Mutual Muse

When discovering music retroactively, it is the product of research and recommendation -- not listening to top-forty radio. So the music-lovers of vintage rock, for instance, tend to follow veins of musical relationships. A good example (which leads even to the present) would be: Muddy Waters -- The Bluesbreakers -- The Yardbirds -- Cream -- Derek and the Dominoes -- Stevie Ray Vaughn & Double Trouble -- The Black Keys. I have recently made a discovery that if I had been an adult or adolescent at the time the music came out, I might not have noticed in the haze of bands competing for my ear and radio play. I have long been an ardent fan of Buffalo Springfield, an American band full of great musical ideas and talent from the latter half of the sixties, who came to an untimely end because of battling egos. Their finest work was their middle album from 1968, entitled, Buffalo Springfield Again. It is a record that encompasses its own little universe of musical and lyrical ideas, stating its creative intentions better than most any group of its time -- and certainly full of unique surprises. Now recently I have been discovering the seventies incarnation of a British band called, Traffic. I decide to give a listen to their sixties incarnation and select their 1968 self-titled effort, Traffic (and coincidentally the middle album also for that version of the group). I take an immediate liking to it, and find it to be a different animal than the later incarnation of the group. What is more, it makes me think of an American band, who, in their own way, they resemble more than any other of the time: Buffalo Springfield. It is not a mere question of them being contemporaries of each other. Here I am detecting a similar vision, approach, quality and style of musicianship. It feels like I'm home again, listening to a lost album. Sadly, both groups, as they were formed for those respective albums, soon collapsed from infighting. Their final albums were odds and sods left over after coming apart; for Traffic it was Last Exit; for Buffalo Springfield it was Last Time Around. Traffic was later reborn with a new direction (though with a definite musical continuity with its sixties version, and in way so was Buffalo Springfield, in the form of Crosby Stills & Nash (aka, "CSN"), then later, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (aka, "CSNY"). With the British group it was a rivalry and clash of musical directions between lead guitarist, songwriter and co-lead vocalist, Dave Mason, and keyboardist, songwriter and guitarist, Steve Winwood. With the American group it was a similar conflict between co-lead guitarist, songwriter and co-lead vocalist, Stephen Stills and co-lead guitarist, songwriter and vocalist Neil Young. Too much talent in one place to be happily contained? Interestingly, in both cases there was so much mutual respect that the rivals took each other back (in both cases temporarily) when, on the one hand Stephen Stills and company made the album, Deja Vu by having a creative reconciliation with Neil Young, and on the other hand when Steve Winwood and company made the album, Welcome to the Canteen by having a creative reconciliation with Dave Mason. In both cases the reunions didn't get past a single musical tour, but the similarities do not end there. Finding myself delighted by the particular contributions Dave Mason had made to the sixties-version of Traffic, I listened to his debut solo album, Alone Together. This is a wonderful album, through and through, but once more, I felt like I had gone back to home sweet home: it bears an astonishing resemblance in style and quality to Stephen Stills first two solo albums, which I acquired after loving his special contributions to both Buffalo Springfield, CSN, and CSNY. Rarely have I found such a pleasing (and accidental) affinity between contemporaneous British and American groups and artists. It is far more the case (at least to the trained ear of the rock fan) to find differences between the popular music of those two Anglophone realms in the late sixties and early seventies period; even when comparing groups in similar subcategories between the two nations, you can't get much more different than The Grateful Dead and Led Zeppelin, or James Taylor and Cat Stevens, or Grand Funk Railroad and Black Sabbath. Yet in the case of the Dave Mason (et al.) / Stephen Stills (et al.) paradigm, I think we have a delightfully miraculous situation of a mutual muse! How cool would it have been if any assemblage of these musicians featuring those two key players had met at a rock festival and jammed together? It would have been musical nirvana!

When a Band or Artist Changes and Gets Better

We are probably all familiar with the negative side of change when it happens to a group or solo artist we like. There can be any number of reasons why musicians and singers lose that muse that made us originally love them. For some, they become wealthy and take the opportunity to be so self-indulgent that they no longer have anything interesting to say musically. For others its because they start taking higher doses of certain drugs, or change to different drugs, which effectively changes the whole character of their music. For others, it seems like life just starts to intimidate them, they begin to lose their youthful passion, and then start to "play it safe" with their music, resulting in a musical output less stimulating for the listener. Then there is the theory that an artist needs to be "hungry" to be good, and that once they are financially secure so goes the spark informing the quality of their music -- this theory seems disproved by Bruce Springsteen, who has kept "the hungry" in his music despite all his mounting success down through the years. Indeed, change does not always have to be negative. There are cases when it is quite a good thing. There are artists (at least up to a point) where a person likes them more as they evolve. That is the key word: evolve. When change is negative, it is not because the artist is evolving but rather they are either retreating from their original passion or rehashing earlier tropes with diminishing inspiration. The trick is for the rock or pop artist not to lose sight of the fact that what they are doing is a form of art and not merely a formulaic business of noise-making where you hope to push the profitable buttons in the music-making doframus. There are great examples of evolution where groups or individuals kept renewing themselves in fresh and beautiful ways while remaining true to their identity: Jethro Tull from the late sixties and through the seventies into the early eighties, blending and developing various permutations of blues rock, folk rock, prog rock and operatic rock; Elton John from the late sixties into the late seventies, going from singer/songwriter to glam rocker to passionate rock and roller. However, my favorite case is The Kinks, and here I am only interested in mapping their mid sixties to early seventies output. They went from unhinged blues rockers and ecstatic mod punks, to astutely satirical and trenchantly poetic observers of urban life, to epic tragedians and fond odesters of the transformations of working class identity and its retention of a Gothic imagination. What a journey -- and I'm not just talking about the lyrics!

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...