You’ve Got to Be Modernistic

Here’s Part Five of my Top Eleven Records o’ the Decade

Modernistic Jason Moran

Every now and again I’ll develop a musical crush on some contemporary jazz player and dive into their work. This is not easy to  do. One jazz recording alone can take months to absorb, and when you have a back catalogue to go through—yeesh! And to paraphrase the so-called Most Interesting Man Alive, “I don’t always listen to jazz, but when I do…”

…I tend to get modernistic. Which is to say, that I usually go for the musicians who play in a post-bop  (’40’s-’50’s style), although not always. Theseadays, players from “conservative” Wynton Marsalis to the more experimental Don Byron reach back to the past and try to make it present (not to mention Thelonious Monk and Saturn’s most famous native, Sun Ra).

Anyway, my favorite contemporary guy of the last few years has been pianist Jason Moran. I’ve been especially stuck on two recordings: his 2001 quartet album Black Stars and his solo foray Modernistic. Modernistic is the one that makes my Top Eleven list, if for no other reason that I love solo piano albums (maybe because I’m the son of a pianist?). Actually there are other reasons.  For one,  it’s no small feat to hold a listener’s attention with one instrument throughout an entire recording. There can be no slacking off, you have to come up with something interesting every bit of the way—no laying out to let another person have a say. In my opinion, a successful record has an intention, thoughtful song sequencing and pacing. I suppose it’s as much a product of thought as feeling.

Modernistic has all of this and then some. It spans time, doubles back and goes forward. It tells the story of jazz piano in the most personal terms. The record begins with James P. Johnson’s tune, “You’ve Got to Be Modernistic” moves on to the great classic “Body and Soul” and then, utilizing tape loops, he goes back to a song from his own youth, “Planet Rock” .

In addition, he interprets the great 19th Century German Romantic composer Robert Schuman  (“Ruf Einer Berg”)and the great twentieth century Jazz composer, the AACM’s  Muhal Richard Abrams (“Time Into Space Into Time”).

“Time Into Space Into Time”—I like that, it sums up this album well.

But that’s just the covers. Moran has a couple of lovely compositions on this album, notably, “Gansterism On Irons” and “Gentle Winds South.” And he makes a witty commentary on his own time-spanning adventures with his “Moran Tonk Circa 1936″ playing some honky tonk style on a rinky dink sounding piano. And that’s not even mentioning the stunning and percussive “Gangsterism on a Lunchtable.”

Modernistic professes love for jazz’s (and what influenced it) piano past and Moran’s own story. It’s moving, exciting and always fresh. It’s a stone classic in my book.

How to Disappear Completely

Here’s Part Four in an eleven part series on my top records o’ the decade. Today, it’s Radiohead’s Kid A!

Radiohead                    Kid A

So the ’90’s happened. Or so they told me. I wasn’t really paying attention because I was too busy making a hash out of my life and then trying to get out of that hash. Since I had stumbled into my thirties midway through that decade, I figured I had gotten too old to follow the happenings in the world of “Alternative” Rock as they called it in those days. I believed that my time had come and gone back in the eighties when I was in college and we called that stuff “College Radio” music or “Underground” or whatever.

But what the hell did I know? I’d never really had MTV and still counted on records and (reluctantly) CD’s and college radio to hear the new sounds. Oh yeah, except I didn’t listen to college radio anymore. An example of how out of it I was? I used to go into this cafe on Valencia Street (slightly before that became a hipster S.F. street) virtually every day and they played this loud rock record that sounded kind of punky but sort of poppy at the same time. I grew to like it after a couple of listens. I never bothered to ask the person behind the counter what they were playing, probably too afraid to seem grandpa-ish and uncool. Meanwhile,  a couple of my friends were telling me, who was mostly listening to seventies Soul period or fifties Honky Tonk or some such thing, to listen to this new record by a band called Nirvana. “Whatever,” I said.

Eventually one of those friends gave me a tape of Nevermind and I instantly realized that I already knew it because I’d been hearing it in that cafe every day! I played the tape to death for a while.

Time passed.

I slightly followed the exploits of Nirvana and the other “Alternative” bands that followed them into the limelight. I was a bit surprised that a band like Sonic Youth which had been around for a long time had become semi-famous. Even the Meat Puppets got a bit of time in the sun thanks to Kurt Cobain! Very odd to witness a band  that I saw in tiny little clubs in the eighties become semi-famous. This is what I had dreamed about in college, but now it was ten years down the line. Weird.

And then Cobain went to Valhalla. I saw the shocked kids standing vigil on TV, which reminded me of the vigils outside of the Dakota after John Lennon was murdered. But suicide! Holy shit! I was too old to feel like Kurt was speaking for me, but I understood the alienation that he expressed. And yet, I was annoyed. What the hell did you expect, man? You wanted to get out of your small town and to become famous, and now that you’re here in the spotlight it’s too much? Suck it up, man! He did. Unfortunately it was the business end of a shotgun. Fade to black.

Now the decade is ending and I’m still pretty clueless about the indie, alternative, what have you scenes. Movements have come and gone without my notice. I’m listening to Free Jazz and whatever else. A friend of mine, On Bass, Brian!, mentions this Radiohead band, who or whatever a “Radiohead” is.  He plays OK Computer. I’m skeptical. I get that they’re singing about alienation—a favorite indie, alternative, what have you, topic—but to me they sound like U2 for introverts. I can’t decide whether that’s a good or bad thing.

Then the New Millenium begins. I’m mostly out of my nineties hash. Since I know more about life I’m not sure if I feel more or less alienated than I did in my twenties. I’m buying music magazines like nobody’s business, catching up on bands old and new. I buy a copy of Wire magazine, a periodical devoted to experimental music that I occasionally read but barely understand. Somewhat apologetically, they put Radiohead on the cover. As I recall, the author of the article spends the first part explaining why Wire would do a feature on such a popular band, then he goes into leader Thom Yorke’s difficulties in dealing with fame (depicted in tedious detail in the documentary film, Meeting People Is Easy) after  OK Computer became a worldwide hit. After the tours and the endless intrusions into his life, beaten and battered Thom tossed his guitar aside (the symbol of his oppression) and holed up with the catalogue of a German electronica label and some Charles Mingus records.

Out comes Kid A, an album that uses modern technology to express an individual’s alienation from modern technology. I borrow the CD from On Bass, Brian! and keep it as long as I can. Aha! I finally get it! Alienation is eternal and ongoing! But rather than let it master you, you have to meet it head on and wrestle with it. At least that’s how I choose to interpret Kid A and its follow up, Amnesiac. The best you can is good enough. Don’t know if that’s an earnest or ironic statement on Thom’s part, though…

I admire Yorke for forging ahead and not giving up, and feel sad that the Cobains of the world give up. But what the hell do I know? Until you’ve walked in someone’s shoes…

So, what are you saying, Uncorrected? That you find these two “cold” technology-driven records life-affirming? That you listen to Kid A whenever you have a migraine and feel alienated from your body? Yesterday I woke  up sucking a lemon.

There’s always dessert…

The Root

This is Part Three in an eleven part series of posts dedicated to my Top Eleven Records of the Decade. These are listed in no order of preference.

D’Angelo     Voodoo

At the beginning of this decade I was listening to a lot of Roots Reggae and Dub and the genre unto himself, Fela Kuti. I was getting deeply in touch with my mystical Pan-African self that lies somewhere deep within my honky soul. D’Angelo’s multi-layered, deeply grooving Voodoo really hit the spot.

Liberal elitist that I am, I first read about the record in the New York Times, a few days before it came out (come to think of it, I also saw an excited reference to its imminent release in the Boondocks comic strip). As I recall, the article (I made a half-assed attempt to find it) discussed how D’Angelo had been collaborating with the Roots’ Ahmir Questlove Thompson to come up with a follow-up to his groundbreaking debut record, Brown Sugar. Dub and Afrofunk smitten-me was excited by the descriptions of D’Angelo and Questlove’s (or is it ?Love?) daily listening sessions of James Brown, Fela, Sly Stone, Jimi, etc. before they went into the studio. Their aim was to get inspiration from the Masters and then create mystical, grooving soul magic in the studio. They were on a mission to save R&B or some such thing…

Since I was (and am) only a casual follower of the contemporary R&B scene (Grandpa Uncorrected is  into the sixties and seventies-era stuff), I could get with D’s and ?Love’s stated aims.

To the record: I was immediately captivated by the slow, dense groove of the opening track, “Playa Playa.” Roy Hargrove’s murky trumpet added adornment to D’Angelo’s multi-tracked vocals. To me, this song sounded like the missing track from Sly Stone’s masterpiece, There’s a Riot Goin’ On or maybe Sly Stone meets King Tubby. You could practically smell the dope smoke coming from the grooves.

“Playa Playa” sets the tone for the rest of the record. It seems to me the listener is in for the ride or not. While there was a hit single, the Prince-inspired  “Untitled (How Does It Feel?),” this record was centered deep in the soul and the nether regions. Some listeners and critics loved this approach, others were turned off by its lack of hummable, catchy tunes.

Me, I dug it. I spun it endlessly on my portable CD player. It’s a fantastic headphone listen. I imagine a lot of college dorm room seductions were made to its numerous slow jams. It’s a record that works on your subconscious and your chakras and your head, heart and souls of your feet. But like I said, not everyone felt that way. The main criticism I heard was that this record was a sludgy mess without enough proper, catchy songs (like D’s first record, Brown Sugar). It’s a valid argument, but going back to the Sly Stone comparison, some go for the singles-packed Stand! and some go for the heart of darkness journey that is Riot. Me, I like all of it.

Although I’ve gone through years this decade without listening to Voodoo, whenever I come back to it, it still works on me.

Come back from your self-imposed exile, D’Angelo!

File Between Jennings and Jones

Note: This is Part Two in my eleven part series of posts on my top records of the decade. They are listed in no order of preference.

Jamey Johnson      That Lonesome Song

I spent a lot of time this decade listening to country music from the Seventies. Like many popular music genres in that decade Country music saw the apex of the album as a complete work of art—not just a collection of singles. To be totally accurate, this trend began in the sixties—check out Johnny Cash’s and Porter Wagoner’s concept albums or Ray Price’s Nightlife record, for example–but the seventies saw the record companies shelling out dough and creative indulgence (relatively speaking) to even the notoriously conservative Nashville hits factories.

Yeah, so anyway, I spent a lot of time this decade with the seventies masterworks of Willie (Red Headed Stranger, Phases & Stages); Waylon (Dreaming My Dreams, Honky Tonk Heroes); Dolly Parton (Coat of Many Colors); and many others by Merle, George, Hank, Jr., Loretta, Tammy, Emmylou, etc.

I’ve become something of a sixties and seventies Country crate digger. I’m still itching to find a copy of Tompall Glaser’s  Charlie, but the search is half the fun.

I lay all this down as a lead-in to one of my favorite records of the last couple of years—Jamey Johnson’s 2008 release, That Lonesome Song.

Since I only keep sporadic track of the current Country music scene and its trends Johnson seemed to come out of nowhere when I saw him on Letterman about a year ago. “Who the hell is this guy?” I asked the TV. The beard, the glower, the band members that looked like the guys in The Sons of Anarchy. But most of all, it’s that voice that’s a little bit Waylon, a little bit George Jones and a lot of other fellas. A sound that’s, to quote one of his songs, “between Jennings and Jones” (and ’70’s Hank Jr., I would add). He doesn’t appear to be a thousand yuks like Brad Paisley (and I’m a Paisley fan, too) but country music needs its glowering, bearded roughnecks.

I ran out and got That Lonesome Song (okay, I downloaded it), and it’s been in top rotation for the past year. It certainly does fit in between Jennings and Jones, and I do believe it stacks up pretty well with some of their best. It’s not just a collection of singles (although it has a lot of good ones) but like my precious albums of the seventies, it’s well thought-out and sequenced. TLS begins with our hero being let out of prison (“Released”) and then it segues directly into the outstanding “High Cost of Living”—a ruthless personal inventory of the singer’s bad history and habits (at least somewhat autobiographical I would think)—then it downshifts into a weeper (“Angel”) just to give you an idea of the emotional range we’re dealing with here. It has a big hit single (“In Color”) that is moving without being corny, it has a dynamic title track,  a melancholy look or two backward, a couple of humorous numbers, and so on.

It can’t be any coincidence that two songs from Waylon Jennings’s masterpiece Dreaming My Dreams (“The Door Is Always Open” and “Dreaming My Dreams”) are covered on this album. I daresay that DMD is a template for That Lonesome Song and was likely on heavy rotation when the latter record was being recorded. The spirit of Waylon is very present—in the sound, the toughness and honesty of the songs, even in the few glimmers of humor. All for the good, in my opinion.

This is a grown up record, hard won, articulate and moving. The kind of record that sticks to your ribs and is in it for the long haul. Any more cliches I can think of ?

I will definitely file (even if it’s an “efile”) this record between Jennings and Jones. It’s a keeper.

I never saw Lynyrd Skynyrd but I sure saw Molly Hatchet

Note: This is the first in an eleven-part series about my top albums of this decade. These records will be discussed in no particular order of preference.

The Drive-By Truckers  Southern Rock Opera

Fans of the Smiths are probably familiar with the stories of  how young Steven Morrissey got through his lonely, depressed adolescence with the help of the music of The New York Dolls (among other folks). One pictures the sensitive lad locking himself in his room and blasting “Jet Boy” on his headphones and exalting in the power of the music.

Let’s take that sensitive young lad image and apply it to me in the winter of ‘79-’80 and exchange the Dolls (I got to them later) for Lynyrd Skynyrd–especially the Gold and Platinum album(a sort of posthumous Greatest Hits odds ‘n sods collection). “What?” you ask, “Skynyrd? Sweet Home Alabama? Gimme Three Steps? Freebird?”

Not to get all autobiographical-like, but that Gold and Platinum album (as well as Springsteen’s Born to Run) was how I got through a tough teen winter. Funny to think that a sensitive kid might lock himself up in his room with the music of one of the brawling ghost of Ronnie Van Zant, but that’s what I did.

I was already a Skynyrd fan—what country boy wasn’t in those days? I’d first heard them when “Sweet Home Alabama” was a hit back when I was in the fourth grade. I remember sitting in my mother’s ‘65 Dodge Dart listening to the news  on the radio of the plane crash that killed Ronnie Van Zant and Steve and Cassie Gaines. I was into all those other Southern Rock bands–The Outlaws, Blackfoot, Molly Hatchet, .38 Special, etc. Just about all of them had a “Freebird” type number that involved long guitar solos. One of my goals was tape the epics from the radio:  “Freebird,” the Outlaws’ “Green Grass and High Tides,” Blackfoot’s “The Highway Song” and whatever Molly Hatchet’s long anthem was called, one after the other.

Anyhoo, as time went on I moved into other musical obsessions. I got into Reggae and Punk. I moved to the big city. It was hard to fit Skynyrd in with all that, although I was always happy to hear ‘em. I just didn’t admit it. Anyone who was at a punk or new wave show in the early eighties recalls hearing people ironically yelling “Freebird!” to the band who of course would never deign to play such old fashioned uncool stuff (not that they were probably capable of playing it anyway). I probably smirked the first hundred times I heard this ironic request, but after awhile I secretly wished somebody would bust into playing it.

I lay all of that history down as a means of discussing my decade-long admiration of The Drive-By Truckers’ 2001 release, Southern Rock Opera. This sprawling two-record set is both a tribute to the memory of the original Skynyrd, growing up in Alabama, and coming to terms with the state’s complex history–the good and the bad. Along the way, there are wonderful character and autobiographical portraits.  And hell yes, there’s a triple guitar attack when needed.

In the song “Three Alabama Icons,” main DBT man, Alabama-bred Patterson Hood explains that Skynyrd was one of the three state icons when he grew up in the seventies (the other two were George Wallace and Bear Bryant). In time, he “rebelled against the music of my high school parking lot” and got into punk rock and the like. I believe I read in some interview that Hood didn’t fully come to an appreciation of his background and Skynyrd “in all their misunderstood glory” until he went up north and heard people speaking ignorantly about the south.

Southern Rock Opera attempts to reconcile Hood’s (as well as his partner, Mike Cooley) ambivalence about Alabama’s tarnished past along with his pride in being a southerner. He sort of fights it to an uneasy draw in “The Three Alabama Icons” song—I’m not so sure that I see George Wallace as a man who wasn’t so much a racist as a political opportunist as Hood does (on the other hand, in another song, they imagine Wallace in hell), but it’s something to think about. They do a much better job with sharply drawn portraits of growing up rocking (“Days of Graduation”; “Let There Be Rock“), stuck in a small town (“Zip City”), and in some wonderful character portraits (“Dead Drunk and Naked”; “Guitar Man Upstairs”; “Women Without Whiskey”).  Although the conception behind the album is Hood’s, some of the best songs (as is often the case with DBT records) such as “Zip City”; “Women Without Whiskey”; and “Guitar Man Upstairs” are by DBT co-leader, Mike Cooley—who is one of my favorite rock lead guitar players.

The Skynyrd-related songs are pretty hit and miss. The best ones are Cooley’s “Shut Up and Get on the Plane,” which has the immortal line, “I guess the price of being sober is being scared out of your mind” and Hood’s moving portrayal of the fatal crash, “Angels and Fuselage.”

This album is too long and not everything works on it, but it holds up about as well as any other “Rock Opera” worth its salt. It’s an American story and it speaks the truth. It sure as heck connects me to my younger self. A definite Top Eleven pick in my book.

In conclusion, let me say this, had the juvenile delinquents that made up Skynyrd been born ten or fifteen years later, who’s to say they wouldn’t have been a punk band?

And let me leave you with one final anecdote: in the waning days of the New York Dolls’ original existence, they found themselves playing clubs through out the southeast. Who were their best buds in those days, according to the Dolls’ David Johansen? Lynyrd Skynyrd.

The ‘08-’09 G.S. Warriors and Once Great Rock Bands as Self Parodies

Warning! Sports content below!

A couple of years ago, excited by the Golden State Warriors late season run into the playoffs and a favorable first round matchup with the Dallas Mavericks—resulting in an historic upset victory by the Dubs—I decided that the unconventional, chaotic style played by my team reminded me of the seventies rock and roll band, The Faces.

For one thing, I’d recently gotten The Faces box set, Five Guys Walk into a Bar…and was deeply immersed in its four volumes. It’s a thrilling, perplexing collection. Definitely not for the beginner, it’s for the fanboys and girls. For one thing, the set is not organized in chronological fashion. Studio recordings, live songs, airchecks, rehearsals from different periods are all mixed together. It’s disconcerting at first, but then you begin to understand why this is so: it’s a representation of the eclectic creativity that five partying guys brought to a band. What could have resulted in drunken chaos (and probably sometimes did) often did not—especially live. There’s nothing like witnessing the power of a group of individuals hitting a groove, pushing each other to discover something new in a tune they may have played thousands of times. Whatever it is that kicks them into that gear—joy, animosity, random whatever—it’s there in the moment and then it’s gone. You’re lucky if you’re there to witness it. But what about when you’re in the middle of it? It’s the rush that must make the tediousness of touring, rehearsal, and music biz scumbags momentarily tolerable or at least forgotten. And it’s nice if you can make a living at it…

Anyhoo, I digress…The point I want to make is that the rush of experiencing the surprising success of the ‘06-’07 G.S. Warriors was for me a lot like listening to the Faces. That group of knuckleheads and overachievers coached by the eccentric, brilliant, infuriating Don Nelson managed for a few months to harness basketball chaos to their advantage, to overturn the rules of the right way and wrong way to succeed in the N.B.A. We Warriors fans, so starved for any kind of positivity or success, grew drunk on the possibilities. A few made free throws against the Utah Jazz in the second round of the playoffs (or what if Houston could have gotten by Utah in the first round? We matched up well against the Rockets!) and we could have made it to the conference finals…Next season’s going to be great! Maybe we’ll land Kevin Garnett!

And then, the inevitable decline. You can’t harness chaos for long. It’s bound to follow it’s own nature. Baron Davis is bound to go back to looking out for Baron Davis (rich and in limbo with the L.A. Clippers); Rod Stewart is bound to follow what’s best for Rod Stewart (very rich, continues to shag models, makes thirty years of shite music). Nellie is Nellie, whoever that is. We are left with good and bad memories, hurt feelings, and the question “Did this really happen?”

Now here we are in ‘09. The Warriors are in chaotic chaos. Nellie has a plan either to escape or remake the team (Watching Stephen Jackson and his supporting cast right now is not unlike observing another band, the late days of the Clash when Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon played with a few flunkies to what purpose no one was sure). Desperate fans cook up fantasy trades in which Baron Davis returns to the Warriors…Sigh…let it go, people!…We’re Warriors fans, our true state is one of humorous resignation with occasional ten year flare-ups of false hope. In this sense, being a Dubs fan is a lot like being involved in a dysfunctional relationship (or some might say, is a dysfunctional relationship)—you’re always waiting for the next disaster to happen.

And here’s where the Faces come back into these ramblings. For some time last year it was reported/rumored that the surviving members of the band would be reuniting to play shows and possibly record a new album in ‘09. I weighed my mixed feelings of disgust (without the late Ronnie Lane, the heart and soul of the band? bollocks!) and curiosity (how much would I be willing to pay to…what am I thinking? how will the fellas be able to deal with Rod Stewart’s ego? piles of money, I guess) The most recent news I’ve read is that the reunion is off. Not that I begrudge Ian and Kenny from picking up some coin, but why tarnish the memory of a great band? They’d probably end up playing “Hot Legs.”

Once again, I sigh. Let the past go. Rod Stewart won’t be the Rod Stewart of 1973 again, nor will Baron Davis be the Boom Dizzle of Spring ‘07 (although there’s a better chance of the latter, I suppose). I’m at peace with this. Just thought you’d like to know.

Musings on Master of Reality and Being Fifteen in This Big, Lonely World

The other night Emel and I went to see John Darnielle aka Mountain Goats in conversation with the great American writer, Tobias Wolff. We got the tickets quite some time ago and had been waiting for the event with much anticipation and curiosity. Was Tobias Wolff a fan of John Darnielle, Indie singer-songwriter cult icon? I had hoped that the two weren’t just thrown together and that T.W. appreciated Darnielle’s narrative songwriting gifts. Yes, T.W. is a Mountain Goats fan and he even sang backup on one of J.D.’s songs after the interview was over. A wonderful moment.

As far as fandom is concerned, I became a Mountain Goats appreciator well into Darnielle’s prolific career. He had been banging out the boombox recordings for a number of years before Emel put one of his signature tracks, “Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton” on a mix for me. I got that tune instantly. It felt like autobiography. It cut to the heart of being fifteen, confused, angry, hopeful, rebellious, dreaming—all those mixed up feelings you have at that age. And it’s triumphant cry at the end, the raised middle finger to dream-killers, authority figures, etc.: “Hail Satan! Hail Satan!”

This song is quite the popular concert staple for Mr. Darnielle, for who doesn’t relish throwing their devil horns in the air and shouting “Hail Satan!” in a crowded, sweaty club? Me, possibly. I hailed Satan inwardly, but I wondered about the motives of this crowd (a sign of true music snobbery on my part, I’m sure). Are they yelling “Hail Satan” because they feel for the plight of Cyrus and Jess or are they yelling “Hail Satan” ironically, as in, “Heh, heh, I used to know tweakers like that in high school, I’d never listen to that shitty music unless it was, here comes the word again, IRONICALLY).

Ah yes, that vein of underground/college/indie irony that I first encountered in the Eighties when people used to yell “Whipping Post” or “Freebird” during  the cool underground bands that we’d see who were unlikely to play such AOR chesnuts. Shouting the names of those stoner anthems showed us how far we’d come from our suburban—or in my case, rural— high school prisons. In the beginning I laughed at these ironic requests, but after a while I used to secretly wish to hear “Freebird” or “Whipping Post.” Sure, you could hear them by turning your FM dial to any number of stations (back in my high school days it was “KZAP, Sacramento’s Best Rock!”), but it wasn’t the same as barrelling down the road with your loser friends and hearing “Whipping Post” blasting out of the speakers, or as was more often the case with me, listening to “Freebird” at deafening levels on my headphones while hiding out in my bedroom—a pure musical moment.

But back in the trying to be an independent young adult cool guy in the city days, I would tamp down my desire to hear those Southern Rock guitar anthems and laugh and laugh at the absurdity of such music. Maybe I was selling my fifteen year-old self out, but as Mr. Darnielle himself observed in an interview, for the music obsessed (and even the not so obsessed, I would imagine), the bands and styles you discover in your teen years hit you like mini-revolutions: as you develop your young adult identity(s), you shed certain kinds of music like old skin. I remember going so intensely from Thin Lizzy to Led Zeppelin to Bruce Springsteen to Bob Marley to The Clash. Being somewhat poor, I had to sell my old records to buy the new ones I lusted for so much (In time, I would re-buy many of those old records). Maybe that wasn’t the case for all the other cool underground, indie people I knew back in my college radio days. Maybe they were secure enough to hold onto all their vinyl and didn’t mind if you saw that their Joy Division records were nestling up comfortably with their Journey records. I, however, wasn’t that guy. I thought there were rules. If you were underground, you didn’t go overground. Ya know, “commercial”; “sell out.” It was a true moment of cognitive dissonance when I went to my friend DC Dan’s apartment and saw that he had both an Allman Brothers poster and a Sex Pistols poster on his walls. I thought that was against the, ya know, rules!

I suppose all that proves what a timid soul I was, how much I wanted to be cool in my sheeplike way, even though I fancied myself a rebel. And that, getting possibly back to the point, is what went through my mind at that Mountain Goats show, “Are these people sheep and not, um, Mountain Goats, as it were?”

Who can truly say? John Darnielle spoke to these people on a meaningful level to them. Would they follow him, as I did, into his more fleshed out productions such as Tallahassee (a fave of mine from a few years ago) or We Shall All Be Healed or The Sunset Tree? Were there grumblings that he had “sold out” because he moved on from the boombox recordings and started using other instrumentation and an outside producer? And was I uncool for preferring these fleshed out recordings and the fact that he had moved on from writing quirky songs to more “mature,” detailed compositions( I feel the same way about Nick Cave’s career, invisible antagonists, so just deal with it!)? And does it matter anyway? You like what you like, eh?

Yeah, well, anyway, me and Tobias Wolff dig where Darnielle is going, and that includes his recent novel for the 33 1/3 series of books about records series, Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality. Here’s where we hopefully come full circle in this long ramble, people. Darnielle’s book about Master of Reality is a novel that features a fifteen year-old named Roger Painter who is locked up in a psychiatric facility in 1985. His things have been taken away and he’s writing journal entries to the man who has his stuff. All Roger wants, besides getting out, is to get his Walkman back so that he can listen to his copy of Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality. Darnielle’s novel in journal form functions as both a well observed close listening to the album’s tracks and its emotional/spiritual importance to its intended audience. Darnielle/Roger Painter poignantly describes the feeling of needing to be saved by music just when you need it most. In fact, Roger’s life changes dramatically when he decides he has to get that tape back. I’ll just leave it there…go out and buy the book!

Not surprisingly, reading this book brought me back to being fifteen, and if not locked up in a psychiatric facility, certainly feeling like I lived in one. I tried to be a “dope smokin’ moron” and listen to Black Sabbath, but dope smokin’ wasn’t much of a rebellion in my house, and as I’ve written before, I was a bit scared of Sabbath. Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy was terrifying enough for me. I moved on, not necessarily forward, into the abovementioned path of music.

A couple of years ago, I stumbled upon Paranoid again for the first time since those fifteen year-old days. I listened to it obsessively, and then picked up the other early albums of theirs. There I was at forty, slowly banging my head to the sludgy riffs of Sabbath. Pardon my French, what a fucking great band!!!

So, here’s the forty something me embracing all of my past selves, listening to Master of Reality with the fifteen year old me and Roger and Cyrus and Jess. Find the hope in the record as John Darnielle/Roger Painter does.  Hail Satan!

Today: Listen to “Son of Obituary”!

About thirty years ago my mother’s boyfriend bought George Gerdes’s Son of Obituary from the cut out bin at the Value Giant in Sonora. That cut out bin holds a rather mystical power over me even now. That guy got quite a few good records out of that bin, including the first Taj Mahal solo record, and I think, B.B. King Live at the Regal. Two blues albums that had a huge influence on my spiritual and existential life. And all for $3.99!

Anyway, Son of Obituary is some record—a double pun because it’s both the sequel to Gerdes’s first record, Obituary, and because of the obvious naughty word play that you can figure out. The Double G was (and is) an actor and musician who mingled with both New York actors and folkies. He ran in the same circles as Loudon Wainwright, and you can certainly hear the same sardonic sense of humor in Gerdes’s songs. His somewhat nasally (but melodic) whine adds to the sardonic tone of it all.

About those songs: somewhat countryish, country-rockish, singer-songwriter, melodic, smart-assed, and at times contemplative. Backed by Nashville Cats in Nashville, this record is filled with piss and vinegar. Listen to the joyful “Hey Packy” (a song addressed to a dog),  the bitter, Dylanesque “Roll Me Over Jehovah”, the mournful “Sack of Woe”, the funny-sad “Messin’ with Mrs. Lately, the wistful “Catechism Wednesday.”  Wonderful narratives and wordplay. Too clever probably by half.

Never made it to CD or MP3. Pick it up if you find it on vinyl. It’s still out there!

If Art Garfunkel Builds It, They Will Come (A Dream)

Lately, I’ve been obsessed with the Simon and Garfunkel song, “America”—a song that I’ve loved for most of my life, despite my up and down feelings about the duo’s recorded output. Oddly, perhaps, my thoughts about this song were rekindled when I heard a version that Yes (!) did of this song early in their career. Paul Simon’s lyrics about hopeful but anxious lovers are not the usual words you hear emitting from Jon Anderson’s pipes. In fact, I don’t think Anderson truly inhabits the lyrics the way Paulie and Artie do—probably why the song was never released on an album (a single B-Side maybe?). Nice guitar soloing though!

But I digress…

“America” is a fascinating song. The verses begin quietly with the musical tension building as they advance to the soaring chorus. The two lovers portrayed in the song take a bus journey to “look for America” armed with a pack of cigarettes and light hearts. They joke about their fellow passengers, including one that they imagine is a spy: “I said, ‘Be careful, his bow tie is really a camera!’”

But as the trip continues, they smoke through their pack of cigarettes, and as the narrator’s lover, Kathy, dozes, he confesses that he feels empty and doesn’t know why. The song ends as our narrator is counting cars on the New Jersey Turnpike. Is this the America we’ve come to look for? Is it the journey or the destination?

Maybe all of these questions were going through my mind as I dreamed the other night that I was watching a filmed interview with Art Garfunkel. In this dream documentary, Garfunkel was standing next to a green field that I understood was in New York City. He explains to the camera that although he believes in sustainable agriculture and would like to grow crops, he feels like it isn’t enough space. It looked like enough space to me, but I was just watching a documentary. In my dream mind, I asked myself, “Why doesn’t he build a baseball diamond?”

Back to Sporting Reality! R.I.P. ‘07-’08 Golden State Warriors

Hi Sporting Reality!

I’ve taken a break from our relationship over the past year. I’ve been busy chasing the ebbing highs of last year’s wonderful, improbable  Warriors playoff chase. Once you get the improbablility high,  you don’t want to come down—even though you know that’s where you’re headed. I doubt that I’ve talked about anything so much over the past year—personal feelings, the presidential race, religion, literature. Maybe music, but even then I’ve privately (insanely) pondered whether this season’s Warriors were the equivalent of the late ’60’s, early ’70’s Rolling Stones (The answer to that was no—more likely the ‘72 Stones for a bit then ultimately the ‘85 Stones, which is to say tired out and blechhh!!!).

Back to the lottery!