Julius Comes Again

Julius Caesar's month arrives.




With apologies to Glen Frey, "the heat is on" throughout the days and nights. This time of year the Beach Boys always came to mind when I was younger. I was never a huge fan of the brothers and cousin from Hawthorne, CA and their many additions/subtractions over the years, but always thought many of their seminal hits catchy, and now find several other tunes of  Brian Wilson's evoking a sadness nostalgia wrings from an old sentimental brain when tweaked by a riff.  Surprising staying power for a band trapped in a regional location tied firmly to one decade, the 1960s.

It's not that the Beach Boys didn't make good music after the Sixties, but no one knows or remembers those songs much, if at all. Everyone remembers all the lyrical names of the California Girls from Help Me Rhonda and Wendy to Barbara Ann and an old lady from Pasadena, but after the Seventies crossed the big dial in the space time universe the band had a tough time selling records. Cameron Crowe found a nugget from the under appreciated album, Surf's Up, which Carl Wilson wrote with Jack Rieley titled Feel Flows. He included it on his rock nostalgia masterpiece film, Almost Famous.  The song is so unlike the usual Beach Boy offering in theme and instrumentation, but when you hear the harmonies you have a real good idea of who you're listening to while it takes you on a transcendental groove that was already out of time by its original release but has remained timeless due to its great production values with an exquisite layered mix of vocals and instrumentation .

Certainly, over my listening years a lot of artists (huge, obscure and everywhere in between) have mined the hot season with some great songs. Lovin' Spoonful's Summer In The City,  Sly Stone's Hot Fun In The Summertime, Alice Cooper's School's Out, Don Henley's  The Boys of Summer, Diesel's Sausalito Summer Nights, Janis Joplin's or Miles Davis' versions of Cole Porter's Summertime, Jimi Hendrix's Long Hot Summer Night, Meatloaf's Paradise By The Dashboard Lights with inspired baseball commentary by Phil Rizutto,  and Green Day's Wake Me When September Ends all pop into my skull as good sun-season melody fodder. I'm sure you have  some other tunes that come to mind that wring out beach towels of of memory-dripping summer madness.

Maybe this month's heat fried some of my circuitry, but I can't think of one British rock act circa 1960s onward that owns a good tune that really means summer. I know there have been plenty of tunes about sunshine from many a Brit band, or artist, but the feeling is that a day of sunshine is one of those rare and sparkling events to be celebrated as a gift, certainly not the American styled season of sweat. The Beatles could pop out Good Day Sunshine and Here Comes the Sun, but those certainly in no way evoke a summer spirit.  The Rolling Stones have a great tune, Winter, but no song of summer. The Kinks coined  the title, Autumn, but never for the season preceding it.  I guess it makes sense when the nation's latitude falls where Southern Canada's rests that odes to warm months would be sparse, much like summer itself in those climates. But, that curious Canadian, Bryan Adams, had a modest hit with The Summer of '69 back in the early 1980s. Of course, Bryan had his eye on the American market back in those days and summer has been  a somewhat topical treatment here in the states.

I say somewhat topical, because only two major rock era acts post the Beach Boy's 1960s moment in the pop sun truly make summer, and what the season really stands for in this country, their stock and trade.  Just my little opinion here on the blogosphere, but only Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger have owned summer in the rock world.  

When you listen to these two great artists, and especially their defining work from the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s, the themes and energy surrounding so many of their songs just screams high temperatures and perspiration born of  passionate desperation for youth on the cusp.


Bob Seger's best material exudes a sexual heat, a longing and an elusiveness of the all-too-brief moments of long days and short nights that quickly were over. His usual persona for many of his memorable songs always looks back in Night Moves, Roll Me Away, Main Street, Brave Strangers and Against the Wind. Other songs like Fire Down Below, Come to Poppa, Sunspot Baby and Her Strut all have beat and thermometer set to sauna levels. "Like a wildfire out of control" ... "young and restless running against the wind." Lines define the time.


Bruce Springsteen means summer in a completely different way for me, although he and Bob share the motorcycle as a metaphor on more than one occasion. The three major album releases- Born to Run, Darkness On The Edge Of Town and The River all deal with summer's promise and agony for youth looking to escape the inexorable determination of their forged fates. Years ago the sameness of some arrangements and beat on several of the Darkness on the Edge of Town's songs bothered me, but as time passed and gave my ears some distance I began to greatly appreciate the force of those slow hammer blows that marked these songs and the everyday intense repetitive drudgery causing the drive to escape they evoked. For Bruce, summer is/was no vacation time, nor a sexual metaphor in the great body of his work. Summer is the grind, it begets work-sweat and meets desperate encounters trying to outrun the inevitable. The earlier songs more defiant, but by The River a resignation has emerged in the author's voice. Later albums channel many of these themes with differing colors. The mixes get better while the July driven eloquence of his youth dims, as it must with age and vantage point, but Bruce Springsteen will always define summer's sound for me. 


As Prove it All Night goes into the seventh minute of a long ago live recording, and Wrecking Ball  awaits its third run the through all the tracks I can hear an M-80 explode nearby in the neighborhood. The dog now frets and pants, his anxiety at a very high level. The cats look about, in better shape than the dog, but they're old and probably don't hear as well. I turn up the music a bit, like I am forced to do every July 4th holiday to ease the critter nerves. Good speakers with summer melodies help.


Thanks for stopping by. 

Lists on a Turkey Day

Happy Thanksgiving! Nice holiday with food and family gathered to say thanks to one another for hanging in there with each other for one more year. Thanksgiving like every other holiday is about tradition, and one tradition we all see at this time of the year is the various lists of top what-evers which pop up to let us know what was best, or worst, about the year/decade/millennium in virtually every conceivable category.   

Today I was perusing the news and caught the latest list of the top 100 guitarists put together by Rolling Stone Magazine. Lists intrigue. Good lists (even when you vehemently disagree with the results) fuel interest and comments. As for for this list you'll find it here (Rolling Stone Top 100 Guitarist this year's version). David Fricke, one of my all-time favorite music journalists, started this guitarist list venture back in 2003 for Rolling Stone (here is his list).

The just-out new Rolling Stone list contains worthy musicians. Some omissions from the latest top 100 bug me. And so, one more blog post for posterity.

Not to see Roy Buchanan mentioned anywhere among the new100 truly stuns me. No man ever defined an instrument as eloquently or as forcefully as Roy defined Leo Fender's Telecaster. Fricke put him in at #57 on his list. Bless him.

I guess time fades away many things. Neil Young comments on that over and over in many of his songs, and I believe it to be true. If I could unlock Mr. Peabody's time machine with his trusted boy, Sherman, I would take you back to the thumb slice of fresh plastic on a record album released in 1972 and plucked from a White Front aisle. I'd just read the Robert Hilburn review. He's another critic I trusted for finding my pet musical sounds.

Aside:
By 1972 many of the top guys in the current Rolling Stone list of 100 greats, were either prematurely dead, or very busy doing there frets frescoes in late youth. The bloom of newness over the blues, and the various permutations the 1960s wrung out of ears who caught the blues fever phenomenon were just about over. Original British and American bands into pure blues like the Rolling Stones, the Paul Butterfield Band, Savoy Brown, John Mayall, the Yardbirds, Fleetwood Mac all were gravitating, or had moved to more pop or jazz sensibilities and made the various band personnel changes that sealed the transition.

The trends of the early 1970s were more folk derived-singer songwriter stuff of Paul Simon, James Taylor, Jim Croce, Neil Young, CSN, Bread, Carol King meets orchestral progressive rock of Yes, the Moody Blues and individual Beatles sprinkled in with lots of Motown, Memphis and Philadelphia soul. Country music was all on its own, and bands like the Burrito Brothers and the Byrds had a very difficult time selling any records trying to put country into rock, but the Eagles had no such problem with a much more pop driven focus sprinkled with country-lite. - Aside ended


The black and white photo of a bearded man holding an electric guitar on the Polydor record jacket, PD 5033, gives no indication of the forces squeezed into the grooves held between the glued cardboard. The black and white back-jacket photo of four skinny longhairs looking into the camera in an archway while a resigned looking anti-pop figure in sandals (who really looks a lot Stonewall Jackson with those sad faraway eyes) stands just in front of the archway also offers no clue to the contents. 

From the opening harmonic intonations on the Don Gibson classic "Sweet Dreams" that Chet Atkins and Patsy Cline both previously made so memorable, which Roy and his Snakestretchers have just redefined through sheer country and other worldly harmonic blisters of stretched/bent notes and rifle burst fills to the two lengthy blues instrumentals, demonstrating a mastery of the idiom and the instrument in a way no other guitar had sounded up to that point in time, through the four other county song covers and the majestic soul searching ballad where the guitar wrenches tears and cries of plaintive pleas cascading above the slow rhythm, this was an amazing earful of no compromise artistry.

Lots of crossovers in rock music where rock meets classical, or rock meets jazz, or rock meets blues, or rock meets country. This album was country, and this album was blues. There was no crossover- just guitar virtuosity in both genres alone. What made the record, and Roy Buchanan, so unique was the no compromise rule. Play them straight and true.

Maybe once in your lifetime you've sat in a bar and heard a band take on all songs the patrons could shout. Each song rang true, thanks to the vibe in the room, and thanks maybe to that 3rd scotch you were sipping through the second set. Roy Buchanan gives the listener the very rare small-crowd-held-in-awe testament to a great bar band held together by one virtuoso.

Other Roy records always teased. Some great moments or songs, but undone by either too much production, which was the case on the three Atlantic albums, or just not enough strong material to make the album stand as a singular statement. The Alligator Records release, When A Guitar Plays The Blues,  is essential, and very rewarding. In The Beginning also offers a great total album with strong tunes and incredible performances throughout, which display s versatile mastery of the guitar and genres Roy Buchanan totally owns.  

Part of my appreciation of Roy Buchanan comes from having met and talked with the man several times and from concert dates, and sweaty small club shows on many occasions. The concert he gave at the Berkeley Community Theater in the mid-1970s I still remember being one of the most riveting and awe inspiring shows of guitar wizardry, and all done without the many pedals or sonic devices so in vogue today, that I have ever seen. He was always so cordial, but by the mid 1980s so dispirited by the number of shows and the lack of money to show for it, he had begun his efforts to drown his frustrations.

I can remember reading his obituary in my office in West Sacramento, CA in 1988 and being gripped with such a sadness. To have one of the greatest guitarists in the world hang himself in a Fairfax County jail cell after being arrested on charges of public drunkenness seemed cosmically malicious.

Time has moved more than 23 years since that morning, and the fade continues to blur the memory of this sweet soul with magical powers on a fretboard with strings. I'll blame the power of the fade for this omission. Enjoy the Roy.




Thanks for stopping by. Next up some other guitarists who should have gotten more love from the Rolling Stone voters.
 

 

Exiled in May

Exile On Main Street is all the music news that fits during this month of May 2010. When it was originally issued it ushered an end to a third chapter in the Rolling Stones volatile and continuing book of life and song. 

When I think back forty plus years, I remember my first girlfriend really hating the Rolling Stones. She hankered for The Bob and all those folk tunes and artists that were beginning to fade in the last years of the 1960s. Simon and Garfunkel were her last refuge at the time, although the Jefferson Airplane's softer moments offered her some solace if the right smoke could be produced.

When she and I first hooked up in 1967 The Bob was recovering from the mysterious accident, and folk was for that-moment-in-evolution a combination of rock being exploited for all it was worth with a 12-string ring on an augmented chord in nearly every recording studio. She dug The Bob from the days of Freewheelin' to Another Side. For all the great sounds of The Byrds and Arthur Lee's Love your ears bled from the way-too-many manufactured stringed-clones in the pop universe at the time. Folk-rock was so pervasive even a sideman like the young Glen Campbell could  walk from the set of Shindig to record Mr. 12 String Guitar for World Pacific Records with all the hits of the day covered in breathtaking mono. It could have been a Sears exclusive.

In the early 1960s mainstream pop music was a lot like most of the mainstream pop music of today, but instead of American Idol it was Teen Idol time. Elvis was Hollywood, and reigned over the Fabians, Bobby Rydells, Neil Sedakas, Wayne Newtons on the male side of the platter while Lesley Gore and big-hair-bouffant girls from the stables of Phil Spector and Shadow Morton with names like the Ronettes and Shangri-Las dug out their flip-sided claims with  those Supremes' girls of Motown to balance the airwaves.

The Beatles and the Rolling Stones in 1964, along with the other British Invaders, wiped away most of those manufactured idols of  the early Sixties with a new raw attack that owed their sound to the rock and blues artists of the 1950s. But, by 1967 most American pop radio music was coming from Detroit at the hit house of Berry Gordy's Motown Records, and the West Coast with the bands that populated the Bay Area and Los Angeles. From across the water in England, an American in London, Jimi Hendrix, along with Cream now captured youthful imaginations. The Rolling Stones had suddenly become a faded page from their own Yesterdays' Papers song, just like so many of the first wave of British Invasion acts, while the Beatles soared on with Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The Rolling Stones anti-Beatles stance had worn thin with the public by 1967. Tunes like Under My Thumb and Stupid Girl alienated nearly all of the girls I knew during that period, and the move to a more psychedelic sonic ornamentation on records like Between the Buttons and Their Satanic Majesty's Request left "all the young dudes" baffled and put-off.

Most kids in the US had no idea at the time of the travails the collective individual Stones were having in England. The British authorities had begun to crackdown on the pesky drugs of choice for 1960s youth. As the Summer of Love shone on London, Los Angeles and San Francisco with emerging new bands like the Doors, Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd, the Stones were being hauled into jail as examples to impressionable teens that cannabis intake would not be tolerated. As a historical piece of minutiae, Donovan was the first to get busted in Britain, but the Stones got all the headlines and much of the blame. In 1967 my girlfriend did not care, maybe they would just go away.

It seems odd today that the band stood on the brink as 1968 came around. They could not tour due to legal issues and seemed on the verge of collapse. Their rivals, The Beatles, had given up touring and were a studio and marketing machine during the last years of the Decade of Change. Both groups, for very differing reasons, brought in new management in 1967 to help deal with all the unpleasant shit- the business end of the music business.

Andrew Loog Oldham got the boot first as the Rolling Stones manager in 1966, and then in 1967 as their record producer. Their Satanic Majesty's Request was self produced by the band with less than desired sales results. Allen Klein picked up the manager mantle and Jimmy Miller would become the band's producer beginning with Beggar's Banquet. 

When Exile on Main Street first saw the record bins on May 12, 1972 most every guy I knew dug the record for the obvious collection of strong songs included on the two long playing vinyl records. It was not The White Album, however a lot of critics in their reviews that spring and summer referred back to The Beatles ultimate release in some effort to compare breadth, and to maintain some media chatter of interconnectedness between the two iconic British rock bands. Tremendous songs from Tumbling Dice to Soul Survivor are sprinkled liberally on every side. Resignation found its way on many of the tracks, but with a fierce determination and swagger to counter weigh against the permeating doubts of dislocation. 

The inclusion of what sounded like rough takes and unfinished mixes, particularly on Side 3 between Happy and Let It Loose took the steam out of the record for a lot my buddies and party-mates. Several girlfriends in my frenetic 1972 just did not groove to Turd On The Run, although they loved to "scrape the shit right off your shoes" in harmony when Sweet Virginia found its way on any sound system. The Stones were now so entrenched in the culture of the world after the success of the previous three classics, Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers that ladies just gave the band's audacity and overt sexual stance a grudging pass. They were just, well, The Stones.

 In the blinding speed that passes/passed for pop culture history, when this record found its first needle in 1972 Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison had all arrived and passed away from the first point in time that the Rolling Stones stood in the mouth of pop music oblivion in 1967. The Stones had lost Brian Jones to a murky death at his own home over this period, and the Beatles were no more. Cream was now a historical footnote, and three bands removed from Eric Clapton and his growing addiction.  Jimmy Miller would produce only one more Rolling Stones album. The young guitar virtuoso, Mick Taylor, who had quickly replaced Brian Jones in 1969, had just two records left with the band before moving on to obscurity.  Young girls bopping with the young boys in 1972 to Let It Loose and Stop Breaking Down had no clue who did Under My Thumb, and did not care.

The band plays on with various bass players, keyboardists and their 1975 found Rolling Stone guitarist, Ron Wood, all these years after the May 12 1972 release. They discovered a new, inventive and very sympathetic producer, Don Was, to keep their tracks fresh sounding, if not quite as shocking in this age of 24/7 pornography. There are a truckload of great tunes they have produced since these fellows were caught in Exile on the European continent almost forty years ago sweating out the music amid the basement steam and drug use.

The best parts and the worst parts of this newly polished and reissued with obligatory-bonus-track-material gemstone hears the band capture so viscerally our beauty and flaws here in the west. We can be beautiful, profane, scarred, passionate, brutal, forgiving and resilient all in the moment of life. These characteristics define our humanity, and maybe this was some crowning achievement to squeeze that truth out and  Shine A Light for the rest of us to embrace, and be okay knowing it is just who we are- imperfect one and all. It was never a concept album, but over all these years really became one.

If you've never owned the LP, or the Cassette, or the CD of this album do yourself a favor and get the new spit-shined grooves on CD. Listen to the whole damn thing a few times to get the context. Find a copy of Melvin Van Peebles' movie Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song to view while listening to the album, then kickback and discover the spirit of the 1970s, which seems a lot like today.

Thanks for stopping by and for the read.

 

Columbine: The Nation Did Go Bowling

It's been seven years since the release of Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine. I have had the pleasure of meeting and talking to Mr. Moore a few times in my previous life, and know him to be a stickler for getting the facts straight. On IMDB.com a small point is made that Eric and Dylan did not go bowling the morning before marching into madness on their high school campus. That could be true, but Michael Moore did get corroborating reports from eyewitness who had been interviewed by the police, the FBI and the local District Attorney's office. He also framed his argument on the image of bowling by asking a question:

"So did Dylan and Eric show up that morning and bowl two games before moving on to shoot up the school? And did they just chuck the balls down the lane? Did this mean something?"

But, the small point entirely misses the bullet hole of accuracy.

Sunday April 20, 2009 marked the 10th Anniversary for the Columbine High School tragedy. Twelve students and a teacher shot dead. The two killers shot themselves as well. Total body count fifteen people dead. A lot of people on April 20, 1999 were horrified at the violence on the high school campus, just not that horrified to change anything in the ten years that have elapsed.

In 1965 with race riots across America, Junior Walker and the All-Stars rang on radios "Shotgun, shoot 'em fore he run." Shotgun, big hit.

1968 was a big year for America in terms of gun violence. Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King were both assassinated that year. The same year The Beatles released their White Album, which contained Happiness is a Warm Gun and Bungalow Bill. The two songs contain two very radical and opposing looks at the American preoccupation with guns. The Rolling Stones had Street Fighting Man come out in 1968 with "I'll kill the king and rail at all his servants." Jimi Hendrix took off on Hey, Joe and Machine Gun for audiences that year.

Neil Young and Crazy Horse came with Down by the River in 1969, and a few years later would pen Ohio with his other group of friends Crosby, Stills and Nash. Even Southern rockers like Lynyrd Skynyrd with Saturday Night Special implored in song some sanity regarding the gun. Nothing changed.

Over the years thousands of songs have been recorded about guns and gun violence. Violence, and our fascination with the ultimate period maker, sells.

Even though gun violence is highly marketable, it is tough making sense out of the continual carnage, tougher still finding a way of reducing the arms race in America. Barack Obama gets elected as an agent of change for America. Americans flood gun stores to stock up thinking one change might be limits on guns.

Remember the crazy girl who didn't like Mondays? Big hit for the Boomtown Rats and Bob Geldoff.

That incident would barely register today. It barely registered in 1993 when Colin Ferguson, deranged but armed boarded a Long Island Rail car at Penn Station and decided some people had to die. Six people died and nineteen were injured that December evening. The wife of one of the dead victims, Carolyn McCarthy, ran and was elected to Congress due in part to her son's amazing recovery from the wounds suffered and her tenacity in putting together a campaign to stop senseless gun violence. After twelve years on the job Representative Carolyn McCarthy has learned guns are a much larger third rail than even Social Security. The only legislation of note Representative McCarthy can show for twelve years in Congress was a fairly watered down background check bill passed last year. In fairness this was the first gun reform legislation passed in Congress in over fourteen years. It came on the heels of the Virginia Tech slaughter that claimed thirty-two lives. We still remember that one, but the memory has softened over the two year fade of time.

How could it not? After all, in this era of the gun let us just recount the brutality of American existence from the growing list of death. In September of 2008 on the roads of Skagit County, Washington six people shot and killed before the shooter turns himself in to authorities. For celebrity sake, we have in Chicago, Illinois Jennifer Hudson's mother and brother shot and killed in their home in late October of 2008. In Arkansas, two days after the Hudson killings two people are killed and another wounded on the campus at the University of Central Arkansas. November 2008 saw an eight year old in Arizona shoot and kill his father and a family friend with a rifle at close range. Right after Christmas in Covina, California Santa Claus shot and killed nine people (family members and friends) before killing himself. Outrage? Not in 2008.

Thus far 2009 we have witnessed a real ramp up of gun carnage. An eleven year old boy shot his father's pregnant fiancee in the head while she slept and then took the bus for school. Seven people were shot, but amazingly no one died at a Mardi Gras parade in February this year. March in Samson, Alabama saw a man shoot and kill nine people before killing himself. According to reports there were ten crime scenes for the Alabama rampage. Also in March, bullets flew into a nursing home where eight people were killed by a middle aged man. And in Oakland four police officers were slain along with their killer in a shootout. This April we have already gotten thirteen dead innocents at an immigration help center in New York state plus the shooter dead from a fatal suicide shot. And two more dead college students at a community college just west of Detroit. Three police officers died this month in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

It's hard to get press in Iraq and Afghanistan these days when we're in the middle of bowling people down with carbines.

"Have A Nice Day."