My definition of “Jazz I Like” is sort of like the the definition of obscenity:  I know it when I see it.

And among the scattering of names in post-Duke-Ellington jazz I have ever really liked was saxophonist Michael Brecker.  Brecker died this past January at 57.

Scott at Powerline, who may be the best music critic in the Twin Cities, directs us to this piece by the NYTimes’ Corey Kilgannon, on Breckers’ last recording sessions, for his Pilgrimmage album, which has been out for a couple of weeks now:

Mr. Brecker’s favorite collaborators — the guitarist Pat Metheny, the bassist John Patitucci, the drummer Jack DeJohnette and the pianists Herbie Hancock and Brad Mehldau — all agreed to attend the session on short notice. Mr. Brecker had played on more than 900 albums, including familiar pop solos on Paul Simon and James Taylor tunes, but now it was apparent that his days were numbered. A reporter was invited to document a day of recording.

Not that there was anything morbid about Mr. Brecker. He became energized immediately upon reuniting with his longtime sidemen. He cast off his cane and began zipping around the studio taking care of logistics.

“Even the first day in the studio, we didn’t know if the whole thing was going to happen,” said Mr. Brecker’s manager, Darryl Pitt. “But Mike just kept getting stronger and stronger in spirit, and it carried through him physically.”

 Of course, I have a soft spot in my heart for Brecker, who – along with his trumpet-playing brother Randy, David Sanborn and Wayne Andre, served as the horn section on Bruce Springsteen’s original “Tenth Avenue Freezeout”, from Born to Run, which served as my introduction to the Brecker brothers.

B-Hub at Yucky Salad misses record stores:

I haven’t been in a record store in over three years now. There’s no point. Who’s going to spend 18 bucks on a cd with two or three good songs when you can just buy those songs for two bucks? I don’t miss buying records, but I do miss record stores– everything about them– the people, the vibe, even the smell. I miss going into The Electric Fetus and buying something cool like “Hang Time” and having the punk rock girl ringing me up giving me an approving glance as if to say, “hmmm, maybe I mis-judged you jock-boy” and I also miss buying something like Bon Jovi and having the same punk rock girl give me a dismissive look that screamed “go date-rape a cheerleader, jock-boy”– I loved both looks and I miss them.

Truth be told, I have never really liked digital music.  Oh, it’s convenient, and it’s brought back the single which is a wonderful thing – but the CD always sounded way to clinically-clean and teutonic to me.  And ever since all three stages of recorded music (recording, mastering and playback) have gone from analog to digital, it’s all felt cold and heartless to me. 

And record stores?  I used to love the feeling you’d get when you’d talk the totally-wasted stoner behind the counter into playing some sample on the house stereo; sliding the record out, dropping the needle, the anticipation as the record rolled toward the start…

And Katie sounds off:

Bill is trying to pretend he isn’t that character from High Fidelity, and he so it that character. He’s if that character and Nick Hornby had a baby. Also, I hate that sone from Hinder so much I wish it was a rabbit so I could kill it with a shotgun.

And the crowd goes wild!

Katie also settles a bet or two:

And no, I’m not dead, I’m just in hiding.- Katie

Sure, I was worried.

Today is Stan Lynch’s 52nd birthday.

Lynch was, of course, the long-time drummer for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers – and he has to be the most underrated American drummer in rock and roll history.

Tom Petty:

“Stan was a little younger than us. But he was a very good drummer and he was really conscientious, and he worked really hard. And he sang as well. He sang harmony. He was like our main harmony singer in the days before Howie [Epstein, the Heartbreakers’ long-time bassist, who died of an overdose a few years ago]. He was a powerhouse onstage. He reminded me sort of [like] Keith Moon in a way. He was so powerful I used to say he had this fifth gear that he could go into and just really make everything explode.”

A great, amazing drummer who ably split the difference between a Max Weinberg-like human metronome and a Keith Moon-ish powerhouse.  Sort of an American John Bonham, without the drinking, drugs, and trashed hotels.

Just saying.

K. T. Tunstall.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, her current single – “Suddenly I See”, or whatever – is a whole lot better than her first, that gawdawful song with the impacted-sounding backup singers going “woo hoo” over and over again.  But the whole enterprise – every single song I’ve ever heard the woman do – sounds so utterly clenched that I just can’t react in any way but to reach for an ibuprofen.

That is all.

The Cars were one of those bands I was always kind of ambivalent about.  It took me a few years to realize why; the songs Ric Ocasek sang, I really didn’t much care about. Bassist Ben Orr, on the other hand, sang the cool stuff.

And when it came to the Cars, there was no cooler song than this one!

UPDATE:  It seems the copyright police struck overnight. 

Well, anyway – I remember seeing the Cars in live appearances later on in their career (during and after the Panorama era)  where they looked like they could barely tolerate each other.  The last time I saw them was probably on SNL in ’87, doing “Touch and Go”; the band visibly hated each other, and ground through the song with all the spark and zing of a late-afternoon staff meeting.

The vid I linked, though, was from a German concernt in about 1978, doing “Bye Bye Love”.   The band was young and kinetic; the song centered on Elliot Easton’s spare but incendiary guitar and Dave Robinson’s Keith-Moonish drums (great on the album, better live).  On the album, “Bye Bye Love” is one of the most perfect pop records of all time.  Live, played by a band that still could leave it all out on stage, it’s a thrill.

But  you’ll have to take my word for it.

…particular old vid and I find myself wanting to buy a six of Carling’s,  hit Taco Tuesday (2 hard-shell tacos for a buck) and drive around the prairie until 4AM…

It was fun finding this vid of Elvis Costello doing a song from back before he tried to turn into Burt Bacharach.

Cool vid, cool performance, one of the great songs in pop history.

And yet during the last verse/chorus or two…

…intrusive cowbell!

There was just…no need for that.

Among people who care about, or at least listen to music, the argument is eternal; were the eighties a vast wasteland, or among the greatest periods of the rock and roll era?

The answer, of course, is “neither”.

Music – specifically, genres of music – conform only loosely with calendar decades. But there are most definitely eras in music, periods when popular music had dynamics that acted differently on each other, to help create music that was more – or, often, less – memorable.

And in American/Western popular music in the past fifty-five or so years, the two main dynamics have been the style and relative dynamism of “White Music” and “Black Music”. The different styles of “White” music (starting with country, rockabilly and folk) and “Black” music (R and B, Blues, Jazz, early Rock and Roll) have spent the past sixty years (as regards the rock and roll era) mixing and mingling and, occasionally, returning to their neutral corners; each of those movements affected popular music; generally, the parts of popular music that were the most dynamic and interesting were the parts where “White” and “Black” styles mixed and mingled the most, a place that’s changed, or even flashed into and out of existence, from time to time throughout the past fifty or sixty years.

So, with an aim toward retiring the whole, age-old, misleading “what decade is better” meme, let’s look at how popular music has really ebbed and flowed; in cycles of 5-7 years driven by events, rather than in ten year cycles driven by the calendar.

By the way, I’m only looking at mass-market popular music, here. Keep your observations on the vitality of Finnish Zombie Metal to yourselves.

Era: Pre-Rock and Roll (1948-1953)

• Events: World War II ends; veterans start creating the “baby boom”.
• White Music: Traditional pop music, with some light jazz/big band overtones. Peggy Lee, the Lettermen and other traditional, factory pop prevail.
• Black Music: R and B, and the first “rock and roll” – still heavily blues based – starts percolating. Very few mainstream white artists copied it (although the likes of Pat Boone did, in fact, start to cover R and B in a very “cleaned-up” form)
• Results: Largely-forgotten music, either because it was outside traditional marketing (black) or just pretty forgettable (white).

Era: Early Rock and Roll (1954-1958)

• Events: With the Eisenhower era in full bloom, and the Greatest Generation becoming established and running a very stable, prosperous ship, kids – including the nascent “Baby Boom” – were developing the spare time and disposable money to develop a “youth culture” with – for the first time – it’s own music.
• Black Music: R and B morphed into what white kids recognized (and can still recognize) as “rock and roll”, as the likes of Chuck Berry started overtly influencing white artists…
• White Music: …like Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and so on, who brought black music to a white mass audience (and opened up the white mass-market audience for black artists’ own work) for the first time.
• Results: The first golden age of Rock and Roll, caused by the mixing and mingling of white and black music and the first “youth” culture in history.

The Brill Building Era (1958-1962)

• Events: The world got a little crazier, with the Soviets launching Sputnik and the Cold War threatening for the first time to reach out and touch Americans at home. The Eisenhower era ends in a recession.
• White Music: After Elvis is drafted (the legend goes), white popular music re-trenched into its pre-1953 pattern, with sanitized pop artists like Fabian, Bobby Rydell and the like performing very traditional pop (with very well-scrubbed R’nB overtones).
• Black Music: Back underground!  A new generation of black performers – James Brown, Sam Cooke – as well as the Motown label, were just getting started.
• Results: Largely-forgettable pop music, memorable more for its novelty acts than its hits.

The Golden Age of the 45 (1962-1968)

• Events: Youth culture metastasized as the boomers went to high school, then college.
• White Music: The Beach Boys dragged pop back from its nadir. Bob Dylan makes folk music a big business. The Beatles re-packaged R’nB, the Rolling Stones put blues on the Top Forty, and suddenly “Black” music was the mainstream…
• Black Music: …even when performedy by black artists. Jimi Hendrix puts the blues on the Top Forty, and Motown and Stax/Volt bring R’nB to a mass audience.
• Results: Black and white music cross-pollinate, spawning the most creative period yet in popular music.

The Album Age (1968-1972)

• Events: The protest movement begets the “Summer of Love”, which begat the descent of (the most-publicized part of) boomer “youth culture” into navel-gazing, self-referential irrelevance.
• White Music: Awash in drugs and self-referential navel-gazing, white music splinters into shades of ultra-white (the singer-songwriter genre with its sublime and ridiculous extremes), drug-induced-stupid (the Doors), art-rock (sublime examples like The Who, ridiculous ones like Emerson Lake and Palmer) and blues-influenced music (Cream, Led Zeppelin) that would eventually morph into “metal”.
• Black Music: As Hendrix drugs himself into irrelevance, Motown and Stax/Volt pulls away from crossover with white music, creating a golden age of R’nB – the peak of Motown and Stax/Volt’s sales, influence and creativity, with the likes of Marvin Gaye, James Brown, Otis Redding the Stylistics and others driving the agenda.
• Results: As the boomer “youth culture” splintered, so did music as a whole, as black and white music both fragmented into niches that would reflect their audiences, and be reflected in their genres.

The Malaise Era (1973-1979)

• Events: As western civilization tried to commit suicide, music became both more escapist and more fragmented.
• White Music: Escapist pop both loud (glitter rock, Bachmann-Turner Overdrive, Boston, Foreigner), not so loud (America, Captain and Tenille, Fleetwood Mac) and inane (Alan O’Day, Rupert Holmes, the Starland Vocal Band) dominated the Top40 charts. The only real sources of dynamism, besides the punk/new-wave breakout that started in the early seventies and peaked in about ’77, was the loved/hated cross-pollination…
• Black Music: …with black/gay disco music, itself a product of R and B’s collapse into excess.
• Results: The golden age of the Big Rock Star, the Top Forty Hit, and the homogenization of radio.

The Alternative Era (1980-1986)

• Events: Ronald Reagan engaged the Soviets and put the “F*** Yeah!” back into “America”. The malaise lifted. American culture got a new lease on life.
• White Music: The splintering of punk and new wave, as well as a rapid plummet in the cost of technology, brought an unprecedented wave of creativity. The seventies pop establishment was pushed aside; artists like Dire Straits, Talking Heads, The Cars, the Police and Tom Petty, fringey underground figures in 1978, dominated the charts by 1982. Pop, Rock and R’nB mixed and matched and interbred in a thousand different styles.  One of the best R’nB/Dance Rock bands was six Australians; one of the best rock and roll bands of the era…
• Black Music: …was also one of the best and most influential R’nB bands of the era, with two black guys, two white guys and two white women led by a 5’4″ black guy from Minneapolis blurring the lines between rock, pop and R’nB so adeptly that huge swathes of the pop audience stopped keeping track. The first big rap hit was performed by three white guys from Brooklyn; the next, by a couple of black guys who looped a white band who got started by dressing up the the blues and R’nB in glitter-rock clothes.
• Results: The best, most creative era in pop music since Sergeant Pepper, a time when black and white and pop and rock and dance and metal and everything in-between mixed and matched and interbred and just plain made things fun.

The Style-Over-Substance Era (1987-1992)

• Events: The Berlin Wall fell. History ended.
• White Music: Hair metal supplanted the variants of new wave, synth-pop, roots/heartland rock and power pop that had dominated the charts during the Reagan administration. Grunge came, grumped about, and flamed out in a depressive “poof”.
• Black Music: Black music morphed into primarily hip-hop, and ceded rock to the white boys. And with the likes of Public Enemy, NWA and the DOC, became a hell of a lot more interesting than the white music of the era.
• Results: Unbelieveably dull. Seriously. “Kill Me” dull.

The Return Of The Seventies (1993-2000)

• Events: With history all over, people could focus on having fun. Unfortunately, if you judge by the music of the era, they failed.
• White Music: In the pre-Ipod, pre-Napster era, white music returned to the seventies. From the boy bands (N*SYNC, Backstreet boys) to pop-rock (Alanis Morissette, Gin Blossoms), “safe” was the word.
• Black Music: R and B and hip-hop became almost inseparably intertwined – and almost-insufferably dull. The inventiveness of Public Enemy and the wry combativeness of NWA was replaced with the dull, thudding thuggishness of…well, just about everything in the genre.
• Results: Rock and roll was dead. Pop music was largely no more interesting, in general, than it had been between 1957 and 1963.

The IPod Era (2000-Present)

• Events: History started again.
• White And Black Music: Everything is available for free. While major label music is safer and more constrained than ever, technology promises (and so far it’s just a promise) to let musicians outflank the major-label system.
• Results: Damned if I know.

So as we see, there really are no “decades” in popular music, merely cycles of 4-7 years. The best of those cycles – 1954-1958, 1962-1968 and 1980-1986 – were times when the usual divides between “white” and “black”, and “underground” and “mass market” got scrambled beyond conventional recognition.

The other times? Business as usual.

That should settle that question once and for all.

I was listening to Hugh Hewitt’s show last night.  He announced that he was about to play “the greatest song in the history of rock and roll…”

…and then the radio cut out before he could play “Born to Run”.

My reception in Saint Paul is always kinda iffy.  Drat the luck.

John Mellencamp on yesterday’s KQ Morning Show, talking about why the US prospered so much during the Baby Boom’s childhood:

(paraphrasing very closely)

During World War II, we bombed everyone else back to the Stone Age!  That’s why we prospered!  There was no competition!

Ah, Coogs.  Silly, silly Coogs.  We did it, huh?  If the US hadn’t been so damn trigger happy, World War II would have worked out for everyone?

Ah, well.  We’ll always have Scarecrow and Lonesome Jubilee.

Schmuck.

It was sometime late in 1986 when Dave Elvin managed to book Country Dick Montana, the eccentric drummer of California cowpunk band the Beat Farmers, on the Don Vogel show.  It was one of the most hilarious interviews of all time.  We’d been using the Farmers’ classic “Happy Boy” as a bumper whenever we needed to cheer Don up, either literally or theatrically.  It always worked, of course – there are few funnier songs, ever.

I remember nothing about the interview except that Montana, who claimed to have just stepped out of the shower, kept Vogel in stitches for twenty minutes.

Atomizer pays eloquent tribute to Montana and the Farmers over at the Frats this morning.

Commenter Fresch Fisch left this in the comments section yesterday – one of the latest treasure trove of YouTube vids I’ve started obsessing over.  Only this one – a “Darkness”-era version of “Backstreets”, the best break-up song of all time – is astounding.

I like just about everything Springsteen’s done, from the great stuff (Born to Run, Tunnel of Love) to the not so great stuff (Tom Joad, Greetings from Asbury Park, Human Touch).  But as I’ve written before, Darkness On The Edge Of Town is still my favorite.

And the concert vids from the era – much more raw than from the Born In The USA tour, but just plain better and more polished than the Born To Run-era shows – are just stunning.  This version of “Backstreets” was from the era where Bruce would launch, more or less ad-lib (or so it seemed) into snippets of different songs during the bridges; “Backstreets” swerves through Manfred Mann’s “Pretty Flamingo”, an early version of “Drive All Night” (which’d come out two years later on The River), and something else that, in typical Springsteen form, has probably been part of a couple of different songs during his career.

I may meander around this subject some more in the next week.

…that I dragged an old guitar out of a closet in my dad’s house, and walked down to Midwest Music to buy strings, a couple of tuning machines, and a book on how to make chords.

A girl in my church youth group whom I hated with whom I fought constantly – Cindy Soper – had brought a guitar to the last meeting.  And I figured if she could play it, I could, too.

So I put the guitar – which had probably come from a department store, and had been left in my dad’s classroom years before (he’d brought it home the day Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, and had been sitting in one closet or another ever since)  – back together, strung, and started paging through the Gene Leis “Nexus” chord book and a book of seventies song sheets, trying to piece one and two together. 

It was terrible.  The damn thing wouldn’t stay in tune for love or money.  With its crack down the bottom of the front panel, it sounded like a truckload of steel wire on a gravel road. 

Fortunately, I was able to borrow a decent guitar from one of my dad’s college students, someone who didn’t play much – a Yamaha classical.  And it eventually worked.  And the following winter, I put my paper-route money into my first real guitar of my own, a little Ventura acoustic that I still play.

It was probably two years before I told anyone that I played; I wanted to be real, real good – or at least not embarassing – before anyone found out.

Years later, I told Cindy that I’d started playing guitar largely because of her.  She rolled her eyes and laughed.  “I quit playing probably a few months after you started!”

Life lesson; anger is the best motivator!

It was thirty years ago today that my oldest, best friend – the guitar – dropped into my life.

Did the seventies have a voice?

You could nominate quite a few voices for the title, of course; Stevie Nicks, Jackson Browne, Paul McCartney, Barry Gibb, Eddie Kendricks, Linda Ronstadt…

…but if you were a teenager in the rural midwest, huddled in your friends’ basements, listening to their older brothers’ records on their dads’ stereos, Brad Delp of Boston was probably on the short list.

Delp – with a bit of help from Tom Scholz’ extreme production style – was the high, clear, blazingly distinctive voice of a corporate rock band that still – at least on their incandescent first album – had a heart underneath all the pure technique.

Delp was found dead yesterday, at age 55.

Some things Bruce says better than I do.

Steve Gigl on Korn’s “unplugged” appearance:

So let’s get this straight: appearing on South Park like the guest stars in a bad Scooby Doo (but I repeat myself) episode? Good career move. Showing off your lead singer’s inability to actually sing, particularly in contrast with Amy Lee? Maybe not so much.

In my list of “dreams I’d love to some come true”, the one about “Watching Korn being chased from the stage by truncheon-wielding former fans” is right behind “be the human cheese in a Rachel Weisz/Marisa Tomei sandwich”.

Just saying.

Where were we? 

Oh, yeah.  I hate Korn.

…who listened to Melissa Etheridge’s dreary, tedious “best song”-winning tune (and preachy, sanctimonious acceptance) at the Oscars on Sunday…

…and found himself fondly, wistfully remembering the Three Six Mafia?

I did not know this:  Pete Townsend (or a fiendishly clever impersonator) has a blog.

And he’s asking is to keep Britney in our thoughts.

And I’ve skiffled through every single page on the blog in the last few hours…

…but, honestly, I’d wondered in the past week or so. Whatever happened to these people?

Jeff Kouba found out:

The lead singer for Quarterflash, Rindy Ross, and her husband Marv, who was also in Quarterflash, went on to form a traditional and folk music band called The Trail Band.

Well, cool.  It’s always neat to see someone you dug twenty years ago isn’t in treatment or working night stock at a Walmart…

…which rarely plays videos that are more than a week old…

…is playing “I’m Not Ready To Make Nice”.

Wow.  Who’da thunk it?

One of the reasons I loved the movie Hi Fidelity so much was that, at one point in my life, it was about basically me. At one point, single and in my early twenties, I had a notebook crammed with lists of the Top Five Songs, or Albums, for any given situation.Most are long-forgotten. Some come back enough to keep themselves imprinted in your brain.

Such is Shoot Out The Lights, the 1982 album that Richard and Linda Thompson wrote and recorded as their ten-year marriage was skittering into oblivion.

If love has eaten your brain, left trash around your head, and scattered for parts unknown taking all your beer and keying your car, there’s no better album to marinade your brain in.

(more…)

Much on my mind lately.
And this too.

I know.  I’m having  a Sheila-like obsession over this twenty-year old concert vid.

Little Miss Attila tackles the untackleable.

…even as I recall either of these bands…

…and how much fun I had with both of ’em – gulp – 25 years ago.

I can’t get enough of this version of my favorite-ever Motown song.