classic rock

Song of the Week: "Wanting and Waiting"

Dusty Wright — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 21:05:36 +0000

Song of the Week: "Wanting and Waiting" Dusty Wright March 28, 2024 - 17:05

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The Brothers Robinson (Chris & Rich) are back, albeit 11 years after releasing a double live album, Wiser for the Time (2013), and taking no effin' prisoners. These are real musicians playing real instruments with no auto-tuned vocals. "Wanting and Waiting" off of Happiness Bastards (2024) is brimming with classic Crowes' hard rock swagger with killer guitar hooks and soulful background vocals. They're missing the "thump" of original founding band member drummer Steve Gorman being left out in the cold. It's too bad; my only complaint about the song's arrangement is that they miss his power and energy. (If you've not read Mr. Gorman's memoir, do so immediately.) On tour now; check out dates here.

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Song of the Week (Perhaps, Year): "Angry"

Ian Alterman — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 23:40:26 +0000

Song of the Week (Perhaps, Year): "Angry" Ian Alterman September 11, 2023 - 19:40

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I pretty much gave up on the Rolling Stones after Tattoo You (1981), which was the last truly great album the band released. Sure, they continued to write the occasional hit or otherwise good/great song, but there was a decided lack of cohesion and creativity, and none of the later albums really "stuck."

So I am extremely pleased to review the first single ("Angry") from their soon-to-be-released album, Hackney Diamonds, their first album in over seven years. If "Angry" is more than a one-off hit, then the album promises to be their best in over 40 years. And they are taking no chances; just as Dolly Parton has done for her upcoming (amazing) rock and roll album, the Stones have brought in some "ringers" to spice things up, including Don Was, Lady Gaga, Sir Elton John, Stevie Wonder, and Sir Paul McCartney. The band also pays tribute to Charlie Watts by using some of the drum tracks he recorded before his death in 2021. How can they miss with a line-up like that?

"Angry" opens not with a new, hot riff by Keith Richards (one almost expects it), but with two extremely common chord sequences -- which the band nevertheless manages to make sound completely fresh and new, and which they use as the foundation of the majority of the song. It is so unexpectedly perfect that it is almost spine-tingling. The lyrics are simple, but effective (basically, "why are we angry at each other?") and are delivered with real punch by Jagger, who is in superb form (at 80 years of age!).

Since any good rock and roll video has to feature a gorgeous young lady, preferably in leather, this one features leather miniskirt-clad actress Sydney Sweeney (Euphoria, The White Lotus) riding around L.A. in a convertible, singing along with the band, while they sing the song from the billboards she passes. Although this concept has been done before, it has never been done as well or as effectively as it is here. Once again, the Stones show why they are who they are, and why they can never be counted out.

I have not looked forward to a Rolling Stones album with such anticipation as I have now in over 40 years.

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Get Back!

Webmaster — Tue, 22 Dec 2020 16:06:41 +0000

Get Back! Webmaster December 22, 2020 - 11:06

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Still from The Beatles: Get Back documentary (Walt Disney Studios)

New Zealand's Uber director Peter Jackson has teased us with what might be the ultimate Beatles' film. This film will be a reimagined Get Back documentary that was originally shot and released by UK-filmmaker Michael Lindsay-Hogg in 1970 to document that album's release. Most folks have seen the rooftop concert captured by Hogg, and the negativity that it generated, but few have seen the behind-the-scenes fun -- yes, fun -- The Beatles had while recording their final album as a group.

The Beatles: Get Back takes us back in time to The Beatles’ intimate recording sessions during a pivotal moment in music history. The film draws from hours of material originally captured for director Hogg. One can imagine filmmaker Jackson's attention to detail will be on full display when the film is finally released.

The release date is scheduled for August 2021 by Walt Disney Studios.

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Younger Times

Steve Holtje — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 23:22:44 +0000

Younger Times Steve Holtje November 30, 2020 - 18:22

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Neil Young: Archives II (1972-1976) (Reprise)

This much-anticipated and very pricey ten-CD box set has arrived, at least for people who pre-ordered it from Neil’s website. (Yes, I did.) It’s a deluxe version, it turns out; limited to 3000 copies, it sold out in two days, and eventually it was announced that a less deluxe version will be available in March. The wait probably would have driven me crazy, since the first Archives box was such a treasure trove of rarities. Young was hinting at such releases decades ago. I’m pretty sure the first reference was in a 1979 interview in Rolling Stone (which is behind a paywall) where he jokingly called it “the bus crash tapes” that would come out after he died. Fortunately that tragedy wasn’t necessary and Neil’s been assembling these eccentric retrospectives himself.

Archives II includes three whole CDs that were recently released: the shelved (and uneven) studio album Homegrown, and the concert albums Tuscaloosa (1973) and Roxy: Tonight’s the Night Live (1973). More about them in the sequence of the box. There are 131 tracks total, with 63 previously unreleased; 12 songs are released for the first time.

Including only one recording (“Yonder Stands the Sinner”) from the official release of Time Fades Away, the first disc continues the short shrift Neil has given to that live album, which holds bad memories for him. There are, however, ample previously unreleased alternate versions of that LP’s songs. However, for me the prizes are the TFA tour Stray Gators live versions of two songs on Neil’s first solo album, “Last Trip to Tulsa” and “The Loner.” The former in particular was a downer, a rambling solo acoustic version that seemed like a bad early-Dylan imitation or, at least, too whimsical for its own good; “The Loner” of course is a classic brooding Young tale of alienation, but staid. Here, both are transformed into rollicking rockers. Elsewhere on CD 1 there are very early solo versions (possibly demos) of songs that eventually emerged differently ("Letter from ‘Nam" = "Long Walk Home"; "Monday Morning" = "Last Dance"), a solo demo of TFA’s “The Bridge,” a studio band take on “TFA,” three fine never-before-heard songs from one of Young’s peak periods, a superb solo concert version of TFA’s “L.A.” that includes an amusing spoken intro, and a CSNY version of “Human Highway” from their aborted attempt at a second solo album.

Tuscaloosa (1973) acts as something of a stand-in for Time Fades Away. As mentioned, it’s from the tour that produced that album (reminder: TFA consisted entirely of songs never before on a Young LP; it wasn’t the usual cash-in rehash of already released material performed live). Recorded five weeks before the concert on TFA, it opens with Neil solo, playing two older songs; then comes a band set with the Stray Gators, focusing on five songs from his then-current studio release, Harvest. It does, however, include three of the more rousing TFA songs: the title track, “Don’t Be Denied,” and “Lookout Joe.” We also get an early version of “New Mama.” It’s a fine album, though a disappointingly short considering we could have also been given more tracks from other stops on the tour to fill out the CD length.

The Tonight’s the Night-era material might seem like the biggest draw for fans, that being Young’s most legendary album, but aside from the Roxy show (for folks who don’t already have it), there’s little here to excite. It does not start well, with an extremely ramshackle rendition of “Speakin’ Out” (here titled Speakin’ Out Jam”) from the first night of the sessions (August 25, 1973) that suggests nobody knew the song, some were drunk, or (probably) both. Throw in tape-speed glitches and that it is cut off before the end, and its inclusion is perverse. But it does document the process of the notorious Tonight’s the Night sessions in all their drug- and alcohol-fueled and tragedy-inspired grimy glory. It’s as though Young is telling us, “You thought the takes we released were sloppy? THIS is sloppy.” And he includes the released take of “Speakin’ Out,” which is magnificent. In fact, he includes most of the released tracks.

Young fanatics have long been tantalized by this story told by Scott Young (Neil’s father) in his book Neil and Me: “Ten years after the original recording, David Briggs and I talked about Tonight's the Night, on which he had shared the producer credit with Neil. At home a couple of weeks earlier he had come across the original tape, the one that wasn't put out. ‘I want to tell you, it is a handful. It is unrelenting. There is no relief in it at all. It does not release you for one second. It's like some guy having you by the throat from the first note, and all the way to the end.’ After all the real smooth stuff Neil had been doing, David felt most critics and others simply failed to read what they should have into Tonight's the Night – that it was an artist making a giant growth step. Neil came in during this conversation, which was in his living room. When David stopped Neil said, ‘You've got that original? I thought it was lost. I've never been able to find it. We'll bring it out someday, that original.’” One wonders what it could possibly be other than more material from August 25th, unless it’s the August 26th tracks (minus the song discussed in the next paragraph) in the different order in which they’re presented here, without the non-8/26 tracks on the original release (the Danny Whitten song “Downtown” live with Crazy Horse in 1970, included in the first Archives box; the solo Neil track “Borrowed Tune” from a December ’73 session, included on CD 5 of this set, and “Lookout Joe” with the Stray Gators, studio take MIA from both boxes, though a live version is included in the Tuscaloosa concert). That sequence could be called “unrelenting.”

However, there is a surprising, and welcome, interpolation: an appearance by Canadian compatriot Joni Mitchell, singing a then-as-yet-unreleased Joni song, “Raised on Robbery,” accompanied not by the slick jazzers on her familiar version released as a single that December and on her LP Court and Spark in January 1974, but by Neil’s band of the time, dubbed the Santa Monica Flyers: Neil on guitar and vocal harmony (elsewhere piano), Ben Keith on lap slide guitar (elsewhere pedal steel), Nils Lofgren on piano and harmony (elsewhere guitar), and the Crazy Horse rhythm section of bassist Billy Talbot and drummer Ralph Molina. In fact, it was recorded on 8/26/73, the same night most of the released takes of Tonight’s the Night were recorded. One wonders, naturally, how this came about (beyond Young having played with Mitchell at a couple of shows that month), but the book (yes, a full-sized hardcover book, the accommodation of which requires the packaging to be much larger than the CDs can fill on their side) has zero commentary by Neil or any writer to explain such matters, or any matters. It does, though, include an abundance of photos, newspaper articles from the era, Neil’s handwritten lyrics, a discography of sorts for the period, and the tracklist with personnel.

Roxy: Tonight’s the Night Live (1973) now includes “The Losing End,” not on the separate release. The album was drawn from three nights of shows, so I again feel like people buying it for the second time deserve more material for a full CD, but at least that one early song redone is of interest. The band knows the music better but is still loose, and Young keeps up an amusing sleazy-entertainer shtick.

The CD titled Walk On has all but one track from On the Beach, Young’s greatest album IMHO (missing is "See the Sky About to Rain"). Also here are “Winterlong,” released on Decade; “Bad Fog of Loneliness,” a former rarity released in several versions in recent years and here appearing in yet another previously unreleased take, this time with Crazy Horse; the solo track “Traces,” which I don’t recall from other releases; and a solo version of English folksong “Greensleeves.”

After this we’re into the 1974 CSNY tour and anticipations of Zuma. The following disc picks up with some June 15-16 sessions, two solos on the 15th and four duos with bassist Tim Drummond on the 16th. “Love/Art Blues,” a bit of doggerel that Young seems overly fond of – there are THREE versions on this CD and no overlap with the previously released versions – is a trifle, but then comes an early version of “Through My Sails,” a song on Zuma with a slightly altered structure and CSN harmonies; here it’s sparse and haunting. “Homefires” is a “new” song, Zuma tune “Pardon My Heart” makes an early appearance, and the very slight “Hawaiian Sunset” a.k.a. "Maui Mama" is a tad hokey. Then, though, comes “L.A. Girls and Ocean Boys,” a superb song apparently abandoned after Young used one of its lines in Zuma’s “Danger Bird.”

With CSNY, we get a previously unreleased version of the great and, until the release of the CSNY Live 1974 box, rare “Pushed It Over the Edge” and a tweaked mix of “On the Beach” that includes no CSN harmonies. Then it’s November ’74 and a stretch of mostly solo Young tunes mostly heard for the first time here; he was really on a roll, they are all excellent songs, and it is amazing that “Frozen Man” had to wait this long for a release. Back to bands for December sessions; one track pairs Crazy Horse with Ben Keith, the rest Keith-focused bands similar to the Harvest sound, some with Levon Helm on drums (including “The Old Homestead,” which Young released on Hawks & Doves in the following decade. This brings us to Homegrown, which I reviewed in June (http://culturecatch.com/node/3951), and takes things a bit out of chronological order.

Zuma gets much love here; I suspect that we can tell which albums Neil is happiest with based on how many tracks are included in these boxes. Eight of its nine tracks are on CD 8, whereas the closing “Through My Sails” is only represented by the solo version programmed earlier in the set. Does Young now wish he hadn’t had CSN add vocal harmonies? Of course, anybody who would buy this box already owns Zuma, so for all its greatness, the reader is presumably more curious about the non-Zuma material. It’s fascinating: early Crazy Horse versions of Rust Never Sleeps classics "Ride My Llama," “Powderfinger,” and “Pocahontas,” Horse renditions of “Kansas” (better that the Homegrown version) and “Hawaii” (more mundane than the haunting 1976 solo recording was released on Hitchhiker), the previously unheard "Born to Run" (recorded seven weeks before Springsteen released his song and album of the same name), an odd “Too Far Gone” with Frank Sampedro on mandolin, and the beautiful voice-and-piano "No One Seems to Know."

After that, we’re into a mix of American Stars & Bars, aborted CSNY, Stills-Young Band, and Comes a Time sessions. In particular, all of Young’s songs on the Stills-Young Band’s Long May You Run are heard; the title track and the great “Fountainbleu” in the LP versions, “Ocean Girl” and "Midnight on the Bay" in mixes preceding the elimination of Crosby and Nash’s vocals (the former has a much cheesier instrumental arrangement than the LP version; the latter song is also heard in a live solo rendition from a March London show; two other March live performances here include a banjo take on “Mellow My Mind”), and "Let It Shine" in a different but C&N-less mix. There are also two outtakes, including “Traces,” more fleshed out in this band rendition than the more intimate version heard earlier on this box. “Stringman,” recorded live by David Briggs in London, has studio overdubs Briggs added two days later. Recorded the same day as those overdubs is the pretty solo “Mediterranean,” heard here for the first time, with overdubbing allowing Young to be heard on both electric and acoustic guitars (there’s also some uncredited piano). Finally, there’s another CSNY stab at “Human Highway,” with Stills contributing some nice bottleneck slide guitar (sounds like a resonator model).

The tenth and final disc combines concert recordings from London (solo at the Odeon, 3/31/76) for the first five tracks and Tokyo (with Crazy Horse, 3/10-11/76) for the other five. (The rumor is that Sampedro and Young were dosed on LSD for one of the Bukokan shows.) It totals just 44 minutes, so again one wishes more tracks had been included. Perhaps it’s to keep it vinyl LP length... Putting the solo acoustic tracks first despite their later recording date preserves the structure of Young’s concerts, where he’d start solo before bringing the band out. He reaches all the way back to his first LP for “The Old Laughing Lady,” a bit too rollicking folkie in tone to do the lyrics as much justice as Jack Nitzsche’s arrangement originally did. The other four tunes sound better. The Crazy Horse half rips ferociously and is a welcome addition to their discography...too bad there’s not more.

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The World Turned Upside Down, Part I

Tony Alterman — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 13:29:49 +0000

The World Turned Upside Down, Part I Tony Alterman September 17, 2020 - 09:29

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The popular music we grow up with is the music that matters most. It defines us in a way that books and artworks rarely do. As times change, and the music with them, we tend to feel that the music of our own time had some special ingredient, some quality that is lacking in what came after. We can admire and even love the music of later generations (and of earlier as well) but it just doesn't simmer in our souls in the same way.

Nothing is quite so fine an occasion to return to the sounds of our youth, and revel in what we had, as an anniversary. Round-number years are great opportunities for them, and there hasn't been a rounder year than 2020 since 2000, so why not go for broke? It is, after all, the golden anniversary of the year 1970, and that feels like an extraordinary opportunity to relive the sounds of times gone by. Break out the beer, and make it a Heineken or St. Pauli Girl, because this was long before supermarkets lined shelves with local craft beers. Get some chips, put on the headphones and load up that old turntable with some seriously scratched vinyl. It's going to be a terrific trip down memory lane.

Wait -- who said "Terrifically awful!"? Are there hecklers in the audience? Or could it be those very Baby Boomers who, according to my eloquent preamble above, were the 1970 adolescents who should now be in high celebratory mode? Is it possible they do not look back with sentimental affection at this key musical decade of their youth?

Of course, it was a tough year, in many ways. There was the War in Vietnam, which expanded that year to Cambodia. There were the notorious shootings of students at Kent State (by the National Guard) and Jackson State (by the local police). A cyclone in what is now Bangladesh killed half a million people over 10 days, roughly the death toll of the first six months of the COVID-19 epidemic. (George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh the following year was in part a response to the cyclone's devastation, though the toll in the war of liberation that followed was much greater.) There was a near-disaster with a space shuttle, and a real disaster when some Weathermen playing with explosives blew themselves up in a Greenwich Village townhouse.

All of this was disturbing, but it is probably not what makes the Woodstock Generation grimace at a year in music whose spiritual beginning might be the Altamont concert disaster on December 6, 1969, presaging the following year's banquet of blood and gore. Then what's eating us about the big 7-0?

The Year the Music Died?

First of all, 1970 will be remembered as the year the greatest rock band in history officially broke up -- a sour enough note to put a damper on any celebrations, though it wasn't official until the last day of the year, when Paul McCartney filed suit. (Be on the lookout for apocalyptic echoes this New Year's Eve.) But the sense had been growing throughout the year that they were done. Moreover, it was the year that both Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died, and their rather ignominious deaths turned a warped mirror on a youth culture that defined itself by its musical heroes. And other heroes did little to compensate. Cream had already gone to pieces; so had the Animals. Brian Jones, original leader of the Rolling Stones, drowned in a swimming pool in July 1969. In 1970, Diana Ross left the Supremes, Garfunkel left Simon, Dave Clark and the Five went separate ways and the Turtles crawled off in different directions. Bob Dylan, after a string of albums in the sixties that established him as an American songwriting genius, was in the midst of a creative funk that wouldn't end until 1975 with Blood on the Tracks. Even Led Zeppelin, having left the starting gate in a fury with two earth-shaking albums, released what remains their least impressive effort.

But perhaps the worst of it was that what had seemed, oddly enough, like an organic whole fragmented into many directions, none of which obviously had the creative spirit and musical quality that characterized what had gone before. That entity we called "Sixties music" was probably an illusion, or at best a Cartesian product of post-British Invasion rock, California psychedelia, Motown, Macon and the New York folk scene. Nevertheless, the impression set in that we were leaving behind contrapuntal harmonies and old Fender tube amps and poignant acoustic guitar chords in alternate tunings, and into the breach rushed a battalion of noisemakers (Grand Funk, the James Gang, Black Sabbath, Wishbone Ash...) who then fought it out with a new brand of nasal folk rockers who had never played an actual folk song (James Taylor, Neil Young, Van Morrison) and some key-tickling commercial songwriters (Elton John, Carole King) for a place on the charts.

As for the pop charts, in December 1969 the Jackson Five released their debut album, followed in short order by two more; this was not taken lightly by rock audiences used to the more serious soul music of the Supremes, the Four Tops, the Temptations, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Martha and the Vandellas, and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. Flanked by the Archies, the Partridge Family, the Osmonds, the Cowsills and the fading but still active 1910 Fruitgum Company, the Jacksons' onslaught seemed to herald the victory of bubblegum pop and the spiritual death of AM radio. This was a big deal. It was on AM that we first heard the Beatles, the Stones and the Who, as well as most of the psychedelic bands from Haight-Ashbury and Laurel Canyon. It was where "Sounds of Silence", "Incense and Peppermints", "We Ain't Got Nothin' Yet" and "Windy" became known to millions of kids. That's what we were giving over to "ABC-123" and other jingles. It was downright depressing.

The whole thing amounted to not just a change in musical taste, but the end of a generation's most characteristic form of expression, which had merged great songwriting with new musical sounds and, not incidentally, aspirations of universal love and peace. The harmonies were for world harmony; the songs were all "folk" songs. The Summer of Love... Woodstock... "All we are saying / Is give peace a chance" - that's the world that was going away, yet the "bomber jet planes" had not turned into swallowtails, in spite of Joni Mitchell's anthem.

Not to flog a lifeless turntable, but yet another trauma was that the experimental spirit once exemplified by Hendrix or Sgt. Pepper showed signs of being channeled through the classical avant-garde and free jazz, with bands apparently competing to create the least hummable, danceable, or indeed listenable tracks under the banner of "progressive rock". Even where Stockhausen, Cage and Berio didn't rule, snippets or entire songs based on earlier classical pieces found their way onto album after album. And 1970 would have a good claim to being the coming-out of this trend: a host of brash new artists started (and sometimes ended) their careers with some wild entry into this melee, while more established ones got busy setting up prog obelisks like Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother for future imitators to gawk at. (This is all a bit ironic since it has been fairly well documented that the same classical avant-garde was already an important influence on the Beatles in Sgt. Pepper, but this is not about making sense, it's about how things felt at the time.)

Bad enough for a year in music? Well, don't relax yet: 1970 was also the year that saw release of an album by psychotic mass murderer Charles Manson (who had originally recorded several of the songs at the Beach Boys' studio), and one by the questionably talented political irritant Screaming Lord Sutch. (If the album is of any interest it is only because the Lord had a truly royal list of backing musicians -- Jimmy Page, who also co-wrote half the songs, John Bonham, Jeff Beck, Nicky Hopkins and Noel Redding, among others.) "Coming down fast" does seem like a good phrase to capture what was going on with rock and roll in 1970.

But I was so much older then...

That this somber assessment is one-sided, and perhaps hopelessly scratched, can be seen from a quick look at what did not go awry in that tumultuous year, at least as far as music is concerned. Let's begin again with the Beatles, who did not, after all, fall off the face of the earth. After some earlier efforts of an experimental temper, each of them released their first rock solo albums in 1970. Among these were McCartney and George's All Things Must Pass, which would remain among the most admired post-Beatles recordings. Simon and Garfunkel, who had set themselves a high bar on 1968's Bookends, jumped right over it with their last studio album, Bridge Over Troubled Water, which included the ultimate New York down-and-out saga, "The Boxer". While Dylan may have been in a slump, Joni Mitchell was in anything but. If her first two albums set the strings of one's soul to an alternate tuning, Ladies of the Canyon was not only packed with great songs but began her widely hailed move towards expressionistic keyboard-driven songwriting. Most critics find the source of that in 1971's Blue, but it started with Ladies, which I still think is the better album. Received wisdom also be damned as regards Traffic's John Barleycorn Must Die, an album panned by some, including the inimitable Robert Christgau. This was the album that made Traffic a fixture of 1970's college dorms, and the following year their Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys put the mortar between the bricks, so to speak.

That's beginning to sound like a decent enough year; and then there is Layla, probably the pre-eminent post-cream recording with Eric Clapton. And Abraxas, the album that made Santana a household name. Astonishingly, the Grateful Dead may have released their two best studio albums that year, American Beauty and Workingman's Dead. While Elton John would be moving on to greater popularity and perhaps greater feats of songwriting, in 1970 he not only made two very fine albums that brought him international recognition (Elton John and Tumbleweed Connection, the latter still among my favorites of his) but also performed the famous radio concert that would be released the following year as 11-17-70. CSN, as Crosby Stills & Nash are affectionately known, added an ampersand and a "Y" to create Déja Vu with Neil Young -- an album so deeply burned into the musical soul of a generation that one merely has to think of the name and it starts up like a jukebox: "Ca-a-a-rry O-on, Lo-ove is coming...." Not much less significant is The Band's Stage Fright, the last of a breathtaking trilogy of albums that Greil Marcus has characterized (in Mystery Train) as a sort of triptych of the American experience.

In the R&B department, or soul music as it was called at the time, it was a year of new beginnings: first albums as solo artists by Diana Ross, Curtis Mayfield and Buddy Miles, and the first Parliament and Funkadelic albums all hit the market. The Five Stairsteps and the Chairmen of the Board had their biggest hits that year. Of course, the big news was Miles Davis' Bitches Brew, which belongs neither more nor less in a discussion of rock music than Soft Machine's Third and other heavily jazz-inflected prog-rock albums. (The following year John McLaughlin would sweep away the boundaries with his first Mahavishnu Orchestra album, The Inner Mounting Flame.) This is a lot to take in, and as you will see in what follows, there was much more than that.

Suddenly, 1970 is starting to sound less like the crucifixion of rock and more like a second coming -- a carefully chosen metaphor, as it was also the year of Jesus Christ Superstar. I'm sure we didn't understand then what it all amounted to. In the next part of this series I intend to do a survey of what was really going on that year, if only to disabuse my own generation of the notion that our once rich heritage was suddenly shredded by amateurs with an ax and a fuzzbox, or a synthesizer and a handful of patch cords.

Mr. Alterman is a writer, musician and native Brooklynite who has taught philosophy around New York City, performs as a singer-songwriter, and writes about local cultural issues on his blog The Parrot's Lamppost.

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1970

I think it would be interesting to read if Mr. Alterman distinguishes between those records which could be considered something of a continuation of the 1960s (I'm thinking perhaps Workingman's Dead and American Beauty) and those that more clearly prefigured the coming decade, such as Layla and John Barleycorn. I'd love to hear his thoughts on this distinction, which i hope we can all agree on, even if our particular candidates differ. Thanks for a great article!

1970 Revisited

Regarding the other Mr. Alterman's provocative suggestion, a few things:
1. There are three more parts coming - the next two will say a little about what was continuing, ending, moving forward, etc.
2. When I think of 60s rock the first thing I think of is great contrapuntal harmonies - Beatles, Beach Boys, Association, Four Tops, Mamas and Papas, Tommy James and the Shondells, etc. For me, that was all but dead soon after 1970, and in that respect, everything was new.
3. However, it is far from cut and dried, as the example of the two Grateful Dead albums demonstrate: certainly they have something continuing, as the Dead's origins were in a country and bluegrass; but they are also a break from the psychedelia the Dead had been doing on Anthem, Aoxomoxoa and Live/Dead, and they were very much in sync with the acoustic turn that happened in the new decade (see the next post in this series).
4. The best claim to new was heavy metal, which was not my cup of tea in most cases. Jazzrock and prog sort of hit their stride; they could be called new, since there was a lot more to come than what had gone before; but early rock and urban blues and both had jazz elements, and as jazz styles and rock more or less changed in tandem. (A bit on this in the 3rd part, but it could really be a separate article.)
5. So, it's complicated. Traffic had released three albums and several hit singles before 1970; are they part of the new, or continuation of the old? I think you could say that a kind of sound among prog and college-oriented groups matured in the early 70s, so after a few years it was recognizably different from 60's rock.

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Song of the Week: "Sucker Puncher"

Dusty Wright — Fri, 27 Sep 2019 21:56:08 +0000

Song of the Week: "Sucker Puncher" Dusty Wright September 27, 2019 - 17:56

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One of my favorite rock 'n' rollers Anna Rose is set to release her latest kick-ass album The Light Between on October 4th. She's currently on tour, too. Her fall tour dates included Franklin, TN's very rightteous Pilgrimage Festival and shows with another favorite artist Texas troubadour Paul Cauthen. The single "Sucker Puncher" is just one of ten killer tracks on her latest long player. It's infectious as hell. Turn it up, rock on; indeed. You can check out more videos and tunes here.

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Song of the Week: "Look Each Other In The Eye"

Dusty Wright — Mon, 31 Oct 2016 17:09:26 +0000

Song of the Week: "Look Each Other In The Eye" Dusty Wright October 31, 2016 - 13:09

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Stephen Stills has always been a masterful songwriter. From his tremendous early days in the Buffalo Springfield and CSN/CSNY and Manasas to his extraordinary solo output, he's canon of rock and folk-rock work is quite impressive. So it should come as no surpirse that his latest tune -- "Look Each Other In The Eye” -- should be excellent. And excellent it is! This timely pre-election song by Mr. Stills boasts a rhythmic Latin salsa lilt with simple but biting lyrics as infectious as anything he's ever released. "Look at what you started now..."

Joe Walsh's Best Serious Songs

Steve Holtje — Mon, 20 Jun 2016 00:07:19 +0000

Joe Walsh's Best Serious Songs Steve Holtje June 19, 2016 - 20:07

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classic rock

I recently posted a Joe Walsh song on my Facebook wall and the reaction was mixed. One commenter wrote, "Walsh always struck me as the real-life Spicoli, and that was about as seriously as I could take him." This is a common misconception about Walsh.

Walsh has had a music career of over five decades. There are many, many people who know of him mostly as a member of the Eagles (since 1975) who had a hit in 1978 with a funny song, "Life's Been Good." Yet Walsh was a music biz veteran of eleven years’ standing when Hotel California was released in 1976; he would not have been recruited into the Eagles if he had not already established himself as such a distinctive guitarist that he could instantly give them the rock cred they so desired. Already on his resume were the killer riffs of "Rocky Mountain Way," "Turn to Stone," "Walk Away," and "Funk #49." The latter two came with the James Gang, an Ohio band that gathered an international following after so impressing the Who while opening for them in Pittsburgh that they were invited to open for the Who for a whole tour.

Walsh has two reputations: great guitarist who came up with the riff of "Life in the Fast Lane" and funny guy who wrote "Life's Been Good." Yet consider that he played oboe in his high school orchestra. Or that after he left the James Gang, Humble Pie tried to recruit him as Peter Frampton's replacement. Or just listen to his albums all the way through instead of only the hits, and focus on the songwriting. In particular, James Gang Rides Again (1970) and Barnstorm (1972) are masterpieces through and through, much deeper and more musically varied than those reputations would suggest.

The first James Gang LP, Yer Album, leaned heavily on cover songs, but also contained two fairly adventurous Walsh tunes, "Take a Look Around" and "Collage," both more musically intricate than the hard-driving power trio style the group was known for.

The second James Gang album, the aforementioned Rides Again, was big on heavy riffs for most of side one, but side two was more sophisticated, climaxing with "Ashes, the Rain and I."

The eponymous debut album by Walsh’s post-James Gang group, Barnstorm (though both the albums he made with them were credited as Joe Walsh albums), is a low-key masterpiece that is, perhaps aside from the wry "Mother Says," an entirely serious affair. "Turn to Stone" is heavy, "Birdcall Morning" is mixes folkie picking and spacey timbres.

Walsh’s third LP, So What, came in the wake of tragedy: the death of his daughter in a car crash. "Song for Emma" was written in her memory. "Help Me through the Night" also shows Walsh's sensitive side.

Though Walsh's role in the Eagles was guitar-slinger, on Hotel California his beautiful ballad "Pretty Maids All in a Row" showed him still refusing to be typecast. The Eagles' superb vocal harmonies are the icing on the songwriting cake.

Walsh's 1978 LP, But Seriously, Folks, made him a superstar thanks to the massive success of "Life's Been Good," but that song also led most casual fans to think of him as a guy who wrote a funny novelty song. Yes, it was the track Top 40 radio played, but anyone who bought the album could also hear that much of it was more serious, "At the Station" being a fine example.

In the long break between Eagles albums, Walsh not only release the above-mentioned LP, he also cut "In the City" for the 1979 soundtrack of cult-favorite movie The Warriors (it's played at the end when most of the titular gang has won its way back to its home turf). The Eagles redid it for their Hotel California follow-up The Long Run, but the less polished Walsh version is just as attractive, a little less predictable.

The acrimonious sessions for The Long Run broke up the Eagles, leaving Walsh free to continuing pursuing his solo career. He immediately released There Goes the Neighborhood. On it, the often serious tone of his earlier albums was mostly gone. The lyrics of the album's only single, "Life of Illusion," were not humorous, but the goofy music undercut their mood. Fortunately the lovely ballad "Rockets" received a more appropriate arrangement.

By the time of 1983's You Bought It -- You Name It, Walsh seemed completely trapped in the role of musical clown; it even featured a song whose title had to be disguised as "I.L.B.T.s," standing for I Love Big Tits (not that I'm disagreeing with him on that). On 1985's The Confessor, things were a bit less silly, and then on 1988's oddly titled Got Any Gum?, he regained his form with "Memory Lane," though it was still an exception to the general mood.

After that, Walsh's solo career petered out and he spent most of his time touring in Ringo Starr's All Stars (in the process marrying Ringo's wife's sister) and with the reunited Eagles. He also, after decades of hard living, cleaned up. His 2012 album, Analog Man, was his first new studio release in twenty years. Walsh's humor was still present, but more wry than goofy (I'm not against him having or displaying his sense of humor, I'm just trying to make the point that it has unfairly overshadowed his other talents). And his song "Family" is totally serious, and once again finds his songwriting and arranging chops -- his distinctive sense of harmony on ballads, the crying tone of his guitar solo -- back at the heights of his '70s work.

Walsh is currently on tour; he'll be at the Borgata in Atlantic City on July 31. - Steve Holtje

New Neil Young Archives Release Draws from Neglected Period

Steve Holtje — Sat, 21 Nov 2015 14:41:52 +0000

New Neil Young Archives Release Draws from Neglected Period Steve Holtje November 21, 2015 - 09:41

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Neil Young and Bluenote Café: Bluenote Café (Reprise)

This is Performance Series 11 from the Neil Young Archives project, a two-CD set of live recordings from eleven 1987-88 shows with his Bluenotes band, which had to be renamed because of a lawsuit by Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes. (The new name better reflects Neil's original inspiration, a beloved Winnipeg bar called, yes, Blue Note Café, shown on the cover.) The first two tracks on Bluenote Café are from the year before This Note's for You was released, the rest (oddly, presented in chronological order of recording date, with just one exception) coming from the tour to promote its release.

There has never been a consensus about This Note's for You, which marked Young's return to Reprise Records after his contentious tenure at Geffen, when his stylistic shifts into genre tangents (rockabilly, electronica) led to Geffen actually suing Young.On the one hand, the title track was a small hit after controversy over MTV initially banning its video, and critics greeted it warmly. But it was another genre shift, into bluesy soul complete with a very prominent horn section, and consumers didn't buy many copies of the LP. (The core of the band is Crazy Horse, but with Frank Sampedro on keyboards instead of guitar.)

This Note's for You was not quite forty minutes in length; Bluenote Café is well over two hours on two CDs, yet only has two earlier classic Young songs (more on that below). There are a whopping seven previously unreleased songs here; it would've been eight if Young had not included a version of "Ordinary People" on Chrome Dreams II a few years ago. Young had either worked up quite a lot of new material but not had room for all of it on This Note's for You, or he was inspired by working with this band and kept writing for it. "Crime in the City" is previewed here; it ended up on the following year's much-better-received Freedom, in a different arrangement, but sounds good with this band too. It's amazing that it took the epic "Ordinary People" so long to appear, because it is a major highlight of this set. And, with the greater looseness and more natural sound of the concert setting, some of the more lackluster material from This Note's for You sounds better here than there. In particular, I had never particularly noticed "Twilight" before, but this time around its intimacy and emotion tugged my heartstrings. It's still not a great album; the horn arrangements are sometimes blatant rip-offs of familiar Stax songs, and Young's voice was never ideal for the brassy uptempo tunes, which would sound better with a bigger voice a la Wilson Pickett. But "live," it's a more immersive and persuasive experience.

Now, about the two "oldies." One is Neil's Buffalo Springfield song "On the Way Home," which always did have a pretty ornate arrangement and fits right in here. The other is "Tonight's the Night," which clocks in at 19:27 and bounces from stripped-down brooding to brassy exultation. I never would have guessed that the latter would work, but it does, brilliantly and cathartically.

The two-CD set is being sold for the price of one CD ($15-17), the same cost as the download; thank you, Neil. If you want the four-LP set, though, get ready to shell out $90.

U2 at MSG

Steve Holtje — Fri, 31 Jul 2015 06:46:41 +0000

U2 at MSG Steve Holtje July 31, 2015 - 02:46

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Photo by steve holtje

I finally did it: I saw U2 in concert at Madison Square Garden, 30 July 2015.

I may have waited too long to catch the band in its prime, but its 37 years of experience -- without a personnel change -- and undiluted passion have made it one of the biggest concert draws for decades now, even if recent albums have been uneven in inspiration.

The current tour, with Thursday night being the next-to-last of eight shows at Madison Square Garden, is promoting last year's Songs of Innocence, which I mostly like. It figured that the annoying album opener, "The Miracle of Joey Ramone" (I wrote that it "panders like a commercial") would also be the concert opener (unless you want to give that honor to Patti Smith's recording "People Have the Power," which at all those shows is the song the quartet has walked on to, coming through the audience and climbing onstage). But then, pandering is an important element of arena rock, and works better in person than on record -- and credit to Bono, who had the balls to get the audience to make a call-and-response ritual of its wordless vocal riff before any instruments were played.

Then we were treated to a blast from the past, "The Electric Co." from U2's debut album -- hardly an obvious choice, unlike that album's opener, "I Will Follow," which with its instantly recognizable guitar hook followed in short order, unfortunately with the execrable "Vertigo" in between. ("The Electric Co." included a brief paraphrase of Stephen Sondheim's "Send in the Clowns," with Bono changing it to "bring on the clowns.") "I Will Follow" showed, hardly for the last time this evening, the undeniable power of thousands of people singing a chorus with no prompting, just out of sheer love.

Bono talked a lot. We got five minutes of chatter that besides the usual "New York, you're great" content included him reminiscing about participating the previous day in the city's first John Lennon Day at a ceremony on Ellis Island that included Yoko Ono; Bono said he'd declared that all the Beatles were Irish, not just Lennon, and that a day later he was sticking with that story. He then set the stage for a string of three more from Songs of Innocence: "Iris (Hold Me Close)," dedicated to his mother, with its last lines delivered a cappella in a touching move; the more boisterous "Cedarwood Road," which was accompanied by animation on a gigantic screen; and "Song for Someone," during which the animation was more prominent.

Photo by steve holtje

This seems like a good point at which to describe the staging. There was the usual large, rectangular stage in the usual spot; there was a smaller, round stage in the middle of the arena; and there was a broad walkway between them. The aforementioned screen was actually two-sided, hanging parallel over the walkway. This setup came into play on the next number, with drummer Larry Mullen, Jr. coming to the front of the stage with just a snare drum he whacked periodically. He continued onto the walkway, and gradually the others followed as they went into a visually and musically stark rendition of "Sunday Bloody Sunday" that included the interjection of a sound collage heavy on Dublin newscasts climaxing with a bombing, immediately followed by Bono's most recent musical response to that sort of thing, "Raised by Wolves." The latter closed with reference visually and from Bono to the horrific May 17, 1974 bombings that killed over thirty people, topped by Bono singing "comfort me" over and over.

Photo by steve holtje

The screens came all the way down, covering the walkway, to show animation of ocean waves for "Until the End of the World" (a climate change reference, perhaps?), the first song to that point from Achtung, Baby. Then the band disappeared into the screened-off walkway and a remix of that album's "The Fly," even more electro'd up, played (not played by the band) as texts with socio-political import were displayed on the screens. This was followed by a distorted version of "Invisible," and it was unclear whether it was also canned, or played by the band, until gradually the quartet was revealed to be playing between the screens -- it was a brilliant blurring of perceptions. (By the way, "Invisible," with its ending slogan of "there is no them," so far has been released only as a single, yet is better than anything on Innocence.)

There was more from Achtung, surprisingly the album most drawn from besides Innocence. "Even Better Than the Real Thing" found the band moving onto the circular stage for awhile, and "Mysterious Ways" found them being joined by a guy in a mirrorball construction helmet and silver lamé. At first he danced; then he circled the band for some "mobbing" using the Meerkat app (this was projected on the TV screens spread around the arena). This was also when Bono introduced a tourist from Virginia and some firemen from NY Engine Co. 44 who had rescued her in Central Park after an accident; the highlight of this was one of the firemen handing Bono a glass of Jameson's Irish whiskey that he gratefully partook of.

Photo by steve holtje

"Elevation" moved back to more standard U2 territory; for the Mandela soundtrack contribution "Ordinary Love," The Edge switched to acoustic guitar, which he stayed on for a duo cover (just like at Live Aid thirty years ago) of "Satellite of Love" by Lou Reed, who Bono called "the poet laureate of New York City." Reed's voice was sampled for one section of this tribute. Then it was back to Innocence for "Every Breaking Wave," another duo but with The Edge switching to a piano that flipped up from under the circular stage.

Photo by steve holtje

The full band returned as the show headed into the homestretch with highly familiar material. "Bullet the Blue Sky" updated the monolog in the middle with such observations as "the whole world has turned into America" and Bono taking a mock self-critical view of his fame and fortune. I do believe that for some of that, he was rapping. The Edge's electric guitar tone on this famous tune tonight suggested a David Gilmour (Pink Floyd) influence. The Martin Luther King tribute "Pride (In the Name of Love)" was prefaced by Bono spouting "don't shoot," "I can't breathe," and other topical phrases. During the "oo-oo-oo-oo" sing-along, he exhorted us to "sing for the peacemakers," and soon thereafter he astutely observed, "Nobody won in Ireland. That's why everybody won in Ireland."

"Beautiful Day" provided further evidence that Bono is the master of the grandiloquent melodic gesture, which would have been proven anyway by the following "With or Without You," complete with a little reprise of "bom bom bom satellite of love." Thus ended the official set.

Needless to say, there was sufficient applause to call the band back for encores. First, though, we heard a recording of Stephen Hawking waxing political. "City of Blinding Lights," one of the most beautiful of recent U2 songs, included some guy pulled up from the crowd singing to Bono and vice versa. The next guest was more famous: Paul Simon joined for a brief, ramshackle attempt at "Mother and Child Reunion," which Bono tied to the fight against AIDS/HIV. I swear, I think Simon sang not his song, but instead a bit of "Let It Be." Of course, "Where the Streets Have No Name" sounded entirely more secure and solid. On the closing "One," Bono let the audience sing with the band almost all the way through, and the crowd-sourced singing came off brilliantly on this call for unity.

I could complain about songs not performed, but after nearly two-and-a-half hours and twenty-six songs, that would be missing the point. There were plenty of good yet affordable seats, and at the aforementioned length, and with hardly any missteps along the way, this was better value than most arena shows I've been to.