August 30, 2008
Song 4: Velvet Underground/I'm Waiting for the Man
Cooler than you: the Velvet Underground
The three songs on the list so far have all been about sex and/or love (in rock’n’roll terms, there’s not much difference between the two). So where’s the third leg of the holy tripod? Where are the drugs?
There aren’t many drug songs from rock’s first decade or so. Certainly it wasn’t that people weren’t taking them; it’s just that they weren’t writing songs about them, or if they were, they were doing so in code. It just wasn’t socially acceptable to write overtly about drugs, or at least not commercially acceptable. By 1967, the Beatles certainly had experience with marijuana and LSD, but they never wrote a song identifiably about ganja, and John Lennon famously and disingenuously denied that “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was about acid. Even Jimi Hendrix, poster boy for the psychedelic lifestyle, ended “Are You Experienced?” with the disclaimer “not necessarily stoned, but beautiful.”
Continue reading "Song 4: Velvet Underground/I'm Waiting for the Man"
Dancing about architecture
Posted by bill at 9:37 AM
| Comments (0)
| TrackBack (0)
August 29, 2008
Song 3: The Jimi Hendrix Experience/Wild Thing
There’s a moment in the U2 documentary Rattle and Hum when Bono—in his typical annoying, self-righteous style—introduces a version of “Helter Skelter” like this: “This is a song that Charles Manson stole from the Beatles. We’re stealing it back.”
Well by 1966, the Brits had up and stolen rock’n’roll from us. We needed someone to steal it back. Fortunately, fate provided just such an agent in the person of James Marshall Hendrix.
It was fate that gave Hendrix his middle name, the same as the name of the powerful brand of amp he would one day use to make noises never before heard by humans. It was fate, along with probably some amount of American racism, that made him go to London in 1966 in search of a recording contract. And it was fate (acting through ex-Animal Chas Chandler) that hooked him up with two big-haired British hipsters, Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell, to form the Jimi Hendrix Experience.
Continue reading "Song 3: The Jimi Hendrix Experience/Wild Thing"
Dancing about architecture
Posted by bill at 11:20 AM
| Comments (0)
| TrackBack (0)
August 21, 2008
Song 2: The Kinks/You Really Got Me
The Kinks, on top of the world.
Levitin left Elvis off his list because the person he was making the list for “had heard Elvis Presley, so I didn’t need to cover that.” This left me with the decision of whether to do the same. For serious Elvis people, this would be no decision at all; the question would be which Elvis song to put on. “That’s All Right, Mama”? “Blue Suede Shoes”? “Heartbreak Hotel”? “Hound Dog”?
But I am not a serious Elvis person. I enjoy his work, admire his talent, and yet there’s something lacking in his music that is essential to what I think of as rock’n’roll. For lack of a better word, I would call it balls. It’s laughable to me that he was once considered so dangerous, because however salacious the material, there’s always a softness about Elvis, an absence of real menace. Not that there’s anything wrong with that—it’s part of what made him lovable, and vulnerable. Some cynics will try to tell you that Elvis the white devil who stole rock’n’roll, watered it down, and sold it to the mainstream, but in my version of the story he was a guileless soul who happened to be the right guy in the right place at the right time, and got famous beyond all comprehension. Which is the tragedy of Elvis, and that’s more than I want to get into here; if you don’t already know the story, read Peter Guralnick’s Careless Love. (As a sidenote, if I was going to pick an Elvis song, it would probably be “Baby, What You Want Me to Do?” from the ‘68 comeback special—the rawest and realest he ever sounded.)
Continue reading "Song 2: The Kinks/You Really Got Me"
Dancing about architecture
Posted by bill at 11:42 AM
| Comments (0)
| TrackBack (0)
August 13, 2008
Song 1: Bo Diddley/Who Do You Love
Bo Diddley’s influence was not only musical, but sartorial (see also: Isaac Hayes, R.I.P.).
Somebody has to represent the African-American inventors of rock’n’roll on the list, and while I have much respect for Little Richard, his singular vocal style and use of the piano as primary instrumentation place him outside the mainstream. Chuck Berry is the obvious choice, maybe even the smart one, but the late Ellas McDaniel (a.k.a. Bo Diddley) was arguably even more innovative. Rock’n’roll famously changed popular music by placing the emphasis on rhythm rather than melody; Diddley took it one step further and added an element of pure sound, pioneering the use of reverb and distortion that Jimi Hendrix would later take into outer space.
But while Bo had one foot in the future, he also had one way back in the past. The rumbling drums found on most of his music are a direct link to rock’s African roots. He was most famous, of course, for the Bo Diddley beat, but even when he didn’t use it—as on “Who Do You Love”—he could lay down the tribal thunder with the best of them.
Continue reading "Song 1: Bo Diddley/Who Do You Love"
Dancing about architecture
Posted by bill at 6:23 PM
| Comments (2)
| TrackBack (0)
August 11, 2008
Rock History in Six Songs or Less
I haven’t actually read This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin, but I have been in the same room with someone who has. It was he who pointed out to me a passage where the author attempts to explain rock’n’roll to an 80-year-old engineer friend of his.
He knew about my previous career in the music business, and he asked if I could come over for dinner one night and play six songs that captured all that was important to know about rock and roll. Six songs to capture all of rock and roll? I wasn’t sure I could come up with sing songs to capture the Beatles, let alone all of rock and roll. The night before he called to tell me that he had heard Elvis Presley, so I didn’t need to cover that. Here’s what I brought to dinner:
Long Tall Sally - Little Richard
Roll Over Beethoven - Beatles
All Along the Watchtower - Jimi Hendrix
Wonderful Tonight - Eric Clapton
Little Red Corvette - Prince
Anarchy in the UK - Sex Pistols
Now this is the sort of thing that grabs my attention, of course. There are some interesting choices here. Little Richard is obviously meant to represent the roots of rock’n’roll, which makes sense since he invented it (just ask him), but he’s such a singular talent it’s hard to think of him as representative of the genre. The inclusion of the Beatles and Hendrix is hard to argue with, though one might quibble with the choice of songs, which were intended in part to acknowledge their writers as well (Chuck Berry and Bob Dylan, respectively). “Roll Over Beethoven,” while a perfectly enjoyable rocker with some historic resonance, doesn’t well represent the depth and breadth of the Beatles’ creativity. “Watchtower” may be Levitin’s strongest choice—majestic, evocative, poetic—though it wouldn’t necessarily be mine.
Continue reading "Rock History in Six Songs or Less"
Dancing about architecture
, Read it in books
Posted by bill at 3:56 PM
| Comments (2)
| TrackBack (0)
August 7, 2008
Spiritual warfare and breathing problems
Lately, I spend an inordinate percentage of my blogging time reading and deleting junk comments. Deleting them because they are, like, clogging up my bandwidth, man; reading them because you never know when the spam machine is going to cough up something lovely or at least useful, something I can repurpose as content. Something like this:
spiritual warfare and breathing problems
order of operations word problem
algebra 2 problems
monovision problem
preschool behavior problem
or this:
elegram taurus worktable? cottony, clipboard cottony.
polygynous proverbial buxtehude seagram frog timon, telegram
andover libido escape libido constrain.
mingle heathen frog
airplane mingle idiom? timon, seagram redemptive.
operon jasper libido lash mingle elute, heathen
operon oval saxophone idiom polygynous.
stepmother taurus timon
mingle buxtehude saxophone? townsend, refer escape.
redemptive democrat.
or this:
monetary monotonous Kerouac.panning buffets.thunderbolt
Continue reading "Spiritual warfare and breathing problems"
Read it in books
, Spam, wonderful spam
Posted by bill at 1:02 PM
| Comments (0)
| TrackBack (0)
July 29, 2008
Rock me and roll me till I'm sick
The poacher character from Withnail and I would have called this “prancing like a tit.”
It has only just come to my attention that this weekend marked the 65th birthday of Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger (DOB 7/26/43), prompting all sorts of hi-larious headlines about how the Mickster is now eligible for a pension. So a tip of the hat to Sir Michael Philip Jagger, who certainly seems to be enjoying his life, although he hasn’t made a good album for either 27 or 32 years, depending on whom you ask (I personally give the benefit of the doubt to 1981’s Tattoo You).
I wanted to post something by way of tribute, and I don’t know how I could do better than the following Mick tribute by Gilda Radner. A bit of setup: A couple of times on Saturday Night Live Gilda did a character called Candy Slice, a dirty punk rocker loosely but clearly based on Patti Smith. She revived the character for her post-SNL Broadway show, which was subsequently released as a movie called Gilda Live, from which this clip is taken. The song she’s doing, “Gimme Mick,” is a fairly simplistic punkish number, but energetically played and with great lyrics. In case you want to sing along, the chorus goes like this:
Gimme Mick, gimme Mick
Baby’s hair, bulging eyes
Lips so thick
Are you woman, are you man?
I’m your biggest funked-up fan
So rock me and roll me till I’m sick
Keep an eye out for Paul Shaffer (as Candy’s drummer/enabler) and guitarist G.E. Smith, Gilda’s pre–Gene Wilder husband (better known as the grinning skull who led the SNL band from 1985 to 1995).
Dancing about architecture
, Somebody's birthday
Posted by bill at 10:53 AM
| Comments (0)
| TrackBack (0)