Music

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The Listening Post: March 2010

Spring and more tunes are in the air:

  • Seconds Of Pleasure—Rockpile. Not quite a forgotten classic, this is still an excellent album of old fashioned, 1950’s-style rock ‘n’ roll. Dave Edmunds and Nick Lowe have always been rock and roll traditionalists, playing a brand of music that has clearly visible roots in rockabilly, Chuck Berry, and blues without sounding like they’re copying the style (a la The Stray Cats). The album opener “Teacher Teacher,” which was all over the airwaves when I was in high school, is the best moment on the album but there are gems aplenty, from “Heart” and “Play That Fast Thing (One More Time)” to “Wrong Again (Let’s Face It)” and “You Ain’t Nothin’ But Fine.” This is an album that may sound somewhat anachronistic today, but would still be a hit at any party. Not essential listening, but great fun from start to finish. Grade: B
  • Heaven Tonight—Cheap Trick. The thing about Cheap Trick is that they’re a frustrating band. Blessed with talent, and capable of writing incredibly hooky power pop, they were also very inconsistent. Heaven Tonight is considered by many to be their best studio album and if that’s the case, it’s too bad. It’s not that the album isn’t good. In fact, overall it’s very good. But that’s only because the good material on it is great. There’s some not-so-hot material on the album, like the sub-“Kashmir” riffing of the title track, or the “Peter Gunn”-esque “On Top Of The World,” or the arena-ready posturing of “Auf Wiedersehen” or the annoying call-and-response vocals that mar the otherwise very good “On The Radio.” But this mediocre material (and it’s mediocre, not awful) is saved by the sheer brilliance of “Stiff Competition,” the cover of The Move’s “California Man” (complete with the sly incorporation of another Move song, “Brontosaurus”), the bouncy “How Are You?” and, most of all, by “Surrender,” one of the greatest of all 1970s rock songs. Grade: B
  • The Sound Is In You—The Grip Weeds. Any band that names itself after John Lennon’s character in How I Won The War has got my attention. That’s way too cool a joke to ignore. But even without the name, 1998’s The Sound Is In You is a worthy listen. It’s a stellar album, filled with great musicianship and very strong songs. There is a very clear debt to the rock music of the 1960s, especially The Byrds and The Who. Much of this album sounds like a cross between those two bands. “Strange Bird” especially sounds like it was lifted completely off one of the first couple of Byrds albums. But from the real start of the album (not including a minute long “Intro”), “Every Minute,” to the fantastic closer “Inca,” there isn’t a disappointing note on the album. The band’s influences shine brightly throughout. In many ways you can play “Spot The Influence” on almost every track, from the blatantly obvious (“Strange Bird,” and their great take on the Buffalo Springfield rarity “Down To The Wire”) to the less obvious (the furious acoustic strumming that opens “What’s In Your Mind” harkens back to the Moody Blues’s “Question”, “Games” name checks the first Flying Burrito Brothers album), but the Grip Weeds manage to synthesize these influences and come out with a nicely updated take on 1960s garage rock. In that sense, they’re the garage rock equivalent to the more classic rock-oriented The Soundtrack Of Our Lives. The album rocks hard, but is never less than insanely tuneful and catchy. Fans of hard guitar rock, furious drumming, great harmony vocals, and hooks you could catch a whale with are well-advised to check this out. Grade: A
  • Bleach (Deluxe Edition)—Nirvana. There’s really no escaping the fact that Bleach is an album that many people want to be great, but which simply isn’t all that fantastic. After the towering Nevermind and the blistering In Utero, many Nirvana fans sought out Bleach expecting an unheard classic. The inclusion of the brilliant “About A Girl” on MTV Unplugged only helped whet the appetite. But Bleach gives new meaning to the term “spotty.” About half of the album is great or at least very, very good. “Blew,” “School,” “Love Buzz,” “Negative Creep,” “Swap Meet,” “Scoff,” “Mr. Moustache,” and “Downer” are all prime slabs of early grunge music. As songs, they are somewhat lacking but they more than pass the audition based on sheer power and conviction. Here was a young band full of sound and fury and even at this early stage Kurt Cobain’s razor-ripped throat was enough to make a believer out of anyone. Best of all was “About A Girl,” one of the very few songs that could have easily fit on the later Nirvana albums, a true masterpiece that showed Kurt’s devotion to the Beatles. The rest of the album? Strictly mediocre riff-fests like “Floyd The Barber,” “Big Cheese,” “Paper Cuts,” and “Sifting” show a band that still hadn’t quite settled into a songwriting groove. But now the album has been re-released with a 12-track live concert from 1990 attached and it’s a stunner. The live show is recorded better than the actual album, and includes most of the highlights from Bleach as well as more well-known later tracks such as “Dive,” “Sappy,” “Molly’s Lips” and “Been A Son.” The performance is never less than ferocious. Sure, it’s a sloppy live show. Nirvana was a pretty sloppy live band, and while Chad Channing does a great job he’s no Dave Grohl. But for a band like Nirvana, sloppiness could be an asset. Because the performance is so frenetic and furious, it never sounds choreographed. The very realness of it leaks from every note, including the missed notes. The live show is not on a par with their recently released performance from the Reading festival, and it’s not as good as the bootlegged 1991 show from Halloween, but it still gives a great opportunity to hear the young band before they knocked the music world off its axis. Grade: B for the original album. Grade: A for the live tracks.
  • Sin & Tonic—Mono Men. Lost in the Nirvana/Pearl Jam/Soundgarden/Alice In Chains tsunami that ushered alternative rock into the mainstream were Seattle’s Mono Men, who brought a more garage rock aesthetic to the punk/grunge movement. There’s no mistaking this album for any of the albums by Seattle’s first tier, but it’s a standout from the second tier, on a par with Flop’s Flop & The Fall Of The Mopsqueezer. Where Flop wrote power pop songs that placed equal emphasis on both the pop and the power, Mono Men dispense with the pop side of the equation and substitute a more roots-rock sound, even delving into quasi-surf instrumentals (“Monster”) and Blasters-meet-The-Clash rockabilly (“Waste O’ Time”). While there are only a few real standout tracks (“Mystery Girl,” “Hexed,” “Waste O’ Time”), the balance of the album is consistent in its excellence. Only the boring “Afterglow,” “Scotch,” and “No Way” drag the album down a bit and, of those three songs, only “No Way” goes nowhere. Grade: B+
  • Clairvoyance—Screaming Trees. One of the best bands from the Seattle “grunge” explosion was also one of the most overlooked. Sure, people knew “Nearly Lost You” because it was on the Singles soundtrack, but Screaming Trees had been a recording outfit since the mid-1980s and several of their albums, especially their later albums like Sweet Oblivion and Dust, were as great as anything that came out of the Northwest alt-rock scene. Clairvoyance is their debut album from 1986, and it only hints at how great the band would later become. The sound of the band was closer to the Los Angeles “Paisley Underground” sound than it was to Seattle grungers like Green River, and a very Doors-y keyboard is at least as prominent as the raging guitars. It’s also hard to believe that it’s Mark Lanegan on vocals…his voice on these early songs is very different than the whiskey-and-cigarettes vocals he would later use to such great effect. The highlights include “Orange Airplane,” “You Tell Me All These Things,” “Forever,” “Lonely Girl,” “The Turning,” and the title track. Unfortunately, none of these highlights are great, and much of the rest is very mediocre. The band had not yet figured out who they were at this point, and many of the songs are heavy on feel and light on actual songwriting. Tracks like “Standing On The Edge” and “Strange Out Here” sink like anchors, and while the remaining tracks are listenable they’re not particularly memorable. There’s promise here, but the Trees would do much, much better. Grade: B-
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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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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+