24 posts tagged “music”

11 p.m. tonight, I hopped on a train on the Upper East Side and headed home to Brooklyn after a wonderful dinner. The trip is probably 7 or 8 miles, but for those of you not used to traveling by subway, that equates to about an hour late at night. Those aren't exactly the moments that try men's souls, but it's a great time to have an iPod. I've been gravitating to music from my teens this week, and flipping through the artists, I land on Rush. From there, I hone in on "Spirit of the Radio," from 1980's Permanent Waves.

Music in my teens was a very different thing for me. It wasn't tied down by any form of nostalgia. Even my deep passion for music of the 1960s was really an exploration of something that was new, at least to me. Rush was my second or third concert. My brother Jeff and I went when I was 15 — Moving Pictures tour at the (then named) Brendan Byrne Arena in Jersey's Meadowlands. It was my first experience with a full multi-media show and it floored me. Next time I saw them, I was 30 and being paid to photograph the show for a music publication. As 45 approaches, I plan on seeing them again.

Today, music easily unleashes a wave of nostalgia and an iPod is something to be handled with emotional care. I grew up in the reasonably well-to-do suburbs of Jersey. That's not to say we were wealthy, but certainly comfortable. The towns I lived in — to the best of my memory — lacked any significant people who weren't white and was completely devoid of people who were poor. Looking back on my teen years, I should have been oblivious to the rest of the world, but in truth, I was never more outraged than when I was in high school. I woke up. I realized I was privileged. I realized that my government (this was the Reagan years), was funding destabilizing wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador, recklessly destroying lives for some bizarre ideological reasons that had little to do with reality. I realized the gap between the poor and wealthy was expanding. I watched the transition from Carter's recession to Reagan's "recovery" and realized what mainstream media wasn't talking about: That large portions of America weren't getting a piece of it. That the economic measures that defined a recovery failed to take into account how it impacted the poor and the middle class. This realization hit me when I was 17, and I was disgusted.

But to turn to "Spirit of the Radio":

    Invisible airwaves
    Crackle with life
    Bright antennae bristle
    With the energy
    Emotional feedback
    On a timeless wavelength
    Bearing a gift beyond price ---
    Almost free...

When I was a teen, reality came into my world via the radio. No, it wasn't public radio or some radio news documentary. It was music. I caught the tale end of an error where adventurous DJs still had the ability to play what they were passionate about. It was Dan Carlisle on WNEW FM coming into my room at midnight and saying "Meet Iggy and the Stooges." It was WBGO introducing a  kid in the suburbs to Gill Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson's "Winter in America."  It was the end of an period where major labels took risks and radio stations weren't driven by corporate-controlled play lists. The world was coming to me through a stereo.

The DJs and the artist they played were my heroes. They were my grounding in reality. They were the ones who started me on the path to music journalism. And some 15 years later, when I began writing about music, I was driven by the passion to return the favor they did for me: to turn people on to music they'd otherwise would have never heard. Over the 12 years I wrote about music, it never brought me a lot of money. But every time someone thanked me for exposing them to a new sound or an artist thanked me for really taking the time to "get" what they were doing, I counted that as a victory.

But back to high school: Over the following years, I would march on Washington, write letters, get involved with progressive organizations, and set out to change the world. I would later come to realize that no one really cared what a teenager thought about world events. I was angry, frustrated, and unshakingly idealistic. I was determined to change the world if I had to do it one person at a time.

The danger of an iPod is that it carries the entire soundtrack to your life. Nostalgia is a dangerous thing. The music of your youth is loaded with years that have flashed by faster than you ever imagined, lost innocence, and the realization that things are never as simple as they seemed. For me, it carried the hardest realization of my life: You don't get to change the whole world, only your small piece of it. It's a sobering thought, but it makes you think many, many times about how you treat the people whose lives you do impact.

As  the ride progressed, in the MTA's typically sluggish style, I realized that my values where the same, but my idealism was gone. I understood a lot as a teenager, but I didn't understand the luxury of outrage. The beauty of being young is two-fold, at least for those whose families have enough money to provide for them: a lack of responsibility and little enough experience on this planet to see how justice is beaten down again and again. It's easy to be outraged when the majority of your day isn't spent busting your ass to earn the money to pay the bills. It's easy to be outraged when you still believe you have the power to change the entire world. It's not that I'm no longer appalled by the injustice of the world, just that the energy to be outraged had been largely beaten out of me. That realization in the sad part of nostalgia.

One day, when I was still in high school, I turned on the radio around midnight, but Dan Carlisle was gone. There had been no farewell broadcast, and I never knew where he ended up, though I imagine it was some station in some other part of the country. His time was passing, though. The days when DJs could get away playing Iggy and the Stooges were coming to an end. I would become a music journalist in the mid-90s, and I would see the major labels unravel under their own greed.  I would turn off my radio, and turn to friends and colleagues for new sounds.  I would turn to the internet and the many cool, devoted people who still worked in the music industry because they loved music more than then despised the industry. And as I finished my ride home tonight, I wondered where Dan is now, and whether he knows that he brought the world into the sheltered bedrooms of a teenagers many years ago.

For the words of the profits
Are written on the studio wall,
Concert hall ---
Echoes with the sounds...
Of salesmen.

The Spirit Of Radio

Because Patty referenced it in her comment to my last post:

Heard this in a bar last night, and remembered how much I loved the song. (Back from 1993)

A little Christmas cheer! This is wonderful.

Ah, it was a great mail day. I got home and there were two packages waiting for me. No, that's not unusual. I write about music, and there are almost always promo CDs waiting for me — generally ones I could care less about. Not today, though.

First off, there was the new Springsteen album. Yes, I'm a huge Springsteen fan, something I inherited from my dad — who's flying in to see Springsteen with me in November.

Then, there was the new Mekons album, Natural. The Mekons formed in Leeds in 1977, and art house punk band. They are probably my favorite band in the world. I collect their albums, and even road tripped to see their 20th anniversary show back in '97. I haven't had a chance to play it yet, but Natural has been called the best album of their career. Given their 30 year history and amazing catalog, I'm excited to hear it.

This song popped into my head, and I had to dig through a stack of CDs to rip it to my iPod. It still sounds great, but I actually listened to they lyrics for the first time.

When I'm watchin' you and Fidel Castro in the sand, kissin'!

She's comin on like a bicycle army

I'm not sure whether it's about a girl, a revolution, or really about nothing at all.

I really don't think I agree with Wikipedia, which says:

The topic of "Sister Havana" is one of jealousy over a hot Latina hooking up with, ultimately, Fidel Castro. "Sister Havana" is driving with a crunchy, sometimes muted riff and (in a throwback to the '70s they love to ape) a prominent cowbell track.

Any insights?

This song is nearly six years old now, but every time I hear it, my body stats to shudder and tears well up in my eyes. I've listened to the album version and seen it live, always the same reaction. This, in my mind, is a true gospel long in all but name. It's a profound calling out to people to come together on a deep, spiritual level — to come together and heal collective wounds — to rise out of the ashes. Of course, this song came out right after 9/11, but I believe it was written before.

I see you Mary in the garden
In the garden of a thousand sighs
There's holy pictures of our children
Dancin' in a sky filled with light
May I feel your arms around me
May I feel your blood mix with mine
A dream of life comes to me
Like a catfish dancin' on the end of the line

I've been a huge Springsteen fan since I was a kid. I think he's the last person on the lists of artists I haven't interviewed but would really, really love to. So, a new album with the E Street Band is a huge deal for me.

On August 13, 2007, I met Stan Ridgway after his show in Minneapolis. You might say this meeting was a long time coming.

 

My first encounter with Stan was back when his band Wall of Voodoo hit MTV hard with "Mexican Radio." Most people remember that song, but far too few people followed him after that. For the record, that wasn't when I became a Stan Ridgway fan. Next time I noticed Stan, he had recorded "Don't Box Me In" with Stewart Copland for the Rumble Fish soundtrack. Loved the song, but that still wasn't where I became a Stan Ridgway fan.

My real curiosity with Stan's work spiked when Rolling Stone gave a glowing review to his first solo album, The Big Heat. I don't remember what it said, but it made me want to run out and by the album. I was, however, in college at the time, so buying a record (yes, vinyl) was a sizable investment.

There was a book and record store close to the VA Tech campus called Books, Strings, and Things. I stopped in there regularly to browse. One day, The Big Heat was sitting in the front of the bin facing the door. I held it and admired it and put it back. This went on for a few days, before I actually bought it

I was floored — the stories in the lyrics, the odd chord progressions, Stan's odder voice, the cool twists to the rhythms. I was a fan.

Flash forward to 2001: My friend and colleague Chris Strouth, who was managing Stan at the time, comes up to me one day and says, "Do you know anyone who would like to write liner notes for a Stan Ridgway album." "Me," I replied. "I was hoping you'd say that," Chris says.

I  ended up writing  the liner notes for the re-issue of  Stan's Black Diamond. Even better, Stan, whose work I'd long admired, liked the notes.

Instead of recounting my thoughts on the album, I'll just cut and paste the notes:

It’s not without a certain sense of irony (and fear) that I find myself penning these liner notes. As a critic, I’ve avoided talk of Stan’s work for years, finding no words to intelligently discuss his quirky sounds, bizarre characters, or singularly peculiar voice. Other writers seem to have faced similar difficulties, bestowing upon him some of the most contrived labels in the history of rock criticism. (“Maverick art/roots-rocker” remains my personal favorite, an eloquent phrase with little to no meaning.)

After all the babble about his “noir” imagery and “sonic textures” has been set aside, one important point remains criminally overlooked: Stan is, perhaps unknowingly, part of a tradition. He is one of the last true balladeers — part of a lineage that stretches back through colonial times and across the Atlantic to the British Isles.

It could be said that balladeers are four-minute novelists or, perhaps more accurately, four-minute journalists, and I couldn’t think of better descriptions of Stan. In the span of a song, he captures the richness of a character and the essence of a situation with deceptive simplicity. In prior times, when oral tradition was the means for transmitting news and stories, that simplicity was essential. Now, it’s a lost art.

Being a character in one of Stan’s songs is a thankless job; there is no glamour for these people. They are black diamonds, though they bear little resemblance to the valuable 489.07-carat gem put up for auction in France earlier this year. They’re more like the other type of “black diamond,” coal, which fueled the industrial revolution, creating great wealth for some, black lung and poverty for others, and violence all around. They are gritty, dirty, and oddly beautiful characters. Some are historical, some fictitious, and some … well … only Stan knows.

On this disc, there’s “Wild” Bill Donovan — founder of the OSS (predecessor of the CIA) — who shaped history through such brilliant, erratic, and questionable means, that his legacy still defies decisive judgment. There’s an ex-con, a “nobody,” whose revelation, “Behind every fortune … there’s got to be a crime,” proves a turning point as irrevocable as an act of war. And there’s a moving eulogy for Tennessee Two guitarist Luther Perkins, for which Stan boldly takes on the character of Johnny Cash. Should writing and singing a song from Cash’s point of view fail under the weight of pretense? Probably, but my money says this song could even bring a tear to the eye of the Man in Black.

Stan originally released Black Diamond in 1995. It quickly fell out of print due to a series of record industry mishaps that are far-too-common, far-too-complicated, and far-too-boring to recount. This reissue would be significant if only for filling a gap in Stan’s remarkable catalog. But it does more than that — it resurrects an extraordinary cast of characters and stories, a significant treasure of black diamonds.

— Bill Snyder
Minneapolis
August 2001

Stan doesn't tour that much, and I was out of town when he came through that year. So, until a couple of weeks ago, I'd never seen him live. I'd spoken with him on the phone, but never met him. It was an amazing show. And it's always a pleasure to be able to write about art you admire.

So, before ending this post, I'll leave you with two songs: One from the album for which I wrote liner notes and the title track from the album that hooked me.

RIP and Thank You!