Zappa

I saw the documentary Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in his Own Words the day before yesterday, and I thought it was a  generally good representation of Zappa, the social critic, and Zappa, the serious musician. The interview segments, which are abundant, span his career, as does the generous inclusion of live performances with The Mothers of Invention. He was brilliant, iconoclastic, and gifted as a composer. Still, like many others with vast talents that prefer no constraint and mouths that prefer no editing, you get the feeling he indulged his worst habits as often as he did his best skills. There is a repetition of ideas in his asides, rants, and excoriations, a set of notions that he continuously honed and delivered over the years, libertarian-genius bromides that wear you down toward the film's end. Still, despite the repetition, you marvel at how he cuts away the fat and gets to the crude, stupid heart that is the pulse of consumerist culture.

 But as a fan of Zappa's music, I was pleased, as the film includes generous portions from live performances that make us realize that above all else, Zappa was an artist, a genius of some sort.  Even die-hard fans and scholars of his work have complained that Zappa didn't challenge himself nearly enough and often times released albums that were sub-par, highlighting musical ideas from bygone decades that no longer seemed fresh, riveting, or daring. His satire also ceased being funny or witty in a considerable measure and was, for many records released through the Seventies and even though much of the Eighties, merely mean-spirited. His cynicism had conquered his inspiration, likely because he realized that he could make money being this cartoon character "Frank Zappa," becoming the man his fans wanted him to be. It was about making money to finance his larger orchestral projects, and the irony that he needed to compromise his principles and act the way new fans with disposable income expected to behave was likely not lost on him.T.

Orson Wells had a similar situation, the story goes, as he took a good many demeaning roles in whatever variety of Hollywood schlock came his way so he could finance his own projects. It's an odd curse, I suppose, a problem the working world would have considered a bother at all. How would one have challenged Zappa, though? His comfort zone was a strange amalgamation of influences --Lenny Bruce, Stravinsky, Sun Ra, Edgar Varese, Lord Buckley, Musique Concrete-- that it's probable that few would know what to suggest as a way for him to diverge from his rut. He created his niche, proud that he wasn't dependent on grant money, gifts from government agencies, and the like. He was something like a home-schooler, nearly irrational in his belief that government couldn't do anything good for the population. There are times when I have to filter the rants I agree with in principle-and turn up the on this music, a body of work that's confused, amused, confounded, entertained, and thrilled me to the marrow since I came across in the 60s.

Zappa's work as a severe composer already has a reasonably entire catalog; one could, I suspect, produce a week or two of unique concerts featuring Zappa's "serious" work. But I agree that there was much in the seventies I disliked from the man in the 70s. "One Size Fits All" was actually a solid album, firing on all cylinders, but commencing with "Apostrophe," featuring the egregious "Yellow Snow," and onward, his satire degenerated into a species of juvenile smut. What would have been interesting would have been if he had collaborated with artists of similar stature, on smaller projects, in different musical areas. Not the Elvis Costello grandstanding collaborations, but rather genuine efforts to work toward the best virtues of another artist. That would have been something had he wanted to make an effort, but his personality was controlling, ironically, despite his diatribes about freedom. There was something of Howard Roark in him that his work would be presented to the world on his terms solely, uncontaminated by meddlers, sycophants, and they're like.

The downside of Zappa's libertarian attitude about his music--my art, my way, at the price I said, or nothing at all--is that much of his output is a remarkably eccentric selection of self-invented cliches. As much as he deserves to be praised for resourcefulness and achieving a crazy amalgam of jazz, classical, comedy, and rock, there are go-to moves he never strayed from, bits of business that seemed more treading water than an expansion of established themes. I do wish he'd found time and interest in collaborating with other musicians on equal footing--singers, lyricists, musicians, other composers. The results might have been exciting and gotten the late FZ out of his comfort zone and lightened the lid on that vacuum-packed cynicism that ceased to be amusing long before he passed on.

Mike Bloomfield in San Diego

 (Originally published in the San Diego Troubadour, used with kind permission).

It’s been mentioned by offhand wits that one’s younger days get hipper the more one speaks of them, an understandable response to a friend or stranger’s grand recollections about the times they’ve been near the famous, the legendary, the brilliant, the ignoble, the stylishly crude. But there’s no intention to brag that I had seen the original Paul Butterfield Blues Band somewhere between 1967–1969 at the Chessmate, a no-age-limit, alcohol-free coffeehouse in Detroit where local and touring folk, blues and jazz acts played.

This is more in wondering what ever happened to the memory of the band’s first guitarist, the late Mike Bloomfield. Bloomfield was a white boy, born in Chicago, from the suburbs, who was in love with black Chicago blues and traveled to Southside Chicago to witness the music he loved in the black clubs where they played: Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Hubert Sumlin. I knew next to nil about the blues then nor did I know who Bloomfield’s influences and mentors were. What I did know was that he played guitar like nothing I had encountered until then.

Biting, fluid, aching, and bittersweet, Bloomfield was masterful that night, a scrawny, jerky Jewish kid playing a black man’s blues with an intensity that was absent of cliché or recycled rockabilly riffs; what he was doing was something else. I was converted to the blues and the cause of lauding Bloomfield each chance I had with fellow music geeks. He recorded two widely praised albums with the Butterfield Band, Introducing the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and East West. Just as things began to break for the band, Bloomfield did what became a predictable habit throughout his career, he abruptly left the band. He started one of the first rock-oriented horn bands — the Electric Flag — leading a racially diverse group of musicians through a variety of American music that include blues, jazz, rockabilly, and soul. A Long Time Coming, their first album, was well reviewed and again, just as things began to percolate, Bloomfield bailed on the project and wound up recording with Blood, Sweat and Tears founder Al Kooper for the Super Session album. Mike Bloomfield, though, couldn’t finish the album and left the project after recording half an album’s worth of splendid guitar work, with Kooper enlisting the aid of guitarist Steve Stills to finish the disc.

And so it was, a genius guitarist who was easily a decade ahead of his time with regard to the art of rock guitar, leaving one promising band and collaboration after another, impatient, a walking case of the jitters. He couldn’t stay in one place too long.

My family moved to San Diego in the summer of 1969, during the Woodstock Festival, and, as it turned out over the years, Mike Bloomfield was a frequent visitor to the area during the 1970s, playing with an assortment of friends at colleges and clubs to promote whatever album he’d just released, or merely picking up a date because he still had name recognition even in music that was becoming increasingly corporate and predictable in a broad range of commercial releases. Bloomfield’s gigs promised the loose-fitting grit of the Bay Area style as well as a funky blend of folk, blues, jazz, and Eastern influences that ran contrary to the tight shoes record companies and radio stations were increasingly insisting musical artists wear in order to gain exposure. Bloomfield had done his best to sabotage his commercial potential by his erratic behavior and inconsistent performances, but there was something intriguing about Bloomfield’s live performances; you didn’t know how well Bloomfield would play, inspired and ruling the frets like the master he could be or so distracted and disassembled that his musicianship would make those unaware of what he could do wonder loudly and angrily what the big deal was with his reputedly great musician.

Apprehension over pending Bloomfield gigs was understandable, considering that his swings in mood and delivery made the interested fan wonder out loud which Mike Bloomfield would show up, the wonderfully expressive blues player who was one of the ground-zero white players to introduce blues, jazz, and raga and improvisational charms into rock ’n’ roll’s evolving instrumental style, or the mercurial bright boy who couldn’t stay in one place, stay in his seat, finish what he’d started? I’ve seen both in San Diego venues, hither and yon, the results different as old steak and the freshest, sweetest fruit.

It sorts of works out as a story of two university engagements, the night and day, the sweet and stinky, the great and the gross.

In the early 1970s, Bloomfield and Friends played a concert at the University of San Diego gym ,the first time I’d have a chance to see him live since Detroit; he was magnificent and everything critics and admirers claimed him to be. Energetic, even smiling, a change from his usually scrunched up scowl as he punished the guitar strings. The music consisted of up-tempo shuffles and rhythm and blues chestnuts, slow, heartbreaking blues and some instances of the fleeting jazz/raga improvisations Bloomfield introduced to the larger world, which was still living within the confines of Top 40 radio. There was always something simultaneously graceful and unwieldy about Bloomfield’s manner of playing; blessed with a fluidity that was uncommon in the day for rock-oriented guitarists, Bloomfield’s habit was to use everything he had when he sallied forth on a long solo. His slow blues would begin with the bittersweet and golden-hued tone of B.B. King — a sublime replication of the human voice. He would seem to lose control of his stream and have his phrases go over the 1–1V-V progression and wander into dissonance and near atonality as though channeling Coltrane’s high-register skirmishes.

After that, he would bring it back to the V chord, his playing deeper, with a long, searing blues bend sustained for several measures as the pitch increased higher in tone and intensity until he released the note and altered the mood again with softer, whispering phrases that brought the blues to a finely buffered resolution. It wasn’t all slow blues and bathos, though, and I remember how amazingly Bloomfield made the up-tempo blues stomp and rock under the snapping lash of his hot-tempered lead work, or how he displayed a knack for rapid, single-note runs during jazzier instrumentals, highlighted by the full, ringing octaves pioneered by Wes Montgomery. It was a good night for Bloomfield, a good night for the blues. Bloomfield, though, needed to keep moving after the show. He was quickly gone, seen rushing out of the gym’s side door holding his guitar case, brusquely brushing past fans trying to shake his hand or give him high fives or something stronger. He was in a hurry to get somewhere.

The memory gets blurry again recollecting another Bloomfield concert, a reunion concert not so long after the show in the USD Gym. I can’t recall the date, but I do remember what happened.

The Electric Flag, the band that Bloomfield formed after his departure from the Butterfield group, leaving promptly after their widely praised first album. Moby Grape also played, a fantastically talented group of musicians that arose toward the end of the San Francisco rock era and produced two worthy albums. Moby Grape and Wow, before their rapid decline due to drug problems and member struggles with mental illness, were scheduled for a double-whammy reunion concert on a date in the mid-’70s at the UCSD Gym. There was a good amount of commotion among my fellow music obsessives, mad chatter over beers and bongs about how this would shake out. Two bands of short life spans but worthy discographies on tour together, attempting again to be relevant in a terrain that was rapidly forgetting the magic and value of the hippie vibe.

Moby Grape’s performance was, to be kind, something resembling an arrangement of mannequins dressed as old bohemians that held guitars while music was piped in through a scratchy PA system.

A desultory display all around, the band sometimes came to life with a snappy guitar riff or unexpected burst of energy from the rhythm section, but there was the element of songs sagging in the middle, the musicians fall out of time with each other, of lyrics being forgotten, missed cues. The harmonies were ragged, a moth eaten weave of voices. That night Moby Grape’s fine legacy was a burden, a standard they couldn’t come to terms with.

Some of the crowd liked it though, but the applause and war-howls was as lackluster as the music. It was an open seating affair, which meant audience members found their patch of hard wood floor and made themselves comfortable amid the other attendees who had the same idea, to get as near the stage as possible and commune with the drum beats, guitar solos, and the passing of ignitable drugs. The lights remained low during the break between bands; I could see the cherry tips of joints floating in air, passed finger tips to fingertips, and the room was filled with the noxious aromas of marijuana reeking sweet. But the rule was this: stay for Bloomfield, the First Guitar Hero, the erratic genius of electric blues and roots music.

It was a pensive wait for the Electric Flag’s arrival on stage, as the squatting student audience, cooling their heels between bio chem exams and writing padded term papers notable for turgid prose and jargonalia, started a murmur of sorts, people yelling out “Bloomfield” or the staid and sturdy “rock ’n’ roll,” voices hoarse with the burn of pot. A Frisbee was being tossed about. There was the tangible feeling that one was a sardine in a can.

The Electric Flag soon took the stage, first the horn section, all proper looking gents dressed for the gig, alert and seemingly sober, and then the others, the bassist and keyboardist. Drummer Buddy Miles came on and took his place behind a large drum set, ready to let the world know again how it was he’d been picked by Jimi Hendrix, John McLaughlin, Carlos Santana, and Bloomfield to handle the sticks on various projects. Miles was a good, not great drummer, able to adjust his rhythm and blues approach to a variety of rhythmic requirements, minimal but firm, steady, on the mark. He was not a Tony Williams, not a Mitch Mitchell, but he got the job done. His second biggest talent seemed to be skill at landing high-profile gigs with famous rock guitarists. Then vocalist Nick Gravenites took his position, an underrated vocalist and the composer of the blues standard “Born in Chicago,” made famous by the Butterfield Blues Band.

Finally, Bloomfield himself emerged, thin, lanky, jeans drooping and back curved, looking not a little like a guitar bearing pugilist approaching his opponent, sensing where the next punch was coming from. There was a good amount of applause and this time the gymnasium echoed with the fanfare, as much from the relief of the waiting as it was anticipation for Bloomfield’s artistry. The performance itself was wanting, though, not bad nor slovenly, but strangely professional. In the metaphysics of judging such things, or at least reconsidering the events years removed, that secret something was missing: the elan, the verve, the energy that comes from playing the notes in such a way that the nervous system lights up like Christmas lights and infuses the sounds with a feeling that resonates in a listener in areas of the soul that have nothing to do with the quality of technique. The band, musically on point, could have been employees gathered to collect their paychecks after a Friday shift. Bloomfield wasn’t having a good time of it and seemed hesitant to play anything.

Where the band would play a solid, Albert King-style blues requiring suitably mournful and sting guitar fills between phrases, Bloomfield was often silent or late to the cue, and his solos were tentative half the time, as if he were trying to remember why he was in the center of the stage in the spotlight. He did play a great solo on the band’s signature song “Texas,” a moment when talent and sensibility jibed and made something moving, a slow blues solo as very few people could play it. This was half way through the show and it made me optimistic that the rest of the night would ascend to the proper heights of excellence. One could here, though, electrical crackling and short bursts of electronic blurting from Bloomfield’s amp.

He was agitated; his face was a road map of exasperated furrows. Two songs later the band went into a slow soul ballad featuring Buddy Miles on drums. Bloomfield strummed away in accompaniment while Miles softly drummed and crooned the lyrics. Miles, who had a voice that was, say, adequate to sing in harmony but far too thin and screechy to take on the Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, or Wilson Pickett gospel-influenced style, had walked up from behind his drum kit and took the microphone from the stand, confessing to the crowd on why he needed his baby. It became an endurance contest but Bloomfield couldn’t take it. His amp continued producing extracurricular belches and his facial features vanished behind a mask of irritation. He abruptly yanked the cord from his amp and walked off the stage, not to return. The rest of the Electric Flag managed as best they could but by that point one could seem a growing stream of students, hippies, faculty and assorted bohemians headed for the exits, heading to the parked cars or buses that awaited them, wondering what happened to Bloomfield and if they could get a refund.

This was the deal one made with their admiration of Bloomfield’s guitar work — that one would either be in the presence of a master, an innovator, a man who changed the way succeeding guitarists approached the way they played guitar, or be witness to a burned-out case. Michael Bloomfield was found dead of an apparent drug overdose February 15, 1981, in the front seat of his Mercedes. He was a heroin user and suffered, it’s been said, from chronic insomnia, two things that might provide clues to the musician’s famed inconsistency. For all his breakthroughs in revolutionizing rock-oriented guitar playing with a heady fusion of blues, jazz, swing, raga and traditional folk-blues techniques, Mike Bloomfield was a man who didn’t stay with a project for very long, as his brief but galvanizing stints with Paul Butterfield and the Electric Flag and Al Kooper attest. Other projects, such his collaboration with Dr. John and John Hammond Jr. in the trio Triumvirate, didn’t go beyond one album and one tour. Another band called KGB with Ric Grech (from Family and Blind Faith), Barry Goldberg (Butterfield) , Carmine Appice (Vanilla Fudge, Jeff Beck, Rod Stewart) and Ray Kennedy (James Gang) was an attempt to put a “super group” together, but , again, didn’t last beyond one album. Bloomfield did, though, keep busy with his music, appearing on a good number of albums by other musicians, and releasing a steady stream of studio albums of his own where his best skills were displayed.

It’d be a little grandiose to maintain that Bloomfield is the Forgotten Guitar Hero, but it irksome to those of us in the early circles of fans to hear younger blues fans discuss the genius of Stevie Ray Vaughn or Robin Trower and the like without a mention of MBs monumental importance to establishing blues as the Rosetta stone through which all contemporary rock guitar playing comes from. Under discussed, obscured, perhaps, but not forgotten, not wholly.

One day few years ago I was at La Jolla’s Pannikin Café on Girard Ave., next to DG Wills bookstore, and there were the familiar plaintive, slicing, fluid riffs of Mike Bloomfield coming out from behind the counter. It was turned up loud, like it should be; I could hear the notes emoting from across the street as I waited for the traffic light to change. John, a fine young man with an angelic crest of long brown hair, was the manager on duty and the Bloomfield disc, 1969‘s Live at Bill Graham’s Fillmore West, was his choice of play. I ordered my coffee, black, no sugar, no room for cream, and asked him if he liked Bloomfield.

“Oh yeah” he replied. He took my money, gave me change. I threw the coins into the tip can.

“You know how old this recording is?” I asked, hoping to brag with one of those back-in-the-day boasts that maintained that the past was better than what’s being sold in the current time. John just smiled and ended the conversation with the best response regarding the matter.

“Really doesn’t matter” he said, “it sounds great right now.”

---

The return of muscle tone

ONCE IN A BLUE MOON--Robert Nix

There was a time when it seemed that every other single musician and band coming over the radio and over the transom had pretty much scuttled guitars as the centerpiece of pop music , preferring cascading and eliding keyboards, pianos and synthesizers both, as the preferred means to make listeners that music was no longer about Chuck Berry or Bachman Turner Overdrive. Welcome to the mid seventies, when matters of melody became serious, grandiose, bands like Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Kansas and even the power trio likes of Rush committing their resources to tricky time signatures,abrupt changes of tone and style, obligatory faux-orchestral atmospherics courtesy of the Moog and mini Moog synthesizers, and certainly, a surfeit of excessively earnest lyrics obsessed with sci fi themes or else wallowing in the shallow end of the pool of deep thought. Pretentious in other words. Not that pleasures were absent, though, as I had my share of record review rants proclaiming that rock and roll had grown up,matured, had become a “legitimate” art form, ready for the concert hall and the canon.Nothing stings like 20–20 hindsight, of course, and let us say that the music of many an art rocker had not traveled well into the 21st century, sunk by their own pretensions and, most damningly, by producing music that was all parts with no sum to add up to. Save for Zappa , King Crimson, and the blessedly wonderful song-emphasis of Peter Gabriel era Genesis, so much of the era’s classically -slanted music was a disorganized , bloated mess, all arrangements and no music you’d care to pay attention to.Robert Nix,  a multi-instrumentalist and composer besides, isn’t about to let the genre fade into pop music history with a reputation for grand-scale naivete . He brings impressive musical muscle, which is to say musical ideas to his new album Once in a Blue Moon ; Nix as composer has a superb grasp of the dissonant, the quarter phrase, the angular progression, the means where melody approaches the atonal to emphasize a lyrics message or mood, dense chords from guitars and a crucially compact compression of keyboard textures to heighten the mood of the lyrical ruminations. There is a sense of disruption in Nix’s music, the pacing is tricky and sufficiently abstracted, but there is a strong evidence here that the artist has studied contemporary theatrical musicals along the lines of Sweeney Todd ; Nix is not thematic , or as thematic, as the narratives that make their way to the proscenium , as his songs are stand-alone testimonials, but there is form and integration in his outlay, where his vocals, a bit thin and reedy but effectively talk -sung and multi-tracked, clash and reconcile with the contraction and release of the ever-active arrangements. The album moves forward, the music spirals, recoils and continually renews itself.  There is no lack of buzzing activity , there is not a moment when you get a sense of the composer offering up a bit of gussied up mood music so he might have a seat and congratulate himself for being serious. Nix keeps it hopping, as in a masterfully calculated track “I Will Not Go With The Flow”;cooly detached one moment that then evolves to matters suggesting a musical variation of cubism, a kind of sound that seems to unfold and reshape itself so the many sorts of nuances and attitudes of the tunes are exposed simultaneously, a personality arguing with itself.

album review: "ImPossible" is impossibly good

ImPossible--Divinity Roxx

Just as the tributes to the recently departed Prince was causing me to become a shade fearful that we might not witness a comparable talent with his scope and easy mastery of rock, rhythm, and blues, hip-hop, funk, fusion and soul, I came upon “ImPossible” (pronounced ‘I’m possible’), a new release by seasoned bassist, singer, MC, bandleader, songwriter Divinity Roxx.I’ve been playing it all week, amazed at her and her band’s effortless blend of motifs, springing from the expected springs of hip-culture and the polysyllabic bantering of rap, but incorporating the riffy drive of rock, the percussive ebullience of greased-up funk, the slow jam testimonies of a lover’s testimonial, the gospel punch of soul , the truly sobering testimonial of unaffected rap rhythm. Roxx, a precise and quick-witted bassist who’s been best known as band member and Musical Director for Beyonce, has collaborated with dozens of names in an equal amount of varying styles, and with ‘ImPossible” brings the world an album that is beyond infectious or catchy or merely entertaining (although it is all those things); she is conceptualist, a synthesizer, a musician with an actual fusion sensibility who , it sounds like , loves many kinds of sounds with equal ardor , imagines the ways the approaches can fit together coherently, effectively, powerfully, and who reveals the know-how, or “feel” how, to make this diversified project work. It rocks, it struts, it is insistent on the downbeat, propulsive on the upbeat. That is what she shares with our beloved and begone Prince, an impressive talent based on tradition but, in the corniest parlance one can manage, stands on the shoulders of giants to see what vistas lay ahead for the music.

I’ve been playing it all today as I write this. Groove-tacular. The principal shortcoming, if that’s the case at all, is Roxx’s limitations as a vocalist; there are more than one occasion on this fine record that you want to knock the ball out of the park the way Aretha Franklin can or had the husky but feminine baritone of Nina Simone to find the emotional cracks, dents, and imperfections in the words; no matter, I say. Roxx is a different generation, raised and reared in hip-hop, and she makes fine use of her voice in the old tradition of toasting; but instead of boasting, these long, percolating recitals grasp the thorny issues of racism, violence against the black community, self-esteem, the need to remain full of love in both one’s personal affairs but also in the face of the world that is hostile to your existence merely for your shade of skin tone. It does sound a little much, an overkill of I-Have-A-Dream and a stream of sentiments taken off placards, if one was relying on casual description, but Roxx and her special guest reciters, including the esteemed Victor Wooten, reveal themselves, speak truth to power, avoid the strident declarations but insist on strength, resolve, action strengthened by keeping an open heart. The effect is, as well, beyond uplifting, it is transforming. The video above, “We Are”, is a superb representation of an effort that has brightened my week. Driving riffs, blistering, joyous rhyming, determined voices joining in the march toward the day when we all might enjoy our similarities and appreciate our differences.

The long black shadow follows you

My Depression is Always Trying to Kill MeVince Grant --(Vince Grant Music)   

The title of Vince Grant’s recent EP pretty much gives the game away as to what the album contains, the story of an earnest singer-songwriter trying not merely to make his self-admitted malady the basis of a transcendent art, but also, more crucially, critically, desperately, to actually deal with a condition that continues to bedevil him. The depression-as-subject matter is a slippery slope in any event, an easily romanticized condition that the less awareness among readers, listeners, and lovers of theater and film consider a prerequisite to being an artist worth considering.This is an idiotic presumption to start with, but it’s one that’s filtered through our culture for centuries, even in the critical discussions that are ostensibly intended to uncover, though, close readings, how a poem, a novel, a play works as art; the thinking, however, has largely focused on what issues the poet has, on the depth of his or her depression, and how the perennial melancholy inspired reams of beautiful downcast poems and lyrics. It was for the longest while that one couldn’t read a biography or critical essay on the works of confessional poets along the lines of Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, or Robert Lowell without the obsession with their depression outweighing the merits of the works as writing: while one couldn’t rightly exclude a mental disorder in regards to discussing what informed a writer’s tone and worldview, the consensus seemed to be that such an artist, confessing details of a life that is slipping increasingly into grey areas that are harder to emerge from as time goes by, achieves success only if they perish, commit suicide, due to the increasing isolation depression places them in. This is morbid thinking and a form of self-fulfilling the prophecy that sees the artist less as someone creating art than as a victim vainly thrashing about with words and motion as a means to cure themselves of that which curses them daily.Vince Grant, a seasoned singer-songwriter who has long contended with depression, doesn’t entertain the notion that he will eventually conquer, transcend or “cure” himself of his depression with his music. In his publicity materials for My Depression is Always Trying to Kill Me, he’s quoted as saying “…I write songs to cope. I’d like to say I write songs to heal, but that may be asking too much.” Any alcoholic and addict who’s down a “fearless and thorough inventory” of themselves with the aim of finding a means to deal with a damning condition they’re powerless over, Grant, in his music, understands not just the bedrock permanence of depression the emotionally crushing, seldom relenting feeling of feeling that an invisible but none the less impenetrable wall surrounds him, separating him from the world, but that dealing with it is something the sufferer does one day at a time.The album is a story of sensations, the cold gloom at the bottom of the dark hole he finds himself, the recalling of dreams, lovers, friends, opportunities taken from him from him by his depression and his attempts at self-medicating with booze and drugs, the attempt to rise from the mire and move toward the sunlight, to re-enter the world of sound and motion, to become part of the great parade of in the life he has, to be a citizen, just for today. It’s one step forward, another step, forward, a step back, a stumble, arising after the fall, a step forward, another step, one day at a time.One can be cynical about the simplicity of a philosophy that is likely culled from twelve-step programs, but what we have with Grant’s songs is a pervasive honesty that doesn’t add the element of “the Hollywood Ending” that assures the listener that hope wins overall; that would be dishonest to Grant’s truth. He does not deny the pain his condition creates for him, he remembers vividly that what he copes with is still present and can take him out if he grows lax in his efforts to keep himself about the waves that threaten to overcome him.The paradox of this review is that Grant’s honesty and unpretentious testimonial about his struggles and small victories is an effort that impresses and inspires me to a great degree; I cannot say, though, that I enjoyed the songs as much I wanted to. Coached in the anthemic style of U2, REM, and Manic Street Preachers and Counting Crows, Grant’s material, musically, is more a collection of borrowed gestures, lacking a distinguishing sound of his. For songcraft, he repeats the worst habit of early U2, which was to dispense with ingenious hooks and the niceties of beginnings, middles, and ends and instead rely on layering three or four chord guitar strums with little discernible movement ; acoustic guitar, a persistent bass figure, the addition of a brash electric guitar, additional percussion, the music in volume, diminishing in volume, the volume rising again, a chorus repeated until the whole arrangement, such as it is, fades. Grant’s earnestness comes through, his ragged vocals convey the humanity of his struggle against the darkness that follows him, but that is not enough to make up for the feeling of things borrowed without that crucial spark of reinventing the riffs that have influenced him.

Gideon King &: City Blog: When fine musicians meet indifferent material

City Blog
Gideon King and City Blog

City Blog, the debut album from Gideon King and City Blog, is an admirable attempt to revive the fusion-jazz verve, funky-melodic improvisations and ethereal lyrics of the Steely Dan/Stanley Clarke/ Blow by Blow and Wired period, Jeff Beck. Great news for those listeners who lean toward instrumental chops guided by solidly arranged tunes, the kind of jamming that didn't forget the register jumping lessons of Coltrane of having each phase of a solo remain a fast but contiguous with the phrase before it and the one that would follow, and Ellington, you bet, who was the master of composing songs for select soloists (especially for his saxophonist Johnny Hodges) that highlighted a musician's instrumental personality. Effortless, layered, compositional nuance and transcendent and inspired ad lib from the soloists elaborating on the foundations. City Blog, though, is a mixed bag, a situation where technically and at times riveting demonstrations of technique gets snared by the tepid go of substandard songs. 

The problem isn't the skill of the musicians , who have a collective resumes that includes stints with Herbie Hancock, Steely Dan, John Scofield and many other notables. City Blog's pedigree is impressive and solo with seamless fury end to end, especially in the guitar work of Gideon King. What he offers here is work that seems to announce the next Guitar Hero; maintaining this acknowledged debt to Steely Dan as an influence, his tone is snaking and sleek, slow to build over the suspended chords with unexpected twists and inversions, consistently constructing solos from brief initial statements to middle sections that provide exhilarating crescendos, fast, precise, stinging, and skillfully tapering off artfully, returning to the main themes. Same for keyboardist Kevin Hays, a versatile member who cross-references funk, bebop, the angular logic of Monk and the sweetly insinuating  vibe of Stevie Wonder; he's adroit, imaginative, full of surprise, a musician who thinks fast on his feet, in a manner of speaking.

The material, though, isn't as impressive as it should be. Where the kind of fusion jazz this band seems to be trying to revive would, generally throw off the tasteful ballads and tone poems and kick an album or a live gig up a few notches and allow the soloists to rage at accelerated tempos over tricky changes, City Blog's material remains long in the middle area where pace is groovy and casual at first, but after several iterations becomes repetitive singsong. You get the feeling of being the last bit of cola being swished side to side in the can, at a mechanical , mind-numbing consistency.  Also , the material lacks graspable hooks, those musical figures that catch your ear and lure through a great song's melodic invention and the musician's contribution to the whole. This is a matter of having the band member skills framed , a context challenging already skilled players to do even better work. The music here too often becomes a meandering fog , with tones, textures, and hints of other styles failing to achieve cohesion. This is less a collection of original songs than it is a style sampler with the incidental benefit of skilled extemporizing. I appreciate the idea, as well, of bringing a day when it seemed that music could change the world for the better with a collective consensus that good vibes, peace, and love can be achieved through songs that carry a message of dreamy utopianism. This is for old hippies , though, and the music of Steely Dan, however seductive and serene in its exotic otherness, had a poetic cynicism , an Imagist take on the world that dealt with the dilemma of human expectations, whether material or spiritual, coming into conflict with a reality that always harshed any dreamer's billowing mellowness.  City Blog takes a different lyrical tact , which is understandable, but its unfortunate well-worn tropes were the alternative to Dan's crafted poetics.

For those looking for solid solos, chops, fleet and frantic improvisations that generate a good amount of heat, there is more than enough to satisfy here. For the rest, it's a drag, exceptional talent gets weighted by songs that don't leave a lasting impression. I am singing riffs from the instrumental bridges, not the hooks from the songs, and that is only half the pleasure I would have preferred received. 

From the vault of old opinions: Elvis Costello

( Imagine my delight in seeing my name on a concert review I had written of Costello and his band The Attractions back in 1979 when they performed at the former Fox Theatre (now Symphony Hall). I was twenty-seven at the time and, in the copious writing I was doing as arts editor for the UCSD student newspaper The Daily Guardian, was getting ever closer to the prose style I wanted, a chatty, smart, didactic with which I could evaluate and digress into the pleasant vagueness of abstract assertion while maintaining a tone of the conversation, the chat, the informal and slightly snarky bull session. (Last week, I gave in, yet again, to vanity and searched for my name on the too-handy Google search engine and found something entirely unexpected. Yes, I sound more than a little full of myself from rereading this, but what the hell? I was teaching myself how to write, a process that continues. Enterprising Elvis Costello fans seem to have amassed an impressive database concerning the work of the prolific singer/songwriter, compiling, among other data impressive and less impressive, reviews and the publications they appeared in, both record and concert evaluations.  Here is the review from the late Seventies when I used to add my middle name to my byline because I thought it sounded cool. Or something like that.--tb.) 

Concert Review:
 Elvis Costello and the Attractions, February 1979
by Ted Navin Burke

Elvis Costello is rock's man of the moment, and one would assume from the frenzied reception the full house gave him last Sunday at his Fox Theatre gig that the Costello's groundswell will never ebb. But will Costello last? Good question. I've been to too many concerts where a performer does an absolute dynamite performance to an audience that seemed to express undying loyalty, only to be forgotten a year later with his albums taken off the Licorice Pizza display racks. Is Costello the Next Big Thing someone whose music will have a profound influence on the pop culture to come, or is he just another in a series of throwaway performers an audience can play with awhile and then discard like an empty box of corn flakes? Good question indeed.

I'm forcing myself to be optimistic, though, thinking that Costello has enough talent to transcend the comic book tackiness that surrounds him — Woody Allen glasses, old jackets with skinny lapels and padded shoulders — and latch onto something firmer in the consciousness of a mass audience whose attention spans tend to be short and tastes fickle. Certainly, Dylan and Bowie had to contend with similar problems of image. Dylan refusing to remain, at different times, a mere protest singer, a mere folk-rocker, a mere country singer, and Bowie deciding to junk the Ziggy Stardust nonsense and show all his would-be glitter creep, followers, that he could make music as well as cutely contrived theatrics.

Costello, Though, doesn't have the same initial problem that Dylan or Bowie confronted. Whereas the other two began with a limited base where everyone expected them to remain — Dylan with folk and New Left politics, Bowie with glitter-rock and an apocalyptic fantasy — Costello's music has an unbelievably broad base. His three albums, My Aim Is True, This Year's Model, and his newest, Armed Forces comprise something of a short-order course in the history of traditional rock and roll motifs, a wide scope encompassing rockabilly, reggae, rhythm and blues, folk-rock, Phil Spector  wall-of-sound-production values, Sky Saxon, and other influences that elude me right now. Unlike the average phony fifties band who take old stuff and succeed in making the music more banal than it was originally — I'm thinking of Sha Na Na and Flash Cadillac — Costello reshapes these old ideas into fresh combinations, oftentimes mixing styles in the same song. Musically, the familiar sounds incredibly fresh. What makes Costello's art more astounding (or confounding) is his knack for lyrics. In an age where the "important" lyricists of the Seventies — Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, Warren Zevon, Tom Waits — have produced a bulk of work that emulates but falls vastly short of middle-period Dylan and the Beat poets before him, Costello has come out of the left field and caught everyone by surprise. His best songs are tightly-constructed first-person narratives, impressionistic glimpses at balled situations and the people in them, with characters who Costello has caught in the variegated acts of Bad Faith and the contingent malaise of non-actualization.

In, In other words, Costello gives the impression that he can tell the moment when someone, or something, starts laying on the bull and can dissect the baloney bulwark with the well-honed epigram. His persona is that of someone who's being victimized by others, an overly sensitive soul continually on the defensive who's developed a brilliant capacity to put down, pontificate, and get in the last word. Through this visage, he takes aim at everything, whether it be lovers who use sex as nothing more than a peer group stock commodity ("Miracle Man," "Living In Paradise"), schoolyard bullies who grow up to be lame-brained thugs ("Two Little Hitters"), media organizations whose ability to Pavlov the masses borders on fascism ("Radio Radio"), or government services that bypass their humane premise and reduce everyone to a number waiting in line for minimal and impersonal service ("Oliver's Army," "Senior Service"). Other themes in his material are difficult to reconcile with one's assumed notions of equanimity  and   and a society predicated on elegant utopian principles, grisly like murder ("Watching the Detectives," "Alison") or misogyny ("I'm Not Angry," "Hand in Hand," et al.). Any number of highly-considered rock stars have had these traits as well, like Dylan (still the darling of the New Left after all these years), Mick Jagger, Bowie. In any event, one has to take the best with the worse. I refuse to get hung up in New Consciousness moralizing over Costello's alleged lack of humanity. Not to confront his worldview is to duck the issues he brings up. As with others in the era of punk rock and new wave, Costello makes clear that his mission is not to be part of a generation that promises to avoid the mistakes of the Boomer Generation that had fought in World War 2 for democratic ideals of liberal democracy only to turn the whole idea on its head in the search for greater persona gain at the sacrifice of community and cooperation. He reduced it to the personal and equates being personally fucked up, distraught, unloved, and being too smart to sit through the onslaught of lies and platitudes to the institutions of a society that, though nominally dedicated to the preservation of rights and quality of life, are designed only to control, dampen initiative, to keep the masses where they are with old lies disguised cleverly as new promises.

On the basis of the description of the ponderousness of Costello's themes, it wouldn't be unusual to assume that he would slip into the seductive fallacy that since all rock lyrics are now poetry, the music can take a back seat. Costello understands that even the most provocative of ideas will exist in a vacuum if the style of the message isn't grabbing. As described earlier, the music stands up in the best tradition of rock and roll, as strong as the Stones, more arresting than Dylan at his creative peak and more riveting (effective) then the theoretical verve of all the New Wavers and punkers put together. This, finally, brings us to the concert itself. Costello's performance was an affirmation of the worn-out rock-critic adage which sustains that rock and roll is an art meant to be experienced live, not on the album, something where the energy will make your armpits sweat, get the blood moving and provoke a response that goes beyond intellect, a response stemming from an instinct more primal. Costello passed this rather dreamy test of rock and roll metaphysics without breathing hard.

Costello An imposing figure on the Fox stage, a slender, psychotic-looking man in a suit with padded shoulders and thin lapels, someone who would bug-eye the audience through his owl-frame glasses. His expression through the night was like someone giving you an if-looks-could-kill stare after you'd said something to offend him. Opening with "This Year's Girl," Costello and his band, The Attractions, pumped through the material with something of a manic drive. Costello would play his guitar, a Fender Jaguar, with hard strokes of the hand that looked as though he were sawing wood, and his legs went through a strange set of movements, buckling knock-kneed one minute, one leg thumping the floor. At the same time, the other was firmly rooted the next and then pirouetting sharply. He paced the stage in pensive bounds, looking like someone who couldn't bear standing still.

The attractions themselves were superb. Organist Steve Naive crouched at his spot, no chair for him. He would bounce about almost as erratically as Costello, producing thick chords, succinct fills, and well-timed riffs that fleshed out the band's sound. The drummer and bassist, whose names sadly elude me, are the best rhythm section now working, interacting with the same verve that distinguished Keith Moon and John Entwhistle of the Who years before. The material, mostly from the new Armed Forces, was received with open arms, but the audience was primed for older songs. The first chords of "Watching the Detectives" drove the crowd crazy. At one point, Costello discarded his guitar and took the mike by hand, and played out the part of an alienated lover killing his girlfriend because she watches too much television. The line "...took my little finger to blow you away" gets the loudest cheer of the night. Costello tells them goodnight when the song ends. After a five-minute ovation, they return and crank into "Pump it Up," played at a rapid, undanceable tempo. This encore lasts all of two and a half minutes, and they're gone again, with the audience yowling for more. They had, though, received more than their monies worth.

U2 are duller than you are

I was trying to watch a U2 concert on Showtime, motivated by the delusion that I would be able to remember precisely why I was briefly obsessed with this band in the Mid-80s. Ten minutes into the performance, the Edge's echoing chord work and Bono's humorless, crucified bellow did me in, the choicest of the choice songs. Even a band as pretentious as the Doors were reliable for crafting tight rock-pop hits that were all the things a radio-friendly tune requires. These qualities achieved a particular state that is a combination of hard work and luck: listenability. The songs got you, it kept you, and the next you know, the experience is over, and you're on the other side of it all whistling the chorus, mumbling lyrics you only half understood.  It's an old aggravation, and many bands have displayed it and kept it in my decades as a music writer, but it still applies to U2 especially. It's a pose, hewed with honest emotion and genuine conviction, but it is a pose, all the same, a stylized sheen that is set to make them attractive in theory.

 I despise this band. Hardly the worst band, mind you, as there is a bottomless pit of worthy candidates for that honor, but certainly the most overrated by my estimation. The fundamental problem is that so much has been ascribed to them on matters separate from the actual music they write, record, and perform. My complaint is this: they have arrangements, not songs in their repertoire, which is to add a variation to other like describers as “all glitter, no gold,” “all sizzle, no steak,” and “all hat, no cattle.” One can, of course, name a few good songs these fellows have offered us, and indeed, my assertion that they cannot tunes at all is unfair. Still, the fact is that what comes to mind with U2 in terms of sonic signatures are not single tunes but rather their approach, their singular sound of the Edge’s slow, heavily flanged, and eventually monotonous guitar build-up, Bono’s braying tenor shouting half-witted spiritual tropes, a bombastic middle portion where the band hammers the chord progression into submission, and then the eventual fade into silence, an attempt here, I suspect, to make the listener reminisce about their own privately held best moments, whether romantic, sexual, romantic. It’s a style that’s been old for a while, for decades. 

This, for me, makes them agreeable intellectually, but it doesn't mitigate the monotony that makes their music a self-regarding drag. Missing, perhaps, is the old "hit song" aesthetic, where there was an emphasis on tunes that were differentiated stylistically, given manageable time constraints, given hooks, beginnings, middles, ends, and concerning things that are not the result of a crisis of conscious or the search for a nebulous spirituality that no one seems able to find. I have to say that after 3 chords, U2 becomes loud tedium. 

They don't have songs; they have a "sound." Some find it stirring, rocking, bracing. I find it bracingly the same from tune to. It's not that they haven't written a solid rocker and a cogent ballad in that massively reverbed catalog of theirs; it's just that unlike mining the albums of the Stones or REM (among so many others), there are not that many good-to-great tunes to amuse yourself with until you come upon a song, usually a track halfway through the second side, that kicks in the vitals and moves inside your head, playing its primary and primordial riffs and significant chords to a moronic, reductive and unceasing drumbeat and hands-free bass part that will not get out of your head. As we can guess, those kinds of tunes do not come along often enough, whereas sorry-Charlie Kitch mongers like U2 are in abundance.

The best of what remains is what it meant all along

 I had the fortune of being a music writer for the San Diego Reader in the mid-seventies , a time when I was lucky enough to meet  a good many musicians I admired greatly. It was also a period when I was teaching myself how to write. Among the best pieces they published by me was an interview with bassist/vocalist/songwriter Bob Mosley, best know for his work with Moby Grape, a short-lived critical favorite at the height of the San Francisco rock scene of the Sixites.  Critic and pop music historian John D'Agostino had given me a contact phone for Mosley back then, and with a couple of calls to the musician, we arranged for a interview. The Reader piece , if you're interested, can be read here. 

The question, I suppose, is does the fallibility of our music heroes lessen the quality and worth of the words and music they made. It's tempting to think so, it's convenient to take the causal short cut as to why innovations and styles of the sixties began to go stale, go wrong and in general lose any useful edge they might of had on the artists themselves. False prophets, fakes, liars,  they fucked it all up for the rest of us. Nothing of the sort, I would say. No musician ever conspired to harsh my mellow during that supremely self-regarding decade.

 Suitably enough, D.H.Lawrence wrote in his 1923 book Studies in Classic American Literature that we should "Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it". In this case, what matters is how resilient the work is , resistent to fad, fashion, moral outrage and critical dismissals . And, we should add, reader disappointment in author's character. It is the work itself, viewed as works of art and subject to criteria that is quite apart from a moral compass (the artist obeying his muse, not his indoctrination) , which needs to be considered wholly. It is the work, studied for structure, theme, conflicts, resolutions, and philosophical underpinnings , all independent of a creator's success or failure as a full actualized human being, that we must regard solely. 

 

 

It is only then that we can draw legitimate pleasure, insight, illumination, catharsis. My current favorite critic, Harold Bloom, has a view coinciding with Lawrence's view that it is the work that only , finished volumes with their beginnings, middles and conclusions, that we can trust, free of the expectations that the author is someone to personally regard as a role model. Literature's sole value, he says, is to help us,the readers, think about ourselves in a world that contains millions of other citizens who , as well, have their own sense of personal narrative. 

 

 

For Mosley and Moby Grape, they are victims of the times, with easy access to sex, drugs, a wide spread contempt for conventional morality and the institutions that enforce them, and they fell apart at their prime; just at the precise moment when they seemed poised to truly dominate the underground rock scene and perhaps far beyond that, drugs and insanity laid them low. Much the same is true of Electric Flag, Blind Faith, Cream, the original Butterfield Blues Band. Ego, drugs, and the intervention of a reality that didn't quite curve with the zeitgeist , brought these bands to an end and ,as a consequence, began the spin that personalities , not talent, was responsible for the music we loved and took to be harbinger of a historical dialectic in process. 

 

 

A collective depression fell over the audience, musical innovation became stale formulations, radio became rigidly formatted yet again, underground newspapers folded, we suddenly noticed a lot of our friends dying on the vine or going crazy . So what remains? Some good music, things we can still listen to five or so decades later and not be embarrassed by the passe add ons of bad poetry, fad, fashion, and so on. Bob Mosley wasn't a saint, not a poet, not a philosopher, not a visionary, and neither was anyone else in Moby Grape and certainly not any other rock musician who rose to prominence in the Sixties. They were musicians and their genius, or the radiations of talent ranging from mediocre to good to genuine excellence, lay in their skills as instrumentalists, singers, songwriters. When the embarrassment fades, the pontifications abate, the audience resentment at their heroes letting them down as heroes, it is the music, the actual work that was done, that will be judged. Mosley, in my quirky estimation, had a hand in writing and performing a handful of truly great songs from a band that, however great they happened to be for a period of time, could not keep their collective muse engaged. They couldn't hold it together. They drifted apart, re-grouped in different formations in series of "reunions", and never approached anything like the best , most sublime moments of their first two records.

 

 

This is assuming that a listener from back in the day survives the trauma of getting older and finding that the cosmological suit they were wearing no longer fits, that one has merged well into the the territory called adulthood and developed an interest in other things--books, politics, ongoing education, new and different kinds of music and other arts--and can be amused by their presumptive , youthful arrogance and find among their old vinyl records those solid pieces of work,those great songs that remain rivetting today, that something good did come out of the Sixties, something was indeed added to our lives that made it better.

Awkward teenage blues

Gene Pitney

Leslie Gore was one of those pure pop singers like Gene Pitney and Neil Sedaka who had an appealing, earnest voice that could manage the hooks and addictive choruses of the songs she performed. Like Pitney, her song "It's My Party (and I'll Cry If I Want To)" was a catchy distillation of teen heartache and anxiety, an age where neither female nor male could help but continually compare their inside turmoil with what seemed cool and calm of the appearances of friends, associates and other hangers-on. Am I good enough? Smart enough? Pretty/handsome enough?  Pitney and Gore were the heralds of awkward teenage blues, that time of life when hormones are kicking in and extending their reign from the brain and the appendages they command, a set of years where self-esteem is rare and fragile where it exists at all.

Not much has changed, just the style of clothes, the music soundtrack, and how far past first base you have to go to fit in, or at least seem to. Pitney, it should be remarked, was pretty much a dour, moody, full-time drama queen in his string of hits, tunes he sang masterfully. He had a range, of course, easily witnessed with a listen to "I'm Going to Be Strong", "It Hurts to Be In Love", but it also had the strange quality of being scratchy, a strange impression of the gruff textured rhythm and blues singers he admired, and a certain "girlishness" as well. He had a fast vibrato, a quiver that would emerge in the center of a phrase, making keywords seem suddenly uncertain, nervous, subject to glandular swings of mood, oftentimes undercutting the stronger voice, the more stoic, stronger pronunciation where Pitney reached down to an unnaturally low register as a means of constructing a solid, masculine calm. The singer was fascinating and melodramatic, and his performances were a clash of emotional raw ends.  But what really hits a nerve with Pitney's voice was the higher register, which he could twist and torture with deceptively able finesse to create a sense of a young and sensitive young man tasting for the wrong time the bitter  fruit of  breaking up. Neal Sedaka's song title "Breaking Up is Hard to Do" offers a clue to the genius of Pitney, who explodes the minor key agony of teenage breakup blues and expand the melodrama to the extent that it's tempting to apply "Wagnerarian" to his extreme style. Maybe not not so dramatic.

Leslie Gore was pop music for young people and I have to say that I found myself liking more than a little of it when I listened to TOP 40 radio. She was pop personified, the girl singing into the mirror as she prepared for a school dance for which she had no corsage nor date, singing her woes and insecurities into the reflection, watching her image, hair parted on the wrong side, watch on the wrong wrist, admit to the worries and dread  of not being in the center of the party,  not being interesting enough for a boy or a girl to talk to, someone for whom being friendless was worse than the death. Death, to her thinking, would be a release from this hell of other people's happiness mocking you without end, amen.

Vinyl records

Nostalgia is something that cuts both ways across the generation divide. On the one hand we have Boomers, those born post World War 2  who grew up with vinyl records, 45s and 33 and 1/3 RPM, who will insist that the original 12  inch releases of the Abbey Road or Safe as Milk  had a clarity, depth, and warmth that later  digital versions, marketed on the much-loathed compact disc format, ruined by making it flat and sterile. The cry was thus: CDs may not scratch and stand to last forever, but we sacrifice the genuine texture and sensuality of the music therein. The new versions are merely heard not felt. If by that they mean that the full force of Beethoven symphonies or the corrosive caterwaul of Ornette Coleman's extensions of Western jazz improvisational strategies are abrasive only to the degree to which they assault merely the nervous system and not the soul as well, then I am with the naysayers. Sadly, though, there is more to the "felt" description, which is surface noise, pops, hisses, clicks, clacks, the corrosive percussion of the damage and ware that attends the ownership of a vinyl record collection.

 Because I had no interest i the hi-fi freak's compulsion to keep his albums pristine with a ritualized way of putting his albums on the turntable--holding the disk only on the edges with lightly pressed fingertips, wiping the disc with a clean dust cloth in a particular circular motion, no variation, setting the expensive needle on the disc gently, gently, gently, GENTLY GODDAMNIT! , repeating the process in reverse when the record was done playing--I just put my records on and just played them, whatever happened on the record surface. I took heed from my best friend, a bigger slob than I was, who shared  "I don't let my possessions possess me". It was an easy matter to accept the scratches, pops, and skips as part of the listening experience; I joked that the imperfections were bonus rhythm tracks, free of charge. Still, as used as I had become to vinyl albums, it was a matter of time before I had to acquiesce and purchase a CD player because it turned out, the record companies had stopped releasing albums in vinyl formats, save for some independent holdouts hither and yon. I  was amazed at how fast I became a CD convert; the music sounded fine, it sounded clean, it sounded exciting. The digital age claimed another convert. It became the case that saying that we should listen to vinyl only so we may "feel" the music better is like remarking that we should not have paved roads or modern cars because travel means nothing artistically unless we feel every pothole, puddle, rock and uneven patch of cracked earth on our long journey to some goddamned family holiday dinner. It was a dead argument made by grumpy white men who wanted it to be 1968 forever, without end.  The only thing I miss about the vinyl experience was the "thingness" of an album--something to open, to read, stare at, take pride in as you put back in the sleeve and add it your large and varied record collection. I admit vinyl was an inferior medium given the crystal clear digital offered , but there was a value-added quality, where the music on the disc was something I paid attention to, fell in love with or hated and argued passionately with other music fanatics and would be pop pundits about why such things were more important than sex. The vinyl album was something that contained music the way a book contained words that told a story and you had to figuratively live with for a period so the glorious transformation of literature can have on our worldview could take effect. That is less the case these days, much less, as everything is digitized, stored in figurative clouds, seemingly every song ever recorded stripped of context, liner notes, album art, credits, and private jokes and turned into bits of code that one can turn on or off like a light switch, absent-mindedly appreciative of the ruthless efficiency in the retrieval of the music, but not moved to linger on lyric, to pause during a hooked up chorus, to move, shake. That's my experience.