"Remember When They Were Great? How The Heck Did They Get So Dull?"

All too often individual musical artists and bands with something striking to communicate with their vocals and instruments get seduced by the money in their first flush of real success, which mat come after perhaps long years of desperate struggle or goading semi-success. A producer at this point takes them aside and tells them that they are now going to use recording techniques that are going to make them "really big" (i.e., appeal to an even broader audience) and thus get them all even higher record sales. What this typically amounts to in the subsequent studio release is an album by a band shorn of all its interesting edges, idiosyncrasies and acoustical texture. Now it is true that the band may at this early stage of early artistic corruption still re-assert its distinct identity during performances of its live act on tour, often doing on stage better versions of songs that had been "homogenized and pasteurized" in the studio. But the fact that the band may not yet have entirely lost its musical soul when it goes up to the footlights does not satisfy the demands of posterity, unless a good live recording is captured on a good night for its members (either with the band's blessing or by a sneaky bootlegger). Otherwise, this reassertion of originality against the studio product is offered up only to the dissipating ether and the fading memories of the people lucky enough to be in the audience for that performance. Some bands (who aren't obsessing about whatever the petty critics are taunting them about) become aware that their older fans, while still loyally attending their concerts, are complaining about the increasingly smooth superficiality of the band's more recent releases. The response from artists (or shall we say by this point "semi-artistic pot-boilers") is typically this: musicians need to "change" in order to "survive"; or, the band needs to "grow"" in order to keep the music "fresh". Now as this blog has pointed out in earlier articles, there actually have been bands where change was good and they developed by using new and pleasing musical ideas. However, all I can say when the responses are merely apologies for denatured inspiration is this: a little less greed and a little more fidelity to one's authentic artistic self will do more for career longevity than bowing to fleeting mega-profits and digitally pureed musical trends. Ask any venerable blues or jazz musician, and he or she will tell you the same. A smaller but more steadfast fan-base is the reward for bands that refuse to have their horns hacked off and their gonads replaced by an electronically-operated titanium pair.

Sometimes There Are Substitutes When the Original Article Fizzles Out

I am among those collectors of music that find it irritating that Crosby Stills Nash (& sometimes Young) only made two albums and one single (which was supposed to herald a third album) from their awe-inspiring "hippie" period. By the time at least three of them patched up their differences to re-form the band in the late seventies, their sound (along with most of the rest of the popular music world) had changed. An opportunity (it would seem) was forever lost. Well, it may be heresy for me to say this, but you can get a darn good fix of that kind of breathtaking vocal blend and blissed-out acoustic/electric balance from their contemporaries of that golden period in music. A different trio came on the scene back then by the name of America, and they brought forth a freshman album called "Homecoming" in 1972 that was the sort of thing that CSN (&Y) should have made after Deja Vu, if their third album hadn't aborted in '73 from egotistical bickering (to which the peace-maker, Graham Nash, to his credit, was not a party). America consisted of multi-instrumentalists and talented vocalists, Gerry Beckley, Dewey Bunnell and Dan Peek. While I absolutely love the solo albums from Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, David Crosby, and Neil Young from what I have loosely called, "the hippie era" (which came to an end sometime in the mid-seventies), the folk-rock "power-house" feeling of those musicians when they were all united as the three or four musketeers can only be found in that album by another group, Homecoming, which was not faux CSN but an original effort by America that picked up where their pioneering predecessors left off.

Another gripe I have is that Cream broke up too soon. It would have been okay if there had come along some true heirs of their sound, but there really weren't (Led Zeppelin are often cited but they are rather a different kettle of fish). Cream had just the right balance of heavy blues rock and jazzy British folk rock. That power-trio was truly unique, but their sound did briefly continue, albeit not by Eric Clapton (who went the way of country-rock pop) nor by Ginger Baker (who turned to jazz-rock fusion). I am not talking about the nearly abortive group Clapton and Baker formed with Steve Winwood (Blind Faith), which aside from being a false start sounded too laid back to be a new incarnation of Cream. No, it was the passionate Scotsman from the fallen trio, Jack Bruce, who carried on (though briefly) the true Cream standard during his solo career. This he managed with his two fine rock albums, Songs for a Tailor (1969), and Harmony Row (1971). In these one of course misses Clapton's voice being a part of musical milieu, but I have always identified with Bruce's vocals as being as much an intrinsic part of the Cream sound, and on these two solo releases by Bruce, he does not deviate from the special style alchemized by Cream, and nor does his backing band.

Still, there are some wonderful groups for which there never arose a substitute after they came (for their fans at least) to an untimely end. No one picked up the ball after it was dropped (although some might have claimed to) when Led Zeppelin broke up. There was never again anything like the glam-rock synergy of Ziggy and his Spiders. And there was never another Beatles, though there have been pretenders to the throne. Oh well...

Review: "Arthur" by The Kinks

This record was a fully intentional and independently inspired concept album. Its songs, though varied in content, support a unifying theme and a progressive narrative. In content Arthur combines an epic reach in terms of lyrics and music with an emerging personal story that communicates with the regular struggling person that resides in each of us. The exultation and nostalgia of belonging to a once mighty nation coexists here with the simple gratitude of living in a stable and free society, no matter how humble one's circumstances. These positive feelings are offset by an expression of grief and sense of waste that comes of war, and an awareness of the gratuitous pleasure some people take in playing with human lives in the constant recycling of martial conflict. The album begins to grapple with the more general contemporary condition in Western society of the long struggle of the average person to achieve financial stability, while at the same time postponing their sweeter dreams for what such people hope will be an idyllic retirement -- but which all too often turns out to be a state of sterile isolation for all the security and amenities it has promised. The then new bass player for The Kinks, John Dalton, adds a strong mellifluous but unaffected voice to the vocal palette of the band, which happily still includes the inimitable and different singing qualities of Ray and brother Dave Davies. The orchestration of the ensemble's musicians reach a peak of grandeur in this album, and their individual instrumental contributions to the greater (and beautifully disciplined) whole reflect a sense of virtuoso elation never again so ambitiously achieved.

The Kinks' Artistic Breakthrough

The Kinks' sixth studio album, The Village Green Preservation Society, which originally came out in 1968, is the product of an already great band leaping into truly outstanding heights. It was an intimate, less self-conscious, more poetic statement of what became more impassioned, grand and bald in their immediately succeeding albums. Though the Kinks were outsold by fellow British bands such as the Rolling Stones and The Who, neither of those sexier bands could have made an album of such thematic and lyrical sophistication, emotional sensitivity and conceptual variety, and the aesthetic dynamics of the musical compositions themselves are a true wonder for the mind to digest. Something truly exquisite must have happened to Ray Davies and his bandmates, a eureka moment of some sort, for while such albums as the Kinks Kontroversy, Face to Face and Something Else certainly bear a proliferation of gems that point toward a steadily rising artistic development, Village Green sounds like a liberation album, every song utterly inspired and possessed of a non-commercial pop sound with a delightfully carefree spirit. Its songs run from wry folk rock to delicately rendered calypso, each deftly commingling such feelings as vintage sadness, gentle humor, the awe of the weird, and the unabashed joy in the humble creations given to everyday life.

The Village Green Preservation Society is an engaging concept album without being overtly so, and each song is an exploration of a special room in a mansion filled with a cornucopia of moods, reflections, rhythms and imagery, both lyrical and musical. It is also an autumnal album, about the baby that was getting thrown out with the bathwater in the rapidly changing times of the High Sixties, but in this album it is the glory and joy of a metaphorical Fall at its nostalgic best: the oeuvre of brightly colored leaves, the gallant celebration of precious things people carelessly throw away or "responsibly" forget as a spiritual winter looms, the faith in mysterious forces more lasting than the vapid trends that fixate people, the exuberant sense of homage to a natural simpler existence, the gently observant humor that enables a psyche to survive a subtly fading world, the illusory mesmerism of summer's golden fame compared to the natural fulfillment of family and friendship in a humbler season, the fascinating strangeness of dying summer's weird evocations, and the power of present-mindedness over inevitable fatalism to inspire a festive mood for the dance honoring the year's final harvest.

Yet this record was not their swansong, but ironically the beginning of new creative muscularity in the group that would last for four consecutive albums. That the Kinks had the misfortune to live in the long shadow of the Beatles is regrettable. And then, just as the Beatles bid adieu, swaggering Led Zeppelin stormed the barn, inadvertently keeping the Kinks from entering the fore as they deserved. Society then as now had tendencies toward monolithic tastes and fixations, but this album fortunately has continued to get pressed in new editions in the decades that have followed its mostly ignored debut, and succeeding generations have discovered that it is a lasting work of art. Moreover, it is an album that especially speaks to our own times, where the changes in society are entering another watershed, with great doubt as to what will survive of our collective culture. Now that the frenetic rattle of the Stones has finally quietened and the colorful fog of the Beatles has finally cleared, true music lovers may finally see and discover in retrospect the fantastic work of those bands who were their equally talented peers and contemporaries -- and most especially, The Kinks.

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.