Cycle Of Trivia

Not everyone knows the song.

But if you do, you know the song.

Including some covers.

Or some other covers.

But while I know music trivia forwards and backwards, I’m not even remotely up on motorcycle trivia. I do better at sports trivia than motorcycles.

So this was actually an education:

Now, the only education I need is finding out how James and Red Molly fit on that bike…

Do It Yourself

Tomorrow is the 65th anniversary of “The Day The Music Died” – the plane crash in Clear Lake IA that killed Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and Jiles “Big Bopper” Richardson.

I’m a huge music trivia nerd – and even I was unaware of the impact Holly made, not in terms of songs, but in how rock and roll was made.

Buddy Holly’s impact on music in his 22 years is scarcely understood even by a lot of serious fans of music, but indeed of Holly himself – myself included.

I learned a lot from this writeup:

In many ways it’s a shame that Buddy spent most of his short career fighting for the things that would help rock and roll music to thrive in the decades to come.

They told him only producers can produce music, not musicians.

He proved them wrong.

They told him that a four piece band consisting of two guitars (rhythm and lead), a stand up bass, and drums wasn’t enough instrumentation to create a hit record.

He proved them wrong

They told him that songwriters only wrote songs, and musicians only played music. You can’t do both.

He proved them wrong.

They told him he would never become a rock and roll star because you had to be good looking like Elvis Presley. Plus he could never make it by wearing glasses.

He proved them wrong.

They told him orchestral arrangements and double tracking vocals in rock music could never work.

He proved them wrong.

They told him that no one from a one horse town by the name of Lubbock, Texas could ever become famous. You had to be from a big city like Los Angeles or New York.

He proved them wrong.

They told him that no musician had the right to question a record label about copyrights, promotion, or ownership of one’s music.

He proved them wrong.

Don McLean was a little wrong – the music died when the iPod was invented.

Anyway – here’s celebrating Buddy Holly:

By the way, September 7 would have been Holly’s 88th birthday .

Bach To The Future

Peter Schickele – better known to decades of music geeks as the author of the “PDQ Bach” music history saga – has passed away. He was 88.

It occurs to me that calling. him the “Spike Jones of Music Satire” depends on a generation of people who know who Spike Jones was.

“They were playing a record in the store,” Mr. Schickele recalled in a 1997 interview for the NPR program “All Things Considered.” “It was a sappy love song. And being a 9-year-old, there’s nothing worse, of course. But all of a sudden, after the last note of the song, there were these two pistol shots.”

That song, he learned, was Mr. Jones’s “A Serenade to a Jerk.”

“I’ve always felt that those pistol shots changed my life,” Mr. Schickele continued. “That was the beginning of it all for me.”

Maybe the “Weird Al Yankovic of Classical Music”?

The music majors in college were all into PDQ Bach – and I eventually figured out why. He really, really did classical music satire – perhaps the most esoteric form of satire there is short of lampponing ancient Greeks in ancient Greek – really, really well. He not only nailed the punch line – the funny jab – but the setup, the keen understanding of the milieu he was sending up.

This one made me laugh so hard I had a hard time breathing.

Maybe you had to be there. But as I was there, there are no regrets.

One of the things that gave me the odd chuckle was Schickele’s constant North Dakota references. Clearly the guy knew something about the state – but he was a New Yorker.

An accomplished bassoonist, the young Mr. Schickele played in his local symphony, the Fargo-Moorhead Symphony Orchestra, when he was in high school.

Years later, he would pay tribute to his North Dakota roots by bestowing upon himself, in his role as P.D.Q.’s earthly representative, an august academic title: professor of musical pathology at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople. (There really is a Hoople, N.D. There really isn’t a University of Southern North Dakota there — or anywhere.)

So I learned something new:

RIP, Peter Schickele. .

December 8, 1980

Haven’t posted here in a while. About time I did. So herewith, a memory.
 
True story: on the day John Lennon was killed, I had turned in a paper I wrote for my high school sociology class concerning gun control. And as a young smartass and White Album fan, I had titled the paper, “Happiness is a Warm Gun.”
 
I had just turned 17 and I was a senior in high school. I learned the news as I sat at the dining room table, which was where I typically did my homework in those days. I had lugged out the massive, cobalt blue IBM Selectric typewriter my dad had brought home from the office. I was typing up a paper for my Honors English class that was due the next morning; if I remember correctly, it concerned Eugene O’Neill’s play “The Hairy Ape.” I could see the television set in the living room and Monday Night Football was on. Then ol’ Howard Cosell told us: John Lennon had been shot dead in New York City.
 
It’s easy to forget now, but it was the beginning of a very violent 10-month period. At the end of that long winter of 1980-81, President Reagan nearly died at the hands of an assassin. Not long after, Pope John Paul II nearly met his maker. By the fall, Anwar Sadat was felled.
 
My generation was too young to really understand the events of the 1960s, especially the toll of the assassins that blighted the decade. We had come of age in the 1970s, a time that seemed simultaneously grim and silly. It was easy for me, and for a lot of my classmates, to adopt a mask of adolescent cynicism and to sneer at what we saw in front of us.
 
When Lennon was killed that night, I was thinking the cynicism I felt about my life and my future prospects was somehow justified. I felt constrained by the town I had called home. I kept thinking to myself — I can’t wait to get the hell out of this place. It wasn’t for me, this Appleton, Wisconsin. There was no way I would ever come back to Podunk and I sneered at those who were content to stay and settle for the blandishments of a boring little town, a suburb without a city attached to it. Once I left, I did not return. That much was true. Still, I was wrong about my town, though you couldn’t have convinced me otherwise.
 
The thing was, that cynicism had a very thin veneer. I remember when we were discussing the murder in school the next day, one of my friends reported the reaction of Mick Jagger, who purportedly called Lennon’s murder “a good career move” or something like that. I didn’t know if Jagger actually said it (and it turns out he didn’t), but we were all convinced it was the worst thing we’d ever heard and some of my friends vowed to get rid of their Stones albums in protest. They didn’t, as I recall.
 
Adolescents are often like that — simultaneously full of dreams and full of crap. Many, many things have changed in the 43 years since John Lennon died. One thing hasn’t — I still write at the dining room table. And, in 2023 at the age of 60, I’m actually less cynical than I was in 1980 at the age of 17. No matter how rotten the world might look at any given moment, there are always opportunities if we choose to see them.

Got To Be A Better Way Home

It’s “Southside” Johnny Lyon’s birthday today.

He’s (checks notes)…uh, 75 today.

Unlike their Asbury Park pals in the E Street Band, the Jukes never really hit it big; their last album to really. move the needle was in 1978.

But let’s be clear – Hearts of Stone didn’t move the needle, it pinned the needle to the right of the deal:

nd their one Top 40 single, in 1991, was a group effort by Springsteen, Jon Bon Jovi and Steve Van Zandt to get their friend across that particular finish line. Of course, I was working at KDWB at the time, and the competition was, well, Vanilla Ice, so it was a welcome respite:

Johnny hasn’t lost a step in concert, of course.. This is his pretty stunning cover of David Ruffin’s “My Whole World Ended”, which he started rolling out about the time he last played the Dakota in Minneapolis in 2019:

Happy Birthday, Southside.

And FFS – come back to the Dakota. We’re burning daylight here.

Shane MacGowan

Well, I’ll be. Something can kill Shane MacGowan.

MacGowan, the lead singer of the legendary Irish punk-folk band The Pogues, passed away overnight. He was 65, going on 110.

He was a Keith Richards/Ozzy Ozbourne-level drinker, a brilliant songwriter, an irreplaceable bandleader…

…and, like most British punks of the era, full of political hot air:

“We just wanted to shove music that had roots and is just generally stronger and has more real anger and emotion, down the throats of a completely pap-oriented pop audience,” he told NME in 1983 as the band was getting off the ground.

He frequently wrote about Irish culture and nationalism, as well as the experiences of the Irish diaspora — including his support of the Irish Republican Army (IRA).

“I was ashamed I didn’t have the guts to join the IRA — and the Pogues was my way of overcoming that,” MacGowan admitted in Julien Temple’s 2020 documentary “Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan.”

MacGowan was celebrated by many of his peers as one of the greatest songwriters of his generation. But he was also known for his heavy boozing, often leaving him stumbling and slurring his words at shows. 

Love the art, ignore the artist.

And at their best, the Pogues were one of the things that made the early-mid eighties such a blast

So what was “their best”?

I’d start with the title cut of their 1985 classic album, If I Should Fall From Grace With God,

Featuring the shreddingest Mandocello solo in rock history.

I’ve always been partial to this one, from the previous album, Rum, Sodomy and the Lash:

This one pops up on the NARN once in a while – and likely will again soon:

Most Americans who are familar with the Pogues at all know them from this, a song that is to Christmas music what Die Hard is to Christmas movies:

MacGowan’s been suffering healthl issues for a while now, and was reportedly wheelchair-bound since 2015.

Probably a decade ago, a story circulated that scientists were studying some of the most legendarily indestructible rock stars – Keith Richards, Ozzy Ozbourne, MacGowan and a few others – to try to figure out how they could survive decades of chemical abuse at a level that’d kill entire 70s funk bands or squads of Marines, and keep on going.

It’d seem they found a data point.

The Bolt From The Blue Redux

This is an update of a piece originally from 11/20/2018

It’s gone through every musician’s mind.

You’re at a show – from a club gig to an area show – and you watch the musicians doing their thing, and the thought crosses your mind; “What if (fill in a member of the band) were to keel over in a faint right now, and the band called for someone in the audience who knew the material, and I jumped on stage and totrally rocked it“?

Yeah, I’ve had that.  At a Springsteen or Asbury Jukes or Richard Thompson or Warren Zevon or Gear Daddies or Los Lobos gig, thinking “If Nils or Gary Thompson or Pete Zorn or David Landau or Cesar or whoever the guitar player is gets the flu and faints away, I could jump up there and totally take over!”

It remains a fantasy for almost everyone.  1

Almost.

It was 50 years ago last Friday, every musician’s fantasy came true, for one Scot Halpin, of Muscatine Iowa, who’d been living in the Bay Area for about a year.

He was at a Who show at the Cow Palace in San Francisco.

After playing an hour and a half, Keith Moon – the Who’s manic drummer – passed out behind the drum kit.  Roadies revived him after another song or two, before he passed out again.

The rest of the band – singer Roger Daltrey, bass player John Entwistle and guitar player Pete Townsend, continued for another song (“See Me, Feel Me”) without a drummer.

Then, Townsend asked the crowd if anyone could play the drums.  Halpin’s friend ignored the fact that Halpin hadn’t touched a drum kit in the year since he’s left Iowa, and got the attention of a roadie, who got the attention of promoter Bill Graham.   And one thing led to another.

As Halpin told the story to the San Francisco Examiner  years later:

When Townshend called out, “Can anyone play the drums?” Halpin and Danese were already at theedge of the stage.

“And my friend starts saying to the security guard, `He can play,’ ” Halpin says. In truth, he hadn’tplayed in a year, but that didn’t slow the braggart Danese, who made such a commotion thatpromoter Bill Graham appeared. “He just looked at me and said, `Can you do it?’ ” Halpin doesn’trecall his answer, but Danese assured Graham that he could.

“The story was that I stepped out from in front of the stage, but that’s not what happened,” Halpinsays. “Townshend and Daltrey look around and they’re as surprised as I am,” he says, “becauseGraham put me up there.”

With a shot of brandy for his nerves, Halpin shook hands with Townshend, then sat down at his firstdrum set since he left Iowa, in front of 13,500 critics. “I get onto the stool. Was it still warm? Whoknows. I’m in complete shock,” Halpin says. “Then I got really focused, and Townshend said tome, `I’m going to lead you. I’m going to cue you.’

“I’m laying down the beat. They’re doing all their `Live at Leeds’ kind of stuff, and then I don’tremember what happened. I guess I played a couple more songs. It was such a weird experience.”

The bootleg reveals that Halpin drummed through the traditional “Smokestack Lightning” and”Naked Eye,” from “Odds and Sods,” closing with the anthem “My Generation.” He wasonstage for about 15 minutes. “I played long enough with them that no one booed and no one threwanything at the stage,” he says.

After the show, Halpin got to party with the band backstage; Daltrey gave Halpin kudos in the press later – and bootleg tapes showed that he did a decent job.   And he won a special, one-time-only “Best Pickup Player Of The Year” award in Rolling Stone‘s critics’ poll at the end of the year.

And until his death fifteen years ago of an inoperable brain tumor, he was probably the luckiest pickup drummer in history.

1 As it largely has for me.  Although in the summer of ’18, I went to a show at the Seventh Street Entry making the 40th Anniversary of Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town, with a Springsteen tribute band, “Tramps Like Us” (possibly now defunct, more’s the pity – and if it’s for lack of a guitar player, have their people call my people).   They did a good show, by the way.   But they were doing “Something In The Night”, one of the more obscure deep cuts on the record, and the lead singer was flloundering for the words.  And I was singing along at the foot of the stage, so rather incredibly, he handed me the mic and I finished out the last verse for him.  Not exactly pinch-hitting for David Hidalgo on “Will The Wolf Survive”, but it was fun, and I thank that lead singer, whoever he was…

Soundtrack, Part 9

Of all the music I’ve talked about this past two weeks, this one may be the closest thing to an emotional time machine.

My own baggage notwithstanding, if you built a time capsule and wanted to put “The perfect 1980s song” in it, this would be a candidate; the shufflying synth drums and faux orchestra skirling about with Mike Campbell’s ultra-minimalist punctuation on guitar (which is backwards rock and roll!) – it tied the whole decade together.

And the song itself – all about getting your arms around what you’ve lost? It felt perfect then.

And a couple of decades later, it still does.

Back to more regular blog material Monday.

Soundtrack, Part 8

My first couple of weeks in the Twin Cities, I spent a lot of time in the car.

And Twin Cities radio stations spent a lot of time playing this song.

I’m not sure if it ever went to #1, but in a month of memorable music, it was perhaps the most chant-along-worthy thing on the radio…

…which led us to hours of racing around freeways or sitting in traffic, rocking back and forth and singing “Shout…Shout…””, and waiting impatiently for the reward of the fat, glorious guitar solo at the end.

I still feel like I”m in traffic, and don’t mind that much, when I hear this one. .

Soundtrack, Part 7

Throughout this series, I’ve focused on memories triggered by music that is cemented into my brain as sublime.

But it wasn’t all good.

There was plenty of music that ranged from awkward to awful. And the more I write about it, the more of it comes back to me..

This was the second or third song I ever saw on MTV:

I gave ’em extra points for sneaking Christian imagery onto MTV (at a time when it wasn’t quite as uncommon as today) – and removed a few for it being…it.

But I never could find a reason to give this then-MTV staple any points at all…

…and am somewhat distressed to say I hear the one on the radio waaaaay more than I should.

It wasn’t all bad, per se. Some of it was just background music. This one was on the charts around this time in 1985:

Have you ever wondered what it looked like to watch two music legends deflate before your eyes, early October of 1985 brought that as well;

Of course, all of the above build up – or, rather, sink down – to the level of this song, which was peaking on the charts around this time…

…and remains , by acclamation, the worst song in pop music history.

Not all nostaliga as good.

I’ll get back on track tomorrow.

Soundtrack, Part 6: Notes From Underground

Long ago, I told the story of my first Sunday in the Twin Cities. It was a free day, without job hunting or much of anything to do.

So I drove downtown. I visited First Avenue, had a burger, looked at Murray’s and vowed that someday, when I had a cool job and an awesome girlfriend and had made it in the Twin Cites I was going to get a butterknife steak at Murrays.

And I bought a tape – my first tape in MInneapolis, from my first Minneapols band. The Replacements.

And given my situation, this song seemed apposite…

…and I may have played it a few hundred times in the first week, and thousands more since then.

And this article reminds me – I gotta get down to Murray’s.


While we’re talking underground? REM hadn’t quite graduated to annoying me completely yet. This song came out too:

And, since we’re on less well-known music that bobbed up on the radio during this, perhaps the most exciting and diverse period in top forty music radio, there were these two songs, also rattling around MTV at the time:

“Whisper to a Scream” by Icicle Works,

And “Litarny” by Guadalcanal Diary:

As I kicked this series off, I allowed it might be possible that my situation was what welded the music from this entire series into my brain.

That’s probably true. But dang, there was a lot of good music.

Not all of it, of course . We’ll visit music tomorrow that was memorable in all the wrong ways.

Soundtrack, Part 5

Nothing about my first week in the Twin Cities ever smacked me upside the head quite as hard as my first rush hour.

I drove Cedar to 494 to try to get to 35W, to drive from Burnsville to Vadnais Heights for an interview.

And 494 during the morning rush hour is still a cardio workout.

Back then? In a barely roadworthy car, learning the few rules that the road had?

I flipped on WLOL. This song started:

The buildup, in my memory, went hand in hand with the traffic, the weaving and ducking and lane-changing, built up around me, mirroring the mental frenzy I’d just merged into.

I’m sure my blood pressure and heart rate still rise when this song come on, anywhere.

Soundtrack, Part 4

Yesterday’s (and Tuesday’s) entry was a bit of eighties apocrypha, meaningful maybe only to me.

Today’s? Sublime, and a pretty universal pop culture reference.

Do I even need to introduce it?

The video isn’t just representative of the golden age of music video. The rotoscope noir-in-color is the golden age of music video. MTV would certainly have existed without it – but nobody would have cared nearly as much.

And the song itself – the bubbling syths and synth drums, the descent into the choruses, and of course Morten Harket’s iconic falsetto in the chorus?

I heard and saw this for the first time sitting on a friend’s couch, watching MTV for the first time. On top of everything else, this song says “Welcome to Minneapolis, and the Rest Of Your Life” to me.

Whevever I am, I feel “1985” down to my marrow.

Soundtrack, Part 3

My first couple of days in the Cities, I was staying on a friend’s couch in Burnsville, working through my list of job leads (which was short) and going through the want ads to try to find some kind of income.

Which left a little time for watching that new toy I’d found, MTV.

And I’m fairly sure this was the first song I ever saw:

It was Simple Minds’s followup to “Don’t You Forget About Me”, their megahit from earlier in the year.

And it was peak SImple Minds; arty, ingenious, pretentious, memorable, full of Jim Kerr’s preening, roiling with Charlie Burchill’s insidious guitar and Mel Gayhor’s sublime drumming.

I heard it on the overhead at happy hour the other day – for maybe the second time since 1990. And it transported my brain back to that living room in Burnsville.

But rather than waiting for a phone call that never came, iti promped me to write…

…well, this entire series.

Soundtrack, Part 2

The two weeks before I moved to Minneapolis, I wrapped up on my roofing and siding job.

I had a boom box to help while away the lonely hours of hammering and sawing. To save battery power (four D batteries ain’t cheap), I usually tuned it to KFYR in Bismark – the only non-country music station in range.

This being the eighties, program directors were casting some very broad nets to try to figure out what’d latch on.

And this song peered out onto the radio a few times during those few weeks. It’s by Jane Wiedlin, erstwhile rhythm guitarist for the Go Gos.

There is no rational reason why this song, of all the hours of music I listened to on that job site that month, this one stuck with me. You never hear it on the radio – ever. I doubt most of you ever have heard it, or retained it if you did.

And yet this song, for me, feels like a hot day, smelling the hay coming in, watching the sun edging down toward the hjorizon.

I didn’t say all of these songs made sense.

Soundtrack, Part 1

John Hughes wrote movies for eveyrone – but they focused through the lens of angsty upper-middle-class kids from the north burbs of Chicago. Risky Business, Sixteen Candles, Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink. even Home Alone (angsty tween!). And their soundtracks reflected those kids; Psychedelic Furs, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Simple Minds – just sing the big singles from each of those movies, and you’ll get a pretty decent digest of new wave pop from the early to mid eighties.

If Hughes had written movies about rangy, restless kids with huge chips on their shoulder in the middle of nowhere, he’d have had a bunch of John Mellencamp’s Scarecrow on the soundtrack.

As I knocked around Jamestown during the weeks before I moved, it felt like my social circle was constricting around me. My haunts and stomping grounds were on short time. . My friends who hadn’t graduated and moved on were all busy with their lives – there, in Jamestown. My focus was moving.

And outside the occasional night knocking back beers at “The Club”, I felt isolated. Above and beyond the isolation of living in a place far, far from the center of action I craved being in.

So as this song plied its way up the charts in early October, it couldn’t have been timed much better:

And I hear it today, and I can still feel that hollow ache of ,as Paul Westerberg put it, “waiting to be”.

Soundtrack

Growing up working in radio, I learned an interesting bit of applied psychology from my various program directors: people tend to become emotionally attached to music they hear from puberty until their brain stops growing, around age 25.

It’s not so much that music attaches itself to important events in your life, as the music and the events happen at a time when your brain is filling in a lot of important space with events that matter to you – and, given its evocative intensity, the music that’s going on at the time.

If I ever got to be a phenomenally wealthy mad scientist, ,one of my experiments would be to pay a family to raise their children around nothing but some absurd, archaic genre of music – say, John Philip Sousa marches – through their twenties, and measure to see how many events, first dances and first crushes and first kisses, they associated with marching music.

Anyway, about this time in 1985, my brain was getting stuffed with the consequences of my following up on my drunken promise to move to the Twin Cities that I’d made about a week earlier at a college homecoming dance. And for the next two weeks as I tried to fill in the many blanks of my half-baked “plan”, my still-growing brain drank in the music that was going on around me, on the radio, on my boom box, and (when I got to the Cities) on MTV, which I finally got to watch.

And to this day, I hear one of those songs, it brings it all back. I hear one of the songs burned into my cortext from that era on an overhead or the radio or at a bar, and I still smell the must of autumn building, of the harvest coming in as I worked my roofing and siding job, the feel of the wind as I drove my barely-roadworthy car to MInneapolis, the “exhilaration” of my first rush hour on my way to an interview.

The smell of fear, the feel of the tingle of hope, and the shiver of taking a huge leap.

I’ve had a theory that the period from 1977 to about 1986 was one of the best periods of all time for popular music.

It might be because it was a fact. Or it might be because it’s associated with that most searingly immediate period in life, adolescence through leaping out into the world.

Why choose?

At the risk of indulging in nostalgia, I’m going to indulge in some of the rewards of nostalgia.

As Regular As The Sands Of Time

News articles we see as regularly as the rising and falling of the tide:

The spring of every election year: “Evangelicals swinging toward the left! (when a poll shows the Democrat vote among Evangelicans rose from 22% to 23%)

Every decade, during “festival” season: “Country music is moving to the left!” (when some flavor of the month singer goes on “The View” instead of the NASCAR pre-race show”

While Making Your Weekend Plans

My band, “Elephant in the Room“, is playing at the “Backing the Blues“ Street dance this coming Saturday.

The event – which was an annual thing for over 40 years until the pandemic, and is restarting this year – is a benefit for the Hennepin County Sheriff Association

The event is free. Donation proceeds go to supporting scholarships for people going into law enforcement. The band is playing for free, so anyone who wants to throw a few bucks in the bucket is much appreciated.

I mean, they had me at barbecue.

Everything Nice And Rough

Tina Turner is passed away yesterday, in her home 83.

It was about this time forty years ago that radio programmers were asking “Tina who?

I mean, she popped on on “oldies” radio.

She had some staples there, in fact:

But Turner was…

…well, in her forties. No woman in the Billboard Chart era had ever had a #1 hit at anywhere near her age.

And so everyone – me included – was kind of gobsmacked when perhaps the greatest comeback in the history of popular music happened about this time forty years ago; 43 year old Tina Turner climbed back from R&B obscurity to the top of the charts – the oldest woman to ever top the Billboard charts at the time, with a series of songs from “Private Dancer”, an album cut with a who’s who of the best sidemen in the business:

Dolly Parton, Shirley Bassey and Cher all had hits after age 50 – loooong after Turner did it.

The story of the intervening years was a catalog of horrors…

…literally the stuff of movies. If you’re not aware of the, uh, turbulence in Turner’s life from 1960 to 1976…

…the movie is one of the better music biopics ever.

Anyway – I loved a lot of things about Tina Turner – but perhaps most of all, the fact that Turner danced with the one that brung her, as it were – she never forgot the sheer power of a hot, fast, sweaty rave-up.

Rest in peace, Tina Turner.

Music History

I’m always amazed at the artists who had the foresight, while creating timeless musical classics, to have a camera rolling in the studio.

This is one such example:

It’s like gospel music in the church of fast-casual food.

There Were No Illusions On The Summer Side Of Life

I get the impression that Gordon Lightfoot knew time was short when he recorded his last album, three years ago. At 81, it wasn’t a big stretch.

It’s the best album he’s done in quite a while – done solo, just Lightfoot on an acoustic guitar, solo, his voice nowhere near it’s strength and power of his glory days, but still very much him. And it was a surprise – in 2016, he famously retired from songwriting, saying it’d caused a lot of problemls with, and for, the people closest to him in his life.

Lightfoot’s best work wrestles with one of those most troublesome human emotions – regret. Popular culture’s current affectation is to “have no regrets” – which is only possibly if you live a life with no failures, mistakes or risks. Like Warren Zevon’s final album, The Wind, it sounds like a guy wrapping up accounts for a life spent swinging for the fence – and leaving a few broken bits and pieces in his wake.

It’s a wonderful end to a wonderful career.


I tried to figure out where to start writing something that I haven’t written dozens of times before, with a long-overdue watching of If You Could Read My Mind, the 2020 documentary about his sixty-plus year career, life and legacy.

The documentary opens, rather pointedly, with Lightfoot and his third wife watching him peforming “For Loving Me”, a semi-comic cad’s anthem that, it turned out, wasn’t nearly fictional enough to have not affected many of Lightfoot’s relationships over the years.

He’s visibly uncomfortable.

“Turn it off. I hate that f*cking song”, he says, face wrinkled in disgust that, we learn in the next 90 minutes, has a whole lot of hindsight behind it.

And the hindsight is fascinating indeed.


The first acoustic guitar part with a moving bass line that I ever learned to play, back in eighth grade, was “Sundown”.

And it occurred to me – while LIghtfoot’s music wasn’t a huge, life-altering influence at the front of my mind, like Springsteen or (in my annoying adolescent days) The Who, Lightfoot’s music was always not just there, but found a way to burrow into my mind. Lightfoot’s music was always filling – there was as substance to it. It didn’t just flit through the mind and keep going.

He was an infamously fastidious songwriter and producer (not to mention, as the documentary notes, a rhythm guitarist who was in his prime such a solid, powerful musical presence that his band didn’t need a drummer until well into the seventies). His craftsmanship was very deliberate, very personal (in sixty years, he never worked with a co-writer), and pretty much completely him.

He came to fame in the folk music revival scene of the early 60s, on the basis of a lot of live performances and several songs covered by other artists; “Early Molrning Rain” and “If You Could Read My Mind” were covered by everyone from a Johnny Cash-style version by, well, Johnny Cash, to a disco version by VIola Wells that topped the R&B charts for a month in 1980.

And that leads us to one of the things that always drew me to Lightfoot; his music, like Dylan’s, kicked the fey, mewling limitations of “revival” folk music out of the way. The covers wandered all over the waterfront – from Wills’s disco read of “If You Could Read My Mind”…

To the Replacements sloppy punk…

To Sarah McLachlan’s alt-pop:


Favorites, looking back at a sixty year carer? Leaving out some of the obvious ones, like “Sundown” and “Wrech of the Edmund Fitzgerald”?

Some days, it’s the maddeningly oblique “Summer Side of Life”, with not-subtle Gospel overtones, distinctly un-folky Hammond organ part, and one of the most glorious vocal hooks ever?

The subtle “Don Quixote”, a protest song about…well, everything, and one that runs through my mind every time I on the air, today?

The tartly autobiographical “Race Among The Ruins”?

The freezing-cold social commentary of “Circle of Steel”?

On any given day, any or all of ’em qualify.

But for today? Looking back at Lightfoot’s 84 years (and my own, uh, several decades), this one seems most appropriate; a wistful look back, wrestling with regret, and finding away to live with them and still live.

RIP, Gordon LIghtfoot.


I Take The Punches I Can’t Slip, And I Give ‘Em Right Back

To: Steve Van Zandt
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant and Longtime Fan
Re: I’ll Meet You Halfway

Steve,

Earlier this week, you got into a bit of a flap over this:

You removed the tweet, but followed up saying that you meant “exterminate at the ballot box”, although you delivered it with all the subtle grace of Sean Penn on a three day bender.

But hey, I’ll meet you halfway. Ask Sarah Palin what it’s like, having something that was meant one way passed off as something completely different. That’s politics.

And given the number of unstable, armed people on your side of the political aisle, perhaps you should moderate your tone a bit.

But while others focus on your original rhetoric, I’m going to roast you for this:

It’s one of an endless series of tweets in your feed where you refer to Republicans as some variant of stupid.

Some of us sure are.

But none of us ever put “Princess of Little Italy” on an otherwise perfect record.

Humility is in order.

That is all.

(CLOSED CIRCUIT: Comments to the effect of “Why do you listen to music from people who hate you” will be mocked and taunted. We’ve been through this).

When Making Weekend Plans

I don’t normally put much music stuff on the blog – I’d rather not dilute the gravitas of this publicatio with rock and roll

…but my band, Elephant in the Room, is playing Shamrock’s on West 7th in Saint Paul, Friday night at

We go on at 930PM.

It’s one of those rooms I’ve been dying to play for like fifteen years, now.

Anyway – if you stop by, say hi!

Mister Bad Example

I’m not sure how I missed this piece, from five years ago, about supremely complicated story of Warren Zevon – a deeply flawed person who wrote some of the best music ever about deeply flawed people.

It’s a sprawling article that covers a lot of turf – too many

In an old Late Show episode from the ’90s, when Zevon was guesting as bandleader, David Letterman asks Zevon to play “Desperados Under the Eaves,” which he had never performed on the show. Zevon demurs, suggesting that he needs an orchestra backing him to do the song justice. Maybe he just didn’t want to play his big hymn about L.A. on the opposite coast from that “beautiful, sensual morgue.” Either way, Dave never was able to convince Warren to play it for him.

The best song can’t ever be your favorite song, because the best song belongs to everybody, whereas a favorite song belongs only to you. Goldsmith goes with “The French Inhaler,” a telling choice for a songwriter — it boasts a parallel narrative that references Zevon’s bitter break-up with the first love of his life and mother to Jordan, Marilyn “Tule” Livingston, and the controversy over Norman Mailer’s 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe. It’s the sort of song — sophisticated without making a big deal about it — that professionals wish they had written.

Favorite but not “best”? Probably a three way battle between “Poor Poor Pitiful Me”, “Lawyers, Guns and Money” and “A Certain Girl”.

The rebooting of Zevon’s reputation – from untouchable to secular saint, in the two decades since he died – fills a lot of the article, and it’s fascinating, and a little bit of a blast down memory lane to the days when he was one of the most alcoholic-y alcoholics around:

One of the most haunting passages from I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead concerns “Reconsider Me,” Zevon’s most poignant love song. (Given how much Zevon labored over his lyrics, the use of “reconsider” seems especially crucial.) Crystal Zevon recounts how Warren showed up at her place at some point in the mid-’80s, before he got sober, to play her the song. In spite of everything, they were thinking about giving their marriage another go.

Their daughter, Ariel, was excited to show her daddy her report card and a drawing she made for him. But when he walked in, he ignored Ariel, instead fixating on Crystal as he played her his beautiful love song. The little girl looked on, quietly devastated.

It’s an illuminating and fascinating read if you’re a fan. And I am.