Friday, August 27, 2010
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Michael Been
Across the spread of rock music history, Michael Been will not be considered a milestone figure, but his band The Call enjoyed a notable shuffle through the limelight in the 1980's, with hits like "And The Walls Came Down", "Let The Day Begin" and "I Still Believe" - all of which I personally found compelling and surprisingly passionate offerings during a period where chilly detachment rules the rock singles charts. The band opened for notables like Peter Gabriel and Simple Minds.
Anyway, Been passed away of a heart attack a few days ago at a music festival in Belgium, where he was doing sound for his son's band, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. He was 60.
"I don't think there ARE any Russians/And there ain't no Yanks/Just corporate criminals/Playin' with tanks."
Indeed.
Anyway, Been passed away of a heart attack a few days ago at a music festival in Belgium, where he was doing sound for his son's band, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. He was 60.
"I don't think there ARE any Russians/And there ain't no Yanks/Just corporate criminals/Playin' with tanks."
Indeed.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
The critic as scorned diva
How exactly do you signal your acute disappointment to a publicist, who insisted you were on a guest list to a Los Lobos show, that you were in fact NOT on any such list, that the cheerless twentysomethings at will call and walking around with iPhones had never heard of you and couldn't care less that you had covered their show and helped in some small way to contribute to their pittence, without sounding like a whining drama queen primadonna asswipe?
This is something I should have an answer for, but curiously do not.
And the same publicist for whom said critic has extended himself this whole summer, and who is now faced with a meager four days to produce a cover story based on two interviews said publicist has done little to facilitate, thus guaranteeing a last minute firedrill for which they will bear absolutely zero accountability.
It seems my careful parsing of language must now be devoted to bullshit. Something here is just not right.
This is something I should have an answer for, but curiously do not.
And the same publicist for whom said critic has extended himself this whole summer, and who is now faced with a meager four days to produce a cover story based on two interviews said publicist has done little to facilitate, thus guaranteeing a last minute firedrill for which they will bear absolutely zero accountability.
It seems my careful parsing of language must now be devoted to bullshit. Something here is just not right.
Friday, August 13, 2010
RIP Richie Hayward
Good guy, great band, and a monster of a drummer. I struggle to think of another drummer who just loved his gig as much as Richie.
Cancer steals another. mf
Little Feat in their 70's prime.
Cancer steals another. mf
Little Feat in their 70's prime.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
What took so long?
Caught a flash of Michael Franti's latest hippie-carib hit song on a beer commercial last night. It sounded like...this is where it belonged, all along. Funny, that.
Monday, August 9, 2010
Letting go the Haight
Saw this piece on MSNBC today, on the 15th anniversary of Jerry Garcia's death.
Joel Selvin was one of the last of a dying breed, a fulltime major city rock critic, and most of the time not a bad one. He certainly had the good fortune to write in San Francisco during and after the city’s great rock epochs, and as such, he is well qualified to be quoted as an expert on the Grateful Dead, who were, despite the broad reach of their repute well after the fact, favorite sons during a period when the city’s rock scene had its pick. Most critics, incidentally, dismissed the Dead with varying intensity levels of scorn.
So I wouldn’t begrudge Selvin’s claim to longtime scrutiny of the Dead, but I was a little disappointed to see the same inch-deep canonization about Jerry Garcia on the 15th anniversary of his death you could have gotten from anyone. This in particular really bothered me:
In fact, I can think of any number of artists who, whether they got famous or not, stayed "true" to what they were, depending on what you really mean by that, or what they thought they were on the planet to do. Coltrane, Miles, Thelonious Monk, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard...even less artistically influential artists. Personal faves like Leo Kottke and Richard Thompson come to mind. Lou Reed. Pete Seeger, for chrissakes.
Garcia and the rest of the band lived a hippie lifestyle in the mid 60’s, but graduated to Marin County and BMW’s as wealthier grown men. Everyone is entitled to the comforts afforded by years of hard work, we don’t take issue with that, but it seems to me that much of the stodgy materialism and flat American conventions at the center of the bullseye of the hippie counter culture is based in precisely that. So it couldn’t be that the message was entirely one of rejecting some middle class comfort. What was it, besides 'have a good time and don't hurt anyone?' Because if it was just that, maybe his cultural influence is overstated. If it was ‘do what you do, regardless of what happens to you in the meantime’, we’re not sure that’s such a great idea.
If you're a Deadhead, you believe it's a virtue that a chubby, middle-aged guy keeps touring and keeps playing 30 year old songs despite failing marriages, lousy and deteriorating health, drug busts, etc. The music matters more than that.
It may be criminally uncool to suggest that it could be just as admirable for a guy to say, 'Hey, I'd like to have a life and a relationship and improve my health, and so I'm going to unplug for a while to rediscover those virtues.' Jerry did that a little, and went some distance to regain control of his body, but we don’t hear Selvin giving him credit for that. We’re not cheerleading for rehab or detoxification, but we’re also persuaded by landing epoch-topping garlands on people simply because they put their work – artistic or otherwise - above their own family and their own health isn’t necessarily the most generous application of life lessons. I’m not sure most Deadheads would reserve the same reverence for an insurance salesman who worked and partied himself to death at 55.
Musicians, in the main, are generally not particularly remarkable people, at least insofar as they often have limited skillsets with which to reinvent themselves. This isn't a slam - the fact is, fan worship tends to cast a lot of virtue onto artists that is often misplaced, and it can be challenging and sort of un-fun (even for a critic-fan like Selvin) to simply regard a virtuoso musical artist as being just that, without trying to turn them into cultural saviors.
And I would propose that the disciplines that make one a truly virtuosic musical artist in fact hinder one from personal reinvention. Concentration, self-criticism, deep immersion into one's artistic oeuvre, an enforced myopia. Reinvention, whether for good or ill, would comes more easily to someone who doesn't know who he is in the first place, or had lost faith with his primary mission. He may end up a better artist in the end, perhaps, but you can write off that cultural savior thing.
This quote also bothered me.
Please. The whole "digital era" in contemporary music wouldn't exist if it weren't for thousands of artists toiling in obscurity, playing "music for music's sake". Selvin seems to embrace this notion that there's the Dead, and there's Lady Gaga, and really not much in between relative to the machinery of contemporary music distribution, which has broken down to the point that those toiling in obscurity probably have never had it better in terms of reaching their fans and latent fans, if they know how to coax the technology. What a pity he was quoted like this, because as much as I'm liable to complain that Selvin suffers a bit of Dead-fan myopia, I cannot believe he believes Garcia is the only or nearly only guy in contemporary popular music who pursued a career resistant to commercial influence and its corrosive effect on artistic substance.
It may well be that a generation or two of American kids who were raised on commercial art, or least marinated in it, saw the Dead as the anti-rock star heroes; sure they were, but there were plenty of other anti-rock star heroes whose music was far less palatable to mass audiences and thus regularly escape critical canonization.
It also helped that the Dead matured and graduated more less intact from a chaotic and self-immolating psychedelic scene, with all the cachet of 60's cool and thankfully little of the narcissistic craziness that brought down many of their contemporaries. And as good as some of the Dead's songs were, and some of them are undeniably treasures, some of that was at least as much Hunter's work as Garcia's, in a lot of cases. Hunter gets mentioned here, but in passing.
From a critical standpoint, I've been personally assailed by Dead skeptics as being a "Deadhead", which was meant as an insult at the time that I didn't take as such, and I've been criticized by genuine Deadheads for "not getting it", or misunderstanding the community, the music, the message. I have always actually kind of appreciated being semi-loathed or derided from both sides.
My view of the Dead is this: perhaps surprisingly, I think a case could be made that the Dead are the greatest American rock band, in terms of longevity, resistance to commercial influence, stalwartness of its fan base and overall quality of the material. I'd argue that case on its merits, if not necessarily with much passion....
I also see them as a connection between what was primarily white, upper middle class kids to a kind of idealized 60's tribalism that resonated with them at a mythological level. Following the Dead around wasn't really an option if you were 18 and had to work at the factory to support your young family. Plenty of American youth, unfortunate enough to spend their lives on the harder side of certain economic and educational realities, were NOT plugged into the Dead phenomenon. They couldn’t be.
For all the deeply ingrained skepticism about materialism and middle class conformity that coursed through the Dead subculture, it was completely and entirely a phenomenon built on postwar prosperity, a kind of American paganism posed against the deities of suburban complacency and materialism. The fact that it cast a skeptical eye on the pillars of middle class values is irrelevant - hell, it would have to. As long as there's a culture, there has to be a counter culture. The Dead, quite unintentionally, benefited by the disillusion and indifference that a lot of children of relative prosperity had toward that prosperity - infuse some ancient American mythology, epic concerts, a tight weave of like-minded fans, plenty of recreational stimulants, pleasing iconography, and you've got yourself a new religion. Nice hymns, unobjectionable sacraments, high priests, little in the way of disconsonant resistance and an embracing community. There were believers, true believers, and adherents of convenience, stopping in for the party. A lot of those.
But I wouldn't credit Jerry Garcia with strategizing or even inventing all this, even if writers like Selvin credit him for presiding benevolently over it. He was a guitar player and songsmith of considerable import, a direct link to the yielding of 1950's American culture into the questioning and iconoclastic spirit of Kerouac and Ginsberg, the proto-hippie, leading a band very capably through good and bad, commercial indifference, many years of deeply insular woodshedding, and for all that he deserves great credit. His influence was significant, musically...culturally, I do see his success as a byproduct of the world he resisted and poked some gentle, good natured hippie humor at. He didn't take very good care of himself, and had a little trouble managing his own life. Lots of people do, especially people who spend many years doing little else than playing rock music and taking recreational drugs. Garcia was, to some extent, the ultimate Deadhead, and his sad demise in some ways belies the emptiness that a lot of cults ultimately mask.
His canonization was inevitable, and I won't complain too loudly about it. I liked his music but only saw the band twice. I think there actually IS a story about the Dead, and most rock bands from that day cannot really make that claim.
But I do wish the narative would grow a little, expand a little, and that those who spend so much time witnessing the Dead and writing about the Dead from the front row, could manage to put them into a broader context.
Joel Selvin was one of the last of a dying breed, a fulltime major city rock critic, and most of the time not a bad one. He certainly had the good fortune to write in San Francisco during and after the city’s great rock epochs, and as such, he is well qualified to be quoted as an expert on the Grateful Dead, who were, despite the broad reach of their repute well after the fact, favorite sons during a period when the city’s rock scene had its pick. Most critics, incidentally, dismissed the Dead with varying intensity levels of scorn.
So I wouldn’t begrudge Selvin’s claim to longtime scrutiny of the Dead, but I was a little disappointed to see the same inch-deep canonization about Jerry Garcia on the 15th anniversary of his death you could have gotten from anyone. This in particular really bothered me:
“Jerry turned out to be an enduring American archetype,” Selvin said. “He was one of the few people of his era who stayed true to himself and pursued a steady mission, undeterred by fame, fortune, marital problems, and all that kind of stuff. Jerry was about what Jerry was about in 1965 as he was when he died. And I think that’s the sort of consistent message that you need to have that kind of impact.”
In fact, I can think of any number of artists who, whether they got famous or not, stayed "true" to what they were, depending on what you really mean by that, or what they thought they were on the planet to do. Coltrane, Miles, Thelonious Monk, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard...even less artistically influential artists. Personal faves like Leo Kottke and Richard Thompson come to mind. Lou Reed. Pete Seeger, for chrissakes.
Garcia and the rest of the band lived a hippie lifestyle in the mid 60’s, but graduated to Marin County and BMW’s as wealthier grown men. Everyone is entitled to the comforts afforded by years of hard work, we don’t take issue with that, but it seems to me that much of the stodgy materialism and flat American conventions at the center of the bullseye of the hippie counter culture is based in precisely that. So it couldn’t be that the message was entirely one of rejecting some middle class comfort. What was it, besides 'have a good time and don't hurt anyone?' Because if it was just that, maybe his cultural influence is overstated. If it was ‘do what you do, regardless of what happens to you in the meantime’, we’re not sure that’s such a great idea.
If you're a Deadhead, you believe it's a virtue that a chubby, middle-aged guy keeps touring and keeps playing 30 year old songs despite failing marriages, lousy and deteriorating health, drug busts, etc. The music matters more than that.
It may be criminally uncool to suggest that it could be just as admirable for a guy to say, 'Hey, I'd like to have a life and a relationship and improve my health, and so I'm going to unplug for a while to rediscover those virtues.' Jerry did that a little, and went some distance to regain control of his body, but we don’t hear Selvin giving him credit for that. We’re not cheerleading for rehab or detoxification, but we’re also persuaded by landing epoch-topping garlands on people simply because they put their work – artistic or otherwise - above their own family and their own health isn’t necessarily the most generous application of life lessons. I’m not sure most Deadheads would reserve the same reverence for an insurance salesman who worked and partied himself to death at 55.
Musicians, in the main, are generally not particularly remarkable people, at least insofar as they often have limited skillsets with which to reinvent themselves. This isn't a slam - the fact is, fan worship tends to cast a lot of virtue onto artists that is often misplaced, and it can be challenging and sort of un-fun (even for a critic-fan like Selvin) to simply regard a virtuoso musical artist as being just that, without trying to turn them into cultural saviors.
And I would propose that the disciplines that make one a truly virtuosic musical artist in fact hinder one from personal reinvention. Concentration, self-criticism, deep immersion into one's artistic oeuvre, an enforced myopia. Reinvention, whether for good or ill, would comes more easily to someone who doesn't know who he is in the first place, or had lost faith with his primary mission. He may end up a better artist in the end, perhaps, but you can write off that cultural savior thing.
This quote also bothered me.
Garcia’s message, said Selvin, was largely one of “music for music’s sake,” which has been “virtually eradicated in the digital era.” Whether playing with the Grateful Dead, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, the Jerry Garcia Band or his bluegrass ensemble, Old and in the Way, Garcia played on, oblivious to the world of commercial music.
Please. The whole "digital era" in contemporary music wouldn't exist if it weren't for thousands of artists toiling in obscurity, playing "music for music's sake". Selvin seems to embrace this notion that there's the Dead, and there's Lady Gaga, and really not much in between relative to the machinery of contemporary music distribution, which has broken down to the point that those toiling in obscurity probably have never had it better in terms of reaching their fans and latent fans, if they know how to coax the technology. What a pity he was quoted like this, because as much as I'm liable to complain that Selvin suffers a bit of Dead-fan myopia, I cannot believe he believes Garcia is the only or nearly only guy in contemporary popular music who pursued a career resistant to commercial influence and its corrosive effect on artistic substance.
It may well be that a generation or two of American kids who were raised on commercial art, or least marinated in it, saw the Dead as the anti-rock star heroes; sure they were, but there were plenty of other anti-rock star heroes whose music was far less palatable to mass audiences and thus regularly escape critical canonization.
It also helped that the Dead matured and graduated more less intact from a chaotic and self-immolating psychedelic scene, with all the cachet of 60's cool and thankfully little of the narcissistic craziness that brought down many of their contemporaries. And as good as some of the Dead's songs were, and some of them are undeniably treasures, some of that was at least as much Hunter's work as Garcia's, in a lot of cases. Hunter gets mentioned here, but in passing.
From a critical standpoint, I've been personally assailed by Dead skeptics as being a "Deadhead", which was meant as an insult at the time that I didn't take as such, and I've been criticized by genuine Deadheads for "not getting it", or misunderstanding the community, the music, the message. I have always actually kind of appreciated being semi-loathed or derided from both sides.
My view of the Dead is this: perhaps surprisingly, I think a case could be made that the Dead are the greatest American rock band, in terms of longevity, resistance to commercial influence, stalwartness of its fan base and overall quality of the material. I'd argue that case on its merits, if not necessarily with much passion....
I also see them as a connection between what was primarily white, upper middle class kids to a kind of idealized 60's tribalism that resonated with them at a mythological level. Following the Dead around wasn't really an option if you were 18 and had to work at the factory to support your young family. Plenty of American youth, unfortunate enough to spend their lives on the harder side of certain economic and educational realities, were NOT plugged into the Dead phenomenon. They couldn’t be.
For all the deeply ingrained skepticism about materialism and middle class conformity that coursed through the Dead subculture, it was completely and entirely a phenomenon built on postwar prosperity, a kind of American paganism posed against the deities of suburban complacency and materialism. The fact that it cast a skeptical eye on the pillars of middle class values is irrelevant - hell, it would have to. As long as there's a culture, there has to be a counter culture. The Dead, quite unintentionally, benefited by the disillusion and indifference that a lot of children of relative prosperity had toward that prosperity - infuse some ancient American mythology, epic concerts, a tight weave of like-minded fans, plenty of recreational stimulants, pleasing iconography, and you've got yourself a new religion. Nice hymns, unobjectionable sacraments, high priests, little in the way of disconsonant resistance and an embracing community. There were believers, true believers, and adherents of convenience, stopping in for the party. A lot of those.
But I wouldn't credit Jerry Garcia with strategizing or even inventing all this, even if writers like Selvin credit him for presiding benevolently over it. He was a guitar player and songsmith of considerable import, a direct link to the yielding of 1950's American culture into the questioning and iconoclastic spirit of Kerouac and Ginsberg, the proto-hippie, leading a band very capably through good and bad, commercial indifference, many years of deeply insular woodshedding, and for all that he deserves great credit. His influence was significant, musically...culturally, I do see his success as a byproduct of the world he resisted and poked some gentle, good natured hippie humor at. He didn't take very good care of himself, and had a little trouble managing his own life. Lots of people do, especially people who spend many years doing little else than playing rock music and taking recreational drugs. Garcia was, to some extent, the ultimate Deadhead, and his sad demise in some ways belies the emptiness that a lot of cults ultimately mask.
His canonization was inevitable, and I won't complain too loudly about it. I liked his music but only saw the band twice. I think there actually IS a story about the Dead, and most rock bands from that day cannot really make that claim.
But I do wish the narative would grow a little, expand a little, and that those who spend so much time witnessing the Dead and writing about the Dead from the front row, could manage to put them into a broader context.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Days off, and not really off
Spent Friday between conference calls and paperwork for day gig, and assembling a piece on Jamie Janover for BM - the piece went okay, generally, although I struggled mightily for a lede and came up with something a little lame. I hope it flies, or at least comes back to me in time to rewrite.
Los Lobos today - somewhat garbled and typically lowkey interview with Steve Berlin on Wednesday. One of the things I like about these guys is their complete and pathological refusal to get real excited about what they do. Makes my life as a writer somewhat more difficult, but an admirable quality. We do what we do, we've been doing it for a while, we're glad a few people like it. Anything else?
Los Lobos today - somewhat garbled and typically lowkey interview with Steve Berlin on Wednesday. One of the things I like about these guys is their complete and pathological refusal to get real excited about what they do. Makes my life as a writer somewhat more difficult, but an admirable quality. We do what we do, we've been doing it for a while, we're glad a few people like it. Anything else?
Monday, August 2, 2010
Pretty sure
...we're getting close to the end here. It bothers me that this should be so, but part of me also accepts it.
I mean, seriously. Isn't it time to yield to younger, more deeply passionate and articulate writers who attribute every quote and place their commas and ellipses properly?
I mean, seriously. Isn't it time to yield to younger, more deeply passionate and articulate writers who attribute every quote and place their commas and ellipses properly?
OK
Frisell piece went pretty well. Bill is one of those guys, and amongst those with careers as lengthy as his there aren't very many, who seems perpetually puzzled that people ever want to interview him.
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