Rock – Page 34 – Rock Salted

Neil Young – American Stars ‘n Bars

Neil Young – American Stars ‘n Bars Reprise MSK 2261 (1977)

After his “Gloom Trilogy” and the slightly overrated Zuma, the somewhat scattershot American Stars ‘n Bars seems like the perfect move for Neil Young. First of all, he sounds like he’s having fun making music for the first time in years–even if those intervening years produced amazing recordings. Side one is the real highlight. Carole Mayedo, Linda Ronstadt and Nicolette Larson make great contributions. It’s country rock, but with a ragged rock ‘n roll heart that Neil wears so proudly on his sleeve. “Saddle Up the Palomino” has a little up and down runs played so slowly you can almost picture Young in the studio waving his arms wildly like a conductor, in a vague and comically half-hearted attempt to coax the musicians gathered for a late-night session that hadn’t been sober for hours, if it ever was to begin with. “Hey Babe” is Neil Young the sweetheart, at least, Young the sweetheart singing double entendres in a quaking, nasal falsetto. This less wholesome attitude comes back with a vengeance on the rockingest track on the first side, “Bite the Bullet.” Side one goes many places, most of them mapped out on the opener “The Old Country Waltz,” which simultaneously proves Young’s bona fides in the realms of country and rock. It’s a song with smooth three-part vocal harmonies, a slurred fiddle, pedal steel guitar and room for a rather steady strum of an acoustic guitar and heavy drum beats on a snare. No concern for precision stands in the way of matters to the heart of the song.

The second side is made up of leftovers from a couple of aborted album projects from the previous three years. The country leanings of side one are gone, in its place some harrowing, solitary folk (“Will to Love”) and a hazy, laid-back guitar anthem set against sustained, spaced-out keyboard chords (“Like a Hurricane”). It is somewhat fitting that after the completely wasted sound of side one Young has to mail in last week’s homework for side two–his own kind of Sunday morning coming down. The thing is, most artists would never make stuff as good as anything on side two, much less have it around to use as filler! Young makes that sort of complete indifference the noble, slacker heart of the album.

There are definitely different sides to Neil Young, but the side of him that favors a wild ride, replete with a few “fuck off and let me do my thing” laughs, and revels in bawdy inside jokes, was one that made only more tentative appearances in the coming years. That makes this a little special. Of course, all that is tempered with a sensitive side that suddenly drops all pretense and demonstrates inquisitiveness and vulnerability. He does all that, and owns the contradictions. This is Neil Young the perfect anti-hero rock star, one who comes across as simply too well-adjusted, by comparison, to be a “real” rock star. In other words, one for the rest of us. Dean Stockwell‘s album cover concept sums this one up.

Black Flag – Loose Nut

Black Flag – Loose Nut SST 035 (1985)

There is a real blue collar/working class attitude on Loose Nut. Maybe that was always present in Black Flag’s music. But this album taps into a really angry version of it. Take “Annihilate This Week.” It is about just getting through the week, beating back the drudgery and routine with alcohol and cigarettes. It sums up the attitude of lots of people I used to work with at stupid minimum wage jobs, enjoying the time spent doing work that actually did accomplish something, however small and faceless, by taking up a low-rent kind of hedonism. But maybe they take the low-rent hedonism as the focus more than getting something done along the way, not seeing anything beyond the week.

“Bastard in Love” is a great love song. The title alone conveys that being “in love” is when social obligations are suspended. But in this case, some “bastard” is just using this as an excuse for shitty, abusive behavior that masks narcissistic self-pity. Meanwhile the song’s narrator is isolated, taking a more authentic view of love, but finds his view unwanted, and is stuck with pain. The best part of the song is just repeating the epithet, “bastard…in lo__ove”. It is the insistence of somebody pushing their stupid shitty relationship into other people’s faces. Just a few lines of the song convey this perfectly.

There is nothing innovative about how this album sounds. It basically adopts the sort of metal/hard rock sound that much of the working class (at least the men) in the USA listened to around 1985. There also isn’t a whole lot of space separating Loose Nut from the sort of bluesy 1970s hard rock that was probably still on a lot of jukeboxes at the time, either, in bars that weren’t really about listening to music as much as drinking and meeting up with pals. Yet it still hits pretty hard. The guitar plays a more restrained role that in years past. The riffs are often predictable progressions, but they cut loose in angular, eccentric solos, with dissonant resolutions all over “This Is Good,” and in a few other brief patches. Loose Nut was the last time the mighty Flag summoned any real power in the recording studio. The band’s demise was just around the corner.

Yet the most curious juxtaposition of Loose Nut is that it invites feminine perspective ever so slightly. Kira complained about the role of the group’s sole female member, but the lyrics at least accept a position of non-dominance, even as those words are delivered with a solid roar against aggressive guitar and rhythms. The macho perspective is consistently mocked across the album. Maybe it isn’t transcended, but there are strides to counteract it. Yes, maybe more could have been done. There was still more happening in that regard on this Black Flag effort than in most hard rock of the late 1980s.

Led Zeppelin – Physical Graffiti

Led Zeppelin – Physical Graffiti Swan Song SSK 89400 (1975)

Led Zeppelin were never a band with a high degree of artistic integrity. They were always a band designed to succeed by catering to what audiences wanted. It should come as no surprise that they updated their approach through the 1970s, and with 1975’s Physical Graffiti they had adopted some funk and proto-disco into their sound. It works. Although all of the best-known hits are on the first disc, disc two cruises by without any hiccups. This is state-of-the-art 1970s hard rock, with every imaginable form of studio effect used to its advantage. Probably the band’s best album.

Grateful Dead – Live/Dead

Grateful Dead – Live/Dead Warner Bros.-Seven Arts 2WS-1830 (1969)

Live/Dead was the Grateful Dead’s first live album and is still one of their greatest. The group was at its peak and a classic lineup was still intact: Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart, Tom “T.C.” Constanten, and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan. Supposedly released to pay off a debt to their record company amassed when recording Aoxomoxoa, Live/Dead has since proved its own worth many times over.

The Dead in the late 1960s were more comfortable with themselves as a band than in earlier years. They had a symbiotic relationship going where each member’s contributions sparked even more creative output. Three songs in the middle of this double-disc album are a good as any Grateful Dead on record (the myriad of bootleg material included). “Saint Stephen,” “The Eleven,” and “Turn On Your Lovelight” capture the Dead at their most daring and impassioned. I think just those three songs alone make this album well worth a listen. There is something almost sinister about this album that seems to have only really surfaced here, never to return. That’s a shame. While there are other good (even very good) live Dead albums, this is one of the few to have any of the anarchistic flavor of the late 60s. Into the 70s and beyond, when Dead live sets started coming out without almost a kind of regularity, the emphasis on easygoing songs seemed to take attention away from the abandon of pure performance.

On the other hand, this album feels like it goes just beyond their previous releases. Where earlier Dead studio albums (with the exception of the live/studio hybrid Anthem of the Sun) tried too hard to be something they weren’t, Live/Dead is more direct and to the point. It makes the case for the Grateful Dead being one of the great live rock bands of the late 60s. This is the album that established the Dead’s reputation as a fan’s band. It avoids pretentiousness by simply showcasing the music that enthralled their fans at live performances. Too often live material is a note-for-note rehash of what you’ve already heard, and little more than a way to bilk die-hard fans for a few more dollars. This was almost unthinkable for the Dead (overlooking many ill-conceived post-1973 diversions). Early on, they seemed to have made music to have fun themselves. Taking chances wasn’t optional. Live/Dead is a glimpse into a time when things weren’t perfect but the essence of the feeling had lots of potential. Though it marked the end of the Dead’s early period–they next moved to a country-rock style–the album is fluid and unapologetic.

Bob Dylan – Hard Rain

Bob Dylan – Hard Rain Columbia PC 34349 (1976)

So, why is he shouting? Some good songs, of course, but still pointless. If you want to hear Dylan being crushed by the forces of evil, well, maybe then this is the album for you. I can accept Self Portrait as some kind of prank on his fans, Planet Waves as something simply lazy, but this? This is Bob Dylan’s defeat. I know some people look to Dylan as a counter-cultural icon, but I prefer to think of him in as someone carried along by the same wave as the rest of the movement in the 60s. Hunter S. Thompson wrote how with the right set of eyes you could look West and see the high water mark, where that wave crested and rolled back. Hard Rain is that near-tsunami rolling back and crashing somewhere East against the opposite shore. Dylan seems exasperated, at a loss with what to do to juggle artistic and commercial concerns, and plain worn out by that process. He sure has worse albums out there. Yet this suggested that Dylan was probably going to focus on bland, clichéd approaches to music during the rest of his career, which often proved to be the case.

Bob Dylan – Down in the Groove

Bob Dylan – Down in the Groove Columbia CK 40957 (1988)

A tedious and painful listening experience. When Bob Dylan is lazy or just uninspired he always leans on the blues. He does so a fair amount here. While he worked it out better with the simpler World Gone Wrong a few years later, here the glitzy and grandiose 1980s production suffocates any possibilities. Not that there really are many possibilities. “Ninety Miles an Hour (Down a Dead End Street)” might be the best offering, which is not saying much. This is a leading contender for the ignoble title of “worst Bob Dylan album.” Really, it’s embarrassing.

Bob Dylan – New Morning

Bob Dylan – New Morning Columbia KC 30290 (1970)

“If a thing is worth doing at all, it is worth doing, even badly . . . .” William S. Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads (1983).

Some claim New Morning was relevant at the time. And I suppose it does show an interest in the West-Coast singer-songwriter movement. “Day of the Locusts,” with its grand, booming piano parts, is probably the best example of how this album sets aim for a more lush, orchestrated and dramatic sound than almost anything else Dylan had done before. But what I hear as well are too many songs comparable to second-rate Grateful Dead material from that band’s country-rock phase (“Went to See the Gypsy,” “New Morning”), half-baked novelty concepts (“Winterlude,” “If Dogs Run Free” [the birth of Tom Waits‘ career?]) and lots of songs with very poor vocals — even by Dylan’s typically low standards in that department. This does, however, mark a turning point where Dylan’s lyrics became more personal, and for a change he is more focused on his own life in what seems like a fairly direct manner — he’s not just singing impersonal or abstract material in the first person. He’s also willing to show more vulnerability here than he would for decades, if ever. Purely in hindsight, though, this album is just too inconsistent to impress, even if there are a few good tunes here and there (“If Not for You,” “The Man in Me”). But, I still feel like rooting for Bob on this one, even when things go wrong, which they do more often than not, because he’s stepping out of his comfort zone and trying something different.

Jack White – Lazaretto

Jack White – Lazaretto XL/Third Man XLCD 645 (2014)

So, bear with me. Listen to Lazaretto. Then, wonder whether Jack White has become a kind of “angry white man” caricature, a sort of pathetic, misogynistic, hapless, self-important, delusional wreck hiding behind a tried-and-true Libertarian (with a capital “L”) artifice, or at least that he has intensely focus-grouped the album to appeal to the teenage boy version of said Libertarian caricature. I said, bear with me. Isn’t this exactly what “Entitlement” and “Want and Able” are about? Even “Alone In My Home” too? These songs are about the proud Individual not being “told what to do”, complaining about people having what they aren’t “able” to get for themselves, and wanting to be recused from interaction with so much of the world while isolated in his private castle/”home”. And isn’t this exactly what a retro sort of sound appeals to as well…the fading glory of the white patriarchal society? It is more than a little ironic that White trades in “blues rock” riffs mostly, because it isn’t black America that fuels Libertarian politics. But he connects with black America only through a patriarchal view of the world, as can be seen from the opener “Three Women,” an adaptation of a Blind Willie McTell tune, full of boastful machismo about more or less being able to possess women — albeit stripped of the original’s slightly militant miscegenation. This fits entirely with White’s public persona, wearing a sharkskin suit on the cover.

The sound of this album is ornate, to say the least. Every song is polished up with the kind gilding that dominates Donald Trump buildings (the analogy holds in more ways than one). The elaborate, densely layered recordings of such nonsense songs seems like a gaudy display of decadence, proving to anyone who listens that White is a successful and wealthy musician who can summon the resources to make an album in a manner so time-consuming. Still, occasionally, it works, like on “Would You Fight For My Love?” there is a line, “You have to want to stop being alone,” when the singing suddenly drops into a spoken monotone, which completely turns the song around and arrests all its momentum to focus on that lyric. It’s effective. But a lot of this album seems like little more than smoke and mirrors. Yes, White knows how to craft a record. He can call up all sorts of devices to make a point. But many of these seem like little more than tricks. They are vacuously applied to these songs, which don’t amount to much more than raw space for the gimmickry. Lazaretto is a platform for Jack White to try to display his encyclopedic knowledge of by-gone musical trends, and argue that he’s really better than you, the listener, in doing so. What emerges is that he probably is a better guitar player than most of us listeners, but that isn’t really his focus here, and the rest of what he does focus on comes across as overcompensation for some deep-seated personal insecurity.

Black Flag – Who’s Got the 10½?

Black Flag – Who’s Got the 10½? SST CD060 (1986)

Listeners self-segregate into a number of different camps when it comes to Black Flag’s music:

Group I – The early Flag (pre-Henry Rollins) is the pinnacle; believes that proficient performance is blasphemous to punk rock; usually explicitly dislikes Henry; loves The First Four Years, Everything Went Black

Group II – Damaged is great but doesn’t understand what the big deal is with anything else; loves Damaged

Group III – Admires the sludge-rock, free jazz/punk experiments and metal touches of the crop of 1984 albums; most likely to appreciate the band’s entire career arc in varying degrees; loves My War, Live ’84, The Process of Weeding Out

Group IV – This group doesn’t actually exist, but theoretically they like the slicker hard rock of the later years; loves Loose Nut

These groups aren’t clearly demarcated. But by-and-large, Groups I and II tend to dominate. Count me in Group III. But it’s worth keeping in mind where you fall on the spectrum, because if you fall in Group I, you’ll probably never like the later years. Too bad, though, because Black Flag was a group that evolved and made a lot of great music in surprisingly different ways through the years. The much-maligned later years garnered a poor reaction in part from two studio albums (Loose Nut, In My Head) that have wide reputations as being too slick and failing to capture the group’s strengths. Their popularity declined too. Once capable of filling sizeable venues, they were playing to scant audiences in small places by the later 1980s. Personal frictions within the band also didn’t help matters. But they could still put on a fierce, well-executed performance and Who’s Got the 10½? is all the evidence anyone should need. In fact, anyone skeptical of the later years should head here first. Every song cooks, with a pummelling energy that is paradoxically wielded with scalpel-like precision. If you stack up all the lineups (ALL of the them), you probably have to concede that this one was the most technically proficient. The real surprise is drummer Anthony Martinez, who manages to find the perfect balance of straight-ahead hard rock steadiness with a supple ability to switch gears that perfectly supports the music. If you want Greg Ginn guitar freakouts, you won’t get as much as the ’84 live album, but still plenty to keep you happy. Kira is still a more versatile bassist than Chuck Dukowski, even if Dukowski had more punk bona fides. What you end up with is a well-oiled machine. This band sounds professional while at the same time sounding like one with something real to say. Unlike the studio albums of this era, Who’s Got the 10½? actually makes full use of the group’s strengths. It’s the most sympathetic document of Black Flag’s work of this time, free from essentially all encumbrances of the studio.

Get the CD version. The original LP issue was shortened, and there are plenty of good tunes added to the expanded CD.

Black Flag – In My Head

Black Flag – In My Head SST 045 (1985)

A couple good ones here, “In My Head,” “Drinking and Driving.” Nothing is bad, exactly, but there is a claustrophobic effect to this one, like Greg Ginn letting perfectionism and micromanagement run amuck. Rollins is so far down in the mix his presence seems only grudgingly permitted. The drums are still all done up with a gated reverb effect that seems overused. This is hard rock but it is recorded in a way that sounds almost hollow. It’s not the band’s best, and probably closer to their least, but I’ll still take it.