MORE MISCELLANEY YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED

 

Sobriety, if I may, is a singular emancipation—an event that arrives not unlike a telegram in the dark hours, bearing tidings, ominous but anticipated. Thirty-eight years prior, the crowning stone was placed atop a life dedicated to spontaneous mischief, and thus commenced an arduous, intricate pilgrimage toward a more measured existence. It was a time of blundering, of tentative exploration—one learned, not by precept, but by doing, by colliding against the furniture, as it were, of one’s own limitations. The classic narrative, as recounted by the devotees of Alcoholics Anonymous, is almost quaint: one pledges, with a grimace of resolution, to remain unsullied by drink, to accept—unflinchingly—the consequences. “No matter what,” they intone, as though the phrase itself were a talisman.

Permit me to observe: the consequences, whether clutched in sobriety or inebriation, are not so much a departure from chaos as a clarifying of its contours. It is as though the fog of dissipation lifted, not to reveal a new Eden, but the same labyrinth, rendered in sharper relief. Providence, in its inscrutable wisdom, kept certain hands from the tiller, for the early years of sobriety—while an improvement over the bibulous epoch—were something akin to a private demolition derby. The world was navigated with a map drafted by a dipsomaniac, the roads serpentine, the landmarks woefully misleading.

The detritus, of course, was self-generated—a concatenation of dilemmas, each demanding redress. The restoration was neither swift nor glamorous: it meant crafting apologies, reconstructing battered relationships, and at long last acknowledging one’s role in the parade of misadventures. The labor was Sisyphean, the pain stubbornly persistent, the repetition dreary. Gradually, the realization dawned: the proper aim was not to force the world’s multifarious phenomena into coherence with obsolete, mangled logic; rather, the challenge was to conjure coherence within oneself, to become someone who might make sense in the world as it stands.

Those old tempests—rages, fits of irritability, the paroxysms of the “dry drunk”—were but variations on a theme, all performed by the same maladroit orchestra. They never succeeded in persuading people, events, or circumstances to conform to parochial expectations. It was a misbegotten amalgam, a cacophony, devoid of melody. Authentic transformation, the kind that allows one to breathe with a briskness unknown to the bemused, is fundamentally a reversal—a relinquishment of the urge to conduct, a willingness instead to find the rhythm, to improvise as befits the evidence at hand. Only then, I submit, does the music begin truly to swing.

________________________

Now, as regards Billy Joel’s “Piano Man”—the archetype of the self-conscious balladeer, casting pearls before a self-conscious audience—it is, in its early measures, almost parodic. The harmonica, wheezing and plaintive, seeks resemblance to Dylan, but achieves something more akin to a department-store simulacrum of “Like a Rolling Stone”—sufficient to lure the casual listener, but never to stir genuine sentiment. The lyricism, striving for Cheever-esque gravitas, is overwrought, mistaking theatricality for insight. Harry Chapin performed similar feats, with perhaps more adroitness, if such is your proclivity. The composition traffics in a kind of pre-packaged melancholy, offering despondency in digestible portions to those who would have their sadness delivered in five-minute increments.

Yet, a salutary transformation occurs. Joel eschews literary excess in favor of conciseness, a fidelity to the architecture of pop. The ear, now privileged over the ego, becomes his guide. The melodies grow nimble, the words—pruned of superfluity—convey emotion with economy. “Uptown Girl” sparkles with retro bravado; “Just the Way You Are”—sentimental though it be—remains a respectable ballad; “Big Shot” delivers its pleasures without apology. Even as he flirts with the ponderous (“You’re Only Human,” the history-light “We Didn’t Start the Fire”), his mastery of tuneful fabrication deepens. This is, after all, the triumph of the craftsman over the would-be artiste—an inversion, rare and blessed, of rock’s penchant for pretension.

 

___________________________________________________

It was at this juncture that my own trajectory bent irreversibly: I procured, with some ceremony, a rapid cable connection to the internet. The ancient ritual of dial-up—those extraterrestrial chirps, the static, the benighted anticipation—engendered a distinct excitement. The slow reveal of a web page, the jerky procession of videos via RealPlayer, were, in their way,
exhilarating.

But the internet then, I hasten to add, was primarily a textual commons—one could read essays, articles, and, in so doing, become edified in realms previously unimagined. High-speed, however, ushered in a new era: articles shrank, graphics proliferated, and the corporate hydra seized dominion over the spaces frequented by users. It became a Babel of advertising, an unremitting parade of commercial enticement. Alas, the technology that once promised deliverance from solitude began, ironically, to entrench it. A tragedy, but one, I suspect, of our own devising.

Ray Stevens * Mr Businessman

 It's a dubious proposition when a compulsive jokester like Ray Stevens --Guitarzan, The Streak, Ahab the Arab--attempts to play catch up with trends and commence writing songs of a critical, scolding nature. Witness here his two-dimensional denunciations against the easiest of straw men targets, the American business executive. You can see that Stevens brainstormed over the wordplay in the lyrics--he was a clever rhymester if nothing else--but his judgment is shallow, let us say..shallow. But it sold, the public was buying, placing the song in the Billboard 100 where it reached number 28. But truthfully, the fad for topical songs passed quickly enough and to be honest no one, virtually no one, mentions this tune when Stevens is brought up in conversation. The song is painful to revisit, basically because it severely reminds me of what a naive and jerky student radical I tried to be in high school. I remember every stupid proclamation I said or printed in the school paper, and Stevens' lyrics echo the cardboard morality. But, to be sure, even pop geniuses make fools of themselves when they attempt to say socially relevant things in their music, an example being the Beatles emulation  of Dylan with their grating put down Nowhere Man. Had the tune been written and performed by a band from the Jersey Shore, critics would have crucified them for their horrible assumption that they had anything worth listening to. But the Beatles were the Beatles, after all, and got a pass and another hit on the radio.

Some words with Kim Simmonds of Savoy Brown, 1978

 

(I had a short but delightful chat with Kim Simmonds, lead guitarist
and leader for the pioneering British blues -rock band Savoy Brown back in 1978. They were touring
as trio supporting their new album Savage Return, and gave a killer set when they
made an appearance at the now gone Roxy Theater. That night Simmonds
did one of the finest, tastiest slow blues guitar solos I've ever heard in my years
of witnessing the best guitarists in the world. Simmonds was a very nice man and accommodating
in answering my questions. He passed away in 2022.
I will always remember how wonderful that guitar solo was.) 

In a small kitchen above the Roxy Theatre a converted neighborhood film house now serving as a concert hall, sandy-haired, fair-skinned Kim Simmonds leans back in a chair and sips from a Styrofoam cup containing Jack Daniels and Perrier. As the lead guitarist of the legendary Savoy Brown and one of the best British blues stylists, Simmonds recounts how he first discovered Black American music.

 "I guess it happened when I was a kid, in my teens," Simmonds says with a relaxed cockney accent, which is unusually mild-mannered for a respected rock star. "I'd been into rock and roll on the guitar, you know, and that later turned into rhythm and blues." He explains how he made the transition from "the Comets to a James Brown thing". "A short time later, I heard some blues records by Otis Rush, Muddy Waters, and other Chicago blues guys, and from there it was all over with."

 Simmonds recalls, "I decided I had to play guitar like Otis Rush or Jimmy Rogers, who played for Muddy Waters, and that the band I was going to be in had to play in the Chicago style". "Luckily for us, the audience seemed ready for something different. We formed the Savoy Brown Blues Band, and soon we had records out and commenced on tours in the States.…. 

Around 1967–1969, at the height of the white blues boom in rock music, Savoy Brown gained American notoriety. The band toured the U.S., playing small clubs, sweaty psychedelic ballrooms, massive indoor auditoriums, and skating rinks, and their audience grew gradually. The band produced a few classic songs that received frequent FM airplay, including "Needle and Spoon," "I'm Tired," and the brilliant "Train to Nowhere." These songs all featured the idiosyncratic vocals of Chris Youldon, who Rolling Stone once called "...The W.C. Fields of the British Blues".

 Savoy Brown did not have a breakthrough hit single, unlike their contemporaries like the Peter Green-based Fleetwood Mac and the originally blues-oriented Jethro Tull. Though the band didn't suffer from a lack of work, Savoy Brown remained on the lower tier, a band with a strong following that lacked the commercial power to push them over the top. However, Simmonds hasn't let the lack of mass recognition affect him. He says, pouring more Perrier into his cup, "I know it'd be very nice to play with very large audiences and get the kind of airplay others get. But I'm happy to play, really. If a song of ours from the new album (Savage Return) becomes a hit single, great, fantastic, but I can't sit down and write a 'hit,' something that deliberate". 

Simmonds explains, "I'd rather write a song just for the feeling and hope others find something they like in it". "I'm not putting down songwriters who do make a living writing very commercial material. It's hard work. How does someone sit down and write something for Sinatra? You must have a feeling for that kind of work; you must be into it. I admire people who can do that". 

He says, "For myself, the way I approach my guitar playing and the way I write songs, it has to be something I feel". "The audience, whether large or small, that my music attracts makes me happy. I guess you could say that I'm happy to play for anyone who wants to listen".  

The latest version of Savoy Brown, featured on Savage Return, is a trio, and the music leans more toward hard rock and less toward blues. During the performance, Simmonds appears less comfortable with the new set than he'd like. He lacks the outright egomania of Ted Nugent, the fluency of Robin Trower, and the bite of Ritchie Blackmore to maintain the spotlight as a constant soloist. Also, most of the new material is undistinguished, resembling any number of heavy metal tunes that people can hum from memory without knowing the title or artist.  

However, Simmonds remains a superlative blues guitarist, and his three traditional solos easily highlight the show. Like other blues greats such as Freddie King, Rush, and Johnny Winter, Simmonds combines speed with taste, flashiness with subtlety, and technique with emotion. These three solos cause one to wonder why Simmonds bothers with hard rock when he excels with more traditional blues. Audiences will be more receptive to what Simmonds does best someday. Meanwhile, Savoy Brown is a band trying its best to make a return onto the scene, and they are doing the best they can.In general, the show was a rousing good time, blessedly free of the obnoxious hype that makes most hard rock concerts endurance contests. Kim Simmonds loathes the idea of giving his audience less than his best, whatever the circumstances he's playing under. 

As the first show wandered out, a long-time Savoy Brown fan clarified the distinction between Simmonds and the other guitar hotshots in the world outside the Roxy Theatre simply but accurately. The fan said unblushingly, "The difference is that Kim Simmonds is a musician, not a rock star".

(Originally published in the UCSD Guardian).

 

THE STUFF FROM THE TOP OF THE CLOSET SHELF

 

Lester Bangs passed away April 30. In 1982, at age 32, a major loss occurred for both rock criticism and American literature.  Like hundreds of others who aspired to be tastemakers in music and add an inflamed commentary on the cultural turns of our time, I loved Bangs and his swagger, the rhythm of his prose, I loved how completely alive and hyperbolic his writing could be. He had the best aspects of Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac, but he also had a heart and a willingness to question his own motives, a recurring theme being when was he (and the rest of us) were going to finally grow up and stop treating musicians as heroes. Rather, Lester came to regard those he admired as flawed as he was, maybe even more so. His deep diving into the psychology of his own obsession with certain musicians -- Lou Reed, most notoriously, convinced me that just because some has a specific skill, even genius, for creating memorable art (whether music, poetry, novels, plays, film making, acting, painting) does not by default make them a saint, nor should an audience expect enlightened attitudes merely  because they do interesting things creatively. He seemed to be getting to the notion that art is not liberation or transcendence of the difficulties of a quirky mind, but rather was a symptom of something more problematic and intransigent.

 

 Bangs was a moralist and a realist  in his own fashion, and felt deeply when regarding his   subject, writing at times so empathetically that you'd think the wound was his own and not a character in a song, as in his splendid masterpiece on Van Morrison's "Madame George" when writing about Astral Weeks in the Marcus collection Stranded. What made Bangs unique was that he didn't project the poetic evocations or dysfunctions of rock music upon the larger culture--he didn't view rock music as a method of social critique--but rather as a means of self-examination. He often wrote badly, but at his best he could not equaled.

 

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

 

In future years,  the younger folks might be nostalgic as they reminisce about the supposed fun and convenience of Horton Plaza before it eventually became a dead mall now being repurposed. the truth of the matter is that even in its prime, it was an alienated space, full of architectural distractions, detours, and dead ends that seemed designed to magnify your unease and increase your desire to escape your sense of uselessness by exhausting your credit limit and begging creditors for an increase in your credit line. I  worked there for a number of years  as a bookseller and made my number one spot to see new movies, and over time you couldn't help by note the waning numbers of people coming to the Plaza, the number of stores advertising off-Holiday Sales with things up to 70 percent off, the closing of stores and the draping of butcher paper over the display windows with a sad sign promising a new retailer coming in soon, watching the

calendar pages fly away and noting again the stores were still vacant and that more stores had joined them, that Horton Plaza had become an empty series of angular paths, walkways, bridges to more locked up storefronts, a structural case of architectural schizophrenia where all the eaves, overhangs, arches and such unusual twists cast deep and despairing shadows over the dead concrete few have reason to walk.

 

_____________________________________

 

Someone on Quora a short shorty beginning with the sentence

“I am completely disappointed at your behaviour”. This is what I wrote:

“I am completely disappointed in your behavior” said Jen. I had just gotten home , drunk from the whisky I bought at a liquor store with the twenty dollars she gave me earlier to get some hamburger buns and party hats with. I parked the car on top of the mailbox and left the engine running while I staggered into the house, pausing to bend over, stick a finger down my throat and produce a loathing wretch of lumpy stomach content over the unmowed lawn. Now I stood on the porch, not even in the front door, while Jen glared at me.

“We’re going to have to reevaluate the terms of our relationship she said. Her voice was a harsh, trembling whisper, it had the texture of sand paper.

“But babe…” I tried to say something conciliatory, but the words never came when I tried to drop to one knee to beg her to forgive me like so many times before, but I lost my balance and fell down the porch steps, landing on my back. I was looking at the clouds in the sky through bare tree branches and power lines.

 

“I am beyond contempt here” said Jen. She went back into the house and closed the door behind here.

 

_______________________________________

 

There's a difference about caring less about music and no longer loving music that provided the soundtrack of your youth. It may be that you're simply tired of songs and albums that have been overplayed for decades. In that sense, it matters little if I ever hear any Pink Floyd records again, love them thought I do. And half the Led Zeppelin songs can also be consigned to the dustbin. Well, maybe not half, but at least two album sides of tracks I no longer get a thrill from, or songs that were weak to begin with. When you get older, your heroes from yore are no longer bulletproof, considering that by the time I turned 71 I had experienced the situations, loves, traumas , celebrations and catastrophes our friends Dylan, Cohen, Mitchell, Young et al adroitly crystallized in their tune craft. Many of us in the day sat around dark bedrooms and dens with the lights off, stoned or unstoned, listening to the heaviness of the message and thought we were really learning something about life. Aging, though, is the great equalizer , a very efficient means of changing the status and emotional attachments untested youth had on their record collections. Gauged against a few decades of actual lived experience, some songs still resonate , while others pale with revisiting. It helps if you've been a music writer and critic , a habit and occasional part-time job I've indulged myself in over six decades: the unreasonable standards I bring , standards hardly set in stone, has allowed me to have a private canon I can rely on when mood and manners require an unsullied equivalent of the prevailing zeitgeist. Also, it's not necessarily a matter of being uninterested in new music artists as such, as its simply an issue that new music striving for the love of the masses are written for young people and , damn it, I am no longer young. But I do have a considerable record collection. Let it be said that it's a wonderful thing when I can add a new and younger artist to my collection , though the instances are rare.

Lester Bangs passed away April 30. In 1982, at age 32, a major loss occurred for both rock criticism and American literature.  Like hundreds of others who aspired to be tastemakers in music and add an inflamed commentary on the cultural turns of our time, I loved Bangs and his swagger, the rhythm of his prose, I loved how completely alive and hyperbolic his writing could be.

He had the best aspects of Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac, but he also had a heart and a willingness to question his own motives, a recurring theme being when was he (and the rest of us) were going to finally grow up and stop treating musicians as heroes. Rather, Lester came to regard those he admired as flawed as he was, maybe even more so. His deep diving into the psychology of his own obsession with certain musicians -- Lou Reed, most notoriously, convinced me that just because some has a specific skill, even genius, for creating memorable art (whether music, poetry, novels, plays, film making, acting, painting) does not by default make them a saint, nor should an audience expect enlightened attitudes merely because they do interesting things creatively. He seemed to be getting to the notion that art is not liberation or transcendence of the difficulties of a quirky mind, but rather was a symptom of something more problematic and intransigent.

 Bangs was a moralist and a realist  in his own fashion, and felt deeply when regarding his   subject, writing at times so empathetically that you'd think the wound was his own and not a character in a song, as in his splendid masterpiece on Van Morrison's "Madame George" when writing about Astral Weeks in the Marcus collection Stranded. What made Bangs unique was that he didn't project the poetic evocations or dysfunctions of rock music upon the larger culture--he didn't view rock music as a method of social critique--but rather as a means of self-examination. He often wrote badly, but at his best he could not equaled.

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

In future years,  the younger folks might be nostalgic as they reminisce about the supposed fun and convenience of Horton Plaza before it eventually became a dead mall now being repurposed. the truth of the matter is that even in its prime, it was an alienated space, full of architectural distractions, detours, and dead ends that seemed designed to magnify your unease and increase your desire to escape your sense of uselessness by exhausting your credit limit and begging creditors for an increase in your credit line. I  worked there for a number of years  as a bookseller and made my number one spot to see new movies, and over time you couldn't help by note the waning numbers of people coming to the Plaza, the number of stores advertising off-Holiday Sales with things up to 70 percent off, the closing of stores and the draping of butcher paper over the display dows with a sad sign promising a new retailer coming in soon, watching the calendar pages fly away and noting again the stores were still vacant and that

more stores had joined them, that Horton Plaza had become an empty series of angular paths, walkways, bridges to more locked up storefronts, a structural case of architectural schizophrenia where all the eaves, overhangs, arches and such unusual twists cast deep and despairing shadows over the dead concrete few have reason to walk.

__________________________________

Someone on Quora a short shorty beginning with the sentence “I am completely disappointed at your behaviour”. This is what I wrote:

“I am completely disappointed in your behavior” said Jen. I

had just gotten home , drunk from the whisky I bought at a liquor store with the twenty dollars she gave me earlier to get some hamburger buns and party hats with. I parked the car on top of the mailbox and left the engine running while I staggered into the house, pausing to bend over, stick a finger down my throat and produce a loathing wretch of lumpy stomach content over the unmowed lawn. Now I stood on the porch, not even in the front door, while Jen glared at me.

“We’re going to have to reevaluate the terms of our relationship she said. Her voice was a harsh, trembling whisper, it had the texture of sand paper.

“But babe…” I tried to say something conciliatory, but the words never came when I tried to drop to one knee to beg her to forgive me like so many times before, but I lost my balance and fell down the porch steps, landing on my back. I was looking at the clouds in the sky through bare tree branches and power lines.

“I am beyond contempt here” said Jen. She went back into the

house and closed the door behind here.

_______________________________________

There's a difference about caring less about music and no longer loving music that provided the soundtrack of your youth. It may be that you're simply tired of songs and albums that have been overplayed for decades.

In that sense, it matters little if I ever hear any Pink Floyd records again,

love them thought I do. And half the Led Zeppelin songs can also be consigned to the dustbin. Well, maybe not half, but at least two album sides of tracks I no longer get a thrill from, or songs that were weak to begin with. When you get older, your heroes from yore are no longer bulletproof, considering that by the time I turned 71 I had experienced the situations, loves, traumas , celebrations and catastrophes our friends Dylan, Cohen, Mitchell, Young et al adroitly crystallized in their tune craft. Many of us in the day sat around dark bedrooms and dens with the lights off, stoned or unstoned, listening to the heaviness of the message and thought we were really learning something about life. Aging, though, is the great equalizer , a very efficient means of changing the status and emotional attachments untested youth had on their record collections. Gauged against a few decades of actual lived experience, some songs still resonate , while others pale with revisiting. It helps if you've been a music writer and critic , a habit and occasional part-time job I've indulged myself in over six decades: the unreasonable standards I bring , standards hardly set in stone, has allowed me to have a private canon I can rely on when mood and manners require an unsullied equivalent of the prevailing

zeitgeist. Also, it's not necessarily a matter of being uninterested in new

music artists as such, as its simply an issue that new music striving for the

love of the masses are written for young people and , damn it, I am no longer young. But I do have a considerable record collection. Let it be said that it's a wonderful thing when I can add a new and younger artist to my collection , though the instances are rare.

 

 

 

BRIAN WILSON

Brian Wilson died on June 11. It’s not a bold  to say he was a indisputably great artists of rock ‘n’ roll. Any rock pantheon that lacks his name is no pantheon at all. His work featured the most graceful and intricate melodies wedded with choir-boy vocal harmonies, a worldview that wished everyone could live the particularly American dreamscape of California. He was a man who heard sounds others couldn’t and was able to lay them out, obsessively, for audiences in a collection of brilliant music. He was an artist who changed the way millions—musicians and audiences—thought about popular music. Plainly, he was someone who cracked the code on new ideas of what was considered a good time and literally changed the world in doing so. Wilson changed how a generation heard music, and he was instrumental in changing how others created it. He was a prime mover in the “Youthquake” that would make the world we lived in more exciting, dangerous, experimental, and open-ended. This wasn’t something Brian Wilson set out to do. All he wanted was to follow his bliss and pay attention to the Muse that appeared to direct his best thinking.

What I remember about first hearing the Beach Boys’ anthem “Surfin’ USA” was that it was March 1963, I think. I was a ‘tweenager in Detroit, Michigan, and there was snow on the ground, the streets and sidewalks coated with dirty slush. Icicles still clung to houses and telephone poles. “Surfin’ USA,” a reworking of Chuck Berry’s sock hop classic “Sweet Little Sixteen” by Beach Boy leader Brian Wilson, was blasting out of a small transistor radio sitting on a kitchen lunch counter from top 40 station WJBK. The magic came through the static, I thought; it had great vocals and a killer guitar sound. But there was something more. The lyrics, mostly by Wilson, extolled the glories of catching waves with waterman lingo, with additional credit to the band’s lead singer Mike Love for a chorus amounting to call-outs of the best surf spots. It’s a tempting inventory of where the water hits the shoreline in full glory and power:

…Haggerties and Swamis (onside, outside, U.S.A.)
Pacific Palisades (inside, outside, U.S.A.)
San Onofre and Sunset (inside, outside, U.S.A.)
Redondo Beach, LA (inside, outside, U.S.A.)
All over La Jolla (inside, outside, U.S.A.)
At Waimea Bay (inside, outside)
Everybody’s gone surfin’
Surfin’ U.S.A…

A prophetic verse, in a way. To this day I don’t surf and neither did Brian Wilson. The Beach Boys’ music, specifically that of main songwriter Wilson, mustered fantasies of forever sunshine on golden beaches surrounded by beautiful girls in bikinis and guys and dolls catching a ride on longboards upon high-cresting waves that curled majestically to the sandy beach. That’s what that 11-year-old dreamed of. Wilson was ten years older, age 21, when “Surfin’ USA” was released, and though he didn’t learn to surf himself, the SoCal native learned about the culture from his younger brother Dennis, who became drummer for the sibling-dominated group. Brian Wilson became enthralled with the culture—the style, the lingo, the innocence of the easy-going ethos—and soon enough was composing paeans to the burgeoning sport.

The stories I’ve read indicate that Wilson’s toes rarely, if ever, trod a surfboard’s waxed surface. Being in a geographically critical area when white surfers brought the sport from Hawaii to the mainland, he composed a body of musical brilliance that introduced the rest of America and the world to the mystic wonder of California beach life. “Surfin’ USA” hit the charts in 1963, and nine years later my family drove across the country from Michigan to the West Coast, taking up residence in a town, name-checked in the song’s chorus: La Jolla. The legacy of our parallel paths resulted in two seismic things: the first being Brian Wilson’s avocation to capture the effervescent harmonies and tones he heard in his head onto record and have the magic embedded deeply in the Beach Boys’ singular work. The second was my eventual discovery of a world, soundtracked by the Beatles, the Stones, and Dylan, a world bigger than I imagined as a teen cloistered with a collection of 45s in my room during the harsh Midwest winters and sweltering summers. The second accomplishment was personal, yes, but it was seismic considering that the upgrade to my sense of things greater than myself occurred 62 years ago and that now that I’m edging just days away from turning 73, I remain intrigued, nearly overjoyed when good things occur. Wilson and many others were mentors of a sort, reinventing music forms, sounds, backbeats, and lyric alertness in ways that grasped a generation’s fancy.

The late jazz critic Whitney Balliet used the endearing phrase “the sound of surprise” to describe musical improvisation in its boldest and highest execution, and though Wilson was writing music using a different vocabulary, the three words present us with what the musician and composer’s body of work was: an expression of surprise, finding nuance and quirky-but-alluring side routes in melodies, baffling tone poems of unexcelled vocal harmonies, oddball middle sections, gradually intensifying wells of delicately layered sound shadings. Beyond this was the unshakable feeling of the artist himself being surprised by the music he was putting forth, the bits and pieces given to the famed collection of Los Angeles studio musicians called the Wrecking Crew, woven, stitched, and embroidered into the kind of complexity—subtle but listener-friendly—that widened the soundscape of pop music radio. One proceeds into these descriptions at the risk of reducing a great artist’s work into a slender set of categories, but it’s not presumptuous to say Wilson didn’t wholly abandon the themes that informed the Beach Boys’ initial string of hits, which were innocence, fun, live and let live, good weather, and good vibes. Back to the first verse of “Surfin’ USA,” where the singer speculates what it would be like “If everybody had an ocean”…

If everybody had an ocean (ooh)
Across the U.S.A. (ooh)
Then everybody’d be surfin’ (ooh)
Like Californ-i-a (ooh)
You’d see them wearing their baggies (ooh)
Huarache sandals too (ooh)
A bushy bushy blond hairdo (ooh)
Surfin’ U.S.A. (ooh)

It seems sophomoric, but it’s worth noting that this dreamy hyperbole expressed a practical utopian spirit. It was a naïve but profound worldview the Beach Boys expressed quite a while before a generation told us that “all you need is love” or Scott McKenzie extolling his listeners to “wear flowers in your hair” if one made a pilgrimage to Haight-Ashbury. Wilson and crew hypothesized that if all of us had our very own ocean, the lot of us would focus on what’s important and get busy getting in the water and seeking a wave to become one with. This is a kind of spirituality, I think, where we return to the water from whence we came to experience the unfiltered miracle and thrill of feeling a part of the world as it dynamically moves, returning to one’s life on land again to do good work, only to “get into the water” again, to replenish the spirit and joy of feeling alive. A naïve way of going through one’s life, perhaps, and honestly, not all who surf are saints. The best of us can be reprobates and scallywags, at least briefly. But the surfing epiphanies Wilson felt early on continued through his lifetime as his music continued through different turns and emotional states. Freedom, serenity, peace, the capacity to be surprised and amazed—these were the burning fires in Wilson’s work, musically and thematically. He continued his search for the kind of feeling many might have thought was slipping out of our collective grasps, and it was wondrous for six-plus decades to follow his muse, to gather and record what he heard, adding exquisite and more intricate melodic structures and a near-Zen lyric simplicity that sought a precise and shining expression of the moment he was in. It’s well-known that Wilson had a lot of noise in his head, which crowded out the sublime melodies he heard, diagnosed with a schizophrenic disorder, subject to outbreaks of paranoia, problems made worse with the era’s defining plague of drug abuse.

We can speak at length of financial feuds within the band, bad management, eccentric antics, isolation from the world, incomplete album projects, a protracted period when he was literally taken hostage by controversial therapist Eugene Landy, who muscled his way into the songwriter’s business affairs… we could talk about it all, dissect it, speak of Wilson’s travails in several dozen ways, but doing so would put a cold sheath over this great artist’s music. The music prevailed. Wilson recovered to varying degrees, most notably with Brian Wilson Presents Smile, a 2004 recreation of the legendary Smile album, which Wilson abandoned in 1967 because he thought the project was somehow cursed. The release was a hit with fans old and new, and, buttressed by rave reviews from flabbergasted critics, the project reveals what the intended sequel to The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds album would have been like: an adventure in new sounds and textures and brilliantly crafted harmonies, ethereally crooning the poetic esoterica of lyricist Van Dyke Parks. It was an art-rock of particularly American designation, a restoration of a masterpiece to the highest ranks of greatest albums ever made.

Zen was mentioned earlier, and it’s appropriate to think briefly on Wilson’s minimalist masterwork, “Good Vibrations.” Broadly, Zen is a school of Buddhism that emphasizes achieving enlightenment through meditation, self-contemplation, and intuition rather than faith and devotion. It focuses on direct experience and perceiving things as they are. Brian Wilson, raised Presbyterian in Hawthorne, California, embraced the counterculture of the mid-’60s. Though not a practicing Buddhist, he felt the vibe of the time and ideas of free love and higher consciousness. He shifted his focus from surfing to seeking a unity of mind and senses, connecting with a greater sense of Totality. He was fascinated with the direct experience of the world, without abstraction or theory, and “Good Vibrations” was a tone poem of gliding grace, an imagist poem of being in what’s routinely called the “aha!” phenomenon, when the world in front of you is revealed as it is, free from menta

Wilson pursued what the American philosopher John Dewey termed “the aesthetic experience,” the state of full engagement with the world and discovering unique ways through an experience. We can be honest here and realize that the composer genius was neither intellectual nor wholly in search of divine knowledge. He was a sensualist creating sound tapestries that would ease a mind rushing with ideas odd and confusing, making an art that would return him again to an elevated tranquility. Superficially, “Good Vibrations” is simply the admission of one man to another that a woman he’s seen but barely knows gives him a positive feeling, a kinship, an attraction he doesn’t quite know what to do with but intends to explore deeper, experience deeper, come to know full well what these new “good vibrations” are. It’s a search for meaning, a meaning found outside his own inventions and in the world with another person who invites him to have a parley that is mysterious and profound. It’s the sweet seduction of the innocent, we might say, and we might think this is a naïve narrative leading to mere sexual awakening. Understandable, but we hear the words—simple, declarative statements of wonder—and we hear the voices that sing them, arranged in delicately contrasted layers, low, middle, and high ends of the vocal range rising, coasting on an ethereal stream. The effect is marvelous, one of a kind, the plain speech of the Beach Boys blended with Brian Wilson’s brilliance for symphonic impressionism on a small scale. This song is literally an orchestration, presented in short but effectively placed sequences that bring their own euphonic nuance to the simple glee of Mike Love’s lyrics. An astonishing effect, an element that makes “Good Vibrations” a masterpiece. The young man describing his need to understand what he’s feeling with no barriers is of itself unmoving, but combined with the music, it enlarges the description, sonically dramatizing what words alone struggle to get across.

Toward the end of the song, the choir-boy harmonies arise as if they were a sudden blast of brilliant sunlight burning through a dark cloud layer, revealing everything, radiating things profound and nearly unspeakable. Those voices, shifting through keys and wordlessly trilling into the fading light of sunset until the song finally, slowly goes quiet, as though to slumber until the next day arrives. This song sees nothing less than a prayer that these moments remain with us and that we might rise to a new day with open hearts and clear minds. Brian Wilson struggled for those moments, to express them in music and share them with generations that still find magic in his transcendental tunes.

(Originally published in the San Diego Troubadour. Used with permission.)

 Ju Ju -- Wayne Shorter (Blue Note)

Wayne Shorter -- tenor sax / McCoy Tyner -- piano / Reggie Workman -- bass / Elvin Jones -- drums

A 1964 session, sweetness and light meet fire and deep-seated anxiety in seeming alternating breaths. Shorter is thoughtful, probing the moods of his ingeniously laid-out material with finesse that hints at 

more expressionistic playing to come--his tone always struck me as inner-directed--while the band delivers everything their names promise. Elvin Jones continues to convince that he is the greatest drummer in jazz history.

Sorcerer --Miles Davis (Sony)

Sorcerer, the 1967 album from Miles Davis, has been in my CD player the last couple of days and, to pun badly, I've been more than a little entranced by how amazingly well these improvisers, all of whom are distinct and potentially dominating in ensemble efforts, work so cohesively as a group. There’s a perfect kind of modal combustion here, with Miles Davis contrasting his spare and fairly angular sense of improvisation with the formidable resourcefulness of this album's principal  ensemble, Wayne Shorter (saxophone), Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (double bass) and Tony Williams (drums). The music is a unusual  combination of  the unforced and the aggressive, resisting the temptation to either go slack in their pace or stray toward the harsh vicissitudes of anguished, strident experimentation,  a pulsing course of off-accented rhythms, musical swaths of varying tones and colors, and ingenious interlacing between primary soloist Davis, Shorter and Hancock. Ensemble exploration at its peak, it seems, as the three of them actively listen to and anticipate each other's ideas during the respective solo spots. This is what the great Davis groups did, find unexamined nuance and moods in the musical tones.  Davis and Shorter in particular offer up a few exquisite moments of dialogue as they answer, query, interrogate and respond to musical propositions put forth by the other. As great as the previous occupant in the saxophone chair had been, the redoubtable and effusively  brilliant John Coltrane, Shorter was a better fit for Davis' ideas for the ensemble at the time,  1967, when this disc was recorded His solos are less galvanic than Coltrane's were, more composed, filled with lithe and delicate phrases , wonderfully respondant to the rhythms and pulse Williams and Carter provided and the full range of ideas underscores and textures the sound with.Davis is at his best, lyrical, on the edge of atonal, bracing when needed, the tone of his notes isolated and longing.

A Tribute to Miles Davis--  Wayne Shorter (saxophones) Wallace Roney (trumpet), Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass), Tony Williams (drums).

You need to bear in mind that this isn't a dusty museum exhibition where the music of the late trumpeter and bandleader is dutifully eviscerated and mounted on a pedestal. Quite the opposite, as Davis alum Hancock, Shorter, Carter and Williams, along with firebrand trumpeter Wallace Roney perform a number of familiar tunes with vigor and intensity. Mere reverence is replaced with passion and a willingness to stir things up. Roney, in particular, is a wonder and an inspired choice to fill the trumpet position; he has a hard-core virtuosity that rivals Freddie Hubbard, and yet retains a sublimely modulated, vibrato-less tone, clean and pristine. His register-jumping flurries on the live version of "So What" or the delicately etched readings are remarkable examples of pace and phrasing. For an instrument known for its uniformly declarative, sound, with the notes, as executed by the most superlative of players, sounding sharp, full, hard bits of color sculpting whole structures of sound from the metaphorical block of granite. Roney, though, had something else, the rarest of thing in jazz trumpet, the ability to make his extemporaneous statements fluid, one note flowing out of the one before it and into the one that follows in a deceptively easy legato that made you think of the accelerated fluidity of saxophonist John Coltrane. Roney, I'd wager , is the obverse of Hubbard; in my life I've witnessed the glory of two of the most compelling jazz trumpet players, one the skyrocketing lyricist, Hubbard, for whom precision and speed were in the mastery of musical ideas that sped by in breath taking forays, and the other and no lesser , Roney, whose virtuosity was in the service of seemingly unlimited ideas of restatement, reconfiguration, and reimagining of a composer's written score. 

And, square as it may sound, it's always great to have Hancock et al return from their wanderings in the fusion wilderness and apply their singular skills on material that requires the best of their improvisational genius. Shorter, for my money, remains the best saxophonist of the post-Coltrane generation, assembling his solos in abstracted sections and deliciously snaky tangents. Williams is, to say nothing else, an astonishing drummer, a continuous rumble of polyrhythms, rising and falling with the many sly turns of this music. Bop, ballads and casually asserted samba rhythms are highlighted with William's strong, graceful stick work.

Both Directions at Once----John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter

Incredibly, what comes to be full-length album of mostly new, previously unheard material from John Coltrane has emerged lo these many years since the man's passing, and it is masterful. What's mind-boggling is that after decades of posthumous Coltrane releases that were previously unheard versions of familiar material --I haven't done a precise count, but it occurs to me that there are enough live versions of Coltrane's disassembly and reconstruction of the  Rodgers and Hammerstein show tune "My Favorite Things" to warrant a series critical comparison in how the saxophonist and his collaborators adjusted their improvisations gig to gig--  but rather something wholly fresh, new, with new compositions and ideas, recorded when this ensemble was at their peak.  The story told as to why this album has surfaced on now comes from Wikipedia, which asserts that the band --Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones-- entered Impulse Records studio in 1963 to lay down the master tape of an album of new material for eventual release. Somewhere in the lapse between that recording and its 2018 release, the original tape was destroyed when the label decided to cut down on expenses regarding storage; what we have here is from a copy of the tape Coltrane had given to his wife. It's not useful to dwell on the reasons for the delay and best, I think, to appreciate how profound this gift of music happens to be.Both Directions at Once, the title, comes from a discussion Coltrane once had with Wayne Shorter at some point, in which had come up the idea of starting their solos in the middle and working their ideas backwards, toward a calmer section that would have been the casual, tentative build up, and then the other way, toward greater fluency, acceleration, intensity from the tenor saxophone's horn, going "both directions at once." You get what they were talking about in mere minutes; Coltrane's playing is serpentine and advances effortlessly through the registers with rail-splitting chromaticism. He darts, dodges, telegraphs and races along melodic lines he creates on initial choruses and subsequently rethinks and rewrites with each return to the song's head; ideas brawl, embrace and interweave in swift, howling glory. The improvisations are as fine, searching and soulful as anything he released in his lifetime. On hand were the members of his Great Quartet, Elvin Jones on drums, McCoy Tyner on piano and Jimmy Garrison on bass. This is a quartet that has weathered time, circumstance and hundreds of hours playing together, with the sinewy yet agile polyrhythms of the ever-brilliant Jones and the no less masterful Garrison buoying and propelling Tyner's color-rich harmonies and Coltrane's thick, sonic weaves. There is nothing tentative about his disc. It's quite a bit of music from this epoch-defining unit, and there is, of course, nothing better than coming across Coltrane you've haven't bared witness to yet.

Alegria—Wayne Shorter

Fronting a superb brass and woodwind ensemble, saxophonist Wayne Shorter goes to expand his considerable palette with this 2003 set of compositions intended, I suppose, to highlight his talent as a master of texture, tone color and someone who can lead a large ensemble through theme and variation. This is not Ellington, this is not Julius Hemphill, this is not even Gunther Schuller. What is, though, is monotony on a virtuoso level. Technically there is much to admire, but there is little to enjoy since the project is obsessed with making Alegria match other large-group efforts at the sacrifice of the punch and flurry a richly showcased set of improvisations would provide. Oh, if they had reached a little less and jammed a little more. Davis didn't forget to swing amid the expanded contexts of Kind of Blue, and neither Mingus nor Monk forgot the blues wail or the gospel shout in the textures and subtler angles of their respective concert works. There are moments here, of course where Shorter's tenor and soprano saxophone sorties emerge from the arty murk and redundant changes of the ensemble to lighten up the proceedings, but even here it feels rootless, divorced from the melodies they should be making statements upon; one senses Shorter trying to make something happen. Nothing does as

The Velvets

 

A recent reading somewhere in the wilds of the internet revealed a disgruntled rock and roller who wondered why 60s icons The Velvet Underground are considered important at all, expressing finally that she considered the famous Andy Warhol "banana" cover debut album to be wildly overrated. I harumphed, muttered something about youth being wasted on the young and then then composed the following paragraph, less a defense than rant . Note the absence of album titles or the names of songs; the paragraph is aimed , I guess, at those who know what I'm talking about and are able to fill in the missing details. 

The first Velvets album was an absolute masterpiece, created almost by accident—simply by the band becoming itself and crafting the kind of avant-noise it would be known for. While American and British rock were growing increasingly arty, instrumentally ambitious, and philosophically poetic—driven by a belief that the future belonged to the younger generation and that future was utopian—the Velvets begged to differ. Not so much begged, in fact, as simply were different: in musical interests, background, and general worldview. California bands leaned into the idea of unlimited space and freedom to do your own thing. European bands drew heavily on centuries of culture and musical legacy, blending blues and Chuck Berry into their evolving sound. But the Velvets were formed in cramped New York City, with a population estimated at 17,843,000 at the time—a crowded center of industry, commerce, and culture. It was full of lawyers, CEOs, eccentrics, junkies, prostitutes, and splintered underground experimentalists—a pressure cooker fueled by speed, heroin, and a street-level deadpan. The city was noisy, galvanic, violent, in-your-face twenty-four hours a day. The only response was to make a noise of your own, a sonic mask against the relentless collapse of the surrounding world.There was little interest—or use—for singing about peace and good vibes. New York gave you all the vibes you could handle—and couldn’t handle—whether you wanted them or not, all at once. The songs were about the world the band emerged from: suicide, drug addiction, gay life in a society that wished gay people would vanish quickly. The music was minimalist and primitive—purposefully and effectively so.Lou Reed instinctively reversed course from his prior work as a hack songwriter. He rejected blather and incoherent poesy, offering the Velvets lyrics that were blunt, spare, and aimed to reflect the raw truth of a world far removed from Laurel Canyon or other bastions of pampered art-making.

an old chat from 1978 with Ozzie Osbourne

 

Ozzie Osbourne and me, 1978. Photo by Stan Honda
(Originally printed in the UCSD Guardian, 1978)

A fist, attached to an arm thick enough to choke a Clydesdale, hammered three times on the door of a third-floor room at the Islandia Hyatt House. The knocks echoed through the hallway like war drums along the Congo in a Tarzan movie. Seconds later, the door creaked open, offering a glimpse of a naked man mid-shower. He spun around and bolted back into the bathroom. Paul—the arm’s owner—told us that Ozzy Osbourne, lead singer of Black Sabbath and in town for a December 3rd concert at the Sports Arena, would be out shortly.

Stan, a photographer, and I sat at a coffee table near the room’s balcony, staring blankly at the television. Francis the Talking Mule was giving a rousing pep talk to the generals of the War Department, telling the slack-jawed military brass that teamwork among the branches was essential if the “Nat-zi’s” were going to be whipped. Donald O’Connor cowered in a corner, his face a stupefied blank—perhaps a bit piqued at having to shelve his song-and-dance shtick once again to play patsy to that noxious mule. I pulled out a pen and began jotting down questions for the interview. What does one ask a member of Black Sabbath?

At the height of their career, Sabbath were the undisputed kings of “downer rock.” The music was—and still is—a slow brand of raunch, built on lumbering, simple chord progressions distorted into a cacophony unmatched since the halcyon days of Blue Cheer. First gaining notoriety in 1968 (now celebrating their tenth year together), Sabbath stood in stark contrast to the hippie optimism of the time. Apart from the Velvet Underground and the Doors, they were among the rare bands venturing against the naive utopias peddled by Jefferson Airplane, the Moody Blues, and the Grateful Dead.

Sabbath’s worldview portrayed a universe unhinged—a grim panorama of murder, pointless revolution, politically motivated wars, vengeance, and natural disaster. Their song titles—“War Pigs,” “Fairies Wear Boots,” “Iron Man”—and albums like *Paranoid*, *Master of Reality*, *Technical Ecstasy*, *Sabotage*, and their latest, *Never Say Die*, reflected anything but hopeful optimism.

As expected, rock critics loathed Ozzy Osbourne and everything Black Sabbath represented, exhausting every ounce of invective to deter listeners. But rather than repelling fans, the young rock crowd embraced the band’s doomsday persona, propelling them to multiple best-selling albums and sold-out American tours.

Other acts jumped on the lucrative grim-bandwagon—Alice Cooper, Blue Öyster Cult—spinning similar apocalyptic themes to great profit. But Sabbath endured, consistently selling well and retaining a loyal following. While Cooper and Cult leaned into theatrics and overt showbiz affectation, Sabbath always cut straight to the point. However bleak their declarations, they were rarely pompous, arrogant, or preachy. Ozzy’s near-atonal yelp delivered Sabbath’s message with the blunt charm and streetwise certainty of a man on the corner.

The shower sputtered to a drip-drip drizzle. Ozzy emerged, his head wrapped in a towel like a turban. He gave a nonchalant “hello,” then paused to watch the TV. A news segment flashed across the screen, reporting on Jim Jones and the secret Swiss bank accounts tied to the People’s Temple. Ozzy lit a Winston from his pack and began discussing the mass suicides in Guyana.

“Fucking Jim Jones,” he said. “What a fucking asshole. An inhuman beast. Making naive, innocent people who thought he was the greatest fucking man on Earth, and small children who didn’t understand what was going on, fucking drink poison. Small kids, murdered. Made to drink cyanide by their parents. You know what that shit does to you? Eats out your stomach from the inside. It’s a lot of fucking incredible pain. Can you imagine what that would do to a child, a little kid? …And I read somewhere that the American government is spending fifteen million dollars to bring back the dead bodies, including Jones. I say leave them there to rot, ‘cause anyone who’d make their kids drink poison doesn’t deserve consideration, whether they’re dead or not. If I were an American, I’d be fucking outraged at the money being spent on those foes…”

I put my pen down and began to ask something. “Considering the recent spate of bad luck we’ve had—like the Guyana affair, the murders of George Moscone and Harvey Milk, the deaths of two popes, the fires in Pacific Palisades, the PSA crash, the landslides in Laguna Beach—do you think you’ve been vindicated for the pessimistic outlook you’ve been using in your lyrics?”

Osbourne yanked the towel from his head with a firm snap and wiped some water beads off his brow. “A lot of people have missed the point of our lyrics,” he said, his Cockney accent taking on a slightly defensive edge. “I mean, Black Sabbath has been slagged for being Satanists, baby eaters, revolutionaries—all manner of strange blokes—and that’s hardly it at all. We were singing about how the world actually is, always has been, y’know?

“When Sabbath was first starting, we had to play under horrible conditions, in dirty cramped clubs in the slum parts of town, and we’ve had to put up with bad crowds: drunks, toughs, junkies, rip-off assholes and shit like that. And when you come out of a scene like that, and you’re writing your own songs and all, it’s only natural that you express what you know about what’s around you. Our words came out of our experience.

“We couldn’t tell people who came to see us in concert that the world was a beautiful place, y’know? We couldn’t sing about flowers, love, and peace. I mean, I couldn’t sing shit like that to some bloke puking his guts out in the gutter, could I? Besides…” Osbourne laughed and stood up. “…that kind of stuff wouldn’t cut it in a Black Sabbath song.”

He crooned the first bars of “Iron Man,” their largest American hit, then sang the opening of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” He laughed again and retook his seat.

“Y’see,” he continued, “poetry doesn’t go with a Black Sabbath tune. The lyrics that Geezer (Butler, bassist) writes and that I sing would be at odds with anything romantic.”

“Do you have any contempt for art-rock bands like Yes or Genesis, whose lyrics tend towards the religious or fantastic?” I asked, hoping that perhaps Osbourne might spew some caustic comments. Osbourne shook his head.

“Not at all. I enjoy some of their music. The good thing about Yes and the others is that they tell people about the world as it could be. I mean, it’s not healthy for rock audiences to only hear the bad side of things. But when Sabbath came out, there was a lot of that stuff around already, and we didn’t fit into it. We had to be honest and call things as we felt them.”

Stan broke the momentary silence. “What do you think of the punk rock movement?”

Osbourne lay back on the bed and reached over to turn the television back on—sound off.

“Not a whole lot,” he said. “I mean, I really haven’t exposed myself to it a lot, so I really can’t say, but what I have heard didn’t impress me a lot. It’s too basic, really. Too fucking simple-minded. I mean, they had a point to make—one point really—and now that they’ve made it, they don’t know what to do.

“As a movement, punk rockers had a good idea. It’s a strong movement among a lot of rockers bored with all the commercial shit they get on the radio. I like that idea a lot. But the New Waver hasn’t put much thought into the music itself, which is the thing that really tells the worth of any movement. It’s more than attitude. The power of any movement to effect anything depends on the quality of the things it produces.

“Take the flower-power hippie movement. From the Love Generation, there was a lot of excellent, exciting music that came out of it, and it still stands up today. Like the Beatles. Those guys changed the world with their music. There were kids in Taiwan wearing Beatle haircuts and singing the words in English. In the Soviet Union too. Flower-power caused a revolution that was felt throughout the world. It was a beautiful thing—until The Machine—I mean the music business, the media—got a hold of it and turned it into something meaningless. Like hamburgers.

“The real hippies just took off to do their own thing, while all the fakes came in and started making fucking money off of it…”

The talk meandered through several topics, such as Walt Disney (“Mickey Mouse was the greatest thing to happen to the planet since Jesus Christ”), and the improved appreciation they’ve been receiving from music writers over the last decade. It appears they realize the band members are not the minions of the Devil, but rather that Black Sabbath is just a rock and roll band—albeit one of the ages, truthfully, whether we like it or not.

GENE PITNEY, AN EARLY FAVORITE

 

Gene Pitney's final curtain call came not with a cough or a stagger, but with a performance—rounded, complete, and received with a standing ovation in a Cardiff auditorium. The word used was “natural causes,” as if God Himself were a concert promoter with a fondness for showmanship, allowing the tenor to finish his set before drawing the velvet drapes. There’s a polite symmetry to it—no collapse on stage, no tortured final note bent grotesque by mortality. Just applause, quiet egress, then absence. His voice was pure architecture: each syllable a stair climbed with theatrical intent, each chorus an attic gable framed in steel and longing. Pitney sang of love in the way-stained glass renders saints—ornate, overwrought, and wondrous. The songs were simple. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. World ends. And yet beneath the corn syrup of the lyrics, there surged a man excavating feeling as if sorrow were a quarry and he the last willing laborer. In the Sixties, when music began its slow morph into rebellion and fuzz pedal aphorisms, Pitney was romanticism’s holdout—unashamed of strings, crescendos, and hearts bleeding into vinyl. “Town Without Pity,” “It Hurts To Be In Love,” “I’m Gonna Be Strong”—these weren’t mere tracks. They were sonatas of collapse, teenage Gothic, snapshots of pain that, through their excess, found strange dignity.I bought his records back then, amid my youthful pantheon of pop: The Four Seasons, tidy in their falsetto flights; Peter, Paul and Mary, solemn with their folk harmonies. These now feel like embroidered samplers on a Midwestern kitchen wall—nice, nostalgic, and devoid of heat. But Pitney? Pitney remained. A soft spot formed around his melodrama like a pearl around grit. In later years, when his name was spoken with smirking condescension, I found myself defending him—not out of loyalty, but recognition. The man had made banality soar. The Prince of Perfect Pitch, they called him, and rightly so. He turned pubescent emotionalism into operetta, and made the adolescent experience seem operatic, and perhaps holy.

Joni Mitchell’s Reckless Drift

People liked it when Joni Mitchell changed. She had always changed. The Hissing of Summer Lawns made sense in that way, as a kind of departure that didn’t feel like escape. It was praised, mostly. Artistic growth. Personal evolution. That sort of thing.Then Hejira came. It was less loved, but still understood. There were broader structures, jazz textures, lyrics that became less declarative. Mitchell was turning inward. That was the signal. The listener had to follow, or not.Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter is the sound of getting lost. Or staying lost. A double album that wanders. The songs are long, some more than ten minutes. There are chords struck and held, left hanging like unsent letters. She sings over them. Not quite melody. Not quite meditation. There is Jaco Pastorius. Wayne Shorter. John Guerin. Their job is to find shape in the murk. Sometimes they almost do.The lyrics are impressionistic. That word is polite. What they really are is scattered. Images with no center. Ideas that don’t argue, just drift past. The poet has rights, they’ll say. Poets can do anything. But this isn't poetry, not really. It is a kind of posture. An affect. Something performed.She touches on things that matter. Weariness. Freedom. Sex and age. But nothing connects. No hooks, no phrases you remember later. No way in. What she offers is not music in the usual sense. It’s art. That’s the claim. The capital-A kind. And the paradox is that she loses the craft in reaching for it.There was a time when she was precise. When she built songs that held. But now the line between artful and arty is crossed and blurred. She’s among those who’ve come to believe their importance entitles them to indulgence. Lennon. Yes. Others.It is not failure. But it is not connection, either.

NO LENNON AT THE STADIUM , 1973

 

He said it like a man who’d just seen God in a parking lot.

“Lennon’s going to be here!” he shouted, voice cracking with the kind of hope that only rock and roll or religion can summon. “I just heard it—John Lennon’s gonna be here. Hot damn!”

He jittered in his seat like a man with too much caffeine and not enough conviction, eyes darting between the Padres game and the stage that loomed like a concrete altar. “What inning is it? The ninth? How many more are there?”

The city had been baited. KPRI, with all the subtlety of a carnival barker, had promised “the most significant musical event of the year.” A phrase so bloated with self-importance it practically begged to be deflated. Yoko Ono and the Plastic Ono Band were the headliners, but the real draw—the unspoken seduction—was the possibility of Lennon. No one needed to say it. It was in the air, like ozone before a storm. Lennon would come. He had to. He’d played for the retarded children in Central Park. He’d sung for John Sinclair, the jailed poet-activist, and turned protest into melody. Surely he’d show up for San Diego’s sickle cell clinics. Surely.

 Jimmy Smith, “The Incredible,” took the stage first. Forty minutes of jazz noodling that circled itself like a dog chasing its tail. Smith, a man whose fingers had once inspired rock gods, now seemed to be playing for himself and a ghost audience that had long since moved on. He stitched together fragments of Stevie Wonder and Roberta Flack, but the seams showed.

The crowd was restless. The stage towered fifty feet above them, a monolith of bad planning. Crew members loitered in front of the platform like bureaucrats at a revolution. The people craned their necks and squinted into the sun, and when they couldn’t see, they jeered.

Papa John Creach came next, electric violin in hand, backed by a band called Zulu that was tight but uninspired. The audience had already checked out. They played Frisbee on the baseball diamond. Someone ran the bases. Another slid into home. The music was background noise to a game of make-believe.

Creach saw it, laughed, and played on. He was a professional. He’d done this with Jefferson Airplane, with Hot Tuna. He knew the drill. But the crowd didn’t care. They were waiting for a Beatle.

“Where’s Lennon, goddammit?” someone growled.

The air was thick with catcalls and war whoops, the kind of primal noise that comes not from joy but from the slow boil of disappointment.

And then she came.

Yoko Ono, flanked by three bodyguards in black, walked to the mic like a priestess to the pyre. She wore white—pants, shirt, the whole ensemble—and raised her arms in greeting. The Plastic Ono Band struck up a beat, mechanical and methodical, and Yoko began to wail.

It wasn’t singing. It was something else. A high-pitched warble, raw and unfiltered, like chalk dragged across a blackboard in a hurricane.

“Hello, San Diego,” she said, peeking up from her lyric sheets. She spoke of expectations, of how the city was nicer than she’d imagined.

“Where’s John?” someone muttered behind me.

She introduced a song for her missing daughter, Kyoko. “Don’t worry Kyoko,” she shrieked, again and again, until the words lost meaning and became sound. Then came “Woman Power,” a feminist anthem with a Miles Davis groove and more of Yoko’s vocal acrobatics.

The exodus began.

People streamed toward the exits like ants from a burning hill.

“Let’s do a slow blues,” Yoko said.

She sat at the edge of the stage, hair falling over her face like a veil. She didn’t sing. She moaned. She sighed. She mimicked the rhythm with breathy theatrics, and midway through, she feigned an orgasm—gasping, writhing, a performance that felt less like art and more like a dare.

The song ended.

She stood.

“All right, see you later,” she said, and vanished.

No Lennon.

“Let’s hear it for Yoko in her first San Diego appearance,” someone announced.

“And her last,” came a voice behind me.

I turned and shook his hand.

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Originally published in the San Diego Reader.