I join the 21st century

As a birthday gift, I got a shiny, pretty ipod classic, in all its 160 GB glory. It was advertised as holding 40,000 songs. Who has 40,000 songs, you may wonder. I think I do. Actually, I’m sure I do if you count all my bootlegs, with 973 versions of Bob Dylan singing “All Along the Watchtower”. I’m curious to see if I have 40,000 songs that are actually listenable.

Unfortunately, I’m still stuck in the 20th century on my PC, so while I have a 160 GB Ipod, I have 35 GB of hard drive space to use with it. So far, complete Dylan, Beatles and Springsteen have amounted to about 11.5 GB. For my remaining 23.5 GB, I’m thinking Jayhawks, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Ray Charles, Buddy Miller, Tift Merritt, a bunch of jazz/blues/old country/rockabilly stuff on the Proper label, and whatever else strikes my fancy.

Whenever I buy a new PC, with a big spacious hard drive, then it truly is on. We’ll see how many times even I can listen to “All Along the Watchtower”.

Joe

Book #29- Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs

This is the first A.B. book I’ve read (after birth). Fortunately, Chuck Klosterman is basically an irrepressable smart ass who writes about pop culture in a funny, entertaining way. The book is a collection of essays. Some get a little ponderous (like his essay on Vanilla Sky), some are more than a little absurd (Saved by the Bell), and some are so dead on that you can’t help but agree (country music).

Klosterman is probably not for everybody. That said, if you’re between 25-40, have a strong interest in the pop culture of the ’70s and ’80s, and/or have strong opinions about things, you’d probably dig it. I think there’s something in here to offend the sensibilities of everybody, but also something that we can all remember and agree with. Plus, it does have a fun title.

Joe

Book 20- Bruce Springsteen’s America: The People Listening, A Poet Singing

See, I told you more books would come. This book was hard to finish, because frankly, it’s quite bad. It’s even more frustrating than normal bad books because it was a good idea. Robert Coles, a child psychologist and master of horrifically loopy and difficult to follow writing, talks with ten “just plain folks” who happen to like Springsteen. For some reason, they can’t be active fans who go out and catch concerts. These ten give their insights into what Springsteen means to them.

Unfortunately, this is lost in a deluge of the worst writing ever. Also, the ten people sound suspiciously alike, and suspiciously similar to Coles. I’m saying either they flat didn’t exist, or they did exist and Coles talked to them, and wrote their stories in his words.

Let this illustrate how awful Coles’s writing is. Julie sometimes will read to me in the car. She started this book in the car and after awhile (maybe 10-15 pages), was kind of slurring her speech. I was a bit alarmed that she was having some sort of mini-stroke, until she finally confessed that she was literally falling asleep while reading it aloud. She put the book down and was out in two seconds.

Don’t buy this book. Don’t read this book. In fact, you maybe shouldn’t even read me talking about this book. I’m sorry for wasting your time and mine.

Book 19- Searching for Robert Johnson by Peter Guralnick

One of the principal advantages of the blues, as an art form, is the shadowy haze from which the bluesman comes, and into which he returns. The early days of blues recordings coincide with the last peak of a truly segregated and rural American South. The music is eery and unintelligible, but practically drips with intensity and mystery. Who were these guys? Where did they (and their sounds) come from?

King among the mysteries of the blues would be Robert Johnson– a man of whom exactly two known photographs exist, who died at about age 27 from a mysterious ailment or poisoning, and who is rumored to be buried in multiple places. Johnson is another of the singers and players who is the subject of a story of a musical deal with Satan– his soul for his skills. Certainly, as Johnson wrote and sang, the stuff he had was gonna bust your brains out.

The voice is in constant flux– high and lonesome, low and growly, then almost speaking in short bursts. The guitar playing is so sophisticated that it’s near impossible to replicate. Bass, melody and chords co-existing in precision. And the song writing– “Dust My Broom”, “Sweet Home Chicago”, “Love in Vain”, “Stop Breakin’ Down”, etc etc etc. Robert Johnson was the real deal.

And Peter Guralnick, in this VERY short book, tries to figure out who he is. Guralnick’s scholarship is exemplary, and he is known both about what he knows and what he doesn’t know. Unfortunately, there’s not much that anybody knows. Knowing much about Robert Johnson is as impossible as knowing much about Shakespeare.

Still, Guralnick is a pro’s pro as a writer. His style is smooth and effective, and his research is top notch. Photographs accompany the text, not of Johnson, but of contemporary scenes and people, and they help to create a mental picture where a physical picture just doesn’t exist.

I recommend “Searching for Robert Johnson”. I also recommend the music, but it is likely a taste for purists. It’s creepy as Hell, folks, but it IS the blues, and swirling through the shadows of obscurity, it is history.

Joe

Presley-iad

While having a mini-vacation last weekend, Julie and I stayed in Tupelo, Mississippi. There’s not too much going on for Tupelo, but one thing it is famous for is being the birthplace of Elvis. We went to Graceland in the middle of a snowstorm a couple of years ago. It was all so incredibly surreal, like walking through a movie set which somebody called home. The garish and overwrought nature of the place ties in neatly with the chiq early ’70s decor. Austin Powers might live there, but not you or I.

While in Tupelo, we went to Elvis’s birthplace. It’s a two room shack, which reminds me of a much smaller version of the old home place where my great aunt and uncle still live. Elvis’s birthplace doesn’t have a broken down refrigerator on the porch or random chickens wandering about, and as I say, it’s much smaller, but otherwise, it was a relative ringer.

We paid our $4 and were rewarded with a tour of the two room dwelling, from a sharp elderly citizen of Tupelo, who filled us in on the history. The house was built by Elvis’s father, and by the time Elvis was three, his father went to prison for passing a forged check, and the family could not make payments, and the house was repossessed. The Presleys then moved in with Elvis’s grandparents, until they moved to Memphis when he was 13, and into public housing.

Somehow the sparse two room shack explained Elvis and Graceland and Colonel Tom and the Memphis Mafia and all of it. You could almost see the little boy, noted by friends to generally have ill-fitting clothing, the survivor of a pair of twins, a quiet Mama’s boy, about to be dispossessed of this very shack due to an eight dollar forged check. You could almost feel the organic American dream which had to sprout– that he would be bigger and richer and able to care for his parents and that the same kids who said his name to laugh at him would say it with that mixture of awe and revulsion which marks America’s attitude toward the many facets of Elvis to this day. Blue suede shoes and white suits and peanut butter and banana sandwiches and the jungle room. It was all there. And you didn’t have to linger too long to find it either.

Our tour guide told us that in 1956, when Elvis came back to town to play a concert, the house and 15 acres of land were for sale. He told the city that they could keep the money from the show if they would buy up the land and build a park. If that’s not a self-confident, self-mythologizing streak, then what is?

Still, I’d like to think that the tiny Tupelo house is the closest thing to the real Elvis we’ll ever find. I’d like to take the positives of the story as true– that our nation isn’t an aristocracy and those blessed with talent and drive and perhaps the hand of God can flourish from a two room shack in Tupelo as well as from the largest mansions. But I guess I also have to remember that little three year old boy and all of the ones who don’t make it out. And all of the pieces of the ones who do make it out that get left behind.

Joe

#12- Twenty Nights to Rock by Bill Tangen

For the second time in three books, I was disappointed. Tangen took a great concept– following Bruce Springsteen around to 20 concerts in 2002-3, and absolutely ruined it. This is the worst sort of rock fan travel writing. Sample section (not real, written by me, but could be real):

“It was nice, to be in Washington. The weather, was kind of rainy. Bruce was in great form though. He sang “Glory Days” and rocked out on his guitar. After the show I met whogivesacrap and obnoxiousjrk from the Springsteen message board. They were real nice. Then we found a great bar where I sang karaoke, which everyone loved.”

Horrid punctuation? Check.
Poor music writing, with no real sense of HOW anything sounded or was played? Check.
Frequent useless references to Internet people? Check.
Constant references to the author singing karaoke? Check.

I’m sure this book was a lot of fun for this guy to write. But for readers, it was a great concept with absolutely awful execution. Twenty Nights to Meander Aimlessly would’ve been appropriate for the type of writing used here. Yuck.

Joe

Book #7 of the 50

7. Mind Out of Time- By Paul Williams

No, title aside, this isn’t some sort of new age theory book. It’s a book about Bob Dylan, specifically from 1987-1990 (and beyond, as Williams so happily tacks on). I was very interested in this book because I tend to know Paul Williams’s writing for two things: 1) rambling incoherently about things like how Dylan’s mumbling is a great artistic technique and 2) being overwhelmingly positive about everything Dylan ever does.

1987-1990 wasn’t a banner time for Bob Dylan. Of the top of my head, I can specifically recall these moments:

1. A painful, shouted version of Leonard Cohen’s gorgeous “Hallelujah” that was played sometime in 1988.

2. An absurdly shambolic version of Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” in 1990 in which the only line Dylan seems able to remember (since he sings it about every other line) is “I AIN’T NOTHIN’ BUT TIRED!” I recall one of my other favorite made-up lines was “And I need a reaction/Yeah, I need a reaction to my face.” Seems he also tries to rhyme “spark” with “f**k” at one point as well.

3. An even more drunken, more absurd cover of Otis Redding’s “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay”, which culminates in the clumsiest, most off-key harmonica solo ever.

And yes, it did get worse. Realizing I haven’t mentioned any Bob Dylan songs, I should bring up the infamous Stuttgaart 1991 (and yes, I know 1991 is after 1990, but bear with me) performance of “New Morning”. Dylan opened the show with this “song”. Based on the recording, he apparently stumbled on stage and tried to control his senses for a moment. Giving up, he went over to the piano and bashed a few random notes like an insolent child while the band played through the song again and again. He then grabbed a stray harmonica and squealed it into the microphone for several bars before realizing it was the wrong harmonica and was horribly off-key. He then picks up a guitar and clumsily thrashes a few chords out of time with the music and likely out of key as well. Eventually, he stumbles over to the microphone and with the tunless intonation of a drunkard sucking on a helium baloon, stumbles through the song without getting 20% of the lyrics right.

So what did Paul Williams do? Write a typical Paul Williams book. He expends a great deal of time talking about how Eastern singers are understood to sing in a way in which a garbled, phlegmatic delivery is not only intentional but appreciated. Sure, Paul, sure. He spends at least 20 pages talking about how Dylan artfully contemplates the segues between his songs. Sure he does, Paul.

I do give Williams a little credit. He does admit that some of this stuff is just rancid. At the same time, I can’t say I really enjoyed the book because, as ever, Williams’s central theme is to take whatever mound of poop Bob Dylan gives us and try to reshape it into some sort of brilliant statue. Paul Williams never seems to get that some of the time (okay, much of the time) our figurative emporer really has no metaphorical clothes.

Ah well, hope everybody else spent their weekend on better pursuits!

Joe

Another new CD

Gary Louris and Mark Olson– Ready for the Flood

Once upon a time, there was a band called the Jayhawks. And nobody ever heard of them. Except a few people who really liked them. They were folksy and twangy and rocked a bit. And there were two major singers/songwriters in this band, Gary Louris and Mark Olson. In 1995, after the best album the band had ever made, Olson left the band. Louris soldiered on, kind of remade the band in his image, they made a couple more great albums that nobody ever heard and about 2004, they disbanded.

2009 brings Louris and Olson back together for the first time on record. They got back together for the first time on tour in 2005, during which my wife Julie and I, actor Steve Zahn, and a couple hundred other Jayhawks fans congregated in a tiny and now extinct club in Lexington, KY, and enjoyed this musical reunion. In the world of Jayhawks fans, this was the equivalent of a Lennon/McCartney reunion tour in 1979.

I’m sure Ready for the Flood will go essentially unnoticed by virtually everyone. In a lot of ways, this is the anti-Springsteen album. It is awaited by few, and will be heard by even less. There is no hype machine, and in fact, this album was held up for a few months while labels scrambled to not release it.

This disc is about two old friends, doing what they do best– crafting hooky dozey melodies and harmonizing like brothers. There’s nothing very exciting about this record, but it is quietly, steadily proficient and beautiful. The Jayhawks, or at least the guts of the group, are growing old gracefully.

“Bloody Hands” is the standout track of the album. Over a bluegrassy mandolin riff, the duo serenely intone, “What the mind forgets/The soul retains/All my love is in vain.” If the Jayhawks aren’t exactly back, they’re as close as they’re likely to ever come.

Joe

Working on a Dream

I’m sort of semi-discontinuing the “albums that matter” series to review two new albums that might matter. First up, The Boss. Fresh off his turn as a star of (as he himself would put it) “late night tellyvision”, it seemed a good time to look at his new disc. Actually, last week seemed like a good time, which I thought on Tuesday when I went and bought the album. But my electricity was off until Friday, so the horrific Kentucky ice storm has delayed this blog.

I’ve seen two camps on this. One says, “Wow, it’s brilliant.” Rolling Stone compared the album to Born to Run and gave it five stars. The other camp says “Wow, it sucks.” I noticed that the Courier-Journal gave the album 2 1/2 stars. I’ve seen some longtime Springsteen fans who are arguing that it might be his worst album ever.

I can’t buy into either side. I think WOAD, as the Springsteen lunies have already abbreviated it, is somewhere between the two extremes, a solid B- kind of album. At first listen, the record is, well, a bit trite. The lyrics tend toward mundane, maybe even banal at times. But WOAD is better than that. The music tells the story here, and Springsteen has worked very hard on the SOUND of this record. In many ways, it is a reversal of form from his last album, Magic, which is actually a brilliant record, but is sometimes a bit  lacking in sound quality. I can’t help but think that WOAD is an okay album, which would have greatly benefitted from another year to craft a few more impressive songs, and which could have made it a really, really good album.

There are a few songs that have grown on me deeply with a few listenings. For my money, “This Life” is a gorgeous sweeping ballad, complete with a “Girls In Their Summer Clothes” sonic depth and Spectorized wall of sound. “Kingdom of Days” is probably the philosophic masterwork here, which sometimes is just a simple love song and sometimes is a meditation on the passing of human existence drop by drop. “Working on a Dream” is upbeat and inoffensive, “My Lucky Day” is a joyful thrash, and “The Wrestler” is evocative and haunting.

On the other hand “Good Eye” is such a skimpy excuse at swampy blues that it reminds me of Dylan’s more derivative 12 bar songs from his recent albums. Zzzzz. “Queen of the Supermarket” is one of those songs that people will either love (me) or hate (my wife). “Surprise, Surprise” feels like complete filler.

WOAD made a lot more sense to me when I stopped to consider that Bruce is now 59 years old. At 56, Bob Dylan released Time Out of Mind,a great album which is absolutely mired in pain, old age and death. Bruce is three years older than that. But he doesn’t slump off into the good night mournfully. The songs on WOAD can call into question the increasingly lessening days of our human existence, but they still can celebrate whatever is left in those days.  If you can approach the album from that standpoint, then there’s plenty to enjoy.

Joe

Back to albums that matter…

And a blog that may not.

Well, it’s been two months. I’d like to claim that this was some sort of intentional decision designed to remind me of how much I enjoy watching the stats page on this blog climb. But it wasn’t. (And it doesn’t climb THAT much anyway!)

But I do miss spouting off randomly, and thought I’d give it another shot.

That album is Buddy Miller’s Universal United House of Prayer. And it matters to me.

One of the constant battles of adult life for me is balancing what I believe and what I think. Reason and faith. Too often, I feel ostracized within the Christian faith because I don’t believe that Jesus would’ve voted Bush/Cheney. In fairness, for that matter, too often I feel ostractized within the Democratic Party because I do feel that there are some absolute values in human behavior and morality. Balacing freedom and responibility intertwines with shutting out both intolerance and moral relativism.

Sometimes, on a good day, or week or year, one finds people in this world who have a gift for putting the whole thing back together. They live their lives with a complete commitment to honoring Jesus Christ, but they also have a gift of understanding and compassion that tells me that they might recognize a bit of Jesus in the grizzly homeless guy they drive past every morning. You know, the human part. And when we’re really lucky, these people aren’t just schmoes like me who work in an office. They are artists, who take this rounded approach and create something new and bold.

That’s where Buddy Miller comes in. Miller is a Christian who records rockish countryish guitar based music. Universal United House of Prayer was a departure to him. The album bears a much heavier religious influence that his previous country/bluesy/Americana CDs. In what it says, and in the space it leaves to complete its vision with its listener, the album is a masterwork.

“Worry Too Much”, a Mark Heard song from the days of Desert Storm is a central piece of this record. In the same vein, Miller mines Dylan’s “With God On Our Side” for a poignancy which even Bob couldn’t find. That’s not to say this record is entirely navel-gazing over the state of our earthly world.

“There’s a Higher Power” is an upbeat gospel song with the McCrary sisters that brings praise into a world gone wrong. Miller’s wife and collaborator, Julie, contributes a heavy gospel song “Fall on the Rock”, with its central message being “You got to fall on the Rock or the Rock’s gonna fall on you.” “Wide River to Cross”, on the other hand, is a gorgeous meditation on human existence, written in the shadow of the death of Julie’s brother in a motorcycle accident.

If you like countryish rock, but could live without another album of wine, weed and women, or if you like the idea of Christian music, but the execution of same just bores you with antiseptic praise bands trying to out-clever each other, check out this record. It has a lived in feel. It’s an album you can feel joy with, or ponder mysteries with, or just abide with. It sounds like a good friend.

Joe