Rick Beato made an interesting observation the other day…that in the '70s, many musicians were famous for being good players. That is, they were masters of an instrument, and that was a big part of the foundation of their fame and their success. He named a whole bunch of them. But he highlights an observation by Jeff Berlin, which is that being a good player is not something that's needed today. Some “stars” no longer play instruments. As David Crosby claims in his unlikely feud with Kanye West, or whatever West is calling himself now*, West is a big star who can neither sing nor play an instrument. I don’t know if he (West) actually writes his own music or not. But in the same spirit, "writing" music might be another quaint old-fashioned notion that’s really not a needed or valued skill in today’s music scene.
As a counter-argument, though, consider a beautiful video called "Tadow" (with flowing, swirling camerawork by Arsedi) that gives grayheads an idea how a groove turns into a song with modern technology. FKJ (Vincent Fenton) and Masego (Micah Davis) (that's the two of them in the picture), both know how to play the sax, even when they're just sampling it, and FKJ plays the keyboard as well as he plays the technology. Watch Masego's little riff on the drums when he sits down at the kit...that is totally beautiful.
Being a wordsmith I feel like the weakest thing about the piece is the apparently extemporized lyrics, but improvised rap is what the kids are into, so, okay—not my generation, not mine to say. They're "playing" the technology like maestros. Not for nothing they've got 406 million views**. Every generation has something new to offer, and you've got to take them on their chosen terms.
*It's been entertaining to watch how badly West wants to claim he's Jesus Christ. He keeps running up on it, but he knows he shouldn't.
**Not as impressive as it sounds, since a lot of them were me. lol
Book o' the Week
The Mindful Photographer by Sophie Howarth. I only know of Sophie Howarth from her time as a curator at the Tate Modern in London, but my impression then was positive. Her brand new book (it only came out a few days ago) is about slowing down as a means of enjoying photographing more. It's said to contain a curated collection of photographs along with anecdotes and explanation.
The book link is your portal to Amazon from TOP, should you wish to support this site.
Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
John Lambert Gordon: "Fascinating commentary on contemporary music and I loved the linked video. My daughter [Jessie Gordon —Ed.] is a jazz singer who usually sings with her own band but sometimes does a one person show using only her voice and a looping pedal. No musicians, no backup instruments, just her voice and the small electronic device shown at the beginning of this clip. The song is a mashup of Gershwin’s 'Summertime' and 'Mango' by Earl Okin. Apologies for the quality. I made this with my iPhone 7 before I knew how to do videography with it."
Mike replies: That's terrific! I enjoyed that.
darlene: "John: Jessica is an incredible voice and musician. Best to her, and thank you for sharing!"
Wolfgang Lonien: "I still remember when I was around 20 and we went to the 'Subway,' a jazz club in Cologne, Germany, to hear Jeff Berlin together with Jean 'Toots' Thielemans. We were standing on our tables to just see these guys, and later we've had some beers and a chat with them. This today would be unthinkable, so Jeff is right about that."
Chris: "Much as I like Rick Beato, he seems to be a firm believer in idea that complexity = good. I think this is simply incorrect. There are things you can admire in complexity that add to the mix, but I think most of us care about melody, and with melody complexity is largely irrelevant. Of course in matters of taste no one can agree. I was, however astonished to hear the other day a hip-hop track with a rap going on on top of Otis Redding's 'Try a Little Tenderness.' Astonishingly awful, lazy, and an assault on the eardrums. "
Peter Barnes: "Thanks for this Mike—I had heard this song, but knew nothing of the artists or the recording process. A beautifully made video too."
Dillan: "I completely agree. People who can play instruments have faded into the background, and that's a shame. For me, the instrumental work was the fun part of music. The singers were mostly just there to accompany the music. My musical tastes range from Louis Armstrong to Soundgarden, but my interest stops cold when the instruments are no longer important. There were exceptions—Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan spring to mind—but they were rare. Today's music does absolutely nothing for me. I suppose that is normal, because I'm nearly in 'old man' territory."
Ronnie A Nilsen: "Content is King! The musicians are doing the same we photographer are doing; using computers to make the process simpler. We use plugins to automate processing. This means that anybody can easily produces something that is technically very good! Be it an image or sound. What differentiates is content. What do you have to tell the world? That is the important part, but is often forgotten when using all the tech to make a HDR image or autotune a song."
[Comments have been added to the last two posts, Tuesday 12:50 p.m.]
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Curiouser and curiouser: Vinyl records are continuing their improbable comeback.
Twelve-inch LPs (LP stands for for long-playing)—introduced in 1948, stereophonic from 1957—were eclipsed by cassette tapes in 1982, and then by CDs in 1987. CDs went on to outsell cassette tapes in 1991, and by 2002 held a dominant 95.7% share of the market. Vinyl records, which had at least two-thirds of the market until 1980, fell to a nadir of just .02% in 2005, and to all appearances were well on the way out.
But then vinyl started a modest resurgence. And the popularity of CDs began to plummet, first in the face of digital downloads, then because of streaming music.
Now, at the end of 2021, vinyl sales have beaten CDs for two years running, currently representing 6.6% of all music sales—the highest level since 1988. Vinyl records now account for two-thirds of revenue from physical formats. Vinyl also beats out single and album digital downloads from providers such as iTunes, which have fallen dramatically to a mere 4.2% of sales. (Did you know that iTunes is largely a thing of the past? I had not caught up to that fact until I wrote this yesterday.)
Streaming music, the latest king of all formats, set a new record at 83.8% of the market through the first half of this year.
Music sales peaked in 1999 at $24 billion, vs. $14 billion now. While consumers are getting more for less—assuming they prefer old music—most of the difference in those numbers, unfortunately, has come out of the pockets of musicians and other creators. This might be all right for the time being, but eventually it will have the effect of discouraging talented people from musical careers. But I guess that's a separate post.
The above are links to Amazon from TOP. Once you're at Amazon, anything you search and buy will be credited to TOP. The following logo is also a link if you click on it:
Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
Lisa S. Gorrell: "I still buy vinyl whenever I can. The music sounds much better than digital CDs or downloads. I'm especially happy when the vinyl comes with a code for digital download, so I've got both worlds. (I still have all the vinyl I bought since I was a teen)."
David Dyer-Bennet: "1988, however, was five years after I gave up LPs and switched to CDs."
Mike replies: I decided to buy the first CD player that broke the $300 barrier. The first $299.99 player was the Sony D-5, which came out in late 1984. I bought the first one I could find for sale. But by that time, I had already purchased more than 20 Compact Discs—not an insignificant outlay as they cost $20–30 at the time! I loved that D-5, by the way, and never again owned a CD player I liked more.
David Dyer-Bennet replies to Mike: "Interestingly, I did exactly the same thing—started buying CDs months before I bought the player, and bought the first player I found under $300, that is. And my early purchases were all classical since that and really mainstream rock/pop were all that was available, and I mostly listened to electric folk and some prog rock. Different player, different year. But I've never looked back. Don't think I've had an LP on a turntable since, though I'm now thinking about whether I want to transfer any of the LPs I haven't replaced. Some of them I can't replace, and if I still remember the music then I probably want it available again."
Stéphane Bosman: "Re 'Eventually it will have the effect of discouraging talented people from musical careers': I think it has for quite some time. I do not see in the current production anything that comes close to what the giants of the '50s to '90s did in term of innovation, diversity, and creativity. Today's production is frankly of a lower level. It is even being studied as a phenomenon. It might be due to reduced glue, weed and acid usage, but I think it more likely that there is no more money for taking risks, to waste studio time, to give oddballs a chance. Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells started the Virgin label. I don't expect anything like that happening again. Another consequences is that concerts have become unaffordable. When recorded music was profitable, concerts served as promotion for the records. Now it is the contrary."
Mike replies: I admire Rick and I watch a lot of his videos, but you have to admit it's kind of funny that a baby-boomer rock 'n' roller is lecturing the kids about the music being too simple! I suppose the older generation has always scolded the younger generation for not being deep enough. I seem to recall reading about a contemporary of Mozart's who scolded him for breaking rules with dissonances.
The bookPerfecting Sound Foreverby Greg Milner, one of my favorites on this topic, contains a section about the market forces that encourage cheap, fast production, even in classical music.
Robert Pillow: "I'd say vinyl is back. After I replaced an ailing turntable this month with a recent model to keep old vinyl in play, I was surprised to find 100 or so 180-gram LPs by various artists, including Led Zeppelin and Muddy Waters, at the local Wal-mart.
"By the way, this resurgence proves vinyl is long playing."
Chuck Albertson: "The last time I checked, musicians' royalties from vinyl releases were greater than from streaming services."
Paul De Zan: "I don't get the LP revival at all. I know a few twentysomethings who are buying LPs to play on equipment that can't possible do justice to them. Then they talk about how much better they sound. I would say they are about $10k in equipment away from that. The sales numbers are too big for the trend to be a hipster scam, though. Maybe it's about album artwork, the single greatest loss in the move to other formats. Personally I stopped buying LPs as soon as I knew CDs were going to happen. Click, pop, hiss...no thanks."
K4kafka: "A dearly missed element of the 'vinyl age' is the loss of album cover art. Some very creative photography on display in a 12" square format."
Mike replies: It's one of the ways Lee Friedlander got his start. Jay Maisel shot the cover of Kind of Blue. Brian Duffy did the cover of Aladdin Sane. We could go on and on here I'm sure....
Ben: "My vinyl heyday was right around (maybe just before) its nadir. Ahead of my time? Contrarian? Or just the right time in my life, and used records were cheap.
"It’s funny that record stores are a thing again now, though I think they all tend to make a bunch of their profit on discogs, or at least a bunch of the new ones raised the capital to start their brick-and-mortar stores through online sales. When my friend who did this to open a basement shop told me a few years back that he was going to quadruple or quintuple his rent to move to a street level in the more expensive part of town, I was floored. How could he make that rent selling vinyl? But he’s doing fine, even through the pandemic. It’s too bad so many of the great little shops didn’t survive the 'aughts and early teens…I think there’s also something to be said for how record stores themselves supported so many independent musicians simply by employing them! How many of your favorite local musicians worked at one of the local record stores?"
Bryan Geyer: "Do take note that the preponderance of the 2021 vinyl volume is unlike the classic LP market that we used to know. Current sales are heavily skewed by Generation Z buyers who pay $20–40 per disc for pop market records that come in vibrant colors and are often bundled with poster art. The scope is very limited. Only the most popular recording artists can consider the cost and complexity implicit in cutting vinyl today, so it's mostly Taylor Swift, et al, that drive the volume. It's a very trendy and restricted market; not nearly so impressive as the raw stats would seem to indicate."
Dan Boney: "I have often found that the 'third generation' of many products is the 'sweet spot'; by then, real refinements have been made and afterwards it shifts to 'making it cheaper'...that’s a lot of what happened with CD players. Works out well with cameras as well—think of the Nikon F3, Leica M3, Olympus OM-3/4....
"One thing that I wonder about with new vinyl—are the releases actually from analog originals, or digital recordings just translated to analog for vinyl release?"
Feeling old yet, fortysomethings? Get prepared, you will.
Here's a collection of songs from the vanished aughts that deserve more listens. These are just random personal faves, among many...no big claims for the list. I've linked to YouTube versions, but of course you can find them in whatever source you use for music (I use Roon and Quobuz for the sound quality). In no particular order:
The Streets [Mike Skinner] — Could Well Be In. A rap song by a white Englishman with a thick accent that constructs a narrative of a hookup in a bar that's surprisingly dimensional and moving. Don't watch the video—better to picture them in your head. The link is to the longer (4:22) uncensored version (so beware profanity).
Autolux — Great Days for the Passenger Element. I think I've mentioned this one before. At some point I got allergic to BDR ("big dumb rock") drumming and started to search out more interesting rhythm work. I guess I learned that from hip-hop. Always loved how this moves.
The Mountain Goats [John Darnielle] — Dilaudid. A "perfect little poem of hate," to borrow what Walker Evans said of Lee Friedlander's photographs. Darnielle, a mercurial and reflexively prolific songwriter, at his most quirkily brilliant. (And no drums on this one.)
Yo La Tengo — You Can Have It All. A blissful, rompy, genial little song built of sublime harmonies.
Athlete — El Salvador. Upbeat sing-a-longer from a band that came, made a splash, and went.
Beck — Ghettochip malfunction (Hell Yes). Hard to say what my favorite Beck song is, but when I listen to this, this is. I like you Ace, your beat is nice.
Beauty Pill — The Cigarette Girl From the Future. A cult classic that might be too experimental/weird for some, but check out the lyrics: the song nails the conundrum of futurism in very few words. Beauty Pill had a hit with the exquisite "Goodnight For Real" from The Unsustainable Lifestyle, which is how I found them.
Jeff Beck — Nadia. I was besotted with this beautiful track during the time I was in love with Sara and listened to it like 600 times. Had to keep away from it for a year after the breakup.
Cat Power — Lived in Bars. Gorgeously sung ballad about the loneliness of the party life. And William Eggleston has a cameo in the video.
Maximo Park — Graffiti. The line "I'll do graffiti if you sing to me in French" makes me laugh. And you have to like a song that ends with the phrase "and that's enough."
Pixies — Bam Thwok. Recorded for but not used in 2004's Shrek 2 and eventually released as a download-only single on Apple's iTunes, this "endearingly daft" song is one of the subset of Pixies songs on which Kim Deal sings lead.
Laura Veirs, Riptide. Wistfully spooky (or spookily wistful) tune from the Portland, Oregon, singer-songwriter's first Nonesuch album, Carbon Glacier. I like the way this melts into an instrumental.
Badly Drawn Boy — A Minor Incident. English singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Damon Michael Gough has a clever stage name. Elegiac, from-the-heart folk-tinged song.
Massive Attack — Risingson. The foreboding dirge-like first single from Massive Attack's massive hit Mezzanine sampled The Velvet Undergound.
J Dilla — Workinonit. Donuts was released three days before the hip-hop producer J Dilla's death from TTP and lupus; most of the tracks were recorded in his hospital room using a 45-rpm record player and a Boss SP-303 sampler. The album, which had its moment, is a pared-down sketchpad of notes and ideas for songs that could never get made.
Modest Mouse — The World at Large. The ying to the yang of the more popular "Float On," into which it flows on the album Good News for People Who Love Bad News.
Ray Davies — Morphine Song. Underrated gem from the Kinks frontman describes his stay in an Emergency Room after being shot by muggers in New Orleans. Moral: Don't chase muggers; but if you do, you might encounter some characters in the ER.
Sondre Lerche — Two Way Monologue. No idea how this guy is viewed in his native Norway, but Lerche "is consistently experimenting with alternate chord voicings and more complex song structures" (Nick Sylvester) on this album, and this title track rollicks right along.
Blind Boys of Alabama — Way Down in the Hole. This Tom Waits cover, by the famous gospel group founded in 1939 that features a revolving cast of mostly visually impaired musicians, was used as the theme music for Season One of HBO's The Wire.
Howe Gelb — Get To Leave. A token track from one of my favorite albums of that decade, "'Sno Angel Like You." Howe Gelb (of Giant Sand...well, not "fame," but of Giant Sand!) is an acquired taste, but this album, for which he realized a longtime dream by hiring a gospel choir to sing backup, is pure gentle quirky fun.
I hafta stop. It sure was fun to go back and revisit these old songs, and a lot more besides. I haven't heard some of them in many years. By the way, if you're wondering why so few things from the last years of the decade, I was working full steam on TOP by that time and didn't have much leisure time to check out bands and music.
Hope you discover a thing or two here you like!
Mike
P.S. This kind of post is surprisingly difficult to pull together. If you happen to see any mistakes, please let me know!
[UPDATE: Andreas Sakka helpfully created a public Spotify playlist of 16 of these 20 songs...thanks Andreas!]
Book o' the Week
Our National Monuments: America's Hidden Gems by Q.T. Luong. Just out! Brand new. Publishing isn't easy. Our friend QT (Tuan) Luong tells me that his new book will have to sell 6,200 copies out of a print run of 7,500 just to break even! And that's not including the labor and time it took to make the photographs. Fortunately, the predecessor book, Treasured Lands, has done exceedingly well. It has won 12 international awards and is now in its 6th printing.
The above is a link to Amazon from TOP. Once you're at Amazon, anything you search and buy will be credited to TOP. The following logo is also a link:
Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
Tom Burke: "Re 'Feeling old yet, fortysomethings?' Never mind them, they’ve got years to get used to it. Wait till you read a 'it happened 50 years ago today!' article about a concert you went to and remember like it was last month. Stones in the Park, summer 1969, and The Guardian did a loving reminiscence about it in 2019. Well, thanks. Still comes as a shock, even three years on. I mean, it cannot possibly be 50 years since that afternoon because I haven’t changed at all. Not really; not inside. Maybe."
Tex Andrews: "I work with Drew Doucette of Beauty Pill. He's the head of AV at the Hirshhorn, handles all the editing of our main video stuff, along with working with all of the time-based media we exhibit. Lots o' troubleshooting there, lemme tell ya. He also obviously consults with the curators and exhibition designers about all of our capabilities/incapabilities, where the projectors need to go, the audio, etc. Real good guy. You'd never know he was a rock star...and Grammy winner (but not with BP)."
Peter Croft: "Huh. I've heard of Jeff Beck and Ray Davies (if it's the same Ray Davies I used to know), but none of the rest of them. I think they stopped writing good music around that time. I'm gettin' old (75)."
Nigli: "Mike, thanks for that. I opened the Spotify playlist and it made my day. It's right up my alley."
Ian Provan: "Thanks for the list Mike! A few songs there I already love, and a few I look forward to checking out. And I second Tom Burke's comment. I saw a few months ago that it's 50 years since Hunky Dory was released, which means next year will be the 50th anniversary of Ziggy Stardust! That was the album that changed me from someone who liked listening to music to someone utterly besotted with rock 'n' roll."
Carlos Quijano: "And the winner is: Howe Gelb. Great. And digging around I found his band Giant Sand: great too. Thanks Mike."
Stuart Phillips: "Thanks for sending me off down a Massive-Attack-shaped rabbit-hole. Re: Tom Burke's comment, it's only 25 years since they were the soundtrack to my undergrad and postgrad studies, from Blue Lines to Protection to Mezzanine. While it's a shock, it's not yet that big a shock!"
Mike replies: Sounds like you might be interested in this:
Another landmark album recently (in July) turned 25, Sublime's self-titled third album, released three days after Brad Nowell's death, but I think they're gone now; and here's a hot tip if you happen to collect vinyl (I don't, any more, although I have earlier versions of those two): Porcupine Tree's Deadwing is just about to come out on vinyl. Those will go very fast. That's the album with the amazing 12-minute Pink-Floydesque "Arriving Somewhere But Not Here" on it.
I spent yesterday feasting on music and movies and articles about music, following up on all your suggestions and comments from the recent post about guitarists. The big discovery for me is Sylvain Luc, who was suggested by a reader signing himself Williiam.
And I've been learning all about The Wrecking Crew, a shifting group of 15 to 35 freewheeling first-call session musicians in L.A. in the 1960s and early '70s who played on literally hundreds of hits from the era. Just a few: The Byrds' "Mr. Tambourine Man"; Barbra Streisand's "The Way We Were"; the Monkees' "Last Train to Clarksville"; the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations"; Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Waters"; Sonny and Cher's "The Beat Goes On" (for which Wrecking Crew stalwart Carol Kaye provided the famous bass line); and Frank Sinatra's "Strangers in the Night" ("the worst f------ song I've ever heard," Sinatra said when he first heard it, but it went straight to number one and stayed there for a whopping fifteen weeks). They played on records by Nat King Cole, the Carpenters, John Denver, Neil Diamond, and Ike and Tina Turner and dozens if not hundreds of others. Frothy now-forgotten number-one hits like The Association's "Windy," and "Dizzy" by Tommy Roe? That was them. They played on dozens of TV themes, too, from "Hawaii Five-O" to "Bonanza" to "Batman," and created innumerable commercial jingles.
Their names never appeared on the records because the recording industry didn't want the public to know that the bands weren't playing on their own records—and that so many of the same musicians were playing on all the records. The facade began to crack when one of the Monkees—I think it was Peter Tork—arrived at the studio with his guitar and was shocked to learn that the songs were already all finished except for the vocals, which was the only part the band members were expected to provide. The word started to get out—I actually remember where I was when I heard the rumor about the Monkees not even playing on their own records (on the school bus passing my friend Larry Dubin's house)—and the practice of having session aces replace band members on recordings started to decline.
One of the biggest reasons for the arrangement in the first place was efficiency. Wrecking Crew players could lay down a finished track in one to four hours whereas it might take the real band a similar number of days of studio time to accomplish the same task. Ironically, the huge and growing sales of records in the '60s made it more feasible to let bands play on their own records; paying for exorbitant amounts of studio time became feasible for big acts in the later years of the '60s and in fact became a bit of a status symbol. (The vinyl box of the recent deluxe 50th Anniversary release of Crosby Stills & Nash's Déjà Vu contains three disks of demos, outtakes and alternates from the sessions.) The Beatles famously allowed themselves unlimited amounts of studio time after they stopped touring.
The group got its moniker from the 1990 memoir of drummer Hal Blaine, who said that in the early days, the more straightlaced and formal studio musicians of an earlier time thought that the new young guys (and Carol!) who were willing to play rock 'n' roll, as well as improvise from charts instead of having everything written out, were going to "wreck" music.
If you're interested in pop music and you remember that era, the 2008 documentary The Wrecking Crew is fascinating. I found it on Amazon but it's available elsewhere too.
Mike
Lens of Interest this week:
If you should happen to be looking for an all-purpose zoom for the Sony APS-C cameras I've been discussing lately, here it is. The Sony E 16–55mm ƒ/2.8 G is a high-quality, constant aperture APS-C zoom of manageable weight and appropriate size that covers the true wide-angle to short telephoto range. Its built-in stabilization makes it a perfect match for the unstabilized A6xxx models, but it's good enough to be matched with Sony's best.
The link above is a portal to Amazon. Also available from:
Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
So (as you might imagine) I've gotten interested in some of the many things people said yesterday about lists, and I've been thinking more about my little off-the-cuff "20 Greatest Male Guitarists" list from yesterday.
Grant said "perhaps you would better understand your affection for lists if you just made a list of things that you like about lists." A good joke, but actually it made me feel tempted to do just that!
I won't, though. Too much work.
False hierarchy and other headaches Thinking about it more, if I were really making a list of notable guitarists, I think it would have to include about 50 people. Twenty is just the wrong number. Too limited.
These things suggest the scale they need...for instance, I think a list of the Greatest NBA Basketball Players of All Time should be a group of about 15. That's the point at which I start to be comfortable leaving people out. With only 20 guitarists, there are musicians not mentioned who we're simply not comfortable leaving out.
A list of 50 would naturally include female guitarists. (And then, not only could I have Bonnie Raitt and Joni Mitchell, I could at least try to finagle a place for Ana Vidović.)
In fact it would have room for representing many things that people mentioned and that need to be represented, such as: a historical figure from before the age of recording; pure virtuosos like Guthrie Govan whose playing is purely about dexterity and speed; and at least one token studio musician. You might consider "token" to be a pejorative, but in fact it's a highly useful concept to a listmaker. In a list of 50, many people could be tokens—each of them representing whole genres, periods, instruments, regions, or styles and approaches that really should be represented. Of course this is only useful if every list item is discussed.
Next, it would be much better if it wasn't titled "Greatest" or "Best." That makes it instantly about status, which opens a Pandora's box. Humans love competition, and our attention is instantly engaged when we make anything into a contest. But art isn't really a contest, cutting contests and "battles of the bands" notwithstanding. So I'd be much more comfortable with a title like "50 Fascinating Guitarists," or "50 Guitarists You Should Know." That takes away not only the Greatest/Best aspect, but also the false-hierarchy aspect, avoiding the absurdity of a list on which the person ranked at number 12, say, is implied to be "better" than the person in the 13th position, which is nothing but false precision.
This is the reason I put my list yesterday in order of birth year: it was a way to abolish ranking.
Balance imbalances Of course then I ran into another problem...I had inadvertently highlighted the fact that many people considered "great guitarists" were born in the 1940s. Which in turn led me to include Kurt Cobain because I realized late in the process that I needed at least one person born in the 1960s.
This is the "balance" problem you run into in any such list. Balance problems open lists to criticism based on ideas of inclusiveness—as when, for example, Victor Bloomfield criticized my list for not including enough classical guitarists (my list only had one, as a token). And didn't somebody mention that I had shortchanged Spanish and Portuguese guitarists?
You might think there are only a limited number of inclusiveness factors to balance, and that therefore it should be possible to consider all of them, but actually there is an unlimited supply. It all depends on which criteria you highlight. What if a list didn't have a single Latinx guitarist? Or a single left-handed guitarist—what are you, biased toward righties? Or a single blind guitarist—don't you know that there are a number of famous blind guitarists, such as José Feliciano, Jeff Healey, and Blind Lemon Jefferson (whose first name, by the way, really was Lemon)? This "balance problem" goes on and on. No matter how the listmaker struggles for balance, there are still going to be openings for criticism to sneak in.
In this case, I highlighted year of birth, which in turn obligated me to make sure not too many of the guitarists I mentioned were people born in the '40s. Many of the musicians who were most active in the peak decades of "classic rock," the '60s and '70s, were naturally born in the '40s. But as I (and, ahem, several critics) mentioned, my attempt at balance in that regard ended up distorting my list, because I made a stab at balance by going out of my way to find a guitarist born in the '60s. You might call this "overbalancing"...bending too far over backwards to preserve an appearance of fairness.
It's related to quotas, as in, "on a list of 50, at least ten must be women, 20 must be acoustic guitarists, and at least one must have sold his soul to the Devil at the crossroads."
Impossible Reader robert e said it nicely: "I think lists are most useful for one's own delectation and education, and possibly to fuel edifying geeky debate if they're not taken too seriously. They're also decent starting points to get into a new topic, again as long as they're not taken too seriously."
That's getting into "a list of the reasons we like lists," and it's a nice starting point. For me, listmaking is a way of engaging with a subject, a reason to get into the kind of research I enjoy doing, which in turn helps me learn. Mostly, I suppose, it's just a way of focusing on something I want to focus on. I do get a bit "obsessive" sometimes. I had fun on Saturday night listening to dozens of guitarists.
Probably the most important thing Robert said, he said twice: don't take it too seriously! That's crucial. Only if a list can stay lighthearted, flexible, and fun does it serve its real functions, which are and ought to be modest.
Finally, Zyni Moë put it succintly (she said it twice too): "lists are impossible."
As the characters in The Wire all say, "true dat."
Mike
Lens of Interest this week:
If you should happen to be looking for an all-purpose zoom for the Sony APS-C cameras I've been discussing lately, here it is. The Sony E 16–55mm ƒ/2.8 G is a high-quality, constant aperture APS-C zoom of manageable weight and appropriate size that covers the true wide-angle to short telephoto range. Good enough to be matched with Sony's best.
The link above is a portal to Amazon. Also available from:
Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
[Ed. note: "Open Mike" is the often off-topic Editorial page of TOP, and is supposed to appear on Wednesday; "Sunday Support Group," loosely defined as posts meant to be supportive of projects and aspirations, is supposed to appear on Sundays. But we're out of sync this week.]
Arthur Rothstein, Boy musician [Weldon Drake], Weslaco, Texas, 1942. Note that his 12-string has 11 strings. From the Library of Congress via Shorpy.
I like lists. They're fun and a challenge to compile. They're also ultimately meaningless and pointless, so I'm not exactly sure why they appeal to me. I guess it's the process of deciding which criteria matter; it helps clarify one's values. It's also a way of celebrating what's real, or good...or of bestowing approval. Or maybe it's just a way of diving into the thing, whatever it is.
I don't know, actually.
I was whiling away some downtime last night and stumbled on a WatchMojo video called "20 Greatest Male Guitarists of All Time." The list was just so bad, so wrong, that it actually troubled me. (I can't come to bed, someone is wrong on the internet!)
So I made my own list.
Here's mine, in chronological order by date of birth:
Andres Segovia b. 1893 Django Reinhardt b. 1910 Robert Johnson b. 1911 Les Paul b. 1915 Wes Montgomery b. 1923
Chet Atkins b. 1924 Chuck Berry b. 1926 Derek Bailey b. 1930 John Fahey b. 1939 Jimi Hendrix b. 1942
Jeff Beck b. 1944 Neil Young b. 1945 Allan Holdsworth b. 1946 Paco de Lucia b. 1947 Carlos Santana b. 1947
Larry Carlton b. 1948 Stevie Ray Vaughan b. 1954 Eddie Van Halen b. 1955 Kurt Cobain b. 1969 Derek Trucks b. 1979
What do you think? I tried to look at different styles, not just flashy BDR-type* players.
But...20? It doesn't even scratch the surface. The real truth is probably that you might be able to pick 20 guitarists in the specific style you like and listen to, and then present them as a group without ranking. I saw one such list of bluegrass flat-picking guitarists. Or you could pick 20 from a particular era, or divide them by some quality or property like most influential or most popular.
My friend Kim, who posts those "C60Crew" mixes on MixCloud, knows about twenty times as much as I do about guitarists. Maybe that's giving me too much credit. But I asked him for help with some list or other a long time ago (was it my Jazz Starter Kit list? I don't remember), and he said, "I hate lists. I don't even think like that."
Ever since then, I've been sort of suspicious of my affection for listmaking.
Anyway, I'm hoping you might educate me on the topic of great guitarists. I'm sure to learn something....
Mike
*Big dumb rock. A friend used to refer to the radio station DC101 in Washington D.C. back in the '80s as "the BDR station."
Book of Interest this week:
The Education of a Photographer, Edited by Charles H. Traub, Steven Heller, and Adam B. Bell, Allworth Press, 2006, 256 pages. A small but rich gold mine of short essays and interviews by and about photographers. Also available from The Book Depository with free shipping worldwide.
Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
dkreithen: "OK, I'll bite: you missed all the Nashville session guys. An imperfect and partial list would include Glen Campbell, Albert Lee, James Burton, Jimmy Capps, Bryan Sutton, and, to me, the greatest living guitarist, Jerry Douglas (but he plays dobro). Those are only the ones that I know the names of. Also, the LA crowd, including Carol Kaye and Tommy Tedesco. In addition, Ry Cooder should be on or near your list. Many of the ones you have listed I would call 'stylists' rather than all-around greats, including: Kurt Cobain (really?), Stevie Ray Vaughn, Van Halen, Neil Young, Chuck Berry. Some of them are notable and individualistic, but hardly great. I would put most rock guitarists in that category. If you want great stylists, you missed folks like Bo Diddley (truly inventive), Buddy Guy, James Williamson, Robert Quine, Billy Zoom, Dave Davies, etc. Your real omission are the session guys (and gals). They don't have household names, but they tend to be the best."
Mike replies: One of my faves among the session guys is Elliott Randall. Jimmy Page's favorite guitar solo is Elliott Randall's on Steely Dan's "Reelin' in the Years." Page supposedly once said it was "a 12 out of 10."
Grant: "Mike, perhaps you would better understand your affection for lists, if you just made a list of things that you like about lists. Just sayin'."
Michael Allen: "Great topic for a Sunday, Mike. I'll weigh in from the Canadian perspective. One of the wellsprings of Canadian guitar is Bruce Cockburn. While best known as an edgy songwriter, his playing has influenced no end of Canadian artists for more than a generation. An apocryphal tale has a Rolling Stone interviewer asking Van Halen what it's like to be the best guitarist in the world, his reply being 'ask Bruce Cockburn.' Probably not true, but with enough potential substance to remain in circulation. Check out his 2005 instrumental album, 'Speechless.' Not at all splashy, but it nourishes me. Cockburn downplayed his technique, feeling that he was a pretty good player for a lyricist.
"It's a pretty straight line from Bruce to Don Ross, who cannot be described. Don won the National Fingerstyle Guitar Championship twice, and to see him play is jaw-dropping (he calls it 'heavy wood'). Keep safe. Mike Allen (Vancouver)."
Robert: "No real arguments (it's a personal list after all), but I would include at least two others that you have not: Roy Buchanan and Tommy Emmanuel (an Australian). And perhaps another Australian (I am from there, so biased): John Williams."
Tippler (partial comment): "Unless you’re cultured enough and have heard every guitarist of all times, you would not know if you missed one that should be on the list. And suppose you did happen to hear every guitarist, you may not know enough about a particular genre of guitar to be able to discern greatness."
Mike replies: Very true, very true. There are whole genres I never listen to. Metal, for one. I wouldn't know Dave Mustaine from Kirk Hammett.
CRM (partial comment): "I think that almost everyone that I would add has already been mentioned. A dozen or two in the comments that I don’t know. I will be wandering around YouTube for the next week."
Mike replies: The great discovery for me of this post so far has been Sylvain Luc. Wonderful. Suggested by Williiam.
Mike Plews (partial comment): "One of the strangest and most wonderful albums I own is a Hank Williams tribute record by Joe Pass and Roy Clark. Turns out they had been fans of each other for years and didn't know."
Mark Roberts: "Speaking of Allan Holdsworth, here's a great video that breaks down one of his mind-blowing licks. It's beautiful to see how it's constructed and amazing to think that such a complex part could be improvised. (And be aware that Rick Beato's YouTube channel can be a serious time sink!)"
Simon: "Lots of great names here, both in Mike's list and the suggestions. Zyni Moë beat me to add a name that I didn't think I'd see—Johnny Marr of The Smiths. Very distinctive and influential. I was also pleased to see Martin Taylor and would also suggest Martin Simpson. One way of settling on a genuinely 'greatest' list is to get the choice of the players that have been nominated. You should end up with a clearer idea of who the ultimate 'guitarist's guitarists' might be. As a player, much as I admire shredders, I'd second Steve Rosenblum's suggestion of David Gilmour. I never tire of Comfortably Numb (particularly the live Pompeii recording) and Another Brick In The Wall Part II."
Dillan: "I know this is an impossible task, but you've left off some true innovators: Freddie King, who influenced everything from surf music to good old roadhouse blues, Link Wray who's innovations led the way from early countryfied rock to the harder sounds of the late '60s, and Dick Dale, who brought a Middle Eastern vibe to surf guitar.
"I humbly submit the subdued, but hugely influential sound of Steve Cropper to this list. Without him, the Stax R & B sound wouldn't exist. His sound reverberates through music today. I would also point out Jerry Garcia, who had a very unique sound. I personally can listen to the man play for hours. I would also consider J.J. Cale, who had a very unique and influential sound. Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Mick Taylor, Jimmy Page, Keith Richards, Pete Townshend, and Mark Knopfler all deserve mention. None were really innovators, but all are profoundly skilled. Speaking of profoundly skilled, Glen Campbell? He was truly awesome! One more to consider, now that I'm thinking: Ry Cooder. He seems like a true master to me. I really enjoyed this article. I know we're all forgetting artists who belong on this list, but it's just for fun anyway. Thank you very much for publishing it!"
Mike replies: A number of musicians would be on my personal favorites list, including Mick Taylor, Freddie King, J.J. Cale, Johnny Marr, and Peter Green, not to mention several jazz greats. Neil Young probably belongs on my personal favorites list and not on a GOAT list. See, this makes me happy, but isn't it silly? Like it matters. I guess it's a good way to talk about it and think about it.
John McMillin: "Pat Metheny's been around for such a long time that he tends to be taken for granted, or remembered only for his popular work in the jazz-rock crossover days of the 'eighties. Since that time, I've seen him tear it up on a beat-up Gibson jazz electric, the wailing Roland guitar sythesizer, various tender nylon-strong acoustics, and the four-necked Pikasso harp guitar that he devised. He's played with dozens of the top jazz musicians all the way back to veterans of Miles Davis's band, but also an 80-piece orchestra of robotically played instruments. Pat's latest release features his intricate compositions performed by a classical guitar quartet. What other guitarist shows that kind of broad range?
"Pat never rests on his laurels. He's well-known for practicing for hours after playing a concert. I've heard that once he practiced for two hours before a gig at his son's birthday party. He's written over 500 songs, and some have entered the jazz canon; guitarist John Pizzarelli just released an album of Metheny covers.
"Metheny's maximalist approach has included exotic instruments, world music, 'found sounds' and plenty of leading-edge technology, which leads him outside the jazz mainstream. In concert, he'll expand the musical palette from a whisper to a roar. At the core of it all is his deep melodicism, as expressed in rich chords and single notes that are as fluid and flexible as a violinist's. What he's expressing is always complex, and humane and warm...except for a couple of wild free jazz and noise albums that even this superfan can't withstand. That's the mark of a musical leader, someone who'll take you beyond where you didn't know you wanted to go."
David Aschkenas: "I might have missed it, but certainly Roy Buchanan and Danny Gatten should be on the list. I did a couple of album covers for Roy back in the '70s."
[My apologies! I finished this this morning and thought I published it around 11:00 a.m. But apparently I just forgot to click the "Publish Now" button. That's only happened rarely in years of blogging. Anyway..."Open Mike" is the off-again on-again Editorial Page of TOP. Today's is a grab-bag. When Yr. Hmbl. Ed. is caught up with himself, it appears on Wednesdays. Even if only barely.]
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Strange & curious: Been feeling like a hermit lately? You've got nothing on Christopher Knight:
For decades, the residents of Maine’s Kennebec Valley believed that the North Pond hermit was a myth. According to local lore, a hermit had been living undetected in the woods since the 1980s; every so often, he would break into seasonal cabins to steal food and other resources. But no one could prove the hermit’s existence—if he was out there, he had taken great pains to guarantee his isolation.
Then, in April 2013, a man was arrested in the deep woods of Maine. His name was Christopher Thomas Knight. According to societal records, he didn’t exist. For 27 years, he had camped out in the forest, surviving on meager supplies that he’d burglarized from houses in the area. He endured winter temperatures of 20 degrees below zero. Every morning, he watched the sun rise over the foggy valley that he called home. He hadn’t had a single conversation with another person for nearly three decades.
His greatest challenge was surviving the Winters. He would deliberately fatten himself up at the end of the Summer and into the Fall. A night camping in the throes of a Maine Winter is not for the faint of heart; a week of it qualifies an outdoorsman as a tough guy. In twenty-seven years at his encampment in the woods, Knight never slept in anything but a tent. The cold was so intense it drove him close to suicide. He would wake himself at 2:30 in the morning in the dead of Winter because he knew he stood a better chance if he faced the worst of the cold awake. "It's dangerous to sleep too long in Winter," he told the reporter who visited him in jail.
But apart from finding an intellectual who loved to read (and loved Lynyrd Skynyrd!), who knew who the Kardashians were, and was so averse to human connection that he seldom made eye contact, the reporter could get little out of him about the central mystery, "why":
Anyone who reveals what he’s learned, Chris told me, is not by his definition a true hermit. Chris had come around on the idea of himself as a hermit, and eventually embraced it. When I mentioned Thoreau, who spent two years at Walden, Chris dismissed him with a single word: "dilettante."
The first quote is by Emily Buder. The second is from a long article in GQ from 2014 by Michael Finkel called "The Strange & Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit." Fascinating article; recommended if you think you're "isolating"!
Snob about fiber-base: When I was young I was a snob about fiber-base black-and-white papers. They were the traditional material, made the old way. RC paper was "plastic," and was tainted by its early reputation for self-destructing. Good for intermediate prints and prints for repro only. Don't extrapolate this any further than it goes, but I will say this: I have plenty of workprints made on Ilford RC papers from thirty and thirty-five years ago, and they look as fresh and clean as the day I made them. I can't say if they'll last 70 years, or 200. But I like their chances.
Opinions about Bogart: I'm mildly a fan of movies made before I was born, especially the genre called "Noir," and if you like Noir you'll have opinions about Bogart. In his top three for me (the other two are The Caine Mutiny and of course Casablanca) is a little-remembered suspense thriller about a writer. To enjoy In a Lonely Place you can't focus on the murder mystery, which is nothing but a sub-plot—you have to get into its psychological portrayal of the doomed love affair. Movies that take this tack have to resonate with you in some way or they might not appeal much. But they can be deep and meaningful if they do touch you.
In a Lonely Place was directed by Nicholas Ray, who directed Rebel Without a Cause and influenced Godard and the French New Wave. It co-stars his now little-known wife, Gloria Grahame. Their marriage broke up during the filming but the two kept the breakup secret so as not to jeopardize the project. The script departed greatly from the book, and the director and actors departed greatly from the script—Ray cleared the set and crafted a new, more subtle ending with the two leads when the planned finale, which had already been shot, rang false. The movie creates characters who might now be understood as having what's called an avoidant/dismissive adult attachment style, but with sympathy for the tragedy inherent in being trapped in such a state. Glenn Erickson of DVD Savant put it beautifully:
Relationships are delicate animals—they can be killed by the wrong words, the wrong actions. Dix and Laurel are madly in love with one another, but that trust is destroyed when her terror and his rage go over the edge. It doesn't matter that he's innocent, or that they are both in intense remorse over what happened. It can't be taken back, and the romance is finished. Both will have to go back to their personal 'lonely places.'
Brilliant lines of criticism—so very much on the mark.
Of course another reason I love old Noir films is for the black-and-white. In a Lonely Place was shot by the cinematographer Burnett Guffey, who also did Bonnie and Clyde, a movie whose cinematography is naturalistic and plainspoken. Cinematographers have trouble being artists because they seldom get to pick their projects; the best they can hope for is to become the go-to of a great director. Guffey was a get-it-done pro whose life's list of accomplishments is a motley of good and bad, television and film, the trivial and the profound. But In a Lonely Place is as outstanding in 1950 B&W as Bonnie and Clyde is in 1967 color. A treat. I'd like to see more of his work.
Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart in In a Lonely Place
Carrie Rickey of The Moviegoer considers the performances the best of of both Grahame's and Bogart's careers. The most disturbing thing I've read about the film? Louise "Brooksie" Brooks said that of all his roles, the role of Dixon Steele in In a Lonely Place came closest to the real-life Humphrey Bogart she knew.
Young Girl Blues: Like guitar? My good old friend Kim's latest is a lilting and wistful mix of guitars across genres—indie, Brit-folk, blues, alt, folk-rock. It's been raining here for a week, and it's a great hour's listen on a rainy day. I loved the Band of Horses song, which I had never heard before. And yes, the "cover" art of Young Girl Blues is in beautiful black-and-white.
Something I happened to hear on XM Radio in the car: it's a version of Led Zeppelin's "Going to California" with the vocals removed. It's one of those songs I've always loved and never tire of, but I found it fascinating how much the vocal serves as another instrument and another line, and how different the music sounds as an acoustic instrumental. Just a curiosity. Lend an ear if you're so inclined.
Aromatically yours: One final reading. Another of my old friends you've met in these pages before, Jim Schley, just published a review of a new book of poetry, Elizabeth A.I. Powell's Atomizer (Amazon).
Vermont poet Elizabeth A.I. Powell's way with words is daring, sardonic and ingenious. She enjoys mixing registers and realms—pop and literary culture, consumerism and religion, self-help and sacrament.
That just makes it sound like something I would enjoy.
The structure (or "scent and architecture," as Powell puts it) of Atomizer is fascinating. Along with its zany variety of forms, the book has a powerful through line, investigating the ancient, arcane and insidious role of perfume, tangled in seduction and deceit. The three sections of the book are named for terms used to categorize layered qualities in synthesized scents. "Top Notes" are "that which evaporates most quickly"; "Heart Notes" are "the distinctive aspects, most...charming, most intelligent"; and "Base Notes," the poet avers, "stay the longest...heavy and deep."
I liked the little tastes and teasers so much I had to order the book. Jim's reviews do that to me every so often. Here's Jim Schley's review of Atomizer, at Seven Days.
Mike
Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
HR: "With regards to your comment about RC papers I am reminded of this. :-) 'We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again and that is well but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.' —Mark Twain"
Mike replies: Thanks! Yes, that. In this case I can only personally recommend Ilford RC papers. I used several others too, decades ago, but they're gone now.
David Evans: "I'm really loving Young Girl blues. I'm not familiar with Mixcloud—is it possible to see individual track information?"
Mike replies: Only if you sign up for a Premium account, which is $8 a month. But there's another way for most cuts. Download the Shazam app from the App Store. It allows your phone to listen to music, compare it to a database, and identify it. Kim will fool it sometimes because his mixes sometimes include extremely esoteric and rare music, but most of the cuts it will identify. I'll ask Kim if he can provide a set list for Young Girl Blues.
Kim was a legendary disk jockey at WHFS in Washington DC back in the station's heyday.
Bob Curtis: "Michael Finkel expanded the article into a book, The Stranger in the Woods [Amazon]."
scott kirkpatrick: "My favorite Bogart has always been Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which captures the bottled anger in 'Nobody puts one over on Fred C. Dobbs!' But I wasn't aware of In a Lonely Place, which leaves out the humorous touches and the sentimental ending, and thus is truly terrifying."
David Comdico: "In a Lonely Place is my favorite Bogart film. It peels beneath the surface of the Bogart character. On the other hand, Johnny Guitar [Amazon Prime Video] is my favorite film by Nicholas Ray. He was a real American original."
Keith B.: "Burnett Guffey's outstanding lighting in Bonnie and Clyde may feel naturalistic, but is actually fairly romantic in style. Naturalistic cinematography (no theatrical lighting, existing light taken as found) was then, and is still, considered too ugly to be employed for commercial narrative motion picture storytelling. There are exceptions, but not many."
Andrew Bearman: "Thank you for turning me on to Mixcloud and to your friend Kim's sets. I am now willingly lost in the woods of great music! And that Bogey still captures a look that only an experienced, weary cat like he could give. A look not too far from how many of us have felt at least a few times during this pandemic. Off to watch In a Lonely Place."
johnbabineau: "Hunch re KK’s Mixcloud: Handstanding athlete on diving board is the actress Doris Day. KK’s comedic gifts endure...."
Animesh Ray: "Your post made me remember a funny experience. I used to do extensive black-and-white printing for work when I was a grad student in the late 1970s–early 1980s. This was related mostly to printing of black-and-white photomicrographs and autoradiograms, for which we were supposed to print on multigrade silver gelatin papers. After that period I did not do any darkroom work, because most of those tasks was taken over by Polaroid for B&W or Kodachrome slides for color.
"Some 30 years later, in 2003, I wanted to do B&W printing as a hobby, so I went to the local city recreations department, which had a darkroom for the photo enthusiasts. The deal was that the use of the darkroom was free if you passed a test; otherwise you would need need to take a two-week course on printing. So I thought I would take that test. As it so happened, I had never heard of RC papers until that time, as I had only used fiber papers in the past—in fact we never called it that! We just called it a printing paper of a certain grade. All the test questions had to do with how to print and process RC papers, so to my utter disbelief I ended up failing the test. In science, we often feel like hermits stuck in lonely towers."
A little plug from the TOP community: regular readers know Gordon Lewis, whose picture Precipitation (AKA "the umbrella woman)" was one of our best-selling prints.
Gordon's son Clay wrote and produced the song "Stranger" by the band Mice on Mercury, just out.
I'm only an old dad, but I think the song's a beauty. Its only problem is that it ends too soon. Check it out on the streaming or download service of your choice.
Nice going, especially for a 16-year-old. Big congratulations to Clay.
Cruel luck Over the years I've known many creative people, and one underlying generality I've come to believe in is this. If you talk to anyone with an interest in anything creative—I even think this extends to other aspirational categories too—you'll hear some account of a setback of some sort that ended up causing the dream to fizzle. It can be something gentle or minor in absolute terms—a failure to capitalize on an early toehold, gains lost, a turn of bad luck, bad treatment from another individual or institution—loss of nerve, or a closed door—something like that.
Of course, it can be major, too, like my friend Kevin, the standout athlete at my small high school, who was a top college baseball player, got drafted into the majors, and then blew his knee out playing a casual game of pickup basketball a week before he was to report for training camp. A mutual friend notes that to this day—we're in our sixties now—any random stranger is likely to hear that story within fifteen minutes of first meeting Kevin.
That couldn't be helped. It wasn't Kevin's fault. Bad luck of the bitterest kind. He went on to make a good life for himself.
And in other cases it seems like the goal was wrong or the ability ran too thin or the Force just wasn't with the person somehow. Luck was too cruel. Or they didn't have enough flexibility to adapt or change. What all these stories have in common is that the circumstances of the setback are remembered. The person might not have a clear idea of what happened or why, but they'll tell you about that early bittersweet dream and how they brushed up to it so tantalizingly. They'll tell you about what happened and assign the blame as to why their careers sidestepped in a different direction. I've heard a detectable variation of that kind of story many, many dozens of times over many years, from all sorts of people. All perfectly understandable. And common, is what I'm saying.
Here's what I've noticed, though. It's that, in the biographies of many successful people, you'll often read of the exact same sorts of early discouragement—bad luck, bad treatment, opportunities lost, breakthroughs that weren't—whatever; but the successful person managed somehow to regroup, maybe reappraise, and move forward anyway.
The OG For example, we were just talking yesterday about David Douglas Duncan (who, by the way, was once considered to be one of the three great brand ambassadors, as they're now called, of Leica, along with Alfred Eisenstadt of LIFE and Henri Cartier-Bresson of Magnum. I forgot to mention that the other day.) Well, DDD had a early setback too. He was a college student studying archaeology in Arizona when he photographed a hotel fire in Tucson. He concentrated on one man who made repeated attempts to get back into the burning hotel to rescue a suitcase. The man turned out to be the notorious 1930s gangster John Dillinger, and the suitcase contained the cash from a recent bank robbery during which Dillinger had killed a man. Young Duncan's great lucky scoop was turned over to the Tucson Citizen newspaper. But somewhere along the way the newspaper lost or destroyed the film, and the college student's pictures never appeared in the newspaper and were never returned to him. Golden opportunity lost, through no fault of his own.
[UPDATE: More likely it was some of Dillinger's gang—see B.J.'s Featured Comment below. In any event, the identifications led to Dillinger's capture. —Ed.]
That's the sort of thing that might have become the sort of setback I'm talking about. DDD might have gone on to become an archaeology professor, say, who repeated to people the story of how he wanted to be a photojournalist when he was young (and some might need to be reminded now how much status that profession had in the broad middle swath of the 20th century). He would lovingly tell of his great encounter with Dillinger, speaking quietly and with a sad smile of the perfidy of the newspaper that betrayed him, and of his dead and buried dream, clutching his calcified resentment next to his heart like a pearl.
Of course, that's not what happened. David Douglas Duncan went on to become a major photographer of three American wars, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam, and those were only the peaks of his peripatetic accomplishment. The Dillinger story is only a footnote, albeit an entertaining one. Duncan was neither stunted nor stymied by that early bit of bad luck. He picked himself up off the ground, dusted himself off, and kept on going.
All this is just a digression, of course! Forgive me. Although I do hope that Clay Lewis eventually forgets this success. Which is to say, I hope it becomes merely the first of many for him.
*It reminds me of something I heard in a lecture to the faculty at a school where I taught, given by the head of psychiatry at a children's hospital: he said, "If you want your children to succeed, let them fail early and often."
Gordon Lewis replies: Thanks for the promo, Mike. This is still all new to Clay. Fortunately, his focus is on the music, so everything else is icing on the cake.
As for your main topic, a similar example comes to mind: Bill "Superfoot" Wallace was a judo champion until an opponent fell on his right knee, causing permanent damage. He could have given up martial arts or exercise entirely. Instead, he became a kickboxer whose unique sideways stance used his right leg only for support. His left roundhouse kick was so fast and accurate that even though everyone knew he would use it, they could do little to stop it.
The way I'd express your point is, if you're looking for an excuse to quit, you can find one. The same applies if you're determined to find a pathway to success.
Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
HiMY SYeD: "I simply want to say, 'Thank You' for writing this. It's important, and I needed to hear it."
Fred Tuman: "The life of a pro photographer in my case can be similar to a professional athlete. I struggled from when I came out of art school till my mid-thirties, when a fashion stylist I knew introduced me to the Head Art Director of a major beauty catalogue. Now I'm shooting soft goods in the morning and complex fashion sets in the evening and everything else in between...and making the money you're supposed to get.
"Two years into this the AD gets a stroke and passes on set. The advertising agency now gives me the cold shoulder like I never existed. I was out with no chance of returning.
"That was the 1990s. Thirty years later I've had a number of commercial hits, but nothing like that. Unlike most in that field, I didn't blow my money by sinking it into a big studio. I invested it and gave myself enough of a cushion to turn down assignments that will end up killing you. Now with COVID-19, you hope you'll get a chance again, if you can last it out and see if any work returns.
"Looking back at everything...when you are busy doing that high-end stuff, you are not enjoying it...the pressure is too great."
William Lewis: "Nice track, I've passed it on to some others I think might enjoy it. I'll have to burn it to CD and see if the local independent radio will play it."
Bryan Geyer: "DDD certainly was one of the 'great brand ambassadors,' but it was Nikon's notable lenses that he preferred to mate to his Leica rangefinder bodies when he covered the bulk of the Korean action.
He later switched to Nikon F reflex bodies (and lenses) for Vietnam.
Mike replies: That's according to Nikon, and it's partly right—DDD was long revered at Nikon for bringing the company to the attention of the world by using its lenses in Korea and spreading the word—but it's still not exactly right. He writes in War Without Heroes: "I depended upon two Leicas (custom-built M3Ds) crossed bandolier-style on my chest. One Leica was fitted with a Leitz 50mm f1.4 Summilux, the other with a Nikkor 28mm f2.8 lens; both lenses with medium yellow filters. In addition—hanging down the center of my chest—I carried a Nikon F with a Nikkor 200mm f4 lens, also with a medium yellow filter."
The film was Kodak Tri-X developed in Kodak D-76.
And by the way, the "D" in M3D stood for his name in a funny way—the pun of "3D" referred to Duncan's nickname "DDD." One of DDD's customized M3's (he had four of them) sold in May 2012 for 1.68 million euros (about $2.13m) at WestLicht.
B.J.: "Mike, the DDD/Dillinger story may be apocryphal. The Hotel Congress still stands in Tucson and is a popular (pre-COVID) hangout for shows, food, and drink. Every year they have a 'Dillinger Days' celebration, so the story of Dillinger's capture is frequently retold. During the January 1934 fire at the hotel, several members of Dillinger's gang were staying there, but Dillinger was staying elsewhere. The gang members escaped from the burning hotel, but offered a cash reward if the firemen would retrieve their luggage from their room. The firemen did so, and later one said that he thought the suitcases were exceptionally heavy. Later, back at the fire station (and this I find a bit difficult to believe) a fireman was reading True Detective magazine and came upon an illustrated article about the Dillinger gang. He recognized several of the men pictured as the ones who asked him to rescue the suitcases. The police were notified, a surveillance operation was set up and, two days later, in several raids, Dillinger and his gang were captured. The heavy suitcases turned out to have been full of firearms.
"Whatever actually happened, I think it is generally accepted that Dillinger himself was not at the hotel during the fire. If so, then DDD did not get any pictures of Dillinger, although he might have gotten pictures of some of Dillinger's gang. Also, the presence of the Dillinger gang in Tucson was not generally known till their capture a few days later.
Mike replies: Thanks for the deeper dive, B.J.—I added an Update to the post. Even if that particular example is not as good as it seemed, though, the principle still holds IMO.
So as far as Tuesday's music post goes, I was overthinking things. Way overthinking things. Needed to take a step back.
I had been struggling with how to set up a good-sounding (n.b.) stereo (i.e., two-channel) music system, not connected to my computer, using a streaming service as a source. I had been looking at various cunning and involved audiophile solutions requiring things like Gustard DACs and $895 network players like the Sonore UltraRendu, a category of device I had not had an inkling existed only weeks ago. I was rather fixated on using Amazon Music HD as a source, mainly because I've tried that and I like it. To access Amazon Music HD, I was halfway home with plans to use my old Mac Mini as a source. I was going to have it converted to use DC power so I could use a linear power supply, and I was planning to get a Gustard U16 as a USB buffer, and...
...Whoa, hoss. It was all getting pretty...complicated. Not to mention expensive. I think I finally caught myself when it dawned on me that one day I was going to have to deal with reselling items like the Gustard U16. Given that I didn't even know what it was three weeks ago, and that I had never heard of Gustard (a manufacturer of Chifi allegedly owned by an otherwise mysterious "Mr. Huang"—the company doesn't even have a website) prior to that, I figured that I might be in for a pretty hard resell. (I'm a little obsessed with Gustard stuff, which you can see at Apos Audio.)
Time to take a deep breath.
All I actually need is something like a Cambridge CXN v2 streamer/preamp, and a regular ol' stereo amplifier. That's it.
You can send the Cambridge CXN v2 signal either via ethernet or WiFi (using a supplied dongle, an option they chose to avoid having that stubby little antenna sticking up from behind the thing), and you can use it as a preamp to control volume and run its outputs straight to your amplifier. Of course, it doesn't support Amazon Music HD, but it does support Qobuz, among other things. So I have resolved to be...flexible, and go with Qobuz (pronounced ko-buzz) rather than Amazon Music HD. The latter is really for computer-connected systems, which mine will not be, and lower-fi outputs like Echoes (which makes the UHD pretty pointless, but never mind).
Control freak The CXN v2, which Cambridge calls a "network player," is Roon-ready, too. More about Roon another day.
There are three ways to control the CXN v2. You can use the buttons and knobs on the front of the unit; you can use the remote control; or you can download the free StreamMagic app and control it remotely with your smartphone or tablet. The only glitch I've heard about is that apparently the touchscreen volume control on the phone doesn't work very well. The workaround is to use the phone's (or the tablet's) up/down volume buttons for volume instead.
The ongoing costs for this, which people fret about and argue over, are laughably tiny. Roon costs ten bucks a month. Qobuz costs fifteen. Are you kidding me? I started buying CDs like a madman in 1982, and have five figures invested in iTunes tracks. $25 is the cost of two CDs or 20 iTunes songs. It's been many, many years since I've spent less than $25 a month on music. Many years. It's a line item in the budget. I listen to music half of every day. It's a consumable, like clothing or food. I'll get my money's worth out of Qobuz within days, if not hours.
Perseveration To perseverate means "repeat or prolong an action, thought, or utterance after the stimulus that prompted it has ceased." Like, continuing to read reviews after you've already read enough reviews. Sooner or later, with anything like this, you need to dive in and get hands-on. It's that way with all manner of photography products too. There comes a time when further research is actually counterproductive. You're just confusing yourself. What do they call it? Paralysis by analysis. Yeah. You can't make a perfect decision with no actual experience. (I chose my current car by going to an auto show and sitting in a bunch of cars. The one I bought hadn't even been on my radar until I got into it and had a visceral "this will do fine" reaction.)
I've ordered a Cambridge CXN v2. There's a good review of it from John Darko, and another one from Andrew Robinson (if you increase the playback speed to 1.5X, Andrew will talk as fast as Doug Demuro). The Cambridge is on backorder at B&H Photo, so it's going to be a wait before it gets here.
But my system will be bone-simple at first: streamer/preamp > power amp > speakers. If I want to add CDs, there's even a matching CD transport** from Cambridge I could add.
So I'll just "get my hands dirty," figuratively speaking of course, and set things up and see how it works. If I like the CXN v2, I'll tell you about the experience at some future date.
Thanks for all the help and the good links the other day. Especially, but not exclusively, to those who recommended the Cambridge or who sent me to primers or what I used to call "backgrounders" on digital streaming. I also bought File Based Audio aka. [sic] Streaming Audio by Hans Beekhuyzen, another YouTube star.
And I'm feeling a little better today.
Mike
*Amazon calls CD-quality files "HD" and hi-res files "UHD," the U meaning "ultra." Normally, HD means higher-than-CD quality. Amazon Music HD, which is a great choice for your computer-connected headphone or desktop system, provides UHD files as well as HD, and everything is at least HD.
**A "transport" is the part of a CD player that has the drawer and spins the disc. The other part of a CD player is the digital to analog converter, or DAC, and the CXN v2 already has a DAC in it.
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Patrick Dodds: "Well, I didn't understand a word of that but you seem happy which is the main thing."
Mike replies: I certainly sympathize. I was going to lampoon the "information" sites on this topic by extracting several quotes and replacing every word I don't know with "[verb]" and "[noun]" and every unfamiliar acronym with "XXX," to try to communicate how opaque and obscure most of this sounds to me...it's been a struggle, as I said earlier, getting up the steep first part of the learning curve. I'm getting there, but it's been painful. "The world of 'things,'" as Benjamin Marks's brother put it (from his comment in the Comments section), was certainly simpler to suss out.
[Ed. Note: Someone said in the comments that musicians don't get very much income from streaming. I've looked and looked for the comment but I just can't find it, and I'm giving up.However, by chance, the intensely chipper young couple at Two Cents have done a video about just that question, called "What's the Best Way to Support Musicians?" Here it is.]
[...Also, don't forget Zoe Heller's famous interview with Mick Jagger, which might be the "last word" on the topic. There's a short, easy-to-digest summary at Mises and you can link to the full article from there if you like.]
We look where we can for consolations in isolation: reading or looking at books, projects like organizing and printing our photographs—and of course, music.
Just wanted to register how very happy I am that Robert Pillow mentioned Amazon Music HD (AMHD) in the comments section the other day (see the Featured Comments to the "No More Vintage Audio" post). I'm sure various mentions of it had flown like darting swallows through my field of view since it came on the scene, but none had penetrated my consciousness until Robert mentioned it. Anyway, I signed up for the free trial and and have been happily listening to CD-quality and higher res files since.
I'll note that implementation matters more than format with recorded music—I'd rather listen to a well-recorded and transferred CD-quality file from a 1940s original (check out the Lester Young playlist, for example, which I had to listen to all the way through before turning in last night) than a poorly recorded, compressed modern file at 24 bits/96 kHz, the highest resolution my aging (but lovely) DAC will decode*. AMHD goes all the way to 24/192**.
If you don't know what those numbers mean, there's a very good explanation of the basics of digital audio from Mark Furneaux. He originally recorded it for a particular friend, but later published it for everyone. As you may know, I think that targeting content as though you're doing it for a friend is an effective stance for presenting information and opinion. :-)
Note also that there are various ways to stream AMHD to an existing stereo system without it coming directly from your computer, but in all such cases I can decipher, it downrezzes the files to CD-quality 16 bits/44.1 kHz. Although Amazon calls CD-quality "HD," for high-definition, because no other streaming services have it for all their offerings, most other humans call higher-than-CD-quality files "HD," and you give up those high-res capabilities if you use Bluetooth or something like the Echo Link.
However, just replacing MP3 and MP4 with 16/44.1 in my desktop system makes a decisive upgrade—I re-sorted my system and reset the sub, and have been enjoying music even more than usual in recent days. One discovery: Rejoice, the swan song of the late South African flugelhornist Hugh Masekala and the late Nigerian drummer Tony Allen, Fela Kuti's former music director. A lovely tribute to the two friends and a superbly good-sounding recording too.
Amazon says AMHD has over 60 million cuts in CD-quality 16/44.1, and millions more in higher resolutions and bit depths. The cost is $12.99/month for Prime members or $14.99/month for Amazon customers. Existing Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers (Individual or Family Plan) can upgrade to Amazon Music HD for an additional $5/month. I can't quite suss this out, but I believe the AMHD trial period is 30 days if you're already an Amazon Music subscriber and 90 days if you're new to Amazon Music altogether. Go to this page and be sure to click "Learn More" to explicitly see the duration of the free trial period you're going to get.
My lifetime fave classic-rock musician, despite being the quintessential hippie and an old folkie, is also an outspoken champion of high-resolution audio***. Neil Young says this of Amazon Music HD: "Earth will be changed forever when Amazon introduces high quality streaming to the masses. This will be the biggest thing to happen in music since the introduction of digital audio 40 years ago."
Good by me. Highly recommended! Try it for yourself.
Mike
*There are better DACs for less nowadays. Again, I try not to recommend things I haven't actually heard, but you might want to investigate the Topping brand.
**There's a strong strain of "you can't hear a difference" people in hi-fi—all amplifiers sound the same, all wires sound the same, loudspeakers are identical as long as their response curves are flat, etc.—and not only can they not hear a difference between Redbook CD resolution and anything higher, but they say, with the conviction available to True Believers, that no human can. I say those folks are damn lucky, because they can buy any old amp and any old wires, and also, please shut up. [Edited later to: ...please have more tolerance for people who don't share your beliefs.]
***He even launched his own crowdfunded high-res streaming service, Pono, in 2015, but had to pull the plug on it in 2017.
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Little Richard, 1932–2020: Richard Wayne Penniman, much better known as Little Richard, died yesterday of stomach cancer.
Little Richard was an inaugural inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. At the ceremony he was called a "living embodiment of the music's roots in the 'fifties." Paul McCartney patterned his rock vocal style after Little Richard's. Mick Jagger said, "when we were on tour with him I would watch his moves every night and learn from him how to entertain and involve the audience, and he was always so generous with advice to me." Jimi Hendrix, who played in Little Richard's band The Upsetters when he was young, once said, "I want to do with my guitar what Little Richard does with his voice."
The photo Mick Jagger posted on his Twitter feed yesterday
Terence McArdle, writing in The Washington Post, said, "He had an incalculable influence on the frenetic attitude of rock music, long after his heyday and his extended forays into religious music. He saw his sound and its feeling of howling abandon as rock incarnate. As he often said, 'My music made your liver quiver, your bladder splatter, your knees freeze—and your big toe shoot right up in your boot!'"
Lee Konitz
Lee Konitz 1927–2020: Alto saxophonist and jazz great Lee Konitz won't see Summer. He died in the middle of April from pneumonia as a complication of COVID-19.
He was important from the 1950s on and has a huge discography, but if you'd like a taste, try the live trio records he did with the young Brad Meldau and Charlie Haden in '96 and '97, such as Another Shade of Blue and, especially, Alone Together, his first album for the famous Blue Note label, recorded live at the Jazz Bakery in Los Angeles in 1996. Stephen Thomas Erlewine at AllMusic wrote, "Alone Together, Lee Konitz's first recording for Blue Note, is a special event. The saxophonist teamed up with legendary bassist Charlie Haden and young lion pianist Brad Mehldau, and the trio's interaction on this set of relaxed bop is astonishing. On paper, the music on Alone Together—a collection of standards—should just be straightahead cool bop, but all three musicians are restless and inventive, making even the simplest numbers on the disc vibrant, lively and adventurous.
"It's a wonderful record, one that makes a convincing argument that Konitz remains a vital force even as he reached his seventieth year."
P.S. If you've ever wondered why jazz sounds the way it does, and why some of it might be hard for you to listen to, I recommend "The 7 Levels of Jazz Harmony" from Adam Neely. And I'll just point out that it can be hard to hear above your level. —Mike, mainly a poblano pepper dude
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James: "Whilst living in England in the '70s, I saw Little Richard at the Odeon Lewisham. He was absolutely fantastic! After the opening song ended and he started talking to the audience, guys were shouting out...'we can't hear the piano, we can't hear the piano.' He stopped the show, made all the backing musicians turn down their egos (sorry, I mean amplifiers), and played up a storm for the rest of the evening."
Talk about dizzying. My old friend Kim was a late-late-night disc jockey on the old WHFS in D.C. way back when there were actually such things as "underground" radio stations. He had a midnight-to-dawn show that centered on new music. And by that he meant that once a new band just started to get popular at all, that was it—time to move on.
He also made tapes for his friends. Driving in the '80s meant a music tour with Kim as tourguide, via cassette tape. I've probably been the recipient of 400 mixed tapes, CDs, and online programs over the years, and that's probably an under-count. But when Kim gets his groove on—man, it's hard for him to stop.
Try the latest program (actually it's not the latest any more—he publishes a torrent of mixes) online. It's called "Light Rain Blues"—a Taj Mahal song title from the midst of the mix. The segues take more swoops and turns than a roller coaster, changing direction like a ricochet. I mean, how can a dj possibly segue from "Cashew" by Venetian Snares to "I Never Knew" by Warne Marsh? In an hour-long "radio show" that also includes Taj and Talking Heads? But listen to the handoff—it works, or at least it does for me. (I loved this mix, which is why I'm posting.)
If it gets weird for you, you hang on and wait till that cut is over...just like you would on a roller-coaster.
Kim is inherently a challenge for anyone who claims to like all kinds of music. This one contains a song that seems to be based on fart sounds, and it's not close to his weirdest mix. You had to have what the jazz musicians call "big ears" to listen to Kim's old show on HFS.
Really too bad about what's happened to radio. It's not a shadow of what it once was. But then, that's true of everyone in the end.
Kim was a gifted color photographer too but he was maybe a Bartleby type...who "preferred not to" chase riches 'n' renown. (He will be the Vivian Maier of 2050.) In his photographs, first, you always had to look for the purple. (I'm kind of kidding him, but look carefully at the "cover image" of "Light Rain Blues" at the link.) His ride is a color-coordinated BMW motorcycle*. Wish I had a picture.
*Alternate title for this post: "Who Was That Masked Man on the Color-Coordinated BMW?"
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Ed Wolpov: "Living in Bethesda since the mid '70s, I remember WHFS well. And, since you mentioned Taj Mahal, here’s a picture that I took at the Fillmore East in NYC circa 1968 of Taj."
Taj Mahal by Ed Wolpov
Gibeault Marc: "Thanks to you I’ve enjoyed Kim’s mixes for several years. Always enjoyable and satisfying. And a very nice guy too, I once asked for the name of a band on one mix where there was no attribution and he went to great lengths to find who it was and where I could get it. Also, I find every illustration he chooses for a mix 'cover art' intriguing, perfect and beautiful."
Michael Dunne: "Is there any way to find out what the playlist is (I can't see a way). There's plenty here I'd like to follow up."
Mike replies: Apparently some people can see it but I can't either. I've been around and around on this with both Kim and MixCloud. What I did was to download the Shazam app on my iPhone, which can "listen" to any music and identify it. It's surprisingly good and is seldom stumped (although Kim stumps it occasionally). You also can't back up while listening to the mixes, so don't wait until the end of the song to use the app.
Need a pick-me up? This is wonderful. Always loved this song.
This was posted in September of last year in honor of the 50th anniversary, in 2018, of the song's release in August of 1968.
This is a great version. Let's dedicate this to John Prine, who died of COVID-19 yesterday.
Mike (Thanks to Steve Rosenblum and KeithB)
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Thomas Walsh: "This is a fabulous video. Playing for Change has long been a favorite of mine. This concept of promoting the universality of music is, in my very humble opinion, the essence of humanity. One of my favorites, that can be found on YouTube, is the rendition that Playing for Change does of 'Everyday People'—definitely worth a listen. When I taught, I would play this song for my classes. Thank you, Mike, for this post. Stay well."
Robert Fogt: "I crossed paths with John Prine just briefly, in freshman algebra class at Proviso East High School. The teacher was something of a hard-ass, and would seat the miscreants at the very back of the class, or 'Ghost Row.' He would then not call on you in class, or collect your homework, until your parents came to the next PTA meeting to 'redeem your lost souls.' (After which all that homework was immediately due.)
"I spent some time in that back row, placed a few seats away from John, but would notice him scribbling (presumably verse?) in the margins of his textbook pages, until he would eventually write himself to sleep. I can still hear the teacher yelling at him, 'Prine, you idiot...wake up!' So I guess, with even just a tiny bit of hindsight, it should have been obvious that he was destined for greatness. (And I still like to think that his 'Sweet Revenge' album cover grew, at least in part, out of that semester.)"
Duncan: "Steven Colbert showed this after he heard that John had been hospitalized and placed on a ventilator. It was recorded in 2016 but never aired. It is eerie how Colbert introduces the song."
Mike replies: That got a few tears from me. Simple and beautiful. He sure has a distinctive picking style. Colbert did a good job too. Thanks.
SteveW: "That was terrific, thank you for posting it. So positive and refreshing, just what the doctor ordered."
["Open Mike" is the anything-goes, often off-topic Editorial Page of TOP. It appears on Wednesdays.]
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Almost everybody loved the Beatles. A notable exception seems to have been John Lennon, who on many occasions disparaged and belittled the band he'd founded as a teenager. One of the many things he eventually came to dislike about his band was its name, with its cutesy confabulation of the word "beat" (which had connotations of both the beat poetry scene of the preceding decade and the musical backbeat of rock'n'roll) and scuttling little bugs. While it was just about the perfect early '60s band name—remember, they started out as essentially a "boy band"—toward the end of the decade Lennon wanted the band to have a harder edge, and wished they had an edgier, cooler name. By then, of course, it was simply their name, and names eventually do take on the luster of the things they signify even if they started out being fairly cringeworthy. (Exhibit: Led Zeppelin. As in, "that went over like a....")
Naming bands has always been a tricky business, with a peculiar alchemy. So many great bands have had terrible names that it's hard even to know where to start—maybe with the band that took its name from a jokey, sexist, borderline lewd sign in a furniture-store window that said "For You Bedroom Needs, We Have Everything But the Girl." And of course many bands started with awful names and came to their senses—Simon and Garfunkel notoriously started out as "Tom and Jerry"—a cartoon cat and mouse for those of you who don't know—and a band called "Mookie Blaylock" eventually become Pearl Jam. The studio that put out one band's first single simply hated the band's name—"The Pendletons"—so much that it gave them a new name without even telling them. That's how The Beach Boys came to be.
Some musicians just give up. One famous band called themselves, uhh, The Band, because that's how Dylan used to introduce them when they were backing him. They were, you know, "the band." It would appear you couldn't get any more basic than that, but you could, as The The later showed.
There are many great band names too, of course. It's hard to get more elemental than Earth, Wind and Fire; De La Soul ("of the soul") and The Velvet Underground are great names, as are Talking Heads, Black Sabbath (which came from a 1963 Boris Karloff horror flick) and Black Flag too for that matter; The Sex Pistols, God Hates Ugly, Dixie Chicks, Public Enemy, The Smiths (a name which is "unforgettably mopey, just like their music," as Joe Daly pointed out), and Fugazi are a few of many good ones. There's a jazz band called Snarky Puppy. The Los Angeles band X not only had the perfect generic name but a singer named John Doe too. As far as I'm concerned, all names that are sly double entendres or masked references to anything pornographic or sexual are out—too easy; everybody does that. It's too much the standard move. Of course, a huge number of bands had jokey or punny names, like JFKFC, but let's not paddle down that tributary or we'll get gone for good.
X (and Exene Cervenka's cat) in 1980
The two best band names ever, in my humble opinion—the names with the most resonance, poetry, dignity, and portent—are The Rolling Stones and The Grateful Dead.
Everybody knows what a rolling stone is—one that gathers no moss, according to the ancient adage. And the original tabloid for the music had the same name, so the resonance of the name extended beyond the band. The aphorism comes all the way from the Latin writer Publilius Syrus by way of the Renaissance scholar Erasmus, who was apparently the first to specifically use the metaphor of a rolling stone. Mythbusters actually put the phrase to the test, rolling a stone for six months. Sure enough, no moss! Thanks guys. The proverb of Syrus translates thusly: "People who are always moving, with no roots in one place or another, avoid responsibilities and cares."
The Temptations (good band name? I can't tell) spell it out, verse upon verse, in their song "Papa Was a Rolling Stone":
Papa was a rolling stone Wherever he laid his hat was his home. And when he died, all he left us was alone.
Great line, that last—"all he left us was alone."
The Grateful Dead is another matter. There are various origin stories. Most say Jerry Garcia turned to it by accident in a dictionary at Phil Lesh's house one night and knew right away it was perfect. Retrospectively, they found a beautiful segment from the Egyptian Book of the Dead:
We now return our souls to the creator, as we stand on the edge of eternal darkness. Let our chant fill the void in order that others may know. In the land of the night the ship of the sun is drawn by the grateful dead.
Plenty of band names make no sense. The Byrds weren't birds, although maybe they sang like them; but beetles can't sing, and there's no such thing as an electric prune. But for some reason the name "Grateful Dead" seemed like a brain-teaser to me 45 years ago when I first heard it. I always wondered what it could really mean. There's a fable about a kindly man seeing to the burial of a stranger's neglected corpse, and the spirit of the one who the body belonged to returns to do favors for the kindly man. But that was never a satisfactory answer to me—I have a knee-jerk tendency to dismiss supernatural explanations. I don't just sorta-kinda not believe in ghosts, I really don't believe in ghosts. YMMV. Maybe "grateful dead" was just meant to be nonsensical, like Jefferson Airplane or Iron Butterfly. Still, I puzzled over it from time to time—why in the world would they dead be grateful? How could they be? What could that possibly mean? I'm not saying I thought about it every year or even every decade, but there are hundreds of questions like that that are still alive in the far back of my mind, some of them surviving all the way from childhood. I really like to know what's really going on.
This answer I finally got. The other night I was standing in the darkness while the dogs sniffed the ground and did their business, and I could see my late neighbor and friend Pete's green house light through the still-bare trees. Pete liked his green house light—was the light across the bay in The Great Gatsby green? I don't recall. I had been fretting about the cornonavirus too much all that day. Pete died two years ago at just about this time of year—he had a heart attack in the middle of the night. Seeing the green light through the woods, the thought popped into my head that at least Pete doesn't have to deal with all this coronavirus stuff....
And that's when it hit me, like a brick. That's the reason the dead are grateful—because they don't have to worry about dying. Jerry Garcia will never care if the Feds confiscate the ventilators from his local hospital!
Anyway, I started writing this post four days ago, and I still can't think of any better band names than The Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead. They may be out there, though. Or still to come. The naming of bands is a mysterious art, seldom done just right.
Mike
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Paul McEvoy (partial comment): "You can't talk about the Rolling Stones' name without talking about Muddy Waters. I'm not even sure Muddy Waters would have been familiar with the phrase. It's quite possibly something he invented. But regardless, that's why the Rolling Stones are called that."
Steve Jacob: "I like Jethro Tull, named after an 18th-century engineer who perfected the seed plough. Electric Light Orchestra is just a rather nice pun.
"Also, a lot from literature and movies: Black Sabbath, after a Boris Karloff horror movie. Blue Oyster Cult, an underground alien movement in Pearlman's poems. The Doors, after Aldous Huxley's TheDoors of Perception. King Crimson, a reference to the Devil in Milton's Paradise Lost. Moody Blues, a nod to Duke Ellington's Mood Indigo. Mott the Hoople, a novel by Willard Manus. Steely Dan, the name of a phallic steamship from William Burroughs' Naked Lunch! Supertramp, from The Autobiography of a Super-tramp by WH Davies. Uriah Heap was formed on the 100th anniversary of Dickens' birthday."
Greg Heins: "'Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And then one fine morning—
"'So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.'"
Graeme Scott (partial comment): "Some band names from the north east of England in the eighties: 'HDQ' (Hung, Drawn and Quartered I think), 'Crucified By Christians,' 'Hellbastard,' and 'Legion of Parasites.' Also remember a friend having a 7" single with about 50 tracks on it by a band called 'Anal C--t.' The UB40 was the card you presented when you went to 'sign on' fortnightly at the Unemployment Benefit Office. I had a UB40 before I even left school (1980): My area had the highest level of unemployment in mainland Britain so the benefits people figured that no 16-year-old leaving school stood a cat in hell's chance of getting a job, and visited schools in order to hand out UB40's to the kids who were about to leave. I'll bet pretty much everyone in the aforementioned bands was in possession of a UB40. Today I'm about to furlough myself from our business (not much work due to COVID) so it's back to UB40 world for the time being."
Mike replies: I always think of Basehead when I think of UB40, even though they're not that similar.
Russell Scheid: "'A-ha.' Shortened from 'A-ha, I've got the perfect name for a band! ;-) "
["Open Mike" is the everything goes, often off-topic editorial page of TOP, wherein the hounds are released! It appears on Wednesdays. Note for this week: I'm just having a little fun here, so please don't take this personally. Gotta keep myself entertained too.]
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RayC wrote: "Okay, I’ll play. I admit I was taken aback by the statement: 'It's a middlebrow conceit to say "I like everything!" in a chipper voice, which to real music aficionados means that music isn't very important to that person.'
Fortunately it was good to see in the comments that I am not alone in having an 'important' relationship to music, but it is a bit eclectic as well as encompassing various forms of jazz, pop and rock from the '40s on. So many of the artists mentioned ticked those boxes. One that I haven’t seen mentioned and perhaps further solidifies my middlebrowness (?) is Jimmy Buffett, whose music just makes me happy. Not an amazing musician but a very good songwriter and, even better perhaps, a great bandleader who often mixes genres and includes band members like Mac McAnally who is just amazing on his own."
Mike replies: Yep, I've gotten a few complaints for saying that, probably from people who are in the habit of saying they like everything. And that's okay, because we know what you mean. But in reality, "liking everything" wouldn't just mean that you're eclectic and listen across genres—we all do that—or that you have a few guilty pleasures such as Jimmy Buffett; most of us probably have some of those, too. (I can't think of one of mine, unless it's Jacques Loussier.)
If you truly like everything, I have some assignments for you that you'll enjoy. (And by "you" I don't mean you, Ray, just the proposed hypothetical person who says s/he likes everything.)
First, listen to Metal Machine Music—loud. Because you like it, you'll want to go on to enjoy the quarter-speed version, and you'll listen intently to the whole four and a quarter hours of it. Also loud. Without distracting yourself with a screen or a book—no cheating.
I'll wait.
Finished? Still like everything? Okay then, we're good.
As an interlude, it's too easy to throw in some happy celebration of low talent like Green Jelly doing "Three Little Pigs" or—a double whammy of dubiousness—William Hung's cover of "Achy-Breaky Heart." (William enjoyed 15 minutes of fame for his campy badness on American Idol years ago. It was always ambiguous whether he actually understood the nature of his own appeal, which was a big part of the joke.) But that would be too easy. Instead, we'll have you listen to the great William Shatner's interpretation of Bernie Taupin's "Rocket Man," which, as the video shows us, Bernie was forced to sit through. Note the thespian chops as the man who brought Captain Kirk to life goes all-in selling the emotion of "high as a kite by then." Gives you chills, doesn't it?
Don't think you get off there. That's just one song. No. Your assignment is to familiarize yourself so thoroughly with Shatner's discography that you can make a cogent case for the three best (which might, of course, mean worst) of his albums. You'll enjoy the process—it's all about the process.
Next we're off to Edgar Varèse's Poème Électronique, during which you may not think of farts. (Note the first comment: "Who is here because of a class?") But since that's too short—you were just getting into the groove—we'll pair it with John Cage's Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano, one of his most appreciated pieces. The hour-plus of that should satiate the craving in you triggered by the Varèse.
Extra credit: write a five-page paper comparing and contrasting the Cage with Gamelan percussion music, which you also like.
Next up on our concert tour—Teletubbies!! For a whole hour. Hey, you're the one who said you like everything.
After an hour of that, continue the "relaxing" a.k.a. mindless vibe with an hour and 40 minutes of Kenny G serving up cruise-ship music. Alternately, throw yourself into the sea.
At this point, readers might be saying, hey, I like soothing Kenny G music! I have some on in the background right now. What's wrong with it? Or, I've listened carefully to John Cage's prepared piano three times over thirty years and I think it's innovative and important, and you're a Philistine. Both of which sentiments are fine. But...both? Together? From the same person? Would one individual say both those things? Calculate the odds. So then...beginning to appreciate my point?
Billies A person who likes everything has to have, pardon the allusion, catholic taste, small "c." If you like Christian folk such as The All Saved Freak Band, presumably you might also like Abbess Hildegard of Bingen, Christian music from eight centuries earlier. (Or maybe you like Hildegard because you're on board with Lilith Fair and she was a very early female composer.) But, because you like everything, you also disapproved (on artistic grounds) when Ice-T removed "Cop Killer" from Body Count, and you're way into Scandinavian Satanic bands like Beherit and Zyklon-B. Contradiction? What contradiction? It's only music.
You see no reason to prefer Justin Bieber over Eminem or vice-versa—and you like Vanilla Ice too, for that matter. And Vanilla Fudge. And Public Enemy and Drake. You like both Billie Holiday and Billie Eilish, naturally, because who wouldn't?
But back to the tour. How far will you make it through Alphonso und Estrella, one of Franz Schubert's 16 operas that have, as one critic delicately put it, "failed to hold the stage" (i.e., are seldom performed)? It has some nice things in it. Unless you don't like opera. But, of course, you do.
When I think of Schubert I always think of Gérard Depardieu breaking the fourth wall in Bertrand Blier's Too Beautiful for You by noticing the soundtrack and exclaiming "Schubert!" in exasperation....
We won't even get into experimental music. For example, Paul Lansky based his "Night Traffic" on recordings of...well, cars going by. For "Deep Listening" (the musical piece—the term also expressed her ethos), the late Pauline Oliveros took various instruments into a cavernous empty cistern deep underground that had an exceptionally long sound decay. (This piece can be a spiritual experience under carefully controlled listening conditions, such as, late at night with no interruptions, in a state of meditative concentration.) Or one of my personal favorites (no joke, I love these) the early Bass Communion v. Muslimgauze collaborations.
We also won't make you listen to a bunch of "outside" jazz. Or some gorgeous Ludovico Einaudi. (I didn't get to minimalism.)
The point, at the risk of being obvious Think I can't go on? Oh, I could go on. We haven't touched country. Or show tunes. Or campfire singalongs. Or marching band music. Or Lo-Fi. Or Edith Piaf or piano rolls. Post-punk. Howe Gelb. Polkas. Quick, name all the subgenres of electronica. Sheet-music hits from the early 1900s. Brit-Pop. Field blues. Renaissance polyphony. Novelty music and parodies. Dance music and drone music. Thrash metal and ambient. Film scores. Dub and Ska.
We haven't even scratched the surface. Music is much larger than whatever small subset you've been calling everything. You could spend ten years, and incredible amounts of time and attention, just exploring and learning one kind of music—post-war orchestral music, for example, or early computer music, or bluegrass—or just one little aspect of music, like drumming, or guitar building. There are guys who know more about jazz than I know about anything. More than I know about myself. I know that, because my friend Artie, who died a few years ago now, was one of those people who remember every little detail about every day of their lives and can never forget it (called hyperthymesia), and Artie knew many things about me that had completely left my own head. He remembered everything about any way in which his life had intersected with mine, even though that overlap was fairly limited. It's a weird experience hearing things about yourself you don't remember, and then having it come back into your consciousness gradually over the next half-day. So I know I don't know all there is to know about me, despite my having been me for all these years. And you think you like everything? You don't know everything. You're not in the ballpark. You don't even know everything about one thing, where music is concerned.
If you liked all of the above, though (heck, just if you listened to the Zorn and Welk links clear through to the end—I think I'd tell the cops whatever they wanted to know long before that), you win—you were right, you like everything!
Otherwise, stop saying that.
Mike (Thanks to Dan W., RayC, and, as always, Kim, for making my originally average ears bigger)
P.S. I have to admit I actually sorta enjoyed a whole lot of the stuff I compiled here, even the self-parodizing Schubert opera. I'll stick to my guns, though—not only do I not like everything, I don't even like all the songs on The White Album.
Please let me know if any of the links are bad!
Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
Robin Dreyer: "I’m worried that it’s not even February, and you’ve already had the most fun you are going to have this year."
Bob G.: "Absolutely hilarious! I couldn’t stop laughing...an essay worthy of the New Yorker, for sure. One question on the assignment—what should our physical state of mind be to listen to the selections? I saw Lawrence Welk in Scranton after a more than a few tokes once, and Makers Mark seems to work with Captain Beefheart...."
Stuart Dootson: "Shatner? Has Been, followed by Seeking Major Tom, followed by (I guess) The Transformed Man. That's just my preference, though!"
Jim Simmons: "Brilliant essay today! When I was in grad school and procrastinating from doing my work, I'd go to the library and listen to their collection of ethnographic records of field recordings of music from the South Pacific, Africa, and other non-western music traditions. Some of it was nearly impossible for my unsophisticated ears to listen to, but it was often mesmerising."
Mark Roberts: "If you're going to listen to Metal Machine Music be sure to get the Dolby 5.1 surround remix issued a couple of years back. Might as well go all the way, right?"
Ken Bennett: "I'm just going to leave this here:
"It features the best atonal banjo solo I have ever heard. :-) "
Mike replies: I don't usually like novelty songs, but that's funny and wonderful, especially the timed silence. Thanks.
Dennis: "Last year, I read This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin. Most of it made sense at the time, but much of it was far enough outside my realm of knowledge that the details didn't stick. But our brains end up wired to respond to music and much of that wiring happens when we're very young. We 'get' chords; we respond to major chords and minor chords differently; we anticipate sequences that return to their starting point and so on. And people who grow up listening to Eastern, rather than Western music end up wired differently, attuned to different chord structures.
"I imagine that if you drew a circle that represented all music, you'd find some people who enjoy a narrow slice that represents classical and others enjoy a narrow slice that represents jazz. Some of us have a hard time characterizing our tastes, preferring an 'eclectic mix' as you say—but instead of a narrow slice, I'd have a number of little blobs spread out across what would still probably be a fairly narrow portion of the circle. A little of this, a little of that, but not much of a lot of other stuff.
"I think that's the issue—how do you answer the question 'what music do you like?' When you like an eclectic mix; a little of this and a little of that? It's been said that your playlist is a window to your soul."
Mike replies: Your comment speaks to the core of much of these issues. Not only do we "get" chords and so forth, but we also have a remarkable innate sense of internal consistency—a feeling that strategies from one genre just don't "belong" in another. I thought of this in the Masterclass ad for Deadmau5, where he says "Using an SSL G-series compressor on a dance music kick makes no f------ sense whatsoever." Even though almost all of EDM seems immaterial to me, because it doesn't move me or interest me intellectually, naturally he has a strong sense of its internal consistency. We also see this in the proliferating lists of subgenres used by critics. Both Mozart and Beethoven were criticized for doing things "you can't do"—they were pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable in the soundworlds of their day, even though they seem very familiar (and not very "out there") to us today.
That internal consistency makes for some bizarre twists occasionally. I learned a while ago that a number of country artists are "volitional" artists—they're not actually from the country and they don't (or didn't originally) actually speak in a Southern drawl or a Western twang. They adopt those characteristics to get along in the genre they want to be included in. Much like the comedian who created the character "Larry the Cable Guy"—there are videos of him early in his career dressed in slacks and speaking without any accent whatsoever. I asked a guy at my Pool League match last night who the singer of the country hit "Wagon Wheel" ("hey, mama rock me"—that one) is, and I was mildly amazed to learn that it's Darius Rucker, the black former lead singer of the rock band Hootie and the Blowfish. Turns out he reinvented himself as a country artist back in 2008.
The question of "what kind of music do you listen to" is quite similar to the question "what kind of photographer are you," which I never quite knew how to answer.
Hank: "You've name-checked almost all of my heroes. You forgot Conlon Nancarrow."
Mike replies: I enjoyed that. I also appreciated the comment under that video written by Gus Cairns:
"When people rant on about 'This isn't music' I just invite them to think of the list of much more celebrated composers who cite Nancarrow as an influence—everyone from Gyorgy Ligeti to John Adams. Also: try to imagine it in a context, as a piece of music with a practical use such as a film score. It's often Hollywood and TV that actually takes avant-garde music and places it into popular culture—Bernard Herrmann is the best known example of a serious avant-garde composer who also wrote popular film scores such as Psycho. Ligeti of course ended up in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Stockhausen writes stuff that would be perfect for SF films—Xenakis would be certain for perfect horror films—where would Nancarrow fit in? Well, imagine him as the score for a Tom and Jerry cartoon. John Adams wrote a whole chamber symphony in homage to cartoon music, and Nancarrow's music, with its zany pratfalls and jagged assaults, is there in the roots of that style. Lastly, this is the Deep End of Nancarrow. You might want to try the orchestrations of some of his earlier studies first before telling us he's not music."
Arg: "Reading your introductory words, I thought you were picking on me for my tendency to say, 'I like every genre of music, because, in my experience, there is great music to be found in every genre.' I usually find myself saying so in reply to the not-uncommon pronouncement along the lines, "I hate (e.g. rap) music.' But then I realized that you were ridiculing a position by taking it in extremis, which includes 'the most literal possible interpretations.'"
Mike replies: Yep. Guilty as charged. Vince laid out the real situation well in his comment. As far as greatness in every genre, I like the art critic Peter Schjeldahl's stance—when faced with art he doesn't like, he asks himself, what would I like about this if I liked it? My friend Kim will engage with music he hates until he's satisfied that he can separate the good from the great from the bad. It's as though his goal is to understand it. Then again, he can really only listen to music a few times before he has to move on. My own goal is to find high points...I'm a connoisseur, not a critic and not catholic. For example, I love "Every Picture Tells a Story" but no other Rod Stewart album, "Post-War" but no other M. Ward album, and "'Sno Angel Like You" but no other Howe Gelb album. My approach would be anathema to many music lovers and I know that.
I suppose a lot of people don't. It's a middlebrow conceit to say "I like everything!" in a chipper voice, which to real music aficionados means that music isn't very important to that person. Nobody who loves music likes everything. Their likes are strong, and their dislikes are strong too—they have what we call opinions. The only way everything can be equivalent is if one doesn't have much discrimination, which is another way to say taste.
I have a friend who has devoted a lot of his life to his love of music, and he once had to quit a job because the background music they piped in over the intercoms annoyed him so much. He'd mention it to his co-workers, and they'd say, "what music?" They weren't even hearing it. My friend couldn't not hear it.
Hank Jones in 1985. Photo by Brian McMillen, CC BY-SA 4.0.
There are two ways we come to things that are central to us in life—by birth (meaning, through the culture in which we are raised, which doesn't always apply just to the values of our immediate families), or by volition or conscious acquisition. I can never remember who it was—some French intellectual, I think—who said that when he discovered Buddhism for the first time, he realized he had been a Buddhist all his life. It became his religion by volition.
I was born in 1957, was a child through the '60s, and grew up on what's now called "classic rock." The first record album I owned was Something New by the Beatles (which included "Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand," which was "I Want to Hold Your Hand" sung in German—in both mono and stereo, no less). In my 20s I taught myself to like classical music, which had figured very little in my upbringing, although my mother professed to like Chopin and had a lot of Chopin records, which I never knew her to listen to. My father bought a Philco console for the kitchen / breakfast room. He liked trumpet music—Al Hirt, a popular trumpet virtuoso, was a particular favorite. He also liked what's sometimes called "schmaltz"—one name I remember was a band called the Percy Faith Strings, which I did not like at all.
Radio radio My life changed when I discovered FM radio. My father had a beautiful radio, a Zenith Trans-Oceanic 3000-1, which he let me listen to but not commandeer; it was self-casing and had an antenna in the handle, a really beautiful thing. I had a little Japanese portable transistor radio that was a little larger than a pack of cigarettes, a dull orange in color. No memory of the make or model. I used to fall asleep every night lying on my side with with it balanced on my ear, listening to rock and pop at low volumes on the local FM stations.
But I came to realize late in life that although many of my musical touchstones are rock and pop, and rock and pop accompanied me through much of my walk through life, I don't actually really like it all that much. Yes, there are many things I love. But I would pick and choose among bands and musicians and then pick and choose among their work, and I finally realized I was never really engaging completely except in fastidiously choosy ways (for instance, I loved Neil Young's music but certainly not all of Neil Young's music). I usually felt a little apart from it. I have some friends now who are really into rock, and they're much more wholehearted about it than I ever managed to be.
My brother Scott, in the 1980s, introduced me to my real love—jazz. Specifically, American jazz centered on the years around my birth—call it 1955 to 1959 give or take. Although I'll listen to any jazz from the earliest beginnings to the present day, and have great favorites scattered throughout the canon, there is something very special about late 1950s hard bop that just hits me where I live. It's a halcyon period, an historical high point in my opinion that's the equal of the high baroque or the classical period of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. The great albums released in '55 to '59 (and many of the albums released in years before and after) includes a cornucopia of masterpieces, and the standard in general is very high.
If I had to exclude any of it, I'd be very unhappy. But as for favorite musicians—among all musicians, not just jazz musicians—I have two. Hank Jones is one and Coleman Hawkins is the other. Both lived long lives and were remarkable in their sustained artistry.
Hank, a pianist of surpassing mastery and impeccable taste, was active from the late 1940s (he was Ella Fitzgerald's accompanist beginning in 1948) until his death in 2010. You could base a whole record collection around his solo albums (more than 60!) and the albums on which he played, which are innumerable. His Great Jazz Trio records with Ron Carter and Tony Williams are especially treasurable, although my favorite is Bluesette. (My only problem with Bluesette is that I have to dole it out to myself, listening no more than once a year, if that, because I want to keep it fresh.) Much of his original material and master tapes were destroyed in the catastrophic 2008 Universal fire. But we have a great deal of it on existing recordings.
Coleman Hawkins, who was known as "Hawk" or "Bean," played mainly tenor saxophone. He was active starting in 1921 and was enjoying a spectacular autumnal flourishing late in his career in the late 1950s, recording Coleman Hawkins Encounters Ben Webster and The Hawk Flies High (with Hank Jones on piano) in 1957. He had a great interest late in life in new styles and younger musicians, and adapted to the changing times when many older swing-era musicians couldn't or didn't want to. A prime example is that he played on Thelonious Monk's great masterpiece Monk's Music with Wilbur Ware, Art Blakey, Gigi Gryce, and John Coltrane, a high point not just of of Monk's catalog, not just of jazz, but of the music of the Western world. Hawk's solos on the record (coincidentally, Riverside's first stereo jazz album) are sublime.
As for Hank, here's a nice little introduction to hm, recorded late in his life, with some rare interviews:
It's curious that neither of my favorite musicians are singers. That must be relatively uncommon. How about you—do you have a particular favorite musician or singer?
Mike
Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
Please help support The Online Photographer throughPatreon
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
Soeren Engelbrecht: I have been a music fan for longer than I have been doing photography. So when the opportunity came around to shoot an album cover, I was over the moon. Here's the result:
"For non-Danish readers: The lyrics of the title track has elements of two nursery rhymes, one of which has the line '...his head facing the wrong way round.'
"To answer your original question: My favourite musician is a Scottish singer called Fish (http://fishmusic.scot) who split with his band Marillion (http://www.marillion.com) in 1989. Since both are still very prolific, I now have two favourite acts. :-) "
Henry Rinne (partial comment): "I rarely think in terms of 'favorite' player. These artists have all made great statements in their music, and I feel that I can listen and accept them without worrying about whether I like them or not, much less trying to decide which one is my favorite. I would always tell my students to leave the 'like' question at the door. Don't even ask it. Open your ears and try to understand what the artist is trying to say. I would approach visual arts the same way. I can learn from so many photographers and painters. The ones that speak to me the most (or the clearest), I will try to internalize and allow their work to influence my own. Great post and as always much appreciated."
mike plews: "Tried to pick a favorite and I just can't. Doc Watson or Jim Hall, just can't do it. But I can drop in a link to seven of the nicest minutes ever seen on network TV:"
Mike replies: That's wonderful. Oscar was a TOP reader, did you know? He was quite a photography enthusiast. Michael interviewed him on L-L.
Dave Millier (partial comment): "What is it about certain genres of music that leave some people rolling orgasmically on the floor in thrall while utterly turning others off? It is idly dismissed as 'taste,' but what does that really mean? Is it what you heard when you were young? (I dismiss that line in my case.) Is it what you've grown used to? (I find that dubious, I grew up listening to a type of music that was all I heard and it left me fairly cold and uninterested in music but the first seconds of hearing early Blondie tracks instantly changed everything about music for me.) Some people get snobbish about it and claim it's to do with musical virtuosity and complexity but that is nonsense for me: I could never stand Led Zep or Deep Purple and they were far more accomplished than the music that moved me). It's a deep puzzler for me: why do some styles of music drive you insane, while others are manna. 'Tis a mysterious thing, musical taste."
JOHN B GILLOOLY: "For me the answer is simple, and in many ways, very important to me. In 7th grade, age 12, early 1984, I succumbed to my cousins' intense personal fandom of U2. They were one and five years older than me and had been fans since the 'beginning'—the Boy album in 1980. (I'm going to play that right now!)
"We were still 3–4 years from Joshua Tree and the band's explosion in popularity. For those years, it still had the cultlike feeling of 'my band.' As kids in their formative years often do, I attached myself, and my brand in a way, to that band. I can still recall where I was and how I listened to many of the later albums, especially Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby.
"And I can honestly say that my 'relationship' with U2 changed the course of my life. I read the U2 books. That got me interested in Irish history and Ireland. One thing leads to another and I'm attending the University College Cork for the 1991–1992 school year. In the fall of 1991, I ride my bike down to HMV in Cork City at midnight on a Tuesday evening for the release of Achtung Baby. I remember listening to it exclusively for months. For me, it rendered all other music outdated.
"Now 36 years later, some 50+ concerts attended, mostly with my cousins, they are still very important to me in that strange way. They were/are one of the few constants in my life. That music has always been there. When I hear it, moments and experiences from decades ago just appear. And to me, that music was just bigger than other music. It was more important. It was important to me in a way that is difficult to describe as an adult? And I have many friends and acquaintances with whom that is the primary thing we share—our mutual 'relationship' with U2.
"In 2015 the story came full circle to an amazing climax. I am at the Boston Garden show in July with my cousin Mike and his family—maybe Mike's 80th show. Bono pulls Mike's 13-year-old son Brian on stage to play guitar for a couple of songs. When I looked at Mike, he had tears streaming down his face. At the end of the second song, after playing side by side with Edge, Bono and Adam, Brian took off the guitar and handed it back to Bono. Bono hesitated—and told him it was his to keep. Here is the sequence of images from that special moment.
"Very happy I had a camera! In this case the Olympus OM-D E-M1!"
A. Dias: "Stunning Hank Jones video/performance!"
Nigel Voak: "I was born in 1957 too, and before I joined the herd listening to the all-conquering Rock of the seventies, I loved the Glen Miller records that my father had. My musical tastes eventually headed back towards Jazz thanks to Pat Metheny. Pat Metheny is my favourite musician. I can still remember vividly the moment in my squalid London flat, listening to a radio program where Phil Collins was playing his favourite music, hearing 'San Lorenzo' by Metheny. The beauty of this track just left me spellbound. The next day I had that record and subsequently all the others too. It also started a musical voyage of discovery concerning this genre.
"Perhaps his later discs do not have that same magic as the ECM recordings, but they are still head and shoulders above much of the music that passes for jazz that gets put out. Of his later productions the two solo guitar albums stand out as does a strangely inspired disc he made with a Polish pop star. I had the chance to speak to my musical hero in Ravenna some years ago when I managed to wrangle a photo pass to a concert. I only had the courage to ask if I could photograph the rehearsal. What do say to one of your heroes? When he plays here in Italy, I always try to catch a date, as his concerts are always wonderful."
Tiny little fun fact: Alanis Morissette's album Jagged Little Pill (1995) has sold more copies than Taylor Swift's entire discography.
Always bringing you the really pertinent news,
Mike
P.S. The purpose of this little post might be to test out the spiffy new ad B&H built exclusively for us...
(If you can't see a link ad with an image above this line, would you let me know please? Thanks!)
Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
David: "What's your source for that fun fact? Just curious."
Jan Steinman: "'Alanis Morissette's album Jagged Little Pill (1995) has sold more copies than Taylor Swift's entire discography'...and is now a Broadway play!"
Christmas, also known as "Songs-You're-Sick-Of Season," is nigh. If you're looking for some good Christmas music, allow me to once again recommend my favorite Christmas album, Nick Lowe's 2013 Quality Street. Actually it's not a "favorite"—it's the only Christmas album I like.
Nick is an Englishman, born in Surrey. Sixty-nine now, he figured in power pop and New Wave in the UK back in the day. He was a producer for artists like Graham Parker, and he wrote the Elvis Costello hit "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding." But most of his music has a retro rockabilly flavor—his first wife was Johnny Cash's stepdaughter Carlene Carter, daughter of June Carter Cash, and they've remained friends.
His best early album was Jesus of Cool (UK title—in the Christian-sensitive US it was called Pure Pop for Now People), from 1978, reissued by Yep Roc records in 2008. His biggest hit was the remake of his song "Cruel to Be Kind," originally from an unreleased Rockpile record. It was a significant hit in the U.S. I personally prefer the original version to the slicker, later radio version.
But Lowe, for all his energy and all his accomplishments, had a knack for hiding his genius under a rock...or a rockpile, I guess you'd say. His most significant artistic successes were a series of collaborations with guitarist Dave Edmunds, in a group that was called Rockpile, but there was a pretty big catch—both men were under contract to different record companies, so there were four studio Rockpile records but only one came out under the name Rockpile—Seconds of Pleasure from 1980. Of the other three, one was a Nick Lowe album, Labor of Lust (1979); one was a Dave Edmunds album, Repeat When Necessary (1978); and one was a Carlene Carter album, Musical Shapes (1980) (with Carlene doing all the vocals, so it was her album).
That's always struck me as funny, since so many groups cling for dear life to an established name despite different personnel and all kinds of changes. It's pretty hard to expect a band to build up a fan base when it keeps camouflaging itself behind different names.
Anyway, he was never a household name and he never will be. But he made a courageous decision as an older guy—he decided to just be himself and start singing quieter songs written from the perspective of an older man. Several albums of these plain, unpretentious, straight-ahead songs have been issued by Yep Roc Records in this millennium. Some on vinyl, which fits. To get the vibe you can listen to At My Age on YouTube, the cover of which pictures Nick with white hair and in a suit and tie.
Anyway, if you flee from standard Christmas music, try Quality Street. I tap my foot to "Rise Up Shepherd," but everyone's got to be grateful to have an uptempo rockabilly cover of "Silent Night"! It doesn't make up for the Chinese water torture of being subjected against your will to "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer" for the nth time under the sickly greenish glow of the fluorescent lights in a Walgreen's, but it helps.
Merry Christmas!
Mike
Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
Ernie Van Veen: "Nick Lowe wrote one of my favourite songs, 'The Beast in Me,' which I have only heard performed by Johnny Cash, his former father-in-law. 'The Beast in Me' usually comes out around Christmas time. (You can interpret that any way you like.)"
Well, that was fun. Our fundraiser print sale was a big success, and both Peter and I are pleased and grateful and convey our thanks to everyone. All three photographs sold well, "Havana" the best.
I'm going to take the day off, for one reason because I say I always take Saturdays off, even though I seldom do, and another being that I'm sick as a dog. (And lazy as a dog, and I want a dog's life, and I don't want to work like a dog. Why do we pick on dogs like that in our expressions?) I have stomach flu. Which is not flu, I hear, but don't blame me—I am not in charge.
Music to whose ears? But before I go, music notes. For your Saturday delectation, a beautiful little video explaining why Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica from 1969 is so good:
The tagline is "Why this awful sounding album is a masterpiece," which I think is funny.
I love that channel—Vox Earworm, I mean. Their video about the Coltrane Changes is great—finally I understand why that very famous Coltrane song, and album, is called "Giant Steps."
Mike
Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
Since we were talking about Ornette Coleman the other day, here's the best picture of him I know of. Photographer Jimmy Katz is well known for his photography of jazz musicians—he won the Award for Excellence in Photography from the Jazz Journalists Association in both 2006 and 2011.
He tells me it's not even his favorite shot from the session, which was done in Ornette's apartment in front of some of his art in 2005. Jimmy likes this 4x5 even more:
"I think of it as Ornette exploring the universe before the rest of us," Jimmy says with a smile. "Which he did."
Jimmy Katz, born in New York City, studied photography with John McKee at Bowdoin College. He and his wife Dena, originally from Moscow, have been collaborating on photographic projects in New York City in the music field since 1991, and have done over 500 recording projects and 175 magazine covers. Here's his website.
Naturally, like most photographers of musicians, he's a fan too. "I explain to people that Ornette was so influential as an artist that when he accepted the MacArthur genius award he actually validated them...There was no way anybody could validate him!"
Mike (Thanks to Jimmy)
Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
Rob de Loe: "The first one is OK. The second one is simply superb!"
James Weekes: "I have seen, probably, over a hundred different pictures of Ornette Coleman, and every one has been a wonderful one. He takes light at the same level as Paris."
