Author: brendanmstewart

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Alex Chilton, RIP

Word is out today that Alex Chilton, the former lead singer of the Box Tops, and one of the guiding forces behind the awesome Big Star has passed away.

Chilton first became prominent as the voice behind “The Letter,” the great Box Tops song from 1967 with which Joe Cocker later had a big hit. Despite the hits with the Box Tops (“The Letter,” “Cry Like A Baby,” “Neon Rainbow”), it was his tenure in Big Star, and the pop perfection that they released, that immortalized Chilton. Despite the fact that Big Star never became even moderately well-known, their influence as one of the original, seminal power pop bands of the 1970s stretches wide and far. Much like the Velvet Underground, the reverberations created by Big Star are still being heard today. R.E.M. and Wilco owe a huge debt to Big Star, and Chilton acolytes run the gamut from their #1 fanboy Paul Westerberg (who wrote the great Replacements song “Alex Chilton“) to Brendan Benson. In fact, the entire school of power pop owes a debt of thanks to Big Star.

Alex Chilton, dead at 59. RIP

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The Listening Post: February 2010

Tunes for the February chill:

  • Them Crooked Vultures—Them Crooked Vultures. What goes around comes around, and we seem to be going back to the era of the “supergroup,” the preposterously named aggregation of stars from various bands pitching together to create a new project. Not since the days of Cream and Blind Faith have the airwaves seen so many of these combos. It was kicked off by a combination of Soundgarden and Rage Against The Machine (Audioslave), furthered by the Guns/Pilots/Nails combo of Velvet Revolver, and brought to an art form by Jack White (The Raconteurs, The Dead Weather). The most recent salvo is this combination of Queens Of The Stone Age, Nirvana/Foo Fighters, and Led Zeppelin. Them Crooked Vultures had a lot of buzz around them last year after an appearance at Austin’s South By Southwest festival and hopes were high for the debut album. Unfortunately, the album itself rarely rises to the hype. For starters, drummer Dave Grohl is particularly understated throughout, and while bassist John Paul Jones does his usual exemplary bass and keyboard work, he is all too frequently buried under the guitar onslaught of Josh Homme. Considering the star power of Grohl and Jones (the two most well-known members of the group), Them Crooked Vultures sounds a lot like a good record by Queens Of The Stone Age. Homme is unquestionably the dominant force here and the record has the good parts and the weak parts of any QOTSA album. There are some great riff rockers, like the four-song combination that opens the album: “No One Loves Me & Neither Do I,” the fantastic “Mind Eraser” and “New Fang,” and “Dead End Friends.” The brilliantly-titled “Caligulove” is a ferocious rocker, and “Gunman” rides a Tyrannosaurus-sized riff straight into your brain. But there are also plodding, dull riff rockers like “Elephants,” and meandering psychedelic mood pieces like “Interlude With Ludes.” Most of the rest resides somewhere between these two extremes: they’re good, but not great and not particularly memorable. The songs that work best are the ones that have melodies to go with the riffs, and unfortunately nearly half of the album lacks anything approaching memorable melodies. Grade: B-
  • Sailor—The Steve Miller Band. Several years before he was joking, smoking, and midnight toking, and making AM radio safe for smooth guitar rock, Steve Miller was one of the best and brightest stars to emerge from the San Francisco rock scene. Some of the early Steve Miller songs have survived, most notably “Living In The U.S.A.” and “Space Cowboy,” but the early albums are well worth hearing in their entirety. They are the best work of Miller’s long career. While Sailor doesn’t quite rise to the level of the album that followed it (Brave New World), it’s still a wonderful album. The opening “Song For Our Ancestors” is the only drag on the album: a five-minute instrumental that is comprised of the sounds of foghorns and a mournful organ sound. And yet…it works. While it doesn’t stand on its own as a song, it provides a nice mood setting for the album that follows, especially the gorgeous “Dear Mary” with it’s sleepy rhythm, plaintive vocal and low trumpets trilling in the back of the mix. But Miller at this point was not the pop rocker he became. “My Friend” is a terrific mid-tempo rocker, and signifies the beginning of when this album starts to pick up speed. The classic “Living In The U.S.A” revs the engine faster before Miller steps back with “Quicksilver Girl.” The country-tinged blues “Lucky Man,” and the Jimmy Reed cover “You’re So Fine” bring Miller back to his blues roots. While the cover of Johnny “Guitar” Watson’s “Gangster Of Love” is almost a throwaway, breaking down into laughter and incoherence less than a minute and a half into the song, it remains a Miller classic (largely due to the line in the huge hit “The Joker”: “Some call me the gangster of love.”) The album ends with a couple of Boz Scaggs-penned rockers, “Overdrive” and “Dime-A-Dance Romance,” and despite the fact that the opening and closing numbers of the album could not be more dissimilar, the album represents a coherent vision from start to finish. I love Steve Miller’s 1970s hits, but for me the real Steve Miller Band classics came out of the late Sixties. This album is one of them and deserves to be known for more than “Living In the U.S.A” and “Gangster Of Love.” Grade: A
  • Psychedelic Lollipop—The Blues Magoos. Generally speaking, it’s best to avoid full-length LPs from one-hit wonders. Especially one-hit wonders from the garage rock/psychedelic Sixties. The Music Machine’s Turn On is a case in point: a brilliant single and a decent album with several filler songs. So it’s a relief to say that the Blues Magoos’ Psychedelic Lollipop is a rough gem of an album. The kickoff of “We Ain’t Got Nothing Yet” is a hard act to follow; the song is rightly considered a garage rock classic. Somewhat surprisingly, the rest of the album sounds fresh. There isn’t a lot of original songwriting on the album, but the covers have been worked over enough so that they bear the stamp of the band. In this sense, it’s akin to The Who Sing My Generation (though not as good). “Tobacco Road” becomes an intense freakout, “Queen Of My Nights” is a really solid ballad, the band does a ? And the Mysterians-style take on James Brown’s “I’ll Go Crazy,” and the version of “Worried Life Blues” sounds like a cross between a great bar band and The Doors. Best of all are “Gotta Get Away” and “She’s Coming Home” which are as good as “We Ain’t Got Nothing Yet.” I wouldn’t go so far as to call the album a lost classic, but it’s definitely a work of a much higher order than what most of their garage band peers were turning out: cohesive, well-played, well-sung, and consistent. Grade: B+
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Under The Dome: Stephen King’s Ham-Fisted Politics

Reading Stephen King’s latest novel, Under The Dome, is a lot like running a marathon. The experience is enjoyable, you’re glad you finished it, and it’s exhausting. Just holding this 1,072 page doorstop of a book is enough to get your arm muscles nicely toned.

As usual, the setting is small town Maine. His old standbys of Castle Rock and Derry have been replaced with Chester’s Mill, but it’s indistinguishable from any other small town in Stephen King’s Maine. What separates Chester’s Mill from all the other towns is an invisible dome that conforms perfectly to the surveyed margins of the town. This dome descends so suddenly that a small plane is suddenly sliced in two, creating the first casualties. Trucks and cars on the road out of and into town slam into the invisible barrier, people walking suddenly end up with broken noses. Worse, there seems to be some sort of energy field near the barrier that causes electronic devices with batteries to explode if they get too close, as the town’s chief law enforcement officer discovers when the pacemaker in his heart explodes out of his chest, killing him instantly. It is this death that allows much of what happens afterwards to proceed, as there is now a vacuum of leadership at the law enforcement level, a vacuum that is immediately filled by the town’s Second Selectman, the corrupt and murderous Big Jim Rennie.

Stephen King novels succeed or fail largely based on the caliber of the villain. The malevolent spirits in The Shining, the vampires in ‘Salem’s Lot, the shape-shifting demon Randall Flagg who pops up in several books but most famously in The Stand, Pennywise the Clown in It, and even the rabid St. Barnard in Cujo all made excellent villains and excellent novels. Conversely, the already dead aliens in The Tommyknockers, the pawn shop evil guy in Needful Things, the abusive husband in Dolores Claiborne, and the evil government agents of Firestarter were pretty lame, and the novels were equally bad. Add Big Jim Rennie to the latter category, but make him the exception that proves the rule.

Stephen King has always been a liberal or left-of-center guy, but he was always more interested in scaring you or giving you a good story than he was in beating you over the head with a political message. His one previous overtly political book, the anti-nuclear power novel The Tommyknockers is possibly the worst novel of his career, a novel so spectacularly uninteresting that it was barely readable. True, almost all of his novels have had a few political asides thrown in, and there was little doubt about which side of the political spectrum his heroes inhabited, but the sort of political hectoring that is found in Under The Dome is rare in King’s canon.

Maybe the eight years of the Bush presidency were simply too much for King, because Under The Dome‘s villains are devoutly Republican evangelical Christians who murder, rape, and operate the nation’s largest methamphetamine lab while quoting the Bible and racistly raging against the black man with the terrorist middle name who sits in the Oval Office. In case you don’t get the point, Big Jim Rennie even has a picture of himself with Sarah Palin prominently displayed on his desk. I have almost no doubt that King’s model for Rennie was some leftist cartoon version of Dick Cheney, right down to the heart condition.

For the hero of the novel, King writes the tale of Dale Barbara, a serviceman who is making his way through the world trying to rid himself of the terrible memories of torture and murder he witnessed American servicemen performing on innocent Iraqis in Fallujah. Iraqis who carried pictures of themselves with their wives and children, just to underscore that they were decent family men and not IED-planting bombers…not that it made any difference to those cruel American soliders who wantonly tortured and murdered them. Oh, buh-rother…can I get some cheese to go with that ham?

The other heroes include a minister who no longer believes in God, an older professor whose gray ponytail lets you know that he’s a Sixties type of guy, and the Republican editor of the local newspaper (helpfully called the Democrat). Fear not, though…whenever the editor speaks out for doing the right thing, or speaks against the corruption of Jim Rennie, or disapproves of the brown-shirt tactics of the newly recruited police force Dale tells her that she “doesn’t sound like a Republican.” Because, you know, Republicans are all in favor of murder, staged riots, brown shirt police force tactics, and corrupt politicians. Well, at least in Stephen King’s world.

The problem with Big Jim Rennie is not that he is insufficiently evil. He’s incredibly evil. The problem is that he’s a Left-wing cartoon of a Christian conservative, and he’s about as believable as Roger Rabbit. In fact, the small town of Chester’s Mill is actually a hotbed of sociopathic miscreants. Who could know that in a town of about 2000 people in Maine you would find so many people willing to murder, rape, and commit arson on the command of an overweight selectman with a bad ticker? And not only is Rennie the power behind the local government, he’s also the main operator of one of the largest meth labs in the entire nation, presided over by a strung out tweaker who…wait for it…runs the Christian music radio station where the meth lab is hidden and who also quotes the Bible in between pipe hits.

The Dome itself is almost secondary in the novel. It’s really just a device that allows this parable of how fascism can be generated by a crisis (if you’re thinking about Bush and 9/11 right now, you must have read the book). The resolution of The Dome is oddly perfunctory. The ending seems almost as if King was running out of typing paper and needed to wrap it up quickly. SPOILER: The Dome is generated by a device implanted by alien children who seem to be playing a game with the inhabitants of the town, similar to how young children will turn the sun’s rays against an ant hill with a magnifying glass. After attempts are made to breach the Dome from the outside with bullets, acid, and even a Cruise missile, the editor of the newspaper comes up with a brilliant idea. She simply begs the alien children to stop, and they say okay. The end.

Unfortunately, almost everyone in the town is dead by this point, courtesy of a massive fireball that was set off when the huge propane tanks fueling the meth lab were blown up. The fireball scorches everything in its way and leaves the air under the dome largely unbreathable. Of course, Jim Rennie escapes the fireball but dies choking on bad air and clutching his heart after being visited by the spirits of those people he killed. You can almost see King sitting at his computer, fingers flying over the keyboard, saying, “Yeah! Take that, Cheney!”

King fundamentally misunderstands the nature of fascism on a conscious level, but on an unconscious level, perhaps even King gets it. Jim Rennie seeks power with an undying thirst, but he explains to one of his henchmen that he seeks power in order to help the people. “Our job, Carter, is to take care of them. We may not like it, we may not always think they’re worth it, but it’s the job God gave us.” Frankly, this is close to the motivation behind every politician who feels that he or she knows better how to spend our money and legislate our lives than it does those who want a smaller, more limited government. Rennie is not speaking of the downtrodden or disenfranchised, he’s speaking of the entire town population. Indeed, his entire mission throughout the book is to immanentize the eschaton, and just like every other totalitarian in history, he seeks his own unique brand of perfection.

Further undermining the novel is the speed with which events take place. Chester’s Mill is a quiet suburban town where the people live their normal lives. Then the Dome comes down and the town devolves into a fascist dictatorship within the span of one week. Rennie’s actions to assume total control begin within hours of the Dome’s arrival, as if he never even considered that the Dome might disappear and he would be held to account for what he does. The townspeople, flush with plenty of food in the store, cell phone service, internet service and even electrical power in homes that have generators (not uncommon in the brutal winters of Maine), become a rioting mob within days. Apparently King’s lack of faith in human nature isn’t limited to Republicans. Far from calamity bringing people together, as 9/11 showed, King seems to believe that we’re one invisible wall and a few hours away from tossing aside hundreds of years of the Rule of Law.

Despite all of these criticisms, Under The Dome is actually a very enjoyable novel. It moves briskly, the plot is interesting, the protagonists are likable, and the villains, while not believable, are at least sufficiently rotten. The politics of the book are ham-fisted and clunky, and the resolution of the plot is lame…over a thousand pages into this thing and they simply ask the aliens to stop? And they do? But it’s a diverting page-turner, and King is a much better writer than most of the people out there plowing the same field.

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The Day The Music Died

It was 51 years ago today that a plane crash took the life of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper. Forever memorialized by Don McLean’s “American Pie” as “The Day The Music Died,” this was the first and biggest tragedy in the young life of rock ‘n’ roll music.

We’ll never know what would have happened with Valens. He was a promising newcomer, only 17 years old, with a fine voice. He wrote two great songs, “Donna” and “Come On, Let’s Go” and made “La Bamba” into a classic rock song. Whether he would have done anything else is a question that will never be answered. He’s in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame but I think that has much more to do with his death and with the fact that he was the first Hispanic rock ‘n’ roller. Certainly his very slight output isn’t what got him through the door.

The Big Bopper, J.P. Richardson is an immortal for his classic novelty rock tune, “Chantilly Lace” and because he was on board the plane that snowy February night. His legacy in rock music is that of any one-hit wonder, but 51 years later, that one hit can still bring a smile to your face which is a whole lot more than most one-hit wonders can claim.

The great loss for music that night was Buddy Holly. It’s easy to forget now just how astounding Holly’s talent was. A white rocker who wrote his own songs and played lead guitar in his band was a sight to behold in 1959. The entire Crickets lineup of just guitars, bass, and drums set the template for the rock music of the Sixties. He was the first rocker to doubletrack his vocals (a trick later used by the Beatles before it became common). He was the first to put strings on a “rock” record. Country, ballads, charging rockers…Buddy Holly did it all and recorded and released a string of classic rock songs. Just look at the names and marvel at the talent: “That’ll Be The Day,” “Peggy Sue,” “Rave On,” “Heartbeat,” “Not Fade Away,” “Words Of Love,” “Maybe Baby,” “Everyday,” “Well, All Right,” “It’s So Easy”…and those are just some of the ones he wrote or co-wrote. Add in some that he didn’t write but made his own like “Oh, Boy!” and “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” and you’re talking about enough classics to fill a lengthy career.

Buddy Holly’s career was 18 months long. What he did in that time is simply staggering.

Add in Elvis’s stint in the Army, Little Richard’s discovery of religion, Jerry Lee Lewis’s scandalous marriage…and rock ‘n’ roll as a music form limped into the Sixties on its last legs. The early Sixties saw much great music, but only some of it could really be called “rock ‘n’ roll.” When the Beatles arrived they revitalized the form but at the same time they drove the final nail into the coffin. Rock ‘n’ roll as a music to dance to at the hop was dead, reinvented as heavier, headier “rock” music. Music to listen to, not dance to.

Rock ‘n’ roll music, the early primitive howling animal that burst out of its cage and into the popular consciousness with the drum snap that started “Rock Around The Clock,” may not have died with Buddy Holly, but it suffered a mortal blow. The music of the Sixties would build on the work done by Holly, Presley, Berry, et al, and expand it into dozens of different directions, some great, some not so great. Soon the Fifties rock ‘n’ rollers would sound tame and quaint in comparison to the Jefferson Airplanes, the Doors, the Led Zeppelins, and the Nirvanas of the world, and that’s really too bad.

The Sixties may or may not be the Golden Age of Rock Music depending on your personal preference, but I don’t think there’s any denying that the Fifties remain the Golden Age of Rock ‘N’ Roll.

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The Listening Post: December 2009

Rocking the Pod last month:

  • Before The Frost…Until The Freeze—The Black Crowes. When The Black Crowes burst onto the scene in 1990, their ambition was clear. They were dead set on reviving a classic rock sound best exemplified by bands like Faces and The Rolling Stones. The music was bluesy without being blues, soulful without being soul. Over the years they’ve followed that path with some great success (their soul-infused second album, The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion) and some real clunkers (the Zeppelin-isms of the unfortunate Lions). What the Crowes were never able to really convey was any sort of real authenticity. They always sounded like the guys who got their blues influences from bands like the Stones and Aerosmith. On Before The Frost, it sounds like the Crowes have stepped back and started listening not just to Muddy and The Wolf, but also to the old American folk music. It’s still a great big rock record, recorded mostly live in Levon Helms’s barn, but the Crowes have never sounded more like a part of the American canon of popular music. From the Middle Eastern-infused semi-instrumental “Aimless Peacock” that opens the LP, through the rock balladry of the the closing “The Last Place That Love Lives” this is a raw, rootsy album. There are plenty of guitar hero moves from Luther Dickinson (“Been A Long Time” “And The Band Played On”) mixed in with folk and country songs that sound like they could be covers of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music (“The Garden Gate,” “Appaloosa,” “Shine Along,” “Roll Old Jeremiah”). There are gentle, soulful ballads (“Lady Of Avenue A”), Stones-y disco (“I Ain’t Hiding” which starts like “Miss You” but ends in a ferocious jam), and country blues (“A Train Still Makes A Lonely Sound”). Through it all Chris Robinson’s vocals have never sounded better and the Crowes have never provided a more sympathetic backdrop. This was released as “Before The Frost” with a free download of “Until The Freeze” if you bought the regular CD. However, they also released the two combined with a different running order as a double LP, and that’s the version I think works best because the couple of clunkers that do show up (“The Last Place That Love Lives,” the generic “Kept My Soul”) are lost in the midst of so much material, where they would stand out more on shorter releases. Grade: A-
  • Scraps At Midnight—Mark Lanegan. At the current time, Jack White is getting a lot of well-deserved press for his modernistic, garage rock recasting of the blues. But White’s not the only one out there who is working in this field. Since the demise of the great Screaming Trees, singer Mark Lanegan has been quietly recording some of the darkest, scariest blues records this side of the Mississippi Delta. The fact that the music itself doesn’t conform to standard blues tropes is testament to his incredible talent. Scraps At Midnight is the sound of rehab, of coming down from your high and looking your demons square in the eye. All of the pain, desolation, and fear of the blues can be heard in these sparse, mostly acoustic songs. From the opening track (“Hospital Roll Call” where the only lyric is a horrifying repeated intonation of the word “sixteen”—allegedly Lanegan’s rehab room number) through the winding, Trees-ish psychedelia of the closer “Because Of This,” Lanegan takes the listener on a guided tour of Hell. It’s a harrowing listen, and not at all instantly likable. Like Neil Young’s Tonight’s The Night or John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, this isn’t an album to play when lounging by the pool at a family barbecue. Also like those albums, it reveals it’s greatness only with repeated plays. If you’re up for the ride, a peek into the heart of darkness, then this is modern blues that pays off on the effort. Grade: B+