Tag: Rock

Bob Dylan – Empire Burlesque

Empire Burlesque

Bob Dylan – Empire Burlesque Columbia FC 40110 (1985)

Empire Burlesque first came to my attention when Richard Hell wrote something on his web site about liking it.  While the focus isn’t always on the lyrics — something almost guaranteed to turn off most Dylan fans — the musical backdrop is far richer than on most of his albums.  It does sound a little dated.  But the use of (synth) horns and backing singers works better here than on Street-Legal.  There is a ragged decadence to the music that fits.  It captures well the superficiality and banality of the Thatcher/Reagan era.  The songs evidence contentment, but with questioning, lingering doubt just below the surface.  Something about it all sounds mature.  Plus, for the skeptics, try going straight to the solo acoustic closer “Dark Eyes.”  Can you maybe admit that the young Dylan of the 1960s was still alive and well?  If you can answer “yes” in the context of an overtly “folk” song, then go back to the opener “Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love?)” and “Emotionally Yours” and ask if there isn’t some of the same spark there in a whole different setting.  This album may be reviled by many fans, but it is probably my favorite of the post-Desire albums, edging out Shot of Love and Good As I Been to You.  This might be his best of the 80s — yes even better than Oh Mercy.

13th Floor Elevators – Easter Everywhere

Easter Everywhere

13th Floor Elevators – Easter Everywhere International Artists IA LP 5 (1967)

Strangely enough, Easter Everywhere manages to be a psych-rock classic.  The epic opener “Slip Inside This House” is about as good as they come.  After that, things may seem a little more uneven than the debut The Psychedelic Sounds of The 13th Floor Elevators, but given a little more time this album reveals itself as something just as finely crafted, if even weirder and darker.  Conventional judgment might call this a poor recording, given the tuneless vocals and guitar–and it’s fair to call them tuneless in the sense that they make pervasive forays into atonality–but it’s precisely those elements that make this so very psychedelic.  A cover of Dylan‘s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” (shortened to just “Baby Blue”) winds up being almost as compelling as “Slip Inside the House.”  This feels like all the unexpected and unpredictable energy of the 1960s coming to a head.

13th Floor Elevators – Live

Live

13th Floor Elevators – Live International Artists IA LP 8 (1968)

A fake live album of studio outtakes with crowd noise overdubs.  The material does actually align with the band’s actual live set lists though.  The thing is, as posthumous releases have demonstrated, they could have released a high quality album of real live recordings.  Not bad for fans, in spite of the pointless canned applause, but casual listeners can safely pass this by.

Bob Dylan – Highway 61 Revisited

Highway 61 Revisited

Bob Dylan – Highway 61 Revisited Columbia CL 2389 (1965)

Highway 61 Revisited was Dylan’s entry into the realm of superstardom.  He had popularity that was entering the same leagues as that of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.  Bringing It All Back Home was massively popular, but Highway 61 confirmed that Dylan was no flash-in-the-pan success.

This is quite simply the single most essential Dylan album, and one of the most essential rock and roll albums by anyone from any era.  The enduring importance of this album might be how it managed to be a rock album of substance, something with real weight and depth, not just tawdry entertainment.  Unlike Bringing It All Back Home with an entire side geared toward folk rather than rock, Highway 61 Revisited focused entirely on rock.  So much early rock and roll was easily dismissed as just dance music or hillbilly stuff without cachet in urban centers.  This album was something else.  It raised the bar for what rock music was (or could be) about.  In a way, it helped give unprecedented legitimacy to rock and roll, without ever diminishing the intensity and energy and exuberance of the music.  By this point, Dylan’s songwriting talent was unassailable.  He had successfully fused blues rock with poetic lyrics that encompassed symbolism, American and biblical mythology, surrealism, literary references, and vivid imagery.  The songs rarely “meant” anything in a literal sense.  They were oblique invocations of certain feelings and images without a fixed and definite meaning.  You can listen to these songs again and again and come away with a slightly interpretation each time.  Roland Barthes wrote the following year in Criticism and Truth that “a work is ‘eternal’ not because it imposes a single meaning on different men, but because it suggests different meanings to one man…”  So it was with these songs.  Dylan’s approach was drawing huge influence from the writings of the Beats, incorporating that writing style into a rock and roll setting.  The music still had a huge, driving syncopated beat, complete with just enough of the twang and grit to draw a clear line of influence from early rock and roll.  He was supported by a studio band that included members of The Paul Butterfield Blues Band plus Al Kooper on keyboards.  Kooper was not a keyboardist, but the recording sessions for this album made him one.  Electric guitarist Mike Bloomfield has a strong presence that separates the sound of this album from others Dylan had recorded to this point (or what he did later, for that matter).

On “Tombstone Blues,” Dylan sings “the sun’s not yellow, it’s chicken,” invoking American slang in which both “yellow” and “chicken” refer to cowardice.  Applying the terms to the sun, Dylan–in a way that epitomizes his songwriting at the time–says something that is perfectly plain but that doesn’t mean anything in particular.  He turns the word “yellow” from a description of color into a slang reference to something that doesn’t really have a literal meaning when applied to the sun.  But to follow this, you almost have to work backwards through the lyrics.  In a nutshell, that’s Dylan’s mid-1960s songwriting.

Spacemen 3 – The Perfect Prescription

The Perfect Prescription

Spacemen 3 – The Perfect Prescription Glass GLALP 026 (1987)

Spacemen 3 were hardly the most original rock group.  They wore their influences on their sleeves.  On their debut, Sound of Confusion, the effect was a jolt of pure slacker charm.  The Stooges, The 13th Floor Elevators, these groups were channeled with the gawkish, unashamed enthusiasm of a most wonderfully unadulterated kind.   Any why not?  It suited the music.  Here on The Perfect Prescription, the influences have shifted to The Velvet Underground, Lou Reed, even gospel music, processed through slightly jangly contemporary British psychedelia of the likes of The Teardrop Explodes, with a more lethargic, down-tempo groove.  This certainly set the stage for the next decade’s “Brit pop”, which you could consider an asset or a liability.  This one is a disappointment though.  Could these guys even play?  You have to wonder with the tuneless vocals on display.  The band seems to maybe start taking themselves seriously.  Snotty music that originated not far from the garage welcomed—no, deserved—to be resurrected with ridiculously faithful and inept 1980s recreations.  It was a proud declaration, “We have learned nothing in the intervening years!”  But the kinds of music with bigger aspirations that Spacemen 3 investigate on this album don’t quiet react well to similar treatment.  You can add acid to water, but not water to acid.  It’s the same with this music.  The irreverent treatment of the serious rock influences has the basic equation backwards, at least when lacking a sense of humor and recognition of the absurdity in doing it that way.  Ah, so it goes.  The Perfect Prescription does advocate for a new rhythm of drugged out rock, and for that it deserves some credit amidst its own shambolic, desultory downward spiral.

Grateful Dead – Dick’s Picks Volume Twenty-Two

Dick's Picks Volume Twenty-Two

Grateful Dead – Dick’s Picks Volume Twenty-Two (Kings Beach Bowl, Kings Beach, Lake Tahoe, CA – 2/23-24/68) Grateful Dead Records GDCD 4042 (2001)

I’ve been listening to the Grateful Dead for quite a long time, and albums like Dick’s Picks, Vol. 22 are the reasons why I keep coming back.  The Dead from about 1967 to 1970 were a great musical force.  They were energetic, genuine and unique.  I almost hesitate to say unique, but I do mean it.  For one, the Dead had a postmodern style that drew heavily on blues, jazz, bluegrass, gospel, and even modern classical elements.  And it’s true that they never really contributed much to any of those genres individually.  But in their extended jams that drew all of them together, their revelry of juxtaposition was something unique.  This stuff was fun!  Rather than the dour, pretentious attitude so familiar to postmodern music, the Dead sounded completely different.  Perhaps the fact that the Dead don’t quite sound as “serious” as some people think they should is the very reason they are almost deemed off-limits.  Sure, it wasn’t that long before the Dead became content to churn out unremarkable AOR rock, with forays into faddish trends like their silly attempt at disco a decade on.  Yet here in 1968, playing in a bowling alley no less, the group sounds thrilled to be making music, without sounding like they are forcing themselves to sound like anything in particular.  Later on, that didn’t seem to be the case.  Contrary to their reputation, I don’t feel like they challenged themselves much from about 1970 onwards, instead becoming content to rest on a few of their own perceived strengths and ending up sounding just like a lot of other bands.  But those days lay far in the future back in February of 1968, back when maybe anything seemed possible.

I hate to say it, but the sound quality here is fair at best.  Still, the unusual mix (likely a necessity given the source tape) lends a few pleasant surprises in making Pigpen‘s organ and Phil Lesh‘s bass more readily audible.  In the end, substance wise, this is one of the finest live sets in the Dead’s extensive catalog, and I think the concerns about sound quality can’t really hold this album back much at all.

David Crosby – Croz

Croz

David Crosby – Croz Blue Castle BCR1142-1 (2014)

I’m not sure what to make of an album like this.  The comment about David Crosby that sticks most in my mind is someone wondering out loud, “why is David Crosby so highly regarded?”  Croz goes far beyond the concept of middle-aged rock.  This is geriatric rock.  Crosby released this when he was 72.  He’s writing about trying to be mature.  These ponderous topics land with a thud.  The pervasive, noodling light rock saxophone and snazzy little guitar licks don’t make any connections to the sorts of music that anyone under 50 listens to.  This album seems to speak to those curmudgeons still trying to live a good life on terms set decades ago, but struggling to understand what it means to live a good life today.  Put up against the strangely affecting faux-retro album A Letter Home by former CSN&Y bandmate Neil Young, released just a few months later, Croz seems unable to look outside itself.

Neil Young – Live at Massey Hall 1971

Live at Massey Hall 1971

Neil Young – Live at Massey Hall 1971 Reprise 9362-43328-2 (2007)

Neil Young’s career reached its peak around the early part of the 1970s.  He has kept on recording and performing long past that time of course.  In his later years it would seem that it became more of a challenge for him to maintain a necessary level of interest in his music.  That’s nothing new really.  Most rock stars of the 1960s that kept on going faced the same challenges–Bob Dylan comes to mind immediately.  Young faced the challenge in his later years by jumping between styles.  In the 1980s, this meant a lot of albums that flirted with various genre experiments, from krautrock (Trans) to vintage 50s rock-n-roll (Everybody’s Rockin’) to contemporary country (Old Ways) to modern hard rock (Landing on Water) to blues/R&B rock (This Note’s for You).  Still later, into the 2000s, he kept jumping between different styles, sometimes at album length but more often within the space of a single album.  While that kind of approach may have helped Young maintain an interest in his music (just like how Bob Dylan amuses himself by radically reworking his old songs in his late-career concerts), it doesn’t always translate into great music.  Now, it does help.  It just doesn’t always produce something that reaches the heights of Young’s best work.  It may elevate Young’s own interest enough to keep him plugging along, but it isn’t always conducive to a burst of inspiration that produces profoundly memorable music.  So listeners of Young’s late career material should expect music that is sturdy and enjoyable, but rarely amazing.  But that’s life.  Artists can’t always give that much of themselves to their music over an entire lifetime.  With music, listeners need to find smaller and more narrowly-defined pleasures in a particular artist’s music to follow along over the long term.

One other thing that Young has done in his later years is an ongoing Neil Young Archives project (Vol. 1 (1963–1972) being the first part), where Young goes back and digs out and presents archival recordings.  While this may seem like something only for his most dedicated fans–and that’s true in the most direct sense–it also offers a chance for live recordings from his most vital period of his career to finally see release.  If and when the performances and songs are good, there is the chance that the music can appeal to more than completist fans.

Live rock records have an awkward history.  For some rock groups, live recordings simply reproduce studio efforts, with sometimes sloppier performances, reduced recording fidelity, and added crowd noise.  Those kinds of records don’t offer a whole lot.  But other groups do things in concert that can’t be captured in a studio recording.  Groups that improvise can offer vast variations on the same material over the course of different live performances in a way that is unique from any single studio version.  Also, sometimes live recordings can offer a chance to hear new (if pre-planned) arrangements of familiar material, like a solo acoustic version of a song that was recorded with a full electric band on the issued studio version.

Live at Massey Hall 1971 was released as part of work on the Neil Young Archives project.  It’s an excellent record.  It captures Young just after he released his amazing After the Gold Rush album (probably his very best) and just before the release his most commercially popular album, Harvest.  He is featured in a solo acoustic setting.  This allows him to present new arrangements and new contexts for what are really some of his best songs.  Young is at the peak of his powers.  Many of the songs he previews from Harvest sound almost superior here free from studio embellishments.  While no, this isn’t the place to start with Neil Young, it is a very important release for admirers of his music and a worthy collection of fresh live renditions of some amazing songs that capture the confused sensations of hope, fear, wonder and longing brought on by what seemed like new found freedoms and the paralyzing responsibility of figuring out what to do with it.