Friday, January 24, 2025

PURE POP FOR NOW PEOPLE

 

Peter Townsend coined the popular term "Power-pop", joined with a not-so-raucous rock backbeat. That was over ten years ago, and Townsend's term, intended no doubt as a throwaway term, like those  elements of conceptual sophistication wherein Lowe takes a cue from other artists (Warhol, Stuart Davis) who have taken the artifacts of a throw-away culture and have transformed them into objects of art. Except for some catchy tunes ("Breaking Glass," "Heart of the City"), most of the material was no more convincing than the average Sha-Na-Na sendup. Pure Pop, in general, was contrived and too deliberate in execution, the old case of an artist being more interested in form than substance.On one level, the title was a perfect parody of the dumb products record companies used to release for consumers they perceived as witless and gullible. I

n a 1967 interview, where he was trying to describe the music of the Beach Boys, Townsend, an ashamed Beach Boy zealot, explained that the Beach Boys were in the vanguard of a new movement of pop music. A pop music that eschews the traditional needs of white rockers to emulate their black mentors and produce a kind of rock and roll that was indigenous to the white, middle-class experience. Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys' primary songwriter, merged creamy, smooth-as-glass harmonies of the Four Freshmen, the rhythm and blues guitar work of Chuck Berry, and wrote lyrics about surfing, fast cars, puppy love, staying true to your school, and so on. Townsend's point about power-pop was this: it was sleek, professionally rendered music that never ventured beyond the banal in its subject matter.

Spearheading the new Power-pop movement is Nick Lowe,  Lowe, a founding member and songwriter in the sadly departed Brinsley Schwartz and best known to rock fans as Elvis Costello's producer, released a record last year that laid out Lowe's methodology in the title: Pure Pop for Now People. On one level, the title was a perfect parody of the dumb products record companies used to release for consumers they perceived as being witless, gullible, and bereft of any sense of discrimination. Yet on another level, it reveals an  transformed them into objects of art. Lowe the conceptualist, wanting nothing to do with the priggish high-toned pretensions of "art-rock" (ELP and Kansas, let us say, not Roxy Music or Steely Dan or Robert Fripp), nor with the knee-jerk anarchy of most punk-rock acts, wanted to produce music that had the same clean, self-contained aesthetic values of the Beach Boys and the early Who, and yet retained a smart-assed, snot-nosed, wise-guy cynicism. The result, Pure Pop, was just that: a smorgasbord of borrowed riffs and chord progressions, vocal arrangements lifted from any number of vocal bands from the sixties, a plethora of musical styles that ranged from rockabilly, boogie-blues, to Phil Spector. Pure Pop, though, was far from the knockout it could have been. Lowe's production was cluttered and muddy. Lowe, though, has made a sizable step forward with his new record, Labour of Lust. Like Pure Pop, the record is a mélange of contrasting styles and attitudes where Lowe demonstrates an impressive

 character and nerve. Lowe's new material sounds better as well. The songs are better arranged, sound more complete, sound more like real songs rather than effete parodies. Lowe's humor is set in a sharper context. "Big Kick, Plain Scrap," featuring one of those James-Brown-style bass lines that defines the essence of funk, is overlaid with a mumbling, sleepy voiced vocal that utters a word salad of lyrics sounding like Captain Beefheart (if the Captain were the lyricist for K.C. and the Sunshine Band). "Dose of You," a perfect Buddy Holly emulation, puns relentlessly about VD, mixing up the tired theme of a young man trying to woo a woman with a seldom-spoken element of what can happen with love.Lowe remains a bright minor talent who has yet to show that he can break out of his narrow confines, but the improvement on Lust indicates that his will be a career that will warrant attention.


Thursday, January 23, 2025

COVID MEMORIES

Sticker balls (left), Corona virus model (right).
 
I worked at the Birch Aquarium Bookshop for 14 years until I finally retired in 2015. In that time I saw the shop evolve into a gift shop, full of toys, games, artwork, delicate glass items, and hundreds of impulse boy toys for the kiddies. AndS yes, they kept books around. But parents with mewling toddlers were the rule of the day, the Aquarium needed their purchases to support their grand efforts to educate the public about Ocean preservation.

Among the kiddie toys featured in bins at the cashier stations were these items, rubber spheres composed of suction cups, which of course stuck to smooth flat surfaces. We called these things "sticky balls" (insert snicker here) and accepted that when school groups came through the store from the aquarium, toddlers, and teens would grab the balls and throw them at the counter glass.

There was a large painting of fish hanging behind the counter, which was protected by a large pane of glass. Of course, a flurry of sticky balls would be tossed at it and we would look behind us after a rush and realize the painting was covered with these multicolored spheres adhering to the protective glass; it looked as if it had broken out in Technicolor gin blossoms. They were among the many banes of my long-term Aquarium employment, and had gratefully forgotten about them.

That is, forgotten about them until the rise of the Covid pandemic. The nightmares haven't stopped since.

Tuesday, January 21, 2025

Murder My Sweet

 


Watched "Murder My Sweet"  recently on TCM , a masterclass detective yarn starring Dick Powell and directed with artful craft by Edward Dmytryk. This is an inspired and fairly taut adaptation of Raymond Chandler's "Farewell My Lovely", and Powell, who we usually think of as a song-and-dance man, makes for an engaging Philip Marlowe, a cynical private eye, not-so-tough, wisecracking and whiskey drinking, a man who, once hired for a job, goes to the cruel truth at the heart of all the enterprises he finds himself embroiled in. Marlowe is a knight errant, in many ways, bound by a personal code me manages not to compromise in a city that is dark, full of sharp black corners and a population ruled by Bad Faith. Everyone lies to Marlowe, and they lie about everything--in this word, everyone has secrets they want to keep hidden, but coming up against Marlowe the protagonist, with his skewed virtue, hard truths and foul intents are revealed. Beautiful black and white here, a solid, even essential example of the film-noir style. The angles of the camera shots, the hard corners, the mastery of black and white and the various, shaded tones in between the extremes are nothing less than sculptural. As with the best dark shades, tones and textures created by the best camera artists in Hollywood when it comes to turning mere black and white into a menacing canvas of dread, danger and barely concealed mendacity, Murder My Sweet presents a world where the Greater Good and the Bigger Bad seem nearly indistinguishable from each other that only a steadfast pragmatist like Marlowe could navigate and remain sane

Saturday, January 4, 2025

The Byrds, "Younger than Yesterday"

 


Released in 1967, the Byrds' fourth album YOUNGER THAN YESTERDAY saw the band saw the band having to commit itself to releasing a record after the recent loss of their principle and prolific songwriter and lead singer Gene Clark. To be sure , Clark's departure is said to have been caused by a money dispute ; he received more royalties than other band members because of his songwriting contributions.

Admirably, Roger (née Jim) McGuinn. Chris Hillman and David Crosby took up the loss and contributed high caliber material to fill in the void left by Clark, the result being YOUNGER THAN YESTERDAY, which I would argue is their best and most important record and certainly, one of the best and most important studio albums by an American rock band in the Sixties. Clark's absence force the other members to draw on their own musical passions and, taking their cue boldly from what the Beatles were doing with their experiments, handily expanded their sound far beyond the jangling-folk rock that initially launched them . The harmonies remain without peer, and we saw the very early integration of jazz, Indian raga, country and western , psychedelia and electronics into their musical weave.

Smart, disciplined production by Gary Usher keeps this record form becoming a swamp of overcooked pretensions--he was the man who had the job to say "that's enough". SO YOU WANNA BE A ROCK AND ROLL STAR, EVERYBODY'S BEEN BURNED, WHY, RENAISSANCE FAIR, TIME BETWEEN-- the songs are first rate and the confidence these fellows confront all the alien influence and make part of their sound and legacy is remarkable. It sounds fresh, alive, 53 years after its release. The only down side on this disc is the last track on the last side (from the original release) , Mind Garden", an unnavigable mind-blown miasma from David Crosby .

It was the day, I suppose, when drugs were exciting, most of us working day jobs after school to have cash to buy records from major corporations believed a Revolution was pending, waiting in the winds , and that many musicians and producers, always marketers, thought they needed a song about altered consciousness to appeal to the gullible teen and the witless rock critic. I assume Crosby was sincere in his attempt to get the experience of having a blown mind in song form, but its a mess. I even thought that in 1967, when I was still in junior high. But beleiver, Younger than Yesterday is a great record.

PHIL LESH AND THE GRATEFUL DEAD

 


The Grateful Dead remain a problematic band for historians who like to place artists in strict genres and loath those who breach the boundaries. The band had equal footing in all things Americana--old time rock, blues, old school rhythm and blues, folk, country, bluegrass-- with the rest of their music easily moving into areas that are modal, jazzy, influenced not a little by Eastern forms of improvisation, and not a little avant gard . Not to say that the majority of this limitless and often exhilarating eclecticism comes from the late Phil Lesh, but the late bass player's already broad musical training and playing experience--theory, composing, playing trumpet in jazz band situations--certainly informs the off-center improvisations his foundation for the Dead. Part of the Dead's musical genius was how they anticipated what the others were going to do in the moment of extemporaneous music making--we generally think of Bob Weir's uncanny skill to be precisely where he needed to be during Garcia's roaming guitar leads. But here we have an isolated and extended example of Lesh's particular genius as a bassist. As has been said in the NY Times obituary, his lines frequently became lead parts in themselves, offering sublime counterpoint and alternative melodic compliments to Garcia's decorative riffing , as well as working in perfect sympathy, simpatico, with the dynamic drum work. Lesh had a jazz player's instincts.

DeLillo's Tale of the Hidden Rock Star

 


Similar in some respects to the film Performance in general idea, Don DeLillo's 1973 novel Great Jones Street is a story of what happens of what happens to the fan base and the larger culture when a revered rock star goes into seclusion. The musician /prophet/poet/stand-in savior is Bucky Wunderlick, a prematurely sainted scribe whose music and lyrics have been scrutinized by fans, critics, philosophers for hints of what the future holds for the world that, evidently, wanted a respite from being the millennial hero. Doubtlessly inspired by the speculative weirdness that ensued after Dylan's famed motorcycle accident and subsequent retreat from public view, DeLillo gets across the idea through satire, parody, monologues, sample song lyrics, odd-ball projections that a media created savior' absence creates another kind of presence, a mystical state of collective speculation which vaguely yet insistently maintains that the personality that gives purpose to millions of lives is not gone but still here, doing their work, to return with something greater, grander, better than what we already have. It's a wildly funny novel, and DeLillo's prose manages the hard job of being dead pan and yet rhythmically lyric.

Thursday, January 2, 2025

Bukowski


So was Charles Bukowski one of the great poets of the 20th Century? Some readers think so, I have another view, but it is a question worth asking. The man learned his lessons well from the writers he liked and carved out a style that is his own, spare, funny, memorable, if sometimes redundant.

 Bukowski is one of the best known modern poets, but not as a “great” poet. Charles Bukowski spent several decades writing about three or four things, which were drinking, staying drunk, screwing drunk women, playing the horses, and drinking. His was not a large world, and after reading a raft of short stories,three novels and five of his plenitude of poetry collections, it's safe to say that he'd run out of things to say about the redundant activities of his life. Hence,his redundant themes and the waning energy of his work as his life wore on, with he waiting for it all to be over with. 

Young people love him because Bukowski is as close to an actual nihilist any of them are likely to encounter in American fiction and poetry. His principal failing is his unwillingness to think harder or differently about the world of drink, cigarettes, whores,racetracks and flop houses and bad sex. This poem, as it goes, goes through the typical moves and ends on some winsome sigh about lost opportunity, faded youth, mauling over of some psychic pain that is somehow aimed at making us understand why he is such a luckless asshole. 

Ironically, few writers have been as lucky as this guy, lucky in that the game he ran on us held up all these years, and that it still has enough allure to sucker yet another acolyte who just entering their drunken -brutishness- is -authenticity phase. Bukowski was good at one point in his life, but his lack of interest in the word outside is few blocks of Los Angeles made him progressively less interesting as his years and books wore on.What is distressing is that he decided rather early on his career to rewrite "Love is a Dog from Hell" and "Ham on Rye" for the remainder of his life, marking his work as the stuff of a man who whore'd his talent to become salable to an audience wanting to seem literate without actually doing any reading beyond a certain depth or page length.I just can't shake the feeling that Bukowski's version of despair and beatitude is more a symptom of cornball fantasy than something felt from the gut or the heart. 

He exhausted that vein long before he passed away. He makes me think of someone who creates enormous amounts of anxiety because his life essentially static, full of non-events, sad variations on daily behavior, and rather than go mad and destroy something, he tries to pass off the nagging vibe by writing a lot, in a reserved, occasionally effective prose; still the, fantasy did not resolve what, I think, were his real symptoms. The themes did not change, the moral of the stories were the same funny/sad/fuck you bits of flophouse grit. One realizes, after a bit, that the only thing Bukowski did successfully, besides write the same story over and over, was grow old.