A Deeper Shade Of Soul

The Failure Of Springsteen's Wrecking Ball

2012-03-05T15:48:00.002-05:00

Let’s be straight with each other, shall we?

Bruce Springsteen’s Wrecking Ball is not a great album. In fact, it’s debatable whether relative to Springsteen’s body of work, it’s even a particularly good one. It evidences the same weaknesses that more than a little of Springsteen’s work has suffered from since his last masterpiece, Tunnel OfLove (1987); over-thought and over-intellectualized concepts that border dangerously on self-importance, backed by music that feels like it’s made by an artist who desperately wants to find new sounds that are the equal of his older ones, but who cannot quite locate them. It is an ambitious album and it is certainly a failure, one of the biggest of his career.

If Wrecking Ball is Springsteen honing in on the Great Recession and placing blame where he thinks it belongs, his chronic tendency to overthink things has him deliberately and needlessly link it lyrically it to past American crisis’, whether it’s the Great Depression, the Civil Rights Movement or striking railroad workers in the 19^th century, which only diffuses the power of the songs for the present they are attempting to speak to. And the music, mostly folk based with touches of gospel, r&b, rock and inexplicably, Irish folk, has a modern sheen, but more often than not, it feels old, as though Springsteen is writing songs for the downtrodden workingman from 1937, not 2012. It sounds like Springsteen has chosen to aim the gun--and has picked up a musket instead of an automatic weapon.

When Springsteen sings of “robber barons” and “cannonballs” in “Death To My Hometown;” or “fat cats” on the woefully clichéd “Easy Money,” the ancient language makes everything feel embarrassingly impotent; it’s as though Professor Springsteen has taken over, and instead of powerfully addressing the breakdown in American society as it exists and is spoken of right now, he’s writing the songs to double as history lessons. What Springsteen has forgotten is that great political albums (whether it’s Dylan or What’s Goin’ On) speak and live in the present and then become timeless—they make history more than they sing about it.

Wrecking Ball’s first single, “We Take Care Of Our Own,” is firmly placed in the present as it lists all the places that we don’t take care of our own, but its ode to the E Street sound (yes, including glockenspiel) is all too shiny and glossy, brawny but empty. Producer Ron Aniello (Jars of Clay, Candlebox, Lifehouse) cannot (as Brendan O’Brien could not) find a guitar tone that sound anything other than, well, mainstream cheese. (For the great rocker he is, it’s inexcusable that Springsteen hasn’t had a consistently cool sounding guitar tone on record since 1984.)

Aniello and Springsteen produced the album pretty much as a duo, with Springsteen playing the majority of instruments himself and Aniello providing percussion and sampling. The samples are fine, but they provide little—they feel tacked on, obvious, and ultimately, unnecessary. And why Springsteen, one of the greatest rockers of all time, has chosen to work with the guy whose biggest credits are Jars Of Clay, Lifehouse and Candlebox is a mystery, other than the fact that they met through Aniello’s production of a Patti Scialfa album. The choice of Aniello evidences another breakdown in the Springsteen camp in recent years—the lack of collaborators who are at Springsteen’s level and can elevate him. At the end of the day, taste matters, and many of the production decisions made on Wrecking Ball exhibit a fatal amount of middling taste.

There are some fine moments on the album. “Shackled and Drawn,” despite its Irish lilt, is buoyant enough to overcome its arrangement. “This Depression” leaves the Irish folk by the wayside and with a beat straight out of “When The Levee Breaks,” has a yearning that and sense of loss that is affecting. “Land Of Hope And Dreams,” a great Springsteen song that he’s been playing since 1999, is rearranged and is far more effective rhythmically than it’s ever been with the E Street Band. “Rocky Ground” has an overtly gospel tone that uplifts. But none of these recordings, not a single one, is a classic, and every Springsteen album in the last decade, even Working On A Dream, has had its share.

You can’t fault Springsteen’s good intentions on Wrecking Ball. His passion and commitment is still palpable. But ultimately, this is an album that won’t make the sub prime mortgage guys at Goldman Sachs lose a single minute of sleep. At the end of the day, Springsteen has done no better than the Obama Administration to hold to account those responsible for the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. If anything, so far in 2012, Obama is having a far better year than Bruce.

Notes On The Big Man, Clarence Clemons: 1942-2011

2011-06-20T22:09:00.004-04:00

I first experienced the healing power of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band on August 14, 1985. I was fourteen, had just gotten home from sleep away camp a few days earlier, and had a couple of weeks of summer vacation left before school started. And instead of being by the pool, I was in bed, really sick. I knew what it was—I was asplenetic, the result of being in a car accident when I was six, and not having a spleen left my immune system compromised, so I had the same infection that I came down with four or five times each year as a child--swollen tonsils so bad I could barely swallow and a temperature of 104. Given its frequency, I wasn’t worried, but I knew that I had at least three days of being hellaciously sick in front of me.

Then my older brother Robert called.

Robert was almost seventeen years older than me. Technically, he was my half-brother (same father) but he never occurred to me like that—he was my big bro. When I was a little boy I worshiped him and he was about as incredible a big brother as anyone could have. When I was in the car accident that had me lose my spleen (and my mother) and was in the hospital for a week recovering from my injuries, Robert, who was serving in the Army in Germany, immediately came home on emergency leave, and except to go to my mother’s funeral, didn’t leave my side for that week, sleeping in a chair next to me every night.

As I got older, our relationship inevitably became more complicated and occasionally stormy. But the love was still there, and in terms of my musical development, he was critical. It was from Robert that at the age of nine or so, I first held Born To Run in my hands. Robert turned me on to the Ramones and the Talking Heads and a zillion other bands that most pre-teens just didn’t listen to, and when I got into the Who, he insisted on playing Quadrophenia to the exclusion of all other Who records. It was from him that I got a cassette that he had picked up while stationed in Germany. The label copy was all in German except for six words: The Rolling Stones – Let It Bleed.

Robert’s call came in and someone yelled up to me to pick up. I wearily brought the phone to my ear, and the first words I heard were, “You want to go see Springsteen in Philly tomorrow night?”

I shot straight out of bed.

“Really???” I asked. Yep. And he told me that he had paid $125 for each ticket that had a face value of $17.50. I told him I was sick and he just said, “Well get better quick, kid. We’re going.” I told him I would and hung up.

I ran downstairs to tell my dad. I was now something beyond manic. My dad loathed rock and never pretended to understand my devotion to the music, but his response was typically great. “Well, if your temperature is normal by tomorrow morning, you can go.” I gobbled some more aspirin and took a couple extra anti-biotics. There was no way in the world I was missing this. By 8am the next morning, Thursday, August 15, my temperature was 98.6. My dad gave me the green light to go to the show.

My brother picked me up in the afternoon, and we drove down to Philadelphia. I’m not sure I had ever been more excited. It was not only my first Springsteen show—it was my first rock concert. It was the height of Born In The U.S.A. mania and that mania was palpable. Bruce was the biggest rock star on the planet, and Veterans Stadium felt like the center of the earth on that immensely hot and humid night.

Bruce opened, as he did practically all his shows on that tour, with a booming version of “Born In The U.S.A.” I pumped my fist in the air like everyone else. But the loudest applause in the early part of the show, even louder than when the band came out from the wings, was during the night’s second song, “Badlands,” when Clarence played his first solo of the night. The sax signified something larger than the guitars or drums; after all, every rock band had guitars and drums, and most had keyboards. No, the sax meant that we were at a Bruce Springsteen concert for real, and that fact being drilled home through Clarence’s tenor filled 65,000 people with an incredible amount of joy.

The four hours (including the intermission) went by in a blur, and Clarence felt almost as important to the night’s proceedings as Bruce himself. He was the foil, visually and musically, and his solos on “Trapped,” “I’m Goin’ Down,” “The Promised Land,” and “Hungry Heart” lit the whole of the stadium. When Bruce closed “Thunder Road” by sliding across the stage sixty feet across his knees to kiss Clarence right on the mouth, it felt both shocking to my 14 year old self and completely right. In a lot of ways, Clarence felt like the most popular person in the stadium that night.

That night, August 15, 1985, was the first night I shared with the band, the first of dozens to come. The huge majority of those shows came after Bruce reunited the band in 1999, and by then, Clarence was not nearly as mobile as he once had been. But he was still the Big Man, still playing well and his sax served as the ultimate signifier that the band was indeed back together; perhaps that’s why he was treasured more than ever. The centerpiece of the tour, a 20-minute version of “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out” climaxed every night with Bruce’s introduction of Clarence and those first two lines of the third verse of the song: “Well they made that change uptown/And the Big Man joined the band.” That was it. That was what, in a lot of ways, it was always all about.

The absence of the band for 10 years had made hardcore fans like myself very conscious to enjoy each moment we experienced with the band. The experience was no longer to be taken for granted, if it had ever been. And of all the many rituals at a Bruce and E Street show, my favorite was always the first notes of Clarence’s first solo every night. I anticipated it every night, and sometimes would look at the crowd instead of Clarence, so I could watch the faces transform into beams of joy as his sax washed over the crowd. It was a clarion call of sorts, living testament to a lot of what Bruce wanted his music to be about—friendship, joy, the search for connection, meaning and soul. Life right here, right now.

And it was about love. To experience Clarence Clemons was to experience love; the love that he put out every night to the crowd, his obvious and immense love affair with Bruce, his love of earthly pleasures, his love of soul and spirit, and his love of providing people with joy. And that love he gave was returned to him from the crowd every single night in most beautiful of ways. While there are a lot of hardcore fans that have complicated feelings about Bruce over a variety of matters (his politics, his newer material, etc.), about Clarence there was no such ambivalence. We all agreed on Clarence. And therefore, the love reflected back at him from the crowd was pure love, about a pure a thing as I’ve ever seen. Thankfully, he knew it, loved it, and reveled in it.

As a player, Clarence was both unaccomplished technically and completely perfect. He was a honker in the King Curtis tradition extending back to Los Angeles jump blues bands from the 40’s and Atlantic R&B of the 50’s. But he was always the band’s link to soul, in both music and attitude. Like the best of Springsteen’s music, where the songs simultaneously contain joy and sorrow, Clarence’s best solos in “Trapped,” “Jungleland,” “Drive All Night,” “The Promised Land,” and others, felt to me like a burst of freedom with a large heaping of knowing sadness. They may have been triumphant, but the triumph always came with a price.

I saw that price up close in April of 2009, back in Philadelphia, where I had first seen the band almost 25 years previously. The lights went down, and the band went to their spots onstage. I was about 15 rows up on the side, Clarence’s side, and even in the dark, I could see Bruce helping Clarence, who had just undergone knee and hip replacement surgery, to his spot onstage, much the way a son helps one of their infirm parents. It was clear that Clarence could barely walk. When Clarence got to his spot and Bruce knew he was properly situated, they embraced and kissed, and before the lights went on and a single note was played, I was crying.

Hearing the news of his death on Saturday night was both totally expected and a complete shock. But what surprised me was the intensity of my reaction. I got home, poured myself a scotch, scoured the Internet, made a “Clarence” playlist on iTunes—and cried off and on all night into Sunday morning. I drove out to Jersey to be with my dad on Father’s Day and the second I heard that ethereal organ intro to “Independence Day,” I lost it in the car. I cried not because there won’t be any more Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band shows with Clarence Clemons. I cried simply because I really loved living on the same planet as him, and knowing that he won’t be around anymore in the flesh really, really hurts. And it hurts today. It seems ridiculous in a way to me that losing Clarence feels like losing a member of the family, but it does. It’s a death in the family.

No matter. His body may no longer breathe, but his being--who he was for Bruce, the E Street Band, and the people he played for--lives on through thousands of hours of music and will continue to inspire and bring joy to multitudes. Perhaps it will even heal another sick fourteen-year-old boy, but it most likely won’t be because he needs to get better because the E Street Band are playing in Philadelphia the following night.

Rest in peace, Big Man. Thank you so much for everything.

Preview Of Upcoming Springsteen Community Conference

2010-10-08T11:16:00.000-04:00

On October 13 at 4pm, E Street Radio will be broadcasting the latest Springsteen Community Conference that I co-hosted with my good friend John Franck. Titled, "The Ties That Bind: Springsteen and the Next Generation," it's a great exploration of Springsteen's influence on a new generation of musicians.

Our guests for this include Tom Morello (Rage Against The Machine), Pete Yorn and drummer Jay Weinberg. It's a killer show, with some great, informative and often hilarious anecdotes, much like the one below. If you're a Bruce fan, you won't want to miss this!

Vampire Weekend Flatten Springsteen

2010-09-10T12:46:00.000-04:00

I first heard Vampire Weekend in the summer of 2007 when they were blog buzzing. A friend sent me a link to their Myspace page and said something smarmy about them, asking me where everyone's balls went. I didn't think much of what I heard-this was obviously "smart people" music made by overeducated kids who had probably majored in semiotics, or something in that realm. But whatever, they kind of blew up. I've listened to their albums and while I can listen to them and experience a bit of pleasure, broadly speaking, they do nothing for me.

There's a YouTube video of them doing Springsteen's "I'm Goin' Down" a couple of weeks ago in Vancouver that's been making the rounds. It took me a couple of tries to get all the way through it-it's so horribly cutesy and neutered that it occurs as pointless. I can't help but wonder why they even played it, as they bring nothing to it; not humor, not longing, not sadness and not fun. Yes, there's an interesting novelty about a hot indie band playing a song off of Born In The U.S.A., something that would have been unthinkable ten to twenty years ago, but all Vampire Weekend does is flatten the song into a non-entity. Listening to it, it's no wonder they've been dubbed the world's Whitest Band.

"I'm Goin' Down" is sometimes considered one of the slightest songs on Born In The U.S.A., but it's really not slight at all. It's a Springsteen song that sounds happy but is really sad, following in the grand Springsteen tradition of uptempo songs with much darker lyrical undertones. What it's really about is how love fades or becomes obscured over time. Or said in a better way, how familiarity breeds contempt.

Bruce spoke of this in his introduction to the song on the Born In The U.S.A. tour in 1984-1985. It's a funny little rap, and by putting the song in its rightful context, he takes something that could be seen as slight and elevates it to the level of something truly special, something that eludes Vampire Weekend utterly and completely.

Download: Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band - "I'm Goin Down" (Los Angeles, CA 10/26/84)

John Legend Finds His Anger

2010-09-08T16:26:00.004-04:00

John Legend with the Roots on September 7, 2010

I've never been much of a John Legend fan. To my ears, he's too damned polite; decent Sunday brunch music perhaps, but entirely middle of the road. Safe. Nice. Harmless. He's clearly in the tradition of upwardly mobile 70's soul - Donnie Hathaway, Roberta Flack, the softer pieces of Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield, and while he may be working in the soul tradition, if you asked me whether the dude has any soul, my answer would have been no.

So I went to last night's John Legend/Roots show at the Music Hall of Williamsburg more excited to see the Roots, well actually, Questlove, than hear anything off of their upcoming album. Wake Up. And indeed, the show was mainly a polite affair, only confirming many of my feelings about Legend.

But for the last song of the main set, they went into a version of Bill Withers' "I Can't Write Left-Handed,"from Withers' classic Live At Carnegie Hall, and a transformation took place. The song, written from the point of view of a wounded Vietnam Vet, was one of the best anti-war songs of its era, and in recreating it in an era of war all the time around the world, both Legend and the Roots got way beyond the polite.

Legend sunk his teeth into the song; in taking on singing for someone else, he gave himself the freedom to not be nice, to give voice to rage, sorrow, and resentment. He moaned, yelled, shouted and caressed his own aggression. He pounded his piano, responding to the anguish in his vocals with thunderous and jazzy little runs. It was revelatory.

The Roots, who had played within themselves all night, like a great basketball player told that they can only do lay-ups and not dunk, finally let loose, and began to tear it up, especially guitarist "Captain" Kirk Douglas who played with both speed and suppleness, elevating the tension with each pass through the chorus. Questlove, who had the visage of a funeral director for most of the night, finally began to beam with a grin as he and Legend looked at each other and kept taking it higher. Each time I thought the song might be concluded, they attacked once more, and when they finally finished, the crowd erupted in both release and appreciation. They came to do an encore, but it was really superfluous - nothing else was necessary.

I came away with a new opinion of John Legend. I still feel no need to put his albums on, but I'm far more interested to hear what he does next - perhaps what's been missing in his music up until now is anger, an anger that would curb his tendency for syrup, and would make his realm of romance far more powerful and earned. And for the question, is John Legend soulful, I have a new answer. His music by and large may not be soulful, but down deep, the man has soul.

The 60 Rolling Stones Songs Of All Time (#20-#11)

2010-09-07T19:03:00.003-04:00

20. "Wild Horses" (1971, from Sticky Fingers)

Recorded in Muscle Shoals in December of 1969 while on the triumphant U.S. tour that cemented their "greatest rock and roll band in the world" status, "Wild Horses" is a classic Jagger-Richards collaboration, with Keith providing the chorus and riff and Mick providing the verses. It's a perfect pop song, managing to drain the cliche out of a cliche and providing sentiment without ever curdling into the maudlin. The Stones may not be often thought of as making beautiful music, but they've made a lot of it, and this might be their most beautiful song of all.

19. “Torn And Frayed” (1972, from Exile On Main Street)

One of their druggiest songs during one their druggiest periods, “Torn And Frayed” is built on three simple chords and the littered reverie of Keith, Anita, Gram Parsons and a boatload of hangers on, leeches, and people looking for a little taste of Glimmer, which as Keith later said, is more addictive than smack. Keith’s background vocals sound like they’re coming from a man’s who’s drowning, which in a way, he was, even though he was at his creative peak.

18, “Dead Flowers” (1971, from Sticky Fingers)

By Peter Ramos

It’s hard to tell how seriously Mick or the Stones took their country-fied song “Dead Flowers” when they recorded it.  British musicians playing the blues was one thing, but country? Of course we know now that Keith was hanging around, trading secrets and habits with Gram Parsons.  As well, the song acquired vocal gravitas, and official country legitimacy, when Townes Van Zandt covered it.  Still, whenever I hear Mick starting to sing in that low, slightly exaggerated Southern twang, I can’t help but think, “He’s kidding, no?”  Later, Mick would officially push the act over the top when the band recorded “Far Away Eyes,” too defensively, perhaps, against the criticism that he—a Brit who went to the London School Of Economics for Christ-sakes!—had no business singing God-fearin’ American country.

I grew up in the suburbs in the 80s. I went to private schools and then a liberal arts college, and though this didn’t completely determine the kinds of music I liked, it seems in some ways no surprise that I listened to classic rock, pop, new wave, punk, and, on rarer occasions, soul and R&B. Hair-band heavy metal couldn’t be taken seriously or even ironically. And country—including the original “classic” kind—was out of the question. And so I must confess, though I’m sure I’m not alone, that hearing “Dead Flowers” for the first time (during the summer of 1990 and right before what should have been my senior year at college) was my first taste of country music.  By this I mean, as I’ve already implied, not that I hadn’t heard country music before, but that I hadn’t yet taken it seriously. However outrageous and artificial Mick’s vocalizing might be, it was the Stones, and not Billy Ray Cyrus (very popular at that time), after all.  Thinking back now, I realize I had already heard “Wild Horses”—in fact it was on a Greatest Hits album I’d owned since middle school—but somehow that song never struck me as being Country in the strict sense, never announced the musical genre it borrowed from in such a loud, self-proclaiming, italicized way.  “Wild Horses” has a country feel; “Dead Flowers,” from the first bar to the last, is Country!  I also suspect that because I’d heard the former so often growing up, on popular radio stations, at mixers and parties, it had become for me naturalized into the genre of “standard classic rock”—not that there’s anything standard about that extraordinary, lovely song. Or maybe, along similar lines, because I’d heard so little real county music growing up—outside of the kind from people like John Denver—I never noticed the influence.

If it matters what and where I was when I first heard “Dead Flowers,” or what state of mind I was in, then I’ll simply state I was with some friends in a field in the middle of summer, very drunk and feeling sorry for myself because of a recent break-up I’d had with my girlfriend of two years. She was not my first girlfriend but my first “true love.” I put the phrase in quotes now to signify that that is how I felt then. So. Your typical suburban college student on summer break, working a shitty job with lots of free time and just enough money to pitch in for and help drink a couple of cases of National Bohemian: sentimental, maudlin, and very drunk.  

This, too, was not a first. In high school, I would also have been drunk, maudlin, sentimental, possibly heartsick, and listening to music—say The Smiths—with this important difference: when I was 16, I really believed my feelings were truly unique to me and that by some miracle Morrissey understood my personal sadness and alienation and articulated it back to me. In college, one comes to understand, more and more, just how typical one’s intense feelings really are. Not that this makes those feelings any less poignant, but it is a relief to finally get beyond the maddening solitary agony of high school narcissism. (Editor’s note: As far as I’m concerned, no one has ever articulated the regrettably long-lasting appeal of Morrissey better than in the sentences above.)

And this last point brings me back to the song itself and to the actual genius of Mick’s performance in it. He knows, as we do, the role drunken heartbreak plays in the economy of country music—it’s a standard, a convention. There’s a tear in my beer. Rather than sing HIS version of country music, his personal take on it, he gives us country music as it is. He uses the standards themselves.  Like any art form, jazz or blues, for example, the standards or conventions of the form, far from inhibiting an artist’s style, personality, uniqueness or originality, are the very media through which his/her personality expresses itself; there is no other way. The Stones are from England, as everyone knows. It’s 1970, not 1955.  If they’re going to play country, they’re going to play it according to its terms, its rules and traditions, and they’re going to do that with the kind of unassailable confidence, that sexy arrogance they’ve had ever since they realized how silly it was perform psychedelic British rock in the wake of Sergeant Pepper’s. Once they’d gotten “2000 Light Years From Home” out of their system, they were ready to become the Stones we’ve come to love ever since.  They would do country, but on country’s terms. Consider the alternatives: if they’d tried, out of a lack of confidence, to insist they were actually playing British “roots music,” some kind of cornball “skiffle” version of country; or imagine if they insisted on there being a connection between country music and Ancient Anglo-Saxon mythology-in the way Led Zeppelin, at their goofiest, sought to establish themselves and their credibility in the genre by drawing parallels between Delta Blues and "The Lord of the Rings." No, that would not do. (Editor’s note: That one sentence sums up Zeppelin’s greatest flaw.)

And yet, Mick is also kidding, after all. Or at least half-kidding. He is capable or being serious when it comes to country. “Wild Horses,” as I’ve implied, is a serious song, a love song, in which the speaker/singer—Mick, obviously—professes his unwavering affection for and dedication to his beloved.  But “Dead Flowers,” lyrically at least, has no such heights of passion. Here the speaker/singer addresses an X-lover. Love has turned to hate: send me hate mail, and I’ll bury you.  But even this passion doesn’t really amount to much; far from being a story of two lovers intent on killing each another, it’s more like, you’re a bratty Southern debutante who looks down on me and my rough neck friends; you also keep sending me these literal reminders that you hate me, but they only show how much you can’t forget me. I, on the other hand, find you annoying, yet neither can I move past you, since I’m a junky and a fuck-up. In fact, I’ll show up at your funeral with flowers but only to finally achieve the ultimate though petty revenge of outliving you.  Again, the banality of this lyrical drama only serves to locate the song more precisely in the very tradition with which the song seeks to align itself.  Traditional country music had already created the story of the lamenting, lovesick-blues singer, endlessly and in so many ways—“If my drinking don’t kill me, her memory will”—it had become itself one more convention of the genre.  

And it’s the genre itself, far from restricting the Stones, that allows them to shine through it.  Consider the song: the loose and lazy backbeat behind that acoustic guitar’s opening open chords, narcotizing and comfortable, the rhythm guitar and honky-tonk piano, and then, a little splash, just the first hints, of that brilliantly whining slide guitar.  In the chorus we hear, just behind Jagger’s low twang but harmonizing with it, unmistakably, Keith’s voice—wonderfully flawed, cracked, but high and lonesome as a bluegrass tenor’s.  And then, best of all, after the second chorus, when the song has completely established itself—Mick Taylor’s solo, a seamless combination of country and blues licks, elegant and tasteful, lowdown and dirty, all at once.  It hits me now that a fine lead guitar solo can make a bad song good (Peter Buck’s on R.E.M.’s silly and otherwise forgettable “Stand") and a good song sublime (Robby Krieger’s on The Doors’ “Moonlight Drive”). And Taylor was new, just finding his way, musically, into the group. This was the first Stones record on which he plays, officially, and on every song. Most amazing of all, he was just out of his teens, “just a lad, nearly 22,” as Hank Williams, himself, sang.

Is it their best song? Maybe not.  But it’s damn good, and more importantly, it opened a door for me into other kinds of music, other traditions within music that deserve attention for their authority, influence and long-lasting beauty.

17, “All Down The Line” (1972, from Exile On Main Street)

To promote their 1975 U.S. tour, the Stones played "Brown Sugar" on a flat-bed truck down Park Avenue in New York. It was Charlie's idea, lifted from New York jazz bands of the 30's who would promote their gigs that way. "Brown Sugar" may have been the "right" choice, but "All Down The Line" would have been the more appropriate one.

When the Stones were at their best, they embodied strut and swagger combined with a devastating uptown elegance, almost as though they were a 1970's version of the Count Basie band - swinging hard with an irresistible and sensual gleam. They'd ravage your town and take your woman - and do it with impeccable style. Nowhere was that more present than on "All Down The Line."

Towering and majestic, lowdown and dirty, this is the music of men at the peak of their powers; musical, sexual, and every which way. "Hear the women sighing," Mick sings, and you know it's true. But even at this peak, this being the Stones, there are no unqualified celebrations. "I need a sanctified girl with a sanctified mind to help me out now," sings Mick, lonely at the top, and way too smart not to notice that all is not well with the Exiles. But judging from the devastating groove, you'd never know that there's a problem. That would come later.

16. “Saint Of Me” (1998, from Bridges To Babylon)

It’s January, 1998 and I’m with my friend John at Madison Square Garden to see what turns out to be a pretty great Stones show. By now, I’ve seen enough Stones tours behind mediocre albums (Steel Wheels, Voodoo Lounge) to know that when Mick introduces a song by saying, “Here’s a new one…,” I’ve got five minutes or so of downtime. On this night however, I hear some interesting drum loops, a cool riff and as Mick starts singing, it dawns on me that this is not the usual paint-by-numbers late-period Stones song, a la “You Got Me Rocking” or other such dribble. I don’t catch all of the lyrics, but “you’ll never make a saint of me” in the chorus comes off loud and clear. The song rocks, the band slashes its way through it, and when it ends, the applause in the Garden is louder than usual for a new song. John and I look at each other, nod, and say simultaneously, “Good song.”

So I go back to the song, and it immediately becomes clear that this is not just a good song - it's a great Rolling Stones song, with every element of the arrangement working magnificently. Actually, it's really a great Mick Jagger song, as Keith is nowhere to be found on it. The guitars are courtesy of Ron Wood and Waddy Wachtel; the bass is from Me'Shelle N'Ddgeocello; the keyboards are from Mick and Billy Preston and the background vocals are by Bernard Fowler and Blondie Chaplin. Keith may have disparaged the Dust Brothers production on Bridges (he recorded most of his contributions with Don Was), but on this track he's just dead wrong; their modern touches work perfectly, giving Mick some vindication in his continued pursuit in keeping the Stones at least a little au currant.

And unlike many Rolling Stones songs post Exile, the lyrics don't sound like they were written in a cab on the way to the studio. The religious imagery alludes to "Sympathy For The Devil," but since by now it's clear that Mick ain't Lucifer, it's essential that he establish that he's not going to grow old gracefully either, which the semi-mean spirited bastard does rather well. Their last great song.

15. "Sweet Virginia" (1972, from Exile On Main Street)

Beyond the sex and violence, the Stones are also a party, and "Sweet Virginia" is the party. When you're out with friends, at someone's home or out at a bar, there's a look that passes over people's faces when "Sweet Virginia" comes on: it's a wry smile, recalling bad things done and bad things yet to be done.

14. "Waiting On A Friend" (1981, from Tattoo You)

Few partnerships/friendships have been more questioned, dissected and speculated about than the one between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. It's easy to understand why; they're such an aesthetically pleasing partnership - in look, sound and in the contrast of their personalities.

The standard rap has become that Keith is the true artist in the band, the one dedicated to the music first, and that Mick is the far more calculated one, the cold-eyed businessman. Keith is the rebel and Mick is the bourgeois social climber with a knighthood, for Chrissakes! And while there's truth to that, the whole truth is far more ambivalent and complicated.

Some of the riffs that are most identified as "Keith Richards riffs," like the one in "Brown Sugar," are Mick's. And no one can be more cold than Keith Richards, who after Mick Taylor's resignation from the band, dismissed him with a one sentence telegram. Mick has written some of the band's greatest music by himself, and kept the band together when Keith was too smacked out to hold up his end of the bargain. The real truth is they need and love each other - more than either would care to admit.

They fight like schoolboys - or an old married couple, and they know where to hit where it hurts. But they're clearly bound together, and women aside, they're obviously the most important person in the others life, a fact that they seem to often resent. And I would assert that it's that resentment, more than anything else, that is responsible for so much mediocre Rolling Stones music in the past thirty five years.

But "Waiting On A Friend," whether about Mick and Keith or not, captures the spirit of the relationship the way we would like to imagine it. It's a gentle and loving, and Nicky Hopkins twinkling piano and Sonny Rollins sax say everything that Keith and Mick Taylor's guitar may have left out. Originally recorded in Jamaica for 1973's Goat's Head Soup, this was one of the songs that Tattoo You associate producer Chris Kimsey recommended that the band rework for the album (it needed lyrics and vocals), and the idea was a stroke of genius on Kimsey's part, as it turned out to be not just one of their best songs, but also one of their most perfectly arranged ones.

13. "Happy" (1972, from Exile On Main Street)

And then there is Keith.

I am not a man who has many heroes. But he's one of them. I love him for the elegance and earthiness of his playing; a style, that while simple to play, no one has ever come close to replicating even half as well. I love how much he loves music; how his face lights up when he talks about Muddy Waters or the effect that hearing rock n' roll for the first time had on him. I love his no bullshit, reality based, anti-pretention, be-your-own-man attitude. I love that the man, deep down, is a romantic of the first order, a believer in chivalry, something of a gallant knight. He's funny as hell and a raconteur of the first order. And he's a man of honor.

It has me forgive his shortcomings: his stubborn and seemingly reflexive dismissal of new sounds; his addictions that no doubt have had an adverse effect on the band; his occasional coldness; and, most importantly, the fact that somewhere down the line, his ability to discern the truly great from the serviceable in his own music went to shit.

"I need love to keep me happy" goes the chorus of his best, most famous, and most beloved song, and it's a truism that sums up the man in some fashion; so simple and yet so affecting. I like living in a world with Keith Richards in it.

12. "You Can't Always Get What You Want" (1969, from Let It Bleed)

I've heard this song a million fucking times and every time it comes on, I'm in awe of it. The arrangement is so astounding as to be almost unbelievable; that chorale opening, the acoustic guitar that cuts like a knife in the first verse, the maracas, Al Kooper's organ, Jimmy Miller's drums (Charlie couldn't get the groove on it), and that outro. It's a perfect song.

11. "Jumping Jack Flash" (1968, from Through The Past, Darkly [Big Hits Vol. 2])

The song that launched them into the band we know and love today, getting them off of psychedelic imitations of the Beatles and taking them of their baroque period. The riff works just as well forty-two years later, if not better, and if you can take it out of its "I've heard this song on classic rock radio thousands of times" context, you'll hear, once again, how amazing it is.

When rock magazine's do their lists of the "Greatest Singers Of All Time," Jagger isn't usually mentioned at the top, which is a shame, because he's an original. Even when he was trying to imitate soul singers, he wasn't really trying to imitate soul singers because he was too smart not to know that he wasn't going to sound a black American soul singer. But he's done his own thing - conjuring, threatening, seducing, sashaying. You'll never get all of him the way you'd get all of, say, Redding, Lennon or Springsteen, but at his best, Jagger gives you enough, teasing you and leaving you wanting more.

Arcade Fire Beyond Niche

2010-08-16T14:37:00.001-04:00

I'm sorry I didn't see the Arcade Fire's shows at Madison Square Garden on August 4th and 5th. From what I've read, the shows were anywhere in the range from very good to great, and while I'm generally positive but far from super-enthusiastic about The Suburbs, live is apparently how you need to get this band.

I'm not going to review the album. Rob Harvilla from the Village Voice has written a review that neatly and smartly encapsulates many of my views about both the band and the album, which for me is another in a series of epochal "good but not nearly great" albums in the tradition of Ok Computer, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Is This It?, Up The Bracket, the entire Spoon catalog, and more - music whose praise has me listen and listen and listen, only to end up scratching my head at what all the fuss is about. I'd love to ascribe it to my contrary nature, but I yearn for consensus about the great far more than I yearn to make everyone else wrong.

And while it'd be nice if the herd of independent thinkers had a more consistent ability to discern the truly great from the good, the success of the Arcade Fire is heartening in that it shows that there is a demand, even amongst the too cool for schoolers, for music to be something more than one's private, nichefied pleasure. Just imagine if the Arcade Fire's songwriting chops matched their ambition. Now that would be something, because Springsteen comparisons or no Springsteen comparisons, Born In The U.S.A. this ain't, rhythmically, humor wise, in insight or any which way. But there's always the next album, and I guess I gotta see 'em live.

The 60 Greatest Rolling Stones Songs Of All Time (#30-#21)

2010-08-12T15:48:00.001-04:00

Well, it only took me three months to start the second half of the countdown, but good things come to those who wait, right?

30. “Start Me Up” (1981, from Tattoo You)

It’s the late fall of 1981. I’m 11 years old, in 6th grade, and I’m visiting my big sister at Syracuse University, where she’s attending law school. My father has allowed me to take the bus on my own to see her, so I’m feeling pretty manly. Big stuff. We’re out getting food at some place that feels “college-y” to me, and I’m feeling really, really cool. “Start Me Up” comes on, and I’m quietly singing along to it all the way through. It’s been a big hit all through that fall of 1981, and I’ve got the Tattoo You cassette, which I like, but don’t love. (It would take me about 25 years to become a big fan of side two.)

The song comes to its coda when Jagger, as the song begins the fade out sings, “You make a dead man come.” I sing along to the line. My sister, who is almost 15 years older and super-protective of me, gets an urgently worried look on her face, and asks semi-frantically, “Do you know what that line means???” “Yeah,” I explain somewhat impudently, very sure of myself. “It means that the girl is so pretty that the dead guy comes out of his coffin.” My sister explodes in laughter, relieved that at least for a little while longer, her baby brother is still very innocent.

29. “Stop Breaking Down” (1972, from Exile On Main Street)

I’m 19 years old, and I read something in Rolling Stone where Steven Tyler is saying that he’s kept time to “All Down The Line” while fucking. Being that I’m not particularly experienced or confident in the area of sex and know that Steven Tyler is, I remember little nugget, and use it the next chance I get. It kind of works, as I’ve got a solid beat to concentrate on and keeping time has never been an issue for me. But something isn’t quite right. I share the Steven Tyler story with the woman I’m with, and she laughs. Fortunately, she knows Exile well and says that “All Down The Line” is way too fast. She suggests that I keep time to “Stop Breaking Down” instead, and implores me to make sure to include some of the syncopation within. Smart woman. Great woman.

A year or so later, I’m with a friend in his dorm room, and we’re heavy into some really great acid. We’re drinking beer after beer and listening to Exile. “Stop Breaking Down” comes on, and we get completely into the fiber of the song, in that special way that only people who have used hallucinogenics will completely understand. I turn to my friend and say, “Jesus. This is really violent.” His eyes bulge, and he responds “Oh My God, you’re right!” like I have just revealed the secret of the Universe. If the Secret was going to be anywhere, I guess it could be in “Stop Breaking Down.” Good times.

28. “Moonlight Mile” (1971, from Sticky Fingers)

It’s the sound of the sun coming up after coming down very, very long night; the fear hovering, a “head full of snow,” and all of it impossibly weary and impossibly romantic. The band’s most beautiful arrangement, thanks to mainly to Mick Taylor, who built the song off a short riff by Keith, elongated and elaborated upon it, and then had the brilliant idea to give it to Paul Buckmaster (“Tiny Dancer”) to add strings. Of course, he got no credit (royalties) for it.

Jagger may never have claimed to be speaking for anyone other than himself, but “Moonlight Mile” captures post-60’s alienation and exhaustion about as well as anyone – and makes it shimmer. One of the greatest ballads by anyone at anytime.

27. “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” (1971, from Sticky Fingers)

Keith takes his fetish for open G tuning and creates one of his most memorable riffs; a slashing dagger of a sound that’s part violence and part sex – the Midnight Rambler coming off a Gibson.

I’ve always been ambivalent about the jam that fills out the last four or so minutes of the song. It’s a fine jam, but it’s impossible to be anything other than a letdown after what’s come before. Mick Taylor may have been the best lead player the Stones ever had; lyrical, melodic and technically brilliant, but unfortunately, he wasn’t necessary, just like the jam on “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.”

26. “Salt Of The Earth” (1968, from Beggars Banquet)

Keith sings sincerely for the Proletariat, because it might have sounded ridiculous coming out of Mick’s mouth, given that he wrote it completely cynically. The Stones were never really a working class band; at the outset, they chose their poverty rather than having it imposed upon them. But they sound completely convincing, mainly because Mick undercuts the sentiment within by acknowledging his own alienation from the masses he courted so successfully. And whoever made the call to include the Los Angeles Watts Street Gospel Choir on it deserves a Nobel Prize.

25. “You’ve Got The Silver” (1969, unreleased alternate take)

The version from Let It Bleed with Keith on lead vocals is great. The alternate, unreleased version with Mick Jagger on lead vocals is otherworldly. It speaks for itself.

24. "Midnight Rambler" (1970, from Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out, recorded 1969)

Violence as sex, sex as violence - all of it so compelling that you don't know whether it's a fantasy or a nightmare. A "Blues Opera" is what Keith calls it, and I guess that's sort of true, although there's plenty of striptease in there too.

Listening to the version from Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out, recorded at Madison Square Garden in November of 1969, I can't help but wonder: What the hell were a band making music this violent doing throwing a free concert? Jerry Garcia said that the Stones were that bit of red and black that one has in their sex life, and when he said that, he must have been thinking about "Midnight Rambler" - this is about as far from peace and love as it gets.

23. “Love In Vain” (1969, from Let It Bleed)

I had a sometimes weird and sometimes wonderful on/off relationship with a woman in my mid-20’s. She was thoroughly inappropriate for me and we had disastrously bad sex (once), but she was beautiful and I loved her anyway, somewhat unrequitedly. She got me into drinking scotch and I kept her cat, two things for which I will forever be grateful to her for. We’re now great friends, so it all turned out.

We didn’t agree on much musically speaking. She was a punk and indie rocker – but punk for her wasn’t the Sex Pistols or the Ramones; she had never even heard Never Mind The Bollocks Here’s The Sex Pistols. For her, punk rock meant a lot crappy, soulless, pretentious and sexless indie bands on K Records that I tried to like – I was smitten enough by her that I was willing to give an open ear to anything she was into – but found utterly dreadful. The one thing we agreed on was the Stones (and Al Green – she hated Springsteen - so much for taste).

We would get drunk on Johnnie Walker Red, put on Let It Bleed, and we’d start singing “Love In Vain,” not particularly well. The lyrics would always hit hard and I would feel that pit in my stomach; I knew this was a relationship that wasn’t going to happen, that she wasn’t even appropriate for me – and I wanted her anyway, and couldn’t have her. Love in vain indeed, but in the end, all for the best.

22. "Casino Boogie" (1972, from Exile On Main Street)

My first copy of Exile was on a 60 minute cassette that I recorded off of someone else. Exile is 66 minutes long, so I had to cut a couple of songs and “Shake Your Hips” and “Casino Boogie” were the casualties. (And there was something to be said for going right from “Rip This Joint” into “Tumbling Dice.”) At the time, the two songs seemed insignificant to me. Even a couple of years later, when I got a full copy of the album, the magnificence of “Casino Boogie” was something that I was not yet equipped to grasp. It took probably several hundred listens for me to finally get the majesty of the thing. But when I did…

To the uninitiated, “Casino Boogie” feels more like a groove than a song. But what a groove! Part New Orleans, part juke joint, part Chicago blues and part bordello, it’s a groove that screams wonderfully decadent times and nasty habits, all of which seem like so much fun, it makes me wonder if in the end, the casualties left in the wake of the Glimmer Twins thought it was all worth it.

21. “Sympathy For The Devil” (1968, from Beggars Banquet)

"Sympathy For The Devil," one of the greatest songs ever about humanity and evil, is terrifying in its perfection. Everything about it is brilliant - the conga intro, primitive and timeless; the way the Nicky Hopkins' piano drops in perfectly; the slow build of it and the perfect dynamics; Keith’s solo, one of the greatest in rock history; and of course, the “woo-woo’s." It’s guttural and earthy yet completely cosmopolitan and sophisticated - Bohemia moved to Africa.

It’s a band triumph - they worked for this one, refining the arrangement over and over again until they got it right, but the biggest triumph belongs to Mick, as both lyricist and vocalist, who captures the terrifying and thrilling frenzy of that Spring of '68, as revolution and murder weren't just in the air, they were the air.

Recorded during the period of Bobby Kennedy's assassination, Jagger takes us on a trip through history to assert that the devil isn’t some presence out there, but something that lurking within all of us, a message missed by many who took the song literally, thinking the song is a paean to Lucifer. The Stones were always smarter than their detractors. But even that speaks to Jagger’s genius; with smooth, cool and controlled fury, he could really make you believe he was the Devil. Or at least back then he could.

Springsteen Community Conference: Bruce & Politics

2010-06-24T10:00:00.003-04:00

At long last is the posting of the Springsteen Community Conference on Sirius/XM's E Street Radio from this past April. The subject was "Bruce and Politics" and I moderated a great panel featuring writer Dave Marsh, John Franck, Jovan Mrvos, Stan Goldstein and Lisa Ianucci. We covered a broad range of subjects and I'm really pleased with how it turned out. Enjoy.

Download: Springsteen Community Conference: Bruce and Politics (zip file)

The 60 Greatest Rolling Stones Songs Of All Time (#40-#31)

2010-05-12T10:26:00.000-04:00

Round three, with a disclaimer to start:

I would LOVE to post streaming links to the original versions of these songs, or mp3's. But that just ain't possible right now, so if you're checking out some of these songs for the first time, make sure to find the original versions on the albums I've noted they're from.

And with that said, we continue.

40. “Mercy Mercy” (1965, from Out Of Our Heads)

In their earliest incarnation as an R&B cover band, the Stones didn’t always improve on the original they were covering. Usually, they toughened up the sound, making it faster and leaner. With Don Covay's "Mercy Mercy," they not only toughened the song up, they took it away from him. The original is pretty standard R&B fare; a pleading, lilting number begging the singer's love interest to stay. It's a good soul song, but far from special.

The Stones made it special. Keith's intro line supplies an ominousness that is nowhere to be found on the original, and Bill and Charlie outrock and outgroove Covay's rhythm section. But Jagger is the star here; you can hear the first hints of him finding his own style as a vocalist; leonine, with a naughty edge - the Midnight Rambler, junior version. "Mercy Mercy" is the sound of the band growing beyond their source material.

39. "Jigsaw Puzzle" (1968, from Beggars Banquet)

If you grew up on late 70's/early 80's AOR radio as I did, it was easy to miss the true greatness of the Stones. Perhaps there were about 15-20 songs in rotation on Classic Rock radio, mainly from Hot Rocks, along with a handful of late 70's and early 80's hits. I'm embarrassed to say that there was a time I thought the band was overrated.

But that's because radio never played songs like "Jigsaw Puzzle," one of those criminally lesser known treasures from the band's creative peak, 1968-1972. It's got everything - a sinewy and sensual Charlie groove; a propulsive and nasty bass line from Bill; a driving acoustic guitar track from Keith; ferocious slide playing from Brian that is both a peak and a last gasp; and vocals from Mick that are so slyly and smartly phrased it's as though he brings discipline to decadence. Which, of course, is exactly what Mick Jagger does.

38. "Winter" (1973, from Goat's Head Soup)

By 1973, the Stones were exhausted, and they sounded like it. Following the masterpiece Exile On Main Street with the lackluster Goat's Head Soup, you could hear the bill come in on the years of continual work, play and abuse. But on this track, unlike many of the other songs on Goat's, Jagger didn't pretend that he was anything but exhausted, and that's what “Winter” great.

37. "No Expectations" (1968, from Beggars Banquet)

I fell in love for the first time when I was 20. She was older than me, sexy as hell, and far more experienced than me. (I wasn’t a virgin, but I might as well have been.) On our first date, we ended up going back to her place, and we put on my cassette of Beggars Banquet on one side and Let It Bleed on the other and made out continuously, long enough to listen to both albums twice, all the way through. It was magical. For me, at least.

The second time “No Expectations” played, I got distracted, and started thinking about Brian Jones, while this woman’s tongue was in my mouth. “I wonder what it would have been like if Brian had stayed in the band,” I asked myself. “If he had stayed, there would have been no Mick Taylor,” I countered, “and then there’s no Sticky Fingers, no Exile.” As I was having this ridiculous conversation with myself, one of Jones’ great slide licks from the song emerged, and I got my head back to the task at hand, moving slowly but surely from the world of innocence to the world of experience.

36. “It’s All Over Now” (single release 1964, from Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass) released 1966)

Another good R&B song that they Stones completely stole into something sublime. The original was done by the Valentinos, an R&B outfit featuring Bobby Womack, who would go onto greater glory. The power chord that Keith nails in the chorus is one of the great moments in the history of rhythm guitar. Their first number one hit in England.

35. “Hand Of Fate” (1976, from Black And Blue)

Black and Blue isn’t a bad album, but it presages later albums like Dirty Work, Steel Wheels and Voodoo Lounge in how inconsequential it feels. But there's nothing inconsequential about "Hand Of Fate," with has just enough impending doom to make it very, very interesting.

34. “Live With Me” (1969, from Let It Bleed)

“I got nasty habits,” Mick declares as I’m closing up the bar where I’ve been DJ’ing all night. I’m there hanging out and indulging myself with the drop-dead-fucking-gorgeous bartender, who doles out lines with every drink she pours us. Johnnie Black on the rocks for me, Southern Comfort straight for her. The sun is coming up, and I have to be at work in about three hours.

Despite the stimuli, I’ve begun to fade, but "Live With Me" immediately gives me a jolt, and I revive, with a big shit-eating grin plastered on my face. I’ve gotten this DJ gig by bonding with the bartender over the Stones, so while it plays, we both light up and sing to each other. I think about how silky the bass is, and I kvell over Keith’s sublime harmony vocals. I also think about what I can do to get this amazing woman into bed, but I don’t make a move on her. I get that I’m so not Mick – he would have gone home with her - but when I kiss her hand and say goodnight (at 8am), I do it gallantly, and I know that Keith would approve.

33. “Miss You” (1978, from Some Girls)

In retrospect, it’s both difficult and easy to understand what all the hubbub was about disco. Difficult, because it’s only a four on the floor beat. Easy, because with its black and gay influence, and its explosive popularity, it was a significant threat to rock’s unquestioned popular dominance. Bruce Springsteen once described the anti-disco backlash as “veiled racism,” and he was right, except that he could have added homophobia as well.

The Stones one contribution to the disco era is also one of their great singles, their comeback after their desultory mid-70’s period, and a statement that they still mattered. It’s also New York in the 70’s; black, white, and Puerto Rican, on roller skates and flatbed trucks, hustling through Central Park, perhaps not getting what it wants, but definitely getting what it needs.

32. “Sway” (1971, from Sticky Fingers)

Mick counts off and the band sort of falls into it, reminding me of what the engineer Andy Johns once said about the Stones, something to the effect of hearing them rehearse hour after hour and them being awful. Then suddenly, it all comes together and they’re the Rolling Stones. “Sway” is murky and ramshackle – and devastating. Jagger’s vocals are white hot and committed – there’s none of the lazy phrasing he would take on later. Charlie’s fills hit harder than almost anything he’s ever played, and Mick Taylor plays a closing solo that the band should be paying him royalties on.

31. “Under My Thumb” (1966, from Aftermath)

The opposite of love isn’t hate – it’s indifference. And even then, the Stones knew that the only way to really gain control is by being indifferent to the object of one's desire. Paradoxical, but when aren't the Stones paradoxical? Power is a central theme of love in the Stones' music, and no one has ever explored power in relationships like they have. Of course, the way Jagger comes off, it seems as though he's the always the one in control, but given how in control he needs to be, you might have to wonder if he's hiding something.

The 60 Greatest Rolling Stones Songs Of All Time (#50-#41)

2010-05-11T10:32:00.004-04:00

And round two begins...

50. “Not Fade Away” (1964, from England's Newest Hitmakers)

Jovan Mrvos writes:

It’s April 1964 and the location is Chicago, Illinois. I’m 15 years old and a sophomore at a large all boys high school. I’m working at a fancy grocery store on the North side. Life is hell. My parents are all up inside of me. I’m stone cold girl crazy going to school with 5000 other Neanderthals. I’m drinking Budweiser and Canadian Club but looking for reefer whenever I can. I’m confused and starting to get early stages of being dazed.

Top Forty radio rules the fetid air waves and WLS is the king with their Silver Dollar Survey and at number 26 (up from 33) after four weeks are England’s newest hit makers, (ha!) with their rambunctious version of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away.” And it has got me hooked lined and sinkered. I was just a tad bit too young for the original (more my older brother’s thing) but was set up perfectly for this.

Part of my (pre-New York Dolls) “personality crisis” was that I never quite fit in anywhere in my world at the time. My ‘hood was rock solid working class borderline “greaser” culture-racist at heart and intolerant at soul but I loved the gritty bottom of blues based music that was starting to leak out of the UK. Sure, I loved The Beatles harmonies, but it was their Chuck Berry shit that made me nuts and when the Stones popped, I had my identity. I was no mod; I was a rocker…not some amped up Teddy Boy but a long haired misfit just trying to get laid or loved, whichever came first.

Back to “Treasure Island” (the grocery store that I was working in and stealing from). When the store would close at night- we would have to mop the floors and re-stock and would change the station from wall-to-wall MUZAK to 89AM and run goods out the back door to pick up on the way home. It was there that I first heard the sounds that simply would change me forever…”I’m gonna tell ya how it’s gonna be…you’re gonna give your love to me…I’m gonna love you night and day… well love is real and not fade away…” Crazy ass harmonica and that gone daddy gone Bo Diddley beat…Game Over.

Thus began a lifelong relationship with the Stones, one that like any other has had its ups and downs, but has sustained for 40+ years. And, as a side bar, came to full fruition when in 1989 I was The Stones A&R person at Columbia for their Steel Wheels LP and did about a dozen dates with them on the tour. Highlight (among many) was being up at Quad Studios with Michael Brauer remixing the first single ("Mixed Emotions") when Mick came up with a leggy Italian by the name of Carla Bruni but, that, my friends, is a story for another day.

“Your love for me has got to be real
For you to know just how I feel
Love is real and not fade away
Well love is real and not fade away”

49. “Bitch” (1971, from Sticky Fingers)

I’ve always relished how unsentimental the Stones can be about love, and on this track, they depict love as both an agent of disorientation and the ultimate distraction. A bitch, indeed. The riff is like a ’65 black GTO with the pedal floored, driving at 100 mph at night down a dark two-lane road, and between the guitars and the horns, it’s a perfect three minute ride. Only Mick Jagger could write and sing a bad metal/S&M lyric like, “When you call my name/I salivate like a Pavlov dog” and make it sound just right.

48. “Before They Make Me Run” (1978, from Some Girls)

Keith Richards isn’t the coolest man in rock n’ roll; he isn’t even the coolest member of the Rolling Stones. (That honor goes to Charlie Watts.) But to many, he is rock’s greatest outlaw, and this is his greatest anthem. If Frank Sinatra had been a rock and roller, he would have sung this song. Think of it as Keith’s “My Way.”

47. “19th Nervous Breakdown” (single release, 1966)

Right from the start, The Rolling Stones projected a bohemian decadence that made them very attractive to the children of the upper class and won them entry into that world. Jagger soaked it all in, and in “19th Nervous Breakdown,” he depicted the world of the idle rich; the Edie Sedgewicks of the world - beautiful, spoiled and doomed, and he lacerated them. He must have known that his put downs would only make him more attractive to them.

46. “It’s Only Rock And Roll” (1974, from It’s Only Rock And Roll)

Chuck Berry is the Louis Armstrong of rock n’ roll, and the Rolling Stones are his greatest progeny. In the midst of their mid-70’s nadir, one of the relatively few highlights was this updated and mutated version of Berry’s “Little Queenie.” Of particular note is the ridiculous video, with the band in sailor suits, overwhelmed by of all things, bubbles.

45. “The Last Time” (single release 1965, from Big Hits (High Tide And Green Grass) released 1966)

This one is thanks to early manager Andrew Loog-Oldham, who, knowing that there were a limited amount of great R&B songs that the band could cover, locked up reluctant songwriters Mick and Keith in a room until they came with something that they could “take to the boys without being embarrassed.” It’s got one of Keith’s great early riffs, which as writer Dave Marsh later noted, seemed to compensate for the band’s lack of a horn section. The song also helped to establish the Jagger persona – tough and callow – and he sounded far more convincing singing this then more than a few of their beloved R&B numbers. And while they didn’t know it at the time, “The Last Time” served as one of the first nails in Brian Jones’ coffin: Once Jagger/Richards had their writing, the terminally insecure former leader of the band was forever on the outside looking in, getting the Mick and Keith freeze out.

44. “Stray Cat Blues” (1968, from Beggars Banquet)

“Would you let your daughter date a Rolling Stone,” asked a tabloid in the mid-60’s, as Andrew Oldham positioned the band in the media to be the anti-Beatles. Perhaps at first it was only imaging, but the band soon learned to live into it, and with tracks like this one, where Mick proposes a threesome with a 15-year old girl and her friend, it’s easy to understand why they were both revered and reviled as objects of both fantasy and worrisome reality. Perhaps Mick can be dismissed as joking on this, but everything here probably happened in reality, and the snarling guitars and the sinewy bass mean nothing but some very nasty business.

43. “Street Fighting Man” (1968, from Beggars Banquet)

Recorded in the Spring of 1968, when the world seemed to be unraveling (Paris student riots, Prague Spring, the murders of MLK and RFK), the band took all the events in, heard the youthful call for revolution, and viewed it far more skeptically than any of their peers – which had them be wiser than any of them. “Think the time is right for Paris revolution/But where I live the game to play is compromise solution,” sang Mick Jagger, former student at the London School of Economics, his cynicism serving him very, very well.

42. “Shattered” (1978, from Some Girls) New York City in the late 70’s was a gritty and grimy mess, and Some Girls was the perfect match for that version it – dirty, tough and pornographically sexual. For a certain kind of person, New York City in that era was the greatest adult playground in the world – the same kind of person who didn’t just love the Stones, but lived them, too.

41. “Little T&A” (1981, from Tattoo You)

“Tits and ass with soul,” sings a very much in love Keith Richards, and it’s a line that has always served as a dividing line for me. If you’re offended by it, we probably shouldn’t meet for lunch. If you love it, we might want to talk about getting married.

The 60 Greatest Rolling Stones Songs Of All Time (#60-#51)

2010-05-10T10:04:00.000-04:00

Paul Westerberg may have a lyric that says he never goes far without a little Big Star, but I don't go anywhere without having the Rolling Stones nearby. More than any artist - and yes, that includes Bruce, Aretha and Al - I've lived the full range of my life to the Stones - I've listened and conjured with them; fallen in love to them; discussed, advocated and argued for and about them; danced, fucked and partied my ass off to them; and, most importantly, formed many, if not most of the seminal relationships in my life through them. Bruce and Aretha may reach into a deeper, more solitary and spiritual dimension of my soul, but the Stones hit pretty deep, and Bruce and Aretha haven't been there when I've been hanging out with a beautiful woman at 3am. For that kind of peak life experience, there is nothing like the music of the Rolling Stones.

The timing of this list is fortuitous, given the media blitz surrounding the re-release of the Greatest Album Of All Time, Exile On Main Street, but it's not deliberate. I've been working on this list for a while, and there are some guest contributions coming in the next segments.

I have little patience for those who hold opinions that are dismissive of the Rolling Stones. Actually, I have plenty of patience - it's just that I'm not very interested in them. If you don't like the Stones, I'm probably not going to be very interested in anything else you do like. As Robert Christgau has written,

Only rock and roll? The Stones are the proof of the form. When the guitars and the drums and the voice come together in those elementary patters that no one else has ever quite managed to simulate, the most undeniable excitement is a virtually automatic result. To insist that this excitement doesn't reach you is not to articulate an aesthetic judgment but to assert a rather uninteresting crotchet of taste. It is to boast that you don't like rock and roll itself.

And with that, here we go...

60. “Emotional Rescue” (1980, from Emotional Rescue)

“I’ll be your savior, steadfast and true,” sings Mick in a falsetto borrowed from Al Green and a handful of other soul singers. And while it’s hard to imagine that bastard Mick coming to anyone’s rescue, emotional or otherwise, the bridge is so beautiful that you’re desperate to believe every word out of his mouth. Of course, he has to let you know that he’s totally full of shit at the end of it, with that absurdly sung “I’ll be your knight in shining armor” line. Bitch, please. You probably sang that buttoning up your pants as you were walking out the door.

59. “She Said Yeah” (1965, from December's Children (And Everybody's))

Yeah, the Clash may have sang “no more Elvis, Beatles, or Rolling Stones,” but they loved the Stones, especially Keith. And with this buzz saw piece of proto-punk from ’66, you can hear how important the Stones, in both sound and attitude, were to the formation of punk rock. And given that the version they covered was by American R&B artist Larry Williams, you can see the link between R&B and punk, a link that unfortunately, not enough people see or recognize.

58. “Beast Of Burden” (1978, from Some Girls)

What makes “Beast Of Burden” so great is how wonderfully every single member of the band plays on it. There’s another member of the “Keith Richards Opening Riff Hall Of Fame”; Charlie’s laid back swing, with subtle patterns on the hi-hat that reveal his love of jazz, specifically Count Basie drummer Jo Jones; the deceptively simple throb of Bill Wyman’s bass; the guitar weave of Keith and Ronnie Wood and finally, Jagger’s vocals, in which he unveils his full arsenal – from aggressive growl to the sensually effeminate falsetto. And the lyrics are unusually tender - and believable.

57. “Heart Of Stone” (single release 1964, from Big Hits (High Tide & Green Grass) released 1966)

From Smokey Robinson, Leiber and Stoller and other great R&B songwriters, Jagger learned early on of the value of putting subtle twists in his lyrics, which, for an ironist like him, was less a clever writing device than an expressive necessity. The song seems like another early piece of “Jagger-as-Cad,” but when he finds that girl who doesn’t fall for his bullshit, he of course is smitten. An early piece of Rolling Stones irony. There would be much more.

56. “Cocksucker Blues” (Unreleased, 1972)

Weary of battles galore at the turn of the 70’s – with the British government, who wanted 90% of their money, with manager Allen Klein (who won the rights to their pre-1971 recordings) and with policemen everywhere – Jagger sings it like he’s being bent over and taking it; getting fucked for sure, but making sure his antagonists get no satisfaction.

55. “Memo From Turner” (1970, credited to Mich Jagger solo, written by Jagger-Richards)

The sound of mixing drugs – hallucinogenics, heroin, and lots and lots of cocaine – with amoral sexuality (or is it the other way around?), thereby making emotionaly and psychological breakdowns inevitable. Recorded for Jagger’s role in the film Performance, it’s said that Mick and co-star Anita Pallenberg (Keith’s girlfriend) fucked on set while Keith stewed in his Rolls outside, which led to communication breakdowns that probably still haven‘t resolved between the twins of Glimmer. Putting in on forty years later, you can still smell the coke.

54. “Undercover Of The Night” (1983, from Undercover)

Saw the video for this when I was 13 and thought it was absurd – Jagger in a white suit, wearing a pencil mustache - and I was right. But the song has had a longer shelf life then could have been imagined back then. The groove remains monstrous and the riffs sound like they were scraped from a crucible – boiled to the essence, rock hard and true. And the song itself has enough fear and loathing to make it one of their best – a little sexy and a little scary.

53. “Let’s Spend The Night Together” (1967, from Between The Buttons)

Let’s get this straight: The Stones were at their best taking from R&B and making it something of their own. They weren’t as great ripping off white rock artists (white country artists being another matter entirely). So this little Beach Boys-esque ditty is from a period where the Stones didn’t really rock all that hard, but Jagger makes it triumph with a searing vocal coming out of the bridge into the final verse that presages the many triumphs of 1968-1972 to come.

52. “Time Waits For No One” (1974, from It's Only Rock And Roll)

It’s Only Rock And Roll is far from a great album, but “Time Waits For No One” serves as a gorgeous last gasp for the Mick Taylor version of the Stones, the version that created much of the band’s greatest work. Jagger’s vocal is unusually uncertain; he must have known how much time he was wasting in the midst of a lousy marriage, a partner temporarily lost to heroin and a band going through the motions. But it’s Taylor who shines brightest; his solo winds and ascends, as if the Yellow Brick Road went high into the air instead of further down the road. Knowing how it all turned out, for both Taylor and the Stones, you can’t help but be a little sad.

51. “Luxury” (1974, from It's Only Rock And Roll)

One of my favorite lines from a record review is Robert Christgau’s review of The Harder They Come: “The Rolling Stones would have killed to make this album.” Indeed. And here, the Stones make their best reggae ever, filled with humor and a little wistfulness.

The Unintentionally Post-Modern Soul Of Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings

2010-04-25T11:00:00.001-04:00

It would be easy to dismiss Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings as an exercise in nostalgia, but that would be a mistake. Sure, there's an obsessive dedication to capturing the sonic elements of classic soul records; the horn arrangements, microphone placements, drum sounds, vintage gear, etc., but it's clear that Jones and producer and Daptone Records head Gabriel Roth are committed to classic soul as an ongoing concern as opposed to being mere preservationists. Whether it's simply a matter of aesthetic preference or a greater desire to return to a musical Eden, in their minds at least, it's all about the authenticity.

But there's an unwritten rule in music that if you're going to work in a well worn genre without expanding its boundaries, you have to have great songs and a great singer, and unfortunately, with their new album, I Learned The Hard Way, Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings have proven once more that they are in possession of neither.

Like their previous albums, I Learned The Hard Way is an amalgam of late 60's and early 70's soul stylings. There's hints of Stax, late 60's Chess Records soul and early Philadelphia International. And once again, the precision with which producer Gabriel Roth captures the sound is impressive, but only impressive in the way a tribute band impresses - you're impressed in the moment with the meticulousness of the re-creation, but ultimately, it rings hollow.

None of the above would matter if the songs were great, but there isn't a great song here. Occasionally good, yes, but more often sounding like a paint-by-numbers home soul kit, like the cliched track about a lover with a wondering eye, "Window Shopping." The sentiment of "Money" may be absolutely true, but the track itself sounds silly, and it'll only make you run to your stereo to put the O'Jays "For The Love Of Money" on. Perhaps the songs could transcend the mediocre if Jones could become a singer who makes the listener actually feel something (the whole damn point of Soul music), but she merely sounds like a soul singer - she doesn't sing particularly soulfully. If you put her on any Stax compilation, she'd be a second or third tier presence at best.

What works about Jones is her story; the persistence, the dedication, her partnership with the Dap-Kings and her current success. And it is a great story. I'm happy for her; she's busted her ass. But while her music may be a soul experience, it's never a true experience of soul.

And it's ironic given their soul roots, but what Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings have unintentionally created is the ultimate expression of post-modernism; the stylistic form of the music is their content, instead of the emotional expression within the songs themselves. That has won them a career and much goodwill, but it will never have them matter, and great soul music, no matter the decade, always matters.

I Learned the Hard Way - Sharo...

E Street Radio Broadcast: Springsteen In The 1990's

2010-04-06T09:17:00.004-04:00

Last week, Sirius/XM's E Street Radio broadcast another roundtable discussion that I participated in. This time, the topic was Bruce Springsteen in the 1990's, a decade that many fans, myself included, view with varying degrees of ambivalence. I hesitate to say that it was a "lost" decade, as Springsteen wrote and released some wonderful music, but looking back, it's clear that things didn't work with the same consistency as they had in the 1970's and 80's. And as a new generation of great rock bands emerged in the early part of the decade, Springsteen's place in the rock world was somewhat upended and newly up for grabs.

My co-panelists for the discussion were Flynn McLean and Jonathan Pont of Backstreets Magazine, and John Franck, the only man in the world I know who can speak expertly about both Springsteen and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. We had a lot of fun, and I think it comes out in the broadcast. And we are not shy with the criticism.

Download and enjoy.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

On Pop, Rock & The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame

2010-03-16T15:14:00.001-04:00

I don't like Abba. I've never liked them; not when I was a kid, nor when I was in my early 20's and they came in vogue amongst the alternative/indie/hipster set (ironically or not). I was at a party this past Christmas season, and when the guests started dancing and singing loudly along to "Dancing Queen," "The Winner Takes It All" and the like, I did all I could not to groan in their faces. Listening to them is like eating Sweet N' Low straight out of the packet; an experience that causes much retching.

Actually, I'm being too polite. Abba suck. Their songs always sounded to me to be on the level of advertising jingles, and if one tries to defend them by saying how great their melodies are, or how memorable their songs are, all I can tell you is that I can remember and sing the Oscar Meyer theme song that I last heard in the late 70's, but that doesn't make it "Like A Rolling Stone."

Last night, Abba were inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, and there's considerable debate as to "what it all means." Long time rock writer Steve Morse has an editorial piece in Sunday's Boston Globe in which he basically states that Abba don't belong in the RRHOF, not because they suck, but because they're pop, not "rock." And he said Madonna doesn't belong the RRHOF either, for much the same reason.

This is a standard complaint amongst some rock fans, who wonder why "rock" artists (white guys with guitars) like Kiss or Alice Cooper aren't in, yet "non-rock" artists like Run-DMC or Madonna are. But I think most of these fans get it wrong, mainly because they have little-to-no historical context for rock n' roll.

Rock n' roll, as it germinated in the 1950's, was like most new forms of music, a hybrid of many styles and forms. Obviously, it's biggest influences were black - blues, r&b and gospel (a fact that is all too often forgotten by many rock fans). But there was plenty of country and pop in artists like Chuck Berry (who has spoken of his influence from country and Nat "King" Cole), Buddy Holly and Elvis (who along with his r&b influences, loved Dean Martin), just as there was plenty of pop in the Beatles and Motown. Rock is inconceivable without pop.

And the corollary with modern pop artists is that most are inconceivable without rock. There is no Abba without the Beatles; there is no Madonna without David Bowie. In terms of hip-hop, at its lyrical best, in Public Enemy, 2Pac and others, they're all difficult to imagine without the revolutionary lyrical impact that Bob Dylan had on artists like Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield and Bob Marley. One feeds off the other in a process that doesn't lend itself to neat categorization.

Do pop, hip-hop and non-rock artists belong in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame? Sure, if they produced a great body of work. For my money, LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy and other seminal rappers should be in there. They all made music that rocked harder and simply matters more than many of the artists that rock fans continually lobby for, like Rush, Alice Cooper, Dire Straits and others.

Abba may not belong in the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame, but it's not because they weren't a rock band in the technical sense of the term. It's because they sucked.

Postscript: If the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame is in trouble, it's because as time goes by, there are fewer and fewer bands that everyone can agree on, and there are fewer and fewer bands that have had the cultural impact of its ancestors. There weren't going to be arguments about Little Richard or the Stones. But the Red Hot Chili Peppers? The Smiths? Duran Duran? Nirvana, Guns N' Roses and Pearl Jam (who I'm not a fan of) are shoo-ins. But 15-20 years from now, what bands that emerged from the 2000's will be deemed RRHOF worthy? The Strokes? Please. In that respect, the debates about the RRHOF only reflect the fragmentation of the music itself and the audience for it. You've got your music, I've got mine, and every once in a while we'll argue about it and let each other know that the other doesn't know what the hell they're talking about.

MP3 Of Apperance on Sirius/XM

2010-03-08T08:40:00.003-05:00

So at long last, here is the mp3 version of the panel discussion I co-moderated on Sirius/XM's E Street Radio on the 25th Anniversary of the Born In The U.S.A. tour. We had a great panel and I couldn't be more pleased with how the discussion turned out. If you're a Bruce fan or a student of rock history, this is for you.

Download: Panel Discussion on the Born In The U.S.A. tour

Radio, Radio

2010-02-24T12:04:00.001-05:00

Today at 4pm E Street Radio on Sirius/XM radio will be broadcasting the show I co-moderated last Thursday, on the 25th Anniversary of the Born In The U.S.A. album, tour and phenomenon. The show has turned out wonderfully - our panel is fantastic and the conversation is illuminating, funny and in parts, beyond geeky. If you're a Springsteen fan, or someone who's interested in a seminal moment in rock history, definitely tune in.

The Story Of Laura Lee

2010-02-22T13:53:00.005-05:00

Sometimes the stories of the artists who didn't quite make it are far more interesting than the ones that did.

A case in point would be 60's & 70's soul singer Laura Lee. Hailing from Detroit, Lee sang gospel with Aretha Franklin's sister Erma; recorded for Chess Records; was pursued for signing by Frank Sinatra; recorded for Hot Wax, Holland-Dozier-Holland's post-Motown label; was Al Green's girlfriend before he broke and was the inspiration for songs like "Tired Of Being Alone."

You can hear a fascinating five-part history of her life at Laura's website here. It's definitely worth your time; it's a living, personal history of soul.

Quote Of The Day

2010-02-19T12:22:00.003-05:00

"You've got to find some way of saying it without saying it."

-Duke Ellington

Tonight At Sirius

2010-02-18T23:56:00.002-05:00

Tonight I co-moderated a panel discussion on E Street Radio on Sirius/XM about the Born In The U.S.A. album/tour/explosion/phenomenon. To say it was fun would be an understatement of epic proportion. We had a great panel: My dear friend John Franck co-moderated with me, and as panelists we had Jovan Mrvos, a former A&R man for Columbia Records who I worked with at CMJ; Lewis Largent, a former MTV VJ and a former co-worker of mine in A&R at Island Def Jam; Backstreets columnist Flynn McClean; and record store owner Stu Wexelbaum.

John has been one of my best friends for over 16 years, and Jovan and Lewis have been wonderful friends as well, people whose ideas, thoughts and opinions about music have been enormously influential in my own relationship with music. I met Flynn and Stu for the first time tonight, but they felt like kindred spirits immediately - twenty minutes into the taping, people were finishing each other sentences and completing conversation threads that others had started.

I write this because the evening was such a joy that it reminded me not only of how much I love music, but how much I revel in discussing it with people whose love for music equals my own. I'm also reminded that music has been the greatest means of friendship I've ever known, and perhaps that, as much as anything, is why my passion for it remains undimmed. There are few things more wonderful than the spark of connection between two people when you discover a shared adoration for a piece of music. It remains as much of a thrill for me pushing 40 as it did when I was 15. That's pretty miraculous.

The show will be airing Wednesday, 02/24 at 4pm ET; Thurs, 02/25 at 12am ET and 8am ET AND Wed, 03/03 at 4pm ET. If you have half as much fun listening to the show as we had making it, you're in for a treat.

Corinne Bailey Rae's Magical Thinking

2010-02-17T21:06:00.002-05:00

Corinne Bailey Rae's first, self-titled album was a breezy affair, a collection of open and friendly neo-soul songs that worked well enough to earn her a wide-ranging following and to go double platinum in the U.S. But that was in 2006, and for her, that's a lifetime ago.

In 2008, Rae's husband, musician Jason Rae, died, and it's in that aftermath that she has just released The Sea, a meditation on grief, pain and living amidst the ghosts of memory. It's also a joyous affair, but it's a joy very much tempered with the edge of death, which simultaneously makes it subdued and truly beautiful. It's a magnificent album, one that pays off with repeat listens, as its subtleties open and give themselves over to the terrible and miraculous wonder that is living.

The Sea has a harder sound than Rae's debut. Rae's vocals are a bit buried in the mix; the guitars have an occasional growl and the bass sometimes throbs with a malevolent intent. It is less a sound of foreboding than it is about the sound of pain realized. Yet there's no ploy for anyone's sympathy. On the album's first single, "I'd Do It All Again," she sings like a late-period Marvin Gaye, defiantly revealing her hurt and vulnerability while declaring that despite her pain, she wouldn't change a damn thing:

"Someone to love is bigger than your pride's worth
It's bigger than the pain you got, for all it hurts
It outruns all the sadness
It's terrifying light to the darkness
And I'd do it all again"

Even better is "The Blackest Lily," easily the toughest and sexiest Rae song has ever recorded. You can feel the lingering memory of lust pervade every nuance of Rae's vocal, where that lust transformed into love - and where finally, she lost it. This is adult music, and it's music that's vaguely uncomfortable, like watching someone strip in front of your eyes, simply to show you who they really are.

It seems a cliche that great soul music comes from something more than a passing acquaintance with pain, but cliches are cliches for a reason - they're usually true. The Sea, Corinne Bailey Rae has made her version of a truly soulful album, one that does what the best of soul has always done - unflinchingly acknowledging life's most devastating blows, while also experiencing their terrible and magical ecstasy.

The Sea - Corinne Bailey Rae

A Deeper Shade Of Soul Podcast: Soul Surviving

2010-01-10T16:54:00.002-05:00

It's January - the dead of winter. As I write this, it's 17 degrees in New York. The holidays are in the rear view mirror, and there are a lot of folks facing some tough times. A lot of my friends and loved ones are going through, for a variety of reasons and circumstances personal, professional and economic, some of the most challenging times they've ever faced - and you can count me in as one of those people.

So this podcast, Soul Surviving, is designed to help get you through whatever you're going through and to come out inspired and better for the experience. On it, we have Curtis Mayfield, Jerry Butler, Dusty Springfield, Television, Flaming Lips, Aretha Franklin and many more. Enjoy!

Download: Soul Surviving

The Incomparable Willie Mitchell

2010-01-06T18:13:00.005-05:00

Willie Mitchell died yesterday. If you don't know who Willie Mitchell was, put on an Al Green record from 1971-1976. It was Willie Mitchell, as much as Al Green, who was responsible for the sound of those epochal, miraculous records, and for the sound of Memphis soul in the 1970's, post-Stax.

As a trumpeter, bandleader, producer and eventually, a co-owner of Hi Records, Mitchell had few, if any peers. Like another great Memphis producer, Sam Phillips, Mitchell was a true original whose biggest demand of the artists he worked with were that they be no one other than their most authentic selves. Such producers and music people are a rare commodity, but the best of them leave a mark on the world that can scarcely be measured.

If you want to know the impact that Willie Mitchell had, close your eyes and imagine a world without "Tired Of Being Alone," "I Can't Stand The Rain," "Call Me," "You Ought To Be With Me," "Let's Stay Together," "Take Me To The River," "Trying To Live My Life Without You," "Back For A Taste Of Your Love" and a few dozen others. The world is a better place for him being in it. That's a life.

I Can't Stand The Rain - Ann P...

Love And Happiness - Al Green

You Ought To Be With Me - Al G...

Springsteen's Top 25 Of The Decade

2009-12-29T10:36:00.002-05:00

Not only was this past decade Bruce Springsteen's most productive decade ever, with five new studio albums released, it featured some of his best work ever. Album for album, none of them (The Rising, Devils & Dust, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, Magic, Working On A Dream) were quite at the level of Springsteen's work from 1973 to 1987 (from the Wild & Innocent through Tunnel Of Love), but the following 25 songs rank favorably with the best of his work, and I'd love to know another artist who had 25 songs that are the equal of these.

1. "Girls In Their Summer Clothes" (Magic, 2007)

The sound of a weathered and bruised man trying to get out from under a whole lot of loneliness and heartbreak, stepping out and ready to love again, knowing that love is the only thing that saves, and all too aware time waits for no one, especially him. With a super-compressed 12-string acoustic guitar, a Pet Sounds influence all over the thing, and lyrics so vivid that they're worthy of the bridge of "Born To Run," this isn't just Springsteen's best song of the decade, it's one of his best songs ever. An absolutely magical recording - it's no wonder they never got it right live.

Girls In Their Summer Clothes ...

2. "Lonesome Day" (The Rising, 2001)

If you read "Portraits Of Grief," The New York Times section on the victims of 9/11, it sometimes seemed as though in each day's section, there was at least one victim who was a huge Springsteen fan. Springsteen took in the events of that day and even more importantly, the aftermath, speaking to families about what they were going through in the wake of the horror. Then he made it all personal - people with an uncertain determination to pull through betrayals private and public, with music that was like a phoenix rising from the ashes.

3. "How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live" (We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions [American Land Edition], 2006)

Taken from Ry Cooder who took it from Blind Alfred Reed, Springsteen kept the original first verse, and then rewrote it as an indictment of the Bush Administration's response to Hurricane Katrina. One of Springsteen's most powerful protest songs, it burned with an anger and resentment that made it one of his greatest songs ever. If there was a better protest song written and released in the wake of Katrina, I don't know what it is.
4. "Long Time Comin'" (Devils & Dust, 2005)

Debuted live in 1996, but released in 2005, "Long Time Comin'," with its pedal steel, and the swing of Steve Jordan on drums, hit the mark perfectly in the studio - the beauty of the arrangement matching the hard earned contentment of the lyrics.

5. "O Mary Don't You Weep" (We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, 2006)

I was hooked on this from the moment I heard it in the spring of 2006, and the natural joy of it never ceased to thrill me after dozens and dozens of listens. Unlike the Brendan O'Brien produced material of the decade, The Seeger Sessions was recorded live and had an ease about it that hearkened back to The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle. Bruce's mastery of soul and gospel shone through abundantly on this, and it makes me long even harder for a whole album of soul style originals.

6. "My City Of Ruins" (The Rising, 2002, debuted live 12/17/00)

From the moment it debuted at Springsteen's Christmas shows with the Max Weinberg 7 in Asbury Park in December of 2000, it was recognized on first listen as a special song. The Asbury crowd, despite never hearing the song before, had their fists in the air by the second chorus, singing "Rise up!" along with Bruce.

After 9/11, it was obvious that the song, despite being written for and about Asbury Park, fit the aftermath of the horror perfectly. So Springsteen opened with the 9/11 telethon with a smart and hymn-like version of it, led with acoustic guitar.

On The Rising, Springsteen found the perfect arrangement for it, with Max Weinberg's drums, sounding more modern in feel and tone than he ever had, leading the way. And anyone who has ever lost someone can relate to the final question Bruce asks, "How do I begin again?"

7. "The Rising" (The Rising, 2002)

Think about the subject matter of "The Rising" for a second, and then think about how utterly disastrous it could have been: A firefighter is called to duty, ascends into the darkness and then ultimately, his death, and then speaks to his beloved from beyond. What other rocker could write about that, and then write about it as movingly and effectively, without pathos, as Springsteen did?

On record, Springsteen found the perfect balance between the somber and the exultant - live with the E Street Band, played in a higher key, the song eventually became anthemic overkill. But Springsteen found another home for it on acoustic guitar, playing versions of it on 2005's Devils & Dust tour that were heartbreaking, and made it clear that it's one of his greatest songs.

8. "Reno" (2005, Devils & Dust)

A song that was an instant "love it or hate it" proposition for many Springsteen fans, with the majority winding up in the latter camp, "Reno" is one of Bruce's saddest songs, a song about a man debasing himself, fantasizing about his lost love while with a prostitute. On record, Springsteen missed the mark on it, but live, he found the true power of the song, turning it into something like a Hemingway short story set to music.

9. "Maria's Bed" (Devils & Dust, 2005)

Bruce introduced "Maria's Bed" in Cleveland in 2005 by saying it was about "the ecstasies of love, the pleasures of passion," and you could taste both the ecstasy and the pleasure in every note. Whether on Devils & Dust or live, the song was a moment on the peak, before the inevitable descent into the valley.

10. "You're Missing" (The Rising, 2002)

A song about the incomprehensibility of sudden death - how the mind struggles to understand loss when the physical evidence of a departed loved one's presence is still around. The genius of this song was in the details - the shirt hanging in the closet, the children asking if their parent will be back - and then an organ coda by Danny Federici that put in whatever the lyrics might have left out.

11. "Livin' In The Future" (Magic, 2007)

A rarity in Springsteen's career - a brilliant studio track that almost completely missed the mark live. On the album, it swung, and Springsteen's harmony vocals, doubled against each other along with Steve and Patti, provided moments of pure bliss for a lyric that was filled with dread for a second George W. term. Simultaneously the sound of the old Asbury boardwalk and something new, mainly due to the primacy of the guitars, this is one criminally underrated song.

12. "Eyes On The Prize" (We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, 2006)

Bruce take the old spiritual and does the almost impossible - he makes it sound like he wrote it. Maybe that's because there's not much spiritual difference between "it's a town full of losers/and I'm pulling out of here to win" and "keep your eyes on the prize, hold on."

The vitality of the recording - from Soozie Tyrell's fiddle to the New Orleans feel of the horns - it astounding, a river that knows exactly where it's flowing. When Bruce cues the horns for their second solo by commanding, "Horns Go!" it's a little piece of Springsteen heaven. Hold on.

13. "You'll Be Coming Down" (Magic, 2007)

Lyrically, it's a sort of weird song, seemingly a message to a beautiful young woman, someone like Lindsay Lohan, warning her of being ground down and used up. Nothing particularly profound, but the song sounds so goddamned good that it doesn't matter. He should have played this one live a whole lot more.

14. "Empty Sky" (The Rising, 2002)

From the moment I heard its opening drum loop, I knew that Bruce made the right decision to work with Brendan O'Brien. O'Brien brought an unmistakably modern feel to the E Street Band, while still having it sound like the E Street Band. The sound of the acoustic 12-string; the natural sounding crack of Max Weinberg's drums, the perfect placement of Roy Bittan's piano in the chorus - the whole arrangement worked in a new way for Springsteen.

Filled with grief, rage and confusion, "Empty Sky" may be about the aftermath of 9/11, but it's also beyond the event, which is why the song will continue to resonate powerfully in the coming years.

15. "Leah" (Devils & Dust, 2005)

"With this hand I build/and with this I burn." In that lyric in "Leah," Springsteen posits that we, and we alone, are the genesis of both our salvation and destruction. How to avoid the destruction? Love. And you gotta work at it.

The impossibly beautiful arrangement embodies the lyric perfectly, and when a mariachi trumpet blows, it's enough to make you want cry. Had Devils & Dust had 11 songs all this good, instead of about five, it would be one of Springsteen's greatest albums.

16. "The Last Carnival" (Working On A Dream, 2009)

A tribute to E Street organist Danny Federici worthy of their 40 years together, that encapsulated the sadness of his death; the acknowledgment that the band was going to keep going on without him; and lastly, the fact that Danny made Bruce utterly crazy at times. And with a beautiful and ethereal vocal coda, it felt as though the band was trying to be with Danny one last time.

17. "All I'm Thinkin' About" (Devils & Dust, 2005)

Bruce showing off the falsetto that he developed in the mid-90's for a joyous little love song with some great steel guitar. It's one of those Springsteen songs that can slip by unnoticed, but when you dig in, you get its greatness.

18. "Let's Be Friends (Skin To Skin)" (The Rising, 2002)

This is the song that should have been the second single off of The Rising. With a great groove, gorgeous background singing and an instantly rewarding chorus, the song had me at hello, but alienated a lot of Springsteen fans for whatever reason. The song was probably a little too black for them.

19. "Code Of Silence" (The Essential Bruce Springsteen, 2003)

June 12, 2000 at Madison Square Garden was the only time I've ever been scared at a Bruce Springsteen concert. The first concert of 10 as the controversy around "American Skin (41 Shots)" became incendiary, with Fraternal Order of Police head Bob Lucente calling Springsteen a "dirtbag" and "floating fag." There were a lot of off duty cops there that night, and most of them seemed, especially the ones in the row in front of me, were drunk and pissed off.

So to start the stand, he opened with this song, a great rocker about a breakdown in communication that creates suspicion and distrust. This was his statement, and it was a great one, for all 10 nights.

As far as the cops went, they booed during all of "American Skin," and then they sang along with "The Promised Land." Then, when Bruce did an incredible acoustic version of "Born In The U.S.A.," one of them shouted, "You have no right to sing this song anymore." Three songs later, he was passed out, drunk.

20. "Long Walk Home" (Magic, 2007)

Disillusionment and the realization that in the Bush Administration we veered so far off the path of what this country is supposed to be about, that we may never get back.

21. "All The Way Home" (Devils & Dust, 2005)

Written for Southside Johnny in 1991, Bruce changed the arrangement completely, speeding it up, making it far less reflective, effectively turning it from a Sinatra-esque torch song into a cool country end-of-the-night come on. Worked for me.

22. "Devil's Arcade" (Magic, 2007)

Love, sex, death, destruction, a killer arrangement and a dramatic high point of Magic.

23. "This Life" (Working On A Dream, 2009)

A gem of a song that should have gotten a lot more attention, mainly from Bruce, who played it barely at all on the Working On A Dream tour.

24. "Gypsy Biker" (Magic, 2007)

An odd song in a way - it's characters seeming more like Vietnam Vets than veterans of Iraq, "Gypsy Biker" burned with some great lead guitar and one absolutely killer line: "To the dead it don't matter much/about who's wrong or right."

25. "American Skin (41 Shots)" (Live In New York City, 2001)

It's too long, and it's lacking a killer melody, but the power of it is undeniable, especially considering the ruckus it caused. It was never a diatribe against the police; after all, the person praying for the victim's life in the first verse is a cop who knows what a deadly error he's made.

Rather, it's a lament about an America where we've been taught to fear the other, and what happens in that climate. The fact that it's another song about the lack of communication made the controversy about it even more fitting - everyone who criticized it had absolutely no idea what the song was about.

Best Springsteen albums of the 2000's in order:

1. Magic
2. The Rising
3. Devils & Dust
4. We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions
5. Working On A Dream.

A Deeper Shade Of Soul: Top 40 Songs of 2009

2009-12-24T10:44:00.002-05:00

Compiling this year’s Top 40 was much harder for me than last year. Is that due to a lack of worthy material? I tend to doubt it – but it sure felt like it. I spent a lot of time listening to new music and feeling very uninspired by a lot of it. That makes me start to think that I'm getting old, or not getting what's going on. But I have a feeling that songcraft has become a lost art - or maybe it's just obscured by the glut of mediocre crap that's out there. There may be marginally more needles out there, but the haystack has gotten a hell of a lot bigger.

And with that negativity out of the way, I'm more convinced than ever that all it takes is one - artist, song, album, or innovation to change the game anew. Nothing just is, and while it seems as though, in John Lennon's words from forty years ago, "everybody had a hard year," anything really is possible.

Have an amazing holiday, a tremendous New Year, and let's make next year and the next decade a great and soulful one.

1. Jay-Z with Alicia Keys – “Empire State Of Mind”

The exception that proved the rule to the new music business, the song of the year proved that it’s still possible to get a fragmented audience to agree on something as long as you bring the goods. While the Blueprint 3 may have been inconsistent, this track was indelible, unforgettable and undeniable, and backed up Jigga’s boasts to the hilt. The new Sinatra, indeed.

Empire State Of Mind (feat. Al...

2. Peaches – “Talk To Me”

What I’ve always loved about Peaches is her commitment to making people uncomfortable and shattering their complacency. “Talk To Me” is the sound of her hand reaching through the speakers, grabbing her lover by the collar and shaking them until they get their head out of their ass – simultaneously scary and very sexy.

Talk To Me - Peaches

3. Florence & The Machine – “Kiss With A Fist”

The best song from one of the best albums of the year. “Soul-inspired indie rock” was what I read about this, and damn if this song didn’t back up the claim. And like the best soul singles, Florence Welch makes her point in a little bit over two minutes. AND she did a Candi Staton cover (“You’ve Got The Love”). I’m in.

Kiss With A Fist - Florence & ...

4. U2 – “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight”

No Line On The Horizon didn’t do much for me, and I’ve come to think that they’re the most overrated band of their generation. But this song reminds me why I once loved them – Bono’s phrasing in the chorus is like an eagle in flight, and while I’ve heard that Edge guitar part in a zillion different variations, criticizing him for it would be like giving Keith Richards shit for playing variations of the same riff for 45 years.

I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Cr...

5. Tegan & Sarah – “The Cure”

I’m still waiting for them to make a masterpiece, which Sainthood most definitely is not. But “The Cure” is more than enough to keep me intrigued. Filled with compassion, caring and sex, the track is such an irresistible invitation/come on, it’s easy to imagine Prince covering it.

The Cure - Tegan & Sara

6. Me’Shell NdegeOcello – “Mass Transit”

Dislocation, isolation and the simplest and perhaps most profound truth of the year: “At the end of the day, nobody wants to be alone.” Twitchy and discomforting, it sounds as though it was written for Kid A. After almost fifteen years, she’s doing her best work.

Mass Transit - Meshell Ndegeoc...

7. Lily Allen – “The Fear”

The great smart-ass provides a superb critique of the failures of material goods to fulfill, without denying the power of its pleasures. It’s Not Me It’s You was inconsistent, but not only does she have greatness within her, consider that she’s already great - and has a lot more growing up to do.

The Fear - Lily Allen

8. Passion Pit – “Little Secrets”

In an alternate universe, this was a #1 single and its “higher & higher” chorus was played during basketball and hockey games across the country. In this universe, a bunch of hipsters liked it a lot.

Little Secrets - Passion Pit

9. Dirty Projectors – “Temecula Sunrise”

Avant-Garde pop is what this is supposed to be, and they found enough balance between the two to keep me happy. Pretention is this band’s mortal enemy and natural habitat, but if they sprinkle the incandescence of this track in enough of their other work, they’ll be fine.

Temecula Sunrise - Dirty Proje...

10. Franz Ferdinand – “No You Girls”

A great piece of modern dance-rock that’s testament to the eternal power of beautiful women.

No You Girls (Album Version) -...

11. Bruce Springsteen – “The Last Carnival”

There’s no way to look at Working On A Dream as anything other than a misfire, the main proof of which is that Springsteen barely played the thing live. But this tribute to E Street organist Danny Federici is a poignant gem; weighted with 40 years of friendship, love, and the miraculous, where even death does not do them part.

The Last Carnival - Bruce Spri...

12. Dave Sitek – “With A Girl Like You”

The TV On The Radio maestro does a cover of the Troggs song from 1966 for the Dark Was The Night compilation and brings a haunted obsessiveness to the proceedings. Extra credit for a fine use of horns.

13. Phoenix – “1901”

It just sounds good. Sometimes it doesn't have to be deep.

1901 - Phoenix

14. Florence & The Machine – “Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)”

She gets compared to Kate Bush and Bjork, but Florence Welch is more soulful than either, and her real antecedent is Marianne Faithful – ethereal and angelic, but firmly grounded in the real world and its irresolvable contradictions.

Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up) - F...

15. Naomi Shelton & The Gospel Queens – “What Have You Done”

A Daptoned piece of retro soul, the track transcends its slavish devotion to sonic authenticity because of Shelton’s piercing growl and some sublime backing vocals.

What Have You Done? - Naomi Sh...

16. Madeline Peyroux – “I Must Be Saved”

The pleasures of Peyroux’s Bare Bones are subtle, but infinitely rewarding, much like this track. Peyroux sings with restraint, subtlety, warmth and wit – traits that couldn’t be more out of fashion in today’s pop mainstream.

I Must Be Saved - Madeleine Pe...

17. Animal Collective – “My Girls”

I listened to Merriweather Post Pavilion ten to fifteen times, liked it enough, but it didn’t really speak to me. “My Girls” does. The fact that it has got some killer hooks going help immeasurably. Yeah, the lyrics are probably a tad too oblique, but they’re geeks, so have some sympathy and forgive them their cleverness – they’d be lost without it.

My Girls - Animal Collective

18. Elvis Costello – “My All Time Doll”

The old misanthrope (not really) reaches back and writes a song worthy of his glory days, filled with piss, vinegar, resentment and an arrangement befitting his station in life.

My All Time Doll - Elvis Coste...

19. Justin Townes Earle – “What I Mean To You”

I never got a chance to go to Bakersfield, California in the late 1940’s and slow dance and fall in love with a beautiful red-lipsticked girl with auburn hair wearing a clingy dress that was soft to the touch. But if I had, this is the music I would have liked to have done it to.

20. Them Crooked Vultures – “No One Loves Me & Neither Do I”

In a rock environment where it’s natural to wonder where everyone’s balls have gone, this is a welcome reprieve, even if the songs aren’t all that. But the riffage in this song makes concerns about songcraft seem like a mere trifle, at least for a moment.

No One Loves Me & Neither Do I...

21. Passion Pit – “The Reeling”

I didn’t get to experience this song in its natural habitat – the dance floor. But this song is great enough that it makes me wish I had. God loves well-placed hi-hat kicks – even if it’s in dance music for hipsters.

The Reeling - Passion Pit

22. Bob Dylan – “If You Ever Go To Houston”

In an America of the (not so) creeping corporate takeover, Mr. Zimmerman, more than any major performer of the past decade, seems intent on preserving the musical heritage of post-war U.S. prior to the Interstate Highway System. If he retires to somewhere in rural Mexico to play accordion in a Mariachi band for German tourists, I won’t be surprised.

If You Ever Go To Houston - Bo...

23. Bruce Springsteen – “This Life”

Bruce gets in touch with the white pop/rock of his youth, and with a bass line right out of Pet Sounds, he makes a shimmering ode to late middle age contentment, with an implicit acknowledgment through the whole thing that the end isn’t that far off.

This Life - Bruce Springsteen

24. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – “Heads Will Roll”

I still couldn’t care less about them, but for one song at least, they got me.

Heads Will Roll - Yeah Yeah Ye...

25. Miranda Lambert – “Only Prettier”

Pedal steel and a smart and pretty (in that order) girl that don’t take shit. AND a sense of humor. I don't need much more that that.

Only Prettier - Miranda Lamber...

26. Allen Toussaint – “West End Blues”

The great producer, songwriter, arranger, gentleman and ambassador of New Orleans music makes Louis Armstrong very, very proud.

West End Blues - Allen Toussai...

27. Manchester Orchestra – “I’ve Got Friends”

I got heavily hyped on this one and didn’t really get it, except for this song. A good chorus goes a long way. Remember that.

I've Got Friends - Manchester ...

28. A.C. Newman – “Like A Hitman, Like A Dancer”

I haven’t paid much attention to Newman’s music since the New Pornographers 2001 album, Mass Romantic, finding it increasingly dull. But with an acoustic riff akin to a matador fending off a bull, this track got me re-interested in Newman’s work, at least for the duration of the song’s three and a half minutes.

Like A Hitman, Like A Dancer -...

29. Beirut – “La Llorona”

I have nothing clever to say about this one – I just find it beautiful.

La Llorona - Beirut

30. Monsters Of Folk – “Ahead Of The Curve”

Conor Oberst sings without even sounding remotely whiny, and sounding reminiscent of “The Weight,” he sounds more his own man as part of a band than he ever has on his own.

Ahead of the Curve - Monsters ...

31. Lady GaGa – “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich”

I have a feeling that her shallowness is a sham – but it works for her. Impenetrable in a way Madonna never was, what she has in common with Madge is a killer work ethic. Andy Warhol would have loved her.

Beautiful, Dirty, Rich - Lady ...

32. Florence & The Machine – “You’ve Got The Love”

They make a lost Candi Staton song grand, orchestral and majestic. They’re easily the rookies of the year, no doubt about it.

You've Got The Love - Florence...

33. Built To Spill – “Good Ol’ Boredom”

Quietly one of the best American bands for the past 15+ years, Doug Martch’s voice is a tried and true indie commodity, and he sounds like he hasn’t aged a day. They just do what they do, and do it really well.

Good Ol' Boredom - Built To Sp...

34. The Flaming Lips – “Evil”

I prefer less their more song-based albums like The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, but I found this track hypnotic and moody enough to go back to for repeated listening.

Evil - The Flaming Lips

35. The xx – “Islands”

Slinky and seductive, this new British band has been the recipient of some strong buzz courtesy of Pitchfork and a host of others. “Islands” captures the magic of falling hard and the magical time when the world seems to end at the edge of the bed you’re sharing with the new object of your desire.

Islands - The xx

36. M. Ward – “Never Had Nobody Like You”

A song that could have been recorded in 1957, which is about the biggest compliment I can give it. Except perhaps that Carl Perkins would have sounded great doing it. Maybe Dion should cover it.

Never Had Nobody Like You (Fea...

37. Wilco – “You And I”

I still find them dull overall, and seeing Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (zzzzzzzz) on so many “Best Album Of The Decade” lists annoyed me. But amidst another album I found rather boring, the simple charm of this one broke through to me.

You And I - Wilco

38. The Doves – “Kingdom Of Rust”

Ok, so Kingdom Of Rust is not The Last Broadcast, but I’ll take it. They make somewhat inscrutable music, often more vibe than song, but the orchestral grandeur of this song worked beautifully.

Kingdom Of Rust - Doves

39. Mary J. Blige – “Said and Done”

Listening to Stronger With Each Tear, it’s clear that Mary has been making the same album since 2001’s No More Drama; breakup songs, inspirational songs, self-affirmations, suffering-in-love songs, etc. Here, she teeters back and forth on the line of cliché, but the pre-chorus works so well that I couldn’t care less.

Said And Done - Mary J. Blige

40. Alice Russell – “Hurry On Now”

A re-worked version of a great single she released in 2007, it doesn’t make it any less of a wonderful song. Pot Of Gold was a major disappointment for me, but with quality material, she’s still a singer to pay attention to. Someone get her some good songs, please.

Hurry On Now - Alice Russell

E Street Radio Appearance: 11/27

2009-12-01T11:08:00.002-05:00

Here is a link to my appearance with John Franck on E Street Radio this past Friday. We played several unreleased Springsteen songs that we think should be on Tracks 2.

Enjoy!

E Street Radio Guest DJ: Ben Lazar & John Franck

The Greatest Unheralded Soul Song Of All Time

2009-10-20T13:57:00.003-04:00

About six years ago I was in Tower Records (R.I.P.), browsing for albums, and saw a CD with a woman's face filling the cover, a soulful looking face, obviously a photo from the past. I picked up the CD, titled Candi Staton, and looked through the song titles, most unfamiliar to me, except for a few songs I knew by other artists, such as "In The Ghetto." I was about to put the CD back when the person standing next to me said, "If you like soul music, you need that CD."

I had never heard of Candi Staton before buying that CD. Reading the liner notes, I discovered that she had been signed to FAME Records, Rick Hall's (he of Muscle Shoals fame and producer of many southern soul classics) label through Capitol Records, and had a few R&B hits in the late 60's and early 70's, but had her biggest success in 1976, with "Young Hearts Run Free," a disco hit.

When I put the CD on at home, I liked what I heard, but at least through the first ten songs or so, I wasn't overwhelmed. That changed when "Heart On A String" came on.

"Heart On A String" explodes from it's opening notes, a torrent of sound that seems to epitomize soul before the brain has even had a chance to really process what it's listening to. The piano pounds, the drums swing magnificently, the bass anchors everything while keeping the action moving, the horns blare an intro melody line, and before you know it, in comes Candi's voice, an amalgamation of country and soul, a voice with a tear in it, the sort of tear that oozes both vulnerability and strength, the sort of strength that comes from surviving when survival, emotional or otherwise, is far from assured.

When I first encountered the song, I couldn't really believe it, because I couldn't believe that I had never heard it before. How was this not an enormous hit? I played it again and again, becoming more enraptured every time I heard it. I played it for friends, pretty much all of who asked, "What song IS this?" And five plus years after I first heard it, it's one of those songs that I never cease to be completely lit up by.

The interplay between the instruments is astounding. Each of the players find their own space to emerge within the song - the pianist peeks out with amazing fills in the first verse, and in the second verse, the guitarist finds the room to rip some brief but incredible lead fills in between Candi's vocals. In the first half of the third and final verse, the song breaks down, and the drummer plays an awe-inspiring rim pattern that leads into a final, joyous close to the song.

And as far as the vocals, listening to Candi sing on "Heart On A String" is akin to watching Baryshnikov dance or Lebron streaking down the court - it's the work of a master. Each phrase, pause, swoop and shout is perfect in tone and execution. She is all hurt and sensuality, trapped in loving someone who is oh so wrong, but feels so right.

Songs gain immeasurable power when they are a shared experience - a hit on the radio, a song at a club, something treasured with friends, or in concert. And soul music, having emerged from the African-American church, was designed to be a shared experience - songs about heartbreak, exultation, joy, loneliness and isolation meant to take on a life of their own with an audience relating to and living out every word. So what does one make of "Heart On A String," a great song that barely anyone has heard?

Five years after I first heard it, and almost forty years after it was recorded, "Heart On A String" is, for my money, one of the great soul songs ever. And despite never finding the audience it deserved, its power resonates as strongly as ever, making it in, in my estimation, the greatest unheralded soul song of all time.

Download: Candi Staton - "Heart On A String"

Heart On A String - Candi Staton

A 60th Birthday Letter To Bruce Springsteen

2009-09-23T12:45:00.007-04:00

Dear Bruce,

Happy 60^th! It’s really hard for me to believe you’re 60, and I’d be willing to bet my copy of Born To Run that you’ll be celebrating with a healthy bit of quiet disbelief. It all goes by so fast, doesn’t it? If it’s any consolation, the way you’re rolling these days, 60 is going to be the new 50. Hell – you could probably make 60 be the new 45.

To get right down to it, I don’t know what I would have done without your music. I look back upon my life and you’ve been so entwined in the fabric of it – my joys and sorrows, my successes and failures, my dreams and disappointments, that it’s impossible to imagine what living would be like without your music. You’ve been a means to some of my deepest friendships, and you’ve been an essential companion in the midst of my darkest solitude. I’ve ecstatically screamed along to “Born To Run” with 70,000 other people shining around me and I’ve sat alone listening to Nebraska, wondering if I’ll ever have what I want for my life.

But through it all, your music has been an anchor for me, in both my personal and professional life. I can pinpoint the exact moment I decided to go into the music business – May 18, 1988 at Madison Square Garden, in the middle of “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out.” In the full thrall of the ecstasy you generated, I said to myself, “I have to make music my life.”

That has been an amazing road, and recently, an immensely challenging one, as both I and the music business itself face a crumbling old world and an emerging new one, a new one that looks little like the one that came before. But I remain undaunted and still totally committed to music as a vehicle for inspiration, possibility, love, sex, joy and the confronting of the things that are the hardest for us to deal with. And I won’t give up. Next week, I’ll be heading into a recording studio to produce a great young artist I’m working with – I’m sure I’ll be thinking of you a lot as I get to work.

Most of all, I think your work has been an incredible partner in fighting my own cynicism and resignation. You acknowledge the cruelness that exists in this world without it curdling into cheap nihilism – and then hold out for the possibility of breaking through one’s circumstances. And when I think about what I’m most cynical and resigned about, I realize that most often, it’s myself – and your music has been one of the greatest tools possible for that daily battle.

More than anything though, what your music gave me, especially when I was a boy and so often felt like a misfit and outsider, was a sense of a world out there that I could find my place in. My dad was wonderful in providing that for me too, but listening to The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle, Darkness On The Edge Of Town, The River and Born To Run made that world feel attainable to me, and it instilled a sense of responsibility within myself to go out there and find it – or create it for myself. I’ve done that, and I don’t think I would have ever done it quite the same way without your music.

So Bruce, even though you haven’t wised up yet and made me your official vaultmaster and producer of a Bootleg Series, I’ll forgive you that because I’m so immensely grateful for what you’ve provided for me and people the world over – joy, fun, ecstasy, soul, passion, poignancy, and an access to the best parts of ourselves. There will never be another one like you.

Thank you, Bruce. Long may you run.

Bootleg Friday: The Jacksons, 1979

2009-07-24T12:24:00.004-04:00

Of all the periods of Michael Jackson's career, the one that may be among the most neglected is the late 70's, post-Jackson 5 and before Off The Wall. After leaving Motown in 1975 and being forced to give up the name "Jackson 5" as part of their settlement to leave, the group, re-named "The Jacksons" began recording for CBS, first for Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff's Philadelphia International label (which went through CBS) and then Epic.

By 1978's Destiny, the Jackson were producing themselves, and the results included the double platinum single "Shake Your Body" (written by Michael and Randy Jackson). The band was complete with their transformation from bubblegum soul to something edgier - hard r&b and funk that shredded.

This week's Bootleg Friday is the Jacksons at a Destiny tour stop in Amsterdam in February 1979. By the end of the year, Off The Wall would be released, and everything would change.

Download: The Jacksons - 2/1/79, Amsterdam, Netherlands (zip file)

The Undeniable Peaches

2009-07-23T16:26:00.004-04:00

I haven’t paid much attention to Peaches since her debut album, 2000’s The Teaches Of Peaches. I loved “Fuck The Pain Away,” a song from that album that defines the term “underground classic.” But I stopped looking out for her, and we had no chance encounters.

That was until recently, when I got her new album, I Feel Cream. I like the album, but there’s one song, “Talk To Me,” that I’m absolutely, positively floored by. It’s like a cross between Betty Davis and Johnny Rotten, and it’s one of the purest (and most likely, unintentional) fusions of punk and soul that I’ve ever heard, in it’s blend of raw vulnerability and hot-tempered demand.

Instrumentally, the song is obviously based in electro, but the construction of the song is rooted in the blues, and when Peaches sings the lyrics that are a plea for communication from a lover who is hiding out, she is absolutely impossible to ignore – she pierces the air, grabs you by the throat and makes you deal with what she has to say. She manages to convey everything – frustration, lust, anger, desire and pain in a little over three minutes. Most artists don’t do that in three years.

Peaches is the kind of artist that Johnny Rotten wanted to see more of back in the halcyon days of the emergence of punk in England; original characters who invented themselves, unshackled by the past, confrontational, subversive and completely authentic. In that, she’s a true inheritor of punk in ways that most of those awful bands on the Warped tour will never be. And she’s a punk with soul.

Talk To Me - Peaches

Laura Izibor: Let The Truth Be Told

2009-07-22T12:06:00.006-04:00

Why does Laura Izibor’s debut album, Let The Truth Be Told, irk me so much? Is it the glossy, semi-generic songs and arrangements? Is it Izibor’s vocals, vaguely characterless, an approximation of soulfulness rather than actually being soulful? Or is it that her songs, like “Shine” and “Don’t Stay,” which take on inspiration and love, do it so safely that they end up feeling like a cliche, resulting in a diminishing of love and inspiration themselves?

Perhaps it’s a combination of all of the above. Izibor has a technically powerful voice, but there’s nothing in it that makes it uniquely her own, rather than just an amalgamation of a boatload of soul singers before her. What’s missing in Izibor’s voice is any hint of the blues, that great ingredient that makes a song land as more than just a platitude. Any great soul singer, be they Otis Redding, Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, or hell, even Amy Winehouse, sings even their most buoyant material with a bluesiness that comes from living with the existential knowledge of the pain that living brings. Listening to Let The Truth Be Told, it's clear that while she may have taken on singing soul because she genuinely loves it, she doesn’t have it in her bones - and the resulting music ends up dismayingly hollow.

The obvious models for Izibor’s music are Alicia Keys, Joss Stone and John Legend – bland, inoffensive and safe as possible, made for film and TV placements, commercials and marketing departments, lacking any of the risk, originality and emotional rawness that make soul music, you know, soulful. Izibor says of her music that “the foundation starts with soul,” but she’s flattering herself with her conceit. Or maybe she doesn’t know any better.

No, why this irks me is that this is the kind of stuff that fools people who don’t know any better that this is the real thing. It’s so maddeningly competent and nothing more that it lands as pointless. It's very nice music - and real soul is never nice. If Izibor is going to be a soul singer that matters, she's going to have to dig a lot deeper into her own self than is evidenced on Let The Truth Be Told. The truth is never as flimsy as this music is.

Let The Truth Be Told - Laura ...

Coming Attractions: Soul Power

2009-07-09T15:58:00.000-04:00

I'm sort of looking forward to this:

Sun City: The Best Of The 1984-85 Benefit Singles

2009-07-09T14:26:00.003-04:00

I watched the Michael Jackson memorial show on Tuesday and was pleasantly surprised with how well it came off. The tributes were heartfelt and authentic, and the musical performances, for the most part, worked. It did him justice, unlike the disaster that was the B.E.T. Awards the Sunday following his death.

Unsurprisingly, the show ended with some of the schmaltz that Michael loved, namely, “We Are The World,” a song whose ickiness has grown exponentially for me as I’ve encountered it over the years. Whether it’s the trite and solipsistic lyrics (as Jackson Browne said, “That’s the problem with North America – we think we ARE the world”), or the mushy arrangement, the song has always occurred for me like the experience of eating Sweet N’ Low right out of the packet – so sweet I want to wretch.

Most of the singers on the project were at or near their pop pinnacle in the winter of 1985, and many of them – Kim Carnes, Huey Lewis, Al Jarreau, Jeffrey Osbourne, Kenny Rogers and Kenny Loggins – were bland MOR fare at best. Neither the song or the assemblage of talent has worn well over time, even though seeing Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles and Bob Dylan singing on the same song will always hold a thrill for me.

Contrast that with the best of the 1984-1985 “benefit” songs, Artists United Against Apartheid’s “Sun City,” created by Little Steven Van Zandt, who at the time, had just recently left the E Street Band, just prior to Springsteen and the band embarking on the immensely successful and lucrative phenomenon that was the Born In The U.S.A. tour.

Van Zandt, producer Arthur and journalist Danny Schecter assembled greatest collection of rock, rap and soul artists ever on one single. The Lineup: Miles Davis, Bruce Springsteen, Kool DJ Herc, Grandmaster Melle Mel, Ruben Blades, Bob Dylan, Herbie Hancock, Ringo Starr, Pete Townshend, Lou Reed, Run DMC, Peter Gabriel, David Ruffin, Eddie Kendricks, Darlene Love, Bobby Womack, Afrika Bambaataa, Kurtis Blow, Jackson Browne, U2, George Clinton, Keith Richards, Ron Wood, Bonnie Raitt, Hall & Oates, Jimmy Cliff, Big Youth, Michael Monroe, Peter Garrett, Ron Carter, Ray Barretto, Gil-Scott Heron, Nona Hendryx, Pat Benatar, and Joey Ramone.

It was an incredible lineup then – and in retrospect, it seems even more incredible. Most of the artists, in direct contrast to the ones on "We Are The World," have gained in stature nearly a quarter century after the recording. Back then, as I wasn’t familiar with many of the artists on the record, it didn’t seem like a big deal. But thinking about it now - Lou Reed and Miles Davis and Springsteen and Joey Ramone and Bobby Womack and Melle Mel and David Ruffin on the same single? Jesus!

And to Van Zandt’s eternal credit, he structured the song so that the rappers would have their own indelible contribution to the song. Remember, “Sun City” was recorded and released prior to rap’s explosion to national prominence with Run-DMC’s “Walk This Way,” which was released in the summer of 1986. The rap section that opens the song leads perfectly into the first chorus – in retrospect, the song is perhaps rap-rock’s greatest moment.

The song was tough and defiant – capturing the best of rock's rebellious spirit . It was independent minded, clear in its intent to bring down Apartheid and wasn’t afraid to point fingers at home, namely at President Reagan’s “constructive engagement” policy with Pretoria.

Incredible song, eclectic lineup, a powerful and crystal clear message – and relative to “We Are The World” and “Do They Know It’s Christmas” – a commercial dud. “Sun City” peaked at #38 on the Billboard Top 40, as many radio stations wouldn’t play the song due to its explicit criticism of Reagan, its tough minded sound, and most likely, the inclusion of so many rappers, which in 1985, top 40 radio had no use for.

More importantly, “Sun City” raised over a million dollars and significantly raised awareness of the scourge of Apartheid. In 1986, Congress passed sanctions against South Africa, overriding a veto from President Reagan. In 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from prison and in 1994, he was elected president of South Africa.

"We Are The World" may have been the pop hit, but "Sun City" was by far the better song. Given that the song itself, with Apartheid gone, is now superflous, it's even further testament that the record holds up so wonderfully, in groove, spirit and soul.

The Ecstasy Of Michael Jackson

2009-06-29T14:20:00.007-04:00

I’ve struggled the last few days with how to address the death of Michael Jackson. I wasn’t particularly moved or surprised when I heard the news – the sadness in the Michael Jackson story has been slowly playing out for the past 25 years. On first hearing of his death, my thoughts were that this was, unfortunately, a somewhat unsurprising and pathetic conclusion to his story.

Michael Jackson was always someone who I admired from afar, but could never relate to, unlike all of my musical heroes. Even during the Thriller era, before the disfiguring plastic surgeries, the off-putting crotch grabbing, the accusations of pedophilia and the draining of joy from his music, he seemed almost like an alien to me; an insanely talented star whose gifts for singing, melody, songwriting and especially dancing were phenomenal, but who seemed as though he had been dropped in from another planet. (It always made sense to me that he identified so intensely with E.T.) The fact that he was the first black artist to be recognized as the biggest artist in the world meant little to me - it was a reach for me to view him the same heroic context with which I view Jackie Robinson or Muhammad Ali. But I’m a white boy. (King Of Pop? Why on earth would anyone want to be the King Of Pop?)

Of course, he was a genius. He was touched at birth – his parents knew it, his brothers and sisters knew it, and he knew it. And he busted his ass to develop himself as an artist. As a boy playing on the chitlin' circuit with the Jackson 5 before they signed to Motown, Michael keenly observed the soul stars of the day, soaking them all up and absorbing the best of their music and routines. Years after the fact, Jackson could describe Sam & Dave’s show at the Apollo – how they danced, what they wore – as though he had seen it the day before. With every great artist he encountered, no matter the medium or genre, the young Michael would pester them with questions – How did they get their sound? How did they prepare themselves to perform? How did they do what they did? It was the behavior of a master continually in the inquiry of his own work. He wasn't just blessed with talent. He worked harder than everyone else, too.

ec⋅sta⋅sy /ˈɛkstəsi/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [ek-stuh-see] Show Use ecstasy in a Sentence –noun, plural -sies. 1. rapturous delight. 2. an overpowering emotion or exaltation; a state of sudden, intense feeling. 3. the frenzy of poetic inspiration. 4. mental transport or rapture from the contemplation of divine things.

To be in ecstasy is to be out of oneself. It’s a concept and experience that Michael Jackson, during his golden age, was obsessed with. It informed the best of his music and it was a mystery that he sought answers for. When interviewed upon Thriller's release in late 1982 by writer (and soul maven) Gerri Hershey, he inquired of Hershey if she knew how to get the famous footage of James Brown performing at the T.A.M.I. show in 1964. “He gets so out of himself,” Michael said worshipfully of James. “There are things I need to know about how I do what I do.”

Michael had a lot of reasons why he wanted to get out of himself. He had a father who beat and terrorized him and his family. His family depended on him for their livelihood for as long as he could remember. He had no childhood. As an idol, millions wanted a piece of him (“Being mobbed hurts,” he once exclaimed), and it’s likely he had no idea who he could trust. Most people terrified him. When he looked in the mirror, he clearly saw much he did not like.

But in the best of his music – most of Off The Wall and Thriller, and his early hits with the Jackson 5, all of that baggage was transformed, and it became a non-entity. The joy of his music and performance carried him out of the pain of his identity and what you saw and heard was a master singer and showman, filled with self-assuredness, confidence and power. The reason why he became so enormous is that he provided that same ecstasy through his music – the experience of being out of oneself – for millions, regardless of boundaries of race, nationality, age or any other consideration.

Somewhere along the line – my sense it was sometime in 1984, when his hair caught on fire at a shoot for Pepsi and the Jackson’s Victory Tour became far less than the triumph it was designed to be – Michael’s access to that ecstasy diminished. His music turned inward – filled with empty bragging (“Bad”), paeans to his own victimhood (“Leave Me Alone,” “They Don’t Care About Us,” “Childhood”), or expressions of an unseemly anger (“Scream,” the closing video segment of "Black & White"). The music stopped being communal – instead, it simply reflected Jackson’s increasing isolation and his distance from reality.

Instead of getting out of himself through his music, Michael tried to do it through changing his face, recreating his childhood by vicariously experiencing it through sleepovers with children, and of course, drugs. Naturally, it didn’t work. He thought he was Peter Pan, and maybe he thought with enough record sales, money and adulation, he really could be Peter Pan. Not seeing that that was an impossibility is what killed him.

Michael Jackson’s ecstasy became present for me while at a party on Saturday night. There were about 100 or so people there, milling about, and “Billie Jean” came on. The room lit up. People started dancing and smiling at each other. Everyone’s self-consciousness melted away; everyone sang those lyrics, whether they experienced them the first time around or not. For five minutes, people got caught up in each other, the beauty of the others around them, the joy of music, an experience of what’s possible for humanity, with all of our flaws, to create. It was then that his death hit me for real. And I was flooded with sadness and compassion for him. For what he gave to the world, he deserved better than what he got.

But as sad as his story may be, it is the ecstasy of his greatest music and performances that will endure. That ecstasy is present somewhere around the world at practically every moment - on dance floors and cars and bedrooms on every continent. That's Michael Jackson's true legacy - and the only one that really matters.

Bootleg Friday: Ray Charles, 1976

2009-06-05T22:43:00.000-04:00

For this week’s Bootleg Friday, I’m going back to a Founding Father, Brother Ray.

I didn’t grow up listening to Ray Charles; I only started getting into him during my early 20's. But he was always there – on radio and TV and in the ether, with that voice that was always immediately recognizable no matter what song he was singing, or where you heard it. He's one of those artists that people who don't follow or even care much about music can identify him as the artist within four bars of his vocal. That voice, much like Sinatra's, is part of the fabric of America.

When I was 10, I got a compilation of Rolling Stone interviews, and while I quickly memorized the John Lennon and Pete Townshend interviews, I remember not really being able to get into Ray’s interview. I’m not even sure I read the whole interview for years. He gave what seemed to me to be defensive answers. He didn’t want to share everything. When the interviewer (Ben Fong-Torres) inquired about Ray’s experience in therapy, Charles blew it off, saying that he spent most of the time talking to the Doctor about how the Doctor’s life was going. Of course, I now understand the reasons for that “defensiveness” I perceived - born dirt poor, losing his sight at 7, orphaned at 15, on his own from then on. A scuffling musician, a target for other musicians and unscrupulous promoters to take advantage of, a heroin addiction and much more. He intimately knew the blues he sang - and he also knew to be careful about how much he gave away.

But as I got into his music – via the great early 90's Atlantic/Rhino box set, The Birth Of Soul, and then the epochal Modern Sounds In Country & Western Music – I came to realize that to interview Ray Charles was, in a way, a futile gesture. What you needed to know about him was in the music. It was there that the tools and defenses he used to survive a world he had known as hard and cold were no longer necessary, and he could shine without impediment, conjuring a range and depth of human emotion in his own singular way.

I can’t help but think that when I listen to this show, recorded in Stutgart, Germany in 1976. It’s a towering performance, especially the opening track, “How Long Has This Been Going On,” a song about discovering infidelity. Charles conveys more than just the hurt of being betrayed; he sings in the voice of a man discovering his own blindness, and now with sight, knows what a fool he has been. And sometimes, it seems like he sings the song with a very wry smile on his face.

Download: "How Long Has This Been Going On" 9/28/76, Stutgart, Germany
Download: "Feel So Bad" 9/28/76, Stutgart, Germany
Download: "Am I Blue" 9/28/76, Stutgart, Germany
Download: "I Can't Stop Loving You" 9/28/76, Stutgart, Germany
Download: "Country Road" 9/28/76, Stutgart, Germany
Download: "How Much I Can" 9/28/76, Stutgart, Germany
Download: "What'd I Say" 9/28/76, Stutgart, Germany

Bootleg Friday: Dr. John & The Meters, 1973

2009-05-29T13:21:00.003-04:00

After spending time with the wonderful new Allen Toussaint album, it only seems fitting that today’s Bootleg Friday be a wonderful 1973 Dr. John show, backed by the Meters, with who he had just recorded Right Place, Wrong Time. The sound leaves something to be desired, but put that aside and let yourself be washed away by the grooves contained within.

Download: Dr. John and the Meters, 3/5/73, Chalmette, LA

The Masterful Allen Toussaint & The Bright Mississippi

2009-05-28T19:36:00.005-04:00

“Stately” is an adjective I rarely use to describe an album, but it fits Allen Toussaint’s new album, The Bright Mississippi, like a glove. The Bright Mississippi is a special album, demanding multiple listens to truly get the tapestry of American music – Ellington inspired jazz, r&b, Creole, ragtime – that it weaves with such effortless cool. It’s an album that contains the full experience that is life – its joys, sorrows, delights and hardships. That is to say, it's an album with soul.

Toussaint, of course, is an American Treasure; one of the masters of American R&B, a songwriter and producer who has worked with the likes of Dr. John, The Meters, Labelle, Elvis Costello, Solomon Burke, the Band and dozens of other greats. American R&B (and therefore, American music) is practically inconceivable without him.

But The Bright Mississippi is Toussaint’s first recorded foray into jazz, and with Joe Henry producing, and an all-star cast including guitarist Marc Ribot, clarinetist Don Byron, and saxophonist Joshua Redman providing loving support, Toussaint takes on some of the most treasured standards in jazz history, with complete aplomb. It’s the sound of masters playing for love, and out of complete respect for both the music and for one another.

There are too many sublime moments on the album to mention, but Toussaint’s version of “West End Blues” merits special notice. Toussaint’s piano runs almost inspire laughter with their ease and grace. Toussaint plays with the melody masterfully, like he's Michael Jordan taking over a game, and he then passes it off to Ribot and then Redman who play impossibly gorgeous solos – every single note perfect, with not one wasted.

This will be one of the best albums of the year – go out and get it. It’s not only that they don’t make albums like this anymore – it’s that no one before has ever made one quite like this.

West End Blues - Allen Toussai...

Buy The Bright Mississippi at the Amazon Mp3 store

Little Moments

2009-05-26T07:52:00.004-04:00

I think we as people sometimes like to attach grandiose reasons to justify our love of a musician or band, when instead, our love is often kindled by smaller, more private and inscrutable moments of reverie. They're little moments of falling in love with the way a singer phrase a certain line, or a great guitar, piano or sax solo, or the way the horns swell in a very specific point in a song, and because they are so private, so unique to each individual, the importance of such moments to a music listener are unfortunately unheralded.

I've been going through something exactly like that over the past couple of days with David Bowie's "Ashes To Ashes." I'm a Bowie fan, but I'm not a fanatic like a lot of people. You could give me three or four Bowie albums to listen to (Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust, Station To Station, Scary Monsters) for the rest of my life, and that would probably be enough Bowie for me. I get his vast influence and I have an inordinate amount of respect for him - but for whatever reason, he's not an essential artist for me. (And given that he's the defacto artist for every bar in the E. Village and Lower East Side, I've heard him enough for a lifetime.)

But I've had "Ashes To Ashes" on repeat, just because of the way Bowie phrases the line, "I've never done good things/I've never done bad things/I never did anything out of the blue" at 1:56 in the song. It's a sublime piece of phrasing; it's very Lennon-esque, and the regret that permeates the line floors me every single time I hear it. It's the sound of a man who knows his time is coming to an end, is seeing the whole of his life flash before him and realizes his own foolishness in not living the way he truly wanted. It's an immensely soulful line - perhaps the most soulful line of his entire career, a career where Bowie has sometimes labored to find soulful moments.

I've listened to the whole song a dozen times or so over the past 72 hours, waiting excitedly for that line to emerge. I've also fast-forwarded through the song just to get to that line and sing it as loud as possible. And it's had me listen to a lot of Bowie for the first time in years, as I try to find similar moments of musical ecstasy.

Ashes To Ashes - David Bowie

The Country Honk Soul Of Justin Townes Earle

2009-05-23T08:45:00.004-04:00

For me not to post for six weeks is what I would, charitably speaking, call a slump. I’ve been working on several pieces, including a long piece on my ambivalence and, on occasion, my downright disappointment with the new Springsteen tour. I also have been writing a piece about American Idol, as I actually watched a few episodes this season, and found myself fascinated, if also a bit revolted. Mainly though, I’ve been way too much of a perfectionist, which doesn’t work. Writers write, and bloggers blog.

But like most slumps, it’s sometimes something small that gets you out of it, like the way a cheap hit can get a ballplayer in a groove. Tonight, I've been listening to the Justin Townes Earle album, Midnight At The Movies, for the first few times. I’ve been completely charmed by Earle’s fluency with seminal American music forms; country, folk, bluegrass and a little bit of Dixieland, all imbued with a punk spirit, a welcome dollup of subtlety and a whole lotta of love. The album seems modest, but there's an ambition that purrs at the very heart of the whole thing.

The son of Steve Earle and with a middle name given to him in honor of Townes Van Zandt, Midnight At The Movies is Earle’s second album, and it’s a huge leap forward for him. It would be easy to say that the sound of the album is retro, but that would be wrong. Instead, it’s a sound out of time, like the dance band for a bar on the Texas/Oklahoma border on a Saturday night circa 1947. It swings in all the right places, is warm when it counts, and possesses a very timely sense of humor.

In addition to his folk, country and bluegrass influences, Earle clearly grew up on punk rock, and from it he extracts the freedom to simply be who he wants to be, damn the conventions. He makes the Replacements “Can’t Hardly Wait” sound as though he wrote it himself – subbing melancholy for Westerberg’s grit, and with mandolins and fiddle that shimmer, it’s a beautifully resonant arrangement.

“What I Mean To You” is the album’s high point. With some gentle pedal steel and a rhythm section straight out of a Dixieland combo, it’s such a good song that you can easily imagine Louis Armstrong singing it. Earle is already such a strong lyricist that he can create vivid imagery with only a few words, and the longing and ache that’s at the heart of the song is so delightful as to be almost astonishing. Earle’s singing is there to support the song rather than call attention to itself; fortunately, his somewhat craggy tenor conveys every emotion that they lyrics may have left out.

This is great American music that’s deserving of your attention and an audience. And it’s got soul. I recommend it highly.

Download: "What I Mean To You"

Download Midnight At The Movies From Amazon

Bootleg Friday: Nirvana, 1987-1994

2009-04-10T12:35:00.001-04:00

Some weeks I labor to figure out what to post for Bootleg Friday. This week, it was an easy call. Today's Bootleg Friday is a selection of live Nirvana tracks from various locations from 1987 to their last performance in Rome in February of 2004. Of note are the rather ramshackle covers of the Who's "Baba O'Riley," and the Cars's "My Best Friends Girl," which the band can't seem to decide whether to take seriously or not, and waver in and out of committing to the song. It's pretty hilarious.

Download: "About A Girl" 8/30/92, Reading Festival
Download: "Jesus Doesn't Want Me For A Sunbeam" 2/7/92, Sydney, Australia
Download: "Baba O' Riley"
Download: "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" 2/7/92, Sydney Australia
Download: "Sliver" 8/30/92, Reading Festival
Download: "Downer" KOAS Radio, 1987
Download: "Here She Comes Now"
Download: "My Best Friend's Girl"
Download: "Smells Like Teen Spirit" 8/30/92, Reading Festival
Download: "All Apologies" 2/22/94, Rome, Italy

Kurt Cobain, 15 Years Gone

2009-04-08T13:28:00.004-04:00

The first time I heard of Nirvana was in August of 1991, while I was finishing a summer internship at Atlantic Records. Regina Joskow, a very wonderful woman and publicist at Atlantic who had been incredibly kind to me, certainly kinder than she needed to be to any summer intern, came up to me and asked with the utmost seriousness, “Ben, have you heard the new Nirvana?”

When I told her I hadn’t, she told me that I needed to – at once. Her manner was that of a Jewish mother, who, when told her guest hadn’t eaten anything all day, demanded that they sit down immediately so she could feed them. She told me that the album’s name was Nevermind, and later that day, she had procured a cassette copy of the album for me. (Pre-release cassettes were commonplace in those pre-Internet days, as we didn’t have to worry about leaks, etc.)

I loved the album immediately and got that it was going to be big. The power of the album was apparent immediately – the quality of the songs, the emotional authority of Cobain’s voice, the monstrous swing of Dave Grohl, and importantly, the humor embedded in the DNA of the lyrics.

Back in school that fall, I watched as the album’s buzz grew and grew; from a small, in the know crowd to something much larger. I missed Nirvana’s New York show at the Marquee that September, but it was talked about like the Second Coming – and people meant it when they raved about it.

I knew that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was on it’s way to phenomenon status in mid-December while at a Guns N’ Roses show at Madison Square Garden. Soundgarden opened, and during the interminable two and half hours waiting for Guns N’ Roses to go on, a DJ spun the hard rock hits of the day, loudly, while a video screen flashed images of attractive young women, which inspired the crowd to demand of them, “Show us your tits,” which most of the women obliged, happily or not.

But when “Smells Like Teen Spirit” came on, the crowd erupted as though the band itself was there – and the tit flashing stopped. 20,000 people sang along, and I was stunned. Sure, by then the single was huge in rock circles, but this was something else entirely – this had crossed over to a hard rock audience, and the ferocity of the response was overwhelming. This was an anthem – a hard rock fusion with punk that resonated like classic rock, transcending the fragmentation that had been afflicting the rock scene for years. I turned to the person I was with, another aspiring music bizzer, and said, “I don’t believe this.” About 5 or 6 weeks later, the album overtook Michael Jackson’s Dangerous to become the number one album in the country.

I was a fan, a pretty big one. The band had their detractors, but I knew they had staying power. As grunge and alternative exploded in the wake of Nirvana’s success – Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins, Alice In Chains and more, it was obvious to me that Nirvana – musically, substantively and emotionally - was head and shoulders above the rest of them. Pearl Jam may have been marketed as the Rolling Stones to Nirvana's Beatles, but I didn't think they were even worthy of the comparisons. (And I still don't.)

My assessment was confirmed with the September 1993 release of In Utero, which, from the opening notes of “Serve The Servants,” stunned me with its overwhelming power, its hypnotic and unforgettable melodies and the soul of Cobain’s vocals. I listened to the album incessantly, loving the dark rawness of it. It felt like a modern version of John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band; filled with pain and anguish that was immensely personal, but with the skill of the writing and the transcendent quality of Cobain’s voice, utterly universal.

I saw the band play the New York Coliseum (now the Time Warner Center) in November of 1993 with Shonen Knife (one of those completely uncommercial bands that got a major label deal because Kurt liked them) and the Breeders, who were exploding with “Cannonball.” The show careened by triumphantly, ninety minutes of great song after great song, diamond hard rock that transcended the burden of the classic. My love deepened.

By then, I was working in the record business full time. I had just started at Elektra Records, and was in charge of shipping Elektra’s promotional and commercial “product” to the staff across the country and to radio stations. It wasn’t the most glamorous job in the business, but I was learning the nuts and bolts of the record business, and I was happy. The industry was transforming – the energy of the Alternative wave that Nirvana had ushered in was still cresting, and young people who had been involved in the alternative/indie scene early on were now taking big jobs at the major labels and management companies. It was an exciting time.

Friday, April 8th 1994 was a quiet afternoon in the Elektra office. The office hummed softly with the anticipation of the weekend; it seemed as though people were avoiding conversations so they could slip out of the office as soon as possible. I caught up on some paperwork. Around 2:30pm, I overheard someone yelling across the hall that Kurt Cobain had been found dead, an apparent suicide. I plugged them for information, and they told me that he had been found that morning, and that it was all over the radio in Seattle. A woman I knew from Gold Mountain Management, Nirvana’s management company, came into the office, breathless, and when I inquired about what had happened, she confirmed Cobain’s suicide and said, “Ben, whatever you hear, it’s ten times worse than that.”

I wasn’t shocked. Cobain had attempted suicide about six weeks previously while in Rome, and the gossip surrounding him and Courtney Love was all bad. But as the news began to seep in, I found myself getting more and more upset.

I turned the radio on to WFMU, an influential college station, and people were calling in. I had expected the tone to be reverential, but what I heard instead was snark. “Nirvana just ripped off the Pixies,” one caller said snidely. Another caller remarked that it wasn’t a big deal at all, and asked the station to go back to its regularly scheduled programming.

I seethed. It was one of my first experiences with indie snark, and it enraged me – first, because of the musical ignorance involved, and second, because of the emotional callousness displayed. Assholes, I thought, and I turned off the radio and went home, playing “All Apologies” over and over, getting mightily sad, and mainly staying in that weekend, watching the coverage on MTV, and listening to Nirvana, Plastic Ono Band and Nebraska. Cobain belonged in that continuum, I thought then (and still do), and it made the loss cut very deep.

I wrote something that weekend about Cobain, a piece I’ve long since lost. But I do remember writing something to the effect of, “Whatever innocence this scene had (and I think it had a lot) is lost forever.” And I was very right – almost too right – about that.

After Cobain’s suicide, there was a retreat – in both music and the marketplace. What seemed so possible in 1992, 1993 and the first part of 1994 - that any great, left of center band could be big and become impactful beyond their own cult, was a possibility that diminished, seemingly overnight. Alternative, once the domain of Nirvana, became the domain of hacks like Better Than Ezra and Third Eye Blind. Indie went back to being for the cult and the cult only. For me, a music lover who loved when good music and the music I loved became popular, it was a very dispiriting time.

Courtney Love’s band Hole played the Academy very shortly after Cobain’s death, and it was one of the rawest, most chaotic shows I’ve ever seen. It teetered on becoming a circus, but when Love when into “Asking For It,” the room hushed. As she sang the song’s coda, “If you live through this with me/I swear I will die for you” over and over, building it, drawing it out and screaming it, the crowd experienced a moment of standing in her soul, of being in her misery and pain, and it remains one of the most powerful and unforgettable moments I’ve ever experienced at any performance.

For me, Kurt Cobain’s loss still hurts. I can’t help but wonder where his music would have gone, what turns it would have taken, where rock might be, even today, had he remained. In thinking of him and the impact of his suicide, I cannot help but think of Nietzsche: “And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

It’s no wonder that the most popular band on rock radio in late 1994 and for all of 1995 became…Hootie and the Blowfish.

Download: Nirvana - "Serve The Servants"
Download: Hole - "Asking For It"

An Interview With Nelson George, Part Two

2009-04-07T10:22:00.008-04:00

Here is part two of my interview with City Kid author Nelson George. (Here is part one.) In this segment we talk about the changes in Brooklyn, the example of his mother, the value of hard work, President Obama and the soul revival.

Q: You grew up in Brooklyn in the 1960’s and 70’s, a very challenging time. What are your thoughts about the renaissance of Brooklyn?

It’s funny that you say, “the renaissance of Brooklyn,” because the streets of Brownsville…the projects that I grew up in are still there. It’s got one of the highest HIV infection rates in the country. It’s still got one of the highest crime rates in the city. So the places that are far away from Manhattan – that don’t have nice brownstones – still have the same issues that I grew up with. They have a gang problem – again. That Brooklyn is still unaffected.

Williamsburg is interesting, because it’s one of the ugliest in the borough – but it’s really convenient to Manhattan, so it works. I have mixed feelings about the whole thing – I hate to see my neighborhood become just an extension of the Upper West Side. That bothers me – I don’t want to live on the Upper West Side (laughter).

But I’m a beneficiary. I go to BAM. The Brooklyn Museum has really upped its game considerably and become a much more vital institution. My neighborhood (Ft. Greene) has great restaurants and things going on. The cultural energy that the new arrivals have brought in – I can’t really be mad at it. But I think Brooklyn is still in flux. I think the economic downturn is going to have an effect – as it should. I guess I just have very conflicted feelings.

Q: There’s something almost Horatio Alger-like in your story. Without being preachy, there is an enormous sub-text in your story about the value of hard work – you have a great quote from Quincy Jones about the value of “ass power,” the ability to keep your ass in your seat until you get the job done. What drove you to work so hard?

My mother was an incredible role model. She was working as a checkout lady in a supermarket and she wanted to be a teacher. So she would work all day, come home, feed us, and then take the IRT out to Flatbush and go to school at Brooklyn College, come back to Brownsville, go through the projects, come home, tuck us in, get some sleep, get us up for school, go about her job…and she did this for three or four years in a row.

Q: Were you consciously inspired by her at the time? She went through some harrowing things – she really comes off as an heroic figure in the book.

She really was. I always say, she was my Cicely Tyson. (Laughter). She had a boyfriend who was a teacher, so there was always reading and education around. Education was a huge part of the vibe around me. The fact that you could use education to pull yourself up – and she did it. She got us out of the projects, bought us a house, got a car…she did a lot of stuff that’s amazing.

I also read all those biographies of writers. I mean, Hemingway – this was a guy who was an alcoholic by every description that we would use now – who turned out an incredible amount of work and was super-focused. If you do stuff – good things will happen. A lot of the books I’ve written and films I worked on were things that no one paid me to do – they were things I started on my own, and I figured if I created something good enough, I would find a buyer eventually. I’m a big believer in people creating. That’s partly why I was so drawn to hip-hop – because people were creating on their own, outside the power structure, and over time, they were able to leverage that into other things.

Q: What are you passionate about today, musically speaking?

I listen to a lot of Hot 97 still to keep up with what the hits are. I used to keep up with every producer and writer, but I had to let that go – it was just too much information in my head. I listen to an eclectic grouping of stuff – I listen to Cesaria Evora, I’ve been listening to a lot of Donnie Hathaway lately…I’ve been super-inspired by his writing.

Funnily enough, with the exception of KRS-One, I don’t like to go back to listen to the hip-hop I came up on – that feels like some old-man nostalgia to me. I’m more interested in what’s going on now and what’s going forward. If you dwell too much in what you like from the past, you get trapped in it. I’m interested in what the future holds. That’s what keeps you vital.

Q: There’s a picture of you with President Obama from 2004, when he was running for the Senate. What are your thoughts on his election? How was it for you? What did it mean for you about America?

The funniest thing to me about is how many people that I know in my age group know the dude. I’m one degree of separation from him with about three friends – people who went to college with him, or law school, or know Michelle. That’s kind of a weird thing – to think I could have easily been at some parties with him and his wife. The President to me was always a white guy from somewhere very far removed from me. It is kind of bizarre. (Laughter)

He speaks to the fact a large percentage of the white population have become comfortable with the acceptance of black authority in a way that was unthinkable a generation before. That’s a huge change in the way America sees itself. It speaks to the fact that the country is not as racist as I think black America has feared.

At the same time, there are millions of people who, for racial reasons, are totally freaked out by this. We haven’t reached Nirvana, but we’ve made a lot of progress. He speaks to a level of social mobility that is now possible for black America. The challenge that black people – all poor people, actually, have now is, “Are you ready to take advantage of this access?” Do we have schools and institutions in place that can produce more Obamas? I’m not sure if that’s the case. I still think there’s a lot of wasted genius in the streets.

We’re a country that’s fixated on bullshit. It’s part of an anti-intellectual tradition that exists in this country – I think Bush was a part of that – and I think it’s one of the reasons I think this country has fallen off. Our lifestyle is not as great as we think it is – because it’s not as rich as it could be. We’re not dealing with what’s going on in the world – it’s hard enough to know anything, but if you’re limited to reading People on an airplane, you ain’t gonna know shit. I think ignorance is a huge problem.

I think that’s one thing that Obama can really speak to. Obama knows the value of the word. He’s written books, and I think reading is one of the fundamentals that is under-valued. I have actors that sometimes come in to read who are functionally illiterate. I think we really need to work on education – it’s crucial to the future of the country. All the technology of the Internet, etc., isn’t going to mean anything if we don’t have people to manifest it. And the people that are educated - they're going to clean up.

Q: Last Question. In the past couple of years, there’s been something of a soul revival: Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones, James Hunter and a few others. Any thoughts about it?

Yeah, I think it’s great! Last year I traveled around the country for a show I do on VH-1 called "Soul Cities." I went to New Orleans, Memphis, Chicago and a few other cities and there are some great singers and performers out there. There’s a huge international audience for this culture that hasn’t gone anywhere. The artists that embrace it will reap rewards, and there are some great young artists doing it. Soul music is kind of like blues music – it’s a building block for so much. Soul music is benefiting from the collapse of the record business because it is a performance based culture more than dance music is. Of all the black music genres, more than hip-hop, more than slick r&b, soul benefits from performance, and with record structures breaking down, the ability to perform is becoming more important than ever –again.

An Interview With Nelson George, Part One

2009-04-06T09:56:00.006-04:00

Nelson George is a writer whose work I have enjoyed for years. His books, Where Did Our Love Go, The Death Of Rhythm And Blues, Hip-Hop America, have lovingly, intelligently and insightfully chronicled the history of soul and post-soul black music, looking behind the scenes and under the hood to get to the sometimes messy contradictions that are both behind the scenes, and in the grooves.

In addition to writing fifteen books, George has also written for the screen, and, in 2007, had his directorial debut with the HBO film Life Support, starring Queen Latifah.

George has recently released his own memoir, City Kid, a chronicle of his growing up in the projects of Brooklyn, his family, and the enormous impact that music, literature and film has on his life. It's a gripping tale told from a perspective that is uniquely his own, one that has been a major contribution to music and film. I recently spoke with George by phone and we had a freewheeling conversation about soul, hip-hop, Brooklyn, President Obama, the decline of the record business and a lot more.

Q: The book is a chronicle of several things: of your family, of life in the ghetto, of New York in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. But what struck me is that the book is really about your love affair with art – music, literature and film, and how that sustained, inspired and propelled you into a different world. Looking back on your life, how do you see your relationship to art, and is it as sustaining for you now as it was then?

The great thing about growing up in New York, and what makes New York such a great place to live is if you’re able to access all the things that the city has to offer. My mother was a big movie fan so we saw tons of movies. We went to Radio City Music Hall and those kinds of places. We saw the beginnings of a lot of black theater – I remember going to see “The Me Nobody Knows,” and early 70’s black plays. I was a big reader as well, and by the time I got to high school it all sort of came together, and I started venturing out – into Times Square, into the Village, which was full of jazz clubs, and Soho – and I don’t even know if it was called that then – it was just a weird area with art galleries. By the time I was in college there was not only hip-hop, but there was a lot of great avant-garde jazz. The city not only gives stimulation, but it allows you to see different worlds. And for me, it’s still that.

In terms of film, besides maybe Paris, I don’t think there’s a better city for film. We still have some incredible revival houses. You can basically see the entire history of cinema on a screen in this town if you’re paying attention. There are films that get played here that don’t get played anywhere else. I recently went to see “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” a silent film from 1927 by Carl Dreyer. And man, it knocked me the fuck out. It’s an incredible piece of film making. You can go on a Saturday night and see a Danish silent film from 1927 on a big screen – those are the kinds of things that make New York special.

I know a lot of talk of like, “the city isn’t what it used to be” in terms of music, but I don’t know. Between the invitations I get to stuff going on in Williamsburg, what’s going on in Brooklyn, still what’s going on downtown – you can still get a great range of music – great DJ’s, great bands, right now. I think the difference between ten years ago – definitely twenty years ago – is that a lot of the action isn’t in Manhattan anymore. Brooklyn has become the cutting edge, and like most things, it’s driven by real estate – real estate is always the number one issue in New York City, and real estate has driven it to Brooklyn.

There’s a critical mass of creative people in this city, and despite the Internet, despite Twitter and all that stuff, people like to be among other people. And creative people like to be around other creative people. The city still has a strong berth on that.

Q: I want to ask you about your eclecticism of taste. You write very lovingly about a lot of different authors and musicians. But you started with soul music, and I’m wondering if there was something about soul that provided you with some sort of foundation with which to view art, and, is there a common thread when you’re being with a piece of art?

The thing that I learned from soul music that still stays with me is a quest for emotion. When I was directing Life Support I asked myself, “What is it I’m trying to do here – what is the thru line?” And I tossed away a lot of my intellectual stuff. I just asked myself, “What is the emotion of this scene? What is the core of this particular moment?” Queen Latifah is pretty funny and she kept telling me, “Stop saying so many words! Just tell me what the emotion is.” That’s something that kind of comes out of soul music. The great thing about soul music is that the words are vehicles – it comes out in the phrasing and the singing. The words on the page might not be much - they might even be banal, but it all comes out in the emotion of the moment.

I write about it in the book about when I was trying to understand why I responded to different works of art, and it all comes back to emotional reaction. If I don’t have an emotional reaction, than the intellectual side takes over. Then you go, “Well, it sounds like it was influences by blah blah blah.” If there’s no emotional connection, there’s nothing to analyze.

Q: Hip-hop is 30+ years old – I think this year is the 30th anniversary of Rapper’s Delight –

Oh, God. (Laughter)

- You chronicled the birth and growth of the music and you may be the journalist most closely identified with the music. What’s your relationship to hip-hop today? Does it still feel as vital to you?

What I would say is, we use this phrase hip-hop – what the fuck does that mean right now? When I hear the records that Hot 97 plays, I hear a lot of dance music. I hear some really good records, but I don’t hear anything that’s connected to ’87 or even ’92. Just because a guy is rhyming doesn’t make it hip-hop. I think when people use the phrase hip-hop, they’re now referring more to a marketing term rather than a cultural one. There’s nothing wrong with that – it’s evolutionary. But I think the word has been devalued because of the way it’s been marketing. I don’t know if there’s hip-hop video games. I don’t see how there’s a rebel aesthetic in video games.

I saw that Def Jam video game when they’re wrestling. That’s hip-hop? Just because someone involved with hip-hop is involved in the game and they say it’s hip-hop doesn’t make it a valid definition. And it’s one reason there’s a lot of disillusionment is because the word itself has been devalued. I think Lil’ Wayne is hip-hop, and I think Kanye is mostly hip-hop, but not always. For me, hip-hop was most exciting when it was giving a voice to the voiceless, not just a commercial phrase to sell product – whether it’s music, clothes or watches. I don’t know if there’s a hip-hop watch. (Laughter)

You could say the same thing about rock – you can line up 50 rock fans and they won’t agree on a single band or what the meaning of the music is.

I actually think that rock is healthier now then it’s been in a long time, because you’ve fragmented away from the era where you had these dominant bands that sold out arenas. Because of the Internet and the breakdown of the record business, it feels more fan based to me. It feels far more organic to me than the top down shit.

My favorite band right now is TV On The Radio. I’ll listen to them more than any individual hip-hop artist, because it seems fresher, and it’s shit I never heard before. Their combination of elements – the way they use their voices and guitars – I never heard that before. That they’re from Brooklyn is a benefit (laughter). But I’m excited about them. And I’m really interested in the afro-punk thing. It seems like it’s growing organically, somewhat out of a reaction to hip-hop, quite honestly. I don’t know if it’ll be big. But if you throw in Santogold, TV On The Radio and even M.I.A., it’s already sort of arrived.

I have an office in the Village, and I was walking on Broadway the other day and I saw a guy who was totally b-boy’d down – 90’s b-boy. He’s wearing red, he’s got a baseball cap on sideways, he’s got matching white sneakers with red laces. And then I see these other kids walking, wearing straight jeans - the kind of faux-80’s outfit. And I thought, “The b-boy looks old! He looks like an old motherfucker from another era!” So there are new forces at work in the black culture that are tied to the pop culture. And I think that is one of the new movements that seems to have credibility to me, because it seems organic.

Q: So as someone who was an editor at Billboard, what are your thoughts about the decline of the record business?

The record business killed itself. I never thought it was a well-run business. When I was around it all those years, I thought there were a lot of people with a lot of passion, and a lot of people that didn’t give a fuck. And a lot of them weren’t business people – they were aficionados of music and they liked being around parties. And I’m even talking about big executives. I never felt like they were business people. I didn’t feel a lot of foresight.

For me, the key moment is when Napster comes out. I was at NYU teaching a class on the history of recorded music in 2000. And boom! The NYU Internet system collapses. And this happened at about five other universities that I know of, because kids are overloading the system, downloading and ripping music. This is a moment of critical mass – people are realizing that something is going on and it’s happening at the youth level. The record industry’s reaction is to sue Napster and sue their customers.

So what happened was that the technology was way ahead of the industry, and for three or four years, the industry’s reaction was to try to penalize the consumer. So they spun their wheels and went the wrong direction – alienated their artists, a lot of their consumer base. It took Apple with iTunes to figure it out. The technology people figured it out before the software people. It's been downhill for nine years.

Q: Greil Marcus’s “Mystery Train” was one of the most influential on me in terms of how I thought about and related to music. In City Kid you write about the impact the book had on you, especially the chapter on Sly Stone. How did you find that book?

I don’t know how I got turned onto that book – I think I read about it somewhere, and I was just knocked out. I had never read anything like that before. To me, black music had never been that well respected in terms of how it was written about. What I was feeling about the music when I was a kid – I wasn’t reading about it in Rolling Stone or in the Village Voice, at least not on a consistent basis. So when I read “Mystery Train,” I was like, “This is some shit.” He dug deep into the music, he dug deep into Sly’s persona, and he dug deep into the ramifications and the politics of the music. I just thought it was an amazing piece of writing.

The other chapter that was so big for me was the chapter on Robert Johnson. Because I had never heard of Robert Johnson before. And I remember going out and getting a Robert Johnson record and putting it on, and being like, “What the fuck.” That was the scariest shit – devil music.

I remember meeting Greil Marcus and him being amazed that I had first experienced Robert Johnson through his book. I owe him a major debt of gratitude. He gave me a way to think about writing about music and a guide into all of it. It’s a major piece of writing and I just hope that I’ve honored it.

Between Marcus and Robert Christgau, I really learned to see culture in the broadest way possible. So when people would say to me, “You’re a hip-hop writer,” I never saw it that way. I saw myself as someone writing about black culture – and hip-hop is one manifestation of that culture.

In the book, you write of LeRoi Jones’s book Blues People, saying, “The idea that our music was in a constant struggle with the forces of capitalism to define its own direction struck me as right on (and still does)." The dynamic of capitalism in black music has really shifted in the past twenty years – you have much more black ownership, you have the black mogul culturally, etc. How do you see that struggle playing out today?

Well, what Berry Gordy accomplished, no one has accomplished in quite the same way. But, the fact is that Russell Simmons, Andre Harrell, Damon Dash, Puffy, Jay-Z and a bunch of other guys have benefited from their music in a way that just wasn’t possible before, and, in fact, have expanded outside of music, using music as a platform for other businesses. I think that’s unprecedented and I’m really excited by it.

The caveat of that is: Are the values that these guys pursuing any more enlightened than the white executive might have been in that same position? That I’m not always sure about. Once you get past the idea that they’re black executives, you starting getting into the question of individual taste and the question of what are they going to do with their power. I think that’s a much more muddy thing.

In part two: George shares his thoughts about the Brooklyn renaissance, the value of hard work, his mother's example, what he's listening to these days and the impact of Barack Obama's election and presidency.

Bootleg Friday: Madeleine Peyroux, 2004

2009-04-03T09:36:00.001-04:00

The first time I saw Madeleine Peyroux was at Fez, in New York in 1996, when she released her debut album on Atlantic, Dreamland. I didn’t get it. Or maybe I did, but what's probably so is that I simply had no ability to listen to a jazz vocalist back then.

But Madeleine Peyroux, with her wonderful albums, Careless Love, Half The Perfect World and this year’s Bare Bones, has become one of my favorite singers of this decade, a vocalist of skill, depth and passion – a blend of the passions of blues and jazz with the complexities and ambivalence of modernity. Peyroux has that rare talent to be able to a have a song hold contradictory moods and feelings simultaneously. And the irony with which she imbues her songs is not the flip and glib style of irony which deadens art. Rather, it articulates a hard earned knowledge of the ways of the world, and it feels close to something like wisdom.

Today’s Bootleg Friday is a Madeleine Peyroux show from Berlin, Germany in December 2004, while supporting her second album, the wonderful Careless Love, one of the finest jazz vocal albums of the decade. You can hear the echoes (and songs) of her influences – Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits and more. But it adds up to something that is uniquely her own.

Download: “Dance To The End Of Love” 12/9/04 Berlin, Germany

Download: “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” 12/9/04 Berlin, Germany

Download: “Between The Bars” 12/9/04 Berlin, Germany

Download: “Lonesome Road” 12/9/04 Berlin, Germany

Download: “Walking After Midnight” 12/9/04 Berlin, Germany

Download: “(Getting Some) Fun Out Of Life” 12/9/04 Berlin, Germany

Download: “La Vie En Rose” 12/9/04 Berlin, Germany

Thoughts On The Dead

2009-04-01T10:04:00.006-04:00

I've been ambivalent about seeing The Dead when they play Madison Square Garden in April. For me, what I really loved about the Grateful Dead was Jerry Garcia. I loved his sweetness and soulfulness, and how he was the linchpin of an American music that took so much in and spanned so much - rock, R&B, folk, jazz, experimental, bluegrass, psychedelia and more. When the Grateful Dead were on, they had a power that was overwhelming and undeniable.

But after reading about the shows and listening to Monday night's show at Roseland, I must admit that I'm excited for the shows. They're playing tight, if a little tentatively - but that is to be expected given that the tour is just starting. And vocally, it's much stronger than I would have thought. It's not that I won't miss Jerry - I will. But listening to the show, you can feel his spirit. And more importantly, I think the tour will be less a celebration of the band, and more a celebration of the songs, which gain resonance with each passing year. While techies and futurists continue to blather on about how the Grateful Dead gave away their music (they didn't), they'll continue to miss the most important point - it was about the songs and the shows. If new bands write songs as good as the ones on Workingman's Dead, American Beauty and Europe '72, and perform with the power that the Grateful Dead did at their best, they'll need to worry far less about new business models and how to market themselves.

*Interestingly enough, Monday's shows in New York conincided with the 20th anniversary of my atttending my first Grateful Dead show in Greensboro, North Carolina. Here's an account of how I got there.

Download: "Althea" 3/30/09, New York, NY

Stax And The Soul Of Hip-Hop

2009-03-31T15:28:00.006-04:00

Hip-hop is clearly the most impactful and important musical genre that has emerged in the past thirty years. And much of it has been built on the rhythmic foundations of soul. Stax has just released The Soul Of Hip Hop, a compilation of Stax songs that were used for tracks and beats in famous hip hop songs, including De La Soul, Rakim, DJ HiTek, Cypress Hill, DJ Muggs, LL Cool J, Public Enemy, DJ Quik, Ice Cube, Notorious B.I.G., Wu-Tang Clan, RZA and more. Featuring songs by Isaac Hayes, The Emotions, Booker T. and the MG's, William Bell and others, it's a great and funky look at the impact that Stax has had on hip-hop.

I spoke with the compilation's producer, Jonathan Kaslow, a former co-worker of mine at Island Def Jam. Jonathan is one of the most knowledgeable and passionate hip-hop and music fans I've ever known, so doing this interview was a true pleasure.

Q: What was the genesis of The Soul Of Hip Hop?

I'm a consultant for Stax, and I've been going back into the vault and taking multitrack masters from the Stax catalog (including the above title) and converting them to Pro Tools sessions. I then take sessions that I feel producers will be interested in and give them to use for sampling. An example of this would be producer Jake One who took the multitrack from "Masquerade" and created a beat that ended up as the music for the Freeway song, "It's Over" on his Def Jam album Free At Last. Some of the producers and artists working with the material are Dr. Dre, Kanye West and Ghostface Killah.

From that, we sort of came up with the “soul of hip-hop” idea – we wanted to educate people how influential Stax has been in the sound of hip-hop. We were in talks with Def Jam to try to make an album of new material using all the Stax multitrack masters. I had arranged something with Rondor Publishing to do a blanket license – but for various reasons, it got shelved.

Q: I know you as a enormous hip-hop fan – what’s your relationship to soul music?

I’ve always had personal relationship to soul music. My mom, Alison Miner, was one of the managers of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and she managed Professor Longhair for a while. So growing up, I was more exposed to the r&b and blues side of things. I wasn’t as educated about the Memphis sound. I discovered it through my love of hip-hop – going back to find where my favorite rap tracks came from.

There are some Stax artists that my mom booked for Jazzfest – she had booked the Staple Singers and Margie Joseph. So the circle of life – it’s incredible. My mom passed a few years ago, I’m working with the masters of the artists she booked, and I’m thinking “Who was my mom talking to to make this happen…was she talking to (Stax head) Al Bell?”

But my education came through hip-hop. I felt like I had to find my own sound. And hip-hop was that. Hip hop is the music of my generaton. But you have a moment when you’re a kid if you’re into hip-hop and if your parents have a big record collection. You have curiosity about how these sounds came. I'd listen to these old albums, and then I'd discover a track that one of my favorite rap songs was from and I'd be like, “Oh shit…that’s from that?” All these of these great rap songs are based on this old music. And when I’d try to find the hip hop sample, it all led back to Stax. I had no idea all this stuff happened in Memphis.

Q: One thing I noticed is that all of these songs come from the post-1969 catalog. The Stax catalog that is venerated is usually from the Atlantic era (up until 1968). But everything you have here is from the era after Stax left Atlantic.

Yeah – that’s a great point. Until I worked at Stax I didn’t have expertise in the catalog. It took me the last few years to learn it. And amongst the old-timers at Stax today, artists like Sam & Dave are the absolute pinnacle of the catalog. Absolutely – for them, it’s the pre-1968 stuff. But everything that moves me is from the post-1969 piece of the catalog when Stax got a lot funkier. For me, after 1969, things got much more interesting rhythmically. The BPM’s got to around 88 or 90…just the kind of tempos that would become perfect to rap to. And a lot of the beats that are sampled from Stax are just so perfect that they just loop it and do nothing else. They don’t have to layer it or anything. They’re perfect.

A lot of the artists in the catalog – Johnnie Taylor, Rufus Thomas, the Mad Lads – they went from that 50’s bluesy, doo-wop influenced sound to pure funk. Stax’s music from 1969-1974 brought us an era of music that for some reason, became the dominant sound in hip-hop from the late 80’s to the mid-90’s. For a guy like me from the hip hop generation, the later era of Stax speaks volumes more.

Q: Why would you recommend this to a hip-hop fan unfamiliar with Stax or old school soul?

For someone who grew up with hip-hop, but didn’t go beyond being a listener–if they never got into production, they can listen to this CD and really get the origins of hip-hop. We approached the project from the context of, “What are the most famous hip-hop songs that used Stax beats, and then what Stax songs comprised those.” A lot of soul fans are unfamiliar with the Mad-Lads, but for me, they’re more important than Sam & Dave. And the people that listen to the older part of the Stax catalog – they can get into it because it’s funky.

This whole project has been an education for the people on the Stax side. They’ve made money off of sampling – but they didn’t know what it was or how to make it interesting for them in a social context. A lot of people of the Stax generation – both artists and executives – would give sample clearances very grudgingly. But thanks to this project, I think the folks at Stax have an ever broader sense of the impact their music has had, and it's actually made them fans of sampling! Because if it wasn’t for the hip-hop generation, someone like me, I wouldn’t even have even 10% of the interest I do in this music. It’s been good for everyone involved.

Q: Do you have future plans with this project?

We have plans to do multiple volumes of this particular set. I want to create “the soul of hip hop” as a brand in that we can create an idea and a theme that is universal to this. It’s a bridge between generations between soul and hip-hop. What I’ve been doing with these is using the multi-track masters, which gives producers so many more options. When I opened the multi-track of David Porter’s “I'm Afraid The Masquerade Is Over,” I almost cried – for me, even though he's a legendary producer and songwriter, what he’s known for is that song, which has been sampled by Wu Tang Clan, LL Cool J, and Biggie. When I could hear the strings separate from the piano – if you mute out things, there’s an almost infinite amount of possibilities you can create. I’d love to give background on how these tracks led to hip-hop. Maybe even do a TV program and show how a hip-hop artist would approach these vaults.

It’s interesting how history is approached differently with rock and rap. In rock, artists will often be obvious and forthcoming about their historical influences - which can reach back decades. In hip-hop, so many of the artists, especially with their braggadocio, will try to portray themselves as a whole new thing – nothing came before, and nothing comes after. Yet the foundation of all their music is older.

It's true - it's a different relationship to history and the past. When I was 11 years old, I was way into the Geto Boys Can’t Be Stopped album, the one with “Mind Playing Tricks On Me.” The first song on side two of the cassette was “You Gotta Let Your Nuts Hang,” which Scarface is all over. I was at my mom’s in New Orleans – and I was going through my her record collection. She had managed the Wild Magnolias, who were this incredible band of Mardi Gras Indians. Their first album is seminal. I heard the loop from “Gotta Let Your Nuts Hang,” knew it was from the Wild Magnolias, and then when I checked the credits of the Geto Boys album, I was like, “I don’t see the song credited.”

So I told my mom, who then called band pianist Willie T, and she had me go to Willie T’s place and play him the Geto Boys. He listened and then said, “I’ve never heard of the Geto Boys, I’ve never heard this song, and no one ever contacted me about using it.” He ended up taking Geto Boys to court and won - I was a hip hop snitch (laughter) – and that money really helped him. Being around the New Orleans musicians growing up, I was taught that they’re the most important thing - and that you have to protect them. My mom taught me that history is a hugely important thing, and it can’t be let to fade in the background. Growing up in hip-hop I had a weird identity – I knew that it was built on the past, but it wasn't something you ever talked about. I think why there’s a lack of history sometimes is because of the socio-economic history of African-Americans in this country. It’s a very painful past sometimes, and I think denying the history can sometimes be a way to get past the pain.

You have tons of examples of that in black music history – middle class blacks in the 50’s and 60’s who hated the blues, and felt that that was old plantation shit to be left behind.

Yeah. I remember working at Def Jam when "Standing In The Shadows Of Motown" came out. The movie came up in a staff meeting, and a very high up black executive said to all of us, “You best keep me as far away from that shit as possible.” And I was like, “You don’t like Motown?” But for that person, their relationship to that music was very different from mine, and it was not to be discussed.

Download: David Porter - "I'm Afraid The Masqurade Is Over"

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