metaphysical assumptions we harbor, for good or ill; we've exhausted our best and largest generalities in that regard, and the task will fall to historians, philosophers and marketers after most of us are dead as to what The Beatles and their songs are worth as art and commercially exploitable assets. For us, there remains only a further dive into autobiography, where we might yet find some clue and excitement as to how these guys became an informing influence on our individual personalities. John Lennon and the Beatles changed my life significantly and unalterably during their existence. I became aware of this only after watching two hours of CNN wall-to-wall coverage of the assassination. I broke down, tears came, I was a senseless, doom-stricken mess, even though at the time I loudly bad-mouthed the pasty, hippie-flake dilettantism of his later work.

None of what I thought mattered in that instance. John Lennon was dead, and it was losing some essential part of myself whose loss would never be filled with anything even half as good or worthy. He still mattered to me in my life quite although I'd had what amounted to an argument with him over his politics and his music during the length of his solo career, despite my best efforts to break off into new sounds and ideas and leave Lennon and the Beatles behind, his death hit as would the end of a family member. For good or ill, his work and the crude course of his ideas helped form values and attitudes that still inform my response to celebrity and events, no less than Dylan, and no less than reading Faulkner, Joyce, or viewing Godard films. Since the killing, the deification that he's had is the sick, fetish culture nostalgia that illustrates the evils of unalloyed hero worship, a need to have a God who once walked in our midst. This bad habit turns dead artists who were marginally interesting into Brand Name, icons whose mention confers the acquisition of class and culture without the nuisance of having to practice credible discernment: every weak and egocentric manuscript Kerouac and Hemingway, among others, has been published, and the initial reason for their reputations, graspable works you can point to, read and parse, become obscured.

Lennon becomes less the musician he was and becomes, in death, just another snap-shot to be re-marketed at various times, complete with booklets containing hyperbole-glutted prose that attempts to instruct me that my response through a period I lived in is meaningless. Such hype utterly refuses to let newer listeners come to their own terms with the body of work. It is no longer about Lennon's music. It's about the promotion machine that keeps selling him. This is evil. Lennon, honest as he was mostly when he had sufficient distance from his antics, would have told us to get genuine as well and admit that much of his later music was half-baked and released solely because of the power of his celebrity. This may well be the time for an honest appraisal of his work, from the Beatles forward, so that his most potent work can stand separate from things with a lesser claim to posterity. Many magazines and other media have used Lennon and the Beatles for their value as nostalgia icons in an attempt pathetic glimpses of their own history. It's only business, nothing personal, and that is precisely the problem. Risky to assume what Lennon might ultimately have sounded like had he not died since he could switch games suddenly and quickly so far as his musical thinking went. This was a consistent quality that kept him attractive, if not always inspiring: there as always, a real hope that he would recover inspiration, as Dylan had after some weak work, or as Elvis Costello had after the soggy offerings of Trust or Goodbye Cruel World. 

Even the weaker efforts of Lennon's later period were marked by his idiosyncratic restlessness, and the songs on Double Fantasy, domesticated that they are, might well have been transitional work, a faltering start, toward new territory. It's laughable that Lennon might ever have become as lugubriously solemn as Don Henley. Still, there's merit in saying that Lennon's work might become par with Paul Simon's: Simon's work is undoubtedly more than screeds praising the domesticated life, and he is one of the few songwriters from the Sixties whose work has substantially improved over the forty years. If Lennon's work had become that good, it would have been a good thing on his own terms. However, it'd be more realistic to say that a make-believe Lennon rebirth of great work would be closer in attitude and grit to Lou Reed and Neil Young, two other geezers whose work remains cranky and unsatisfied at heart. Since his death, it'd been my thinking that Lennon would have transcended his cliches as some of the contemporaries had.

AWKWARD TEENAGE BLUES

 

Leslie Gore was one of those pure pop singers like Gene Pitney and Neil Sedaka who had an appealing, earnest voice that could manage the hooks and addictive choruses of the songs she performed. Like Pitney, her song "It's My Party (and I'll Cry If I Want To)" was a catchy distillation of teen heartache and anxiety, an age where neither female nor male could help but continually compare their inside turmoil with what seemed cool and calm of the appearances of friends, associates, and other hangers-on. Am I good enough? Smart enough? Pretty/handsome enough?  Pitney and Gore were the heralds of awkward teenage blues, that time of life when hormones are kicking in and extending their reign from the brain and the appendages they command, a set of years where self-esteem is rare and fragile where it exists at all.

Not much has changed, just the style of clothes, the music soundtrack, and how far past first base you have to go to fit in, or at least seem to. Pitney was dour, moody, full-time drama queen in his string of hits, tunes he sang masterfully. He had a range, of course, easily witnessed with a listen to "I'm Going to Be Strong", "It Hurts to Be In Love", but it also had the strange quality of being scratchy, a strange impression of the gruff textured rhythm and blues singers he admired, and a certain "girlishness" as well. He had a fast vibrato, a quiver that would appear in the center of a phrase, making keywords seem suddenly uncertain, nervous, subject to glandular swings of mood, oftentimes undercutting the stronger voice, the more stoic, stronger pronunciation where Pitney reached down to an unnaturally low register as a means of constructing a solid, masculine calm. The singer was fascinating and melodramatic, and his performances were a clash of emotional raw ends.  But what really hits a nerve with Pitney's voice was the higher register, which he could twist and torture with deceptively able finesse to create a sense of a young and sensitive young man tasting for the wrong time the bitter fruit of breaking up. Neal Sedaka's song title "Breaking Up is Hard to Do" offers a clue to the genius of Pitney, who explodes the minor key agony of teenage breakup blues and expand the melodrama to the extent that it's tempting to apply "Wagnerian" to his extreme style. Maybe not so dramatic.

Leslie Gore was pop music for young people and I have to say that I found myself liking more than a little of it when I listened to TOP 40 radio. She was pop personified, the girl singing into the mirror as she prepared for a school dance for which she had no corsage nor date, singing her woes and insecurities into the reflection, watching her image, hair parted on the wrong side, watch on the wrong wrist, admit to the worries and dread  of not being in the center of the party,  not being interesting enough for a boy or a girl to talk to, someone for whom being friendless was worse than the death. Death, to her thinking, would be a release from this hell of other people's happiness mocking you without end, amen.

HOLLER, STOMP AND RIFF WITH WAYNE RIKER

Blues Lightning
The Wayne Riker Gathering

The last we beheld guitarist Wayne Riker was on his 2018 release Blues Breakout, a spectacular exhibition of fretboard heroics. Known locally and nationally for  mastery of  a variety styles, the previous album was Riker in a mood to blaze the blues.It was, to my ears, the most impressive display of blues guitar know-how since Johnny Winter's fabled  Second Winter .  Riker is a very distinct, even singular stylist, of course, but what he shares with Winter is an unerring sense of melding technique, taste, flash and feeling into each phrase he puts out there. Wonderfully fluid , he makes it seem that he can make his guitar convey the emotion and attitude he feels the moment he feels it; this disc is the kind of long-form improvisation which renews itself with each chorus. Each solo our friend Wayne essays forth is packed with what might be called The "Wow Factor”.

The new record Blues Lightning  continues this ride, with Riker this time availing himself of another able musicians, a quartet with Riker on guitar, Doug Kvandal on organ, Mackenzie Leighton on bass and Walt Riker on drums. A briefer album Blues Lightning has six hard-sizzling tracks, recorded live on three different dates at San Diego's Studio West. The mood up-tempo, with enough of B.B. King’s feel for elegant hullabaloo. The band throughout demonstrates a flawless sense of what how to play the changes,  with bass and drums locked into a neat habit of propulsion , keeping the music tight while allowing it rock hard . Riker's guitar work is a revelation to anyone who had loved his accelerated dexterity from the 2018 release. This time his breaks are sweet, the phrases more voice-like , with a  very use of seeming obligato statements, superbly use of pauses between riffs, and an emotionally pulverizing feeling for the high blues bend, controlling with a vibrato at the end of the line , compelling your author to slam his hand on the coffee table a few times.  The band mix is spicier with Kvandal's adroit work on the Hammond B-3 organ work, producing swells of funky, grinding texture that weds Riker's spikey guitaring and the rock-solid rhythm section. He fills gaps, offers short phrases to underscore vocal lines, and is a glorious second voice on his own solos, spare, resonant, eternally funky. Guitarist and organist engage in a continuous series of quick- witted dialogues and call -and- response.As mentioned before, the album, this release has only 6 tracks, each of them a glistening gem of finesse and feel. But what brings Blues Lightning even more intoxicating is the are the six powerhouse vocalists, Leonard Patton, Shelle Blue, Deanna Haala, Scott Mathiasen, Lauren Leigh Martin , and  Michelle Lundeen.  Each vocalist applies their potent skills to their respective songs. Every hoop, holler, and belted testament to the ironic ways of life and love, a subtle array of emphasis and insight. It’s a one of the record's added pleasures that listeners get to appreciate the contrasting yet complementary contrasts that makes the music even more electrifying.

We range from the subdued and conversational truth telling of Leonard Patton's reading of the B.B.King classic "Everyday I Have the Blues "(composed by Memphis Slim) ,  a vocal marked both by restraint and conviction in the singing while the band provides a sprite, marauding groove, to the classic blues shouting brought on by Scott Mathiasen on Freddy King's "Tore Down" ( written by Sonny Thompson), a snappy and strutting shuffle highlighting the singer’s grand and soulful rasp over the percolating ensemble. Shelle Blue’s reading of “W-O-M-A-N” ,  composed by Dorothy Hawkins, Abbey Mallory, Jean Mitchell  and Jamesetta Rogers, is a sexy and assertive response to the male-point of view of  “I’m A Man”, reminding everyone in the room that women are full partners in the life they have with their mates.  The B.B. King arrangement of “Rock me Baby” is sufficiently  growled, groaned and soulful as rendered by Deanna Haala’s declarative voice .

 Michele Lundeen’s vocal on the blues -torch song ballad “That’s Why I’m Crying” (composed by Samuel Maghett)  brings a hint of the sassy earnestness of Eartha Kitt to the testifying. Riker’s guitar fills and his solo on this tune, incidentally, are quite thrilling, responding to the highs and lows of Lundeen’s matchless singing.Singer and guitarist create unbearable tension until Riker cuts loose with a bravura solo, eloquent and slashing. The solo is an exquisite showcase of two-fisted blues work, as is , in point of fact, the entirety of Blues Lightning.  Buy the record and do as I do and place the disc on while having your morning coffee. Twenty minutes of that in the A.M. and I am ready to seize the day.

HIP RECORD COLLECTIONS

 

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 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 iPOD; the songwriter is consistently better, the production crisper, the lyrics are effectively "poetic"  without the florid excess that capsized  half of Sgt.Pepper's songs on their iPOD; the songwriter is consistently better, the production crisper, the lyrics are effectively "poetic"  without the florid excess that capsized about half of Sgt.Pepper's songs. Perhaps most important, though, is that  you could still listen to Revolver and still regard the Beatles as a working band . It might be a better bet that musicologist would be a better choice to pick apart what made the musicianship on this record so alive and cogent, but a big attraction in my life is that these guys still sound like a band showing up for a gig, setting up their own gear, and ready to play . It may be nostalgia, but something was lost when Sgt. Pepper became the standard by which most  Beatles records after it would be judged, two sides of special effects, guest shots and  flailing ambition toward the Art Gesture. Revolver was the band still in work shirts. 

It might be compared to Miles Davis when he was performing with his classic bands--John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock,Tony Williams, Ron Carter, et al-- with a long string of releases like Birth of the Cool and Kind of Blue (name your favorite here)and when he turned to the jazz rock fusion of Bitch's Brew and On the Corner, which featured the endeavors of Chick Corea, and John McLaughlin . The first mentioned releases are conspicuous examples of bands sensitive to each members nuances, strengths and weaknesses, quirks and signatures, combing with the material to offer adventurous improvisations as part of an ensemble effort, while with Bitch's Brew Davis and his producers culled performances from hours of taped jam sessions where ideas and motifs were explored to produce albums that are, in effect, mosaics. The general tone of the later releases was less the sparks that occur between musicians confronting each other in performance but rather something more theatrical; thought the musicianship is rather magnificent and often times bracing on the later electric releases,they seem more in service to Davis' cantankerous muse , performing as directed. As much as I admire and respect the accomplishment of both the Beatles and Davis in their late work, studio craft and all, a larger part of me would have preferred if the musicians had found a way to expand their horizons without abandoning their identities as bands. The Rolling Stones sought to produce their own version of Sgt.Pepper with the releases of the bloated and wasted Satanic Requests, and it's a fine thing to appreciate the Stones self critical response to bad notices (and perhaps some sober listening to the record, after the fact); they abandoned their attempts to compete with the Beatles on their new turf and returned  to riffy, R&B inflected rock and roll. 

What hasn't been mentioned here is that Frank Zappa released his first Mothers of Invention album Freak Out on June 27, 1966, a full month before the Beatles released Revolver in August of that year. Zappa was an erratic, quizzical, quarrelsome presence, but he achieved things with that album that neither the Beatles nor the Stones came close to; both those bands were more influential in the pop music sphere, where their separate approaches to including cross genre and experimental gestures made for pleasant and easily appreciated (and imitated)music for a large record buying public. Zappa, though, with his solid chops as composer, producer, guitarist, satirist and multi media maven, was miles further up the road and around the bend with respect to advancing the primitive ways of rock and roll into an art form. A good amount of Zappa's early music remains challenging to comprehend, which is another way of saying that it's hard to sit through and that it's downright ugly. The ugliness, though, wasn't merely my limited aesthetic; Zappa cultivated it, advanced it, gloried in it. Now that's integrity.  But the stuff that sounded ugly decades ago still kills small animals today.

DIONNE WARWICK, GENE PITNEY, BURT BACHARACH AND HAL DAVID

 

Dionne  Warwick was a vocal original . The going tradition for black pop and soul singers had been a very gospel , shout to the rafters approach that required range and training. Warwick had the training, obviously, but not the vocal range and managed in working spectacularly well within her limits. She had an interesting, off beat sense of when to sing a lyric, a subtle tone of sadness in the lower register, there was a magical sense of her speaking to you directly, softly, after a good cry. This is shown in the video of  Walk on By  , a song that begins that begins with the pacing of someone trying to hurry down a street, trying to avoid eye contact with a former lover they can't bring themselves to see, a perfect mood, at the edge of the frantic, as Warwick movingly , slowly sings the opening words of her imagined speech to her ex-paramour :

If you see me walkin' down the street

And I start to cry each time we meet

Walk on by, walk on by

Make believe that you don't see the tears

Just let me grieve in private 'cause each time I see

I break down and cry, I cry

Walk on by, don't stop

Walk on by, don't stop

Walk on by

This is one of the great heartbreak songs of the era, and it shows Warwick's particular genius for softly dramatizing a lyric by underplaying the emotion. Leslie Gore, Patty Duke and a myriad other  pop proto-divas  would have raised the roof beams with this song, but Ms. Dionne finds the right pitch. The sorrow, the self pity, the resignation is all there, but it the quality of Warwick's singing places her not in sort of hysterical moment of solipsistic self-pity but someone, actually, he is more the Hemingway stoic, shouldering the pain and the grief and dealing with what the everyday life demands. Of course, there is that sweetly sad piano figure in the chorus that presents an effective change in tempo and mood, a circling keyboard figure that halts the forward motion of the  narrative and stops the narrator, our singer Dionne, dead in her tracks, briefly and sharply  remembering the pain of breaking up.

These are rare and beautiful attributes in a singer, the capacity to emote in such a small scale; she was the exact opposite of the late Gene Pitney, who turned every sad song into an aria of teen heartache. Both singers, incidentally, were blessed to have song many songs by the Bacharach/David team, two men who knew how to write songs for a singer's vocal strengths. Bear in mind, I was a big fan of Pitney's. For comparison, above is Pitney singing "I'm Gonna Be Strong" , written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil (later covered by Cyndi Lauper in her early band Blue Ash). An extreme bit of heartache here, with the perfect singer for the sad tale. The tempo is the same through out, but as it progresses, subtly but quickly, Pitney's voice is stronger, filled with more self-aggrandizing emotion, a man turning in his sleep and trying to burn his way through his lose with nothing but  stoicism, but who, in the final hour, alone, will just weep as hard and as loud as he is able. The way Pitney's voice climbs to his highest register is chilling, equaling the grandiose swell of the orchestration. Tortured high notes were precisely what Pitney's music were about, observable in the operatic, compressed, grandiose and florid teen angst songs he sang with a voice that could start out low, smooth, slightly scratchy with restraint, and then in the sudden turn in tempo and a light flourish of horns or sweeping , storm-bringing violins, slide up the banister to the next landing and again defy gravity to the yet the next level as he his voice climbed in register, piercing the heart with melodrama and perfect pitch as the most banal love stories became the raging of simultaneous tempests.

 It was corny, but Pitney had the voice and he had the songs to pull it off and make records that still have that stirring hard hitting effect; "Town Without Pity", "It Hurts To Be In Love", "Twenty Four Hours to Tulsa", "I'm Gonna Be Strong", and an substantial string of other hits he had ( 16 top twenty hits between 1961 through 1968) took the tear jerker to the next level. As mentioned by someone the other day in the British press commemorating his music, his tunes weren't love songs, they were suicide notes. Pitney's multi-octave sobbing qualified as Johnny Ray turning into the Hulk wherein the sadder he was made, the stronger his voice became. All this was enough for me to buy his records in the early Sixties when I was just making my way to developing my own tastes in musicians and their sounds.Most of the early stuff I liked--The Four Seasons, Peter Paul and Mary--I dismiss as charming indulgences of a young boy who hadn't yet become a snob, but Pitney? I kept a soft spot for his recordings in my heart, and defended him in recent years when those verbal battles about musical tastes found his name impugned in my presence. The Prince of Perfect Pitch deserves respect for turning the roiling moodiness of teenage love into sublime expressions of virtuoso emotionalism.