Pockets Lead the Way

Here in New England it has been a damned cold week. Snow, cold - winter (though it's headed back into the 50s this weekend: NEw England!) - I have had enough. Time to cast our musical attention southward... it is good, then, that I have sort of gotten myself out of college in my Band of the Month series, and can write about R.E.M., 80s left of the dial darlings.

I first heard them on the radio, Radio Free Europe, some station or show playing underground music, probably fall of 1982. My Springsteen loving pal was something of a new wave fan (big into XTC and Elvis Costello, I recall), which spilled into punk and indie bands like REM - though more like X, one of his favorites. (He wore out Under a Big Black Sun as a sophomore, like we wore out The River as freshmen.) He sought out college radio and the like - that's where I heard Radio Free Europe; I don't remember what I thought - I liked it, but can't say it made too much of an impression. I think there was some hype, that I didn't quite get, but didn't turn me off. I filed them away, I think, for future reference. And then - a year or so later - Reckoning came out, the radio started playing South Central Rain - Dick Clark featured South Central Rain! I remember watching that with my brothers - they were very confused: Why can't he sing? they asked, or something to that effect. But I knew... It didn't take the kids long to catch up - one of them ended up getting me Murmur for Christmas, and the next summer I lived on Fables of the Reconstruction.... And later? I believe that Reckoning ended up being the first CD I ever bought; Lifes Rich Pageant, I think, was the first LP I replaced with a CD (like, a week after I got the LP). And so on. I saw REM in 1986 - but that experience factors more next month. And after that - I always liked them; I sometimes loved, them; I never liked them as much as I did in the middle of the 80s. But to the end, they made good music, and sometimes great music.

That's beside the point. It's also a function of the power of their music in that period. There aren't many bands who can measure up to those 2 records. I wore Fables of the Reconstruction out - I lived on it. I taped it, when I got it - I gave a copy to one of my friends, who kept it in his car, and we'd listen to it endlessly. (There were a bunch of tapes we listened to all the time: that one, The Good Earth, a couple Husker Du records, a compilation of stuff from the big Springsteen live box, Live at Leeds, Live at Folsom Prison and San Quentin, a couple Iggy Pop and Stooges records (old and new), a Ramones greatest hits, Motorhead's Ace of Spades - there was some Ministry in there somewhere, and various heavy metal acts he liked... all good.) It was good.

But it was more than good. It wasn't just the music, words, it was something about the feeling REM gave me. They always conjured up imagery in their songs - for all the jokes about Stipe's indecipherable lyrics, that is the most striking thing to me, how clear the imagery is. They are full of scenes: The smell is sweet the short haired boy woman offers pull up a seat... the walls constructed stone by stone... two doors to go between the wall was raised today... did you ever call, I waited for your call... I will try not to breath, I can hold my head still... that's me in the corner, that's me in the spotlight... I was wrong, I have been laughable... bank the quarry river swim.... Even when he's at his most opaque - it's not so much opaque as just stripped of the normal syntax, really. We knee skinned that river red - why not?

I admit the imagery their music conjures is not all Stipe's: their music, especially Reckoning and Fables of the Reconstruction, bring up almost irresistible images for me - memories, real and imaginary imaginary landscapes. The associations were odd ones - memories, in particular, of the places my grandparents lived - in rural Vermont and Canada, places with fields and woods, and old dirt roads overgrown with grass. I latched onto the natural images on those records - the fields divided one by one, the green growing rushes, the palpable feeling of hot summer days. They reminded me of being a kid, in the country, reading the Hardy Boys (The Secret of the Lost Tunnel! with it's old south setting, its Civil War treasure, its overgrown mansions and battlefields...) - imagining the stories in the real world. There probably isn't much else in common - but I can't help it: the associations are overwhelming, and always make me very happy.



Though getting away from myself - REM's songs never fail to impress. Stipe's impressionism never really loses touch with the world - real stories, real scenes, real people are in them. All of them are crafted just so. And the music is just as impressive. Especially those early 80s songs - the lush Rickenbacker guitars, Mike Mills' bass lines, his backing vocals, the steady, relentless propulsion - they are so good.

So it's time for the top ten - and another reminder of how horribly arbitrary these lists are. I mean - I like these groups because I like them! everything they do - their basic sound, style, the things they do, that make them who they are. So - yeah, maybe I can pick out 5 or 6 that are better, somehow, obviously necessary on a top ten list - but after that? something like "Moral Kiosk" come up on shuffle and I stop to listen cause I haven't heard it in years and think, this is not a song that I would think to include in a top ten, but - you know... if this was the best REM did, I'd still have most of their records, wouldn't I? That probably goes without saying - if the best thing The Who ever did was Eminence Front or Squeeze Box or Naked Eye, I'd have been a fan...

But that's not helping me now. Okay: I don't know if this 10 is better than the next 10 (beyond the top 6 or 7) but - I do have to resist the temptation just to put 5 each from Reckoning and Fables. That's not quite fair to the rest of their career, which has an awful lot of good work - but I have to say, I was completely besotted with those records, and it comes back every time I hear them now... But I did it with the Beatles - I can do it for REM!

1. Driver 8 (this is another of the all time great songs)
2. Little America
3. Life and How to Live It
4. Pretty Persuasion
5. Try Not to Breathe
6. Catapult
7. 7 Chinese Brothers
8. South Central Rain
9. Country Feedback
10. Carnival of Sorts (Boxcars)

...though that leaves off Don't Go Back To Rockville - that can't be right... I don't know. Whatever. Video!



Picking videos isn't any easier than picking the songs. They are well documented on YouTube - lots of excellent live footage out there. What can I do? I tried to find their American Bandstand performance, but had no luck - I think I remember it - band in shadow, Stipe with headphones on, buzzing away.... This will have to do - on Letterman, network TV debut and all that... YOu can see some of the group dynamic at work - Mills and Buck showing their composure, Stipe hiding, Bill Berry waiting patiently behind the kit...



And while we're on the Reckoning - here's 7 Chinese Brothers:



Though this - we have to have this. Same show, here's two (2) train songs! You can never have too many train songs.



And since it can't all be from the early days - Country Feedback:



Though I have to stop somewhere - so I will end here: Little America. The biggest wagon is the empty wagon is the noisiest... they were so goddamned young!

Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground

This month's band is a bit out of order, if I were sticking to my rough chronology - but events have intervened, so let's look at the Velvet Underground, and Lou Reed.

I became a fan after college; that was late, I suppose, but it took a while to get where I was going. I started listening to a lot of things after college that I'd missed before - contemporary stuff like the Feelies, Replacements and Husker Du; punk, especially the Sex Pistols, Joy Division, the Ramones; and older underground music - the Velvets, Stooges, etc... All of it felt like I had finally reached the place I wanted to be. All of those bands, really, made me feel that way - like I was hearing something that I had imagined but didn't know existed until now... And the best of these was the Velvet Underground.

There were reasons. Reed's lyrics, obviously - they were a different matter than anyone else I'd listened to. Stories, full of characters, situations, described, in clear and evocative ways. They were naughty of course (shiny shiny boots of leather...), but more than that, I loved their descriptive power, their way of describing things that might be happening somewhere. I was not, then, the movie geek I would become - but I had the makings; and Reed's songs operate almost like little movies. They are built, after all, around stories and people - vignettes, scenes - and images - "Severin, down on your bended knee..." - conversations, actions, things seen. Not all - but the imagery in Reed's songs is still more vivid than almost anyone else (at least of the songwriters I knew then) - "I wish that I was born a thousand years ago..." They are a tour of a world - they are like a sketchbook, with commentary... they feel documentary. And the man can turn a phrase....

But I don't know - was it the words? or the music? Because the music blew me away just as much. Nothing else quite sounds like that - listening to the first Velvet Underground record, especially, is like watching old Godard films - the more you know about music (or films) the more familiar they seem, because everyone since then seems to be stealing a little of it - but almost no one since then has come close to taking the chances they took. There's nothing quite like that set of drones and pretty melodies, the dissonance and pulsing rhythms, the ebb and flow of the music, between songs, inside songs. They are beautiful, genuinely unsettling, and build up to real honest to god rock and roll climaxes. It crushed me in the late 80s, and has the same effect now.

And then there is this - it had the same effect in 1973 or 4. I have a memory - I don't know if I trust it - of hearing Walk on the Wild Side on the radio, on AM, I think, when it was a hit, I think. I try to place the memory - I can, almost - I was in my bedroom, it was back when I shared a room with my brothers - I think I remember details, playing with some kind of plastic cowboys and Indians or soldiers or something on an old dresser... and Lou Reed came on the radio and brought me up short. That's a very strange song to hear as a kid, used to the Carpenters and Wings and maybe Elton John. It didn't sound like anything I had ever heard - or anything I would hear for a couple years afterwards, I think. But even then - it was fantastic. It would bring me up short, when I heard it - the way it sounds... It's a fairly simple rock song in a sense, but nothing about it is simple. From the chunky acoustic guitar, the twin bass lines, the brushed drums, Lou's voice, to the colored girls on the chorus, and the sax solo - it didn't sound like anything else. I don't know how often I heard it, in those early days - but I must have loved it. When I started hearing it later, I remembered it, and could sing along with it.... Now - when I first heard it, I had no clue what it was about. When I heard it later - well, yes. But by that time I had heard plenty of "dirty" songs - you know - Love is the Drug; Sweet Emotion; things like that... That time around I got Walk on the Wild side. But from the start - the sound of it burrowed into my head and waited until I was old enough to get it.

What I did get, from the beginning, was the line about the colored girls singing. I recognized the irony - the joke, about white musicians using black musicians and voices to give their songs authenticity and a touch of beauty. I could tell this song was doing that, and making fun of it at the same time. And I thought that was very cool. And I think I recognized it in a lot of Reed's music - the stuff I heard in the 70s and 80s especially. The AOR stations I listened to played Sweet Jane and Rock and Roll from Rock and Roll Animal a lot - those guitar solos are as familiar as Jimmy Page or Tommy Iommi's... they were odd - sounding nothing like Walk on the Wild Side (which got played a bit); then later, other stations would occasionally play something from the Velvets - which sounded nothing like either. And when I started listening to the Velvet Underground records - well - that's another of Lou's many virtues. He was something of a musical chameleon. He played in many styles - played with styles - adopting the slick rock and roll of Rock and Roll Animal, going off into the experimental strangeness of Metal Machine Music - you could never quite tell how seriously he meant to take it... though I suspect a big part of the point is that you don't really have to choose, seriousness or irony. You should be able to hold both in your mind at the same time - and when it's good, it's good.

And so one more thing, still on the musical legacy of Reed and the Velvets. It sometimes seems that all of my favorite songs in the last 30 years have been variations on Heroin. Seriously - Bad? Atmosphere? Marquee Moon? The Cross? Nirvana made people talk about the soft/hard thing - it wasn't new - it isn't even really unique to the Velvets, but they did something different. Songs like Behind Blue Eyes, Stairway to Heaven have a similar structure, but they seem so much more conventional. The main difference, I think, is that the Velvets work the structure around a drone - most of the other bands weren't doing that. (Oddly enough, the one big English band that did love drones, as much as the Velvets, is the Beatles - all those fake-Indian songs, or Tomorrow Never Knows?) But after the Velvets, people picked up on it - whole National Musical Styles picked up on it - take Krautrock.... They made drones an integral part of rock. That's something right there.

It's also something that really depended on John Cale and Mo Tucker, too - I've made this post mostly about Lou Reed, for obvious reasons - but they were a great band. Cale brought a lot of the musical sophistication and strangeness - and Tucker brought that sound, that 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 drum pattern, that makes every song seem to race. YOu can't beat them.

All right - now to the top 10. I could have stuck to The Velvet Underground, but I think I will make this a combined list - Velvets and Lou by himself. Here then - my 10 favorite songs:

1. Some Kinds of Love - the possibilities are endless...
2. Heroin
3. Street Hassle - tramps like us, we were born to pay...
4. What Goes On - this song, especially the live versions, chugging along the way it does, could go on forever, and I would be happy; it is all you need. Lou and Sterling do yeoman work, keeping those rhythm guitars going for 10 minutes at a stretch.
5. Walk on the Wild Side
6. Rock and Roll - another song that comes in half a dozen variations, all of them thrilling
7. Sweet Jane
8. All Tomorrow's Parties
9. Pale Blue Eyes
10. Venus in Furs

And now some video - start with Walk on the Wild Side, live in France, full glam - which in Lou's case translates into something like horror movie makeup:



And Street Hassle, video made of Warhol films...



Loutallica! doing Sweet Jane.



80s Lou, doing Rock and Roll at Amnesty International. I read a Christian rock newsletter that described Lou Reed at this concert (and the Meters if such a thing can be imagined) as "disposable pop music." This remains one of the touchstones in my life for bad music criticism.



The Gift, from the Velvet's reunion tour:



And Heroin, also from the reunion (nice shots of Mo and CAle, as well as Lou - though Sterling gets short shrift from the editors, I'm sorry to say):



One more - Romeo had Juliet - since, for all my talk about the Velvet Underground, Lou kept churning them out for a long time. The one time I saw Lou play, was after the New York record - he held his own with the Feelies, which no one else has ever done... Also - this is the first record I could not find of vinyl, and had to buy on CD. It marked the end of something there...

A Sort of Homecoming

Well, it's October, and the trees are stripped bare of all they wear - so it's time for another post on a favorite band - this time, U2. They are another band I embraced in college - and maybe the first band that I embraced almost in real time. I heard U2 - I Will Follow, specifically - on the radio, sometime in the spring of 1981 I think, senior year of high school. There were a lot of new wave type bands on the radio those days, and I can't say U2 sounded all that different at first - but the more I heard it, the more impression it made. They didn't sound like everyone else - the echoey production, the rattling percussion, and the riffs - the guitars - the guitars... they jumped off the radio, they stopped me cold, made me listen. I am a sucker for a riff. I remember at first, they were not that big - bands like the Police or The Knack (a couple years earlier) or, shoot - Flock of Seagulls - were in heavy rotation at times; you couldn't escape those songs. U2, at the beginning, were just one of the songs on the radio, a modest hit I guess - but every time they came on I turned it up and stopped to listen.

I went to college in Boston about the time October came out. In Boston, they were in heavy rotation. I Fall Down was the single (I believe) - but stations played both records, all the way down - though especially I Will Follow, Out of Control, Electric Co., maybe Stories for Boys, Gloria, Rejoice, I Fall Down, October.... that was enough. It is probably pretty obvious that I loved guitar music all along - U2 was the first new band (punk, new wave, etc.) that really caught my ear, and it was the guitar that got me. I liked them as much as I liked anyone, and unlike all the other bands I really liked, they were still around,, active, making music, engaged with the world as it was in 1982. They struck me, over the first three records, as the obvious successors to the Who - the insistent rhythm guitar, the energy, the power - I had become a fanatical devotee of the Who - U2 seemed like their modern equivalent...

It felt like I had them to myself the first couple years of college. My friends were mostly into either classic rock or mainstream pop - some of them were actively hostile to new wave or punk. Somehow, the ones who were into newer stuff didn't seem to be into U2 - one guy (the Springsteen fan) loved Elvis Costello, X and XTC; another guy listened to The Police and Prince all the time. (That's how I remember it, anyway - a couple years later, he drove a bunch of us to Worcester to see U2 - he must have been a fan all along - I guess neither of us mentioned it until War or The Unforgettable Fire came out.) There were more U2 fans later - after War - but the first year or so, they were really just mine.... And they were - I didn't have a lot of money in college, I didn't buy many records - just U2's records, the day they came out (if I could). Going by record stores until they did come out. Then making my poor brothers listen to them until they were as enthusiastic as I was...

And then? I saw them live, spring 85 I think, at the Worcester Centrum. That was something - but for some reason, it seemed like it opened the door to doubts. Maybe they were too professional by then - maybe their live act sounded too much like the records. Not that I was an expert on live music, but I was spoiled, listening to Live at Leeds all the time - and having seen a real guitar hero (however obscure) in Phil Keaggy - as great a show as they could put on, I guess I probably wished there was more to listen to. I shouldn't make too much of this - seeing U2 live was truly a peak experience in those days... But it didn't quite hold - and where seeing other favorite bands tended to seal the deal (The Replacements, REM, things like that), seeing U2 seemed to make room to find fault. Though it's probably just this - when I got out of college, I hit another of the periods when I started discovering music. I changed radio stations; I read different magazines; I discovered underground music (the Replacements and Husker Du), and older bands - punk, the Velvets, the Stooges, country... U2 got left behind, maybe. Or maybe, they just took three years to get a new record out, and I spent it with those bands and REM. That happens.

But Joshua Tree came out - a record I looked forward to as much as their earlier records - and though it sounded fantastic, it did not satisfy. I am going to say - it is the funniest record this side of the Song Remains the Same. It is not meant to be funny - but the lyrics - "I see the stone set in your eyes" - lord lord. On and on and on with that stuff.... I do not think that record would pass a Turing Test. Someone has fed a bunch of Rock Cliche Symbols (stones, rocks, rivers, fire, red, sky, snow, sleet, driving rain) into a computer and had it generate lyrics. I swear.... But even then - they can sound so good. Joshua Tree makes me wish I didn't speak English - because those songs, Bono included, sound fantastic. Great riffs (though they do get a bit repetitive), a propulsive beat - they never stopped sounding great. But - in his early days, Bono's songs almost make sense - and by the time of Achtung Baby, they're almost neutral again... But the damage was done. I didn't care all that much anymore...

But those early records still pack a lot of punch. And the later ones retain The Edge's riffing, and the propulsion of the rhythm section. I noticed, listening to them the last week or so, to prep for this, that they never lost that propulsion, from start to finish. Their songs race along - they lock into a groove, and they don't let up. Those early songs all have a break in the middle, a swirly abstract bit, where Bono mewls and the Edge noodles and Larry and Adam step back and Steve Lillywhite drops plates on the floor - but they never lose the beat in those sections, never lose the pulse, not on record, not live... I don't know if they were the best rhythm section, necessarily, but they were locked in (and The Edge is most definitely part of the rhythm section), and they never faltered. They are still a joy to listen to. And The Edge - he never seems to come up with more than one idea per song - but he comes up with an astonishing number of ideas, and he rides 'em into the ground. And that works for me.

Okay then - to the list: top 10 U2 songs.... you will note the heavy concentration of early stuff - I won't deny it or apologize - they started at the top, and never matched it, lyrically, musically, anything. But they have some high moments along the way...

1. Out of Control
2. The Electric Co. - 1 and 2 were obvious; the order less so. Musically, I think I prefer Electric Co. - it rocks out about as much as anything they did. But I think Out of Control gets the top because it is a better song, because it just sums up everything on the first record - and has such a great riff to it. They are, though, both of them, exhilarating.
3. Bad - they got a bit spacy on this record - and the lyrics start to get really lost. Bono trying to do improv on some of those songs - ugh... but still, when they were on - and there's this, too - for some reason, when he got to writing about dope, Bono almost starts to make sense. I notice it on the Joshua Tree - Running to Stand Still works about as well as anything there, the imagery connects to something - people, places, and it fits the themes... like Bad does. I noticed, over the years, how much this song owes to Heroin, the song (in structure at least) - and to Joy Division's Atmosphere (pretty much everything - the drum patterns, the verse structures, half the lyrics)... But hey - steal from the best. And I cannot resist the sound of this song - the way it builds, the guitar sounds, the drums coming in and building up, it is just fantastic.
4. All I Want is You - I suppose Bono's lyrics and singing are not terrible here, but this is here because of the guitar. God, I love those open chords...
5. Gloria
6. I Will Follow
7. New Year's Day - it might be my imagination, but isn't Bono singing this song from the perspective of Jesus Christ, debating whether he should come back yet or not? whether we are worthy of him? it's any easy mistake to make, I suppose. Bono makes it rather often.
8. Sunday Bloody Sunday
9. A Sort of Homecoming
10. Mysterious Ways - I give short shrift to the later records, but they still have their merits, especially Achtung Baby. Though less character...

And so - video. Might as well start where it started for me - though I don't think I saw this actual video until the advent of YouTube. Still...



And a couple fairly early live performances - Out of control:



... and Electric Co.



And finally, first - an unembedded version of Bad, from 1984 - harder than later, more bite - I think part of what started to disappoint me about U2 was that I always heard their songs in my head harder than they played them. I would imagine Bad taking off in concert - the guitars tougher, everything faster, more violent - more like the Who. The records hinted at The Who - the concerts never delivered The Who. And over time, the music tended to slip inot the background - Bono seemed to take over more and more of the group, the sound - and I loved them for the Edge. Alas.... Still - here is Bad, from Live Aid... they were the band I watched that thing to see, not Led Zeppelin or Queen - and they are still far, far better than what those old timers offered up (however generous memory is)... This performance is starting to bloat, I'm afraid - Bono's starting to pretend he's a cowboy, he's quoting Lou Reed and Mick Jagger and seems confused by the security between him and the audience - and for most of this, the band is just vamping while Bono does his thing.... But boy, they could command a stage.

Bruuuuce!

This month's Band of the Month brings me to college. My next door neighbor, my freshman year, was a New Jersey kid and a Springsteen fan. He had most of the records, if not all of them - though he had them on LP, and, somehow, he and I and our roommates didn't have turntables. But he had also The River on cassette, and we wore it out.

I liked Bruce before I got there - that AOR station I mentioned last month played him, quite a bit actually - especially the first record, I think, because I remember hearing Blinded By the Light, Spirits in the Night and For You more than anything else. They were great songs; and songs from The River turned up on that radio station and others, and I liked them too, without quite loving it - but I was ready for it when I got to college. My first memories of Springsteen were more ambiguous - I read about him before I heard him, and what I heard was colored by the hype. There was that Time Magazine story, which I might have read; I think I remember something in one of those educational magazines they distributed in school (one of the useful ones, with stories about Thor and Jimmy Walker, and Brice Springsteen. Also, the Democratic primary contenders for 1976 - Sargent Shriver! Mo Udall! Jimmy Carter! I wish I remembered what it was.) All this prose was very giddy. When I finally heard Bruce - Born to Run, probably on America's Top 40 - I can't say I understood the fuss. Except - it was a haunting song - that strange, pulsing drone, those murmured/growled/yowled vocals - it didn't sound world changing too me, but it also didn't quite sound like anything else I had ever heard... Anyway - that was that, for a while, until Manfred Mann's Earth Band covered Blinded by the Light - a song (the cover) I dearly loved, at that young age. Again - Casey Kasem played the original, and it was strange and a bit beyond me - but you could hear the cool in it... Over the next year or so, I started hearing more Springsteen here and there - enough to start to get it, though I wasn't a fan exactly. There was a girl in high school who was a Springsteen fan - an Enthusiast. People thought that was very strange then - maybe it was, though when I got to college, well, I became one too.

It was a communal thing - bunches of us would listen to The River, sing along, play air guitar, do what guys do... or we'd listen to the records, which took some negotiation, to find a turntable - but we must have - those records, especially Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, are as familiar to me as The River or Nebraska are. (When Nebraska came out, someone got it on tape again - and I think I must have copied it, because I listened to it for years.) It was intense - and when Nebraska came out - it got more intense. That was not a communal record (though me and the kid from Jersey would listen to it together.) I listened to it alone a lot - or maybe it's just the kind of record that makes you feel alone. I don't know. I worshipped it though - it was one of my iconic records for many years...

But this infatuation with Springsteen, powerful as it was, did not last very long. It lasted roughly until the release of Born in the USA, to be honest. That was a record that came with very high expectations (as had Nebraska) - and it was very disappointing. It's hard to say why, exactly - there are good songs on there (the title track particularly) - but it felt wrong. It was so overproduced - it sounded normal, on the radio, in 1984. (Not a good time to sound normal.) Maybe more than that - it struck me as being a direct continuation of The River, with slicker production and fewer good songs - and it occurred to me that this was the first time Springsteen did not change with his new record. The first six were all different - they all sound different. There's obviously a lot of continuity - but still: the funky folk sound of the first one.... the more melodic, soulful, jazzy approach on the second... the epic rock and roll sprawl of Born to Run, piles of instruments all humming along.... then Darkness, while continuing some of that, moves toward a harder rock sound - think Adam Raised a Cain or Candy's Room... then The River's combination of much rootsier, rock & roll songs alongside the country/folk of the title track, Stolen Car, etc. - which gets stripped to the bone for Nebraska, country, rockabilly, folk.... all of them emphasizing different things, all of them revolving around slightly different musical styles - all of them telling slightly different kinds of stories, too. Moving toward narrative - songs like Blinded by the Light or Growin' Up aren't quite narrative at all; but every record is more story oriented, until you reach Nebraska, which plays like a set of short stories. And different types of stories - different locations (some of the records are very urban; some are very much New Jersey - some are clearly more rural, rural Jersey or PA, etc., and Nebraska is national) - different tones. Types of characters - the noirish songs on Born to Run morph into the serial killers, small time crooks, desperate auto workers shooting up a bar on a spree on Nebraska.... All that - he covers an amazing amount of ground in those records, covers a surprising amount of musical ground as well - and all that seems to be starting to spin its wheels on Born in the USA.

So he lost me. I bought the big live record that came out about that time - which, I thought, and still think, redeems most of the songs on Born in the USA... have I mentioned how much I dislike the production?... But after that - the next couple records were meh... and so? Other groups supplanted Springsteen in my heart... partly, I imagine, because I liked him in college, and I had no money in college, and so managed, despite loving Bruce, and listening to Bruce a ton - to never buy any Springsteen records until I got that big live thing - after I got out of college. And Tunnel of Love, I bought that... and so I didn't have the records around to keep going back to - not until a lot later when I made a point of getting Nebraska and Asbury Park. There you have it. He's tended to retreat in my mind more than even groups like U2, who I loved for a while, then started to love less - but I had those records (see, in college, I was the only U2 fan I knew, until I got my brothers to like them - so I had to buy their records if I was going to hear them. Other people liked Bruce - I could listen to their records.) So I didn't overlook them.

I shouldn't overlook Springsteen. My tastes have changed - he does not fit well with the things I have listened to for the last 25 years (that will be coming in this series - among the songwriting set, Lou Reed, David Thomas and Richard Thompson are going to loom large).... but he was so good in the 70s - the songs, when I listen to them now, still come back to me, how great they are, and how many different ways they are great. A song like Two Hearts or Factory plays now, and I feel what I felt then....

And now - top ten - a very difficult list to compile, for the reasons hinted at above - his consistency as a songwriter, the variety of styles he worked in... but here goes anyway:

1. Atlantic City
2. Blinded By the Light
3. Johnny 99
4. Growin' Up
5. The River
6. Born to Run
7. State Trooper/Open All Night [they are very close to the same song - same riff, one acoustic, quieter, the other fast and electric, thew lyrics echoing each other - one desperate, one hyperactive and joyful, both of them racing through the New Jersey night... though given the general tone of Nebraska, it's hard not to imagine the two of them running into one another out there... though - the mean one comes first; the happy one comes later - corrects it, maybe, who knows. I am counting them as one, no matter what.]
8. 4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)
9. Two Hearts
10. Candy's Room

Video - a liver version of Atlantic City:



And Manfred Mann - which doesn't really sound much like Bruce, but gave people a taste of his songs - and is still a pretty good bit of work....



Bruce Rocks - Candy's Room:



And a draft (sounding more like The River) - Candy's Boy:



And - I guess the iconic Springsteen song, Born to Run:

In the Days of My Youth...

It is the second Friday of the month, and so time to focus on another band. (Second Friday seems more promising than first, I think... to maintain this habit.) Let me take you back, now, to the summer of 1980. (We've been there before, briefly.) I remember it well - staying up all night - 3, 4, 5 in the morning - reading books and listening to the radio. AOR! In it's heyday! I imagine I was driving the rest of the house crazy, staying up half the night with the radio on, but what can you do? That summer told: it formed my tastes, in music and books - it is a fact that most of what I ended up liking then, I like now.

My youthful musical trek was not always smooth - I was at the mercy of the radio, and lived in the boonies, and mostly stuck with AM until well into high school. I started paying attention to music about 1974 and 75. I mean, that’s about when I started paying attention to songs, started seeking out groups and types of music, and talking about it with my friends at school. I started listening to the top 40 in the summer of 1975. Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynolds were high on the charts. Jive Talkin’ hit number 1. I listened to the top 40 every week, and I started to have favorites: Elton John; Steve Miller; David Bowie put out Golden Years and Fame that summer; I discovered and liked rock bands - Aerosmith, BTO, Kiss - most of all, Kiss. Not just Kiss - one of my cousins had three records, Frampton Comes Alive, Aerosmith’s Rocks, and BTO’s Not Fragile - I would visit, we would play air guitar to Do You Feel Like We Do? and all was well. But for most of the middle of the 70s, it was all about Kiss.

This post, though, is not about Kiss. The thing is, even when I was young and stupid, I was restless and curious. At the beginning I did not make many distinctions about music - I liked and disliked everything I heard as if it existed in a vacuum. That changed as my tastes developed, and probably not in a good way at first. I tended to fall into the habits of an isolated adolescent white boy - I got to be a rock snob; my tastes became more rigid, I second guessed myself. (Though not before I bought an Abba record, and Saturday Night Fever.) So as much as I might love The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald or Someone Saved My Life Tonight, I would think they were a bit below me. Though I didn’t stop liking them - even at 15, I had a bit of a sense of irony, and that let me listen to what I wanted, when I needed it.

But I didn’t stop looking for music and finding new things. And when I was young, I was inclined to look at every new discovery as a kind of step to a higher level of consciousness. I would move from Elton John and the Bee Gees to Aerosmith and Kiss and think, I have done it - I have finally discovered what real rock and roll sounds like! And a year or so later, I would discover Styx and maybe Queen and say the same thing. And so I moved, from BTO and Frampton to Kiss to the Eagles (poor me) then Styx, then groups like Styx (Journey, REO, Kansas, Queen - that kind of crap), which brought me up to the edges of the province of straight up classic rock. And by the summer of 1980, that’s where I was.

And thus: I found a radio station that played real AOR: The Beatles and the Stones and the Who and the Doors, Sabbath and Springsteen and the Kinks and Pink Floyd and anything else the guardians of Rock And Roll thought met the grade. (Which at times could include the likes Lou Reed and Zappa and even, though I only discovered this a long time later, Captain Beefheart. But those are acts you will have to wait for, in this series, since I am following, roughly, my discovery of music.) One might go on. Some of these bands we will meet again: today, we are going to the band that was the center of the universe when I was 17 (not for me alone I suspect). The main course - the piece de resistance - the stuff of white boys’ dreams:



That, thought I, then, that, is what Rock and Roll Should Sound Like. That was hardly a unique opinion - most of the other guys at school would have agreed. The radio station certainly agreed - they played the hell out of Led Zeppelin. I somehow acquired, along here, Led Zeppelin II and IV on 8 track, and eventually, The Song Remains The Same on vinyl - but thanks to the radio, I didn't need them. I knew the first record and Houses of the Holy and most of Physical Graffiti as well as I knew the ones I had - most of those records got played all the way through every month somewhere on the radio... (III got short shrift; and the later ones were often politely ignored.) I would stay up to 3 in the morning, and hear a Zep song an hour. And usually put down the book (Pride and Prejudice! Lord Jim! I was preparing for an AP English class...) and play air guitar for the duration...

Sad, sad. I should be clear though - the station I listened to did play a lot of bands - they played deep cuts. I got a real musical education, at least in rock of the 60s and 70s, everything from Zep and Sabbath to Jackson Browne and Supertramp, over that summer and the next year. And in fact, things got better in 81 - they started playing new wave type stuff as well (or I found a different, even better radio station, that made no distinctions...) - I heard U2 and the Ramones and Elvis Costello and the B-52s, etc, before I got out of high school - which, in the woods of Maine, was an accomplishment. But all of it, for that year or so, revolved around the Zep.

And then I went to college, and it didn't revolve around them anymore. The radio stations in Boston played contemporary music, contemporary rock - my music-loving friends were mainly Bruce-o-philes (he should be next month's story) - and my freshman year there was a bit of a Satanic Panic, which I mostly ignored, but it made groups like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath somewhat frowned on... (Though I had a Sabbath poster on the wall; I think I pretended it was Led Zeppelin, since they offended the christians a bit less... but still; I wish I could find that poster. I didn't really care much about Sabbath back then; now, I think their version of hard rock has aged a lot better than Led Zeppelin's; I know I'd rather hear Paranoid than Heartbreaker.) And over the years, I found more bands, that repeated the old process - "this is it! I have finally discovered what real rock and roll sounds like!" - though I admit, after the summer of 1980, I never quite abandoned what went before. My new discoveries (and there are a lot of them: we have three or four pretty major revisions in what I listened to coming through the years) after that were added to what I already liked.

And somewhere in the mid-80s, sometime after I started listening to punk in earnest, I started hearing those AOR bands, the cock rock bands, with a different set of ears. (I mentioned this way back in 2004, writing about Johnny Ramone.) I noticed the riffs, I paid attention to Bonzo, I stopped feeling guilty - or "ironic" - about loving guitar solos. I also noticed, maybe, just how ridiculous their lyrics were; how annoying Robert Plant's voice was; how obnoxious their misogyny was; and how cavalierly they treated the people who wrote their actual songs... But - with eyes open - I still thought they kicked ass. And still do.

In fact, right now, I probably like them almost as much as I ever did, at least since that first flush of discovery. Though I like them differently. In 1980, I liked what you would expect - Stairway to Heaven and Dazed and Confused of course, and the first 2 records, and the harder stuff on the 4th, the long solos, the blues, the boogies.... Oh, I liked the ballads and such, but they were complimentary. But now? I suppose there is no denying: when push comes to shove, Led Zeppelin is basically a duo: John Bonham and Jimmy Page. It's the riffs, it's the drums - even on the ballads, it's the beats, its the riffs. It is awe inspiring, how on a song like All of My Love, a ballad - with Bonzo and Jimmy both so strung out they could barely stand - the band just swings like a motherfucker. They could go up their asses - and these days, I have no patience for a lot of their bluesy boogie workouts, the endless and pointless extensions of Whole Lotta Love and the like, the theremin passages... These days, I make no apologies for preferring the ballads, and have come to really like their later stuff - when Jones and Plant were doing most of the work, and they had almost turned into a prog band. With a drummer who knew how to rock... In the end - they are not like the Beatles; making a top 10 Zeppelin songs is not going to make me agonize and wring my hands, I won't be able to come up with another 20 songs that could be on this list - one or two maybe (How Many More Times, Good Times, Bad Times, Achilles Last Stand, the Immigrant Song - that's about it, probably...), no more. But still, these days, I might listen to the songs on this list as much as anything I have.

Here they are: my 10 favorite Led Zeppelin tracks:

1. Thank You (the live one on the BBC sessions particularly sends me; it’s a real song; and Jimmy really lets it rip. Bless them.)
2. Dazed and Confused - what I said about not liking the indulgent noisy songs doesn't apply universally. It’s the guitar; even the half hour versions of this are almost listenable. The early, short versions, though, are pretty hard to beat.
3. Stairway to Heaven - boring, but what can you say?
4. Ramble On - seeing them play it on the recent live DVD brought it back - the truth is that for most of the last 15 years or so, I've mostly been listening to things like that BBC collection, or HOw the West Was Won, the live stuff that came out after the fact... and those records don't have Ramble On, so I forgot. Now I remember.
5. When the Levee Breaks - it’s the drums, man.
6. All of My Love - there's more to the end of the Zep's run than they get credit for. The last couple records, the songs get good - the words aren’t stupid; the melodies are more than just excuses to jam; Plant has learned to sing. And however fucked up they were, Page and Bonham are always stunning. And so detailed - Page’s work is scary perfect.
7. Fool in the Rain - ditto
8. Communication Breakdown - a faster version of God Save the Queen?
9. Kashmir - riffs; drums
10. Over the Hills and Far Away - live, especially

That's enough - this post has started to approach Dazed and Confused length itself... Let's do some video. Let's start with half of Zep and the Foo Fighters... (though Dave should have written the lyrics down somewhere.)



Try Page and Plant doing Thank You, in the mid-90s:



And - Dazed and Confused, done right on Danish TV; violin bow and all, they get it in in under 10 minutes:



and finally - isolated drum track for Fool in the Rain. Because - because.

Been a Long Lonely Lonely Time

Today for our Friday music post, something a bit different - just got two DVDs - Celebration Day, the film of the 2007 Led Zeppelin reunion concert, and Color Me Obsessed, a doc about the Replacements. And they have, shall we say, cast my mind back a piece....

They are both pretty good films, for what they are - though this being music day, I do feel compelled to write about the music more than then filmmaking. And especially because they were both pretty important bands, for me - obviously important in the world at large, too, Zep openly, The Mats rather in secret.... but to me... I could probably call Led Zeppelin the beginning of my - mature, call it - tastes in music. I was a typical small town white kid in the 70s, and liked about what you would expect - from top 40 like Elton John to popular rock, like Kiss and Aerosmith, to more sophisticated versions of that, call it Queen, Styx - to, finally, plain old AOR. And while that included the Beatles and the Kinks and the Stones, bands you heard often enough on all kinds of radio stations, since they made singles too - it was defined, for me, and I imagine for pretty much everyone, by the Zep. You did not hear Led Zeppelin on singles stations. They were pretty much the definition of Album Oriented Rock.... I am not saying anything here that people do not know; but that does not make it less true. For me, they signified moving from being a pop fan (however much rock you liked) to being a rock fan. In practice, that usually meant switching to a different radio station. And that brought with it a completely new set of music - as well as a noticeably different format. Longer runs of songs between commercials - less talk - no news... You know. AOR, FM radio, 1979 edition. And this was most definitely tied directly to the radio. I didn't have money to buy a lot of records; I didn't really hang around with other kids listening to their records; I got my music from the radio. We kids talked about music - but if you wanted to hear it, most of the time you had to hear it on the radio.

I don't know how typical that is. Maybe most kids like me bought more records - maybe they traded tapes - I don't know. I imagine, kids living in cities and suburbs had very different options - more radio stations, record stores, concerts, within their reach... But I was well away from that. It was radio. And - for pretty significant periods of my youth, it was me sitting in my room half the night reading a book and listening to the radio, me alone, me and the music. And so - listening to Zep on the radio might have been an experience shared by millions of kids - but it was an experience I had completely by myself. And so - those songs got inside me, somehow, in my head, where they rattle and echo ever since. Not just Led Zeppelin, of course - and by the time I got to college, other bands were starting to be more important to me, and that went on... But for a year or so - my last year or two of high school - they were the best band in the world to me, the absolute center of the rock and roll universe. (Though maybe not the musical universe. I remember when John Bonham died, a terrible thing; but when John Lennon died, I was in shock, for days... But that's - a complicated equation. The music universe and the rock universe aren't necessarily the same things; and THE music universe and MY music universe weren't necessarily the same thing either - the Beatles were the world; Zep was my world, for a while.)

Okay... so how's the film? Not bad, for a bunch of old farts. Not up to their old standards, but how could it be? They are well rehearsed, they have chosen a very fine set list - they look fabulous... Robert Plante and John Paul Jones don't look a day over 45, either of them... Jimmy Page, on the other hand - looks like someone's granddad, pretending to be a rock star. But frankly, that just makes him cooler - with his white hair, thinning a bit, his little paunch - god knows how those other two do it, but he seems more or less willing to just look like his age. And when he wants the stage, he takes it... But still: in the end - it's a good show, but - missing something - no question what. Maybe, the fact that they are as tight, well rehearsed, enthusiastic, as they are just points up the utter indispensability of John Bonham. I think, when you get down to it, the fact is - they were, from start to finish, a duo, plus singer and bass player. Jones and Plante are very good at what they do - but they were always secondary. The band was a duet between Page and Bonham, plus a backup band... and Jason is not John. And so here - you get a very nice record (and video), but you don't get much point in listening to this instead of something like How The West Was Won.

Okay - that was long and autobiographical and barely mentioned the DVD - but wait 'til I get started on the Replacements! The film - Color Me Obsessed - is an interesting one. A documentary about a band that contains none of the band's music, no footage of them, and very little imagery of them at all. No appearances by anyone in the band, either. Instead - interviews, with fans, other musicians and people around the Minneapolis scene (up to and including Greg Norton and Grant Hart - no Bob Mould, though), journalists, from Robert Christgau to David Carr to Jim DeRogatis, the odd record company stooge, the occasional wife. It's an interesting choice - it is disappointing not to hear or see the Mats, I mean - don't you want that? but it's not a bad way to approach the Replacements. They were kind of a secret - they still are kind of a secret - wildly influential, but in ways that let people talk more about other bands... Though even in real time, they were harder, I think, to get a handle on than their peers. Someone mentions it in the film - that with Husker Du, they had a clear idea what kind of band they wanted to be; with the Mats - they never had any ideas. They slipped under the radar... So - talking about them, instead of seeing them - gets at something. Though I'd still love to see some good clean footage of them...

Digging around the web, I found an interview with the director - who says, every interview in the film started with the question, "Why the Replacements?" Well, I suppose like everyone in the doc, I could tell my Replacements story. I came to them late - after college - after Tim. There's autobiography in that - I grew up in the boonies, where AOR was the cutting edge, where Elvis Costello and U2 came off as exotic oddities - then went to college closer to civilization, though still in the suburbs. But I did what you are supposed to do in college, especially fi you come from the woods of Maine - I heard bunches of new bands, bunches of old bands that never got played up there, listened to a lot more depth of the bands I did like... Listened to records, as well as the radio, as it happened. Especially records I didn't hear on the radio - I got obsessed with Live At Leeds for a while there; some of us would listen to The River, all four sides, three times a week... But I heard new stuff as well - I had a buddy who liked X and XTC and Elvis Costello (as well as being a Springsteen freak) - I started taking newer stuff seriously. Nothing particularly radical - I mean - U2, The Pretenders, Prince - but still... not all Jimmy Page wanking, like high school.

But it stopped. I don't know why, maybe there were too many reasons. The X and XTC buddy dropped out; maybe the radio got more conservative, or maybe the music scene got more conservative (I don't rule either out: the turn of the decade, even on fairly mainstream radio stations, I heard the standard new wave bands, Talking Heads, B-52s, Elvis Costello; The Ramones and the Clash getting airplay on mainstream rock stations; U2, The Pretenders, The Police; you'd hear The Damned, Soft Cell, Romeo Void, Gang of Four... by '84 or so the new stuff was dull and derivative - Simple Minds? The Call? Tears for Fears? The Alarm? - not all bad, I guess, but nothing there that would wake you up the way U2 or The Pretenders or London Calling woke me up earlier... There were still songs on the radio I loved as much as ever - but they were usually by groups I already liked, usually discovered in the first year or two of college: U2, Prince, REM...) Maybe it was me - college wasn't a high point, I tended to stagnate while I was there. Did I grow complacent?

Whatever it was, it changed when I left college - I went to grad school, in the big city, and there I started seeing fanzines and underground rock papers, that mentioned bands I had not heard of - and I paid attention. I started looking for college radio or anything else that went away from the normal stuff on the radio, and heard some of them. Somewhere along the line I got wind of The Replacements - I remember a college newspaper running a cartoon using them to beat up REM, and I think I remember some kind of big time magazine (Time?) running a story about punks on major labels, covering Tim and Candy Apple Gray. (And Three Way Tie for Last - though I guess that wasn't actually on a major label, so I might be making this up). The point is - it gave me a target, and when Tim came out, I got it....

Or maybe I heard it on the radio - I think Hold My Life played a bit.... It doesn't matter, I bought it soon enough. What matters is - when I heard them - Hold My Life, specifically - I was floored. There have been some other songs that had that kind of effect on me - not many, though, few as quickly or completely. (I Will Follow; South Central Rain; Slipping (Into Something); Walk on the Wild Side? London Calling?... there aren't a lot...) With the Replacements - they sounded like nothing I had ever heard before. Or - maybe they sounded exactly like what I loved already. They had that quality - to sound like rock and roll distilled to its essence, but like they were inventing it on the spot. I don't know. I still feel it when I listen to Tim - the qualities, the songs, the rough way they are played, the way Westerburg sings - it has a kind of immediacy you don't get anywhere else. Except the other Mats records. (I quickly bought Let It Be, and was blown away a second time.) But that record, Tim, especially - Hold My Life, Bastards of the Young, Little Mascara, Left of the Dial, Kiss Me on the Bus, Here Comes a Regular - I am hard pressed to explain, though it comes to being the best written songs for an awful long time either side of it, and given performances that have an almost inexplainable directness. Loose, almost careless sounding, but still, somehow, precise, sharp, completely committed.... I don't know.

I know that for a year or two, probably roughly from the time I got my hands on Tim to the time - christ - til the time I got Pleased to Meet Me - they were my favorite band in the world. The center of my rock and roll universe. They were what I wanted rock music to sound like. It certainly helped that I saw them, right at the end, a couple weeks before Westerberg broke his arm and they cancelled their tour and a couple months before they fired poor Bob Stinson from his own band... They were as advertised - an odd mix of drunken shenanigans, half serious covers, snarky noise, and those fucking incredible songs, given strange, sloppy, but usually completely committed readings. They were funny and mind-blowingly brilliant at once. They ended up playing Mississippi Queen until the cops escorted them off the stage at closing time. My god, they were great.

And - like poor Led Zeppelin before them, I was not faithful to them. I had some money in my pockets and started buying records and found plenty of other music to love - Husker Du and the like - though most profoundly, the Velvet Underground and Joy Division, whose records I bought up that summer and listened to rather obsessively. And then I saw The Feelies. And then Pleased to Meet Me came out, and I saw them again, and despite a stunning rendition of Within Your Reach (immediately becoming one of my all time favorite songs), they were - just a band this time. Great as that record is - they were just a band. And by now I was fairly immersed in the contemporary music scene - going to shows, buying records - finding the Meat Puppets and Butthole Surfers and a whole bunch of local bands, and later the Pixies and Jane's Addiction and then Public Enemy and BDP and NWA... and filling in all the old stuff, and finding that these bands - The Stooges - Pere Ubu - The Byrds - Hank Williams and Johnny Cash - as well as the Velvets, Joy Division and the like - that was what I really liked - that is what I meant, all along. And the Replacements - didn't keep up. While I was listening to more and more music, they were putting out more and more mediocre material. I saw them a third time, at a theater even - and remember nothing at all about it, not even what record they were supporting (Don't Tell a Soul? maybe...)

And there you have it. You can probably blame the movie for this long piece - the film is reflective and personal, about music's impact on the listener, the fan.... And it took me back there, 25 years, to hearing them, seeing them.... and, by extension, 30+ years to sitting in my room listening to Ramble On... Nostalgia, nostalgia. And reminders that for a while, both of these bands were completely transformative for me. I still love them - I may be more likely, if push comes to shove, to listen to Fairport Convention or Can - or to the Minutemen or The Feelies or the Meat Puppets, here, today, 2012 - but I don't think, without the passion I felt for Zep and the Mats, that I would have ever have heard of those other bands.

This could be me, right down to the stereo on the milk crates...

iReview the iPad

Well, another couple weeks of silence on this blog, though this time I am happy to say I have had good reasons - an honest to god vacation, off to Maine and Vermont, seeing sights, visiting family, people I have not seen in 13, 15, 20 years, people I had seen, even then, almost exclusively at funerals. It was a good change to see them for pleasure again. And fun to poke around in the woods again....



I was not entirely off the grid all this time, though. For I have recently acquired a new toy:



And a fine machine it is! This trip was a nice little proof of concept - a chance to rely on the iPad for a week or so, see what it does. And I have to say - I like it. I bought it mostly to replace my laptop, which is growing long in the tooth - it's vintage 2004, badly behind the times in hardware (a pre-Intel mac), and consequently software. It still works, especially for computer type things - nothing wrong with the version of office on it, or anything else I use - but running into trouble browsing, especially. I thought, then, that for half the price of a new mac laptop, I could get an iPad - which would be much lighter, smaller, and could have 3G capabilities if I wanted them.

IN fact, it is fine for most of those functions. It isn't easy to type on it (which, along with the fact that I was on vacation, visiting people, in Vermont, with rather spotty 3G service, kept me from making any posts, here, say...), but it works - it can be made to work for typing. And I found an old,unusable bluetooth keyboard at work, that works perfectly with the iPad - so if I need to type, I can. It is quite good at browsing and email - especially on wifi, but works as well as the iphone on 3G, and you can see it. Some web apps act a bit funky with it - it's hard to scroll, for instance - but it does what I need it to. As it happens, having 3G for a month has sold me on it - it's a nice feature to have around town, and proved very useful in the wilds. The GPS worked like a charm, at least on top of the hills - to the point of helping us find my grandparent's old farm, burned out 50 odd years ago, overgrown into a jungle now.



But the best thing - taking me more than a little by surprise - is how well it works as a reader. It is a bit heavy - maybe a bit bigger than ideal for this sort of thing - but those are quibbles. It is smaller than most books (if heavier), and carries, after all, as many books as you can download onto it. I admit this is something I was thinking about - I take a lot of classes at Harvard extension, and lately, most of the supplemental readings have been distributed as PDFs - it occurred to me that it was a lot easier to load them all onto a machine than print them all out... But now that I have it, and have tried out reading books, I think I am hooked. It is a good size for reading - a good screen, a good interface, and it feels good in the hand. It can hold a hundred pounds of books... and - not to be underestimated - you can read it in the dark. I can sit on my balcony in the middle of the night and read away - an underrated feature.

It helps that I chose good books to try it out on. Prompted by Ta-Nehisi Coates' enthusiasm, I started by downloading a free version of U.S. Grant's Memoirs. That is definitely an inspired choice. He is a remarkably modern seeming writer - never flowery, but sharp, funny, in a dry way. A kind of brisk, unsentimental recitation of his experience, mostly of the war - with many fine asides and details. And a steady attention to logistics - the roads, supply lines, how many wagons and mules and teamsters he needed - the mark of a former quartermaster. A truly outstanding book.

I'm following it up with James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom - another fine book, this time bought from Amazon, for Kindle. That gave me a chance to compare the iBooks app to the Kindle app - not much to choose between them, though I think I would give the edge to iBooks. Little bit better interface, little bit easier to read and use. But basically, both work, and it makes it easy enough to use both to find material. The book - I'm enjoying completely, though I'm still only halfway through.

All this Civil War reading does take me back - rather notably. Back when I was a kid, when my grandfather was alive and living in the Vermont hills, I spent most of my time with my nose in books - Hardy Boys, and then Bruce Catton - so no one up there was too surprised, when they caught me with my nose in the iPad that I was reading more Civil War history. They didn't bat an eye...

Salinger

Another icon dies - J. D. Salinger, only a day after Howard Zinn... Is it true that many of the comments on Salinger's death are personal? it seems that way - notes about reading Catcher in the Rye, the personal connection the reader had to it. There may be good reasons - Salinger seems to me to have had a particularly intimate way of writing - "to inhabit the skin" of Holden Caufield, say (as Ted Burke put it) - a quality, that intimacy, that interiority - I remember from all his work I read. My strongest memory of Salinger is personal - less the stories, more the fact that I found a copy of Nine Stories at a summer camp where my parents volunteered and we usually took summer vacation. An old beat up paperback, maybe missing the cover, that I carried around with me most of the week, reading it when I could, sitting in the shade, reading it in the back seat of the car. I remember there was something off about that summer - somebody did a lot of fighting, me and my mother, or me and my brothers, or my brothers and my parents - I don't remember who or why, just a kind of simmering tension, that was unusual, especially for vacations. (Might have been the year my brother broke his leg, though that seems late - but it would certainly explain the bad tempers.) There was one day, we took a day trip somewhere - godawful hot, but someone had to go to the DMV, I think it was - and I ended up stuck in the car with some collection of quarreling relatives, waiting while someone was attending to unpleasant official business. Sitting in the back seat listening to whatever argument and whining was going on, reading Salinger, and tuning out everything else. It seemed like the perfect thing to be reading... As for Catcher in the Rye, I read that in high school, toward the end - later than a lot of people did, I suspect. I liked it well enough, but it didn't really stick with me. I was enough of an old fart at 17 that I was obsessed with "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" - the most inspiring novel at the time was Ignacio Silone's Bread and Wine. After the fact, I found, the best book I read at the time to be The Great Gatsby - I had to reread it once or twice to really get it, but it gained in power; I can't say the same for Catcher in the Rye... but Nine Stories haunts me.

Memories

July is not a good blogging month for me - there is too much to do: vacations, mine and people visiting me - softball games - baseball to watch, too hot, usually to do a lot of writing... And I suppose I've been a bit burnt out, after taking too classes in the spring, then knocking out a bunch of Japanese film posts in June... not a lot of posts, but longish posts...

Excuses excuses. There are things to do - one thing to do is post a response to Joseph B's Mr. Bernstein Meme. The principal is simple - a memory, with the same kind of disproportionate importance of the girl in white on the ferry, cited by Bernstein in Citizen Kane. Which also puts me in mind of Caveh Zahedi's monologue in Waking Life about Holy Moments... I have been thinking about memory - I have been scanning slides - which create whole webs of associations. The knowledge about who is in the pictures, where, what they are doing - the memories, the sense memories, of the things in the pictures (when I remember them) - and the memories of watching slides themselves. My family had - well, probably thousands of slides. Once a month or so, we would set up a screen, make a big bowl of popcorn, turn off the lights and go through them - grabbing boxes of them blind, going through them almost randomly... An event.

So - that is what I should write about - but it is harder work than it should be. And - I have a lot more slides to go through - making it easy to procrastinate.... Now: I can stick pretty close to Bernstein's memory - a girl, spotted once... In this case - an Asian girl, college aged, throwing a frisbee with some friends in JFK Park, in Harvard Square, 12-15 years ago. Summer - she had short hair, shorts and a tee shirt, she was really good with he frisbee... I don't know what about her stuck - I have spent lots of afternoons in JFK park, eating lunch, reading, whatever - lots of kids throwing frisbees (and playing soccer and volleyball and sunbathing and walking dogs and kids and everything else people do, lazy summer afternoons...) But I remember her.

Though I hope I can write something about this, say:



A train, photographed somewhere on the line from Northern Vermont, NIagara Falls and Toronto, sometime in the summer of 1977 or 78. Nothing spectacular - and honestly, it doesn't really spark any memories. What it does do, though, is remind me of James Bennings' RR - and that film sparks memories. All of it - but especially, starting with shot #4 (the link above has pictures of all the trains in the film), of waiting or trains to cross roads. I had forgotten that - it's rare, now, to have to wait for a long train to cross a road - but when I was a kid, it happened quite a lot. Maybe it happened most when we were traveling in Canada - I remember long trains, trains crossing roads, or running alongside roads. I remember counting the cars of trains, especially when they were crossing the highway. And - some of those big monsters - 100 plus cars - I remember some of those. I remember counting cars on trains - one of the games we played when we were driving (my family) - counting horses, counting snowmobiles, not to mention road bingo - games we played, driving to Vermont, Canada, etc. There's a lot there....

And finally - that train, that trip, to Niagara falls - that's the picture at the top. I haven't come to the rest of the Niagara slides. That's likely to bring back some memories, when I dig them up.

Distractions

I have nothing much to say here. I have spent this week with a lovely new toy - a little slide scanner, nothing special, but it works. My family took slides - up to the middle of the 80s, maybe - 70%? more? - of the pictures we took were slides. It's been years since anyone bothered to bring out the projector, the screen, all that stuff - they were in danger of disappearing into - nothingness... So this has been a blessing. Quick and simple process getting them on the computer (the machine scans to SD cards) - the quality doesn't seem to be all that good, though it might just be the fact that these are 30 to 50 year old slides, snapshots at that. But it does what it does and does it very well... I've gotten a few hundred done this weekend - god knows how many more there are at the family homestead, but I might get them all in there. I am happy...

Anyway - here is a picture that probably explains a lot. It's hard to see - but that's Johnny West on the arm of the chair; and those are Hardy Boys books on the chair and in hand. That's me at 8 or 9, every inch the nerd I would become...



Now this picture - thankfully, I never became the evil clown I foretold here...

Boris, Live

...or, the blogger relives his 20s. I don't think I have ever posted a concert review on this blog. That is mostly because I have barely seen a concert since starting this blog. In fact, I believe I have now seen three in the three years of its existence: one was some old college friends of mine, playing a church in New Hampshire; the other two were Damon and Naomi, supporting their previous CD and now this show, last night, opening for Boris. It was not always thus: in my youth, in the late 80s, I saw many concerts - some of my friends and I made a habit of it, frequenting the Channel, the Rat, TT The Bears - following local bands (The Zulus, Bullet LaVolta, Galaxie 500 [as one may surmise from my recent concert experiences], Buffalo Tom, The Blood Oranges, as well as national indie bands. Seeing The Feelies at least once (usually twice) a year; the Butthole Surfers, Meat Puppets, Husker Du, Replacements whenever they came to town, and bands like that. I didn't see many really big acts: I saw U2 and REM in arenas (the woostah centrum - whatever it's called these days), saw Husker Du, Lou Reed, The Waterboys, a few others at middle sized theaters.... Mostly clubs.... But I stopped going in the early 90s - I started listening to jazz all the time; people got married and had kids and stopped hanging around nightclubs; the rock scene got boring - Nirvana? christ, I'd seen 15 bands that sounded like them by the time they came around - why were they the ones getting big? So now - I still go to shows once in a while, but it's either people I personally know or it's those one or two bands I insist on giving money to - Damon and Naomi; Pere Ubu and its many offshoots.

Which brings us around to last nights show. In 2004, coincidentally, David Thomas played Cambridge the very night the Red Sox won game 4 of the world series: however devoted and passionate a Pere Ubu fan I may be, I never pretended to be David Thomas growing up, and god knows I pretended to be Carl Yastrzemski from more or less as soon as I could lift a toy bat. I had some fears of the same thing happening this year - a Rocky win wold have brought on a game 5, with Beckett closing out the series - could I have resisted that for a concert? I certainly hope so.

Damon and Naomi were fine - they were touring with a kind of big band - cello, horns, Kurihara - playing most from their new record, which is okay. It's taking a while to settle in - longer than their previous couple records did, for some reason. But they were fine, more than enough to get me out on the first really cold night of the year, probably even if they were going up against Josh Beckett. But I admit - Boris was the kicker. I've been listening to them almost constantly this year: Pink began separating itself from the bunch of psychedelic hard rock prog I've been listening to over the last year or so (Comets on Fire and bands of that ilk, including Ilk) - and Rainbow, the Kurihara record, has become one of my favorites in the last year or so. So I had high hopes.

I was not disappointed. It's been a while - it was about as good a show as I have ever seen. Overpowering: as loud as I can remember, certainly the loudest band I have ever seen sober (seeing groups like Ministry, the Surfers, a couple death metal bands - Rigor Mortis! - I made heavy use of the bar....) - but what was strange is how well I could hear it. All the drones and feedback Boris uses, the overtones and guitar interplay, I could hear. I can't hear anything today, but that's life. I could hear the band. And I have to say - they hit my sweet spot. Pummeling volume, hard fast songs, epic solos, double, blended guitar parts (at least with Kurihara), a good deal of variety for all that - fast songs, slow dirgy songs, experimental songs, straightforward melodic songs - sometimes all at once.... It was bliss.

I can't resist - the wonders of the internet being what they are: here is a clip from a show in Georgia, just a taste...