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?"
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:
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)
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:
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
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:
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
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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!)
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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
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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
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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)
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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."
David Sanborn and Jools Holland once had a television show called "Night Music" that typically juxtaposed two very different musicians with disparate styles. Sometimes the combinations landed with a thud and sometimes they soared, and you were never sure which you were going to get.
Here's a strange combination and a musical nugget you might never be aware of if you're not a deep fan of either: the Grateful Dead once performed a concert with Ornette Coleman, of all people, as a guest. My friend Terry alerted me to it. The concert took place at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum on the 23rd of February, 1993, and you can listen to it on Archive. org. If you have a good tolerance for unconventional music or you're just an Ornette Coleman fan (did I just say the same thing twice?), Ornette joins the band on "Space," "The Other One," "Stella Blue" and "Turn On Your Lovelight" from the second set...although some of the other songs from that evening are pretty spacey too—"Drums" features didgeridoo zapping from one stereo channel to the other.
Ornette was repaying a favor—he had enlisted Jerry Garcia, a longtime fan of his, to play on his 1988 album Virgin Beauty. This was one of two concerts for which Ornette joined the band. The concert took place just two and a half years prior to Jerry's untimely demise, and Jerry's voice sounds worn and hoarse, sometimes struggling to stay in tune—it gives his performances a worldly, weary feeling with hints of ruin, like late Billie Holiday.
If you don't know who Ornette is, here's a primer (the word in its meaning of "a short introduction" is pronounced "primmer," not as "prime" with an "r" at the end).
If you want a concert with guests that were easier to integrate, try this legendary 1970 show at Fillmore East with the Allman Brothers Band and Peter Green sitting in. (Ten life points if you know who Peter Green is.) Start with "Not Fade Away."
Mike (Thanks to Terry)
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R.A. Krajnyak: "I'll take Blues Guitarist Extraordinaire and Fleetwood Mac founder for 10 life points, Alex. B.B. King said of him, 'He has the sweetest tone I ever heard; he was the only one who gave me the cold sweats.'"
Rick D: " I remember 'Night Music'! My top two discoveries watching were John Hiatt and a Bulgarian wedding band (really!). We gathered our culture where we could."
Gordon Lewis: "I remember 'Night Music' well. One of my favorite pairings was Leonard Cohen singing 'Who By Fire' backed by Sonny Rollins on tenor sax and the Was Not Was singers on background vocals. It will give you goosebumps even in the summertime."
Speaking of the John Lennon stamp, this is a photograph of Lennon I've always liked:
It's a Polaroid by Andy Warhol. It's descriptive, but not grandiose or glorifying: the subject is wearing a T-shirt and hasn't bothered to arrange his hair, although Warhol might have liked the shape his hair makes. And the photo is plainspoken and small in size. Lennon's expression doesn't tell you what to think of him either way: he's not doing a star turn, not trying to make himself look appealing to the viewer with a conventional Murricun grimace/grin, but neither is he showing the darker side that his personality was reputed to have, anger or superciliousness or arrogance. To me, all this makes it more engaging; I find myself searching the picture for clues, as if to ask: what kind of person was this? The eyes seem simultaneously brightened (by the specular reflection of the flash) and obscured (by the glasses). And of course there's something slightly macabre about the portrait, because you're looking at a murder victim, too. And you're looking into history, at a man who died almost forty years ago now. Whatever you see in the eyes is changed by the fact that you know his fate.
And the photographer—who, like all great portraitists, is partly revealed, reflected, by the aspect his sitter presents to us—is dead too. The transaction we're voyeuristically witnessing is one of viewer and viewed, seer and the seen, both famous still, but both long gone.
Double appeal And by the way, this picture contains what you might call double appeal. It's a lesson I learned in the magazine business from Outdoor Photographer magazine back in the '90s—that you increase your chances of success if you appeal to two different markets or audiences with the same artwork or product. (That presumes you don't limit the extent of the appeal to either group by including the other.) In this case, the picture appeals to Beatles, Lennon, and "classic rock" music fans on the one hand, and it also appeals to people interested in Andy Warhol, pop art, and modern art on the other. OP appeals to both the photo-hobbyist audience and to outdoor-activity audiences. The key with a magazine was that you could sell advertisements in two separate categories, greatly increasing your chances of selling enough ads. My magazine at the time was a darkroom magazine, which, I recognized, meant that we were trying to appeal not just to one audience but a subset of one audience. (I left in 2000; the magazine folded in 2013.)
The movie industry has codified this down to a rather crude basic level—movies are designed to sell to one of four types of audience—older females, older males, younger males, or younger females. Producers are always on the lookout for movies that appeal to two of the four groups, and one that appeals to three of the groups or (this is rare) all four groups can be a bonanza. Movies are seldom made to appeal to older males exclusively, because, statistically, older males don't go to the movies. Usually, movies targeted to them are also targeted to older females or younger males at the same time. Old fashioned "auteur" movies, categorized as "dramas" now, are the motion picture equivalent of "literary" novels—potentially prestigious, but sales lightweights.
In photography, O. Winston Link is a prime example of double appeal—he appealed to photographers and photography collectors, and also to railfans and steam train enthusiasts. Scott Schumann's "Sartorialist" blog appeals to street photography fans and people interested in fashion; Brandon Stanton's "Humans of New York" appeals to people who like environmental portraits, people who like human interest stories, and people who are interested in New York City.
I realized the appeal of "The Simpsons" years ago while watching it with my then-five-year-old son—he and I would both laugh at it, but at completely different parts. He liked the cartoon slapstick and the in-your-face jokes, I liked the cultural references and sardonic asides. (I think we both rather liked Bart's part wise, part wiseass Bugs Bunnyesque take-it-all-in-stride attitude.)
Any time you can appeal to two (or more) constituencies without limiting the appeal to one of them, you increase your audience as well as your odds of success.
Mike
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hugh crawford: "And a dead medium as well. Warhol used a Polaroid BigShot fixed focus camera (with the amazing chemical mechanical lighting of the Magicubes, also extinct). The Polaroid peel-apart 669 film is long gone and the Fuji is in the outdated and expensive category. A great camera that looked like a toy. With 655 positive negative film I could make 40x50 inch prints. I still have a pack of 655 in my RB Graflex but it's 'too special to use.'"
Eolake: "I have just watched "How The Beatles Changed The World" (I think it was Netflix). It was excellent. Being from 1963, I didn’t know that much about it. They weren’t just the most successful band in history. Warhol’s book From A To B And Back Again is interesting. Like all his work, very abstract."
Mike replies: Relative to the movie you mentioned, I can recommendRevolution in the Headby Ian MacDonald (Ian MacCormick), the British music critic who committed suicide in 2003. He's a Lennon partisan, but then so am I. And he has an inexplicable antipathy to George Harrison, which I definitely don't share. But it's a fascinating book, and had me going back to many of the old songs to listen to them intently with "new ears."
Doug Thacker: "Warhol must have made thousands of Polaroid portraits over the years, and almost all of them were strong in the way that only the best photographic portraits are. I've always found this fascinating, and instructive. Because he was using rudimentary equipment, with a fixed lens and on-camera flash, the extraordinary character of his portraits comes down to his connection with his subjects, however fleeting, his trust in his own intuition, and his timing with the shutter button.
"As you point out vis a vis the Lennon photo, both the subject and the photographer are now dead. Each of them was among the most influential figures of the century, and each of them was shot by an assassin, or, in Warhol's case, a would-be assassin, Valerie Solanas.
"When Warhol was shot, in Manhattan in 1968, he was rushed to nearby New York Hospital, where his life was saved only by the heroic efforts of a team of surgeons. In all the years following, he would refuse to even walk past that hospital, because whenever he did so, he said, he could see and feel his own death.
"When Warhol fell ill and required emergency gallbladder surgery in 1997, it was this same hospital he was taken to. And it was here that he died, shortly after a routine gallbladder removal.
"It would be easy to look at this portrait of John Lennon by Andy Warhol and see prefigured in it somehow their fatal victimization, but that's not what strikes me. What strikes me in this portrait is their strength and their defiance and their victory. I don't know what more you could ask of a portrait, or of an artist."
Tom Burke: "I can’t comment on the image—pictures of the Beatles (as a group or as individuals) have been around my life since forever.
"But, as an aside, and seeing as this is as much about the Beatles as anything, I’ve come to realise that I was incredibly lucky to be the right age at the right time and in the right place. I remember buying 'She Loves You' in the late summer or early autumn of 1963. I was 13, and it was the most exciting thing I’d ever heard. From then I bought every Beatles single up to 'Lady Madonna' on the day it was released, apart from 'Help!'—I was out of the country that summer. It’s difficult to comprehend now just how significant The Beatles were in the UK in those years. Britain in the early '60s was so traditional—the post-war era had seen a determined attempt to re-assert the normality of the pre war years, but by the '60s that was breaking down. There were parallel changes in other areas—theatre, TV, literature—but pop music reached a greater proportion of the population than anything else, and The Beatles were the first and best of a whole new thing. Much as I enjoyed Cliff Richard in the years before, he was a British copy of US originals. The Beatles rewrote the rule book. And as I got a little bit older and started wanting more than just 'Moon in June' songs, they were moving the same way at the same time. There’d never been a song like 'Paperback Writer,' for instance, or 'Penny Lane,' or the lyricism of 'Eleanor Rigby.' Amazing years. And I think that their significance is demonstrated by the fact that a couple of very old images of John Lennon still considered worthy of note and comment."
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James: '"I say a little prayer'—the only 45rpm single I ever wore out and had to replace. Still love it on CD now."
I've been on sort of a jag for slow-drag R&B with a hip-hop or World flavor lately. Caro Emerald (Caroline Esmeralda van der Leeuw) is a Dutch torch/pop singer with a touch of retro campiness.
Caro Emerald
The lyrics of her song "A Night Like This," for instance (which sounds for all the world like a pre-existing standard, but isn't), were "based on a specific scene in the 1967 Bond movie Casino Royale." [Wikipedia]. And sounds like it. Both songs come from her 2015 debut, Deleted Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor.
Jhené Aiko's "Sativa" sounds like a cross between Sade and Tom Waits to me. :-)
Mike
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Some people are lucky. John Seabrook, writing in The New Yorker, said of Steve ("Fly Like an Eagle," "Take the Money and Run," "The Joker") Miller, "His mother, a former singer, and his father, a physician, were jazz and blues aficionados from Milwaukee, where Miller grew up; Les Paul was his godfather. Later, when the family moved to Dallas, T-Bone Walker would play guitar in his parents’ living room. 'That kind of luck is just stupid,' Miller said."
If there was ever an opposite of stupid luck, it's the forlorn tale of Tina Brooks, a "lame" from Fayetteville, North Carolina, by way of New York city. A small, reticent man with a woman's name, he was a sort of an opposite "Fresh Prince," too—instead of "I got in one little fight and my mom got scared / And said 'You're moving with your auntie and uncle in Bel-Air,'" young Tina got bullied mercilessly in New York city and had to be sent back to live with relatives in Fayetteville for his own protection.
I've learned over the years that if there's a band that I think is more popular than I think it deserves to be, or less popular than it deserves to be, the first place to look is the frontman or -woman—the band that's more popular than its music will have a good-looking singer or leader with strong gender characteristics and/or admirable qualities; the band that's less popular than its music deserves will have a leader who's unattractive or otherwise not personally or physically admirable. It's not invariably the case. But it's the first place to look.
Tina Brooks is a poster child for the latter situation. There's a fine but little-known article by Jack Chambers that tells his story and thankfully still exists online. (Of course it's "little-known"—naturally. Everything about Tina Brooks is little-known.) It starts out like this:
Listening to The Waiting Game by Tina Brooks, freshly mastered in 2002 with 24-bit technology in Blue Note's limited edition Connoisseur series (Blue Note 40536), there can be no doubt that Brooks was a hard-bop master. Here is abundant evidence of the tenor saxophonist's easy but insistent swing, his blues-based sound and feeling perfectly suited to the hard-bop genre that was the special domain of Blue Note Records at their best. Brooks also seems to be a natural leader, as the composer of all five original themes (the sixth is the Broadway ballad "Stranger in Paradise"), and the dominating voice in the quintet of hard-bitten but stylish veterans Johnny Coles, Kenny Drew, Wilbur Ware and Philly Joe Jones.
He was 28 when he made the record, and you might have thought, if you didn't know better, that he was well on his way to an influential career in the jazz forefront. Then comes the sobering thought—when Tina Brooks recorded The Waiting Game in 1961, his career was effectively finished. The record date fell five days before his 29th birthday, but he never recorded again. He would live 13 more years, but neither The Waiting Game nor any of the other music of his mature years was released in his lifetime. He died at 42, a bitter, penniless, incapacitated wreck, but he was he was given up for dead years before that.
It's a great article, one I've read several times, and a vivid if very sad story. Well worth reading, except you probably won't—Brooks gets ignored, and you'll probably ignore him too.
Tina Brooks' first date as a leader, Minor Move, is a virtual congress of the luckless—double bassist Doug Watkins fell asleep at the wheel and drove headlong into an oncoming truck at the age of 27; pianist Sonny Clark (who you first met in these pages at number 9 on my Jazz Starter Kit list) died of a probable heroin overdose at 31; and the brilliant trumpeter Lee Morgan was shot and killed onstage by his jealous common-law wife, Helen Moore AKA Helen Morgan, when he was 33 (it's the subject of the film I Called Him Morgan). Of the personnel on the record, only drummer Art Blakey, of the Jazz Messengers (the wrong drummer for Brooks, the only flaw of Minor Move), lived to be old.
Of the four who died young, though, Brooks was the most luckless; the others had careers and got acclaim and enjoyed success. Brooks, brilliant as he was, was stillborn as an artist, his outstanding work unaccountably left in the can for reasons no one knows, until after it was too late for him.
Musically, everything Tina Brooks did in his short star-crossed life is worth checking out. My own favorite is Back to the Tracks, a great hard bop album in the high Blue Note style that rewards multiple listens. It's another all-star lineup—Jackie McLean on alto, Blue Mitchell on trumpet, Kenny Drew on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and a more sympatico Art—Art Taylor—on drums.
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.
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Michael Badalamenti: "Thanks for bringing Tina Brooks to my attention. I spent quite an enjoyable afternoon listing to Minor Move, The Waiting Game, Back to the Tracks, True Blue, and Street Singer. Reading Chambers' article about the suppression of Brooks' music by Blue Note was heartbreaking."
["Open Mike" (no karaoke) is the often off-topic, anything-goes Editorial page of TOP. It appears on...ohthehellwithit, it appears whenever it appears, I give up. —MJ]
Most of this has surfaced on TOP before, here and there, but repetition never hurts and what's more, repetition never hurts.
Musical tastes...everyone's is different. I was mainly into later '50s jazz for about 10–12 years. Now I’m back to listening to some pop and rock for the emotion, but my tastes are eclectic. I listen to a fair amount of classical but my tastes in that area are pretty circumscribed, basically instrumental music from the Baroque to the late Classical period, favoring smaller-scale over larger. I went through several years in the '80s obsessed with Bach. Almost addicted: if I didn't get a Bach fix every three or four days I started jonesing. Favorite: BWV 1052, which Robert Schumann considered among the greatest of masterpieces. A window to the heavens of great God.
I have a turntable in the family room with a few hundred old albums, including the first one I ever got when I was seven years old, “Something New” by the Beatles, a USA-only packaging, bought new in the Summer of '64. Although I grew up with it I don't really like rock that much, and I don't care much any more for blues, other than roots blues, although I used to. By far my favorite period of rock is '90s grunge. About three times better than the '60s if you ask me, although the '60s were also pretty good.
I have about 14,000 music files* but overall they don’t really reflect my tastes…more my explorations.
It takes an awful lot for a whole record to break through into “favorite” status and it doesn’t happen very often. Some favorite albums that I b'lieve are all from the 2000s:
'Sno Angel Like You by Howe Gelb (of Giant Sand—he hired a gospel choir for the project, and the result is zany but completely enjoyable, to me anyway). Howe Gelb is an isolated and neglected genius.
The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas by the brilliant Courtney Barnett, a young Australian singer-songwriter. In her natural state she sounds like she's high.
You Had It Coming by Jeff Beck. Soundtrack to my life during an important year. Strange it didn't damage my hearing, except maybe it did. After my GF bailed on me, I was afraid to listen to this again for a long time, but when I finally did it wasn't too bad.
That's enough of that. Nobody works in albums any more.
I listen to a fair amount of pop too but it's like gum, sweet at first chew but pretty soon you want to spit it out. Songs with words are problematic if you ask me, because it adds a whole 'nuther layer the artists have to get right. A lot of musicians suck at lyrics. There's a legend that Paul McCartney's original lyrics for "Yesterday" started with "scrambled eggs," but John and George Martin jumped all over him, insisting the melody was way too good for stupid lyrics. (This is why some people do better work in bands.) Another example: "Seaweed" by the Fruit Bats. Gorgeous melody, instrumentally perfect (the intro of the banjo at 1:23 breaks your heart, just lovely), but the lyrics are so go**amned horribly shi**y it makes me want to wring Eric Johnson's neck every time I hear it. A potentially brilliant gem of a song ruined. If I were rich I'd pay him a lot of money to write new lyrics for it, and I'd hire a guy to stand there next to him and hit him with a stick every time he started drifting off into stupid. (I blame Weezer and "the Sweater Song," which kicked off a brief fad for willfully stupid, trivial lyrics**, as if it were cool...fortunately pretty soon people realized it was just stupid rather than stupid-as-cool.) Lyrics are like color in photographs: a whole extra layer that has to be right or ruination results. /rant
A few recent-ish favorite songs or cuts:
"Fade Out Lines" by The Avener, a deep house rework of "The Fade Out Line" by Phoebe Killdeer and The Short Straws that was a hit in Europe. (But, again, if you're tempted to listen too hard to the lyrics, best not to.)
Lorine Chia
"Eve's Perspective" by Lorine Chia. This might be a lesbian anthem for all I know, although I don't know anything about Lorine. But I've been listening to a fair amount of hip-hop and rap recently and I'm naturally drawn to the slowdrag melodic stuff such as Geto Boys' "Six Feet Deep" which rechannels Marvin Gaye. I'm over this now ("Eve's Perspective," I mean) but the cut had legs for a whole year for me.
"Destiny" by Henry Binns and Sam Hardaker (Zero 7). Bobby Burnett turned me on to this, and it alone is enough reason for all the people who made it to have been born.
"Turiya and Ramakrishna" by Alice Coltrane (jazz)
"Arriving Somewhere But Not Here" by Porcupine Tree. A long, dramatic, almost operatic cut, in the style of high-period Pink Floyd. A good example of the importance of primacy in art: if this had come out in the '70s it would have been as famous as Tubular Bells. But despite being completely amazing no one's ever heard of it, or heard it.
"Gabriel's Mother's Hiway Ballad #16 Blues" by Arlo Guthrie. A stone folk classic, but I just discovered it last year, waiting in the line at the car wash. Whatever's old is new the first time you hear it.
My two favorite musicians, in any genre, are Coleman Hawkins and Hank Jones. (Both have huge discographies. To sample, try the Hawk's Here and Now, an Impulse disc from '62 which has both "Quintessence" and "Apache Love Song." If you have Amazon Prime you can stream it for free on Amazon; otherwise better get it on iTunes, as it's pretty thoroughly out of print. For Hank, try any Great Jazz Trio record or one of my faves, "Bluesette." I love Mr. Hank, he is a paragon of taste and modesty and chops that never stop. R.I.P.
Finally, a few amazing videos everybody should see:
Tash Sultana, "Jungle," (bedroom recording). New discovery to me, compliments of a woman I don't know named Isabella.
Marquese Scott used a spell of homelessness, living on the street, to work on his urban dancing, and this vid earned him an apartment and a BMW. Or so I heard, and I like the story so I'm not fact-checking it. The music is a Dubstep version of the controversial "Pumped Up Kicks" by Foster the People from 2010.
Imogen Heap's virtuoso one-woman "Just for Now" is a must-view.
Ibeyi's "The River" is simple but stunning, very creative, and I love the song.
Finally, compare this one and this one. Threads, it's all threads.
Obviously this conversation could continue. Music is a consumable as far as I'm concerned. I need fresh, and it's a constant exploration, a constant search. It's possible for someone to love music and not like a single thing I've mentioned in this post. An ocean, fortunately, and you can't drink up it all. Suits me.
Mike (Thanks to M.D.)
* I'm sorry, but nothing by Leonard Nimoy.
** The prototype is Jimmy Webb's "MacArthur Park" from 1968—even Webb himself was put off by its bloated, bombastic, over-the-top arrangement violently yoked to dopey, meaningless lyrics. Wikipedia tells us that comedian Dave Barry nominated it as the worst song ever written. Listen to the original Richard Harris version for the full-on treacle of the arrangement. One hopes its great popularity had mostly to do with audiences' appreciation of its campiness....
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Wolfgang Lonien: "What a coincidence that you bring up music. I used to be a bass player when I was young (almost like in another life), but lately—short before my 61st—I've begun online jamming again—and 'published' an album. Listen to it here if you like. And honest critique is welcome, tho please keep in mind that this is a) only some jammin', and b) I'm missing some 35 years of practice, so I'm like a bl**dy beginner...."
Mike replies: I wonder if I have the right page...it sounds very accomplished to me, not much like jamming. Good on you for getting back to it and getting yourself out there in any case! I'm always impressed by that. I hope my novel will be like that.
Ken: "Your tastes in music, cameras and photography are seemingly (mostly) the opposite of mine. Maybe, for me, that's one part of what makes TOP interesting to read. Better that than an echo chamber."
Mike replies: Yes, that's why it's so important for reviewers to be honest and open about their tastes and prejudices. That way, readers can learn from them even if they don't agree with them.
Speed: "Re: Scrambled eggs. Keen to not forget his magical dream melody, McCartney wrote some temporary lyrics for the song—about scrambled eggs, and named it after the breakfast dish. They went: 'Scrambled eggs, oh, my baby, how I love your legs.' Scrambled Eggs became a running joke between the band for 'months and months' ... 'We almost had it finished when we made up our minds that only a one word title would suit and, believe me, we just couldn’t find the right one. Then, one morning, Paul woke up, and the song and the title were both there. Completed!' See the article here."
I know, it's been "all photography all the time" here at TOP lately. But this is "Open Mike" day, and this is easy to type.
Gimme Shelter
Sympathy for the Devil
Midnight Rambler (live version)
Tumbling Dice
Satisfaction
Monkey Man
Harlem Shuffle*
Wild Horses
Shattered
Can't You Hear Me Knockin'
Simple; obvious. No one can have any arguments with that. :-)
Mike
*NY mix, from Rarities
P.S. This will be the last off-topic post for the rest of the year, I promise. Except for maybe one or two.
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MarkB: "0. Paint It Black."
hugh crawford: "No Paint It Black?"
Jim Metzger: "Can we give Paint it Black Miss Congeniality?"
Dave Levingston: "Strange...my list has Paint It Black at the top...."
Josh Hawkins: "Paint it black. It's not just the best Rolling Stones song, it may one of the top 10 rock and roll songs period."
Romano: "¿Angie?"
Michel: "When you take a typing break I suggest listening to this bit from Tig Notaro—the first three minutes or so of the clip."
Mike replies: I've heard this in the car on Sirius XM. It's a wonderful little bit. Love it. Thanks for the link.
Andrew Lamb: "'You Can't Always Get What You Want' would be on my top ten. About ten years ago, I had to photograph L'wren Scott's fashion collection in New York. She was doing small presentations in a suite at the Pierre. It was just the fashion writer, L'wren Scott, a model, and yours truly. It was odd to see Mick Jagger bound into the room, wearing just a pair of boxers. I diplomatically lowered my camera. Needless to say, he knew the fashion writer and chatted amiably about the recent fashion shows. It was an odd way to meet him."
Jim A.: "It makes sense for you to be in music mode. Hang in there. I recently bought my first turntable (Denon) since high school (1970s) and have been rediscovering beloved songs from my youth. I've lugged my old album collection from closet to closet for years now and it's a pleasure to finally here some forgotten gems. I'm also exploring the catalog of these older bands so this post was perfect timing for me.
"Back in the day, I did not buy Beatles and Stones albums. They were just too wildly popular and got way too much air play. Every time I turned on the radio in my rusty 1968 Mustang Grande (with malfunctioning gas gauge and mighty Thriftpower I-6) I heard their music. Now I have plenty of great old Beatles and Stones stuff to explore, and the comments are helping! Commercial for Mustang Grande—1968 (Flamenco music...'color this one cool').
Groundbreaking. Neil has put all his music online for streaming, for free (for now), at the highest resolution possible (if you're set up for it—CD or MP3 quality if you're not).
Mike (Thanks to Bobby B.)
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Gerry Kopelow was a teenager in the sixties. Here's a shot of Joni Mitchell he got at the Mariposa Folk Festival in Toronto in 1967 or so (before security). Handheld Leica and Tri-X.
Big bad, much sorry. I failed to publish the above photo by Gerry Kopelow and the following comment that Jeff Markus wrote in response to the Joni Mitchell post (it's good, read it):
My first exposure to Joni's music was through a woman friend, though, as it was 1969, I was hearing the first two albums. Joni and Joan Baez seemed to be what many of the college-aged women here in California were listening to then. Never cottoned to Baez, but always liked Joni. A year later married a Joni fan, so Clouds and Ladies of the Canyon were in heavy rotation. Buffalo Springfield and Neil Young's first solo albums were my contribution.
Two years later, single again, I've fallen in with some hard-partying U.S. sailors stationed in Spain who have off-base living privileges. They've rented a huge old house up a dirt road and someone brings to the party a copy of Joni's new album, Blue, which has a lyric about her going to a party up a red dirt road in Spain. Still my favorite Joni album.
1985—working as a photo assistant and printer for Norman Seeff, in the studio shooting for the cover of Dog Eat Dog. We're told by the trainer not to move or speak as she brings the timber wolf out to meet Joni. The wolf circles a couple of times, then goes up and licks Joni's cheek. The trainer is astonished, says "he really must like you, he's never done that with a stranger before."
Two years later, taking a break in Joni's living room while shooting for the cover of Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm. She's explaining that she started using jazz players for her studio work because she was told by her rock players that they just didn't understand her strange chordal structures, but that the jazz guys would. After the break our first setup was at the piano. She played the lead-in for "The Last Time I Saw Richard," then couldn't remember where it went. I muttered "goddam weird chords," Joni busted up laughing, Norman got the shot.
My runner-up favorite Joni albums are Hits and Misses because the little white car on their covers is my Hollywood beater, four cylinders of fury, the mighty Datsun B110.
I just love stuff like this...a supposedly "off topic" post about Joni Mitchell becomes ON topic because we hear from the assistant to the photographer who shot many of her album covers. Great stuff. The Internet is goddam weird chords.
I meant to feature this but the task got lost in the shuffle. Big thanks to Jeff, and to Gerry.
Mike
P.S. My work day is done already (always goes fast), so Henning's article gets pushed back to tomorrow. It's about using a pixel-shift camera to rephotograph slides and negatives, another topic that arose last week.
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Three screensavers of Joni Mitchell, from her website
Robert Plant, who used to be the vocalist for a folk-metal band called Led Zeppelin, recently noted that vocalists are "one-trick ponies." I think what he meant was that they're stuck with one instrument...their own voices. Amy Winehouse might love Tony Bennett and vice versa, but neither could sing like the other.
And sure enough, the match of any particular voice to any particular one of us seems to require a certain alchemy. It's almost a matter of chemistry, as fickle and personal as romantic chemistry. John Lennon ruined his voice with ill-advised scream therapy in 1970 (something you wouldn't think a rock and roller would have any need for), but before that it got to me like few others, and Bob Marley could practically sing the phone book and pull me in.
We're idiosyncratic, too. Hendrix was a guitarist who sang, and it worked, but I never could understand why Stevie Ray Vaughan didn't hire a vocalist for his band like, say, Robin Trower did. It was once a commonplace for blowhard conservatives to rant about how Dylan can't sing, even before he couldn't (believe me on this point—I went to Dartmouth in the '70s), but Neil Young, whose voice is fingernails on a chalkboard to some, is my favorite musician in rock. I don't mind his voice at all.
Creativity and invention Neil's fellow Canadian Joni Mitchell (the Taylor Swift of the baby boom generation, for you younger people) was one of the greatest artists in the world—of any kind—in the 1970s, with a stretch of eight albums—from Clouds in 1969 to Don Juan's Reckless Daughter in 1977—that represented an almost unparalleled sustained high point of creativity, invention, and mastery in the singer-songwriter genre. But, personally, apart from a memorable drug-fueled late-night encounter with The Hissing of Summer Lawns in a coed's dorm room, I never engaged with her very deeply in the day. The problem for me was, first, that her voice never particularly meshed with me; and then, later on, I felt her artistry was gradually let down by the fact that she was never a particularly happy woman. She was always realistic and always thoughtful and honest, which is suited to young people during the search for individuation and intimacy. It's just that as she got older she sounded increasingly like someone who was never particularly fulfilled as a person. The young confessions, so honest, turned into distanced observations.
I've been trying to catch up with her lately, because there's a new biography out. My first favorite among her albums has always been Wild Things Run Fast, featuring a painting of her, by her (looking strangely vacant), on the cover. Wild Things was on the downslope of her great run, after she had identified jazz as a suitable field for her genius and had tried to turn in that direction, but it was another attempt to make a more rhythmic album connected to the pop music of the moment.
Wild Things was a gateway drug to jazz for me, and I still love the songs—has anyone ever given better advice to someone with a crush than "Be Cool"? Her medley of "Chinese Café" and "Unchained Melody" achingly unchains the melody three quarters of the way through, and her observations in that song have a poignant melancholy worthy of Billie Holiday or Edith Piaf. The album ends with her gorgeous mashup setting of 1 Corinthians 13:1 that never fails to move me—I could say of it what Ron Rosenbaum said of "Amelia," that "it's a certain kind of song, one that seems to activate some sort of hard-wired emotional cell cluster in my brain, I'm (unscientifically) convinced. Songs that do for me what crack does for other people."
Wild Things was never highly popular, despite the blandishments on its behalf by David Geffen and the world tour Joni undertook behind it. Her Taylor Swift moment had passed by then, and her popularity, once fanatical and dependable, had begun its long downward ebb.
Court and Spark, my other longtime favorite among her albums, was the one everyone liked. It was an immediate critical and popular success and has always been her best-selling album. True Joni Mitchell fans will have a different favorite, most often Blue, or Clouds or Ladies of the Canyon, but Court and Spark is her most accessible work. "Help Me" followed by "Free Man in Paris" is among the most soaring one-two punches on records, and her version of the famous and much-recorded "Twisted" became definitive. (I could write a whole post on "Twisted"—it consists of adroit comic lyrics written by Annie Ross in 1952 (in the video, that's Count Basie on the piano and Tony Bennett on the couch), added to an instrumental of the same title composed by the doomed Wardell Gray in 1949. Annie Ross said of it, "the title was [sic] infinite possibilities"—one of which was macabre, in that poor Wardell Gray, a lush saxophone stylist, was discovered in the desert outside of Las Vegas in 1955 with his neck broken—and the murder, probably mob-related, was never solved. In fact it was never accepted as a murder, as if healthy young men just turn up with broken necks sometimes.) Among the infinite possibilities, Ross decided on a hilarious tale of an unrepentant analysand. Joni Mitchell made it hers, and made it immortal. Her instincts were sure—the line about two heads being better than one made a perfect album ending.
The new book is by David Yaffe, a humanities professor at Syracuse. It's reportedly somewhat hagiographic, as celebrity biographies inescapably are. Mitchell used her long list of often very famous lovers as both "muse and nemesis," in the words of Sibbie O'Sullivan, and she could be both grandiose (excusable) and abrasive, crass, and vindictive (less so), and sometimes outright zany (as when she sometimes insisted she had an inner black male self). She is 74 now, unmarried, and divides her time between her 80-acre ranch in Sechelt, British Columbia, and her home in L.A. Like Lennon, she was less than responsible about caring for her primary instrument—her voice—which deteriorated due to her four-pack-a-day cigarette habit. She has suffered health problems since 2015, and the world sends its love.
But artists aren't about the artist; they're about the art. I'm eager to see what light David Yaffee has to shed on that. Joni Mitchell's art has influenced everyone who's heard it. Book's in my queue.
Mike
"Open Mike" is the often off-topic editorial page of TOP. It's supposed to appear on Wednesdays, but dang, this stuff doesn't write itself. It's not hard to write, it's just hard to know what to say. Really takes it outta me sometimes.
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
Ken White: "I enjoyed Joni’s music in the '60s and '70s and felt somewhat embarrassed by that fact. Then one night I found myself in a bar in Nevada City, California listening to solo guitarist perform of 'A Case of You' to a mostly empty room. Somehow that experience allowed me to hear her music with different ears. She is still in regular rotation in my house. Best wishes to Joni, always."
Richard Reusser: "I decided Joni might be worth exploring after my (very late) exposure to 'The Last Waltz' on DVD. Her performance mesmerizes me every time I re-watch. Great post. Music and photography are like wine and chocolate."
Andrew Lamb: "She’s one of the all-time greats. Not sure if I’d want to meet her. She comes across as tricky. She’s also a good example of an artist who ruthlessly mines everything for her art. Everything is copy, especially ex-lovers. Blue is my favourite, by the way."
Ron Braithwaite: "This is amazing timing. I've been listening to the new(ish) Joni Mitchell anthology, The Studio Albums (1968-1979) pretty steadily for the past few days (with occasional interludes of Gil Scott-Heron's new(ish) I'm New Here). Joni has been one of the main players in the soundtrack of my life, first finding her in 1969. Thanks for bring this up and for your insight: 'But artists aren't about the artist; they're about the art. Joni Mitchell's art has influenced everyone who heard it. Don't know about you, but book's in my queue.'"
Mike replies: Alas, not that recent: Gil died in 2011. My favorite was his album with Brian Jackson,Winter in America, thanks to my Dartmouth roommate Bruce Jackman.
Benjamin Marks: "Court and Spark has long been a favorite here. Growing up, we had an uncle in the music business and every year he would select some popular music as gifts for us. My parents could not have been less interested in popular music...at least not after the American Songbook era (Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn singing). But in 1974 my uncle walked through the door with that album and knowing nothing else about the singer, we took to Joni Mitchell like ducks to water. We kind of evolved with her as her work got more complex over the years. Court and Spark was such a favorite that we memorized the songs with the skips and pops in our copy of the album. Years later, I replaced that scratched up album with a CD and oddly the tracks didn't sound quite right without the defects we had introduced. I have a recent boxed set of remasters sitting next to my CD player. Good music just doesn't get old."
JG: "At first, I loved Wild Things Run Fast—both for its music, as well as its sound quality (I have a white-jacket test pressing of the LP made with 'Quiex II' vinyl and it sounds quite a bit better than the standard vinyl pressings)—but over time, I came to hate it. That's because my boss at the time—the late, great HP [Harry Pearson of The Absolute Sound magazine —Ed.]—loved it even more than I did and played it so often while reviewing stereo equipment that I eventually burned-out on it. (I'll bet it has been at least two decades since the last time I listened to it.) Accordingly, my favorite of her albums is Blue and as coincidence would have it, I was actually listening to it as I read your piece. 8^) P.S.: You might also enjoy reading Sheila Weller's book Girls Like Us, which covers the backstories about Carole King, Carly Simon, and Joni Mitchell."
Mike replies: Ahh...so then you could live without that white-jacket test pressing, is what you're saying? Hint, hint? :-)
Chris Y.: "Honestly I keep coming back to her first album Song to a Seagull. Get it in vinyl and drop the needle on that thing. (I've just recently learned thanks to this moment Mitchell is having, that the guitar she is using on it is a 1956 Martin D28. It sounds like a Steinway.) She used ethereal tunings, almost Shakespearean lyrics, and as you noted, a worldly and heartbroken voice that completely redefined what the folksinging art form could be. With that album she raised the bar to the moon. Anyone discovering her now, especially musicians, should go back to that record and decide for themselves whether she was the Taylor Swift of her time, or something much more. This was her coffeehouse time, hypnotizing small audiences of cognoscenti in small smoky rooms, in town after town. Her work since then has ranged from unique to incomparable, but I always go back to the beginning for the deepest draught...."
John McMillin: "From 'Amelia' to 'Refuge of the Roads,' the Hejira album set the gold standard for me. Just thinking about these songs starts my scalp tingling, as if my hair follicles are antennae connecting me with some distant broadcast of truth, emotion and beauty. Jaco never played so lyrically, with this kind of restraint. Soon, in this fertile crescent where folk collides with jazz, Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays would be in her band for a short while, bringing them to my ears for a lifetime of musical wonderment and awe. Joni played and recorded with an all-star band of other top jazz players, and her tunes are still favorites for jazz covers and interpretations. So it's almost impossible for me to imagine my musical universe without Mitchell's projects and collaborations...not to overlook her songs and lyrics, which are as exquisite, witty and profound as the best instrumental work of her collaborators."
One of my musical friends hates Steely Dan, damning them as "too slick." Me, I'm cheerfully a child of my times. (We all are, it's just that younger people won't know it till they're older.) I love them because a large percentage of their songs are indivisibly associated with memories of times in my life, places that are gone now, and a motley crew of friends and acquaintances. I remember where I was and who I was talking to when I heard that "Aja" had come out; I associate "Reelin' in the Years" with a very memorable Summer interlude at Rehoboth Beach, so much so that every time I catch a few bars of it, it brings up the smell of hydrangeas and salt-sea air and the panicky feeling of running for my life from a gang of drunks who thought I had hustled their friend at pool. "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" takes me back to a transistor radio at a Kentucky Fried Chicken stand that doesn't exist any more, my first job, age fourteen. I have "Can't Buy a Thrill" on yellow vinyl and "Aja" on red. Child of my times, as I was saying.
And they first stirred my inner hunger for the spikier dissonances of jazz, which became my major listening passion for a solid fifteen years or so. Victor Feldman, Joe Sample, Larry Carlton, and Wayne Shorter all played on "Aja."
Steely Dan, the reclusive songwriting duo of which Walter Becker was half, was a band of the 'seventies. By 1981 they were gone, not to return until years later when they reincarnated as a live nostalgia act. I never blame bands for becoming nostalgia acts, by the way; I'd do it if it were me. Everyone's choices in this life are limited; why not celebrate whatever your high point was? Why not make your living doing what's most fun for you?
I don't know how Walter Becker died, but then, when did we ever know anything about Walter Becker? The best line in his obituary is "Mr. Becker moved to Maui, where he detoxed and became an avocado farmer." Well that is something I did not know. I suppose old artists have to go somewhere, and do something.
The band's best album was "Aja," but my favorite will always be "Katy Lied," a record that helped me survive a time in my life about which the less said, the better.
We never knew you, Walter, but that's the way you wanted it. Thanks for your half of the long soundtrack, and goodbye.
Mike
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
RubyT: "This post really meant a lot to my husband, who was reeling with the news. Yours is the only memorial that captured his feelings."
Jim R: (partial comment): "I was fortunate enough to have seen one of the Steely Dan Beacon Theater 'full album' shows about six years ago (we chose 'The Royal Scam'). It was one of the best things I've ever spent any amount of money on. The house lights dimmed, the band slipped into place in the dark, and a single spot illuminated an old red turntable on a stool. A lovely dressed woman (one of the backup singers) came into view, turned on the turntable and placed the stylus on the album. Vinyl crackle and hiss lasted three seconds and then wham—house lights on bright and they tore into 'Kid Charlemagne.'"
John Krumm: "I had to laugh when you said 'I'd do it if it were me,' because the first thing I thought is that TOP is a bit of a nostalgia act, even down to the somewhat old-fashioned blog format. And I suppose if you changed things radically we'd protest and want you to play more of your old hits, so to speak."
Mike Chisholm: "'Aja'? 'Katy Lied'? No, no. Great albums, but don't be silly: 'Countdown to Ecstasy' is the best. Album. Ever. By anyone."
Mike replies: Actually Howe Gelb's "'Sno Angel Like You' is the best album ever by anyone. It has a gospel choir! But since no one has ever heard of that one, I'll let it slide.
No wait, it's the Pixies' 'Doolittle'.... Wait....
