The Face of Music Versus Just Good Music

Our contemporary music scene has taken a tendency that began creeping in with Elvis in the fifties and reduced then inflated that reduction to a gaseous extreme: music is not so much something you listen to as something you relate to because of the image of the people (or featured person) making it. They've got the look and social attitude you want to cop to make your own reputation in the social milieu. This appeals especially to the image-obsessive psychology of the teenager and (with a veneer of added sophistication) the early-twenties set. Because of this, we have a highly odd situation which has occurred in at least American culture: only young people listen to contemporary pop musicians. Older people either get interested in other forms of music or just lose interest in music. In other countries, say at a wedding or family reunion, contemporary music can be played and you will find all age groups on the dance floor, all of them sincerely relating to it. American pop music is different. It appeals to a narrow set of concerns, social nuances and life experiences. Thus you have people who were once part of the younger age group for whom the music industry temporarily catered, occasionally giving a dusty disc a spin from their youth to escape into nostalgia. How pathetically unfortunate! A part of the problem is that music today doesn't have any depth, and that lies in the fact that a pop artist is encouraged to be as obsessed with their image as an actor or model. That takes away from time practicing your instrument or writing deep lyrics. Yet this worm in the cheese has been growing from early on, and I don't mean to insult the memory of Elvis, but he became trapped by his looks. He definitely had real talent, musical gifts, a beautiful and powerful voice he could modulate into many forms of emotional expression, and he knew a thing of two about blending and adapting different musical traditions. Unfortunately, his producers soon got him on the fast track out of revolutionary rock'n'roller to sanitized teen idol, and he thus became tragically moribund (despite a passionate and appealing attempt in the late sixties to break free). Rock artists sometimes are aware of the trap, and find ways to mock it or disentangle themselves from it with cleverly appealing rebelliousness. Groups with such names as "The Faces" and "The Small Faces" were mocking the desire of the record producers to have only the pretty boys and girls doing the singing and playing. There are tragicomic examples of this, including among the Rolling Stones, who were not known for being pretty boys but were presented as being appealing "bad boys" with scruffy good looks. Yet the factor of "cuteness" played a role even among them, when they were told that their keyboard player was too "square looking" to be an official member of their group. To their credit, the Stones retained him in their recordings and increasingly in their stage performances as a "guest musician", because he was simply too talented and creatively conducive to work with to give up entirely for the sake of "image". Well, some might say that the reason the pop music industry has refined things to the absurd point in which we now find ourselves is because it simply works in terms of raking in the profit. Well, I am here to argue, that there are greater profits to be reaped when the music is put forward as the more important matter of concern, instead of making it (unbelievably!) a side issue that the computers can take care of. In the late sixties and early seventies (a cultural window of time when some of the greatest rock music ever was made), we already had record producers trying to build upon image to enhance sales. Consequently, you had rock musicians who were living in mansions with servants dressing on the stage as though they lived on a tribal hippie commune in Northern California. Artists in concert, whatever their real talent, really played up the idea of Hippie Messiah or Hippie Goddess, as symbolic leaders of the Countercultural Revolution. Many of them to varying degrees sincerely meant it. Others were just interested in making music and expressing whatever moved them, and hoped it would appeal (the costumes were just for fun and added insurance). In that golden era, if you were talented, your music would indeed likely appeal, because the generation for whom they were performing generally had the highest standards and the most sophisticated ears attained by a popular audience. As their fans grew out of their youth, they remained loyal to their favorite music artists, because those singers and musicians had created such depth of work. It was an investment that paid off, for it allowed those artists to evolve with their own growing maturity in life, and the record companies kept producing them (at least for awhile). Consequently, there was nothing foolish or self-deceiving about a thirty-year-old man or woman going out and buying the latest album by an artist they had first enjoyed when they were fifteen, and nor was it strange for them to go the record store and purchase a brand new album by a brand new artist. Newcomers too were expected to at least equal the standard of quality set by the established artists who had made precedents of musical achievement before them. In the midst of this idyllic era, there emerged a group that was only minimally concerned with image, and certainly not anything that wasn't who they really were in their everyday lives. What is more, they were super talented, not merely in terms of raw playing ability, but compositional ability, and because they worked together like a true music ensemble rather than a nest of feuding egos nipping at each other. This group was the Moody Blues. When they came on stage, they might create temporary confusion, because they were dressed in sophisticated yet understated ultra-modern jet-setter fashions of French salon intellectuals with longish but quite neat hairdos. Yet once they started playing, all was "forgiven". They didn't need to dress like faux American Indians or cowboys or gypsies or circus performers or in any other costume out of the mythical trunk of childhood's imagination. They came to make music, and putting all their efforts into that rather than theatrical acts of superficial bravado or egoistic posturing, they could put on a show that took people on focused and utterly captivating journeys their imaginations and spirits had not yet begun to explore. In other words, these musicians were confident in what they had to offer as art, as being quite capable of standing on its own. Their albums are a statement of their commitment to excellence, and their live performances did not shame them but proved they had done all their own work on those records and that it lived on fully within them. They did not make any claims of definition, they just created their own unique thing, but no musician later drawn to the Prog movement can escape thanking The Moody Blues for how many tools they gave their successors to work with in terms of creative expression in the arena of popular music. So, if in a time where music and image had reached an equilibrium of importance in the fashioning of musical careers, there could emerge a group wholly concerned (aside from the maintenance of a modest courtliness of manner) with making good music, then perhaps in our age where good music has been nearly wholly eclipsed by image, it is time for another group of greatly talented singers and instrumentalists, who care more about musical expression rather than how cool they can snarl for the camera, to force their way through and liberate young adults and adults of all ages from this musical desert in which we now find ourselves. There has come a time when all should feel capable of dancing together to the same music, and for the young not to feel it is an intrusion by the old.

Staying Power and Adaptability

When you think about it, the great musical artists that first began emerging in the mid-sixties accomplished something no rock, pop or even rock'n'roll musicians have accomplished before or since. They had the will and the musical skill to keep their work relevant and contemporary over time. Only when pure exhaustion and a drying up the creative well took over did these artists bow out, and even then, they could come out to play with great skill for special occasions. The rock and rollers of the fifties always played the musical style of their era of fame -- they never changed. The crooners of the early sixties never evolved (with the exception of Neil Sedaka, who revived his career in the seventies as a singer/songwriter). The New Wavers and Hair Metalists never became relevant again, except on the nostalgia/reunion circuit. A crop of musicians who emerged as talents in the mid to late sixties were a different breed. For them, musical inspiration was the main thing, not just giving the crowd what presumably the crowd wanted. Instead, they taught the crowd to appreciate new things. So whenever new musical textures, palettes, instruments, dynamics, voicing, and idioms became available, they adapted them to their central need to express something fresh artistically from within themselves. They kept evolving, and the best of them remained true to their core artistic self through all the different musical tools of which they availed themselves over time. If they ever lost this sense of who they were as real creative people, they crashed up on the rocks of musical superficiality, and many of them did lose their way in the eighties when music producers and record company executives developed an autonomic fetish for the predominance of synthesizers (which had once been tastefully used in the seventies) but became a musically-ephemerizing monster of the succeeding decade. Yet many of those sixties artists who were still determined to make authentic music, but who had been tricked into making one of those cod-New Wave albums, soon recovered their true sense of artistic identity and came out with great albums that proved that non-computerized music is still the most satisfying to the soul and the imagination. Today, we cannot even speak of musicians adapting. Most groups only last two to four albums, and then, they move on to become computer technicians or tattoo artists (or some such obscure profession). In the hyper-drive fickleness of today's culture, we have rendered our pop musicians more disposable than even their music. Be that as it may, here are some good groups or artists rooted in the sixties to follow through the musical changes of culture in the latter half of the twentieth century (though some of them, admittedly, don't break through the eighties barrier, while others find resurrection on the other side of the eighties, or, miraculously, manage to make meaningful music amidst the surface gleam of the eighties milieu): The Who, The Kinks, The Beatles (and the solo careers of its various members), The Rolling Stones, Jethro Tull, Yes, Steve Winwood, Joni Mitchell, Crosby-Nash, Stephen Stills, Van Morrison, Stevie Wonder, Neil Young, Carlos Santana, King Crimson, Genesis, Peter Gabriel.

Review: George Harrison's Thirty-Three and Third

Talk about a quintessential work of what was best about skillful seventies pop, this album from 1976 is it. Harrison's voice is sweet and strong, his slide-guitar work is as good as any master's, and he's got a great horn and rhythm section. The instrumentation is gracefully interplayed, every instrument well-voiced and balanced. The songs each have a distinct personality, while fitting well with the overall mood and style of the album. This is not a minor album or background music, as some claim. It is funky, jazzy, soulful, reverential, compassionate, mirthfully rebellious, tender of heart, graciously laudatory, merry -- and indeed thoroughly artful. Some of the songs are mellow, but appropriately so, and mellifluous to boot; others have delightful energy and plenty of punch. There is no filler, and the bonus track for the remastering (a non-album single), though not from the time of the album's original release, does fit perfectly the tone and feel of the rest of the album (which is probably why they included it on this one rather than a later release). You could know nothing of George Harrison the Demigod Beatle, or George Harrison the Hippie Hero, and become a fan just from listening to this album alone. Living in the first decade of the 21st century and looking at this cultural product from of the heart of the 1970s, my central afterthought is: people then, like Harrison, had issues of moral concern, just as we do now, but they had so much to celebrate about the prospects of their world.

Review of the Beatles' Redaction: Let It Be...Naked

I was not a youth growing up in the nineteen-sixties and early seventies, so I do not view the music of the Beatles through the psycho-social filter through which their music was initially judged. I grew up with the music of the nineteen-eighties, which, generally speaking, is rather poor by comparison. In fact, I lost interest in the music of my generation and started raiding my baby-boomer auntie's record collection, and found much more satisfying music there from her generation. The 1968 session recordings which were shaped into the Beatles' last album release in 1970, entitled, Let It Be, historically and to the present day are mostly disliked by professional critics, and were so, in part, by even two of the Beatles themselves: Paul McCartney and John Lennon. I was raised by musicians, and so I have a fairly decent ear for good music. In fact, I'm something of a snob in terms of what it takes to make my ears happy. The worst I can possibly come up with in terms of the original album release in question is that it may be a little overproduced here and there, but some of that I like -- it was, after all, the final salute from the living group, and a little musical drama isn't bad. However, the McCartney-led redaction, Let It Be...Naked, I am not ashamed to say is an absolute pleasure! Once again, the critics don't like it. They must build job security by finding fussy and negative things to say. Critics also tend to idolize their predecessors and their historic pronouncements, and here we're talking about the first generation of the popular music press that emerged and developed in the sixties and seventies. As good as the music was from 1965-1975, the music critics of that era made it their business (following what sort of critical agenda I cannot decipher) to attack those musicians with any real talent and imagination, and raise up the mediocre bands with grandiloquent praise, if these critics sniffed out anything about such groups that came across as "street cred" and "rootsy authenticity". I have no vested interest in these rascally critical traditions. I do not listen with my ego, I listen for aesthetic quality. Let It Be..Naked sounds much more akin to its inarguably great predecessor, The White Album, and its historical (recording-wise) masterful successor, Abbey Road. McCartney's new redaction of what served as the group's final album has a sound, texture and spirit that makes much more sense in terms of where it fits in the evolving artistic vision of the group. That the Beatles were bickering during the sessions, and sowing the seeds of their break-up is irrelevant to the art they produced from these sessions. The members of the group may have felt miserable at the time, but they must have channeled and sublimated this misery into what I have to say are authentic emotions and very fresh and engaging lyrics and musical dynamics. This is not a "throwaway album", in either the Spector version or in this new "authenticated" version, but I have to say that I love this latest version. It certainly does feel like McCartney might have been proven right if only Lennon had gone along with it: they could have done an incredible live tour with this music. They're singing well together, their musical command of the instruments displays a relaxed facility, you can sense a good-humored camaraderie in the ensemble playing and singing, and there is absolutely nothing here that sounds forced. It sounds wonderfully, beautifully real. Without a doubt, even compared to their other work of the same career phase, it is easily some of the best rock, folk rock, blues rock, rock balladry and sixties funk that you will ever hear. So don't listen to the mounded wall of bull-crap from the paid egos. Buy this album and listen to it with the innocent ears you were born with -- and you will thank this blog for clearing your path to it.

Folk Music Saved Popular Music and Created Rock

In the mid-fifties, electric blues and country music converged to create a danceable form of popular music that was dubbed "rock and roll". Throughout the rest of the fifties this new hybrid form of music remained quite vigorous and inspired under the likes of such African American artists as Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Jimmy Reed, and such white artists as Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley. With many artists it was a toss-up as to whether they should be defined as country or blues or rock and roll, and none of them stuck by hard genre rules in their repertoire. Suffice it to say, these rock and rollers not only blended earlier styles of popular music but sped them up and played them louder. Many blues artists that emerged in the fifties should probably also be classed as rock and roll musicians, at least with regard to many of their successful songs, but if their audiences at the time were mostly African American, then record companies marketed them as blues musicians, and rock historians then later interpreted them as such. Never mind this, the British rock and rollers that emerged in the sixties did not pay attention to American marketing. They recognized the rock and roll qualities of Big Mama Thornton, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Elmore James, T-Bone Walker, Lightning Hopkins, Bo Diddley and John Lee Hooker. Those Brits used the influence of hard-driving electric blues to create their own genre of popular music, called "rhythm and blues" or "R & B". But just as the British baby-boomers were cooking up a new era in rock and roll in the sixties musical underground, America's Cold War tensions were having a negative impact on popular culture. Rock and roll was getting smothered by record companies that were heeding the admonishments of political, media and religious authorities to tone down the music they were pressing to vinyl. Rock and roll seemed fated to fade away like previous popular musical crazes like swing, jump-blues, calypso, and bossa nova. Popular music became a tame, whoozy, adolescent-crush thing with good-looking crooners, and the wildest things got was California-style surf music which celebrated hot rods and the adolescent social freedom of the warm beach setting, utilizing harmonic singing and jangling/gurgling tidal-wave guitar riffs. Consequently, young Americans who were interested in music that expressed any inspired feeling outside these two aforementioned forms had to find it in folk music (not to be confused with traditional forms of pre-commercial ethnic music, though these were inspirations for this modern form). Folk music (as a popular genre) was talking about more serious matters in its lyrics, insisted on using acoustic instruments, and utilized solo and/or harmonic singing, and had a broader and more varied emotional palette. Some of its practitioners of lasting merit were Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Peter Paul and Mary, and Pete Seeger. And then came the British Invasion in the mid sixties. America was re-introduced to "unsafe" popular music again from an outside source, replete with all the musical energy and wildness of the rock and roll they had known in the 1950s, some of it strongly infused with blues sensibilities that had a wry British spin. Of course the most talented and influential exponents of the British invasion were the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Animals and The Who. The American crooners that had been ruling the roost of American popular music tucked tail and ran, and the imagination of many folkies caught fire under the influence of these British bands. Many of the more dynamic folk artists adapted the more aggressive energy of R & B and added electric instrumentation. British rhythm and blues musicians in their turn fell in love with American popular folk music. At the moment folk and R & B fused, rock was born! Out of this new genre emerged such former folkies now rockers as Bob Dylan (now branded a musical heretic by folk purists), The Byrds, The Mamas and The Papas, The Lovin' Spoonful, Simon and Garfunkel, Buffalo Springfield and Moby Grape. Then there were the British musicians who incorporate American folk music ideas into their compositions, like the Beatles (a la Help!, Rubber Soul, Revolver, etc), and Donovan. Folk music gave popular music a sustaining strength in the form of rock, by endowing it with more reflective sensibilities, sociopolitical concerns, acoustic textures and musical idioms, and greater lyrical possibilities in terms of subject matter and forms of vocal and verbal expression. Those who felt the folk influence more pronouncedly formed the singer/songwriter genre of popular music that emerged in the late sixties and flourished in the seventies under the leadership of such varied British and American artists as Joni Mitchell, Cat Stevens, Nick Drake, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Jim Croce, John Denver, Glen Campbell, Neil Diamond, Judy Collins and Carol King. Other folk-influenced rockers began to think more deeply about the roots of folk and began exploring alternative ethnic forms such as Cajun/Creole music (Little Feat), swamp-style rockabilly (Creedence Clearwater Revival), countrified rock (The Band, Poco, The Flying Burrito Brothers, The Eagles), and even Creole/American Indian (Redbone -- not to be confused with Leon Redbone). On the British side of the Atlantic there were rockers that incorporated into their style distinctively British forms of traditional music (these were sometimes called "trad bands" if that became the predominating feature of their repertoire), and this movement was exemplified by such groups and solo artists as Fairport Convention, Jethro Tull, Sandy Denny, The Strawbs, Richard Thompson, and Steeleye Span. And then came Punk in the mid seventies, and it blew popular music back to the Stone Age. Oh well...

To Tear Down Defintions that Defy Listening, Part Two: Prog Rock

The groups that get labeled "prog rock" are so diversely different, and almost all of them are British; these facts alone have led me to believe that really prog might be defined with credible accuracy like this: any sort of British music that American critics could not understand. These groups essentially wanted to develop the range and depth of expression of popular music utilizing everything from interesting time signatures to compositional suites. There are exceptions to the British identity for this music. There were a few German groups, but North America only really produced one, and that one was Canadian and not even pure prog; they were more a hybrid of prog and pomp rock, and they were called Rush (some Americans are so uneasy about allowing them to be called a "prog group" that they are often otherwise defined as "soft heavy metal" -- at least until a growing addiction to synthesizers flattened out Rush's imagination and teeth by the mid-80s), and these embarrassed-by-prog fans position '70s-era Rush with the likes of Blue Oyster Cult (a band which sounds like the Byrds singing and playing heavy metal). But Rush was progressive music, replete with all the high-minded philosophical and mystical amalgam of lyrical conception, classical orchestration and jazz nuances typical of the genre. Their lead vocalist Geddy Lee could sing in upper stratospheres that Jon Anderson of Yes could only dream of. They had the equality of superlative and studious talent between its respective musicians that is characteristic of prog groups, with the rhythm section being as aggressive and pronounced as the guitar and keyboards (another prog trait). Theirs (like others of their kind) was not music for the lazy mind or the repressed imagination, and they were not only North America's perfect answer to Britain's Yes, but they were on the rise in the latter half of the '70s just as Yes began to enter a decline (before its eighties resurgence that is). This is all by way of circuitous but hopefully cognitive introduction to my definition of prog. Prog stands for "progressive music" in the sense that its practitioners believed that popular music should not merely maintain a creative holding pattern, and otherwise only slightly embellish in various idiosyncratic ways the same old rock formula; rather it should evolve while still remaining entertaining. In a way, that is the best way to define a whole host of groups that otherwise bear little resemblance to each other in the details. As much as many "rock purists" would hate to admit it, prog has its roots in the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album, and musicians inspired by the album wanted to keep this thread spinning when the Beatles laid it aside after Magical Mystery Tour. Rock critics are fond of saying that "prog is not really rock", and it seems they state this because they don't like how it admixes strong elements of classical music, folk music and even jazz. They forget popular music's family tree, which has never borne purebreds of any sort; so here it goes: rock music comes from blues and country music; blues music comes from African music and European folk music, country music comes from European folk music; classical music comes from European religious and folk music. Those are some pretty involuted branches on that tree, aren't they? Essentially then, prog musicians and their bands simply refused to play nice and stick to the strictures of a false canon of what critics claimed "orthodox" rock music was. In short, prog rockers were heretics! I love heretics! Here is a list of the best of these omnivorous rock bands, each of whom had a different ratio in its combination of the above described elements: Jethro Tull, Yes, Caravan, Genesis, Rush, Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Emerson Lake & Palmer. Oh, I know -- some like to say that Peter Gabriel-era Genesis wasn't prog but "art rock" (just more white-washing, just like calling Rush "thinking man's metal"), but if they were really art rock (in the sense of being avant-garde like Brian Eno), why did so many regular prog rock fans love them?! Here's another thing to consider: if we follow the definition of prog by its overt musical ingredients, the United States could claim it also had a wonderful prog rock band back in the seventies. I'll give you a hint: they were blues-rock based but partook heartily of jazz and folk music elements and would have to be defined as the one and only Southern prog rock band. The answer: The Allman Brothers Band -- they're America's Dixie Pink Floyd! I hope I'm making all the purist snobs squirm!

Interlude: Pomp Rock (Glam's Legitimate Child)

By the mid-seventies, the world was becoming a more difficult place economically, and as the promise of the Age of Aquarius seemed to slip away, young people back then dealt with worsening hopes principally in one of two possible ways: with rugged optimism or with angry disgust. These attitudes fed two different emergent forms in rock music: punk and pomp. Punk rebuked the jam-oriented rock of the hippie culture and pissed on the Romanticism of glam rock. Punk could express itself with righteous frustration (e.g., The Clash), or with gratuitous nihilism (e.g., The Sex Pistols). Punk was also anti-any-form-of-musical-sophistication-or-skilled-performance (i.e, "keep it simple stupid"). Pomp Rock was an altogether different animal. Pomp married traditions of glam with the more intense forms of hard rock as it had evolved in the seventies from blues-inflected-jam-rock to muscular testosterone-fueled riffing, sometimes disparagingly called "cock rock." An extreme form of hard rock included ghastly-dramatic stage performances (e.g., Alice Cooper). A pomp group that partook of this blood-thirsty side of hard rock and merged it with glam was Kiss, which had science-fictional glam-styled costumes and painted on clown-fashion various forms of demonic or animal-like make-up, but the group otherwise made music in a recognizably intensified glam style rather than being heavy metal, as one might have mistakenly expected from their fearsome look. Overall these factors made Kiss somewhat of hybrid in terms of the attitudes it fed. But of the many pomp groups of the late seventies (most of whom thrived particularly in America, whatever their country of origin), there is one that took a happier side of the glam tradition for its inspirations and did it excellently well. This was Queen. The proof of their quality over others of their kind was their durability. While other pomp rock groups hit destructive reefs on the shores of the '80s with the onset of the New Wave movement, Queen carried the banner of pumped-up glam with honor and vigor well into the middle of that decade. Queen was a group with so much talent, inventiveness, beauty of song, excitement of the senses and unflagging energy to match, that one is struck with wonder at the heights of musical experience they so singularly achieved and created. They were operatic, rock-and-rolling, richly melodious, vocally harmonic, instrumentally dynamic and Freddie Mercury's vocals commanded your passion. They were so extraordinary in the enthusiasm they could create that they seemed sprung from the forehead of Dionysus! Glam did not go out with a whimper but with a bang!

To Tear Down Definitions that Defy Listening, Part One: Glam Rock

In America, there has been a bias toward popular music that reflects "street smarts", "street toughness", and emotionality carried to the manic level. Every sub-genre has its place and mood, but there are whole worlds of music people do not listen to because they have been led to believe that they are somehow "alien" to what is "authentic rock'n'roll". The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is reflective of American narrow-mindedness. Prog(ressive) rock and glam rock are the two most glaring absences in their roster of inductees. Inductees David Bowie and Genesis don't count because they were chosen for their pop contributions to the music business, not for the glam and prog eras of their careers. I have seen definitions for glam and prog, but they really don't entirely get at why I fell in love with various exponents of these forms of popular music -- well before I knew they belonged to these categories (I did not grow up in the eras in which they emerged). Just like any branch of popular music, there are strong and weak artists in both these categories. But these aforementioned areas of music have artists that equal the best of any of the other so-called "real" rock artists. So let me propose some working realistic definitions of these two much misunderstood subgenres, starting with glam rock. Glam is a celebratory kind of music; even when it deals with melancholic subjects, there is an heroic take on the emotions of disappointment or tragedy. Glam makes use of early rock'n'roll performance art, musical tropes and instrumentation (e.g., saxophones and pianos, along with the usual guitars, bass and drums). Glam is typically energetic or at least melodramatic in a delightfully knowing sort of way. Glam has humor, wit and gusto, and often plays the persevering underdog or the mystical social alchemy of androgyny in its musical/theatrical stage personae. It is also keenly sensitive to the Romantic identifications and aspirations of youth. Glam's lyrics are often science fictional, baroquely poetic, and have multiple levels of meaning or delightfully nonsensical meaning. We no longer can experience authentic glam on stage -- the cultural context of its time has come and gone. Yet perhaps its stage presence more than anything else is what turned off the hippie generation (though their younger siblings loved it), and caused its later rejection by the punk generation with its angst-ridden aesthetic (though punk borrowed from glam's rootsiness, just as glam had before, in its turn, borrowed from hippie music to create its unique psychedelic-styled updating of '50s rock music). Glam performance was all about entertaining the crowd, and outrageous costumes were often worn, referencing everything from science fiction, to the Golden Age of Hollywood, to Art Deco expressionistic musical theater. With glam you do not have prolonged guitar or drum solos, but you do have skilled and tight musicianship. Yet glam also addressed itself to real feelings and real social situations (especially adolescent ones), otherwise it would not have been so hugely popular. Glam just had its own way of doing this; instead of stewing indecisively or introspectively in unresolved unhappiness, it sent a clear message to not let anything or anyone get you down, but to stand up for your individual self and find your crowd of like-minded individuals! This individuality of spirit made the t-shirt and jeans uniform of puritan hippiedom NOT de rigeur among its practitioners and fans. In a way, it was a liberating art form to young white people the way its musical contemporary, funk, was to young black people; both these genres said: "life is hard, so let's lighten up and fight back with humor and bravado!" Then of course, there is the elephant in the room: glam was often very accepting and frank about celebrating people with a gay identity in its lyrics and dress, which in machismo-minded, homophobic America was probably the chief reason it was not as big a success as in more cosmopolitan England. Yet glam musicians could be anything from heterosexuals, to bisexuals, to homosexuals; the point was, they saw gender and identity as running in a natural and creative continuum. Glam artists generally recognized for their real musical and lyrical merit were: T. Rex, David Bowie, Roxy Music, Mott the Hoople and Slade; others accord some estimation for cross-dressing camp groups like The New York Dolls. There are other famous bands and artists that carried the glam moniker, but they are so superficial that they should be more properly classed as early '70s "bubblegum music".

Records of Epical Effect

If we're real music lovers, we've all known two sorts of positive listening experiences when it comes to recorded music. The more common one makes us come away with a sense that it was "good", "interesting", "entertaining", "well-played and well-sung", a "nice bunch of songs". The positive variant is something far rarer. I would simply call it an "epic" listening experience. With this latter kind, you find your mouth gaping, your scalp tingling and a sudden urge to get up and dance like a shaman. Few groups turn out records of such grandeur (or even want to), but there are some that manage to turn out not merely one but even more than one. Such groups are at the peak of their powers with high artistic aspirations and a desire to give their listeners a truly natural high. Epical popular music display compositions that create a sense of conceptual progress or the sense of a grand musical journey. They give a sweeping perspective of the gamut of human feeling yet possess a strong unity of meaning. Such albums employ a balanced orchestration of dynamics that shift from the subtle to the thrilling. They encompass a vast range of ideas that contribute to an astonishing wholeness. Their lyrics are exultant and/or profound in their propensity of insights or fascinating imagery and philosophical observations. Their musical themes are strong, sweeping and energetic, often forming a structure that develops in musical power as they recur like musical architecture in the record's musical cycle. The lyrics are often liberated both in meaning and delivery, and are unencumbered by petty concerns. Overall, the music often maintains an engaging balance of earthly richness through acoustic instrumentation and celestial reach through electric instrumentation, all of it played with virtuosity. The tapestry of ideas may be varied but the individual songs or sections contribute to a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Here are some of my personal favorite examples of albums which have enough of these elements to elicit a sense of epic-like reach in their depth and feeling: The Zombies: Odessey and Oracle [1968], The Moody Blues: In Search of the Lost Chord [1968], Love: Forever Changes [1968], The Beatles: The White Album [1968], The Kinks: Arthur, or The Rise and Fall of the British Empire [1969], Elton John: Tumbleweed Connection [1970], The Who: Who's Next [1971], Yes: The Yes Album [1971], Jethro Tull: Thick as a Brick [1972], David Bowie: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars [1972]. Queen: A Night at the Opera [1975].

The 1970s Were Great! Here's Proof!

The accepted line now in pop-music history was that the 1970s were a disappointment, that the music somehow failed to fulfill the promise of the 1960s. Well, you could say that with some justification about its political-social-economic progress (or shall we say, "regress"), but the music itself is another matter entirely. One easy way to gauge this is to find one of the handful of artists who rode the waves of the '70s successfully and examine their output. Of course, music is constantly evolving, artists (hopefully) are constantly growing. Those groups which manage to hold themselves together for more than a few years are either good at figuring out the fickle tastes of the general public, or, they are able to remain true to themselves, never sell out, and command the respect and loyalty of a core fan-base. I would prefer to look at the 1970s through the filter of the latter kind, and one would be hard put to find a better example than Jethro Tull. Jethro Tull as a group represents a fantastic development of a whole array of musical ideas first introduced into the popular music of the 1960s. They also managed not to crumble before either Punk or Disco. They maintained their integrity and kept going from strength to strength in each of their albums, despite the fact the snobbish/minimalist-oriented musical press hated them. As a fan who discovered them after-the-fact (I was only a young boy during their era of greatness), it is difficult for me to fully understand why the music press were so tone deaf, but then again, they despised the magnificent Led Zeppelin too -- so go figure! However, Jethro Tull did not try to curry favor with the critics when one of their albums got (predictably) slammed, but just went ahead and made another great album of visionary originality. They were unapologetically British, musically progressive, artistic, bluesy, hard-rocking, world-aware, philosophical, comical, witty, and even, medieval. They were a complete ensemble of acoustic, electric, electronic and orchestral instruments, including the usual guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, but also flute, strings, piano, and saxophone. The chapters of their growth make for an incredible odyssey, and each forms a perfect musical and lyrical exploration of a different cluster of ideas. Though there were line-up changes, most who were members at all stayed on for at least several years, and there were some that remained on for at least half or all of the band's rather lengthy peak period, which began before the seventies and spilled over into the eighties. This is a long way to say they remained consistent in quality and musical identity. And they followed their own peculiar nature. If Ian Anderson is the creative heart of the group, then he never lacked for talented collaborators among his band-mates. Nor did they ever do a "rush-job" in the recording studio -- every album from this period has a finished, fully-realized quality. They released five top-form rock operas: Aqualung (1971), Thick as a Brick (1972), Passion Play (1973), War Child (1974), Too Old to Rock'n'Roll, Too Young to Die (1976). Two wonderful hard-rock/trad-rock albums: Minstrel in the Gallery (1975), The Broadsword and the Beast (1982). Two great hippie-rock albums: Stand Up (1969), Benefit (1970). And three exquisite folk rock/social commentary albums: Songs from the Wood (1977), Heavy Horses (1978), Stormwatch (1979). Nowadays the critics would be so lucky to find anyone so talented to write about. That is why they fawn over anyone who approaches even a tenth of such musical ability and inspired songwriting. Back in the day though, your typical critic didn't know how good it was.

Don't Get Me Wrong

So while it's true I've kept one ear on the '60s and another on the '70s, I've got a third vestigial ear on whatever is happening in my present. Occasionally I'll get excited about someone "now", e.g., The White Stripes, The Black Keys, Brian Jonestown Massacre, Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, De Danaan, etc. But such bands are the exception to the rule nowadays. And there are many equally creative, talented bands out there we fail to hear about because they never find a way to escape their regional stomping grounds; they don't know the right people, don't have access to the right connections, don't have an appealing physical look, don't have "catchy" pop hooks, are deemed "too old" to be marketable, came around "too soon" or "too late" -- the ensnaring variables go on and on. But there was a time when people with vision and talent more often than not did get recognized if they had their sh*t together, because more people were paying attention and more people had a better general music education to have an ear for good music. There were more public venues, and more people were out and about taking in what life had to offer, instead of stuck in some compulsive internet cul-de-sac of a mental existence! (ahem!) And there were more record companies interested in real music that they were willing to accept on the musicians' own terms and motivated to promote in a way that was accurate -- because the fans were hip and the musicians were more about their long-term credibility than the fast money. Most of what I see now that manages to penetrate into the national or global awareness, flashes in and flashes out of real inspiration, because the record company machines eventually flatten them out to the lowest common denominator of taste, replete with musical tropes and electronic digital effects that seem rented out among the Top 40 like overused bowling shoes. And we'll not even talk about the ill effects upon the creative potential of popular music due to the monopolies on radio stations and video channels. And then there is the current era's hyperactive use of distortion. If it were just here and there, strategically placed to create an evocative sonic texture, or give concrete artistic meaning to the odd song with a particular sort of mood, fine. But now inarticulate noise is employed as a full fledged instrument in of itself. "That's Doug; it looks like he plays a guitar, but he's really our rhythm distortionist." Distortion is now aurally sculpted across endless galleries of undeveloped songs disguised as music, created the way a sculptor trapped in solitary confinement might go mad and start forming an array of sculptures from his own dung. If the innumerable bands who are using all this distortion are trying to say, "life sucks!!!", then I got the point well over a decade ago. You've been beating that pathetic horse so long it's become just a scrap of bones. Now let's move on and learn to play our instruments, shall we?

The Release from the Banal

From the previous post, you might assume I'm a Baby-Boomer, but in actuality, I'm a member of the so-called, "Generation X". In my adolescence, I had been content to enjoy the likes of Adam and the Ants' "Friend or Foe", Duran Duran's "Hungry Like a Wolf", ABC's "Look of Love", etc. And then I heard (or rather saw -- remember, those were the days when MTV actually played music) the song, "It Can Happen" by Yes. My mind was blown. I had discovered prog rock without knowing what it was. I soon lost interest in New Romanticism and Jungle Beat music. Yes's album, 90125, was a whole universe of inspired feeling and energy to me. It matched very much the passionate aspiration and mystic idealism burgeoning in me as a teenager. The music seemed at once technically stratospheric and emotionally heroic, as well as incomparably sincere. And every song on the album was strong, which by the 1980s was a rare thing indeed. I had a tape-player, and I wore that tape out. I found nothing to compare with it in the contemporary scene, and I was hungry for more. So I got the greatest hits album of the group, originally released in the late 1970s, Classic Yes. It was a breathtaking discovery. This group had a deep well of achievement. Thus began a life-long commitment to musical archaeology, and an ever decreasing interest in the contemporary scene of popular music. It was not an act of will. It simply was that older music just sounded better and reached me more deeply. By comparison, the music made for my own generation seemed in general to be overproduced, artificially enhanced, full of empty-headed rebellion, stuffed with cod emotion, shallow in musical conception, and effect-oriented rather than truly communicative. Eagerly I awaited the next Yes album, for it seemed they might be one of the few that could carry on the banner of compelling popular music. Their follow-up work which came finally in 1987, entitled, Big Generator, was a signal disappointment for me. It had the energy and prowess but not the inspiration and originality of 90125. From there, I cast off more deeply into the musical seas of the 1970s and 1960s, though occasionally catching a fair wind from what was happening in the present. Whenever I have veered from this course (a more recent example was when I heard the brilliant album Hittin' the Note by the Allman Brothers Band), it is because I have heard a band recommitting itself to the inspired, great-hearted music of that golden era of pop music before everything got dumbed-down for the emergent party-culture and anesthetized by too much synthesizer. Some in my boat felt rescued by the Grunge movement in the 1990s, but I wasn't angry enough about the world to find appeal in its muddy guitars, growling vocals and nihilistic philosophy. I respect what it sought to achieve, but sadly, music soon fell from this brief return to authentic emotion and fell into a dismal era that resembled the post-Buddy Holly/pre-Beatles pap of the early 1960s. The only alternatives were whiney, jangly alt-pop and demon-throated berserker-metal. From where I was coming from, none of these represented a viable listening choice. This blog is about my journey into a musical world before "purist" critics, "doughnut-machine" record companies and a degenerative culture of superficiality put the clamp on the growth of popular music. The music I will espouse in the course of this blog should be rekindled in every generation of listeners.

What's Missing from the Appreciation of Music?

Popular music criticism has always been a problematic place, ever since the seriousness of the Beatles' approach to music in the latter half of their career inspired journalists to start writing about it like they once did baseball. For one, you notice from the get-go that critics often use it as a place to grandstand their own purposes, usually only properly listening to a bit of it, so that, even if their reviews are positive, they are not wholly accurate and involve a lot of philosophizing that has nothing directly to do with the music. After the Beatles, the critics had evolved an approach that made them appear to know more about music than the musicians themselves, which was equally ridiculous. Sadly, the more ridiculous component in this scene were those musicians themselves, who became so caught up in the criticism that they did back-flips trying to please these critics, who weren't really listening to them in the first place. What amazes is the way critics would fall all over themselves complementing and extolling the virtues of a musically mediocre band whose lyrics (however semi-literate) appealed to the socio-political notions of the critics. By this stage there was much talk about "authentic" rock and roll, forgetting that, in popular music, there never was nor ever will be anything you can call "pure"; it's always been a hybrid medium, and that has always been its virtue. All of this messy lack of really listening was driven as much by commercially-driven agendas as the critics claimed the music of the musicians was. Sell those newspapers and magazines to the hip crowd, appeal to their sense of elitism, while also appealing to their post-adolescent insecurity about embracing a popular music that seeks to be about something more than the aggressive anticipation of a hot date or the bemoaning of a doleful breakup,. This the deftly critics accomplished by also claiming that for popular music to be legitimately "serious" it must be about rebellion and nothing else. and rebelling is a lot easier than thinking or feeling. In the end, this tradition of criticism was gunning for any band that attempted instrumental cultivation, dynamic orchestration and lyrical sophistication, ready to fire off a gun-blast that sounded the fatal word (or so they hoped), "pretentious". These critics finally found their darlings in the Punk Revolution, which they hailed as "the saviors of popular music". From there on, these critics shot down without premeditation anyone deviating from this musically crude ideal, and street credit (at least among white performers), depended on having some form of "punk leanings". Thus was an era of progressive development in popular music undone, and though there still have been some wonderful moments since, the music overall has never been as good. The sad thing is that, though we know better now, the histories and reference books of popular music that deal with the latter half of the twentieth century have been written either by these old school critics with their puritanical notions of what "true rock and roll is", or by hacks who merely paraphrase what these critics said decades ago, thus perpetuating a misinformed understanding of music from the sixties and seventies. This blog will seek to undo the effects of that in way more consistently articulate and analytical than what one finds in write-in reviews on Amazon. It certainly will have be more forthright than the feeble attempts at critical revisionism found in most popular music information websites. The reviews and comparative studies essayed here will have no motive in profit, but only in what makes for good listening for different moods and different seasons. In short, if you are restless listener, seeking always to explore and deepen your engagement with popular music, this will be the site for you.