AND THE BAND PLAYED ON
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I have a sister, Sharon, who is thirteen years older. This might not sound
inherently cool, but when you were born in sixty-four, having a sister who was old enough to
really be into rock and roll was quite a benefit. Before I can even remember, I'm sure I'd already
heard every good and bad popular artist being played on top forty radio in the mid sixties enough
to have had it seep into my pores. Look through any window. Yeah.
Sharon had a stack of 45s that included, among other things, several early Stones hits --
19th
Nervous Breakdown, Get Off My Cloud -- Beatles upon Beatles, from She Loves You
up through Help, the Kinks' Well Respected Man and some stuff
that, even as a toddler, I thought was borderline, like Herman's Hermits and Tom Jones.
My first serious infatuation with popular music hit around the time I was in kindergarten --
Bobby Sherman. I still remember the poster my sister bought for me, he was wearing the usual
heartthrob Aqua-Netted, over-the-collar shag hair helmet, a wide-collared black shirt,
striped denim bell-bottoms and a
black velvet choker. Oh, yes. The single I had was Julie Do You Love
Me?. I did a web search on Bobby Sherman, recently. He's
an EMT or fireman or something for some little burby place in Cali, like
Sepulveda or Carmel. Maybe it's Reseda. "Because we are all in
some way or another going to Reseda someday ... to die." What would I
--or any of us, really -- do without Mike Doughty?
I also loved Beatles songs. The first record I ever bought, when I was old enough, was Magical Mystery Tour. I understood exactly none of it, of course -- since Mystery Tour was, in retrospect, largely drug and political allegory. Admittedly, though, it had a certain Alice In Wonderland feel I can still separate from the drug allegory in my head (though there have been insinuations Alice In Wonderland was also drug allegory). My favorite tune off the album was -- and still is -- Hello, Goodbye, though Your Mother Should Know runs a close second. I Am The Walrus frightened me when I was six or seven. I got better.
The next album I bought was Sgt. Pepper.
There was a bit of a dry run, for me, between that and the next one. The Beatles had, of course, broken up by then -- and really, there wasn't much for a pop/rock neophyte in anything released after Sgt. Pepper. I listened to a lot of my (older, male) cousins' stuff -- mostly Wings and Beatles, too, at that point in history -- and listened to the pop/top forty station (WKRQ - Q102) in Cincinnati. I didn't bump for another album until I was twelve. I was a confused, overweight, lonely seventh-grader when I saw Peter Frampton performing Show Me The Way on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert or Burt Sugarman's Midnight Special. Which is to say, yes -- Jewish guys in their mid-thirties determined the trajectory of my musical taste for several years. Sue me.
Some of my friends were into Shaun Cassidy (who didn't become cool until WASP, when Todd Rundgren took him over for a while), Leif Garrett and The Osmonds. I know, I know -- now, Pete seems so harmless. But he PLAYED THE GUITAR, he wrote his own songs and he was really good compared to the pabulum that was marketed at young girls at that point (not that it's any better now, when your choice is whores for something -- record sales, groupies and Jesus come most immediately to mind). Comes Alive was ubiquitous, and I had a crush on one of my cousin's friends who played acoustic and loved Frampton. Pete was probably the best thing that ever happened to me, not so much because any one song of his 'changed my young life' but because I started listening to mainstream rock radio to hear the songs, and started hearing a broad spectrum of real music for the first time in my life. Not only that, but I started developing the ever-valuable BULLSHIT DETECTOR for insincere, overproduced or under-written music. It's been the devil on my shoulder for many years, and tells me, for instance, why bands like the Strokes suck, while the White Stripes at least mean it in some sense other than the sense that gets them free drugs and strange.
WEBN (I'd link, but they're now part of the whole Clear Channel McMegacorpoconglomerateleviathan, and I don't really feel like getting them gratuitous hits) was a really cool station, when I was an adolescent. They were risqué, edgy, they played viable and adventurous music. Now, they're just another Clear Channel hive of misogyny and testosterock; I have faith that, pretty soon, it'll all be owned by Rupert Murdoch anyway ... and by gum, who doesn't want an ancient white Australian multibillionaire deciding what's good music, huh?
Back in the late seventies, though, rock and roll radio still only smelled funny -- it wasn't dead yet. There were two major FM rock stations in Cincinnati, WSAI and WEBN, and between the two they played some serious stuff. A few years later, when WSAI went under, a station called WSKS came to life with the direct aim of stealing listeners from WEBN. They succeeded to the point Jacor (original owner of WEBN) began playing their exact format and eventually destroyed them, but that's Jacor. It was fun while it lasted, 96Rock. Hi to Chris Geisen, who was the evening man on WSKS and who ... actually saw this rant online (thank you, Google! Bawk bawk!) and sent me an e-mail to advise me he's now a jock on a modern rock (Clear Channel, but who else is there these days?) outlet in Indianapolis, and does production work for several Clear Channel stations in Indy and the Bob & Tom show. Congrats, Chris -- not many people manage to stay in the biz without totally selling their souls.
The next blip on my radar came when I was a freshman in high school. Though I was a good student and not at all a reprobate, I hung out with the girls who would eventually become the 'heads'. We used to sit out our lunch break at a sort of poolroom/jukebox/greasy spoon across the street from the high school and watch guys' butts while they played pool, listen to the jukebox and soak up that good, lardy smell from the buckets of fries always in the fryer. I had a good sage-colored Bobbie Brooks wool skirt that never lost that odor the whole six or seven years I kept it after high school.
Let me interject, at this point, that I grew up in a very, very small town in southern Ohio, about forty miles east of Cincinnati. The population of the town was (and still hovers) right around a thousand. There are a half-dozen churches representing most major Protestant denominations (the Catholic church recently combined with another ten miles away), three or four bars (they open and close every so often), a couple of restaurants, a couple of garages and gas stations/package stores/convenience stores, a flower shop or two, a hardware store, a cemetery and not much else. Radio and the jukebox at the little smokers' haven across from the high school were about the only ways we ever heard of new bands or songs.
So there I was, not (yet) a smoker, watching the hip heads smoke, eat french fries and play pool, when somebody tossed a buck in the jukebox for the six or eight songs and, along with the two or three singles from the Eagles The Long Run and Foreigner's first (eponymous) album, Cheap Trick's Voices wafted out of it. One of my then-friends said, "hey, this is that song I was telling you about, I thought you'd like it," and I was gone.
At that point in my life, I'd never subscribed to rabid fandom. I'd liked Peter Frampton's songs,
but in fact had thought
the image his handlers let us get of him to be a little precious, with the flowered shirts and the satin bell-bottoms. Even with the Beatles
and Bobby Sherman, it had always been the songs.
Two weeks after the first time I heard Voices, Burt Sugarman's Midnight Special showed a trilogy of videos from the Dream Police album -- the first "intentional video" I'd ever seen. It was Dream Police, The Way Of The World and Voices. (For those of you with digital cable or satellite, they still play the version of Dream Police and Voices that were on this promo on VH-1 Classic, but they've dropped Way Of The World, which I find incredibly sad, since it was the best song on the album.) They looked crazy and passing evil, the guys in the band. I didn't even like blondes, especially, but I was hooked on Robin Zander. I bought Dream Police, then the first two (Cheap Trick and In Color) and Cheap Trick At Budokan (it's NOT called Live At Budokan, so would you people PLEASE get with the program? It's been twenty years, for crysake!). I've never regretted a second or a dollar of it.
Since then, I've gone through several phases of stuff, all of which I still own, pretty much. I've had my New British Invasion phase, my southern rock phase (well, if you can classify Little Feat that way), my eclectic Midwestern pop phase (in which I still am, really, if you include Canadian pop bands). I listen to a large number of bands, though I'm more a band/artist than singles fan. If I can't buy the album and get a charge out of it, I lose respect for the artist, usually. If you wrote one single and the record company forced you to do the other eleven to thirteen songs at gunpoint, you don't deserve an oeuvre. Let's see, here's a brief list -- if there are websites, I've linked to the coolest I could find:
You've already heard most of what I have to say that really has any applicability in the general sense. They still look crazy to me, and I still buy everything when it comes out, even if I am disappointed once in a while. For the most part, other than The Doctor, these guys haven't put out an album that didn't have something on it of redeeming value. The last studio album, Cheap Trick '97, is worth the price of admission for Carnival Game alone.
Todd Rundgren (link is to fan site -- Todd's actual site is a subscription site, and while I have no objection to his managing his career this way, and in fact applaud it, you won't get much information that way!)
For having jumped on the Todd bandwagon around eighty-three, I'm a come-lately to Todd. I picked up on him when The Ever Popular Tortured Artist Effect was out because I heard an interview with him on one of the Cincinnati rock stations and they played the song Drive, which is the REAL best song on the album. I know, you've heard Bang On The Drum until at sporting events until you're sick as hell of it. So am I. But Todd gets a little money every time somebody plays it somewhere... and the rest of his catalog is full of worthwhile material. Little of which sounds like "Bang".
Ben Folds Five (the band no longer exists. Ben tours on his own, and the other two members of the "five" have their own projects, now, but the site still exists, so...)
I just want to say this -- I WAS ONE OF THE EARLY ONES. I bought the first CD when it was still on the Caroline label, and when nobody was playing Ben and the boys but college radio. I was driving home from the gym (back in my single days, when I thought muscle definition in my thighs might guarantee my next relationship would be a good, lasting one) one summer night when the song Where's Summer B.? came bubbling out of my back deck speakers. I was so thrilled with the song I pulled over and called the radio station from a pay phone to find out who it was. I'd like to say everything they did was as satisfying as the first album, but for me, I found their output uneven at best. Fear Of Pop, Ben's first solo work, is an entertaining concept, but I confess I haven't bought it yet. I'm still trying to decipher The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner. Not really -- I understand Reinhold okay. I'm actually still trying to figure out what the hell they thought they were doing releasing a turkey like Brick as a single when there were better songs on the second album. But that's the way it goes -- I always want something else for the single. If Cheap Trick had listened to me, they'd have had bigger hits all along, but did they listen to me?
Just the first album, actually. They got all cheery and quit writing really beautiful, whiny Midwestern songs after that. I don't like all the production value and philosophy. Give me good, gut-level grief like Raining In Baltimore or Rain King any day.
psychodots/Bears/Raisins (no Raisins link. The band's been defunct for, what, ten years now?)
Long, long history, long story; if you're not interested, skip on to the next one. You see, in the mid-seventies these guys named Rob Fetters, Bob Nyswonger and Chris Arduser ended up in Cincinnati from Greater Toledo (don't ask me why they thought they'd do better as a rock band in Cincinnati, I surely can't answer that). Other drummers were in and out of the lineup until, in the late seventies, Rick Neiheisel (who now releases piano R&B as Ricky Nye) joined up as keyboard player, and by eighty-three they'd settled in with a drummer named Bam Powell. For several years, this lineup terrorized clubs, fans and each other with a sort of even-more-amped NRBQ mix of purely original rock and roll. Their vinyl album from eighty-three, which is eponymous, is available as a CD (the release date is 1994. Don't let this frighten you, it was remastered and re-released a few years back but is, in actuality, the old album with a couple of singles tacked on the end). Another possible point of interest in this CD is that Adrian Belew produced it. When the Raisins broke up in 1985, Fetters and Nyswonger, Neiheisel and Powell went their separate ways. Neiheisel played keyboard in a few local allstar outfits with the Goshorn Brothers (see Pure Prairie League) and Cincinnati favorite Robin Lacey and DeZydeco before launching his own band, Ricky Nye and the Red Hots, in which he plays piano and Hammond (and accordion) and sings. Powell did a short stint in the Warsaw Falcons and a long one in The Blue Birds, a blues and R&B outfit. They did a couple of locally released discs. Fetters and Nyswonger reunited with Arduser and formed The Bears with Adrian Belew, a power pop project that never quite managed to get off the ground the way they'd have liked. Belew had his own irons in the fire, so in the intervals, and after The Bears was retired for good, Arduser, Nyswonger and Fetters formed a project that started out going by The Raisins but was renamed psychodots by the time the first of three CDs was released. They played locally and regionally but, again, never succeeded well enough to make it worth a serious go. Psychodots broke up a few years back, though there have been, in the past twelve months, two psychodot reunions and at least one Raisins lineup reunion. Fetters now works for a studio in Cincinnati called Sound Images, which produces segues and songs for ABC prime time series (the original Raisins version of the song Fear Is Never Boring was used to promote Two Guys, A Girl and a Pizza Place when the pilot premiered), and released a solo project, Lefty Loose, Righty Tight, last year that has reworks of a few psychodots numbers and some originals, all of which are mellower and creditably more intricate than their live/'dots versions. Arduser plays hired gun as drummer in several bands, including Ricky Nye and the Red Hots, and works with Nyswonger in a project called GraveBlankets. Powell and Nyswonger also play in Bucket, with local singer/songwriter Lee Rolfes that used to be fun when nobody knew what was going on, but is now a trial to see in the clubs -- but really, it's a beautiful thing. No, really -- that's it, at least for now.
I'm not going into a long disquisition on The Q. Cool drivin' music, and they heavily influenced members of the Raisins/Bears/psychodots family. Other people know their history in much greater detail than I, I wouldn't begin to try to say more. Except I'm marginally less interested since Big Al left. That's it.
Kate Bush (this looks suspiciously like a fan site, not an official site, but since she hasn't released anything in about eight years, who cares?)
Don't get me started on this one, either. Let's just say Kate was the original piano playing, red-haired diva with the scary voice, and I won't name any names, or tar all the poseurs with the same brush, because I actually sorta liked Fiona Apple... if you don't get the message yet, and you really want to know what I think, Email me for a private rant.
Were so cool, and are so dead, but they were so LOUD that if you listen really hard, you can still hear them. That ethos still has its place, or else the Offspring wouldn't have a career, verdad? RIP Joey and Dee Dee. You guys were the id of my generation. And I'm glad you didn't live to see the world's latest Bonzo go somewhere other than Bitburg. Because Joey, man, you'd have wanted to smack that little bastid. Seriously.
Nick Lowe (appears to be a fan page, but sometimes those are the best, eh?)
The Jesus Of Cool. Nick The Knife. The Basher. I bought Labour Of Lust for the single. No, Switch Board Susan, actually, thanks. But from the early Stiffs stuff (the REAL version of I Knew The Bride was an amphetamine-fueled pre-cowpunk reel, not that sappy thing that's on Nick's Basher compilation ) and production of Elvis Costello's early work up through Little Village, this guy's had more to do with British pop than anybody but maybe Dave Edmunds since John Lennon was murdered outside the Dakota. End of discussion.
The saddest thing in the world is, Lowell George is dead and has been for over twenty years, now. I mean, I have to respect the guys for trying to carry it on since then without him, and they've put out some creditable music, but Lowell heard the voices of angels, and he played slide with a Sears Craftsman 9/16" socket, and I have read that he mentored Bonnie Raitt for a while (which may just mean he drank whiskey with her, I don't know), and he wrote one of the best rock songs ever, Easy To Slip. Please, please, if you never buy another album recorded before 1985, buy any Little Feat album from the early days. For a white boy from Atlanta, Lowell George knew more about blues than he had any business knowing. He knew a whole lot more about 'em than Robert Cray. Compare the two and argue it with me, if you want.
Primus (it's actually Les Claypool's official site -- hey, Primus ain't around no more, whaddya' want, taco flavored Doritos? Oh, yeah, that's right -- they brought them out again. Carry on.)
Yeah, they suck. So what? I'm convinced something really strange happened to Les Claypool somewhere along the line in his personal development and, instead of being a nuclear physicist or a rocket scientist, he became a bass player instead. It takes a certain level of intelligence to produce such perverse and strange music that is, in the end, so listenable. There's nothing so strange Primus won't do a song about it, and nothing so trite Primus won't do a strange song about it. Damn tough call to make the bass a lead instrument and still write rock songs, but they do it. I don't know how they ever made it out of the backwaters of the moronic record companies. Like some Troma creation, they managed to make it out of the basement. I don't know how, I'm just glad they did.
I know, I know -- it's cool to hate the popular kids. Screw that, I'm not a kid anymore, and I know bullshit when I hear it -- there's not much bullshit here. I don't care if you think it's mostly hype; I don't care if they've made up ridiculous stories so they could sit in a hotel room in Iowa and laugh at the music press trying to figure out of they were siblings or exes. I just don't care. Their songs are solid, and I don't get tired of hearing them over and over on the radio. Except that stupid one about the bowling alley -- could have done without that. Modern rock is lucky to have "Jack White," whatever his real name is, involved it it. Somebody has to raise the bar for sincerity every few years or everything will sound like the Strokes or Coldplay. Not that I don't like to hear a Coldplay single, once in a while...
Ah, yes -- Sloan. Every few years, a band comes along to remind me why I
liked the Beatles. Not that I necessarily want to make a comparison these
boys can't live up to, since frankly, they borrow as much from Badfinger and a
lot of intervening stuff that's borrowed heavily from the Beatles and Badfinger
... or to discount the beauty of the effects of technology and pop culture in
the intervening years, for that matter. The first time I heard Losing
California on the radio, it also reminded me why I liked Cheap Trick, which
is probably a less intimidating comparison. Sloan are a crew of slacker
boys from Nova Scotia who seem no less clean-cut than I ever was (moderately,
though there probably have been plenty of things that would have been parole
offenses, if not outright jail terms ... what's a little high-level misdemeanor
between friends, huh?). Patrick Pentland can write a Cheap Trick song like
nobody but Rick Nielsen. Or something like that -- I don't think he's
actually the one who was the CT fan, I think it was Chris Murphy, but his songs
sound considerably less like theirs. God, I hate the fact that everybody's
career and interviews are endlessly analyzed, these days -- these guys aren't
anything miraculous, they're just a really, really good rock band who (okay,
perhaps that part is actually a bit of a miracle) haven't given up just because
the music business is a cesspool that eats young people and spits out marketing.
And good on 'em, and I hope they keep going until their arthritis keeps them
from playing anymore.
SOME MUSICAL RANTS
Rant #1 -- Music/Radio/Greed
First off, please understand that I'm not griping about the music industry because I hate music, because I hate rock and roll, because I think there hasn't been a worthwhile album recorded since I graduated from high school, or by an artist under thirty since then, or because I think there's nothing that can be done about it. There's nothing I hate more than alarmist blowhards who gripe about how everything was better when they were kids. Things were only marginally better when I was younger, they were already at least somewhat like they are now -- they're only more like that, and it's not like there's no solution. But, hey -- if you don't want to hear or read about it, "fish on", as Les Claypool says.
I have a few things that crawl around under my skin about the music industry, bands, rock and roll and rock radio. Radio used to be a cool place to go, a forum for record companies to cast a broad, eclectic net to catch a few people who'd buy concert tickets and albums and merchandise, and in the bargain, a lot of people were made happy by hearing songs they liked, finding artists who fit their needs. When did radio become so openly one long commercial? And why? Was it necessary to kill rock and roll radio for the sake of a buck? I used to love feeling like it was chance when I heard something on the radio that touched me. Now, I know there are thousands of artists out there doing music I'd buy -- and probably thousands of other people would buy -- but because HUNDREDS of thousands of people might not buy it, a record company doesn't see any point promoting it even to the point of releasing an album. Most of the artists above have had to resort to independent recording and distribution deals, though they've had catalogs of mainstream hits and have a body of work that would impress God. Because music is no longer a money-making venture. Music is $$. This sucks.
For once, I have a solution for my rant. GO SEE LOCAL BANDS. Go to a club in town,
wherever "town" is for you, and pay the cover and sit through at least a set of a local band. Do it
once a month, once a week. If you usually go to bars where there's a DJ -- trade that off once a
month or every other week for a band where there are people up on the stage who love music,
sweating their asses off to make something they think you will like. Rock and roll is getting to
the point where it's a rare truly good song that makes it through the noise, these days. I'm sick of
electronic crap, of whispering chick singers, I'm sick of it all. Go see bands that don't have
contracts. Don't pay more than thirty bucks to see national acts. Either their record companies
or the bands themselves are being egregiously acquisitive, charging more than thirty dollars for a
show, unless the concert shirt is free when you leave. Don't encourage the bastards, they'll just
get worse.
Rant #2 -- Poseurs and
Enablers
Without naming names, and without necessarily blaming the artists in toto for this, there are so many bands/artists out there who are innovating either not at all or as little as possible, riding on the coattails of truly innovative artists who are virtually invisible due to death, record company obliviousness, personal difficulties, refusal to deal with McMusic, physical unattractiveness ... I know, I know -- this has been the story of rock and roll since Elvis Presley started ripping off black musicians. But Elvis credited his sources eventually. There are too many people out there who sound like Tom Waits, or like John Lennon, or like Nirvana, or like Kate Bush, or like Pink Floyd who claim without any right that they came up with those sounds or that ethos by themselves, and the adolescents for whom the record industry actually releases some large portion of the music they release lap that up without having the proper bullshit detectors to know they're full of crap. One way or another I'm convinced these artist and the record companies will pay -- perhaps Les Claypool will write a song called "Parrots" about them ... oh, wait, he already did that. Never mind. There are artists who are derivative of other artists, of course -- Lenny Kravitz comes to mind because he's on the radio right now. But Lenny will say, in an interview, who he feels affected him when he was learning to play music. It doesn't matter if the fourteen-year-old skate punk never heard of the Guess Who before. Maybe he'll go home and ask his dad who Guess Who were and his dad will put on an old, dusty copy of Best Of Guess Who so he can hear the original version, and he'll say, "wow, that sucks" and go on like nothing ever happened. But maybe he'll think it's cool and listen to some more of it, and he'll learn about one of the most important cultural histories we're not getting, at this point, unless we're old enough to remember it.
What the record companies don't seem to realize is, if they promoted their current artists' influences, they could make some back-catalog sales of artists like Tom Waits and Rickie Lee Jones, like the Who or Cheap Trick or the Beatles, if they were more conscientious about promoting the current crop's influences.
One exception, surprisingly, is Hanson. Squeaky clean and apparently with their hearts in the right place, they do make an effort to say things like, "we really dig the Beach Boys". Of course, if any one of those kids had said, "who are the Beach Boys?" everybody would have shouted "Bullshit!" anyway, including Brian Wilson, but that's just it -- they didn't pretend the Beach Boys never existed and they invented family vocal harmonies. And maybe the record company sells a few copies of Pet Sounds in the bargain.
The saddest part of all this is, it underestimates the intelligence and curiosity of the average consumer (and let's be honest, the record company's average consumer is a fourteen-year-old suburban boy with a single parent who makes over thirty grand a year and has a part-time after school job, all of which is discretionary income). I can't imagine kids are that much different twenty years later. I was always interested. Cheap Trick renewed my interest in the Beatles, the Who and the Kinks, and introduced me to Badfinger and Roy Wood/ELO. Okay, so they never managed to sell me on Elvis. Five out of six is pretty good odds.
Okay, you want me to tie the fly for you? If you've got a broadband or DSL connection, here's an internet music connection for you: WOXY. Trawl away. They're in Oxford, Ohio. They've been playing modern rock since it was called 'new wave,' so they know their shit. They still play music that follows/adheres to the same basic esthetic. I don't like it all, but I didn't like it all twenty years ago, either -- I don't expect to like everything I hear on any radio station, I never did. Even 96 Rock had to play some Phil Collins once in a while, back in the 80s.
When they give up, so do I. I'll build a castle of Roy Wood and Cheap Trick CDs, and bury myself in the basement. Until then, keep your stick on the ice.