Tag: Rock

The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Parlophone PCS 7027 (1967)

A good album, no more.  Who cares about this stuff when The Beach Boys outdid it a million times over with…Smiley Smile.  Yeah, I did just say that. William S. Burroughs once wrote that the function of art is to remind us of what we know and what we don’t know that we know.  Well, an album like Sgt. Pepper’s, about the mid-20th century white middle class experience, is a bit unnecessary, at least for me, because it’s aimed at perhaps the most (over-)documented cultural demographic that has ever existed on the face of the earth.

Love – Forever Changes

Forever Changes

Love – Forever Changes Elektra EKS 74013 (1967)

Forever Changes is probably the single greatest statement in rock and roll on the unanticipated dark side of the whole yippie/hippie thing of the late 1960s and early 70s.  Hunter S. Thompson wrote about “the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait” for anyone who took Dr. Timothy Leary’s “turn on, tune in, drop out” consciousness expansion ideals too seriously.  And it is from about that perspective that Forever Changes resides.  Much of the lyrical content conjures up a process of reflection and expanding self-awareness.  But it’s in the context of recognizing that with all the great possibilities in life there come a lot of obstacles and disappointments.  Funkadelic had an album a few years later titled Free Your Mind… and Your Ass Will Follow.  Well, in between freeing your mind and everything else falls a lot of stuff.  Heavy stuff.  So what of all the others who haven’t freed their minds, and the difficult possibility that those people (actively or not) stand in the way of anything further?  Grim and meat-hook possibilities indeed.

Part of what makes this album unique is that Love was an unlikely band to have made it.  The songs are drenched in orchestrated strings and laced through with latin and Euro-classical-tinged acoustic guitar.  Earlier Love recordings like “¡Que Vida!” from Da Capo hint at it, but most of the group’s best material to this point was in the vein of garage rock (“Seven & Seven Is”, “My Little Red Book”) or psychedelia (“Stephanie Knows Who”, “She Comes in Colors”).  And that makes the kind of naive sense of bewilderment so pervasive here as convincing as it is.

There is something timeless in this too.  The immediate context was the Vietnam war era, but three or four decades later couldn’t the lyrics “they’re locking them up today/ they’re throwing away the key/ I wonder who it’ll be tomorrow/ you or me?” from “The Red Telephone” refer just as well, and more literally, to Guantanamo Bay almost four decades later?  And that’s just it.  The complexities and difficulties of life that consume Forever Changes are ones that still linger.  They touch on things deep and vast.

Of course, the unmatched blend of optimism and loneliness of Bryan MacLean‘s “Alone Again Or” makes it basically a perfect song.  But then the same greatness can be attributed to the epic “You Set the Scene”, which is the summation of everything that precedes it.  Arthur Lee sings “and for every happy hello/ there will be goodbye”, but later reiterates “and I face each day with a smile.”  The tensions, contradictions, wonder and cautious acceptance that permeates the song is the same feeling that carries the rest of the album.  That song is also a great example of how so much of the album makes a contemplative, searching state of mind so palpable.  Even if the music deals with the downsides of the cultural artifacts it considers, in the end it still finds them worthwhile.  Nothing good comes without hard work and struggle!

I have wavered in my appreciation for this album over the years.  I loved it at first, but then changed my opinion and thought it lightweight and superficial for a while.  But I came back around, and I think for good.  This is the real deal.  Whenever I come back to it, I’m more impressed than before.

If you have no sense of wonder, or just can’t see anything in yippie/hippie culture, this album probably won’t hold interest for you.  But for you, I am sorry, for you have missed out.  This album has rightfully earned a place among those few and rarefied that are worthy of a lifetime of listening, and that can actually re-frame your whole point of reference as a listener.

Patti Smith – Banga

Banga

Patti Smith – Banga Columbia 88697 22217 2 (2012)

Assured pop/rock music suits the mature Patti Smith.  After an increasingly disappointing string of albums for Columbia late in life, Banga is her strongest offering in a long, long time.  It simply tries, more successfully than the tediously nostalgic Twelve, the bland Gung Ho, or the inconsistent and forced Trampin’.  She is making music a little less aggressively “rocking” and more pleasantly and melodically poppy (with echoes of her late 1980s effort Dream of Life).

Frankly, Patti in her late 60s fronting raw punk rock would seem a bit out of place.  It is not the sort of thing someone her age can pull off, if for no other reason than it was a technique of the past and such a thing would only appeal to listeners stuck in the past.  Instead, she is crafting detailed, nuanced pop songs.  Everything she does here has precedent, not necessarily in her work, but in rock and pop generally.  She summons it.  She guides it.  She makes a case for the continued relevance of pleasant sounding rock music to open a channel with audiences.

Many of these songs are tributes, to fallen comrades or simply historical figures.  “Maria” (for the late actress Maria Schneider) builds gradually to some of the most prominent electric guitar work on the whole album.  The opener “Amerigo” is about Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian explorer who is the namesake of America.  But the song is a meditation on how the New World has the capacity to change the European colonizers as much as they sought to conquer it.  “Tarkovsky (The Second Stop is Jupiter)” is for Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky.  It has touches of cabaret jazz, wedded to psychedelic guitar and stark spoken word from Smith.  Bits of “Constantine’s Dream” seems to bear an uncanny resemblance to The Birthday Party‘s goth-rock staple “Junkyard.”

The best that Banga has to offer is a steady determination to keep going in the right direction.  That is, it doesn’t give in to complacent comforts of later life.  It doesn’t just toil away in the same way as before though.  Patti is still trying to adapt to circumstance.  This is her most inspiring quality.  She is a shining example of how there are ways to look at the world that bend through time but keep moving toward some kind of good and better world.

The Byrds – Sweetheart of the Rodeo

Sweetheart of the Rodeo

The Byrds – Sweetheart of the Rodeo Columbia CS 9670  (1968)

Here’s a very well crafted album, free from any identifiable faults, that most listeners will probably like.  I tend to agree with Lester Bangs, providing context in a two-part review of The Stooges‘ Fun House for CREEM Magazine, that The Byrds and their ilk were really an obvious and direct electrified extension of acoustic folk of the early 1960s, and their attempts at genre crossover, like this album of country/rock, really presented a straightforward combination of the styles that would have inevitably been attempted by somebody at some point.  They take proven elements from country and rock and set them side-by-side.  The vocal harmonies sound like typical smooth, airy and Anglo-centric Byrds stuff, and the country material is all authentic twang.  But even if the Byrds rarely take any real chances, you can’t really argue with the craftsmanship here.  Tons of great old tunes and covers of contemporary country, folk and R&B too.  If you are going to do the obvious, you can’t make any mistakes, and on that score The Byrds really deliver.

Flipper – Public Flipper Limited: Live 1980-1985

Public Flipper Limited: Live 1980-1985

Flipper – Public Flipper Limited: Live 1980-1985 Subterranean SUB 53 (1986)

Flipper was one of the great rock bands of the 1980s.  Often times the alternative and grunge rock scenes of the 1990s are described as a group of young people rejecting a bourgeois lifestyle.  This is most pronounced when young adults choose to be downwardly mobile from a middle or upper-middle class lifestyle to a lower-middle or lower class lifestyle when options to be more upwardly-mobile were available — this explains some hostility to “hipsters” (doing the same) by those who aspire to what the hipsters reject.  Anyway, Flipper was there first, of course.  There is definitely something aggressive about Flipper’s quite explicit indifference to all expectations.  “Ambition” is like a foreign word.  But this all has a point.  Flipper present a very political approach to life that is an alternative but equally “violent” tactic as Mahatma Gandhi‘s civil disobedience.  Some explanation is due.  Modern thinkers can call Gandhi “violent” in the sense that he challenged the “structural violence” of a society that was premised on exploitation and disenfranchisement of many, in other words a social structure that accepted and indeed promoted as a base foundation the conditions of sweatshops, extreme poverty and other deplorable conditions.  Flipper’s aesthetic built upon the rejection of that “structural violence”.  What made them great though, was that they built up a whole new vocabulary of sleazy, indifferent, non-cooperation that didn’t rely on the regular features of pop and rock.  When on “Life” they sing repeatedly, “Life is the only thing worth living for,” it recalls Motörhead absurdly singing, “Killed by death,” but more daringly turns new age positive thinking into a kind of empty, meaningless slogan.  Awesome.  Major record labels, like all big businesses in their own ways, are dependent upon the creative talent of musicians to exploit it to turn a profit.  By expressing no viable “talent” in the conventional sense, Flipper could exist outside of that system.  Yet, they were very talented, because you’d have to be to come up with a song like “Sex Bomb,” and because there is such a creative consistency in what they did through the 1980s.  But it was a talent that was useless to the big music industry.  The slogan on the band’s touring van was “Flipper suffer for their music – now it’s your turn.”   Most of the world couldn’t image why anyone would subject themselves to this music.  That’s only because of a lack of imagination of their part though.  So, of course, Public Flipper Limited is an inspiration to the rest of us.

The Misfits – The Misfits Box Set

The Misfits Box Set

The Misfits – The Misfits Box Set Caroline CAR 7529-2 (1996)

The Misfits.  It’s almost iconic that TV sitcoms and movies are going to show the “rebel” or “delinquent” teenager/adolescent with a Misfits poster in his room, or wearing a Misfits T-shirt.  Yes, watch some old “Saved By the Bell” re-runs to confirm.  Watch David Cross’ cameo in the movie “Men In Black”.  The evidence is there.  For those reasons, I never bothered with The Misfits for a long time, despite the growing number of friends over the years who have loved them tremendously.  When I finally gave them a shot, since my wife had the box set, I could finally hear for myself what it was all about.  And now I love it.

There are three basic components to The Misfits’ sound.  They had the songs, they had the singer, and they had the gimmick.

The group’s debut single is a weird and highly forgettable slab of disco-inflected sleaze rock, with a bad recording of a good song on the B-side.  But they hadn’t found a guitarist yet.  Probably around the time they did find their guitarist, or in any event by around 1978-79, they seem to have written the bulk of their classic songs.  They went on to record and re-record these into the early 1980s, with only some of these recordings seeing proper release.  But the song were always there.  They were propulsive, with a strong sense of melody, and a lethargic, pseudo-lazy, slacker’s sense of rhythm.  Even when the lyrics were stupid or adolescent or both, the songwriting still provided great melodies.  The songs also frequently leaned toward catchy sing-along choruses, a good measure of the reason for the group’s continued cult following.

The songwriting might have been irrelevant had The Misfits not had a great singer in Glenn Danzig.  He was the main difference between The Misfits and so many other punk bands.  Other than Nina Hagen, perhaps no other punk singer had his control and range.  Danzig’s vocals are what allowed The Misfits to actually put into practice their developed sense of melody in a way few others could realize, even if they had the inclination.  So the undercurrents of 1960s East coast doo-wop revival are there in the recordings and are convincing enough as to make them easy to overlook.

The gimmick the band had was a fixation on horror movie themes.  The band logo kind of says it all.  Now, The Cramps certainly were also doing something similar.  But where The Cramps focused on divining the countercultural implications of late-night TV and monster movies (at least up through their early 80s record label feud), The Misfits focused on humoring a kind of comic-book horror aesthetic.  A small but noticeable difference.  Funny though, how those two bands that must have seemed the most trivial at the time have held up so much better than so many other gimmick-less punk bands of the day.  If nothing else, and even if you find no substance in the gimmick, the Misfits’ gimmick gave them a common cause to rally around, and tended to unify everything in their recordings.

As for everything else, the sound of The Misfits triggers associations with kind of the basic elements of punk.  Comparisons to The Damned, or any other notable punk band of the late-1970s makes for a fair characterization of the sounds The Misfits’ banged out of their instruments.  After they had exhausted recording their earliest compositions, the well sort-of ran dry, so-to-speak.  They only really wrote a few great songs into the 1980s.  It wasn’t long before their gimmick stopped being a joke, and they seemed to start making it a grave and serious matter.  By the time of the original group’s final full-length album, only their second, they had turned into a rather faceless, unremarkable punk-metal band (and Danzig went on to Samhain, who were that only much much worse).  What happened to drain them of their creativity and originality makes for a good question, and one that I can’t answer.  The group reformed with a series of often high-profile replacement members.  But who cares.  Fortunately, this Misfits Box Set is only about the original band.

Operating as an independent act, with their own record label, The Misfits had tremendous difficulties releasing material, though freedom from the constraints that go hand in hand with better distribution might have been necessary for them be what they were in the first place.  Despite a number of highly productive recording sessions in the 1970s, they didn’t release much of those recordings during their existence as a functional band.  And what they did manage to release was often the more inferior material, looked at in hindsight.  And so this box set is invaluable.  It’s all pretty damn good.  Listening to the whole thing straight through will find you listening to a lot of the same songs over and over again, but hey, even with a lot of repetition they are still good songs!

If you ask me, and if you’ve read this far you are asking (sort-of), the best Misfits recordings were scattered across singles, EPs, the first of their two albums, and vault-clearing compilations like this box set.  Some of the material released prior to this box set hides behind needless echo/reverb.  Some originally unreleased versions of songs benefit from punchier guitar, even if the vocals don’t jump out front-and-center.  And some songs just feel right at certain tempos.  The great thing with this box set is that you can pick the version of each song that feels right for you.  They are all right here (that is, except for the bulk of Walk Among Us which is the only Danzig-era material not on this box set).

If you hear a few Misfits songs and like them, go straight for this box set and save yourself all the trouble of attacking them piecemeal.

John Cale – The Island Years

The Island Years

John Cale – The Island Years Island 314524235-2 (1996)

John Cale was at the epicenter of much of rock music’s development in the 1970s.  Well, to be fair, his influence began in the 1960s, with one of the first and still one of the best “underground” (read: modern) rock bands, The Velvet Underground.  Then he was producing The Stooges‘ self-titled debut and recording on his own and in collaboration with others.  But his solo career was in full swing in the 1970s, and he continued to produce some outstanding records by others.

After a solo debut (Vintage Violence) that focused on artful country-rock shot through with strong Leonard Cohen influences and another album operating in the realm of modern classical music (The Academy in Peril), he made the gentle Paris 1919.  Then he landed a multi-record deal with Island records and released a trio of albums within the space of about a year.  The three Island records Fear, Slow Dazzle and Helen of Troy–all collected here with additional bonus tracks–have a certain consistency and commonality that makes them ideally suited to being packaged together.  Though each of the albums collected has its own personality.  Fear is the inventive one, with a twisted, arty appeal.  Slow Dazzle is the most conventional sounding–relatively speaking–with a more traditional rock sensibility.  Helen of Troy is the most savage and viscious of the three, with a hard tone laid down by a band well-practiced from performing live with Cale.

Reviewer Patrick Brown described Cale as a “master of mood”.  That’s absolutely true, but it’s also worth noting that on his Island trilogy he specialized in a very particular kind of mood that bore a very special place in the context of its time (very much like Jim O’Rourke roughly two-and-a-half decades later).  Somebody on a wiki wrote that Cale’s music in the 70s “featured a dark and threatening aura, often carrying a sense of barely-suppressed aggression.”  While Paris 1919 was hopeful and intimate with an emphasis on the nostalgic, the Island trio adapted to times a bit more tumultuous.  There was now a palpable sense of uncertainty.  Nostalgia still played a role (like “Ship of Fools” from Fear), but it now conveyed something lost and squarely of the past, like a new era was upon us and the old ways didn’t point the way for the future.  There are plenty of songs here that recall various bygone rock and roll movements, but reconfigured in a punchy and sometimes more unnerving way (like Cale’s deconstruction of “Heartbreak Hotel” from Slow Dazzle).  Even when mannerisms of the past are present (like the saxophone on “Darling I Need You” from Slow Dazzle), the sound is never “retro” but more of a transposition, accentuated with heavier bass and a more ominous or wearied tone.  Discussing the songs here, that astute RYM reviewer praised “pretty much any one where he starts screaming.”  There are quite a few of those.  Cale has plenty of hard rockers here, most of which build up from a steady beginning to a kind of frenzied, chaotic conclusion.  What makes these so special is the very explicit unraveling that takes place within those songs, something not merely implied.  But even when it seems like any of this music is set to go off its hinges, Cale reels things back a touch.  His pop sensibility always remains in reach.  He was strongly influenced by The Beach Boys (like on “China Sea” from Helen of Troy), and even recorded a Brian Wilson tribute (“Mr Wilson” from Slow Dazzle).  Though in some ways this music might actually be seen as the frayed rock and roll spirit that sits just outside the best of Carpenters‘ early 1970s oeuvre, now less contained and closer to (or past) the boiling point.

Cale’s lyrics are suited to the material.  They are always a little obtuse.  Still, they serve the overall mood, which is given a greater importance than interpretation of the words divorced from the music.

As a producer, Cale’s work here is brilliant.  It’s never heavy-handed.  There is a warmth but also a clarity to it.  He makes the instrumentals and vocals all very articulate without losing a razor-sharp edge.  It gives all these songs a sense of power and nominally polite menace barely contained under the surface.  Cale was producing other albums in this era like Patti Smith‘s Horses and (most of) The Modern Lovers‘ self-titled debut.   Cale would later go on to be a fixture at CBGB’s in the late 70s, with harder more direct rock like Sabotage/Live.

These albums aren’t “punk” but they make sure steps between a lot of earlier rock and that movement.  This collection captures the sense that whatever had happened in the 1960s was over and conveys the need for something new.  As one other reviewer on RateYourMusic (drifterdk) wrote, “The paranoia, the ennui, the boredom, the restlessness, the drugs, the heavy politics, the terrorism, the wars, the unrest, the dissatisfaction, it’s all here.”  But it’s not just that those elements are here.  Cale masterfully switches between different modes, with a rocker here, a gentle ballad there, a poppy and fun tune there.  There is something in the totality of what he achieves across this trilogy of albums that can’t be conveyed in any one song.

This music is vital.  Cale was really on a run at this point, and drugs hadn’t slowed him down yet.  Listeners wanting the glossy, happy version of 1970s rock and pop probably will want to pass on this, which gets more to the unvarnished heart of the era.

Black Flag – Family Man

Family Man

Black Flag – Family Man SST 026 (1984)

You might say that Black Flag represented the very best qualities of a rock band from the country that gave birth to rock and roll.  They did new things and they pushed boundaries.  They came up in the late punk scene, one in which there was no “entry code”.  Anyone could self-identify as a “punk” — just like James Franco‘s character starts calling himself a “punker” in an episode of the TV show Freaks and Geeks (incidentally, Franco is heard listening to Black Flag in that episode).  But even without an entry code, there ended up being a lot of conformist behavior in the punk scene.  Many punks practically wore uniforms!  Black Flag vocalist Henry Rollins commented in the documentary Punk: Attitude that lots of punks ended up being a lot more close-minded than they promised.  Rollins can safely say that because Black Flag was most definitely not made up of those kinds of punks.  Although in their first four years, Black Flag seemed like a band fairly close to the norm, with just a better guitarist than most — Greg Ginn — and less fashion sense.  But as time went on it became clear to anyone paying attention that Black Flag was actually really different.  They had long hair to piss off the close-minded punks in the audience.  And what is more punk than that!

After a draining legal battle, the band emerged from hiatus in 1984 with what seems like a truckload of albums.  The third (or second?) of them was Family Man.  It raised the stakes considerably for how far the band was willing to go.  Punk bands, before or since, were NOT releasing albums of roughly half spoken word pieces and half instrumentals.  Granted, the origins of punk lay in college-educated poets like Patti Smith, with very clear connections to literary and performance art circles.  Even Lydia Lunch came to fore in a scene of like-minded artists.  But when Rollins started doing “spoken word” (not that the term was even well-associated with it at the time), he did not come from any formal background in literature.  He took a very DIY (do-it-yourself), self-taught approach.  Side one of Family Man is devoted entirely to Rollins doing spoken pieces.  His words are, well, a bit juvenile and fueled by a disturbing amount of aggression and rage.  But, he is very earnest about what he is doing.  It also takes a considerable amount of guts to try to break spoken word performances to fresh audiences on the West Coast and Midwest with little or no reference points.  Punks would have found more refined performance at a William S. Burroughs reading, but that’s not really the point.  The real point is that Rollins was doing what he thought mattered even when it wasn’t what was expected — or accepted.  His earliest attempt here might be a bit rough-hewn, but he did get better going forward.

Side two of the album opens with “Armageddon Man,” the one true full-band track.  Even though that might lend the impression that it’s the “classic” Black Flag sound, it’s hardly that.  It’s another extended jam, running over nine minutes.  From there, the rest are instrumentals.  Guitarist Greg Ginn has plenty of space to stretch out and he makes the most of the opportunity.  It’s worth noting that side two is probably bassist Kira Roessler‘s finest moment with the band on record.  Drummer Bill Stevenson sometimes struggled to mesh with Ginn, but he does okay here, in spite of a few patches where it takes him a moment to lock into a good groove.  The influences on side two run the gamut.  The jammy, long-song format takes a cue from Ginn’s adored Grateful Dead.  But telling is the closer “The Pups Are Doggin’ It,” with Kira playing a bass line cribbed from “Right Off” on Miles Davis‘s A Tribute to Jack Johnson.  The jazz influences in Ginn’s playing work best when Stevenson hits a hard beat along the lines of what the great jazz drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson would do.  The results on the second side of the record are much more replayable than the first side.  For that matter, the instrumentals simply rock harder and come together better than on the following year’s all instrumental EP The Process of Weeding Out.

The best thing about this album is its capacity to surprise by taking chances and breaking the mold for what a hardcore punk band was supposed to be like.  The relentless drive to try to evolve and rethink the very foundations of the band’s sound take this album beyond just the literal contents of the recording.  An album like this provokes a dialog.  The outcome of that dialog can be anything…and the ending isn’t written yet.