'I disliked The Monkees from day one because at the time I was a serious teen who wanted to be Rolling Stone rock critic and considered "our music" done by "our artists" to be a new art for; following, I put together my own home made aesthetic criteria , actually a free floating borrowing of a half dozen other critics opinions and tastes, convinced that it was my duty to protect and preserve the one true and undiluted thing , the music. Let me beat to the punch regarding that last sentence: I was indeed full of myself, intoxicatingly so. Nonetheless, The Monkees were the antithesis of that; my friends and I howled and mocked and denounced the fellows as much as we could, but they sold records anyway. The synthesis of this dialectic, I suppose, was that counter-culture ideas, attitudes and styles, from fashion, music, politics and the like, had been absorbed by mainstream culture. I think Marcuse referred to the process as "repressive tolerance", the notion that the System can neutralize radical impulses in a restless and dissatisfied population merely by allowing their rebellion to express itself through institutional channels. What i do recall is that Frank Zappa, the maestro of rock avant garde and someone the pure of spirit thought was far above the temptation to sell out, appeared as himself in their one feature film "Head". It pays to remember that the Mothers of Invention were not a hippie collective in which everything was done collaboratively. The band, rather , was a business concern of Zappa's and the musicians were on salary to play his music the way he wanted to hear it. Zappa the entrepreneur appreciated , no doubt, the conceptualization and execution of the Monkees as a product created to fill an under served niche even as Zappa the serious artist dismissed their tunes.
Monday, November 6, 2017
Even in movies, the dead should remain dead
So little of what passes as cultural commentary on the internet is trivial and distracting like an itch you can't scratch that it comes as (very) mild surprise that one of the opinioneers delivered a grouse worth considering. An uncredited scribe in The Guardian mentioned and elaborated on an element of many super hero films that is , perhaps, killing interest in the genre: viewers cannot depend on a character remaining dead if he or she gets killed . The story makes the point that there have been so many deaths-and-miraculous-resurrections of characters that a viewer's willing suspension of disbelief refuses to kick in; it becomes more a matter of plot mechanics than catharsis.
It is one thing that Superman, presented to us as deceased in Batman v Superman, reenters the action in the upcoming Justice League , since DC has generally made sure the Man of Steel was represented on screen in Christ like terms since the beginning. It just makes sense just to remain consistent with the analogue and to consistent as well with the comic book canon; Superman simply must come back from the dead. Every dead character returning to the narrative fold, though, kills the fun of these things. Which brings up the point this piece strongly suggests, the nagging question as to why audiences continue to bother showing up for these things. I know it's been predicted often, but there is a tipping point for this material. We're saturated ,carpet bombed, pummeled with creeps in capes destroying fictional cities and a fantastic and devastating fall off in attendance looms sooner than Hollywood might think. This is to say the studios need to diversify their crops.
Sunday, November 5, 2017
"Forever Changes" was released 50 years ago!
FOREVER CHANGES--Love |
I caught wind that 2017 is the 50th anniversary of the release of Love's seminal record Forever Changes, an occasion that I couldn't let pass without a tribute listen to the revered 1967 album. I was mesmerized all over again by a range of materials—acidic rock guitar, marching rhythms, sad Mariachi horn sorties and Spanish guitar and tango beats, lush arrangements, MOR pop-jazz, and the skill to write the private lyric that drew the listener closer to the speaker to hear the words, but which denied a comforting assurance. There were menacing undercurrents under fleeting elegance, an album full of wide roads, sharp terms, and idyllic optimism. It was as if vocalist and principal songwriter Arthur Lee absorbed every note of music, from every style that poured from Los Angeles radio, blending them will, providing a true, original thing, something no one had heard before. It remains a fascinating and dramatic document; it’s damn good music. The way this disc moves from one mood to the next, quickly but not jarringly, from upbeat, dance-happy jazz to the serene yet melancholic textures, shades, and tonalities the orchestrations create as they play over the solid rock band base, remains amazing and, I think, unequaled. The Beatles were antecedents, of course, in the employ of diverse musical styles in their songs and mixing those up in ways rock and roll songwriters hadn't imagined up to that time. But a major element of Lee's and Love's success in diving headlong into the choppy eclecticism is avoiding the limitless disasters of others who attempted their versions of Sgt Pepper. Not all the music on Forever Changes has aged well. Lee’s lyrics sometimes become a murmuring stream of hippie Know-Nothingism. The guitar solos, though brief, likewise cringe-inducing, atonal fuzz tone blasts that sour these albums’ otherwise sublime arrangements. Where were Hendrix and Clapton when you needed their savvy on the frets?
All told, this is only nitpicking. The record is of- its- time and still creates a spell fifty years later. Arthur Lee was one of the greatest of rock singers as well, an ironic commentary on identity politics; we see this in his beautiful crooner style, which echoes the under-considered talent of Johnny Mathis and Sammy Davis Jr., two pioneering black performers who honed singing styles that were smooth, gallant, and acceptable to large white audiences, and also in the way Lee mastered the grunting, gravelly, slurring style of British singers like Mick Jagger and Eric Burdon, two singers who tried to replicate the sound of their heroes Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf but who, lacking the vocal apparatus, wound up creating a style of singing that was itself appealing and a means of personal expression. Lee was equally smitten with both styles and mingled them throughout his oeuvre, the silky croon and gruff belt combined for an unexpected effect, mysterious and suggestively unique. Two songs particularly have remained with me these fifty years since I first heard this record, melodies, chords, and winsome vocals that echo still amidst the accumulated memories, the opening song, and the album's final song. The first, written by guitarist and singer Bryan MacLean, is the exquisitely flawless “Alone Again Or".It begins faintly, volume slowly increasing, a Spanish guitar and a sharp, insistent report of a small drum kit, simple and elegantly finger-picked chords that bring us a confession of a kind, a soul reaching, out to a lover who leaves him alone in his isolation. The second verse is a declaration, a statement of personal purpose:
“I heard a funny thing /somebody said to me /you know that I could be in love with almost everyone, I think that people are/The greatest fun….”
As the melody charges, segues into a stirring horn solo and again fades off and then builds momentum again, we have the genius of the album, a mix of insight and naivete trying to balance them out, contained in a gorgeous, simple framework. MacLean's forlorn disquisition is about the battle of a man trying to bring clarity to the many sensations his senses brought him. Each day a new hope, every afternoon the same confusions of elation and sadness, each night a solitude that embraces the narrator as fully as the sleep that will come over him and so prepare him for the morning.
The album's last tune, Lee’s masterpiece, is “You Set the Scene,” a fascinating stitchery of the kind of rush discotheque pulse where everything is noticed and reality becomes a druggy collage. Details are word fragments, phrases, and images that do not follow each other in logical order; it is as good a description of an acid trip as I’ve listened to. The trippy pulse of the first section segues into the steady, marching stride of the second portion. Horns blare a hearkening fanfare, drums kick in with a steady, even gait, and the narrator seems to have become a man who has crashed from his high after a vision and now allows his eyes to scour the hillsides and valleys and consider, finally, the kind of future he’d to live in.
“ Everything I've seen needs rearranging /And for anyone who thinks it's strange/Then you should be the first to want to make this change/And for everyone who thinks that life is just a game/Do you like the part you're playing?”
Yes, these smacks of the old counterculture conceits, the young man, smitten with The Truth, saying farewell to parents and old friends to become genuinely authentic. But Lee’s imagination prevents this from becoming a preposterous demonstration. Lee’s voice soars, croons, quivers, strains effectively on high notes, floating with confidence over the increasingly dynamic horn arrangement. This is a march into the future; it astonishes me how magnificent this music still sounds fifty years on. Forever Changes, Love's third album, is considered by many to be the best American response to the Beatles bar-raising disc Sgt.Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. As is too often the case, Lee’s greatest creative period was short-lived; drugs, jail, eccentricity, and erratic behavior prevented him from regaining the heights he reached with Forever Changes.
Chickenbone Slim's "The Big Beat" (album review)
THE BIG BEAT--Chickenbone Slim |
Chickenbone Slim is the alter ego of longtime San Diego bluesman Larry Teves, bassist, vocalist, and songwriter who many remember as the leader of the popular area blues band the Boogiemen. The Boogiemen was a crackerjack jump blues band in the style of Little Charlie and the Nightcats and, a bristling, swaggering bunch of dedicated blues hounds filling taverns throughout the county with their combustible, guitar and harmonica-driven approach to hard blues swing. The Boogiemen are no more, alas, but Teves is on the scene again in the guise of Chickenbone Slim, with a new disc, The Big Beat, which continues the blues orientation.
As expected, there is a difference in this recent incarnation, which is that Chickenbone is more than the brawny bluster of riffing over the changes and singing about drinking, smoking, and driving around looking for kicks; the blues are here—the backbone of the Teves-penned songs—but there has been growth. Life has happened, experiences have changed tone, and responses and reactions cut a bit deeper. These are songs from one who’s been through a few situations, has fought his way out of some tight spots, problematic circumstances where it’s something different each time that rocks this blues man’s world. Following suit, the bluesman Chickenbone goes for a broader musical palette, beginning with the swerving, off-kilter strut of the title song “The Big Beat.” A seasoned narrator finding similarities in following the drummer’s accents and the flow of one’s bliss, a message underscored and firmly moved forward with the brash harmonica punctuation from multi-instrumentalist Jon Atkinson. The mood becomes more laconic with the strutting and stirring ‘Long Way Down,” a rueful recollection of paying the cost to be the boss, the popping rhythms nicely framing the spare, stinging, and appealingly gruff guitar work from Scot Smart. “Hemi Dodge” goes the other way stylistically, a country jaunt, a road song braced on lonesome harmonica moans and Chickenbone’s sly, galloping guitar.
Chickenbone intones the song in a comically talk-sung manner, a deadpan that very much made me think of a man sharing the wisdom of his experience mere minutes after his most recent disaster. Folk, funk, swing blues, and the swampier varieties of soul and funk inform this refreshing variety of styles. Chickenbone Slim, nee Larry Teves, brings us the blues from neighborhoods where most of us actually live. He plays a rangy kind of music, writes songs with the terse and sharp wit of someone who knows the meaning of living paycheck-to-paycheck. It’s punchy; it’s full of inescapable hooks, cutting guitar and gold-toned harmonica wailing. The Big Beat makes you glad you got out of bed and poured that first cup of coffee.
(This originally appeared in The San DiegoTroubadour. Used with kind permission.)
Saturday, November 4, 2017
The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan
I
t's not enough that we have the same first name and the same Irish second initial, my attraction to Berrigan's poems was the rather unbelligerent way he ignored the constricting formalities in poetry and rendered something of a record of his thoughts unspooling as he walked through the neighborhood or went about his tasks. "Where Will I Wander" is the title of a recent John Ashbery volume, and it might well be an apt description of Berrigan's style; shambling, personal, messy, yet able to draw out the sublime phrase or the extended insight from the myriad places his stanzas and line shifts would land on. The world radiated a magic and energy well enough without the poet's talents for making essences clear to an audience needing to know something more about what lies behind the veil, and Berrigan's gift were his personable conflations of cartoon logic, antic flights of lyric waxing, and darkest hour reflection , a poetry which, at it's best, seemed less a poem than it did a monologue from someone already aware that their world was extraordinary and that their task was to record one's ongoing incomprehension of the why of the invisible world. Things To Do In New York City:
t's not enough that we have the same first name and the same Irish second initial, my attraction to Berrigan's poems was the rather unbelligerent way he ignored the constricting formalities in poetry and rendered something of a record of his thoughts unspooling as he walked through the neighborhood or went about his tasks. "Where Will I Wander" is the title of a recent John Ashbery volume, and it might well be an apt description of Berrigan's style; shambling, personal, messy, yet able to draw out the sublime phrase or the extended insight from the myriad places his stanzas and line shifts would land on. The world radiated a magic and energy well enough without the poet's talents for making essences clear to an audience needing to know something more about what lies behind the veil, and Berrigan's gift were his personable conflations of cartoon logic, antic flights of lyric waxing, and darkest hour reflection , a poetry which, at it's best, seemed less a poem than it did a monologue from someone already aware that their world was extraordinary and that their task was to record one's ongoing incomprehension of the why of the invisible world. Things To Do In New York City:
"Wake up high up
frame bent & turned on
Moving slowly
& by the numbers
light cigarette
Dress in basic black
& reading a lovely old man’s book:
BY THE WATERS OF MANHATTAN
change
flashback
play cribbage on the Williamsburg Bridge
watching the boats sail by
the sun, like a monument,
move slowly up the sky
above the bloody rush:
break yr legs & break yr heart
kiss the girls & make them cry
loving the gods & seeing them die
celebrate your own
& everyone else’s birth:
Make friends forever
& go away " --Ted Berrigan
This is a poet who listens to himself complain and explain his pains against a backdrop of others in commute likewise obsessed with their discomforts and who take pride in lasting just long enough in the streets, shops and cold water flats and paint flecked studios of Manhattan to make it to the end of the day, to slip under the coming shroud of dusk and darker colors where tv dinners, drinks, a book to be read aloud from, a check book to be balanced although there is no money, to deal with the needed things to be done in the daylight hours that hustle, burn and disturb the senses in order to pay bills and distract one from concerns with the yawning abyss they are always three foot steps from falling into, the goal of all this commotion, procrastination and casual impatience with the way the city flows too slowly or accelerates time too nimbly is to sit at the table, muted night traffic, the refrigerator rattling and grinding with electricity waging war against the inevitable chill of frozen peas, to sit at the table and stare out the window, counting the lit windows in the windows you survey, smoke another cigarette, inhaling the sulfur deep til it burns the lung's deep, tender tissue, pen in hand, tip of pen to notebook paper, a line of words and then another, a pause to refresh yourself, another drag of cigarette smoke, another line of words, two lines, one line cut in half, someone is talking to someone not seen nor named, the night goes on, the windows of the city burn bright and enternal u until dawn and the first harbor boat blasts away every gull leaving their gifts on the pylons.
Read more Ted Berrigan.
Thor: Ragnarok is the distraction we require
Thor: Ragnarok nearly lives up to the hype, with the accent being on Marvel's patented triplicate move, slick action, lots of jokes and a particularly intense emphasis on making sure the movies from their studio tie into together. It wouldn't be unfair to say that the movie would be incoherent for plot and character if one hadn't seen a long string of other Marvel brand films, in the right sequence. Perhaps part of the promotional hype should have been for Marvel to own the potential impenetrability of this film's core rationale for those other less familiar with this connected universe and provided for them a list of titles to view beforehand. All the same, Thor and Hulk seem less Avengers than they do Hope and Crosby of the 'Road" movies. Is the ramped up comedy a good idea? Yes, since is this is only good Thor movie of the three that have been made. The laughs were honestly achieved from character interaction , personality clash, the whole shot, and the humor were managed much, much better than the repetitive joke-fight-joke-joke-fight tedium of Civil War. Marvel movies are Disney movies, after all, and franchise films are required in this studio to very much resembling in style and tone what was made before; for them, judging their movies becomes how well the individual directors made the house style entertaining and just a little different. The present movie is an inspired variation on the formula.
For special effects set pieces, this effort is among the best of the year, diluted a notch or two for crowding too many into this two-hour movie. It works much better than the previous EF fiesta Valerian, which I thought was merely busy despite the amount of money spent constructing that confounding mess. Thor: Ragnarok has the benefit of character recognition--despite what I've already said about potential plot incoherent, the host of characters are known commodities, and well portrayed, full of plausible quirks and comic nonchalance. Matters move along briskly, the spectacle builds well, and the decision to use the design ideas of comic book genius artist Jack Kirby and Thor co-creator is a way to differentiate this picture from the three tepid films in this franchise. It has the psychedelic visual style of Kirby used to good and effective measure here.
This isn't the game changer for the Marvel Universe that fans are hoping for--for all their polish, crafted fury and a sense of ongoing wit, Marvel films have fallen prey to a lurking Disneyism that has all but infiltrated the rebel spirit of the comic book ethos and has made each hit they produce to be otherwise indistinguishable from the one before it. Spectacular effects, superb editing, snappy dialogue, in that order or similarly changed up to minuscule degrees, are what dominate this connected universe, and there is a mounting tedium in their ongoing slate of releases, which explains why the punchlines are ramped up in this production and that the small amounts of self-reflective dread and existential moments are removed or reduced to all but inconsequential plot requirements. If that's the case, it works on its own terms, a distraction from real-world headlines that inform you that the world is filled with awful people doing hideous, heinous, ugly things to other people. This was a hoot, a laugh, a nail-biter, the entertainment we need.
Friday, November 3, 2017
MOHAVISOUL: Hometown Blues (album review)
You may find yourself scrutinizing the information on the sleeve MohaviSoul's new release, Hometown Blues, to see if any members hail from regions that would qualify them as authentic mountain folks. It turns out to be a case of simulacra, but it is worth remarking that this ensemble has a sound that is not what you'd find in the usual soundtrack of a surf-and-sun , postcard-perfect day. MohaviSoul is making music that's catchy and obviously, honestly informed by a love for the Old Schoolers and the legacy they left for the world.
Neither laboriously beleaguered nor overly sunny, these are stories about the simple ironies and unexpected pains and pleasures a life brings us. MohaviSoul is a bluegrass band, storytellers of woe and joy and love found and lost as their heroes seek fortune and adventure and a better chance around the bend. Formed in Ocean Beach, the beach area’s last outpost of the ’60s idea of being distinct and true to one’s one Thing, the interplay of guitars, fiddle, and dobro are bittersweet counterparts to the plaintive vocals of guitarist Mark Miller and mandolin player Randy Hansen, both of whom are also MohaviSoul’s principal songwriters. They are palpable rustic; their chords and taciturn lyrics seemed to have been written in the dusty patina that would fall on the old, corroded truck these metaphorical minstrels would use to drive state to state searching for another day's wage.
Neither laboriously beleaguered nor overly sunny, these are stories about the simple ironies and unexpected pains and pleasures a life brings us. MohaviSoul is a bluegrass band, storytellers of woe and joy and love found and lost as their heroes seek fortune and adventure and a better chance around the bend. Formed in Ocean Beach, the beach area’s last outpost of the ’60s idea of being distinct and true to one’s one Thing, the interplay of guitars, fiddle, and dobro are bittersweet counterparts to the plaintive vocals of guitarist Mark Miller and mandolin player Randy Hansen, both of whom are also MohaviSoul’s principal songwriters. They are palpable rustic; their chords and taciturn lyrics seemed to have been written in the dusty patina that would fall on the old, corroded truck these metaphorical minstrels would use to drive state to state searching for another day's wage.
The tunes are sufficiently rustic and soulfully rendered, a sequence of tales reminiscent of depression and dust bowl days; long, dry highways; train whistles; large regrets; and small joy. There is a strong, persistent sense that one shoulders their burden and moves onward, stoic, strong, accepting of what one has been handed throughout their adventures before and afterward. There is, as well, a remarkable lack of the pessimism one would expect from a genre predicated on a world view that borders on the bleak and despairing. The allure of bluegrass and mountain music and the appeal of Americana music in the largest sense are the tales of indomitable spirit and the willingness of the heroes to persevere and greet the next day, lessons learned, with a song and a strong, purposeful stride.
Superbly backed by the interlocking and buoyant mandolin from Hanson; the banjo work of Jason Weiss; and the subtly bittersweet colors, tones, and accents given us by special guests John Mailander on fiddle and Will Jaffee on dobro, the songs of Miller and Hanson are clear and poetically plain spoken, oftentimes declaring that whoever is listening to the varied tales of hardship, heartache, and the lot needs to heed the simplest advice: don’t sweat the chump change. “Gettie Up,” sexy as it sounds but more practical than it is randy, tells us to get on the beam when life becomes the trudge, while “Stay Tuned,” a spritely, rollicking ramble, simply and subtly warns us to be pleasantly surprised when different and better outcomes result from what at first appears to be a grim and final dead end. MohaviSoul’s music is swiftly seductive, full of foot tapping, shoulder moving tempos, simple music accomplishing profound emotional effects.
(This originally appeared in slightly different form in the San Diego Troubadour. Used with Kind Permission).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
-
here