Tag: Rock

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.

The 13th Floor Elevators – The Psychedelic Sounds of The 13th Floor Elevators

The Psychedelic Sounds of The 13th Floor Elevators

The 13th Floor Elevators – The Psychedelic Sounds of The 13th Floor Elevators International Artists IA-LP-1 (1966)

Mid-Sixties music from Texas, coming from the likes of The 13th Floor Elevators and The Red Crayola, took remarkably fresh looks at modern rock and roll. The 13th Floor Elevators were probably the most psychedelic band of the era. Their garage-oriented acid rock exploded with desperate vigor. “You’re Gonna Miss Me” later affirmed its classic status upon inclusion in the legendary Nuggets compilation, but that song merely flanks a much bigger musical explosion.

The liner notes (some of the coolest you’ll find with any rock album) talk about music via a program of chemically deranging structures of the senses in a “quest for pure sanity.” Relating all knowledge simultaneously will help mankind deal with “life in its entirety.” The suggested tool seems to be LSD.

This album is a great example of the proper way to use drums in rock and roll. Simply laying out a beat straight on the top or bottom won’t work. Drummers are not substitutes for metronomes. Everyone in a rock and roll band should be responsible for the rhythm, with the bass (or its equivalent) as the signpost telling where the rhythm is at any moment. The drums cannot impose anything on the band without ruining the music; they must be an integral part of the music. The 13th Floor Elevators’ philosophy of recognizing reactions with “perfect cross-reference” makes the drums an essential part of their agenda. It isn’t about ability really. There is some exciting percussion here, even though the record–the CD reissue at least–is too hazy to make out everything the rhythm section did.

Singer Roky Erickson (b. Roger Kynard Erickson) had a manic energy unlike any other known human being. His life story a few years later involved commitment to a mental institution–when those were still scary places. Jug player Tommy Hall added one of the most distinctive elements of The 13th Floor Elevators’ sound with his otherworldly stutters and pops. Hall and Erickson’s contributions to amazing songs like “Fire Engine,” “Splash 1” and “Reverberation” are unique, but the vision of the album has held up thanks to the presence of strong, varied songs from beginning to end.

A bunch of crazed lunatics? Partly. But only in a good way. The 13th Floor Elevators definitely had a complex and coherent purpose for their extreme energy.

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.