ZAPPA PLAYED BY OTHERS

Frank Zappa was often brilliant in composing in his multi-decade career as an agent provocateur in America's fickle, short-memory popular culture. Most early fans, I am convinced, because they thought he was weird, off the wall, psychedelic to a high degree, a man with a band, the Mothers of Invention, creating the perfect soundtrack for whatever recreational drugs you happen to take. It may seem like a conceited thing to say at this point in my life, and it may be due to romancing the glory days of the Sixties when one was discovering literature, art, great music; I love his odd time signatures, abrupt switches between genres sans easy-going transitions, his dedication to dissonance. 

It was an audio-assault American audience weren't used to, large audiences, mass audiences in any event, but I soon suspected there was more to Zappa's game than random bizarreness as I encountered him in interviews insisting, over and over, that he didn't do drugs of any kind. He did imbibe alcohol from time to time, which was a relief since I couldn't imagine, in my still expanding mind-- because I was incapable of conceding that anyone could be as not-of-this-earth as Zappa without having to insult his brain in some manner.  Even so, he was sober as a judge, a serious composer, and the music he made from the early efforts to the end of his was the work of a man who regarded himself not as a pop star, rock star, or even professional celebrity, but rather as an artist, a composer, a severe composer making use of anything he found helpful in his goal of alternately inspiring or antagonizing his audience. There's much admiration to the dedication to complexity, although I understand why many have seen him off-putting and arrogant. 

That he was, but I still like his music and continue to listen to it since I first bought my first Zappa album, We're Only in it for the Money, in the late Sixties. That said, I have become less and less of a fan of Zappa's guitar solos, which I find, and have always found repetitive and without direction. His extended, live solos on many of his albums ruin the experience of hearing fine musicians play arresting compositions. It's a habit born of modern jazz players developed in the  40s and 50s. Through a significant portion of the 60s, when soloists of exceptional caliber would improvise ad infinitum, engaging the process of "spontaneous composition," an idea that a musician, responding to impulse, urge, inspiration and certainly without a great deal of preparation, careens off the highway and ventures down several tonal tributaries in a hunt for a better combination of notes in increasingly tricky formations. Some geniuses managed this consistently in their work, with John Coltrane coming to mind most easily; his music, with his friends Elvin Jones, McCoy Tyner, and Jimmy Garrison, among a handful of others, being all of a piece. The inventiveness of the extended forays went far beyond a riffing variations-on-a-theme and became whole compositional endeavors.  Keith Jarrett also should be mentioned, although that for all the brilliance he demonstrates as band leader and band member, his several multi-disc solo piano concerts have merely bored me; so much effort getting himself warmed up for the inspired parts makes you think more of someone burning gasoline looking for the perfect parking space rather than an artist working their way efficiently to the dimension where they exceed their expectations. For Zappa, he is neither of these two musicians to whatever degree. He is an exciting guitarist, recognizable from the first note, influential in relatively short solos tailored to the material (One Size Fits All). He is not the world-class concert soloist, although his True Believers wish it were the case. I hope he'd written sections for his best improvisers and let them shine, a lesson he might have learned from the Great Ellington. Lately, I've been dialing up interpretations of his daunting pieces, with generally good, even spectacular results. 

Here's a unit doing a tight and together take on the dizzying and sonically cubist "G Spot Tornado," originally from his  1986 release Jazz from Hell. This was a disc of wholly instrumental tunes with uncompromised complexity and density. The majority of the tracks were the efforts of Zappa's programming of a then-bleeding edge synthesizer, the Synclavier, without the aid of other musicians for most of the album. The band here, Germany's hr-Bigband out of Frankfurt, serves a blistering version in this clip.

"WOW": The Story of an Album

WOW--Moby Grape

For a brief moment in 1967 it seemed Moby Grape would be the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band of all time. The evidence that the San Francisco band would ascend to the uppermost heights of the rock pantheon was their eponymously titled debut album ,Moby Grape. Bay Area promoter Matthew Katz assembled the band around Canadian guitarist, songwriter, and vocalist Skip Spence, a colorful figure who incidentally played drums on the first Jefferson Airplane album. Katz raided other bands in Northern and Southern California for other musicians, settling finally on lead guitarist Jerry Miller and drummer Don Stevenson, guitarist Peter Lewis and bassist/vocalist Bob Mosley. It would seem they assembled the band Svengali-like, but the musicians took to one another remarkably well. Perhaps brilliantly is the more suitable adverb, as their first release made the cold, cynical hearts of the rock critic cabal go aflutter. Though the band intended to showcase Spence, all five musicians contributed in equal measure as songwriters and vocalists, with the first album regarded by many pundits, critics, and wags as the finest album from the San Francisco scene of the 1960s. Fronted by a three-man guitar army in Miller, Lewis, and Spence, their sound was eclectic, vibrant, and tight yet not constricted in their arrangements, with songs that easily bridged the styles of hard rock, country, blues, folk-rock, just touching the edges of jazz and pure psychedelia.

From nowhere came a group of collaboratively written songs with fetching melodies and crystalline harmonies that rivaled the Byrds. Their lyrics reflected the free-for-all times, of course, but there was something reliably grounded in this collective’s approach to describing experience, a refreshing stoicism learned from this band’s leanings toward working-class country and the gritty realism of the blues. The guitars meshed together wonderfully, wittily, at once powerful, rapid, bludgeoning with “Omaha” or in the delicately layered picking and strumming underscoring the subtly wrenching melancholy in the ballad “8:05.” The stylistic range and consistent excellence of the songwriting was utterly superb, the musicianship drew nearly uniform raves from reviewers, live performances were leaving audiences in varying states of awe. You wonder what might go wrong, but things did go awry after they released the album. The Sixties counterculture didn’t want corporate pre-packaging; the preference was for music that was real, risk-taking, authentic.

The precise definition of the authenticity was nebulous, but many of them could smell hype quickly from afar. Hype was exactly what Columbia Records, the band’s record label (and a subsidiary of CBS) did to promote them, infamously releasing five singles at the same time. The thinking was that a shot-gun approach would assure that at least one of the five would hit and garner maximum airplay and revenue. It failed miserably. Rock magazines, underground newspapers, and some strait-laced writers for the mainstream press viewed the ploy as conspicuously cynical to move product. The band’s reputation suffered as a result, although they continued to receive airplay on FM radio stations and drew audiences at live gigs. Moby Grape, though, didn’t sell in the numbers that fans and critics think it should have. Some of the spirit was leeched from the band. With their second album Wow, released in 1969, we have a harbinger of the series of bad breaks and bad decisions that stunted this band’s once-seemingly infinite potential.

It’s worth a mention that Grape’s debut was released May 29, 1967, three days after the seismic release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely-Hearts Club Band on May 26 that same year. It would seem there was a fateful invisible hand at work here. The Beatles were receiving praise for their willingness to experiment with song form and production technique, particularly with Rubber Soul in 1965 and, later and more ambitiously, with 1966’s Revolver. Sitars, multiple track overdubbing, instruments played backwards, musical styles covering the range of blues, hard rock, rhythm and blues, classical allusions, old-time jazz and Music Hall balladry became part of the lexicon that rock bands could and would use in songs and records. Rock ‘n’ roll was now just “rock.” They elevated it to an art form or so critics and millions of naïve fans declared. The Beatles raised the bar with those two albums, and it seemed that any musical group worth attention emulated the British band’s initiative, Moby Grape among them. It’s arguable that the first album was the rare thing, a high-quality disc bearing the influence of someone else’s work; perhaps Grape had nearly equaled the Beatles in their achievements so far. The release of Sgt.Pepper changed everything and raised the bar again, this time to absurd heights. Where Rubber Soul and Revolver were brave if slightly tentative steps toward turning pop music into a much more adventurous, artful undertaking, Sgt.Pepper strolled boldly, in giant steps, crossing genres with ease, inventing new sounds and recording techniques as they laid it down, writing subtly arranged melodies and melodies with a keener wit and a modernist poetic bent remindful of T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams.

Nothing seemed off limits or off the table for the Brits. Moby Grape’s release in July of 1967 was comparable to Revolver, and three days later the Beatles exploded all the things they’d been playing with for years, reconfiguring the pieces for a new music. Because the Beatles were so far ahead of the game, I remember thinking that it would be folly for other musicians to match their achievement. The Stones tried and famously failed with Their Satanic Majesties Request, released later in 1967.It was a stoned-out two-sided self-indulgence. It was more murk than music. Jagger, Richards, and the rest realized their foolishness and returned to their rhythm and blues roots.

There is little doubt that Moby Grape felt competitive with the Liverpudlians. Even after the much-maligned fiasco of Columbia Records’ release-five-singles gimmick, the first received almost universal praise from critics as an across-the-board masterpiece. It was surely their due to go up against the Beatles and their Sgt. Pepper achievement and show them how it’s done.

This was a period where the Beatles were receiving an unwholesome amount of credit for every element of studio and melodic sophistication in rock music, and it should be said that the single biggest motivation, most likely, for Lennon and McCartney to up their game and turn their pop-rock into art music was the Beach Boys and their Pet Sounds album. Released May 16, 1966, a full year before the release of the Beatles’ disc, Pet Sounds was head Beach Boy Brian Wilson in full flower as composer and arranger, constructing songs with odd meters, ethereal harmonies, sweeping sound stacks of nearly symphonic effect that was brilliantly anchored by the work of the Wrecking Crew, the famed collection of session musicians who gave flesh and blood to Wilson’s abstract and diffuse explanations of what he wanted his songs to sound like. The boys from Liverpool, particularly McCartney, were flabbergasted by what they heard. The competition began in earnest, Sgt.Pepper was their response, and the consequence of the rivalry were two masterpieces. And now it was Moby Grape’s turn to one-up the Beatles.

If Moby Grape deserves its place in the canon, Wow is surely the sharpest disappointment for a follow-up effort. Appearing on store shelves in April 1968, it sold well, peaking at number 20 on the Billboard 200 album chart but was greeted by expressly mixed reviews. I remember that a few reviews were particularly vicious, with most tastemakers citing the album’s faults with questionable production decisions. There was, in fact, many that recommended the album. American rock critic Robert Christgau succinctly summarized the album’s dilemma, saying Wow suffered from “Pepperitis,” referring to the strong impulse at the time to emulate the Beatles’ best and worst habits. Some of Wow’s artful strokes are baffling, sometimes infuriating. “Bitter Wind,” a compelling folk song highlighting the woes and sorrows of a man looking for truth through an unforgiving life, begins and proceeds beautifully, with a stirring pair of acoustic guitars that provide a galloping rhythm as Bob Mosley shouts a beautifully hoarse, soul-inflected vocal. All starts off grandly: the guitars, Mosley’s gritty singing, and chiming choir boy harmony when matters are summarily destroyed. Out of nowhere a gong is banged and as its resonance fades, the listener is overwhelmed with a blitzkrieg of sound, a virtual cacophony of electronic blorts and blasts simulating a hard wind, under which we hear fragments of the song and Mosley’s fine vocal forlornly obscured.

This was little more than the creation of something very fine, honest, and soulful and then smothering it with the thickest, gaudiest pillow you could find. Note that there are live acoustic versions of “Bitter Wind” available on later repackagings of Moby Grape songs. The unsullied version is worth seeking. There are many other bits of production overkill that would add a thousand more words to this piece, but an item I must bring up is a track called “Just Like Gene Autry: A Foxtrot.” Again, coming from a fad started by the Beatles and their Music Hall, turn-of-the-century tributes like “When I’m 64” and furthered with bands like the New Vaudeville Band (“Winchester Cathedral”) or Harper’s Bizarre (“Anything Goes”) securing hits with retro sounds, Moby Grape wanted a crack at it. But more so. Perhaps they were thinking that listeners weren’t getting the full experience of music made in the days of primitive recording technology. As the second to last song faded, there were a few seconds of silence and then a spoken voice booming through the speakers, announcing that he was there to remind you that the next song was at 78rpm, the same speed as the old albums our grandparents bought, and that it would do us good to get out of seats and change the album to the recommended setting. I don’t remember being high, but the announcement startled me and made me as indignant as a 16-year-old could become. 

I got off my bed where I’d been listening with my head wedged between two detachable speakers and changed the speed. Waiting for me at the sped-up rate were simulated scratches, crowd noise as if this were emanating from a live location and Arthur Godfrey, THE Arthur Godfrey, going along with the joke by introducing a fictional jazz dance band from atop an equally bogus hotel. The music was a sluggish parody of long-ago pop aesthetics, a humorless slice of nostalgia-mongering that was a profound drag to sit through. The best way to describe how miserable “Just Like Gene Autry” sounded is to suggest that you imagine playing your vinyl albums while pressing your thumb on the spinning disc. This ruins the listening experience, since from that time onward I made it a point to rise rapidly from whatever chair I was sitting in and lift the arm from the record before being instructed to change the record’s speed. But that bit of labor is something I did willingly for several years, as there is terrific music on Wow.

Several songs remain unscathed despite bad production and inflated ideas, as we have in the wonderful tale of “Motorcycle Irene,” Skip Spence’s darkly comic rendering of the myth of the motorcycle Madonna, the tough chick all the guys want but no one wants to mess with. With a rolling, rumbling piano making things move along with a surfeit of bass notes, Irene’s tale is wry and ironic. “Murder in My Heart for the Judge” shows Moby Grape’s blues side to superb effect, a chug-a-long shuffle where the band’s trademark three-pronged guitar work gives us something of a dialogue between the fret player, a call and response of anxiety, glee, and stoned nonchalance as a hippie appears before a hanging judge. Mosley sings lead again and shows himself as a man who might have been one of the great blue-eyed soul singers. Here, though, he is a free spirit baring his soul and throwing himself on the mercy of the cosmic inevitability before him, a plea to the judge responds “Just for getting smart boy/ I’m gonna give you more than a lifetime…” Jerry Miller slashes, punctuates, and animates the courtroom crisis with his fluid, witty blues guitaring. Despite a French horn introduction and the middle section that seem arbitrary and nonsensical, “Can’t Be So Bad” is a powerhouse boogie where all the counter culture trappings are dropped, the pretense of a generational consensus vanishes, leaving only the protagonist making a case to her beau that things are going get better if she just gives him another chance. The unadorned beseeching of a man to his mate was refreshing, honest, disarming. Miller’s guitar solo here positively rips with the sting of Bloomfield and all of Clapton’s fluidity. Truth is that Wow has several good songs: “He,” “Naked If I Want To,” “Three-Four,” “Rose Colored Glasses,” and “Miller’s Blues,” which rise above the often-murky sound mix and indifferently applied effects.

Their sophomore effort, truth, was one of the most disappointing purchases I made with my combined allowance and pop-bottle cash, naively assuming it was too diffuse, esoteric, muddy, self-indulgent, and all those terms one gleans from reading Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy’s record review sections. All the same I kept dropping Wow onto my turntable, moved the needle around to skip what was less worth a listen, and basked in a growing appreciation of how wonderful this band could be if there was nothing blocking their muse. Imperfect as it was, this record has been part of my permanent record collection all these decades later. Wow was a disappointment, but the best of it retains the  naive spark and sass. Naive, which is to say innocent, and part of the miracle of Moby Grape's first record and the most sublime minutes of Wow is that the band rarely advanced beyond innocence into the quicksand of pretentiousness. When they did, as on Wow, they paid the cost with grating, unlistenable minutes . 

(This originally appeared in the San Diego Troubadour. Used with kind permission).

MISCELLANEOUS MISSIVES ON RANDOM ALBUMS OF YORE

It was after I slid into my forties where the other songs and albums by Led Zeppelin reemerged on my radar and revealed a band that was more diverse, musically, than the popular invective allows. Where I lived at the time, Zeppelin fans were just as likely to be listening to the Band, Van Morrison and CS&N, along with other folk "sissy" artists as they were the macho sounds of hard rock. By the time I turned 48, how I perceived the world at 18 - 21 is irrelevant to the fact that they've made some good, sometimes brilliant tunes. Hardly perfect: the lyrics are an embarrassment, but the band is about riff and sound, as Richard Cobeen said in the Lennon thread by way of dismissing the band, but is something I think is crucial to their rock and roll success: riffs and sounds over laid on a varied set of styles and influences that work, sonically, more often than they don't. The lyrics, with the vocals, were just part of the overlay, a part of the texture. Like the Beatles, Steely Dan, and Led Zeppelin were studio artists, where the studio was the proverbial third instrument. Live, they were one of the worst bands I've ever seen--though they sounded pretty damned good when I saw them in '67 (?) on their first US tour with Jethro Tull--but in the studio , their music was finessed and honed, typical in those days. For all his faults as a faulty technician in live circumstances, he is a producer who brought a fresh ear to the recording process, and came up with ideas that circumvented the routine dullness and rigor that's become the bane of less able hard rock and metal bands after his Zeppelin's break up. It was after I slid into my forties where the other songs and albums by Zeppelin again got my attention. What the new fascination revealed was a band that was more diverse, musically, than what the fidgeting knocks against them at the time allowed.Led Zeppelin IV is their high water mark for track-by-track knockouts and variety of sounds, but Houses of the Holy is where the band really stretched beyond the comfort of the hard rock style they created. I think they do reggae fine, and "The Crunge" is quite funked up-- Plant's Brown vamping is inspired, and the lyrics are , in turn, somewhat surreal without losing a greasy, fry-cooked crease in the seam.The only real bad aftershock of " Sgt Pepper's" and other "concept albums" from the period was the mistaken notion by other artists that there had to be one grandiose and grandiloquent theme running through  both sides of their albums in order for the their work to be current with the mood of the art rock of the period. The Beatles succeeded with "Sgt.Pepper", "Magical Mystery Tour", and, and"Abbey Road" ( easily their most consistent set of material, I think) because they never abandoned the idea that the album needs to be a collection of good songs that sound good in a set: over lapping themes, lyrically, 

are absent in the Beatles work, unless you consider the reprise of the Pepper theme song on a leitmotif of any real significance (it's use was cosmetic), although musical ideas did give the feel of conceptual unity track to track, album to album. Lennon and McCartney and Harrison's greatest contribution to rock music was their dedication to having each one of their songs be the best they could do before slating it for album release. For other bands, the stabs at concept albums were routinely disastrous, witnessed by the Stones attempt to best their competitors with the regrettable 'Satanic Majesties Requests". The Who with "Tommy" and "Who’s Next" and the Kinks , best of all, with "Lola", "Muswell Hillbillies" and "Village Green" , both were rare, if visible exceptions to the rule. "Revolver" and "Yesterday and Today" are amazing song collections, united by grand ideas or not. I buy albums; finally, on the hope that the music is good, the songs are good, not the ideas confirm or critique the Western Tradition. Conventional wisdom is often wrong, but not always, and I think the popular opinion that Pepper is a better disc, song by song, than Satanic Majesties is on the mark. Majesties had The Stones basically playing catch up with the Beatles with their emergent eclecticism and failing, for the most part. That they didn't have George Martin producing and finessing the rough spots of unfinished songs marks the difference.Majesties, though does have at least one great song, "2000 Man", and a brilliant one, "She's A Rainbow" For the rest, it sounds like a noisy party in the apartment next door. The album sounds like a collection of affectations instead of a cohesive set of songs. Cohere is exactly what the tunes on Pepper did, good, great, brilliant, and mediocre. The sounded like they belonged together. Authenticity is such an elusive quality that it's mostly useless when judging as subjective as whether someone's music is legitimate. It's a nice way to chase your own tail, though, which is what many like to do. Better to consider whether the music is at least

honest, or better yet, if it's done well: whether music, lyrics, voice, style work on their own terms, makes for a more interesting set of topics, and a more compelling record collection.I would say that "She's Leaving Home" is one of the most atrociously three-hankie wank fests ever written, but I would say that "Good Morning Good Morning" has a lyric that is defensible: it serves the purpose, it's lines and images are clipped, fitting the beats, and the words don't address anything larger than what they're supposed to, a bad mood on a fast morning. It's a self-contained set of references, locked in a particular frame of mind. It is not Lennon's subtlest work, but it's not embarrassing at all. "Catch the Wind" is a lovely song, with a beautifully tendered lyric. Though obviously coming into public view on Dylan's coattails, Donavan was no talentless amateur: he wrote good material in his "new Dylan" period, and did, remarkably, go in a direction quite distinct from Dylan's. He had his moments of good work. Anyone who is still complaining about Zep's less-than-Eliot lyrics has spent too much time staring at their lyric sheets while wearing headphones. It's better to consider Sgt. Pepper as a good album as a good album as a good album, with its historical importance set to the side. There are several good songs on it that have worn well over the decades that keep it from becoming the equivalent of the nutty uncle you don't want your pals to see. Realizing which songs were good after the fact isn't nostalgia, it's common sense. Catcher in the Rye remains what it is, certainly the classic of growing up twisted and feeling put upon. It makes no sense to trash it just because your reading habits became more sophisticated.

IGGY POP CAN CRY IF HE WANTS TO

AVENUE B--Iggy Pop

An album that's more interesting to read than listen to, I'm afraid:too much of his 1999 release, Avenue B, his 12th release, is light, redundant pop,disturbingly generic stylings that sap power from whatever conviction Iggy can summon. The version of 'Shakin All Over' rattles the teeth rather nicely, but overall, this album seems misguided, a mistaken idea to market Iggy into Real Legend, the Last Rock and Roll Survivor Who Matters. He may be all that, but there is a tangible sense of someone entering a room who believes His Time Has Come. There is more packaging than anything else; the emphasis on a slow-to medium pace while Pop ruminates, remembers, regrets and eventually reconciles with his life's deeds (theoretically at least) is not one of his strengths, and never has been. Unlike Lou Reed, who can go maudlin and sentimental until he ripens and rots and yet still manages to make you believe that he at means it, Pop sounds merely flat and cornball.He is and always will a ranter, a raver, a rocker, a reactor, never a thoughtful reflector of the meaning of his history. Ig has to rock rough and hard, with those clipped couplets and first-lesson guitar chords slicing up the music of history in ways that remind you that wit is a survival instinct. He can do it, as his fellow Motor City brethren Wayne Kramer, former MC-5, does on albums like The Hard Stuff and Citizen Wayne. We don't need Iggy to become the American Peter Townsend, forever flummoxed by the irony that he didn't die before he got old.

AMY WINEHOUSE

(from 2011)

This is too sad for words, all the talent that Amy Winehouse had  now silenced because she couldn't muster up the strength to confront what was killing her.  Her song "Rehab"  showed she had an ironic awareness of her drug use , but this shows, again, that self-knowledge unaccompanied by action is inadequate . The insidious thing about being an addict is that the thought of stopping what you know will silence you forever abate quickly after the craving takes over and the first FIX of the day becomes all that matters at the moment. Self awareness vaporizes and you forget or ignore the truth of the matter and wallow in the nod and the eventual panic to get still more drugs. As talented and smart, even brilliant, as Winehouse was, she seemed more or less without a clue to the severity of her situation. Drugs make you stupid, they reduce your life to a banal statistic despite whatever genius potential you began life with, they kill you and make you another deceased cipher. The real tragedy is less that a brilliant artist is silenced too young in her career, but that we are bound to keep reading variations of this sad scenario for the rest of our natural collective lives.

The moral of this tale is simple: Save your own life.

This is a nicely written tribute by NY Times culture monger Guy Trebay on how the recently deceased Amy Winehouse will last, but it presents what I think will be the article that will dominate the flux of Winewhouse postmortems to come: more concern with what she looked like rather than how she sounded. It's a paradox that on the one hand the host of articles are yet to come will praise what were he conspicuous gifts, that unique voice (a combination of Billie Holiday and Diana Ross) and a surreal grit as a lyricist, and yet have the conversation drift, as if directed by gravity, to the matter of her appearance. I sympathize with Trebay, who was required to write so many snappy column inches with so little actual Amy Winehouse music to refer to. It's not as if there was something to surmount in her art as there was in Sinatra's skill set when his voice deepened and grew coarser, darker; he changed the way he sang and selected different songwriters to write for him, to brilliant effect. 

It's not like she's had an evolution as a lyricist, like Joni Mitchell or Elvis Costello, both of whom started out as gifted  who overtime  became precious, pedantic and harder to beat with each release. No, there is only a very slight bit of studio work in her brief stay with us, enjoyable , full of promise and , alas, she's dead.  This isn't unusual for an icon who didn't release many studio albums during her lifetime. It was a mere two for Winehouse, and basing a discussion of her work solely goes static before long. The valid conclusion is for us to ponder what might have been and then give a sigh, but since we're not yet finished wringing our hands over her passing, we have pundits applying a slipshod semiotics... to her sense of style , dealing in tortuously strained metaphors to wrench more cultural significance from her departed presence. It strains credulity, and it insults her fans and it insults her.

THE VARIABLE FOOT: COMING THROUGH LOSS

THE VARIABLE FOOT: COMING THROUGH LOSS: THE HOSPICE BUBBLE & Other Devestating  Affirmations poems by Lizzie Wann Witnessing the decline and eventual death of a parent is...

PATTI SMITH, ROCK AND ROLLER

photo by Frank Stefanko

I've seen Patti Smith twice in the Seventies, once at a student-run music club called the Back Door at San Diego University, and then about two years later at the Civic Theatre in the Downtown. A shock was what it was, like sex for the first time, scraping guitar, rudimentary drums, one-note bass l ines, and Smith's incantations, yowling, caterwauling, and proclamations, channeling Jim Morrison and Blake. It was static, feedback and backbeat fused with Smith's flailing rag doll dancing and howling, hardly refined but sublime. I told my date in the middle of the Civic Theatre concert that I wanted to climb on stage and fuck Smith. My date, a demure young woman had a look in her eye and whispered in my ear "So do I..."

photo by Frank Stefanko

Patti Smith may be many things, but she is not a phony, and neither was Allan Ginsberg. Full of themselves, perhaps, and a shade pretentious but this is what it takes to an artist in America. Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Gore Vidal, Kate Braverman, Ann Waldman, Truman Capote, and John Irving are no less fixed in their public identities and self-images of being people with words that cannot bedenied. Writing is not for modest people; but none of us have to live with these folks, just read their books and find what value there is to be had. Real emotion, insight, poetry, things that resonate with you despite the writer's quarrelsome personality. That's why you read them. Patti Smith I think is a fair- to- mediocre poet, but she was an excellent rock-and-roll artist; I have a firm rock-and-roll aesthetic and consider her best work to be on record and on the stage, in front of a band, and it is here where I think she taps into something larger than herself. But again, whatever she is, she's not a phony, whether you like her. I like some of what she has done and I admire her gutsiness to invade a male bastion and make rock-and-roll something women can find a primary place in. 

For Ginsberg, I would say he stopped writing good poems thirty-five years ago, abandoning his Blakean visions for a Buddhist practice of a direct transcription of his thought processes--no editing, "first thought, best thought". The result has been an awful lot of wasted paper. Still, when all is said about by professors, acolytes, and sycophants, there remain the great poems he wrote back in the day, mainly because "Howl", a certifiable masterpiece. There are several other Ginsberg poems and volumes that likewise ascend to the sublime, and when it all is said that there is to say about him, the writing that is actually good is what I return to, again and again. I worked a poetry reading he gave eleven years ago, and he was a crab, but he was also a man in a hurry; he knew he was dying and was dead about nine months later. So I will forgive his affectations and will be grateful that he lived long enough to write a handful of the best poems written by a post-war American writer.I wouldn't say that Ginsberg is a great poet, only that he has written some great poems. A great poet remains great over a longer stretch of their career than AG did; he ceased being a poet and became instead a celebrity. His great work, though, remains great, and that, for me, mitigates somewhat the ensuring mediocrity and cult of personality he cultivated. I would say Smith's arrogance is precisely what her rock-and-roll performance style require, and I found it exciting when I've seen her in full throttle. Personally, I don't mind arrogance in an artist if there's something there to back it up.

I admire writers Norman Mailer and Camille Paglia, two strong personalities who back up their bluster with strong and eloquent word-smith-ing. The distinction between the gifted egotist and the blustering pretender would be that the gifted egotist's personality receded after a while and a reader confronts their assertions at face value. The pretender's disguise merely dissolves like spun sugar against a wet tongue. Smith, in a more limited sense, is akin to the aforementioned two; she is not a writer, really, but a performer tapping into energies made real by her immodest assertions. In a rock-and-roll context, I think it's riveting, and there is a strong DIY appeal here. She's marshaled her limit assets as a singer and musician, and even as a poet and transformed everything into a perfect rock-and-roll concept, where rough-hewed elements and qualities of the self-taught are deathless assets. If arrogance and extreme self-confidence are, of themselves, qualities one objects to regardless of the work produced, there's nothing I can say to change your mind.

BUCKETHEAD WILL HURT YOU

MONSTERS AND ROBOTS--
Buckethead

I just popped Monsters and Robots out of the CD player, and the effect is exhilarating. There's fractured genius going on here, with all the metal / fusion/ funk / bluegrass cross over the boundaries so easily, and Buckethead's super-velocity guitar work punching up the action in ways that are sonic and lethal. Wow.  If Ornette Coleman were a shred guitarist, this is the full-kerrang sonic scraping he’d give the world that braved an audience with him. Transmutation Live is a must have, based on this. It's as if someone put your head against a wall and then slammed it with big red brick. There's a strong suggestion of Capt. Beefheart, with its disconcerting sci-fi lyric -scape and self-mythologizing, but this is the evidence that skilled pastiche is the dominant form .A mixed and borrowed bag of tricks it  may well be, but the unrelenting virtuosity , the unchained fury the musician brings to bear on this difficult assortment of styles rises Monsters and Robots the assortment of merely agile eclecticism that too often passes as music worth a dozen relistens.  Buckethead slices and dices the elements so well together that the channel-surfing dynamics make sense when the bits are linked, stitched and seared together with the speed-genius of the fret work.

THE BALLAD OF PHIL OCHS

The Revelle Campus Cafeteria at UCSD, 1970, was the first time I became entirely aware of folksinger/anti-war activist and counter culture hero Phil Ochs. He was performing to a packed house of hippies, New Left agitators, Marxist professors with a collective lapse of enthusiasm for talk of revolution, rattled undergraduates, and unsmiling advocates for black power and feminism at an anti-war fundraiser, organized by one of the many ad hoc coalitions that attempted to join the far-flung nether regions of the counterculture in common cause. Ochs made a name for himself as the genius pamphleteer among his generation of left-leaning folkies that he was a part of. Considered by the critical mafia to be the heir to Bob Dylan’s protest throne, an easy assumption might be that Dylan ceased writing topical protest in favor of more personal and sort of surreal existentialism in his lyrics. Ochs was a hero of mine, the poet and the wise guy who stirred up audiences with a critical rhyme, a sly smile, a riveting argument you couldn’t ignore.

Born in 1940 in El Paso, Texas, a young Ochs—and as a teenager—showed exceptional musical promise as a clarinetist and becoming the principal chair on that instrument with the Capital University Conservatory of Music in Ohio. His ears, to be sure, picked up the pop and rock music of the day, ranging from Elvis Presley to Johnny Cash, and became fascinated with the movie rebel icons Marlon Brando and James Dean. After a two-year stint at a military academy, he became obsessed with current events, deciding to be a writer, a journalist, specifically. His interest in politics motivated him to take up music again in the form of an acoustic guitar and to become heavily involved in the pervasive folk boom of the time, learning a rich catalog of old folk songs in various traditions and start writing the most poetic, powerful, and passionate protest and topical songs this side of Dylan himself. Ochs performed everywhere he could for the cause of justice, whether it was in clubs, concert halls, anti-war rallies, or civil rights marches of all sorts. He was a romantic, a visionary, a starry-eyed optimist who believed that the oppressed people of America would throw off the chains that bound them and would one day walk into the horizon as free brothers and sisters. The optimism, seemingly resilient and unbreakable at first, yet frayed the longer the Vietnam War dragged on, and the persistence of racism remained. Depression became a more prominent part of his personality—alcohol became a more constant companion, and his songwriting became darker, more fatalistic, hinting at several instances of his own coming demise. He was delusional and paranoid. Making his depression more severe was an assault on him by robbers when he was in Tanzania, which damaged his vocal cords. His voice never recovered, and his inability to sing brought him more profound despair.

The advent of the Seventies meant a total turnaround of musical styles and political attitudes. At the zenith of his popularity, Ochs was a facile protest singer-songwriter during the Sixties, having written perhaps his most famous song, “I Ain’t Marching Anymore.” He was an able rabble-rouser at peace rallies and civil rights marchers, who could stir dormant liberal sympathies into anger and shame. Still, the white knight of worthy causes was considered passé, and his music became an object of instant obsolescence. Not content to be a professional has-been, Ochs attempted on his final album trilogy (Pleasures of Tile Harbor, Tape from California, Phil Ochs’ Greatest Hits, and Rehearsals for Retirement) to follow the new musical trends, using rock musicians, Sgt. Pepper-styled electronic effects and massive orchestration cast in the mold of Charles Ives. The net result was a confused jumble of affectations, with plenty of good material nearly smothered under an avalanche of desperate gimmickry. Ochs and his producer absorbed precisely the worst elements of what the Beatles were doing with their in-studio experiments. This convoluted eclecticism nearly choked the life out of many of their best songs and made the slighter fare they filled their later albums with, becoming not just remote but ineffectively elitist.

At their best and most penetrating, his later songs were haunting encapsulations, sketching the displaced anomie of his generation that found itself in a new set of cultural conditions where people would rather dance than organize, and eerily foreshadowing Ochs’ own sense of self-apocalypse. “Tape From California,” the song, is a rocking sojourn through an activist’s shattered psyche—someone has woken from a long sleep and finding a terrain not by a community of authentic people working to change the society for the better but rather by hippies, drug freaks, record company PR men, hip magazine writers, scene makers, blow job artists, flunkies, junkies, alcoholic poets without notebooks, and self-declared painters of all sorts who never touched a canvas, everyone one of them feigning art and culture by looking, in truth all of them, for a cheap thrill to last until the garbage trucks arrived.

“The Crucifixion,” Ochs’ masterwork, is a complex, extended allegory about the way a culture treats its heroes (Christ and JFK), according to the best virtues they’d like to see in themselves, and then watching them with necrophiliac glee as they are systematically destroyed, a process that begins when the heroes encroach too close to where the change must be made. Blessedly, the version here is live and free of the special effects clutter that spoiled the studio original. Ochs’ voice is plaintive and unadorned, with an implicit, devastating sorrow to phrasing. “The War Is Over,” first seeming like one of the brilliant anti-war tomes Ochs could write, but instead turns out to be a solipsist daydream. Ochs had been a veteran of countless free benefits and was dismayed that he could sing and declare the same worn-out polemics time after time and effect nothing, except perhaps eliciting a momentary surge of self-righteous, smug radicalism in his audiences. The war, meanwhile, trudged on, a fact that caused Ochs to throw his hands in the air and declare the war was over, at least as far as he was concerned.The last song on the compilation, “No More Songs,” concludes the album on a thoroughly depressing note. Voice and melody drenched in a defeated, archly lyric melancholia, he recalls the people he’s known, the things he’s believed in, the lovers he’s had, and moans that all was in vain. With the past being meaningless, he complains that there are “… no more songs” and then recedes into a numbing orchestral backwash. The first record, comprised strictly of his protest material, is the least interesting of the set. The topicality is dated and irrelevant to anyone’s current state of mind, and Ochs’ idealism’s enthusiasm comes off as youthfully smug and embarrassing.

This song is so beautifully tragic and precise in its sense of despair and crushed idealism that I begin to tear up every time I hear it. It was the last song on his final album, the ironically titled Greatest Hits. Released on the heels of the presciently named Rehearsals for Retirement in 1969, the songs on Greatest Hits were a combination of remembrance and sad reflection upon a world that could not match his greatest hopes for the future; it seemed a final bow, the lyrics of a man saying goodbye to all that. Ochs did, in fact, take his life by hanging himself on April 9, 1976. He was 36 years old.

Late in his career, Ochs had taken to dressing up in a gold lamé suit and famously telling a booing audience in Carnegie Hall that America could only be saved by a revolution, which wouldn’t have happened until Elvis Presley became our Che Guevara. Ochs, a true romantic, believing that Great Men with Great Causes can change the world for the better, was also an alcoholic and a man gave to depression that deepened as he got older. Much of his songwriting became a series of melancholic laments that dwelled on the smashing of the idealism that had fueled his songwriting as an anti-war and civil rights activist earlier in the Sixties and the failure of his personal relationships.

Hello, hello, hello, is there anybody home?
I’ve only called to say I’m sorry.
The drums are in the dawn, and all the voices gone
And it seems that there are no more songs

Once I knew a girl, she was a flower in a flame
I loved her as the sea sang sadly
Now the ashes of the dream can be found in the magazines
And it seems that there are no more songs

Once I knew a sage, who sang upon the stage
He told about the world, his lover
A ghost without a name stands ragged in the rain
And it seems that there are no more songs

The rebels they were here, they came beside the door
They told me that the moon was bleeding
Then all to my surprise, they took away my eyes
And it seems that there are no more songs

A star is in the sky; it’s time to say goodbye
A whale is on the beach; he’s dying
A white flag in my hand and a white bone in the sand
And it seems that there are no more songs

Hello, hello, hello, is there anybody home?
I’ve only called to say I’m sorry.
The drums are in the dawn, and all the voices gone
And it seems that there are no more songs
It appears that there are no more songs
It appears that there are no more songs

Strangely, bizarrely, and fantastically out of context, I saw Phil Ochs perform this song on a Cleveland dance TV show called Upbeat, hosted by a local DJ who was desperately trying to comprehend why Ochs, acoustic guitar in hand, was on a teen dance show along with a parade of bubblegum rock and pop-soul bands that performed bad lip-sync renditions of their regional hits songs. The DJ knew enough about Ochs to see that he was a protest singer by trade and mentioned that, with recent civil rights legislation and with the Paris Peace talks taking place in an attempt to end the Vietnam War, the otherwise gutless host said that Ochs might be out of a job unless he sang more upbeat tunes or words to that effect. Ochs just smiled and said he hoped for the best, and then performed “No More Songs” live on acoustic guitar. I remember this being one of the few songs that haunted me and continued to haunt me for decades.

At his best, Phil Ochs was stunningly brilliant as a singer and songwriter, especially as a lyricist and true poet. He was someone who could easily belong to the songwriter branch of the Confessional Poets like Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, writers of abnormal mental activity who were compelled to write their demons into verse in perhaps some effort to extract their awfulness from their souls. It has been suggested that writing is a species of self-medication, a means to alleviate distress without growing more robust and finding hope. It’s been recommended as well that this was a school of writing and a habit of thinking for which early death, either by one’s own hand or through the degenerative results of copious alcohol and drug abuse, was how a poet of this description achieved a reputation and legitimacy as a poet.

This was something that had repulsed me as I parsed 20th-century poets in college, my idea at the time being that one had to insist that art embrace life and affirm its vitality. I didn’t read confessional poets for years. Still, I came to a change in my thinking that effectively set aside my previous conceit that poetry, let alone any art, was required to advance anyone’s preferences as an arbitrary standard. Each poet, painter, writer, the dancer had to live up to that standard; the muse to create came from whatever source it came from, manifesting its inspiration in our personalities and our need to express our comforts and misgivings as creatures in this sphere of existence. It was under no requirement to make our lives better, let alone save ourselves from a wicked end or at least the bad habits that can make lives sordid, squalid endurance contests. Everyone is different, everyone has their story to tell, everyone’s fate is their own and no one else’s. Most live more or less everyday lives, wherever that is on the continuum of behaviors, no matter how good or bad or how many poems they write. Others are just… doomed, in some respect.

I am reminded of Harold Bloom’s assertion that literature’s only use is to help us think about ourselves in the world, the quality of being nothing more nor less than humans struggling through life with wit and grit, creating and failing and destroying with an array of emotion and words to give them personality. The job of the poet isn’t to instruct others in how to live a whole life, but rather chronicle the unending problematic situations of the life we are constantly trying to negotiate a contract of conduct with, only to find, again, that life is a pure, unceasing process, churning, burning, destroying, and creating from the ash and mire. The poet records the ironies that will not stop coming, the lessons that will always be taught to the same romantics, adventurers, would-be saints, and dime store dictators. It is one of the ironies of modern existence and the expansion of all media that the subjects of protest songs, songs that are very specific to a cause or to injustice, no longer seem to spark the desire to work toward bettering the world that the romantics among us wish would come to be. The embarrassment has more to do with our memories than with Ochs’ politics. A posthumous collection of his songwriting, the two-disc Chord of Fame from 1976, scans the timeline from how we were, thinking we could change the world with good sentiments if not concrete policies, to the way we are now, with ideals shattered and wearing a chic cynicism. For my part, I continually thank Ochs for being a significant influence in forcing me to confront and accept social justice as a living principle and work mightily to avoid the fatal view that claimed this brilliant man’s life.

(This originally appeared in the San Diego Troubadour. Used with kind permission.)

DYLAN DOES NOT SING. HE DOES SOMETHING ELSE

 If you're wondering, ever, why rock criticism is The Red-Light District of the reviewing arts, this article recently posted on the Esquire website to celebrate Bob Dylan's 78th birthday, shows the reason. The essay baldly asserts that Dylan is "The Greatest American Singer of All Time". Written by someone named Jeff Slate, a songwriter and occasional music journalist, the piece an unctuous, overeager stroll through the obvious facts of Dylan's career , laced with fatuous claims for this to be the greatest American singer. The basic formulation is that as a developing artist, a man dedicated to making a splash in the music world with the resources at this command, the young Dylan had tried on several musical styles—blues, folk, field hollers, gospel, rock-and-roll, and that he had made each style his own reinventing all of them. The basic problem is that Dylan has an awful instrument for carrying a tune. There's room for an agreement that the Bard of the Counter Culture has created a good number of impressive, moving, and subtle vocal performances during his long stay in the public eye, but that isn't the same thing as being the Greatest Singer this culture has ever produced. Slate gushes like a nervously prolix fanboy as he over rates the artist's obvious accomplishment. He undersells what was going on in the kind of reinvention that's required for an artist of latent genius to accomplish anything beyond the bathroom and the hairbrush.Dylan is a great singer because he had the ability that suited the qualities and limitations of his voice. All great songwriters do this, especially with Burt Bacharach, who wrote perfect melodies for a stream of quirky vocalists who , without him, likely would have trouble finding a good ftt for their native sound. I am thinking specifically of Dionne Warwick and Gene Pitney, two singers who, I'm convinced, might have languished without Bacharach's melodic accommodations of their strengths. Dylan is a more extreme example of this. His early versions of anonymous folk classics are drearily cluttered with many affectations that make me cringe when played . The genius of his vocal style didn't develop until he committed to writing his songs; the affectations began to fall away and, by the time we come to Blonde on Blonde, we've experienced a long string of potent lyrics dramatized b y a singular , original style that handily introduced and forced acceptance of a new aesthetic in pop singing. Mick Jagger is someone I'd say is an artist who followed the same route, a man with a technically awful voice who, in partner Keith Richard, had a voice that could create musical context and frame Jagger's singing. I've argued that Dylan and Jagger were not singers, but VOCALISTS, men who could do interesting things with their voice to dramatize a lyric. What those two do is a certain singing, but the distinction is helpful in keeping one's statements about an artist's work both sober and sane.Dylan, though, is not the greatest American singer. Sinatra can , hypothetically, could sing "Blowing in the Wind" or "Just Like a Woman" with style and aplomb (the results , no doubt, would sound ridiculous), but Dylan couldn't handle a single tune from Sinatra's songbook. There are many would argue otherwise, that he could pull off the fete and change the direction of history once again, but the brilliance of this man, Dylan, lies entirely on the work he created.On his own songs, the gentleman rules without peer. "No sings Dylan like Dylan" was an early Columbia slogan for the songwriter, quite a prescient declaration as we take the long view of his career. But is less about Dylan's singing than it is about the article writer's rote hyperbole.

Bob Seger's "Seven"

Bob Seger's SEVEN album is an uncommonly mature rock and roll statement in a scene where the rule of thumb dictates that rockers must be public idiots for audience consumption. Seger doesn't wear funny hats, tight pants showing the width of his rig, or bandy about the stage gasping and wheezing, acting like the power of the music has possessed his soul. No, Seger is content to sing his hard rock straight forward, letting the rough-edged intensity of the music supply its own excitement. And Seger is a singer of such manic power as to lay to rest forever all the inept rabble-rousing Slade, Foghat and Humble Pie indulge in. Seger has his finger on the rock and roll pulse—beat. "Get Out of Denver “opens the album, a Chuck Berry chop done the way Berry meant it—fast, intense and over with, quick. The truck driver as dope smuggler theme makes a believable image of a Semi hauling ass down a Midwest highway from a slew of county sheriff’s cars. "Need Ya" is a great lift from the Faces' "It's All Over Now." Seger's voice is breathless and hoarse, laden with an obvious base desire while some slippery slide guitar from Jim McCarty riffs under it. "School Teacher" is the weak link in the album's progression. Neither the rapid redundancy nor Seger's all stops pulled grate manage to salvage this nothing exercise. Fortunately, this fluke is one of a kind, and everything that follows is an ecstatic upward climb. "UMC (Upper Middle Class)" smacks of brilliance. Brandishing a mocking Mel Torme blues scamper while fine-tuning a witty, Mose Allison outlay of mid-century irony, Seger sings a song about wanting to be rich...Why not? One can sing the blues convincingly if one's led a wretched life to back up bragging about hard times. But who sings about wanting to be poor? Seger at once lampoons his white culture and expresses a universal aspiration anyone with an eye for better things can identify with. "Seen A Lot Floors" is great rock and roll touring song, a terse blues grunt whose matter of fact lyrical sparseness amplifies its meaning. "Seen a lot of flooooors....Seen a lot of dooooors " shouts Seger, letting the words drop into oblivion of existential detachment. The details of toad life—the motels, the groupies, the larger than humanly tolerable concert halls— all become an amorphous drug-drenched blur. A Jim McCarty solo starting with a ruthlessly stretched harmonic enters, followed by a lazily drawled sax solo, returning bluntly to Seger's bone-tired voice. Indicative maybe that after a while even the music ceases to have meaning, that it becomes part of the systemized routine that earns the artist a living. "Floors" is great. "20 Years from Now" is the only let up in the up-tempo phases of SEVEN,   a tune more mawkish than moving that is not helped by Seger's efforts to duplicate Van Morrison's serpentine quiver of a voice.  But the song is worth the listening effort if only to hear Seger squeeze his words in an affected (but effective) Otis Reddingisms. The last song, "All Your Love," again cops from the Faces. The guitar chords are chunky, metallic without approaching heavy metal, and Seger's phrasing cleanly takes from Rod Stewart without once suggesting imitation. Bob Seger is his own man, able to take from any number of mainstream rock sources and use them to his own best advantage SEVEN fires no innovating trails in the history of rock and roll, but at least it's honest, which is more than you have a right to expect from a scene dominated with disposable personas.