ROLLING STONED TO DEATH

The record review section of Rolling Stone turned 50 years old in 2017, and I'll admit from the first sentence that I haven't held the critical opinions in high regard for the better part of thirty years. I tend to question RSs motives in who they cover and the reasons for the favorable reviews so artists seem to get every time they release something. Music critic and pop cultural historian Jim DeRogatis, author of the Lester Bangs biography Let It Blurt, was once the editor of the RS review section and shared with at a book event that Jann Wenner, founder and very hands-on editor, decreed that there are artists who will never get a negative review, among them Dylan, The Boss, Tom Petty,...the usual suspects. I believe him, and I'm convinced Wenner corrupted the integrity of his reviewers; the section isn't a place of true criticism, the practice of discussing this at length, in detail, with the instance of rendering an honest estimation. It has been, for a long time, a tedious exercise in rubber stamping new albums with praise that rarely rise above the corroded cliches and platitudes that have haunted music reviewers for decades. 

There are notable exceptions, of course, chief among them Mikal Gilmore, a sterling prose stylist and a man given to nuanced consideration of history and tradition and contextualizes his praise against high standards. It should be said as well that the record review section was my most essential writing laboratory. As in the already mentioned Marcus, Bangs, Landau and RJ Gleason (and Robert Christgau at the now defunct Village Voice and Duncan Shepard at the SD Reader), these were my models for what I thought a fine critical prose should read like. For that I am grateful. That just makes it sadder to note that what was indeed the freshest and most invigorating forum for commentary has ceased to be a place for independent thinking and has become, in most part, a section of corporate shilling. 

Much of the decline in mass circulation criticism that , incidentally, gave an honest and considered evaluation of music, films and books could well be due to changing readership expectations; a cursory glance and a longer examination of the current crop of yammer among online internet outlets seems to require those would-be examiners of to have had a huge gulp of the kool-aid that's being served, no matter how ethically loathsome, and suspend critical standards as long as they draw a paycheck, replacing them with talking points and backstories agreed up between skittish media companies and the advertising and promotional departments of big corporations.I've suspected that if you treat an audience like fools, lemmings and immature hords addicted to fads and fashion, they will behave, in time, accordingly, accepting the faint shadows on the wall as the one reality their senses need to appreciate. Some of that, or maybe all of it, seems to be true. 

OVERHEARD about lyricists

Essentially and factually, Bob Dylan is a song lyricist who has a particularly strong gift for the poetic effect, while Cohen is a poet in the most coherent sense; he had published several volumes of poetry and published two novels prior to his taking up the guitar. Dylan's style is the definition of the postmodern jam session, a splendid mash-up of Little Richard, Hank Williams, Chuck Berry and a long line of obscure or anonymous folk singers whose music he heard and absorbed. His lyrics, however arcane and tempered with Surreal and Symbolist trappings--although the trappings, in themselves, were frequently artful and inspired--he labored to the pulse of the chord progression, the tight couplets, the strict obedience to a rock and roll beat. This is the reason he is so much more quotable than Cohen has turned out to be; the songwriter's instinct is to get your attention and keep it and to have you humming the refrain and singing the chorus as you walk away from the music player to attend to another task.

Chances are that you are likely to continue humming along with the music while you work, on your break, on the drive home, for the remains of the day. This is not to insist that Cohen is not quotable or of equal worth--I agree that Cohen, in general, is the superior writer to Dylan, and is more expert at presenting a persona that is believably engaged with the heartaches, pains and dread-festooned pleasures his songs take place. His lyrics are more measured, balanced, and less exclamatory and time wasting, and exhibit a superior sense of irony. Cohen is the literary figure, the genuine article, which comes to songwriting with both his limitations and his considerable gifts. All is to say that Dylan has Tin Pan Alley throwing a large shadow over his work. Cohen, in turn, is next to a very large bottle of ink and a quill. Cohen tends the words he uses more than Dylan does; his language is strange and abstruse at times, but beyond the oddity of the existences he sets upon his canvas there exist an element that is persuasive, alluring, masterfully wrought with a writing, from the page alone, that blends all the attendant aspects of Cohen’s stressed worldliness– sexuality, religious ecstasy, the burden of his whiteness– into a whole , subtly argued, minutely detailed, expertly layered with just so many fine, exacting touches of language.  

His songs, which I find the finest of the late 20th century in English–only Dylan, Costello, Mitchell and Paul Simon, have comparable bodies of work–we find more attention given to the effect of every word and phrase that’s applied to his themes, his storylines. In many writers overall. Unlike Dylan, who has been indiscriminate for the last thirty years, I would say Cohen is a better lyricist than Dylan because he’s a better years about the quality of work he’s released, there is scarcely anything in Cohen’s songbook that wasn’t less than considered, pondered over, measured for effect and the achievement of the cultivated ambiguity that made you yearn for some of the sweet agonies that accompanies a permanent residence in the half-lit zone between the sacred and the profane.

TWO QUICK APPRECIATIONS OF CAPTAIN BEEFHEART

The good Captain was someone I struggled with for decades, as  his music kept me guessing as to whether he was putting me on with the trash compactor surrealism of the lyrics, the swooping, howling, icon-smashing bark that constituted his singing, or the time signatures, which seemed a rhythmic approximation of what traffic might like in a universe that had a trillion miles of road , an equal number of cars but no traffic lights or stop signs. or if he was indeed the genius his supporters claimed he was, a self-starting savant who employed every tic, gesture, sound, click, rattle and hum that caught his attention and assembled them in ways that amounted to a careening challenge to a listener expecting something more down home. He resembled no one so much as Ornette Coleman, the jazz player, and composer who kept people guessing through his long decades as a music maker, and in the case of both artists, I am leaning toward the side that considers them major musical forces of the 20Th century. What likely confounded the music fans of the time, perhaps, was the lack of obvious virtuosity in the playing--no extended guitar solos, no unpunctuated drum essays--and the lack of straightforward beginning, middle, end structure on which a band's gratuitous catalog of chops can be displayed.

 His music was about sound, about the layering of tones and textures, sweet blues juxtaposed against inverted jitterbug temps and "free jazz" dissonances ala Albert Ayler and the lithe,  sliding alienation of a single blues note resonating from a cheap amplifier under one of the Captain's (nee Don Van Vliet) aqua-urban nightscapes.All this in service to a man who was truly one of the very few poets to lead a rock band; while the notable likes of contemporaries Joni Mitchell,  Paul Simon, Tim Buckley or even the Beatles never quite transcended the sense that there was some serious contemplation to the words they would employ to render their "poetic" effects, The Captain was a natural word drunk, a cross between Tristan Tzara, Kurt Schwitters and Howlin' Wolf; a prankster, a conjurer of mood, an organically generated underminer of literal meaning.

Three Months in the Mirror

Three months in the mirror 

burning hip 

- let's go to the kennel honey 

and get one of those cute little moth pups 

they flap their little wings 

and fly around a light globe 

and you can keep 'em in the closet 

and feed 'em socks - 

six months in the mirror 

burning hip 

- honey let's go out naked tonight 

with our moth puppy 

don't forget the socks and the light bulbs 

make sure it's not too warm 

you don't want to burn his lttle wings -

the lights are soft, streets soft, skies soft, 

the mirrors soft 

the smell of burnt powder 

the moth flies through the mirror 

powder falls lightly around around around 

and around the sun .

One reads this, finds themselves arguing with the words and the fractured adjectives, the quirky signifiers and surrenders to it, finally, ceasing to ask   "what is talking about" and asking, instead "what is he saying?". The Captain would answer only in ways that were just as inspirationally conflated as the poem/lyric he'd just written. As a guess, I would say a momentarily less zany Captain might offer the advice that a lister should take off the headphones, go outside and trust the authority of their senses if they wanted an answer that helped. The beauty of the Captain's music was that he made you figure it out for yourself--these are your senses, build something! 

Hearing him over time, decades in fact, brought me to one of those low-calorie epiphanies that comes to you while daydreaming at taxi-stand or the bankline in 1976, that what the Captain impresses on my psyche was the sense that I had just  woken up after a long lucid dream during an equally elongated street walk and I  was suddenly, brutally, incomprehensible in a world of familiar things that now seemed alien, detached from the very space they occupied, removed from all function or purpose other than to be played with, reconfigured, reinvented endlessly , constantly evolving in the way that children spontaneously create games and rules and  are away modifying the rules to accompanying new items to add to the play, to accommodate mistakes, to create fairness or give the short shrift to any idea of fairness. To create something and to let those things morph of their own accord by whatever invisible forces brought them to my liberated senses. In a major sense I've to believe Captain Beefheart was a witness to beauty that was fatal to the population's collective sense of pleasure, decorum and social duty; all he could do     was report and to keep us guessing, guessing, one would imagine, until our own sense of a better, achievable reality formed and allowed us to move forward as better citizens without the saber, the gun and the prisonhouse to keep us on the road to deferred bliss.

  Beefheart, rock's most idiosyncratic avant-garde individualist, and was remarkably at his peak with his next to last album with the Magic Band,  1978's Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller. He seems to have hammered his worrisome kinks and inspirational quirks into a form that benefits his talent for constructing fractured, asymmetrical, dada-derived music. Splendid use of free jazz tonalities, urban blues, Caribbean rhythms, and rhythm and blues. The music is as crankishly idiosyncratic as it's ever been (jump-cut time signatures, a free mixing of "free-jazz" randomness and pop song structures, blues and neoclassical shades blending into thick atonal texture) and Beefheart's vocals, one of the raspiest voices anywhere, deliver his Dada gesturing, free-associative lyrics with the same kind of off-kilter verve.(One would be remiss in thinking that Beefheart's lyrics are without substance or lack meaning: no less than Wallace Stevens, who explored his dreams of a world of perfect arrangements and their contradictions, Beefheart, nee Don Van Vliet chooses to inspect a terrain of imperfect things, material and organic, and forge connections and conversation between them with nothing but the force of applied and intense whimsy. ) 

The effect sounds like an Unlikely super session between Howlin' Wolf and Alfred Jarry (costumes designed by Max Ernst). His new Magic Band, featuring ex-Zappa sidemen as Bruce Fowler (trombone) and Art Tripp (drums) , handle the demands of the music with disciplined ease, executing Beefheart 's quixotic time signatures and self-deconstructing arrangements with a professionalism that tends toward both perfection and liveliness, usually an unlikely symbiosis in art-rock groups. However cerebral Beefheart's music sounds, though, it should be pointed out that Shiny Beast is a fun album, full of good humor and strong material. This time out, The Captain is out to entertain and beguile, a work of art that does what any object of scrutiny must do, which is to offer a genius's bluster, blarney and brilliance the only way it can be presented, in your face, without apologies or a phone number for a second date

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Barry Alfonso comments:

Like you, I feel a great vacuum-space with the departure of The Captain from this planet. What a rare and exalted being. I had the pleasure of interviewing him back in 1982, when he was hanging out by the La Brea Tar Pits (near his good friends, Smilodon and the Ground Sloth) doing press for his last album, Ice Cream for Crow. There was a lot of wonderful blarney slung by CB that day – I especially treasure his description of the music-consuming public as “fish in a fishbowl eating their own excretum.” But he also said some things that confirm your instincts about what he was up to creatively. Beefheart definitely saw himself as a COMPOSER, akin to Igor Stravinski. 

In his mind, everything in a song was a part, a movement, not the expression of an individual player – in fact, his guitarist Gary Lucas later told me that after Gary played a part in the studio, Beefheart said to him, “Thanks for the use of your fingers, man.” His musicians were his paintbrushes, his tools. This doesn’t sound very nice or respectful and Beefheart admitted as much. (His musicians – especially those who played during his Trout Mask period – insisted they had more to do with shaping the intricate song-parts than Beefheart gave them credit for. This is probably true. Yet I suspect CB so penetrated their psyches that they didn’t always realize when they were doing his will.) During our interview, Beefheart said that he got his songs whole, in a flash, and that the length of the song was how long it took to describe that single burst. That may account for the odd sense of movement and form in his songs.

 It also relates to his intense visual sense – CB was a painter and he thought like one when he was creating songs. Everything from “Ella Guru” to “Ice Cream for Crow” can be approached as still-life paintings seen from various angles through the course of the song. You are given a weird scene or portrait and you walk around it, poke at it, sniff it, taste it. As you said, there’s a heavy prankster element in CB. He liked to mess with people’s minds – he gave them a good fluffing, as if he was thwacking a pillow. He re-booted your cerebellum and made the world look cockeyed – or maybe right for the first time.

THAT RARE THING, A GOOD POEM ABOUT JAZZ

I'd normally put this poem at the bottom of things to be read and evaluated, given that it is yet another poem in a long string of tributes to jazz legends; the results I've read or heard from thirty years of open readings, workshops, and editing anthologies are that most of the attempts to get to the core of the improviser’s art are ham-handed and none-to-fresh (nor particularly musical). Davis, Parker, Ellington, all have had their names evoked and their legends dragged through a white jazz critic's generalizations about music, suffering, and black folks and their innate "soulfulness" and rhythm, through which a sort of benevolent racism can be viewed, the mythical good intentions of the humane plantation owner who sought to be kind to "his children". 

It's not a topic category that's ever yielded much in way of revelation or poetic effect for me; the revisionist poems, ostensibly written by mostly white poets to honor a black American art form, made me think of the stale paternalism that was, after all, is said and done, merely another attempt to define non-white traditions within American history and defuse them of any quality a group might take to define their experiences in terms other than what the Caucasian canon that said, I think Peter Balakian’s poem “Blue” almost works as the poetry equivalent of the sound of Davis’ trumpet. Void of the generalizations and ersatz sociology that have made this sub-genre in urban poetry a laughable species of verse, Balakian approaches the poem much the same as Davis might have approached his solos, focusing on the mood of the moment, the suggestive textures of a note bent against a modal piano figure and the quiet rumble of bass and drums creating a host of alluring shades, tones and coloration , a space that is about the problematic personality rising above and over defects of character and external hindrances to happiness and creating those series of moments that are sublime, pure, unaffected bits of harmony and beauty, albeit a loveliness tempered with the doings of a scornful cityscape. Balakian chooses interesting words for his impressions of listening to the Davis group; the city is transformed, it becomes something new, if briefly, for Balakian’s rhapsodic narrator and this must be the transcendence Davis himself must have felt when this music was played.

Light we pulled into a string of glass

that seeped out of the long vibration

of Miles' Blue in Green

like slow time in the empty lot

after soot and rain and rush,

the Ferry out of sight,

my bones electric with the hum

of the cable of the Bridge at 3 a.m.

and the dying lights of the Bowery.

Bill Evans making the rain thin

to a beam of haze before the

horn comes back from underwater.

New York seems lovely and quite habitable even by the timidest of us; it becomes not the most sophisticated and elegant place in the world, but rather, with the music from Miles' transubstantiating phrases, is the world where each and every crook, thief, liar, cuckold, and cheat assumes grace, finds a place, blends in with a rich backdrop of wise, somber hues that make up the thick and awe-inspiring skyline. The city with its traffic, racist cops, crowds, posers, slums, jerks, geniuses, writers and money-grubbing capitalist becomes transformed, cast in a softer light, rinsed with soft rain, tall buildings seen in water puddle reflections and blurred neon nightclub signs burning away the mist just enough for you to who is furnishing the soundtrack. This is a cityscape that exists only in black and white photographs carefully framed to produce an effect, but Balakian is writing about how Davis’ music from this period made him feel about the quality of his life in a dense urban center. That he does it with a modicum of hyperbole is a wonder, and the final lines about Bill Evans clearing away the rain and Davis’ horn resurfacing after an absence is the subtlest description of a jazz group’s interaction I’ve read in years. Of course, it makes no literal sense. It’s a poem, and a good one.

DYLAN AND THE CANON

Cambridge University Press,is coming out with booked titled The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan, the intent being, one supposes, that august institution wants to enshrine Dylan at last, accepting him into the Canon. No doubt I will purchase the volume and read closely what a generation of critics reared on Dylan's lyrics will have to say as they make their respective cases for him being a poet worthy of being placed alongside Milton and Eliot. I fear, though, that a good many of them will miss the point of what's been exciting about Dylan's work, that it is, after all, rock and roll. Rock and roll is always worth discussing at length, through as many different filters as possible, but one fears that too many critics, desiring to sound academic, ie, "legitimate" as they bring their learning to an analysis of the songwriter's work, will forget to achieve that state of accelerated insight one discovers in the best of Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs and instead convert their passion to tenure-seeking jargon. The problem with a number of literary treatments with Dylan's work, I find, has the error of sticking too closely to Dylan's lyrics and attempting to align him with the supreme examples of our poetry. Although these articles are fancifully argued much of the time, Dylan winds up suffering, as there is, I believe, more than contrasts than favorably compares. His language, in itself, hasn't the stuff that sustains a reading that would seek a system of allegory and metaphor that approaches Blake. The lyrics are a bit flat in that sense, limited in dimension, mainly because the writing we consider is not poetry, a medium that can achieve verbal effects on an unlimited number of levels. Dylan's words are lyrics, and their effectiveness, their power lies in the music gives them life.

A straight reading of "Desolation Row" would give the feeling of some intriguing surrealism sadly constrained by a sing-song rhyme scheme. The song, though, changes everything, from the steadfast, aggressive strum of the acoustic guitar, Dylan's vocal performance (snarling, deadpan, phrases bitten off in reserved disgust), guitarist Charlie McCoy's Spanish-style improvisations and the careening harmonica solos add a power not attained by a close reading of the lyric sheet. Greil Marcus, who has been guilty of summary vagueness on the subject of Dylan's Greater Importance, is , nonetheless, superb when he confronts specific Dylan songs, convincingly getting across how the conflated traditions Dylan brought together--folk, blues, Tex Mex, rock and roll, and Symbolist Poetry, produced something new, strange and transcendent. He could grasp at how these things worked together for their artistic power. I am afraid, though, that the Cambridge Companion could suffer from a surfeit of specializations that too often have little to do with edification. There are some writings on Dylan's work that are as exotic as the singer's most intangible imagery. An example, cited by the Boston Globe and on Ron Silliman's blog, suggests a turgid time awaits even the most faith Dylan partisan: "Dylan's lyrics construct an author-reader relation posited on the model of an irresolvable enigma which is both the incitement to and the perpetual frustration of readerly desire."

One had reason to think that rock and roll lyrics were truly the poetry of the age, but hindsight reveals the hubris of youthful assumptions. Far, far too little of the work by even the best lyricists have approached the wealth of expression and style that page poets have managed, even up to the current day. Dylan is not Wallace Stevens, Tom Waits is not Blake, Leonard Cohen is not Shakespeare, Joni Mitchell is not Auden. What needs to be developed is a critical language that can discuss, at length, the work of these songwriters as songwriters who assimilated aesthetic values from poetry. Otherwise, I think we're all missing the point and blowing so much smoke up each other's pant legs as we drone in platitudes about how rock lyrics are the poetry. It misses the mark entirely. Lyric writing for music is a distinct craft from than that of the tradition of the page poet. There are points, of course, where the traditions converge and perhaps borrow from one another, but not often enough to willy-nilly refer to gifted songwriters as poets. The work that really needs to be done in this area is to expand how one discusses the art of songwriting. Dylan, Paul Simon, Mitchell, Costello, et al, are better referenced against the likes of Stephen Foster, The Gershwins, you name it. Dylan, I would say, has had a very minor effect on contemporary poetry--the revolutions we habitually talk about here in modern verse were well underway long before he even picked up a guitar. His real impact is on music, on songwriting, on rock and roll. It's is his profound influence on popular music that helped change American culture, and it is in this area that his artistic legacy is based. At the end of the day, Dylan remains a musical artist, not a literary one. 

It's not every attempt to place Dylan on a par with canonical poets without insight or mired in a nervously applied jargon. Some are superb pieces of critical thinking. Even Christopher Rick's unfairly mocked, high-level inspection of Dylan's work in his book Dylan's Vision of Sin at least speaks to the reader incomprehensible prose, which greatly mitigates the thin air he's attempting to take deep breaths in. Michael Gray's study, Song and Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan, brings a thoroughness to the subject matter, bring focus on a multitude of influences Dylan absorbed and used t create something new. Gray spends his time on the lyrics and performs some impressive maneuvers to make the lyricist a suitable companion for the page poets, but what makes Song and Dance Man especially powerful is the stress on how the music ratchets up the power of lyrics. He writes, in this book, like a Greil Marcus who doesn't get quickly distracted from completing an idea.The cited sentence has none of that--it seems a foul odor emerging from a long-sealed crypt. Dylan deserves better than the crypt, of course, and I'll pay my money to see how the folks at Cambridge did assembling the best thinking they could find on Dylan's hard-to-classify work. Until I buy and read the Dylan Companion, of course, my question, to risk using a metaphor a third time too many, is whether the songwriter will be illuminated or embalmed.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Barry Alfonso comments:

This debate has been going on for 40 years, at least. There seems to be this nagging obsession with wrapping people like Dylan in ivy vines and sticking them in an alcove between Maxwell Bodenheim and William Cullen Bryant. To subject Dylan to academic scrutiny seems to have two goals: One, to find something in popular culture worth elevating into serious literature and Two, to keep songwriters relegated to the realm of lesser craftsmen. I agree with you that Dylan’s rightful peer is Stephen Foster or Ira Gershwin, rather than the likes of Pound or Elliot. Actually, rather than picking apart his songs, I think the most fruitful line of Dylan study is sociological. The single most significant thing about him may be his repeated ability (at least until the mid-1980s) to be in sync with the cultural shifts among young people. His retreat from snotty surrealist speedfreak verse into paired down, semi-biblical family-oriented poesy between 1966 and 1968 was especially prescient. (Even the self-absorbed nastiness he displayed in “Like a Rolling Stone,” ”Positively 4th Street,” etc. mirrored the narcissism of his peers – they identified with his contempt, even if was directed at them.) Dylan’s most productive years can be seen for a search for normalcy, which is either inspiring or depressing to behold depending upon the respect you give to Western bourgeois civilization. His post-Christian period work can be seen as a synthesis of his various phases, as an acceptance of life’s contradictory truths or as the dedication of a professional tunesmith to keep on working until he drops – possibly all three. I’m not sure the hallowed English departments of academe are ready to dissect Dylan on these terms.

JEFF BECK

JEFF BECK IS GOD AFTER ALL

I had been of the recent opinion that what guitarist Jeff Beck has been doing for the last decade was mostly composed of doodling-- short, strange guitar riffs and odd sounds aplenty, but little in the way of interesting guitar work. The July 22nd concert at the  Mattress Firm Amphitheater was another matter altogether; I've had the honor of seeing Beck three times previously; what did that night was a revelation. Fluid, fast, angular, bluesy, full of blues phrasing framed sidewise and in reverse order, tonalities that are from a refined adaptation of Indian classical improvisation, splintered chromaticism, power chords, fusion dynamics and the sweetest lyric playing one would wish for. And yes, lots of funk. All this, of course, with a fine band , including drummer Vinnie Colaiuta (Frank Zappa, Sting, Herbie Hancock), vocalist Jimmy Hall, bassist Rhonda Smith (Prince, Chaka Khan, Beyoncé, George Clinton) and cellist Vanessa Freebairn-Smith, all of whom propelled the guitarist with a tightly conceptualized sense of varying rhythms that propelled the guitarist to what seemed like greater and more inspired outlays of his singular virtuosity as the set wore on. Although not a hyper virtuoso along the lines of Joe Pass or John McLaughlin, two guitarists he clearly admires, Beck has all the same spent the majority of career in a state of perpetual flux, going from one style to the next, from hard rock, blues metal, rockabilly , jazz-rock to increasingly synth-dominated backdrops, and sometimes his playing, in my regard, missed the mark. Always, always, though, he was adding to his armory, changing his style, broadening his understanding of where a solo could go, evolving to his current state of what seems to be a superior style that's all of a piece, without seams, without stitches; grand swaths of bracing electric dissonance intersected superbly with a spare and melodic ad-libbing along a song's main theme. Simple, winsomely stated phrases built into quick-witted crescendos.It was a night was a rich, fluent display of all his 50 years of experiments, investigations, inquiries into all manner of music from around the world. It was fluid, intense, the work of a singular artist at the very top of his form.

______________________________________________________________________

Get tasteless

And so this goes: discussing the lack of excitement I feel regarding Jeff Beck's guitar work for the last couple of decades, my associate offers that like Miles Davis, improvisers play slower and use fewer notes doing so. Okay. Davis is another thing altogether, but Beck is certainly not Davis. Of course, he never claimed he was. The notes are usually well executed, but his playing lacks a real sense of spontaneity.It sounds dry, calculated, lifeless in their cold perfection. His solos bring to mind the phrase "wait for it" as he goes through his fabled fingerwork. He makes me think of what John McLaughlin said to me in the Seventies when I asked him after a concert what the thought of Jerry Garcia. "I keep waiting for something to happen," he said,.His answer to my next question threw me.  I asked for his opinion of guitarist Allan Holdsworth. Holdsworth, a fretman who I regard as the Coltrane of electric guitar, speed, melody, amazing register jumping fluidity, madly modulated acceleration, was and remains my favorite guitarist. McLaughlin, who with Larry Coryell jump-started the trend for rock guitarists to take on super speeds, had the view that Holdsworth was cluttering up his improvisations with too many notes,  failing to leave space and to build tension. "You can't sustain beauty with speed alone" was what my friend David Sternbach, a fine poet I knew back in college, He was talking about McLaughlin back in my dorm room days. The point of this digression is just to remark that it is a matter of taste--Christ, I hate that cliche--but at the bottom line I wish Beck would pick up a Les Paul again,  cut his fingernails and use a pick, crank up the distortion and volume  and let the world know what his reputation is based on. I would be very happy if he did another album as good Guitar Shop. So would a lot of people,

___________________________________________________________________________

Occasional guitar genius Jeff Beck.

Jeff Beck is a tiresome guitar player whose penchant for sparse noodling sends too many listeners, seduced by legacy and legend,  into reveries about how "less is more" and the virtues of having a minimal palette of tones. Truth be told, less is merely less and a Jeff Beck performance means there will be huge, gaping spaces in an improvised section, while the guitarist waits for what seems like the random moment to lay another twist to the string. His band, particularly on theLive at Ronnie Scott's album, stays busy while the master awaits is riffing muse, laying down a carpet of funk with a fabric of high-register bass work, minimal drum work, and a variety of ethereal space chords emanating from the keyboards. John Cage had the notion that the audience need to sit in their impatient stews for some periods so they have a chance to listen to their own music (Zen/chance practices in music are more exciting theorized about than experienced firsthand) and the take away for me is that the point of going to a Jeff Beck concert is to confront his reputation and to wait for him to do something interesting. This is what the late critic Steve Esmedina called "boredom as aesthetic effect". Beck, I'm sure, intends other things, and thinks himself akin to Miles Davis, another musician who never burdened his solos with gratuitous technique. Davis, though, could build tension and, when required, fire on all cylinders and make it frantic, exciting, breathe taking. Beck does not do that. Decades go by and endless conversations refer to the genius of Beck and still nothing happens at the address I was given. I understand that and we have, of course, is essentially subjectivities competing for dominance.

The matter isn’t whether Beck can play guitar. As a blues/rock guitarist who first came to American attention during the British invasion of the Sixties with the Yardbirds and later with his string of short-lived (but memorable) ensembles, Beck is a pioneer in matters of extending the vocabulary of an African American vernacular and incorporating elements of funk, jazz, reggae and fusion and rockabilly into his particular mix. He’s recorded quite a bit of music that still makes me turn my head and stare incredulously at the speakers; when he wasn’t being cheap with his playing and willing to lavish more in guitar bravado, his guitar work is of a whole piece. Not just flashy solos, which were, in fact, the least of Beck’s best art, but of control of tone color,  splendidly, tasty fills in the interstices of his band’s alternately rocking or funky fury, attacks, flurries and elongated elaborations on the tremolo bar when your attention was otherwise engaged.  What makes Jeff Beck a great guitarist (when he wants to show off) is that while his compatriots were concentrating on the number of notes they could cram into a twelve-bar or sixteen bar phrase, he did what Miles Davis did with is trumpet after he ventured from the fast, rapid, conspicuously virtuoso inclined sphere of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and instead pared back his soloing to what was essential and made musical sense. 

While others dominated their songs and performances with fusillades that eventually became a comfortable rut, Beck filled his accorded solo slots with the gift of space, fewer notes, high register bends, and unique tunings. I put forth his first two albums The Jeff Beck Group and Beckola in evidence and will skip ahead to his fusion release Wired and still later Beck’s Guitar Shop as prime examples. That sweet, discerning blend of flash, taste, discretionary speed, off-center attack and an uncanny mastery of electric guitar volume are marvels for future generations to listen to if they wonder what all fuss was about. These weren’t records by an artist still making his reputation. Presently, his reputation is made, his name now a brand, his work too frequently a stylized snore.  Again, I wish Beck would indulge the less savory side of his musical nature and burn a hole in the state no one can leap over.That, though, is part of the fun of discussing musicians and their work. It just seemed to me that Beck has refined his style over the decades to the point that he is drastically essentialist in the tweaking of his playing; all the speedy, distorted, flashier bits are missing in large measure in the interest of a more mature purity, Artists, as they age, do that, but I think Beck's ruthless reappraisal of his chops has, for me, left much of what he's recorded sound empty. I would love to hear Beck rave it up again, to cram a lot of notes into a measure and make them stick, like he used to.

FALL BACK

It never rains in California, so the song goes, and there are no seasons in this terrain, according to a great many residents transplanted from other states with what is commonly termed “real weather.” I was relocated from Michigan in 1969, in late July, at the same time the Woodstock Festival was in full swing and the counterculture was hitting its critical mass. To say the least, even at the age of 17, a head full of the rancorous MC5 and the careening blues improvisations of Cream still rattling in my memory from the times I slogged through snow, slush and hard, cold rain to attend and come home from no-age-limit rock ‘n’ roll shows, which were hosted in various Detroit clubs and associated caverns of calamity, I thought San Diego’s weather was overripe with sunshine, warm wind, the sea breeze and salt air.

I didn’t take to my new hometown that well in my first half decade here; it took about ten years for me to stop telling new acquaintances that I was from out of town, that we did things differently in the Motor City, that San Diego was inferior because there were no seasons to gauge your mood with, there was nothing conducive to making an inner life more soulful, fuller, deeper. It took time, of course, but over the years, through high school and junior college and the different circle of friends I formed, I tired of my “outsider” rap and realized that there were seasons in this area after all, that once I stopped trying to instruct the world in what it should mean and be, the subtleties of the season, the shade of the light and the tone it creates in shadows are lovely indeed.

There is beauty to be had, there is sadness to be felt, and there is peace to be engulfed by. Blessed, somehow, with the gift of surviving my best thinking and most of my mischief as a younger man, mellowness comprises more of my mood and the incidental things, the sweet sounds of lyrics against a forlorn melody drifting through an autumn air where the world is darker, colors deeper, the shadows of trees looming longer across sidewalks and lawns and streets, where the material world appears much more solid and even the plastered, stucco sides of apartments and the splintered siding of old, fly-apart garages give you a sense of being more solid and with a density of significance that suggests itself in the right light, the right month before the ascent of winter. It is a moment of clarity, which, perhaps, is too easily referred to as an epiphany, a moment when the air suggests the passage of time and the acquisition of my years to one’s life is not just an intellectual construct that is measured and filed away but rather becomes felt experience. The floodgates open the collected memories of six decades, gather in a tight ball, and unspool.

All this is to say that I came across a version of “Autumn Leaves” by Eric Clapton, a game interpretation of the classic in which he applied his warm, husky burr of a voice to the melancholic melody. The song was a 1945 French song “Les Feuilles Mortes” (“The Dead Leaves”) written by Joseph Kosma and lyrics by poet Jacques Prévert. By 1947 English lyrics were written for the tune by American songwriter Johnny Mercer, and it has been a jazz standard since that time, with legendary renditions by Jo Stafford, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, a very important melody in the Great American Songbook. Mercer, perhaps sensing that original title, translated from the French as “The Dead Leaves,” might be too grim for an American public, changed the title to what we know it as now. A crucial choice, as “autumn”, suggests not the fatalistic end of something beautiful, thereby leaving someone in a permanent state of mourning. Rather, the substitution suggests that life is cyclical, that lifetimes have beginnings, middles, and ends until one’s last day or night on the planet, but that in between birth and death there is a variety of experiences to go through, curiousness to be satisfied; love to have, hold, and lose; fortunes to be made and lost; and always a new beginning, a new spring, a new summer, a new fall, a new winter. Growth, decline, renewal, a great chain of being, each experience enriched by the joys, frustrations, and sorrows that have come before. You mourn the loss of a lover, the absence of wife or husband, you feel the ache deep in your marrow. You are reminded in sensations and rushes of exhilaration the memories of things that have changed you and made you the person you are at the moment a song plays, a piano chord chimes in the background, a singer’s dulcet one wafts through the window from a passing car, that melody releasing just a little of the stored emotion and that nearly overwhelms you with the idea that you are a part of a set of experiences that have made your life one that is full of meaning and purpose. Such as the filtered light of autumn sunshine casts long shadows and gives the world the neighborhoods one lives in and walks through a feeling of place that is deep and quirkishly profound. It is somehow more soulful for the sheer volume of human activity within its walls and along its streets, so you too feel older, rooted, a soul with a deep and quietly observed feeling for the small things, the incidental sounds, details, words that make up the world that you cannot, finally, be complete without.

The song is a beauty, a gem of the rarest sort where the melodic structure and the simple, bittersweet, yet achingly evocative lyrics lace together in a twine that is alternately tight and loose, a bind that has you in a grip and yet allows you, even compels you to remember, to dream with eyes open. Mercer’s lyrics are a marvel of brevity, the kind of lyric that is spare and without excessive poetic flourish, a sentiment of mixed emotions that are spoken plainly but still have the power to evoke powerful recollections of when life seemed boundless with opportunity.

The falling leaves drift by the window,

The autumn leaves of red and gold.

I see your lips, the summer kisses,

The sunburned hands I used to hold.

Since you went away the days grow long,

And soon I’ll hear old winter’s song. 

but I miss you most of all my darling 

When Autumn leaves start to fall.

There are those who prefer Elvis Costello’s opaque moroseness, with each stanza rife with slippery rhymes and a nearly narcissistic grasp of one’s sorrow, others will opt for Joni Mitchell’s travelogue heartaches concerning her passing fancies, many will cite Tom Waits as their idea of a lyricist who combines surrealism with the ground-in grit, and many of us kneel before the altar Leonard Cohen’s sacred and profane testimonies of an inner life both erotic and spiritual. “Autumn Leaves,” though, speaks directly to the idea of the wizened season, of the days getting shorter as darkness overcomes the light, the air turns crisp, and the branches of trees become stark arrangements leafless limbs. It equates the color of the leaves with lips of the beloved, red and gold, the hands of the lover that are no longer there to grasp. There is, in the melody, a wonderful, simple intoxicating feeling of the melody going up and down in pitch, the slight rush of recollection in sunnier times, the realization that what is being something that is memorized nostalgia and that one must confront, yet again, the hard truth that someone you loved is gone and getting on with his (or her) life, all this so one may get on with their own life. These are autumn moments when you stand in the middle of the sidewalk on residential streets staring at the curled leaves and their tri-colored hues waft on increasingly bare tree limbs as the wind gets chillier and more insistent. The leaves you see cover walkways and lawns in front of homes and apartment buildings that are being absorbed by a deep, muted light that makes the inanimate things of the world seem to pulse with significance, memory history that is private and without an adequate vocabulary to bring to sharp clarity. The melody climbs, pauses in a center as if to consider the sudden elation, and descends again, bringing you back to the present tense, the beautifully muted light and the pleasantly cool air that assuages the troubled brow.

Eric Clapton sings in a low key, his wonderfully, slight hoarse croon not quite reaching the notes on the songs highest pitch, but still bringing us a message of a man who knows the seasons and the reconsiderations they entail. The late Eva Cassidy, a singer with an exquisitely expressive voice whose artfully timed inflections were the place where deep, rich bells seemed to ring, slowed her version down, making the melody move as if in a swooning reverie of intense happiness before giving way, haltingly, to the regret that what was once sweet is now removed. She sings it, croons it, and seduces the emotion from the lyric, a voice filling in the areas where one thinks there should be extra qualifiers, adjectives, verbs. But there is no need for that , for Cassidy, as her voice lingers over the words that are there, bare though they are, her tone modulating just so to the left and to the right, a slight inflection changing emphasis, suggesting other emotions welling up just under the emotional mess being confessed.

This is the state of being between moments of clarity – minutes, weeks, months when you notice the sun setting around 3pm and, as traffic stalls at intersections on the way to the freeway on ramp, the radio plays the old music and as you drum your fingers on the steering wheel, half aware of the traffic until a car horn blares, you get absorbed by the cool air, the dark cloud formations, the lyrics and musical hooks of songs that are the soundtrack for your story so far. You pause or are made to linger, and you drift into the wonders of what it was like, contemplate just what the hell happened to you and the loves that made you whole, and come to accept the world you’re now a member of, an adult made full by every kiss and slap in the face one’s had the honor to have bestowed on them. We remember our mortality and become grateful for our humanity, grateful that ours are lives that have been touched and have touched others in turn.

A HISTORY OF HIP

HIP:THE HISTORY
By John Leland

John Leland's Hip:The History is the sort of book I like to read on the bus, the portentous social study of an indefinite essence that makes the reader of the book appear, well, hip. This is the perfect book for the pop culture obsessive who wonders, indeed worries and frets over the issue as to whether white musicians can become real blues musicians or whether Caucasian jazz musicians have added anything of value to the the jazz canon besides gimmick. Leland, a reporter for the New York Times, has done his research and brings together the expected doses of cultural anthropology, literature and, of course, music to bear on this sweeping, if unsettled account as to what "hip" is and how it appears to have developed over time. 

Most importantly he concentrates on the lopsided relationship between black and white, each group borrowing each other's culture and suiting them for their respective needs; in the case of black Americans, rising from a slavery as free people in a racist environment, hip was an an ironic manner, a mode of regarding their existence on the offbeat, a way to keep the put upon psyche within a measure of equilibrium. For the younger white hipsters, in love black music and style, it was an attempt to gain knowledge, authenticity and personal legitimacy through a source that was Other than what a generation felt was their over-privileged and pampered class. Leland's range is admirable and does a remarkable job of advancing his thesis--that the framework of what we consider hip is a way in which both races eye other warily--and is sensitive to the fact that for all the attempts of white artists and their followers to cultivate their own good style from their black influences, the white hipsters is never far from black face minstrelsy. For all the appropriation, experimentation, and varied perversions of black art that has emerged over the decades, there are only a few men and women who've attained the stature of their African American heroes.

A HISTORY OF PROG ROCK

THE SHOW THAT NEVER ENDS:
THE RISE AND FALL OF PROG ROCK
By David Weigel

I was not entirely a progressive rock fan during the 70s, when the genre was at its peak and the music of the bands in this volume was at it's...busiest. I loathed the singers for the most part, thinking that while the front man had decent enough voices, suitably trained to negotiate the usually overheated song structures, I could stand them rarely a whit. Save for Peter Gabriel of Genesis (and later as a solo artist), the lot of them sounded over earnest, wide eyed with wonder, strangulated high notes offering the would-be wisdom of righteously and insanely stupid lyrics. I always had a wager with anyone who knew Wallace Stevens or John Ashbery well enough, or The Bard for that matter, would feel compelled to harm themselves to relieve the disgust that overwhelms them. 

On the other side of this genre, though, was generally good musician and an honest desire to extend rock's instrumental bearings toward more complexity. Yes, ELP, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, King Crimson, Genesis all moved in this direction, at best being brilliant with the snap and zip of odd time signatures, odd keys and ensemble stretches consisting of many moving parts. It was delirious, and much of the stuff remains good, cranky fun. David Weigel, a politics writer by reputation, is also a huge fan of progressive rock, and here expands on a series of fascinating articles he did for Slate some years ago on the history of this odd and painfully dated brand of music making. 

He interviews many of the musicians, he investigates the places from which they rose, and comes to consider how it was that a good many British musicians, seemingly at the same time, came to employ classical music complexity in the service of a bigger and busier kind of rock and roll. His conclusion, though not explicitly stated, is that it seems a case of the young musicians "getting back to their musical roots", of rediscovering the European classical heritage and making it their own. The book is especially fun and fascinating for the music fan who's been wanting more to be published about this under considered music. Weigel , to his weigel, does not rate the bands--re realizes that he is a reporter, not a critic--and does his subject justice by sticking with the absorbing story laid out before him.

MARTY BALIN

Marty Balin, co-founder, lead singer, and principal songwriter for the iconic ’60s band Jefferson Airplane died September 27, 2018, at 76. The cause of death hasn’t yet been disclosed. It’s always sad when a musical talent from your prime music listening years passes on. Although natural as it is to reflect upon morosely, I found myself smiling, remembering why I liked him beyond his psychedelic pedigree. During the infamous Altamont Rock Festival of 1969, when the Rolling Stones were convinced to headline a hastily and badly planned “West Coast Woodstock” at a motor speedway, it was obvious from those in the know that the fete was doomed to disaster; the producers had the monumentally bad idea to hire the Hells Angels as security. To wit, when audience members crowded the front of the festival stage during the Jefferson Airplane’s performance, Angels “security” began beating up unfortunate attendees. Seeing this, Balin left his microphone and jumped into the crowd to intervene in the beating. Balin received a beating himself from the hired help. He was knocked unconscious. Nothing about Altamont turned outright, with the death at the hands of the Angels security of a young black man. But my respect for Balin grew immensely. Balin jumped in; man, was my refrain for years when speaking of the unique vocalese of the Airplane’s singing partnership. He stepped in, he stepped up, he took a fist in the face to do the right thing.

Born Martyn Jerel Buchwald on January 30, 1942, of immigrant parents in Cincinnati, Ohio, Balin changed his name in 1962 and did some early recording for Challenge Records. Later, he moved from pop-rock and became a folkie, leading a folk music foursome called the Town Criers. In time he moved to California’s Bay Area, knocking around as guitarist and folk musician, eventually meeting fellow Jefferson Airplane co-founders Paul Kanter and original lead vocalist Signe Anderson. After some gigging around area clubs and venues, lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen, bassist Jack Casady, and drummer Skip Spence joined the troupe. Soon afterward, they released their 1966 debut album Jefferson Airplane Takes Off. The nascent band earned a growing popular following. It later gained national attention in 1967 after Anderson left the band and was replaced by Grace Slick and their second album, the classic Surrealistic Pillow. This was the classic formation that remained intact for their best and most creative period.

Jefferson Airplane was a side of the psychedelic rock I found most appealing, being in their short-lived prime a volatile and imaginative forced marriage of folk tradition, jazzy “mystery chords,” Joycean/ Eliot verifying, and bracing harmonies provided by the bulldozing Grace Slick and Balin’s bittersweet tenor. Their albums were a fascinating, eclectic mess, indulgent and snotty and harsh; I would put them, along with the Stooges, MC5, and The Velvet Underground, as stylistic forerunners of the punk rock anti-aesthetic. Balin was the ballast for the band—a balladeer, a genuine folk singer, a romantic who never abandoned his tendency for the oddly effective lyric that emphasized an actual relationship rather than a worldview. He was the sensual, intuitive romantic that balanced Slick’s jagged surrealism and Dadaesque wit. Even as the jarring exponents of what was called “acid rock,” the musical evocation of the hallucinogenic LSD trip intended to expand consciousness and such, Balin’s strongest songs, lyric, disarming, reasonably center in relatable emotion and sentiment, was something of the sane center of a band otherwise committed to the vagaries of extreme experience. A jangling folk-rocker with “It’s No Secret,” an able writer of street-action anthems like “Volunteers,” the loneliest of the lonely true hearts in “Coming Back to Me,” or a perplexed consciousness sussing through confounding circumstances with angular hard rock tempos, Balin was an essential presence and creative force in a great but generally unstable band. Both the quality of his songwriting, both alone and as a collaborator, and the sincere, crooning anguish of his vocals was an irreplaceable weave through Jefferson Airplane’s discography between 1966 through 1969: five studio albums and one blistering live set, one of the strongest of any American rock band from the period.

I liked this band up until 1969’s Volunteers album when Paul Kanter’s sci-fi libertarian fantasizes turned J.A. into a plodding monstrosity of ego and half-measured music. Those among the readership who followed the career arc of this band through the ’60s and the ’70s will recall, perhaps stifling a gag reflex, the slew of Jefferson Starship albums that evolved from the original band. For this short note, it will suffice it to say that the best thing the Starship ever did was recording and releasing Marty Balin’s vocal on perhaps the best song he ever wrote, “Miracles" from their  1975 album Red Octopus. He glides over the song's unusual-for-a-pop song complexity with a chanteur's confidence; he infuses the moody inflections of the melody with a sufficiently moaning timbre which suggests a rich mesh of responses, everything between agony and ecstasy. Balin turns it into a radiant ode to the act and the sensual philosophy of romantic sex with your partner. It was a refreshing difference of how a male talks of such things. It was the best thing Jefferson Starship ever did, a masterpiece of pop-rock sexuality that rose to canonical heights over the increasing vapidity and knuckleheaded irrelevance. The band, or at least the management and record company, hung their heads in shame all the way to the bank. It remains, I suppose, the supreme irony of things that a band beginning as Jefferson Airplane, counterculture revolutionaries singing of a society without pretense, class structure, false morality and, by implication, cash, evolved into the Jefferson Starship, a cash cow for corporate interests. So yes, money changes everything. That said, it should be mentioned that the guitar work of Jorma and Jack Cassidy’s basslines were among the best teams of the era. And Balin was a fine musician, singer, and songwriter who might have done better if he had a less dicey means to bring his music to the public.

(This was originally published in the San Diego Troubadour. Used with permission.)