Victor Wainwright is, above and beyond all, a bluesman. History now shows it; he’s twice been honored as the “Pinetop Perkins Piano Player of the Year” via the Blues Music Awards (the blues community equivalent to the Grammys and the highest honor that can be given to a keyboard player), and last year walked away with “B.B. King Entertainer of the Year” and “Band of the Year” honors, again from the Blues Foundation. He’s also doing his best to wrest the title of “hardest working man in show business” away from anyone; Wainwright has, for nearly a decade, averaged in excess of 200 lives shows per YEAR. Somehow, in the midst of all that, he also finds time to write and record new music… I sometimes wonder when the man schedules time for himself to sleep.

While live performances are what really bring the music to the people (perhaps especially in the case of blues), recording albums is where the legacy starts and where the foundation of a live show begins. In keeping with his love for the music in a variety of blues genres, Wainwright has alternately toured with The Victor Wainwright Band, The WildRoots and Southern Hospitality, a blues “supergroup” that also includes J.P. Soars and Damon Fowler. He recently went into Ardent Studios is Memphis, TN (Wainwright’s home-base city) to begin recording a new project, “Victor Wainwright and the Train.” Much to my pleasure and excitement, he invited me to join him in the studio for one of the last days recording the initial tracks for the album, tentatively due in late summer or early autumn of this year. As you can well imagine, I jumped at the chance to be among the first to get a taste of his newest music.

I’ve been a fan of Wainwright’s music for a long time - he was one of the first artists I more or less attached myself to when I moved to Memphis some nine years ago. Between those earlier days in his career when he played Beale Street as often as weekly to now where his concert tours are of international scope, I’m guessing I’ve seen him in concert a good thirty times, maybe more (and please believe me when I say I’ll continue to go to great effort to make any show I can - he’s just that good). A studio session, though, is a whole ‘nother animal; what you lose in the spontaneity and energy of a live crowd, you gain from the chance to lay something down and do it again if you feel like you have something a little better within. It’s a fascinating process to see… and, of course, to a fan, being able to watch the magic being created is a special experience. This is the first project recorded under “The Train” moniker; when I asked Wainwright why he chose to go with this instead of the WildRoots (a band he’s recorded and toured with for years), he replied, “It’s something a little different… plus, this is the first time I’ve entirely self-produced an album, and it just seemed appropriate to give it an identity of it’s own.” Fair enough. That new identity comes in the form of Wainwright on keyboards and lead vocals, Pat Harrington on guitar, Terrence Grayson on bass and Billy Dean on drums; the whole band chips in on background vocals. Grayson and Harrington are the newest elements of his touring troupe, Dean is a man he’s worked with for quite some time. The sessions at Ardent were overseen by Dave Gross as Lead Engineer, who was assisted by Mike Wilson.

Lagniappe
My sincere thanks to Lisa Mac, the official photographer for these sessions, for allowing me to use a couple of her photographs for this article. She's a very talented and very sweet lady; you can see more of her work here. The uncredited photos used were my own. It's always worth checking Victor's website for tour dates, significant announcements and samples of his work.

It’s certainly not going to take reading this to know that music fans lost a lot in 2016. It’s not really that surprising; so many of the music heroes of my youth (and current legends) are nearing or are well into their seventies, and most of them lived the life… not a great recipe for longevity. If there’s any bright side to that at all, it’s the realization that music is eternal. Legends are fading away from us, but as always, the torch is passed to a myriad of artists with fire and vision and talent… and perhaps most important, the drive to share their vision with the world. Music is amazing; it matters not how devoted a fan you are, you can never have a complete set. That makes me eternally hopeful for the future, and as always, as I culled through my notes for last year’s music, I found there were a ton of wonders to behold.

I use the word “favorites” in place of “best” on my lists anymore. It’s way more appropriate and less arrogant. That said, I found that my Top Ten for the year stretched to 29 albums, and I had to do a bit of paring to get it that “low.” That’s one killer album every 12.6 days for the entire year - nice! These are listed in two sections - the first section being the seven albums I listened to most in the past year, probably as good an indicator of my favorites as exists. All the others are listed after, and each section is alphabetical by artist, the way I file my stuff in my collection (and yes, I’m aware I do it wrong).

The links are to YouTube videos, and I didn't once ask permission to do that.
​I hope I'll be forgiven. That said, the albums I listened to the most in 2016:

Agnes Obel - Citizen of Glass
For my taste, Obel is way at the top of the list of the best young songwriters out there. This is her third album and I have yet to hear a song I don’t care for. She’s good with both her melodies and her words and navigates a lot of moods well; she does longing, introspection and hope with equal ease. What excites me most with this release is the huge leap forward the album’s production took. Sometimes, piano-based artists seem like they have fewer options available to them (in regards to tone and mood), so the creative production here bodes well for the future.
​
Favorite tracks: Stretch Your Eyes, Red Virgin Soil, Citizen Of Glass

Brian Jonestown Massacre - Third World Pyramid
Looking at this year’s list, there are two constants - my love of good female vocalists and my appreciation for “neo-psych” music, drawing heavily on the late sixties and early seventies without being copycat. From the second perspective, BJM has been kicking out some of the most consistently amazing music album after album for a long time now. The matching of mood with production is strong on this release, which is not unusual for Anton Newcombe and whoever he currently surrounds himself with. I’d love to hear a collaboration with Flaming Lips some day. Newcombe is a prolific and twisted genius; no wonder BJM are perennial favorites of mine.

​Favorite tracks: Government Beard, O Bother,
Like Describing Colors To A Blind Man On Acid 

Deering and Down - Know Rhyme, Know Reason
I like a really good female vocalist who can handle a variety of song styles. Boom - got it here. I like wonderfully catchy melodies and well-written lyrics, including frequent forays into the realm of clever. Boom - got it here. I’m a lifetime Stones fan, so I don’t need my rock to sound pristine; a little grit and grind in there does my soul good. Boom - got it here. I like when a band understands that the tone and mood of the recording can take a good song and make it great. Boom - got it here. As a little extra added accolade, if “amount of times sung loudly and badly in the shower” is any indication, "Heartful of Love" from this record is my favorite song of the year. 

Favorite tracks: Heartful of Love, Spaced Out Like An Astronaut, 
​River City, Pick A Knee

Haroula Rose - Here The Blue River
What a great year for female vocalists! Rose is somewhat similar to Obel in that she’s constantly catchy and works through a lot of emotions well, but they both have distinctive songwriting and performing styles, both superb. Between the two, Rose is a little less produced on this album, relying on her voice to carry these melodies way deep into your soul, and the results are hauntingly good. I probably connected to this album more than many because I understand the idea of connecting with a river, and obviously, so does she.

​Favorite tracks: The River (Drifting), Songbird, Margo
(warning: the video is emotionally intense)

Miranda Richards - Echoes of the Dreamtime
This is sort of a perfect combination of my female vocalist and neo-psych passions all rolled up in one album. Richards (who used to sing with Brian Jonestown Massacre, by the way) had released a couple of albums prior to this; both showed a lot of promise, and everything just jelled perfectly here. This is one of the best overall collections of gorgeous songs in a good long time, and her commitment to depth of emotion filtered through a seemingly pure spirit makes every performance here a delight. The more I listened to this one, the more I loved it; this will be a part of my "old hippie and no apologies for it" life forever. Extra points for the stunning cover.

​Favorite tracks: Colours So Fine, Julian, Tokyo’s Dancing, Already Fine

r.roo - Erroor
I will never abandon my love of good electronic music, and this album was my favorite of all the electronic stuff I heard this year. He’s been making records for quite some time, though I only found out about him this past year. How much do I like his work? I bought all TWENTY-TWO of the releases in his discography after hearing this one, and I’m glad I did. This is hauntingly eclectic and shows a fine understanding of everything from ambient to Berlin school techniques, from cinematic to minimal, all merged into a style distinctly his own.

​Favorite tracks: Art of Forgetting, Erroor, Space Train
(but this is an album best listened through beginning to end, non-stop)

Cross and Quinn - Cold Sky Blue
David Cross (ex-King Crimson) and Sean Quinn (Tiny Magnetic Pets) have released an album that appeals to the throwback in me; moody, textured and layered and lots of interplay between instruments I love (synths, violins, percussion). They also bring in a few guest vocalists who add quite a bit to the songs they perform on, particularly Beth Hirsch on the title track. From start to finish, this is an album reminiscent of the gentler side of prog, where melody and introspection are the focus, as opposed to breakneck playing; both idioms have their place, and Cross and Quinn are masters of the former.

​Favorite tracks: Cold Sky Blue, Arc En Ciel (Parts 1 & 2),
​Counting All The Stars

Daevid Allen Weird Quintet - Elevenses
Daevid passed early in 2015; this album represents the final recordings made during a lifetime of creative, whimsical energy and genius. Stealing from the description on Amazon (because I can’t do better), “Elevenses finds Allen mixing styles from throughout his career,  including blues, Irish folk, ambient and post-punk.” That shouldn’t work, but it does, all glued together with Allen’s trippy, whimsical little-boy-innocent vocals. As already alluded to, we’ve lost so many in the music world of late, and I miss Daevid Allen as much as any of them.

​Favorite tracks: Imagicknation, Dim Sum In Alphabetical Order,
​Secretary Of Lore

Damian Jurado - Visions Of Us On the Land
This album was my introduction to Jurado’s work, even though he’s been around for a while. When that happens, I never know whether to feel like I got cheated out of all those years enjoying him or whether I should just appreciate the goldmine of new music. He is one of the most consistently catchy songwriters I’ve come across in quite some time, and he surrounds himself with good people who are unafraid to venture into some unusual production spaces. This gives the album a lot of legs; repeated listens continually show off various subtle aspects of the album, and it’s one of those amazing releases that are almost completely different albums on headphones or speakers. For a while, this was one of my “I don’t want to hear anything but this” albums in 2016.

   Favorite tracks: November 20, QACHINA, Walrus 

Green Isac Orchestra (self-titled)
​Of all the obscure artists I’m a passionate fan of, I think I most wish the world would discover Green Isac. They’re not prolific - only six albums dating back to 1990 - but I have yet to hear a single track that wasn’t superbly crafted. They’re completely instrumental, mixing elements of world music, synthesizer sensibilities and eclectic percussions that wow me every time I hear them. They added “Orchestra” to their name for this release, giving credit and credence to their willingness to find additional musicians with a similar vision. They have continually explored new ways to express their emotions. I may well have to name them the best band that most people have never heard of.

Favorite tracks: Emmesity, Dr. One, Hapi, Algebra

Leonard Cohen - You Want It Darker
Actually, no… I want the wisdom and light I enjoyed for almost fifty years while you were establishing yourself as among the finest and most visionary songwriters ever. Like Bowie’s Blackstar, this is a fitting farewell. Cohen is often thought of as a dreary visionary, but I always felt like his darkness was masking the hope he never seemed to abandon, even during some very difficult days. Here, Leonard is obviously saying goodbye to us and to this worldly dimension. With his age, he had to rely on talking these lyrics as much as singing them, but he was gifted a voice for exactly that. For me, the underlying emotion here wasn't so much sadness or resignation at the end of his years, but a content reflection of what has been and what is to come. He was ready; we weren’t.

Favorite tracks: You Want It Darker, It Seemed The Better Way,
If I Didn’t Have Your Love

Lindsey Stirling - Brave Enough
Lindsey is one of those absurdly talented humans (violinist, composer, dancer, performance artist) who is amazing at a lot of things… and not the least of them is knowing how to combine them to completely delight her audience. The music here is a wonderful combination of complex dance pop with touches of classical, and “complex” is a very key word here. Her talent shines through on every track without over-barraging the listener with frantic solos and the like. It’s there when she needs it, but I truly respect that the complete song is what matters here, not just the moment. By the way, her videos are well worth checking out, if for no other reason that she really really REALLY looks like she’s having fun with all this.

​Favorite tracks: Lost Girls, The Phoenix, First Light

Mind Soup - Yesterday's Tomorrow
I’m a little late on the bandwagon here, as this was released in late 2015, but they have VERY little presence on the internet and it took me a while to find them. That said, I’ll be checking frequently, hoping for new stuff (already bought the whole back catalog, an additional three albums). This is good, proper old hippie music, leaning more towards the mellower side of psychedelia. It’s also another album that’s a completely different experience on headphones, and in this case, I prefer that mode of listening here. Introspective, intricate, intriguing instrumentals that have a long-lasting feel.

​Favorite tracks: The Planetarium, Tethys, Red Light Green Light

The Monkees - Good Times
1) I listened to this almost out of respect for the band that essentially introduced me to pop and rock music, and wound up blown away with one of the best pop albums I’ve heard in a long time. They can still sing, AND they kept the formula intact here - work with great songwriters and great producers and let their instincts for the songs take over. Unforgettable pop genius from beginning to end here. 2) Chuck all the arguments and put these folks in the Rock Hall of Fame. I can’t even BEGIN to imagine how many humans were the same as me in that these guys opened up the world of rock to us. I don’t care how they were formed, I don’t care about the politics… the music is great and timeless. They belong.

​Favorite tracks: Good Times, Me And Magdaleena, You Bring The Summer

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Skeleton Key
Nick is the strongest candidate, in my opinion, to hold the throne held by Leonard Cohen for so long. He has a similar ability to take darkness and desolation and make fascinating art of it. One of the things I enjoyed from Cohen for so long was the spirit of hope and refusing to give up that was an undercurrent to his entire career, and I hear the same thing here. Between the Bad Seeds and his solo work, Cave has released a half zillion albums (very UNLIKE Cohen in that regard) and his work retains the edge that made him notable to begin with.

​Favorite tracks: Jesus Alone, Anthrocene, I Need You

Quilt - Plaza
I could steal from Nick Lowe here and call this “pure pop for now people,” but that wouldn’t entirely do this album justice. It’s well-grounded in jangly pop sensibilities, but there’s plenty in the production and presentation of the songs to keep the listener hearing more and more with each listen. Perhaps the complex pop of, say, XTC would be a better comparison. Super strong songwriting and vocals help this one to shine., and I’m pretty sure I heard something like a mellotron on a track or two, so yeah… I’m sold.

​Favorite tracks: O’Connor’s Barn, Roller, Passersby, Padova

Ray LaMontagne - Ouroboros
Much like Damien Jurado, I somehow remained ignorant to this man’s work until I heard this album. My loss, but I get to make up for it now. Ouroboros drips with raw emotion throughout - if you can listen to this record without being moved in some way, I’d be concerned for your health and well being. He doesn’t have the strongest voice in the world, but he compensates by writing to his own abilities and augmenting it with excellent playing and on-the-mark production. Perhaps an acquired taste, but one I’m glad I got.

Favorite tracks: Homecoming, While It Still Beats,
Wouldn’t It Make A Lovely Photograph

Sarah Jarosz - Undercurrent
I’ve been a fan of hers since her debut release in 2009, and I’d have to say this is her most realized and complete album yet (which, I guess, makes sense). I’ve seen instances where a young artist was nearly ruined by attention and accolades early on (she was all of 18 when she released that debut), but it feels like Jarosz has used the attention to broaden her circle of friends, which in turn has seemingly furthered her development as a songwriter, singer and player. I had the pleasure of seeing her in concert this year (another one off the bucket list!), and was impressed with how well she was able to bring her music to a live stage. It feels like she has a long and amazing career ahead, and I can’t wait to see what her musical future brings .

​Favorite tracks: Green Lights, Everything to Hide, Jacqueline

St. Paul and the Broken Bones - Sea of Noise
Having had the pleasure of seeing them live three times now, I was more and more convinced that their debut album simply did NOT capture in the studio what these guys are capable of on a stage. Man. talk about the benefit of being on the road and honing your craft… this album nails it. This is as huge a leap forward for a sophomore release as I can ever recall. At this point in time, St. Paul is the standard for blue-eyed soul singers; his passion, persona and… well, his old school soul always shine on stage, and on this album, they hit every nuance in the studio as well. An instant classic.

​Favorite tracks: Flow With It (You Got Me Feeling Like), All I Ever Wonder,
Call Me, Midnight On The Earth

Violent Femmes - We Can Do Anything
Apparently, they can. Sixteen years, a few lawsuits and plenty of bad blood since their last album, the Femmes released a gem. This is every bit as whimsical, poignant, irreverent and flat out fun as their debut all those years ago; talent is talent, I guess, and overcomes all odds. I’m not sure what it says about me, but I feel like Gordon Gano is maybe the best smartass out there in songwriting land; I tend to take him as sardonic even when I imagine he’s being serious, all of which keeps the edge to his music. Besides, how can you hate a band that so often sounds like a bunch of drunks out for a good time on the town? I can honestly file this one under “I sure didn’t see something this good coming…”

Favorite tracks: I Could Be Anything, Foothills, Memory

William Tyler - Modern Country
Don’t be fooled by the title… this is an instrumental album full of melody, sparse soundscapes and virtuoso playing. “Virtuoso” can take many forms; here, it’s not shredding as much as finding the right space and time for the notes in these songs. I can’t imagine I’m far off with a guess that Robert Fripp is one of his influences; I wouldn’t call these tracks ambient, but Fripp’s understanding of space in music and his patience with composition are distinct earmarks of the music here. I’ve enjoyed this album on two different levels - careful scrutiny with headphones on, and as uplifting background music (so maybe it is a little ambient, but more in theory than sonically). 
Favorite tracks: Highway Anxiety, I’m Gonna Live Forever (If It Kills Me)*,
The Great Unwind

​*song title of the year!

Wye Oak - Tween
I’ll close the list with yet another artist who eluded me until this year. I’m told by fans of longer standing than me that this is not their best effort, more of a hodgepodge release than anything else. If that’s the case, I cannot wait to dive in to the rest of the catalog. What I’m hearing here is very catchy songs with exemplary vocals in a style that carries hints of influence from poppish folk to Americana to the occasional nod to synth culture and even a bit of controlled mayhem. Perhaps the most amazing thing about it is that this doesn’t sound choppy or pieced together, even with so many styles and influences to consider. 

Favorite tracks: Too Right, Out Of Nowhere, Watching The Waiting

Lagniappe
​This is the first time I’ve made a list like this since late 1999, when I was asked to contribute a “favorite artists of the 20th century” article to a regional mag. I have to say that I enjoyed it, especially being reminded of how much music I absolutely adored in the past year. Dontcha just LOVE looking over a list that reminds you that, no matter how bleak some things get, there’s always something good and/or interesting in the universe of music to console yourself with? 2017… bring it on!

There’s no easing in to this one. The album starts with the midtempo grinder “Stephanie’s Starboard Side,” an excellent showcase for Down’s earthy lead vocals and Deering’s sweeter than sugar harmonies. Like every track on this release, the melody grows more and more infectious with repeated play, allowing the listener the freedom to explore lyrics like, “If Mama was alive and she could see us here now, I wonder… would she break down and cry? / See for yourself, mister see for yourself… you can hear your ancestors sigh.” There’s a lot going on there, with plenty of room for interpretation and imagination, and I’m betting that’s JUST how these two like it. Artistic ambiguity and hints of dark humor permeate the album and add a lot to the tone and emotion felt. The second track, “Pick A Knee,” is a great example, merging a lonesome guitar sound like what you might hear in a David Lynch film with a lead talk-sing vocal reminiscent of Frank Zappa. “Come over here, honey, please! Pick a knee. Looks like you’re smiling - are you smiling at me? If I’m a madman, baby, I just might be crazy for you.” Yeah, I’m hooked… that’s fun and flirty and just a little… well, scandalous, and it works.

Deering gets her chance to show off her completely opposite vocal stylings as well. Tracks like “The Other Night” and “Angel In Your Eyes” are perfect vehicles for her comparatively subtle passion, and she shows that she’s equally comfortable with influences as diverse as Americana and fifties/sixties pop songs. However, don’t be fooled by the less aggressive approach she exhibits - the songs are full of emotion and observation, a wonderful combination when done as well as it’s done here. She’s not limited to ballads, either. For example, “River City” is as good a midtempo rocker as you’ll hear, full of enough hooks to fill a tackle box and with a lead vocal that starts out beautifully understated and eventually swaggers back into abandon by the time the chorus rolls around. This happens all the way through the record, with the duo taking you up and down in tempo and emotion, never losing effectiveness, never giving a reason for the listener to drift away - the songs are just too interesting for that.

Adding to the album’s sonic appeal is the engineering and production, both credited to Doug Easley. The album is very well recorded and sounds perfectly spontaneous, though logic and experience tell me that lots of the touches and flourishes that keep this record interesting had to be the result of some thought put into things. I particularly like the guitar tones used throughout; Easley shows a fantastic understanding as to when a song needs something distantly lonesome on one track, driving and in your face on another. Once I became familiar with the album, I heard something a little different on each subsequent listen; that, along with the pure quality of the songwriting and performances here are what keep me coming back over and over again.

While there’s not a bad track out of the thirteen songs here. “Heart Full Of Love” is the album’s masterpiece to these ears. The song is full of attitude that comes from that place somewhere between hope and desperation, much like so many of the greatest songs ever written about love. The music reminds me stylistically of that era of the Rolling Stones when they were so great - it’s loose and reckless and full of frustration. “When I went to bed you were in my head and you stayed the whole night through / When I went to bed, it was just like I said, honey - everything was all about you… Please allow me to show ya what a thrill it is to know ya…” Wow. Who can’t relate to that burning feeling of there being somebody you want so badly but can maybe only have in your mind?

And that, in a nutshell, is the essence of this release - grit, grind, glory and grace, and all of it with abandon. This is guaranteed a cherished spot in my “Best of 2016” list, and I strongly suspect I’ll be going back to this one again and again for a good many years.

Lagniappe
It's worth mentioning that Lahna and Neil are really good people as well as truly gifted artists. They're as entertaining to have conversation with as they are on record - fun, funny, irreverent and serious, all when appropriate. Their website has plenty of information and also features freebie downloads of quite a few of their songs: http://deeringanddown.com/

Note: It's safe to say that Suzanne Vega is on a very short list of the most respected artists in my life. Very soon, she will be releasing her first album of new material in some seven years, entitled Tales From the Realm of the Queen of Pentacles. It seems like a proper time, then, for a reprint of an article I did based on my first opportunity to interview her. This interview was done on the phone in September of 1990 as part of her promotional work for her third album, Days Of Open Hand (April, 1990) and the tour supporting the album. The article was published as the cover story of the September 21, 1990 issue of Jam Entertainment News in Florida. The black and white photo you see to the left was the cover of that issue of the magazine (it's a scan of a photocopy; the original cover had, I think violet spot color added to the black and white photo). The color pic shown below is part of the promotion and packaging for her new album... and no, I cannot wait!!



Suzanne Vega: Days Of Open Mind

There are precious few artists who have both musical ability and lyrical insight; fewer still have a sincere desire to communicate both as effectively as possible. Suzanne Vega is one of those few. Bursting on the scene in 1985 with her self-titled debut album, she was heralded as being at the forefront of the "New Folk" movement. 1987 saw the release of a new album, Solitude Standing, with its top-five single, "Luka," and an accompanying video that etched itself permanently into your mind with its stark look and vision. It would have been the path of least resistance for her to simply clone that successful album, but she's hardly the sort of person to revel in the past. Her most recent album release, Days of Open Hand, is distinctly Suzanne Vega, yet very different from any face she's shown the public to date.

While still an album for the thinker in us, with Open Hand Suzanne is exploring more of the world around her. "The characters on this album are a lot more interactive," says Vega. "There's much more of an extension, like extending your hand towards the audience. The characters in the songs are more interactive with each other or with another person, and the album is not so much about solitude. I think the whole band took a step forward in terms of the production of the album. I feel we kept the root of the acoustic guitar, but basically expanded it in all possible directions. We've always tried to do that - keep what made it me, but make it as diverse as possible at the same time."

"Diverse" is an understatement. Besides her regular band (Anton Sanko, Marc Shulman, Michael Visceglia and Frank Vilardi), she had the pleasure of working with John Linnell of They Might Be Giants and noted avant composer Philip Glass... all on the same release. "Philip and I met in 1985. He was looking for another songwriter to work with for Songs Of Liquid Days, and someone told him about me. He came to check me out at Folk City and asked if I would give him some lyrics to work with. Of course, I was just absolutely thrilled! We became very friendly after that, because he's a very inclusive guy. He said he would do a string arrangement for me at some point if I needed one in return for those lyrics. He's not sentimental at all - that's why I picked him to do that particular song ("Fifty Fifty Chance"), because I felt it would be sort of bracing." It was a pleasurable experience that she'd enjoy repeating. "He's a great guy to work with. We've done benefits together and hung out together. I also think I'd like to work with They Might Be Giants again, just because I think it would be fun to work in a more humorous way. I do have a humorous side to my personality, but it doesn't come out on the records. There's lots more - I'd love to work with Chrissie Hynde or Lou Reed, among others."

It's not surprising that her third release is adventurous in regards to album production. On her first two albums, she had worked with Lenny Kaye then Steve Addabbo as producers. Wait a minute - Isn't Lenny Kaye the punky guitarist from The Patti Smith Group? He's hardly someone you'd think of as a producer of what is essentially acoustic music, but he's exactly what Suzanne wanted. "In my own music," she explains, I was trying to fuse some of the energy that was happening in '82 or '83. I was coming from a very traditional folk world, trying to make it meet what was contemporary at the time. The original idea was to meet in between where Patti Smith was and where my roots were. It seemed that by working with Lenny, we could create something new. We wanted something that had the passion of a Patti Smith!"

Suzanne is the type of artist who is not content just to do something without learning from the experience, and she absorbed a lot from working with both producers. "From Steve, I learned to make things technically smooth, and to make sure that everything was in tune and in time. Lenny - well, he basically taught me to surprise myself, just go for things and constantly push the limits." In keeping with that philosophy, she decided to handle the production herself for Open Hand, assisted by bandmate Anton Lanko; "I just felt that it was time to take the reins myself and see what would happen!"

The results, as you can hear for yourself, are a triumph. Though she doesn't yet know whether she'll produce the next album herself ("It depends on what the new songs come out like")**, she's already kicking around new ideas for it. "I've been writing stuff here and there. I haven't finished the songs I've started - I've got about 20 half-baked ideas. I'm not even sure what direction they'll take. Sometimes it's like that - after it's done, you can analyze it and say, 'Oh, that's what happened.' Some of it might actually be about the places we've been to recently; a lot of cities have been hitting me in different ways. That might lead to something, although you just never know what's going to come through."

It's obvious that the kicking around of new ideas isn't something new. As with most artists of her calibre, Suzanne's songwriting is what first hooks you. Her musical influences are incredibly diverse; she's currently listening to a lot of They Might Be Giants as well as Hildegarde of Bingen, who she describes as "a 12th century composer who wrote these basically religious songs that were just gorgeous." Admitting to such a wide variety of influences, it's easy to see why she's not especially comfortable with being pidgeonholed as a "folkie" by the music press. "I can understand why the journalists have a need to do that," she states, "but I don't feel that I need to do that to myself. What I try to do is mix all the different things that I'm interested in. I'm interested in jazz, in classical, to some degree, I'm interested in punk. I feel like you should just take the things that interest you and mix them all together. If it's truthful, something good will happen. I don't philosophize. I don't believe in doing that whether it's politics or religion. I know what my interests are and that's what I try to follow. I try not to define myself too much within music because I don't feel comfortable being defined."

Of course, the lyric's are only part of a song's presentation. If you listen to her albums in the order recorded, it's easy to hear the progress she's made with her voice. Is this a result of some specific training or simply the inevitable reward that comes with confidence and experience? Suzanne replies, "Neither, really. It's just that I'm thinking about it more. I used to get so frustrated with my voice and felt that I had no control over it whatsoever. Back in '84, I wasn't touring as much as I am now, so my voice was okay but I never really thought about it. More recently, I'm thinking that it's more important to sing in tune. Plus, as I get healthier and stronger, I find that I have more energy. That and concentrating real hard on the songs are making my singing get better."

What a delight - a great artist working hard to further improve on her craft! She's quite proud of the recent tour and reports that her show is a real tribute to the band's versatility. In addition to full band segments and Suzanne working solo on stage, there's a part she calls the "intimate section of the show - everyone sits together on the stage and plays different instruments from what they usually play and it's very quiet and wonderful!" Of her audience, she asks only one thing; "Come and see me without any preconceptions. Have an open mind about the music and what I stand for... and be prepared to be surprised!"****
(end)

* * * * *
** She chose not to; her next album, 99.9Fº (September 1992) was produced by Mitchell Froom, as was Nine Objects of Desire (September 1996).

* * * * A short time after this article was published, I saw her in concert at the Bob Carr Auditorium in Orlando. As described, the show was magical, her audience devout and enthusiastic, and I was very impressed with her diversity and intimacy on stage. She's still at the top of my list of "must see" performers.

Lagniappe
First and foremost, I have to say that I just hate how this article was edited! No disrespect intended to my editor at the time; he was under a lot of pressure to shorten the feature articles to make room for bigger pictures. That said, it feels (especially in retrospect) like the article jumps around a little too much for the sake of brevity. I've gotten older and more sympathetic to the difficult job editors can have (like, say, keeping grumpy writers happy), but I know at the time I did a lot of BPMing about this one (and some of it justified)!  With that out of the way...

By the time I did this article, I was already a pretty experienced journalist. I had interviewed heroes of mine, including Patti Smith, so it came as a bit of a surprise to me that I was a bit nervous before I talked to Suzanne. That was completely unfounded. I've conducted close to 500 artist interviews in my career and I'd put her very near the top of the list insofar as "ease of conversation" is concerned. She put me at ease very quickly, which I doubt was even an intentional gesture on her part; it was a simple byproduct of talking to her. First, she's very respectful of anybody who writes, no matter the discipline, so there was never even a hint of "artist snobbery" on her part. Second, speaking to her really wasn't a standard interview type situation where I ask questions, she gives answers, repeat repeat repeat; it was an honest-to-goodness conversation. She put thought into her answers, laughed, and even asked questions of me during the course of our speaking. Suzanne made me feel like she was honestly interested in my opinion as both a fan and a professional as to which were my favorite songs on the album. She asked what else I had heard recently that I enjoyed, much like you would with a music pal when you find some common ground. It was during this conversation that I first learned of the music of Hildegard of Bingen, who I still listen to and enjoy to this day. Also, the entire interview wasn't completely about music; we talked about writers, life situations, little joys and petty annoyances; it was honestly like talking to your friend.

Days of Open Hand was, as mentioned, her third album; her next, 99.9Fº, provided me with both one of the absolute highs and one of the absolute lows of my writing career. I loved the album from moment one and still do, and gave it a very in-depth, glowing review, which the magazine printed. You can imagine my joy, I'm sure, when her publicity company actually contacted me about two weeks later, thanking and complimenting me on the review and asking if I'd like to do (another) interview with Suzanne. This almost never happens; unless you're Rolling Stone, chasing an artist interview can often be a long and difficult task, especially for someone of Vega's stature. Of course, I did the interview, and I have to say, it was even better than the first one. We talked for over an hour, again about a wide array of subjects. She was going through a lot of life changes at the time, her music had taken a very different direction... there was a lot worth talking about, and again, she was open, honest and a very good conversationalist. I learned more about her writing process and how she approaches the creation of a new song, and I also remember talking a lot about why she prefers to be an observer in her lyrics as opposed to a preacher. I wrote the article, and upon completion, let it sit for a day or two; upon re-reading it, I felt it was among my best pieces of writing to that point. The low point? The magazine flatly refused to print it. The reason? "We already ran an article you wrote about her." I think it's safe to say that was the angriest moment of my career as a professional writer. Among writers, I'm probably the world's worst archivist... so no, I don't have a copy of what I wrote, and it was never published, so of course I never will. 

One of my current fondest hopes as a writer? To have the chance to interview her again. I'm doing my best...

How do you have a career in music that spans over 46 years, while releasing only twelve studio albums... yet still earn induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, receive a Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award and become a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame? By filling those twelve albums with songs of a quality that only an elite few can claim to have reached; Leonard Cohen is, of course, one of those elite few.

No doubt part of his brilliance as a songwriter comes from his inherent abilities as a poet and novelist. While it was December of 1967 before he released his classic debut album Songs Of Leonard Cohen, he had already been awarded the prestigious Quebec Literary Competition Prize in 1964 for his first novel, The Favorite Game; even before that, during his college years in the early '50s, his poetry was garnering citations and frequent publication. Scanning the list of awards, achievements, honorary degrees and hall of fame inductions he's earned in his career will take you a few minutes, and also gives a sense as to how respected the man is in three completely different writing disciplines (poetry, fiction and songwriting). It doesn't take much research to begin finding laudatory quotes from some of the finest writers in the history of rock praising Cohen for the influences he's had on so many others; so many of those I respect as writers (including Suzanne Vega, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Lou Reed and Patti Smith, off the top of my head) pretty much gush when asked about Cohen and his body of work. He's also never been accused of backing away from life, always a plus for an insightful writer. From several epic romantic relationships in his life to a half-decade seclusion at a Buddhist center near Los Angeles, Cohen has clearly never been afraid to assess either his own life or the world around him, characteristics that combine beautifully with his incredible wordplay, allowing him to deliver recorded masterpiece after masterpiece. Of Cohen's twelve studio releases, there are four in particular which have been overwhelming favorites during my journey as a rabid music fan (and all four would be with me on the fabled desert island). I'm Your Man and The Future are releases from the later part of Cohen's career and deserve a blog post of their own at some point in the future. For this post, I'll focus on the first Cohen albums that had a profound effect on my life, his debut and New Skin For The Old Ceremony.

New Skin For The Old Ceremony

I'm starting with Cohen's fourth studio album because it was essentially my real and proper introduction to his work. I was twelve when his debut was released, so I missed out on the initial excitement of that album. New Skin was released in August of 1974, almost seven years after the debut. Keep in mind that this was still an era when artists released albums a lot more frequently than they do today; the "album a year" standard was a pretty loose rule, but followed by a lot of people, so four studio albums in seven years was already a slower pace for releases than most (and, of course, Cohen would become even less prolific with time). Though I missed out on the debut, by this time in my life "Suzanne" was already a radio staple and a song well known to me and anyone listening to FM hippie rock back then. Still, that was close to my entire knowledge of Cohen's work when New Skin was released. He wasn't really a name that was in the forefront of my mind... until I heard "I Tried To Leave You" on the local album rock station and absolutely flipped. The incredibly stark feel to the song was such a perfect match to the lyrics, still among the best examples of an intense love/hate chronicle I've ever heard. I was taken from the start, and when that little, muted horn began to play in the background, I did what I had so often done in that era - called the radio station, found out the name of the album and immediately drove to the record store to buy a copy. As much as "I Tried To Leave You" affected me, I doubt I was prepared for the emotional punch in the gut that was the album's opener, "Is This What You Wanted." Never before and rarely since had I heard such a brutal indictment of a lost love affair, probably ill-fated from the start. "You were the sensitive woman, and I was the very reverend Freud / You were the manual orgasm, and I was the dirty little boy / And is this what you wanted, to live in a house that is haunted / By the ghost of you and me?" I can't even estimate the number of times I've heard this song, sometimes for entertainment, sometimes for solace, and it still amazes me to this day.

Such is the case with the entirety of the album. There's something, sometimes many things in each and every track that all amaze me for the creativity and artistry shown. It's hard with a man as talented as Cohen to point to "his best work" or any such thing, but I do feel that that imagery and the intensity of emotion presented in these songs are certainly among... well, his best work. Even the title of the album is almost a poem in its own right, an image of a sadly faded relationship now just going through the motions - and it takes a poet with Cohen's vision to express that powerful a sentiment in only six words. The cover shows a woodcut of two regal, angelic beings enjoying carnal pleasures and whether by intent or due to the limitations of the medium, they don't look overjoyed (a perfect companion to most of the sentiment of the album); and what a perfect touch of irony that the cover upset enough people at the time that it was censored for a while, replaced by the record company with a simple photo of Leonard. Perfect irony! 

For all the triumphs on this album, all eleven of them, I'd still feel I was falling short if I didn't make special mention of the song "A Singer Must Die." It works on so many levels, the powerful lyric depicting an artist begging sarcastic forgiveness for his own creativity that ran afoul of the mainstream, coupled again with Cohen's mournful voice against bare guitar and string/horn flourishes that are both distant and yet oh so essential. I can't help but imagine that anybody who has been rebuked and/or misunderstood for making the effort to create would find sorrow and sympathy in the words, "And I thank you, I thank you for doing your duty / You keepers of truth, you guardians of beauty / Your vision is right, my vision is wrong / I'm sorry for smudging the air with my song." It's one of the most defiant apologies I can imagine, yet later in the song, Cohen sheds light on the damage that can be done by continually having to fight for your art, for your heart and soul, as he sings, "And I am so afraid that I listen to you..." The power and conviction of Cohen's soul coupled with his own weaknesses and doubts couldn't be more effectively transmitted.

For the era, it was one of the rare times when I violently disagreed with the Rolling Stone review of an important album. I didn't specifically recall the review, just that I hated it, and when I checked the Stone archives, I remembered why. Writer Paul Nelson said the album was "...not one of his best, but there are songs on it that will not be easily forgotten by his admirers," and later says "The current album is unfortunately marred by John Lissauer's coproduction... and generally insensitive, melodramatic, obtrusive arrangements." Wow! I'd love to have a conversation with Nelson now and see if he still feels the same way in retrospect; I've missed the mark on reviews a few times in my life, but I can't imagine missing it by more than this. Calling the arrangements insensitive and especially obtrusive is way up on my list of "worst calls ever" by Rolling Stone. If anything, production and arrangements on the album were incredibly daring in their subtlety and laid the foundation for some of the stellar works still in Cohen's future.

Songs Of Leonard Cohen

I'm covering this second for my own logical reasons; after being so taken with New Skin, it was only natural that I would go back to discover Cohen's previous work, and this was his debut that contained the only other song by him I was familiar with, so it was a natural! It was an odd step back into time, as there are a lot of similarities between the two albums. Both, of course, feature Cohen's trademark vocals, which early on were a sort of distant, noncommittal style of passion (long before the gravel set in). Both feature a very spare approach to the production of the songs; these songs are essentially guitar based folk tunes at the core of them, though I feel the album is distanced from being pure folk by the wonderful and subtle overtones lent by a variety of instruments. The entire key to the album's production is the idea that nothing ever overwhelms Cohen's voice, which is essential. He is, at the heart of it, a master of words, and those words should and do take center stage here. 

It's interesting in retrospect, then, when I read about the making of the album to find that Cohen was actually quite at odds with producer John Simon. Simon was a "replacement producer," stepping in when the famed John Hammond took ill and was unable to produce the recordings as originally planned. Cohen and Simon reportedly argued over both instrumentation and production, Cohen arguing for a bare sound and Simon feeling the songs needed the additional instrumentation. If the album sounds like a compromise between the two positions, it essentially is, in part due to the constraints of 1967 technology; according to biographer Ira Nadel, Cohen was able to make some changes to the mix to move the album closer to his own vision, but some of Simon's additions simply couldn't be removed from the master tapes, which were only four-track recordings (standard for the time). Personally, I think I'm glad that those restrictions kept Cohen from completely removing the additional flourishes. So many years later, I still find the album to be refreshing for the many layers the songs contain, and I'm not sure that a completely bare approach wouldn't have detracted from the effectiveness (and longevity) of the record.

Where this differs from New Skin is in the brutality of that album's emotion. That's not necessarily a bad thing; some of the subtleties of these songs didn't really connect with me on first listen, but I was fascinated enough with Cohen's talent to keep diving into the songs until I was able to truly appreciate them. It's decidedly far less of a sledgehammer to the psyche than New Skin, not that I'd call Songs an uplifting album. Depression and lost or fading love are still the major themes here. Still, where New Skin is pretty much a wall-to-wall document of despair, Songs shows moments where Cohen is trying to temper the losses, looking for some thread of salvation within. "Suzanne," of course, is perfectly beautiful within its own non-specific imagery; after all this time, I'm still not sure (and don't really care to be) whether it's an ode to a future or past love, and that vagueness and room for listener interpretation is a lot of what keeps the song classic. "Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye" is almost an antithesis to most of New Skin in that it's looking for that bright side to parting, making an effort to commemorate the good without dwelling only on the sorrow of a broken love. While this slight difference in the intensity of emotion surprised me a little bit, I think it has also added to my extended enjoyment of Cohen's debut. The fact that it didn't hit me so hard at first was probably a welcome change, in fact, and I've enjoyed the record numerous times over the years, always discovering a little nuance here or there that hadn't struck me before. It's an album that has grown in my esteem as the years pass, another classic work I'm grateful for.

After revisiting Stone's review for New Skin, I thought it would be fun to see what they had said about this album (like I said, I was twelve and among other things hadn't actually discovered Rolling Stone magazine yet). It's always fun to see what was said about the classics... or is it? I was shocked! Writer Arthur Schmidt, after opening his review by talking about how he's grown to appreciate Cohen's voice, literally says, "The record as a whole is another matter - I don't think I could ever tolerate all of it. There are three brilliant songs, one good one, three qualified bummers, and three are the flaming shits." That sound you heard was indeed my jaw hitting the floor; Schmidt at least goes on to say that Cohen is a brilliant poet, but then says it simply doesn't translate to songwriting. It's another case where I'd love to hear now if the man's opinion has changed any over the course of time and tide. I don't know exactly when this review was written, but it wasn't published until March of 1968 (over two months after the album's release), so I'd also be interested to know if the reviewer had time to let the record sink in before writing his piece.

As it worked out, Leonard Cohen obviously had the last laugh on both of those horrible reviews; it's over four decades later and his concert tours still sell out worldwide. That's perhaps the finest tribute to the timelessness of the man's music; who would have ever thought that a 79 year old man could still be playing to adoring audiences after all that time, without making any compromises to his music? While I was researching this post, I came across an interview with the BBC where Cohen was discussing his career, and my favorite part of the interview was when he stated that his greatest honor in life was that he was able to write what he wanted to and get paid for it... he was never paid to write. I certainly feel like I'm honored to have had his insights and the sheer brilliance and power of his words as a large part of my own life's soundtrack.

In an odd and roundabout way, Nick Drake is partially responsible for my career in music journalism. In 1972, I bought a copy of Pink Moon, Drake's third and final completed album. I had no idea who he was; I bought it because it had a cool cover and it was in the import bin (and my best "music pal" and I loved haunting the import bins to find obscure stuff from around the world). A few days later, my friend asked me about the album, and I replied, "The guy is so underwhelming I can't stop listening to him." He said that would make a really good line in a record review. What fortunate timing; that day's assignment in my creative writing class at school was a piece of critical writing, so I went ahead and submitted a review of the album, using the "underwhelming" line as the review's close (I also remember saying it was "obvious and still subtle" and "simple in a complex kind of way"). When I got the assignment back, it had the dreaded "see me" note on it. When I did, my teacher said it was a very well written review, to the point where I should consider music journalism as a potential career. She also asked to borrow my copy of the album, as she was unable to find one to buy, which is pretty high praise for the first review I ever wrote. When she returned it, she said, "I'm not sure I'm hearing in the record what you're hearing." About a decade later, I bumped into her by chance and one of the first things she said to me was that she was "still a huge Nick Drake fan, thanks to you!" Who knew that an aspiring high school writer would experience such a perfect analogy for Nick Drake's career? If you don't count the Family Tree album (and it's best to not), you're looking at a man who released three albums, none of which sold even 5,000 copies at the time of their release. He released 31 songs, not even two hours of music... yet now, he's named by a myriad of artists as a major influence on their work, his albums are easily gotten and they post better sales figures now than they ever did on their release. That's a wonderful story of hope that ought to be held dear to the heart of any and all aspiring artists out there, especially considering some of the facts of Drake's short and tragic life.

Nick was born on June 19, 1948 and died on November 25, 1974. His years were filled with an olio of solitude, creativity and depression; his death, in fact, was the result of an overdose of the prescription antidepressant amitriptyline. Whether the overdose was intentional or accidental is a question still debated, never answered. He had the fortune of being born to a talented family; while neither did so professionally, both his parents (Rodney and Molly) were decent musicians and composers, and his older sister Gabrielle (his only sibling) became a successful film and television actress. Nick was particularly encouraged and inspired by his mother, and due largely in part to her influence, he learned piano at a young age. He even began writing songs and recording them on a reel-to-reel recorder his mother kept near the piano. Some recordings of Molly Drake's songs came to light over the course of time; I've never heard them myself (add to bucket list...), but those who have say Nick's work bears a strong similarity in style and tone to his mother's. In 1962, Drake began attending Marlborough College and, while still quiet and private, seemed to blossom in the college atmosphere. Somewhat surprisingly, he developed a taste for sports, competing both as a sprinter and on the rugby team; he achieved notable success in both sports. He also played piano in the school orchestra and learned to play clarinet and saxophone. He formed a band circa 1964/5, and it was obvious the music bug had bitten him hard. In 1965, he bought his first acoustic guitar; by then, his academic performance was beginning to suffer due to the time and attention he was paying to music. While he still earned a scholarship to study English literature, he put off those studies, instead spending six months at a French University, avidly practicing guitar. By now, he was already fascinated with open tunings and fingerpicking techniques, which became trademarks of his recorded music. Besides guitar, Drake also discovered pot while in France and became a regular and heavy user of such; it is also likely that he experimented with LSD during this time. 

When he returned to England, he enrolled at Cambridge University. He was an intelligent man who had the capability to be an outstanding student, but instead was described by teachers and tutors as unenthusiastic and unwilling to apply himself to his studies. He was already becoming withdrawn, preferring to spend his time in his room with music and dope. Drake had discovered for himself both the American and British folk scenes and did some performing in coffee houses around London. He managed to land a gig opening for Country Joe and The Fish in February of 1968; one of those in attendance was Ashley Hutchings, bassist for Fairport Convention. Hutchings was impressed with Drake and introduced him to producer Joe Boyd. Boyd had a production and management company with ties to Island Records, and by early 1968 was impressed enough with Drake's work that he wanted to begin working on a record. Drake had apparently already decided to not complete his third year at Cambridge in favor of music, so his decision to accept Boyd's offer was most likely a very easy one to make.

Five Leaves Left (1969)

Later in 1968, Drake (with Boyd as producer) began working on his debut album. Reportedly, the initial sessions did not go well, and tension began to grow between Drake and Boyd. Boyd wanted a full and produced sound for the sessions (he was a huge advocate of George Martin's style of "studio as an instrument" method of recording); Drake wanted a simpler approach to the songs. A man named Richard Hewson initially provided string arrangements for the songs, and neither Drake nor Boyd were happy with them. Nick suggested they let Robert Kirby, a music student he befriended in college, take a shot at the arrangements, and while Boyd wasn't sure about letting a student with no experience whatsoever into a recording studio, he was taken with Drake's uncharacteristic assertiveness about it. "The Kirby experiment" worked so well that he would go on to do arrangements for the second album as well.

Once the recording was finished, post-production held up the release even further. Upon release, it received generally enthusiastic reviews, got BBC airplay from some influential DJs and was backed by full page interviews with Drake in the pop press. The album's opening track was also included on an Island Records sampler album, so despite accusations that Island didn't support the album well, the foundation does seem to have been in place. The one element that was seriously lacking, however, was cooperation from Drake himself, particularly in the realm of live performances. His bouts of depression were beginning to grow, which only made his ineffectiveness as a live performer worse. Live shows were already inherently difficult. First, Drake's songs didn't fit neatly into any niche; he surely wasn't rock, folkies wanted something more of a sing-along nature and there just weren't that many places where his material would be effective live. Second, there was no way he could match the intricate arrangements of his material in concert, and the deep and simple beauty of his songs didn't necessarily transcend in a live setting. Third, he used so many different open tunings that there were often lengthy gaps between songs, and fourth, due to his nature and depression, Drake rarely if ever addressed or acknowledged his audience. That's a very poor recipe for a successful show, and after a lot of lukewarm receptions to his performances, Drake made the decision to simply eschew almost all live performing. I can't imagine Island Records was terribly happy with that decision.

Bryter Layter (1970)

For all that, Joe Boyd was anxious to record a second album. Drake's talent was undeniable, and even if he wasn't anything of a commercial success yet, he seemed to have the support of some prominent members of the music industry, including a lot of musicians. Five Leaves Left had featured excellent performances (including contributions from Richard Thompson, among others), and for the second album, he got more help from various members of Fairport Convention as well as contributions on two songs from John Cale. Drake was disappointed with the sales of the first record, so at Boyd's suggestion, he agreed to have bass and drum tracks included as part of Bryter Layter. "I imagined it as more commercial," said Boyd in a later interview. The feel of the album is more upbeat and a bit jazzier (though the songs still feature generally pastoral and often grey images), and there was a lot of confidence that the resulting album had a good chance at being a commercial success. It sold fewer than 3,000 copies. Reviews for the album ranged from praising Drake's beautiful guitar work and arrangements to calling the album "an awkward mix of folk and cocktail jazz." His label wanted desperately to back the album with the standard array of interviews, radio appearances and concerts, but Drake flatly refused all offers.

Soon after the album's release, Boyd sold his company to Island Records and decided to relocate to the States to work on film soundtracks. With two good albums that were commercial flops under his belt, the loss of his industry mentor signaled a deeper retreat into the depression that had already often consumed Drake. The very few live shows he gave were generally disasters; during one of his last shows ever, he simply walked off the stage halfway through a song and didn't return. As his depression grew deeper and more severe, he was finally convinced by his family to see a psychiatrist, who prescribed antidepressants. His sister recalls that this entire period of time was among the worst in Drake's life. He stayed home, withdrew from family and friends and essentially only ever left his place to buy drugs or, rarely, play a few songs live. 

Pink Moon (1972)

By now, Island Records neither expected nor really wanted a third album from Drake. However, somewhat surprisingly, in October of 1971 Drake approached John Wood (who had engineered the first two albums) with material for a third album. Drake was unhappy with the arrangements on both his previous releases, generally calling them too full and too intricate. He wanted a very barren sound to the recording of the new record and got his wish. The sessions for Pink Moon lasted only two nights, most likely made much easier by the length of the completed album (eleven songs, about twenty eight minutes) and the fact that except for a single piano overdub, the album is strictly Drake's voice and acoustic guitar. Wood later recalled that Drake was "determined to make this very stark, bare record," and obviously got what he sought. Still, the sheer emotional depth of the songs makes it a very powerful recording, perhaps even moreso in retrospect after learning more about Drake's life. When Island released the album (and after reading Drake's story and the history of recording Pink Moon, I'm shocked it was released at all), the label did so with a very unusual ad, declaring in print: "Pink Moon - Nick Drake's latest album. The first we heard of it was when it was finished." The rest of the story is very familiar; mixed reviews and a complete unwillingness on the part of Drake to promote the record in any way. With no momentum, no real track record, no artist cooperation and a very difficult album to sell, it's not surprising at all that Pink Moon was Drake's worst selling work.**

It's also not surprising that Drake retreated even further following his latest career disappointment. He went back to live with his parents, which was difficult both on Nick and on the rest of the family. He has been variously described by friends and fellow musicians as the most withdrawn person any of them had ever met; he had a habit of disappearing from his folks' home, turning up a few days later at a friend's house, crashing and saying nothing, then disappearing again. The downward spiral continued, with Drake's little bit of self-esteem seemingly eroded to the point where his personal appearance was no longer of concern to him. He suffered a nervous breakdown in 1972 and was hospitalized for five weeks... yet, somehow, in February of 1974, Drake contacted John Wood again and stated that he was ready to work on a fourth album. Old friend/mentor Joe Boyd happened to be in England at the time and agreed to attend the recording sessions. While four tracks were completed, both Boyd and Wood noticed a severe deterioration in Drake's performance; vocals now had to be overdubbed, for example, as Drake seemed incapable of playing and singing at the same time. Drake's attitude not only hadn't gotten better, but now anger at being told he was a genius while remaining poor and obscure were added to the mix. Still, for all that, his mother recalled that the sessions seemed to somewhat raise Drake's spirits for the first time in recent memory, and family and his few friends were encouraged by that.

On November 24, 1974, Nick spent the afternoon visiting a friend. He returned to his parents' home and went to his room early. His mother recalls hearing him in the kitchen near dawn the next morning; most likely, he had been up for hours and perhaps all night, as was his custom. Due to depression and insomnia, it wasn't unusual for him to stay up late and sleep well into the following morning. On November 25, his mother checked in on him about noon and found him lying in his bed, dead. There was no suicide note. The coroner determined that the cause of Drake's death was an overdose of his prescribed antidepressants and labeled the death a suicide. Family members dispute the finding; however, there is little doubt that even though he was in the midst of recording a new album, he had pretty much given up on life in general. The world lost a musical genius... even if his genius was still years and years away from being discovered by the masses.

As stated before, Nick Drake's legacy is only three albums. The four songs he had recorded at the time of his death made it to a boxed set of Drake's work, entitled Fruit Tree (after a song from the first record), and in 2007 Island released Family Tree, essentially a cleaned up version of several bootleg recordings of very early Nick Drake. Like most projects of that nature, the material was never meant to be released in any form, and probably shouldn't have been; it adds nothing to Drake's legend. The man's obscurity was so pervasive that his funeral was attended by his family and best friends... and not only had his family met virtually none of those friends, but they hadn't met one another. He hated performing, he wouldn't talk to the press, he suffered from a silent and debilitating disease that is as tragic as any medical condition known, yet somehow he became revered for his musical talent, his insight and his brilliance. He has been publicly cited as a major influence by artists as diverse as Robert Smith (The Cure), David Sylvian (Japan and solo), Peter Buck (REM), Kate Bush, Paul Weller, Beck, and even The Black Crowes. "Life In A Northern Town," a significant hit for The Dream Academy, was an homage to Drake, as was John Martyn's brilliant song "Solid Air."

Obviously, I'm personally glad for it. Once I bought my copy of Pink Moon, it was a chore, but I finally acquired copies of both Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter (though in the wrong order, I believe) and immersed myself in those three albums. They're not perfect by any means; of the 31 total songs released, I can pick out five or six that I'd call clunkers, either because they just aren't of the quality of the rest of the catalog or because I'd agree that they were ruined in the recording and arranging of them. Still, even those are tolerable and I can find a little something about every one of them to appreciate. Of course, when he was good, he was very, very good, and in fact "brilliant" is not too strong a word to describe his art. Of the three albums, I still have a special place in my heart for Pink Moon, both because of the accidental jumpstart it gave to my writing career and because of the natural tendency to most appreciate the first work one hears by any great artist. I consider it a near-perfect record and it's high on my list of favorite albums of my lifetime. I really did do Nick Drake backwards, hearing his most bleak and bare work first before experiencing the more produced records, and I have wondered how I would have reacted had I heard them in proper order. I can't help but thinking that I'd have been a lifelong devotee of his regardless; no matter the treatments, the music is just that good.

* * * * *

** When I discovered that the album sold fewer than 3000 copies, I found myself shocked that a high school kid in Orlando, Florida somehow wound up with one of those copies. Such an influential album in my life, both as a journalist and as a music appreciator! The world can indeed work in strange ways...

The song "American Pie" says it was when Buddy Holly's plane crashed; I know some serious hip-hop people who feel it was because of Tupac's assassination; for me, and for a lot of people who bought into Woodstock Nation, December 6, 1969 was The Day The Music Died.

How does one event take on so much significance in our collective psyche the the mere mention of it conjures a catalog of images and meanings? I guess because we as people need starting and ending points; a lot of religions and philosophies have been built around that premise. I don't really believe that America lost it's collective innocence on the day Kennedy was assassinated... but it's a lot easier to say that then it is to have a long discussion about civil rights and boiling tempers and some people feeling that God-given rights were being taken away while others were saying that God-given rights were finally being granted and the expansion of media and the abandonment of lemming culture and and and and and and and... Nobody flipped a switch that day so that suddenly, Americans were no longer innocent, but it also cannot be disputed that things were never again quite the same afterwards. The Hippie Movement wasn't really born during the Summer of Love, Woodstock wasn't perfect... but again, there's really no arguing that things were just not the same after those focus points. For all the flaws in the reasoning and the lifestyle that came with being a hippie, a lot of good things happened, a lot of positive changes were made, and an awful lot of fun was there to be had.

Then came Altamont.

The What, Part One
In its purest factual terms, The Altamont Speedway Free Festival was a one-day freebie rock concert/festival/counterculture event. It took place on Saturday, December 6, 1969 in northern California. The acts scheduled to appear were, in order, Ike and Tina Turner, Santana, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, The Grateful Dead and The Rolling Stones. It was attended by approximately 300,000 people (I've read various accounts of the show, some of which claim a half million people attended, but 300,000 is the figure I most often see quoted). Partially because of the era and largely by design, it was referred to in the buildup to the show as "Woodstock West." It is generally accepted that The Rolling Stones were the major organizers of the event with quite a bit of initial input from The Grateful Dead. The show was to be at the tail end of the Stones 1969 tour; the band had already done a lot of concert, studio and behind-the-scenes filming during the tour for a documentary on the band, and a large part of the original purpose of Altamont was that the event be a very grand finale to both the Stones tour and film.

The Why
As with many iconic events, much of "why" depends on which stories you care to believe, though over the course of time, there's a general consensus as to how the festival came about (for the most part, at least). Spencer Dryden of Jefferson Airplane says the idea for a "Woodstock West" began when he and Jorma Kaukonen discussed the idea of a free show featuring Airplane, The Grateful Dead and The Rolling Stones. Airplane, of course, performed at Woodstock. The Grateful Dead did not, reportedly because they were leery of the event being too much of a mudbath to be a success (they were at least half right!). The Stones didn't play Woodstock either; Jagger was in Australia honoring his contract to film "Ned Kelly." Though Jagger starred in the film, it was a massive flop. I've read hints and allegations that Jagger could have taken a few days holiday from the filming for the Stones to play Woodstock, but that he wasn't interested because he really didn't think it was going to be all that big a deal. I also read that his being so wrong played heavily in his decision to perform at and organize Altamont.

By now, most accounts of the festival's genesis credit the Stones as being the main organizers, again with a lot of input from the Grateful Dead. It's not unreasonable to think that Jagger and Company failing to appear at Woodstock was a major factor in presenting Altamont; with the Beatles having broken up, the Stones were the unquestioned kings of the rock world, and they missed out on playing to the biggest audience ever assembled for a rock show. Besides the potential error in judgement, Jagger is certainly known to have quite an ego and it's certainly within the realm of possibility that organizing a show that drew more people than Woodstock would be a very solid "we showed THEM!" sort of thing. The Stones had toured much of America in '69, and there were multitudes of complaints about ticket prices being so high, and many accounts of the reasoning behind Altamont include the idea of the band ending the tour and the decade with "the biggest free show of them all;" again, ego and the added attraction of placating any criticisms the band might have received for gouging. Finally, the potential of having some incredible footage of the Stones playing to a massive adoring crowd, as well as behind-the-scenes footage showing the band's solid business acumen, would be an irresistible conclusion to the documentary they had been filming for most of the year. 

Woodstock, remember, was not originally intended to be a free show. It simply became absolutely impossible to demand a ticket for entrance, partially because the weather gods just wouldn't cooperate and partially because about a bazillion more people than anybody anticipated in their wildest dreams showed up. Making Altamont a free show from the start circumvented any need for that, turning it into a tidy little package of ease and a PR masterwork all at once.

The How
This is where things began to go horribly wrong, even before the day of the show. I don't know what the exact timeline was in regards to when the decision was actually made to hold the show and thus how much time anybody and everybody had to actually prepare for it. I do know that the FIRST announcement to the public about a free rock festival featuring the Rolling Stones and others was made only four days before the event was to take place. It is known that the originally desired site was the San Jose State practice field; there had been a recent outdoor free festival held there which accommodated 52 bands and 80,000 people over three days, but the city of San Jose turned down the request. Next on the list was the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco; however, Kezar Stadium (located in Golden Gate park) already had a 49ers game scheduled for that weekend, so the venue became completely impractical. The Sears Point Raceway was settled upon; again, I could not find a date for when the venue decision was made. It was an attractive venue - huge, and the president had offered his land at no cost, assuming various conditions were met. Most of those conditions were pretty standard and easy to agree to; however, during negotiations for the lease contract, two major snags surfaced. First, a huge sum of money was demanded by the raceway as a deposit against potential damages (I've read $100,000, $200,000 and $300,000 in various accounts), and the Stones were very hesitant to put that money up. Second, and probably the dealbreaker, was the raceway's insistence that ANY film revenues resulting from the day's concerts be split 50/50 between the raceway and the band. Game, set, match, fail... there was no way the Stones were ceding that to anybody.

Here's a very interesting little bit of intrigue in regards to the negotiations about film rights. Sears Point Raceway was owned by a large holding company that did business under the name of Filmways. Another of the companies Filmways owned was a promotional firm called Concert Associates. They were the promoters of the Stones concert near Los Angeles during the 1969 tour of America, and like every other promoter, agreed to some very demanding concert terms. Obviously, ticket sales were brisk and one of the ways the Stones reportedly exacted a lot of concessions from Concert Associates was via an unwritten promise to return to Los Angeles for a second show within a matter of weeks (which Concert Associates, of course, would promote). The Stones reneged on the promise. Even as there was no way the Stones would budge on film rights to the upcoming show, there was equally no way Filmways was going to cut any leeway at all in their demands. Touché!

It certainly looked like Filmways would exact quite a revenge. The festival was scheduled for December 6, the stage was already built at the Sears raceway, and pow! As of Thursday, December 4, there WAS NO VENUE for the show. Then, local businessman Dick Carter, who had recently taken over a facility some 65 miles away called Altamont Raceway, got involved. The track had gone broke three times before Carter took it over, and through contacts at the Stanford Business School, he was able to offer his facility for free to the festival. In his eyes, the publicity the raceway would receive would translate into community goodwill and plenty of future dollars. Thus, a man with absolutely zero experience in anything remotely resembling music or rock promotion who ran a facility that had never hosted an event with an attendance of over 6,500 people offered up his place for a concert that was supposed to be the size of Woodstock. Uh-oh...

On the night of December 4, the location for the show was officially switched (though some reports say it wasn't actually announced until only 20 hours before the show was to begin). 

The Pre-Show Problems
Maybe we're all a little wiser or more worldly now, maybe there were too many egos on the line... but simple common sense should tell ANYONE that you cannot, in 36 hours, properly prepare a facility to accommodate over a quarter million people AND seven very prominent performers, including the most famous, notorious rock and roll band in the world. It can't be done... or perhaps far more brutally honest, it can't be properly done. There is simply no way sanitation facilities can be arranged and installed that quickly. There is simply no way proper medical facilities can be arranged and installed that quickly. There is simply no way a proper stage and sound system can be designed and installed that quickly. It mattered not, apparently... they tried to do it all, and while technically they got it done, they did not get it done right, and in the bitter reality of things, they didn't come within a couple of galactic miles of getting it right.

In regards to sanitation facilities, there were reportedly about 100 portable toilets brought to the site, which is not even 10% of what would be minimally sanitary for the expected crowd. Clean water was scarce and nearly impossible to come by on the day of the show. Medical facilities were barren, to say the least; a few tents, a few doctors and nurses, a little bit of medication, and essentially zero facilities on hand to deal with any major sort of disaster. The greatest parts of the efforts made were on the staging and sound system, and even here, both were more than a miserable failure. As I mentioned, there simply wasn't the time available to deisgn and build a new stage, so they took the only route available - the stage that had been built for Sears was moved in pieces to Altamont and reassembled there. Major problem: at Sears, the stage was built at the top of a rise, and so the 39-inch height of the construction was more than adequate for both the safety of the performers and the enjoyment of the audience. At Altamont, the stage sat at the bottom of a slope. You read that right... some of the top performers in the world were to perform on a stage 39 inches tall that was set at the bottom of several hills. There was no "clear area" between the stage and the crowd. There was no barrier between the stage and the crowd.

The sound system wasn't much better. From all reports, nobody heard the sound well that day - not the performers, not the people a hundred feet away from the stage, certainly not the people half a mile away from the stage. The system was nowhere near big enough, loud enough or good enough for a proper presentation of that much music to that many people. 

Directly quoting Rolling Stone magazine from their extensive coverage of the Altamont disaster published in their January 21, 1970 issue: 
"It was as if Altamont's organizers had worked out a blueprint for disaster. Like:
   1) Promise a free concert by a popular rock group which rarely appears in this country. 
       Announce the site only four days in advance.
   2) Change the location 20 hours before the concert.
   3) The new concert site should be as close as possible to a giant freeway.
   4) Make sure the grounds are barren, treeless, desolate.
   5) Don't warn neighboring landowners that hundreds of thousands of people are expected. Be unaware of their out-front
       hostility toward long hair and rock music.
   6) Provide one-sixtieth the required toilet facilities to insure that people will use nearby fields, the sides of cars, etc.
   7) The stage should be located in an area likely to be completely surrounded by people and their vehicles.
   8) Build the stage low enough to be easily hurdled. Don't secure a clear area between stage and audience.
   9) Provide an unreliable barely audible low fidelity sound system.
  10) Ask the Hell's Angels to act as "security" guards."

I'm sorry, what was #10 again??!!??

The Hell's Angels
Yeah... #10 is the one that gets the most notoriety in regards to Altamont. For all that was going wrong and for the entire disaster cocktail that was being brewed, the Stones were most concerned about security. This intensified when they found they'd be performing on a stage that was located in a virtual canyon only about a yard off the ground. Jagger especially had a lot of fears about his own safety, many of them justified; the persona(s) he was crafting were potentially dangerous when viewed or adored by the wrong, perhaps slightly unstable, perhaps slightly addled fan. Besides, it was a rock show and even outside of the Stones, a LOT of big name talent was scheduled to appear. Of all the problems, something had to be done about security.

In fairness, there were certainly extenuating circumstances behind the Stones decision to hire the Angels for security (I'm not going to put quotes around "security" because the people that paid the cash paid for security, plain and simple). Remember, earlier in 1969 came the tragic death of Brian Jones, and amid the grief and mourning, the Stones organized a free show at Hyde Park in London, which sort of doubled as Mick Jones' public debut as the new Stone. That show had its problems as well, but (especially when compared to Altamont) was relatively non-violent. At that show, the London chapter of the Hell's Angels were hired for security, and it went pretty well; they did a good job and they were easy to work with. Also, there was a sort of common knowledge that the Grateful Dead had used the services of the Hell's Angels at their shows before. All this seemed to make it a logical and convenient choice. That this resulted in problems is now the stuff of legend, but at the very least, the band seemed to have at least some justification for the action. Of course, what wasn't known to the band at the time was that the British Angel's weren't actually a real chapter of the Hell's Angels at all... they were a group of avid motorcycle fanciers who essentially christened themselves as a chapter. The real Angels had nothing to do with them in any way, shape or form. After the show, Mick Taylor was quoted as saying, "I think we expected probably something like the Hell's Angels that were our security force at Hyde Park, but of course they're not the real Hell's Angels, they're completely phony. These guys in California are the real thing - they're very violent."

Most accounts agree that the Angels were hired the day before Altamont, and that the "fee" was $500 worth of beer that the Angels could drink freely. Beyond that, it gets very, very, very murky, and it's unlikely that will ever change. Various sources on the side of the Stones and other festival authorities say a lot of things about the deal. Some vigorously claim the Angels were definitely hired as a standard security force, some say they were hired strictly to surround the very low stage and make sure nobody climbed on to the stage who wasn't supposed to be there; Sam Cutler, who at the time was the Stones' road manager, declared that the only agreement ever in place was that the Angels make sure nobody tampered with the power generators. From the Angels' side, they have always denied that they were hired as or ever agreed to provide any sort of security, and again in fairness, that would be extremely consistent with every event the Angels have ever attended or been asked to be a part of. They're NOT a police force, and they make no bones about it. However, written deeply into their own code is the idea that when a deal is made, they adhere to their end of it. From everything I've read, my very best guess would be that the basic deal was indeed that the Angels got $500 worth of beer and that their responsibilities were to surround and protect the stage. I would further guess that when the Angels asked about what means they were supposed to use to protect said stage, in some form or another, "any means necessary" was the agreement. Keep in mind, again... from the Stones side, they had a very successful experience with the Hells Angels back home, and their idea of "any means necessary" was almost certainly not how the Angels on this side of the pond interpret the phrase.

And as such, the stage was set, so to speak. Fairly early on Saturday morning, the first of probably around 300,000 music fans began filing into the Altamont Speedway for what they most likely hoped and dreamed would be an event, maybe the show of a lifetime. It was, just not in any of the ways they were hoping.

The What, Part Two
Woodstock was Three Days Of Peace, Love and Music. Altamont was One Day Of War, Terror and Barely Audible Music. As with all things, it started innocuously enough. People, lots of them, showed up. There were plenty of drugs (most accounts say LOTS of low grade acid) and plenty of alcohol to wash the drugs down. The Angels were there, and while there was plenty of confusion as to exactly what they should do, there was of course no confusion about the beer that was provided for them to consume. Tensions mounted quickly, there was a lot of hostility between the Angels and the crowd, the Angels and the organizers, the crowd and the performers... the whole thing was a huge cauldron of bad vibes, bad drugs, bad planning and, predictably, bad results.

The most notorious incident of the festival happened late, during the Stones performance (which didn't start until after sundown, after making the crowd wait for 90 minutes. Jagger reportedly felt both his makeup and the lighting were more effective in the dark). The name Meredith Hunter will live forever as the ultimate symbol of the Woodstock Nation failure - he was the 18-year old man who was killed by a Hell's Angel while the Rolling Stones played live music. By the time the Stones had taken the stage, so much had already happened that neither the crown nor the Angels were in a particularly loving mood. Again, there are variations about what happened with and to Hunter, but in this case, there's actually film evidence to make much of it clear. Hunter was, from all accounts, a relatively passive young man, intelligent, well-spoken, responsible. However, for whatever reason, he also owned a gun, a fairly menacing-looking long barreled revolver. Who knows why, but for whatever reason, Hunter took his gun with him to the festival that day. By the time the Stones were on stage, he was extremely altered; his autopsy showed he had a significant amount of methamphetamine in his system when he died. Fairly early in the Stones set, Hunter and other fans made an effort to get up onstage with the Stones, and if nothing else was certain, it was VERY clear that the Angels were not to allow this. Hunter was grabbed, punched and chased back into the crowd. The next few moments are subject to various accounts; some say the Angels chased Hunter through the crowd, with the possibility that he was attacked with a knife during the chase, others say the Angels forgot about him after dragging him off the stage and chasing him back to the crowd. However, a few moments later are the moments etched into infamy, with film backup. After about a minute, Hunter reappeared by the stage, his girlfriend reportedly pleading with him to calm down and back off. More than one witness described Hunter as enraged, irrational and so high he could barely walk. He drew his long-barreled .22 from inside his jacket. Hell's Angel Alan Passero saw the revolver being drawn, drew a knife from his own belt, charged Hunter and stabbed him at least twice, which resulted in Hunter's death. The whole incident was a couple of seconds in time, and though caught on film, the cameraman was completely unaware that he had done so until about a week later when reviewing the raw footage. After the stabbing, the crowd closed around Passero and Hunter; it is possible that Hunter was stabbed up to five times, though only two are actually captured on film, and as with everything else, there are widely varying accounts as to what happened next. Some say Passero took his place back by the stage and resumed his job, others say he "stood guard" over Hunter's fallen body and angrily demanded the crowd leave him alone, some reporting the quote, "He's going to die anyways, just let him die."

It was a couple of seconds, but one young man and a whole lot of dreams, fantasies and fairy tales died in those couple of seconds.

While certainly the day's most notorious incident, it was far from the only ugliness of the day. Four people actually died that day; Hunter, two people in a hit-and-run incident outside of the speedway and a young man who jumped into an irrigation canal and was quickly overwhelmed by a very strong current; he drowned. There are legends that four children were also born during the festival, but what looked to be a pretty thorough investigation by Rolling Stone magazine found no evidence of it; nobody at any of the medical stations reported the birth of a child, and no area hospitals had any record of births that could be attributed to the timeframe of the festival and attended to after. The magazine seemed to conclude that the myth of four births was a sort of weak counter to the documented fact that four people died. What else?

   • During Santana's set, quite a few concertgoers were beaten by Angels carrying the preferred weapon of the day - sawed
     off pool cues. 

   • Skirmishes between the crowd and the Angels continued; during Jefferson Airplane's set, singer Marty Balin tried to
     intercede during a fight between a member of the audience and one of the Angels and was literally knocked out cold.
     When Paul Kantner took to the mic to say something about it, he was verbally and physically threatened by another
     Angel, and it took intervention to prevent Kantner from being possibly seriously hurt.

   • Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young gave a very half-hearted performance, only even consenting to perform at the sincere
     urging of David Crosby. There was continuous violence visible to them during most of their set, including one time where
     the Angels looked to make an almost military charge into the crowd, brandishing their pool cues and knocking cold
     anybody they felt they needed to. After the CSNY set, stretchers were taken into the crowd and a "significant number" of
     bloodied, wounded fans were taken from the crowd.

   • The Grateful Dead, who were supposed to perform after CSNY and just before the Stones, heard of all the violence and
     ugliness and simply refused to play. This prompted many journalists to comment that it was a perfect thumbnail of
     Altamont - that essentially the "home team" and one of the principal organizers of the event didn't even play.

   • Even Mick Jagger, for all his paranoia, fell victim. Shortly after the Stones arrived at the event via helicopter, a fan rushed
     up to him, reportedly screaming, "I hate you! I hate you!" and punched Jagger in the face.

The litany goes on and on and on. Medical people report that there were so many freakouts from the combination of bad drugs and bad happenings that they pretty much abandoned their preferred method of trying first to talk people down; things got so crazy, doctors started immediately administering doses of thorazine to try to bring people out of it. There were so many freakouts the doctors had to send for emergency supplies of thorazine; they ran out. The fights never stopped, and once the mood of the crowd went from bad to worse to disastrous, the fighting wasn't just warfare between the Angels and the fans; the crowd turned on itself, with numerous injuries reported even far away from the mayhem of the stage. 

Nothing went right. Nothing. Woodstock had hopefully proven that a city-sized crowd could gather and exist together in difficult circumstances, and that caring and music would hold them together and provide a means for survival. Altamont proved that it just wasn't so.

Epilogue
Did the music really die that day? Not literally, of course not. Journalistic excess, guilty as charged... yes, I wanted very much for you to read this article. Much of the greatest music of my and many other lives was created from the seventies onward and continues to be made to this very day. Were things the same afterwards? No, they weren't. While they obviously didn't go away for good, the idea of festivals (at least in the U.S.) went away for a long, long time, and when they began to come back, you can bet your bottom dollar that Altamont was the primary case study of everything NOT to do if you want to survive, both financially and maybe even figuratively. While for the most part the Stones never said much about the whole thing, most of the other performers were very open about the trauma they suffered as a result of their world falling apart around them. Certainly there was an element of their profession, which by now was becoming established and (dare I say it?) perhaps even respectable, being seriously affected in a negative way by all this. However, reading over the quotes and watching some of the video footage of interviews with the performers... the pain on their faces and in their voices seems real. And seriously... who ever picks up a guitar and dreams of playing on stage in front of a whole lot of people and thinks, "Woah! Maybe some day I can even help get somebody killed!"

Alan Passero was eventually arrested and charged with murder. He was found not guilty, mainly because of the film evidence which plainly showed that Hunter drew his weapon first (there's even disputed evidence that he fired the gun before he was attacked). As of references I found from as late as 1973, nobody from the Rolling Stones organization and nobody from any of the systems involved with Altamont has contacted Meredith Hunter's family to offer even so much as a condolence. Though it was reported that the Stones were supposed to be carrying a $1,000,000 insurance policy for the event, I can find no documentation anywhere that anybody got any financial compensation from Altamont. Outside of the Hunter family, I have no doubt that some 300,000 people carried some pretty deep scars with them for a long, long time. December 5, 1969 - the Rolling Stones gift the music world with Let It Bleed. December 6, 1969 - Altamont, largely the brainchild of those same Stones, draws enough blood that the entire hippie movement goes on life support.

What a difference one damned day makes...

Like any lifelong fan of music (or anything, for that matter), I can point to a certain number of moments while I was discovering and falling in love with music that literally changed my outlook on things forever. In December of 1969, I was 14 years old and listening to the cool FM station in Rochester, NY, when the DJ got all excited and announced that he'd be playing the brand new Rolling Stones album in it's entirety. It took about the first minute of "Gimme Shelter," the album's opening track, for me to think that nothing, musically, would ever be the same in my life again. I was right.

While I didn't necessarily have the "personal database" to fall back on then that I have now, I knew right away I had never heard anything like "Gimme Shelter" before. It's still my favorite rock 'n roll song of all time, hands down, so I guess it's fair to say I've never heard anything like it since. From the haunting grab-your-ears-by-the-throat opening to that amazing female vocal to the power of the song itself to the lyrics and to every nuance of the song I've explored so many times over the years, it is indeed a perfect piece of music. I can't think of many other songs where a performance by a background singer (in this case, the amazing Merry Clayton) netted the singer a recording contract, but it did so here. The song was so powerful on first listen that I called the radio station to make sure of the album's title and did the unthinkable; I dipped into the piggybank, zealously hoarded for Christmas shopping, hiked up to the local mall and bought Let It Bleed on the strength of one song.

It was only after getting home and playing my newfound favorite rock song ever about a dozen times in a row that I let the needle continue on to track two... and for the next forty-ish minutes, was given for the first time the gift of my favorite rock 'n roll album of all time. To this day, I remember sitting and listening slack-jawed, astounded over and over and over again; nine perfect slices that embodied everything I wanted out of rock 'n roll, then and always. After the first listen to the complete album, I just sat there in silence, staring at the cover and truly appreciating having been given something astounding, groudbreaking... life-changing. The realization that something had shifted was immediate, and to this day, it's the feeling I always secretly hope for during the first few moments of every new release I hear. 

This is the Stones album that has it all. You get welcome peeks into music that fascinated the Stones - blues, with their cover of Robert Johnson's classic "Love In Vain" or country, with gems like "You Got The Silver," the title track and the brilliant album rework of what was already the best single of 1969, "Country Honk" (reworking, of course, "Honky Tonk Women"). You get badass boys with their tales of midnight ramblers flaunting social mores while imploring some chick to live with them. You get the Stones at their darkest and most doomsday-prophetic via "Gimme Shelter," and after we hear songs of love and lust and violence and uncertainty and braggadocio, the album closes with angelic voices and a magnificent tune advising us after all this that, while we can't always get what we want, if we look sometime, we just might find... we get what we need.

For me, this was also the Stones at their most bombastic, coupled with them being at their most creative. It's interesting to note that the band started recording "You Can't Always Get What You Want" in November of 1968 (even before the release of the previous album, Beggar's Banquet); they began work in earnest on recording the album in February of '69 and didn't finish until November of that year. It's almost a perfect storm of circumstances in allowing an already great band to blossom. While the Stones had, no doubt, been aware of the power they held as a great band for a while, certainly the attention they drew from tracks like "Sympathy For The Devil" only stood to magnify that power they held over the rock public's psyche; when you combine creativity, vision, talent and the perception of power, some amazing things can happen. It was also a personally volatile time for the band; the death of Brian Jones and all the swirling circumstances had, perhaps, slapped the Stones in the face with the reality that everything wasn't always going to be perfect and idyllic. Thus, in many ways, Let It Bleed is an insanely transitional record for the band. It's the last time Brian Jones would appear on any Stones recordings, of course, and even his very minimal contributions (congas on one song, autoharp on another) are at least haunting enough in memory to color the intensity of the release. It was the first appearance on record of Jones' replacement, Mick Taylor, but he only appears on two tracks as well; thus, for the most part, this most classic of albums was generated in the largest part by the Core Four of Jagger, Richards, Wyman and Watts. Of course, it's nice to have friends, too, and for a list of pals making appearances on one or two select tracks throughout, how's this for a hall-of-fame list: Ian Stewart, Nicky Hopkins, Byron Berline, Merry Clayton, Ry Cooder, Bobby Keys, Jimmy Miller, Leon Russell, Jack Nitzsche, Al Kooper and, of course, The London Bach Choir all contribute. Jimmy Miller also produced the album, reprising his excellent work from Beggar's Banquet, and it was pretty obvious that Miller understood the band, gave them the creative reign they needed and was able to take a lot of diverse sounds, moods and influences and help shape them into incredibly cohesive releases. His brilliance in the Stones legacy should not be understated.

Why? Because, no matter what was needed within the sound and mood of a song, Miller's production genius helped to get it across. A good song is a good song and the eight originals and one cover here are all good songs, but the individual care and treatment tendered to each track helps, in cohesion with the performances, to transcend them to brilliant. "Gimme Shelter" needs the near-mystic power of Clayton's vocal to drive home Keith's stinging guitar and Mick's half-pleading, half-warning vocal, just as the title track needs the sloppy, boozy rambling treatment it receives to compliment Jagger's purposely comical cloying. "Midnight Rambler" wouldn't have had half the scary power it has without the churning grind of the open and close, Jagger's harmonica doing a surprisingly good job of playing off a typically loose and effective performance from Richards. Of course, "You Can't Always Get What You Want" is perhaps the band's absolute apex as a production piece. It takes more than just a little bit of genius to make Jagger sound convincingly innocent by this point, but everything about the track drives home the atypical wide-eyed optimism offered by Mick and company. For all this, the track which gets very little mention in retrospect is "Monkey Man," and I consider that to be a shame. This is a vintage Stones performance all the way through, from the slinky churn of the basic tune to the surreal and pretty damned funny lyrics within. "I'm a fleabit peanut monkey, all my friends are junkies... that's not really true." Bad boy hilarious! Jagger's vocal is a nice teasing compliment to the mood and tone of the song, but what really makes this a stellar track is Keith's guitar work. For all the guitar highs on this album, and there are plenty of them, this track is strangely my favorite. Especially with the extended instrumental break starting at about 1:45 of the song, this is Richard's at his aggressive, chunky, brutal, soaring and sloppy best, everything I love about his work and pretty much all his trademarks rolled into one nifty little package. That kind of work underneath lines like "I'm a cold Italian pizza, I could use a lemon squeezer... what do you do?" make me answer, "Well... me, I just kinda sit back and listen and chuckle in wonder... how 'bout you?"

If you're going to be the consummate bad-boy band of the sixties, and if you're going to release an album hoping to summarize the hopes and fears, the triumphs and sorrows, the agonies and the ecstacies of the decade before moving on, you best realize you're taking on a Herculean task. Obviously, the Stones met the challenge, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who's life was never again quite the same. I adore this album. I did on the day of it's release, I do now, and if someday I can find a way to take a copy with me to the hereafter, I assure you, I will.

Lagniappe

I mentioned in a Strawbs retrospective a while back about that band having one of the most impressive four-album runs in rock history; how about Beggar's Banquet (1968), Let It Bleed (1969), Sticky Fingers (1971) and Exile On Main Street (1972)? I'd say that qualifies for inclusion on any "as good as it gets" list... Here's a line about a classic album you might have easily forgotten; "the album was originally released in the U.S on LP record, reel to reel tape and 8-track cartridge..." Delia Smith is pretty much the British equivalent to Julia Childs, in that she's usually acknowledged as the biggest star television chef in the country's media history. As a relative unknown back in '69, it was she who baked the cake used on the cover of Let It Bleed. As much as I've always liked the cover, I never understood the reasoning behind it until I found out that the cover design was actually for the album's working title, Automatic Changer. Personally, I'm glad they changed the title and didn't change the cover... The cover was, by the way, one of ten chosen by the Royal Mail in England for a set of "Classic Album Cover" postage stamps issued in January of 2010... Re-reading (after all these years; I didn't remember a bit of it) the original review of this album written by Greil Marcus that appeared in Rolling Stone Magazine made me really nostalgic for a couple of reasons. First, of course, it was nice to be reminded about what a great rock critic Marcus was; I loved his writing (even though he comically hates the cover of this album!). Second, it was good to read such a passionate, in-depth review of an instant classic. Marcus obviously had no word limit on the review; it takes the time to explore the potential social significance of the album, and in general is written in a way that reviews are rarely written any more. It was quite a vibrant reminder as to how much all this meant not just to us, but to the changing world and to art and culture. You can find the original review here; it's well worth your time, a nice reminder of how passionate a good critic can be in regards to his or her work.

Family Roots, the latest from rapidly rising star Victor Wainwright, is one of those delightful releases from an artist of significance that sort of is and isn't a new album, all at the same time. This one is a double disc set, but essentially you can view it as two albums packaged together. The first disc is subtitled Still Smokin'!, and is both a tribute to and a celebration of his past. It's a three-generation recording, featuring the trio of Victor Wainwright, his father, Vic Sr., and his grandfather Jesse. The second disc carries the subtitle Extended Stay and features Wainwright's current road band (himself, Nick Black on guitar, Will Hanlon on bass and Billy Dean on drums) just letting it loose for a "live in the studio" romp through some of the band's favorite cover material.

It's obviously best to look at these discs on their own individual merits. I'll start with a little of my own background knowledge in regards to Still Smokin'! First, having had the chance to share conversation with Victor a few times, I know that he used to play in honky tonks and bars with Jesse and Vic Sr., so the "family roots" referred to in the title are honest and run deep. I knew this recording was coming, and I knew that Wainwright was really excited about being able to do this. I honestly don't think it was just a tribute thing, though the love and respect he has for his family is very obvious here - I think it was a matter of three men who have enjoyed playing music together for a long, long time having a chance to share their joy with as much of the world as wants to join. From that (and many other) viewpoints, the disc is a rousing success. 

One of the important things to know about Wainwright is that there's the subtle element of a teacher in everything he does musically; he loves working with talented, young, unknown musicians to help keep the blues alive, and even when he performs live, there's a lot of nods to the history of his music. That teacher's instinct is one of the things I find most intriguing about Still Smokin'! This isn't really blues like you've come to expect from Wainwright; it is very much his own roots and sways back and forth between good ol' bar boogie ala Jerry Lee and slower, more traditionally country flavored ballads. I have no doubt this was the sort of stuff that was incredibly popular in backroad honky tonks back in the day, and the disc makes me wish I could have seen a performance of it back then. The teaching element works its way into the fabric of the recording when it becomes obvious on a couple of listens that the soulful gut-wrenching blues that Wainwright is currently perfecting is really not all that many steps away from the honkin' and country sounds found here. Right off the bat, I have to say that ANY fans out there of the classic era of Ray Price will no doubt love how Jesse handles the vocal chores on the ballad portions of the disc. They even cover Price's best known classic, "For The Good Times," and they nail it. For the record, Price is currently in his 80s and still keeps an active touring schedule, and I sincerely hope that somehow, he gets to hear this! 

"Lonesome 77203," "Trouble In Mind" and "Help Me Make It Through The Night" are among the other classic ballad performances presented here; of those, I'm particularly fond of "Help Me" for the superb vocal duet between Jesse and longtime Memphis icon Reba Russell; the styles and personalities of two very fine singers mesh perfectly on this track, and I can't help but think it was probably among the fun highlights of the sessions. Ballad wise, my favorite track here is "Nightlife." This is the best example here of just how close real country blues and real black blues actually are, and the band bridges that gap seamlessly. Of particular note are the quick piano highlight (both Victor and Jesse are credited with piano on the disc; I don't know for sure, but it sounds more like Victor to me) and the beautiful moaning guitar work throughout the track by Josh Roberts. Again... to students of music everywhere looking for tracks that show the strong relationships between what might seem to be very different genres on the surface, I can't encourage you enough to study and enjoy this piece.

The uptempo boogie numbers on the disc are certainly easier to identify with Victor, since he is such an accomplished boogie woogie player. Here, we're treated to "Got Me Runnin'," "Rockin' My Life Away" and "Sweet Little Sixteen." "Sixteen" is a real delight - great arrangement, Jesse's vocal is spot on, Victor's piano (again, I'm assuming it's Victor here!) is as wonderful as you expect, and the guitar lead is short, sweet and just what is called for (Vic Sr.?). Keyboard wise, perhaps the real nuggets on the disc are three snippets entitled "Four Handed Boogie." Man oh man oh man... Victor comes by it honestly! These are piano duets featuring him and his grandfather and they're nothing but pure fun. Not only that, but it gives a lot of hope for fans of Victor that we'll have the chance to enjoy him for a long time - Granddad can not only sing, but he still has the chops!

Moving to Extended Stay finds Wainwright and company in territory more familiar to his fans. Here, we have eight well-chosen covers, tunes the band simply enjoys hearing and enjoys playing... and by "extended stay," the band means these eight tunes come in at right about an hour! It's a "live in the studio" recording; that sometimes scares me, to be honest, because I've heard too many live studio recordings that were obviously overdubbed, but I'd be pretty willing to bet that this is a legit live recording, no tricks. It's easy to characterize the feel of this disc... it's fun, it's vibrant, it's a bunch of great musicians really groovin' on and with one another, it's occasionally a touch sloppy (which, to me, just adds to the fun) and it's as good a starting point for a new Wainwright fan as there might be. 

Three tracks in particular absolutely delight me. "Minnie The Moocher" is a perfect choice for this stage of Wainwright's career - the character he is and is developing on stage is truly reminiscent of the galloping fun that was Cab Calloway in his prime, and the band just nails the joyful attitude of the song. As an added bonus, though it's not listed, this is actually a medley, as about halfway through, the band slides into "St. James' Infirmary." It's such a natural transition that it will be difficult to hear "Moocher" without hearing "Infirmary" going forward. Another favorite is "Bo Diddley;" the fact that everybody has covered this at some point in their lives makes it, to me, crucial listening - that's why great musicians play standards, to show what they can offer, and what these guys offer is again loose, raucous fun... and another oh-so-natural transition, as the song segues effortlessly between "Bo" and "Who Do You Love" for the entirety of its nine minutes. See, THIS is what makes these guys so much fun to see on a stage!

The absolute cruncher of the whole package comes from the brilliant cover of the Tom Waits chestnut "Get Behind The Mule." This is, of course, a natural; again, the persona that Wainwright has been developing is a perfect vehicle for Tom Waits, both musically and conceptually. It's not at all surprising that Wainwright is a huge Waits fan (who isn't?), and believe me, he does everybody proud here. Can you out-slink and out-sleaze Tom Waits? Maybe not entirely... but here, Wainwright at the VERY least equals Waits' best efforts, no mean feat. More than anywhere else on the disc, Wainwright's vocal work here clearly defines where he is at this point in time, and the prospects for the future seem virtually unlimited when I hear a performance of this calibre. Again, we get a real treat here - the second half of the song is another seamless segue, this time into a seriously Howlin' Wolf-ish rendition of "Wang Dang Doodle." This is nothing shy of brilliant, and even for all the shining moments between these two discs, this track alone is worth the price of admission. I mean, dayam... Tom Waits AND Howlin' Wolf in one track?!?!?

I feel your best bet with Family Roots is to approach it not as a new Victor Wainwright album (there's no new material, etc.) but more accurately as an intimate and personal peek into some of the music and values that Wainwright cherishes. For me, an album like this is a gift; it provides so much insight as to what it was that bit Victor in the first place and obviously never went away. I truly enjoyed this glimpse of where he's been and where he is... and I hope it's obvious that I can't WAIT to see where he's going to go as time marches on!

So... 48 years ago, there was this hippie kid who was trying really hard to be a nice guy but ultimately wound up proving for all the world to see that without a shadow of a doubt, he was nothing but a heathen criminal unfit to serve in the United States military. His most horrific crime? Um... littering... Of course, I'm referring to Arlo Guthrie, and more of course the event I'm referring to not only kept him out of the military, but provided hippies and classic rockers and story lovers everywhere with one of the cornerstone songs of our lifetime. Thanks to Arlo's kind and helpful nature, an over-zealous cop and the ability to weave a magic tale from a pretty silly event, the world has been able to enjoy the saga of "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" for what is now approaching a half century.

Thing of it is, it would be a great story/song even if the whole thing was made up, but it wasn't! Now, even according to Guthrie himself, he "might have exaggerated a little" in the song (he's a storyteller; it's an inherent right), and the film version of Alice's Restaurant took a few liberties for the sake of making a movie, but essentially, yeah. The man got arrested for littering and, at the time, any American citizen who had been convicted of a crime could be ruled morally unfit to be drafted. Amazing!


The Truth
Alice M. Brock, a friend of Arlo Guthrie's, really did own a restaurant in a small town in Massachusetts. She and her husband Ray really did live in a former church. It was originally built as the St. James Chapel in 1829, then in 1866 was enlarged and renamed Trinity Church. Ray and Alice bought the deconsecrated church in 1964 and made it their home until sometime in the early '70s. In 1965, the Brocks hosted a "Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat" for friends (though not nearly as many as were seen in the film). Guthrie was one of their guests, and since there was a lot of garbage in the church at the time, he decided to be a good guy and help them get the church cleaned up some. Guthrie had gone to school a little ways away from the church, and so was familiar with a lot of the back roads of the area, including a place that a lot of local people had used to dump their trash. Quoting from an interview Guthrie did with NPR in 2005, "...it wasn't like some pristine virgin forest that we... were screwing around with. And our pile of garbage, well, we couldn't tell the difference once we threw ours down. But there was someone who could and that happened to be the local chief of police, a guy named Bill Obanhein, who we called Officer Obie. And he confronted us that next morning after Thanksgiving with our crime."

When you're the son of a songwriter as legendary as Woody Guthrie, I'd guess it's only natural to make songs out of odd stories in your life. "Alice's Restaurant" wasn't released on an album until 1967, but part of the reason was that a lot of the song hadn't actually happened yet. After Thanksgiving (Guthrie really did have to go clean up his pile of garbage; I haven't been able to confirm if he ever paid a $25 fine or not) Arlo wound up leaving school in the midst of so much social upheaval; "all the world was changing and I wanted to be where that was happening," says Guthrie. Of course, leaving school meant that he was also eligible to be drafted and sent to Viet Nam, but upon going to the induction center, he really was declared ineligible for the draft because of littering. Guthrie was reportedly dumbfounded at his fortune, and turned the incidents into his most famous song. He says it took about a full year to put the song together; he would add things as they happened to him and keep them in the song if they were funny and true; if things weren't funny or people didn't respond, he would drop a bit from the song. Eventually, it morphed into the very familiar story we all love so much to hear, especially at this time of year. 

The song, as you might guess, hasn't remained static. Since it was over 18 minutes long, it was way too long to be released as a single (wouldn't even have fit on a 45), but two years after the album, Guthrie released a reworked "Alice's Rock & Roll Restaurant" as a single.The nearly five-minute tune incorporated the chorus and removed the entire monologue. There was a very different arrangement, and extra verses, but in all honesty, it wasn't anywhere near as charming or captivating as the real deal. Guthrie has, of course, performed the song numerous times in concert, and it has been adapted and re-recorded a couple of times since the 1967 album was released.

The Film
In 1969, the story was adapted for the big screen, starring Guthrie as himself (and I must admit... he played himself well on camera!). The real Alice makes several camero appearances in the movie, though her character is portrayed by Pat Quinn. Probably my favorite incidental bit about the movie is that police chief William Obanheim plays himself, Officer Obie, in the movie. I have to give him credit for his reasoning for accepting the role; he told Newsweek magazine that "making himself look like a fool was preferable to having somebody else make him look like a fool." While most of the significant plot elements in the movie were based on truth, some characters were added, events were made up and a few details changed on screen (Ray and Alice, for example, lived alone in their church, not as part of a commune as the movie depicts). The song is a more accurate representation of the real events than the film is. I found it surprising to learn that the film grossed over $6 million in the United States, making it the 21st highest grossing movie of that year.

My personal opinion of the film? I have a difficult time watching it... not because of the liberties taken (that's okay, it's a good story) and not because it's a bad movie or anything (I don't think it's bad at all). The problem I have is in the darker moments of the film; the graveside service for a passed friend... the scene where Ray goes on his enraged rant and makes me feel like his character never really believed in the whole hippie thing, but just grabbed onto it for convenience sake... I know the movie is listed as a "comedy," but I just don't see it as such... more a tragedy with some very light moments. In an odd sort of way, I strongly compare it to the film version of Quadrophenia. Arlo and Jimmy (Quadrophenia's lead character) seem so similar to me; young men who think they've found something real to believe in which they give themselves over to heart and soul, only to learn the harsh lesson in the long run that it was all a phase, a facade, and all the beauty and revolution and revelations were more posturing than lifestyle. Both films make me sad watching something so important being stripped away from people who believed so innocently and completely in the ideals.

Postscript
Alice Brock was always something of a renaissance woman. Before she owned her restaurant, she was a painter and designer and teacher, and she returned to her creative muses from the '70s onward. The Alice's Restaurant Cookbook was published in 1969 with recipes and "hippie wisdom" from Alice, and she also illustrated a 2004 children's book entitled Mooses Come Walking, written by Arlo. I found many references to her having an art gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She has a website that displays her paintings and other creative works; there is a blog on the site, but the last post to the blog was made in 2011. I honestly couldn't find any reference to Alice dated after 2007 or so... but I also couldn't find any reference to her having died, either, and I'd assume that a lady of such significance would garner some attention and some loving tributes for her life had she passed. She and Ray divorced in the early 70's, and Ray died in 1979.

Alice, if by good fortune you see this, drop me a line!

Arlo, of course, is still going strong. He still plays a lot of live shows, and in fact his Here Come The Kids tour started in October of this year and continues through May of 2014. His son Abe is joining him on keyboards and vocals for the tour. I saw Arlo in, I think, the late '80s, and Abe was with him then as well. The show I caught was during one of the periods where Arlo preferred to not perform "Alice's Restaurant," and he didn't that night, much to the irritation of a lot of the crowd. That's sad, because the show was really good; Arlo was fun and funny and personable, in good voice and with a ton of great songs that he played. I even had the chance to chat with him and his son for a few minutes after the show, and he honestly came across as being an incredibly nice and kind human being. I'm truly glad I got to see that performance.

And you know what's REALLY cool? In 1991, Arlo purchased the Trinity Church, Ray and Alice's former residence. It has been renamed The Guthrie Center, and is described in Arlo's bio as "a not-for-profit interfaith church foundation dedicated to providing a wide range of local and international services." I guess I couldn't have been much righter when I viewed him as an incredibly nice and kind human being. The services The Guthrie Center offer includes everything from providing HIV/AIDS services to baking cookies with a local service organization... from an HD Walk-A-Thon to raise awareness and money for research into Huntington's Disease to offering a place for simple meditation... From a folk music venue offering concerts and regular hootenannies to an annual "Garbage Trail Walk," which also raises money for Huntington's research...

...and yes, they also offer up a Thanksgiving Dinner That Can't Be Beat every year for the local community. If outsiders are welcome, I think I need to add that to my bucket list. I'd even be willing to help get rid of the garbage.

When you take a look at how much Laura Nyro influenced the music of the late '60s and early '70s as a songwriter alone, you have to wonder why she's still somewhat relegated to "cult" status. By the age of 17, she had already composed the classic "And When I Die," first popularized by Peter, Paul and Mary, then hitting huge for Blood, Sweat and Tears... and just thinking of the huge disparity in the stylistic approach of those two groups, it's amazing enough that the same song could be successfully interpreted by both artists. "Wedding Bell Blues," "Stoned Soul Picnic," "Save The Country," "Eli's Coming" and "Stoney End" all did wonders to further the careers of The Fifth Dimension, Three Dog Night and Barbra Streisand, and that's not even considering her own recorded output, which is simply a catalog of excellence.

Laura was born on October 18, 1947. Her love of music began early and she had a huge range of music she enjoyed; John Coltrane, Nina Simone, Miles Davis, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Curtis Mayfield, Dusty Springfield, '50s and '60s girl groups and even Dionne Warwick's interpretations of the work of Bacharach & David are all cited as influences evident in her own music. Her mom exposed her to works by impressionist classical composers, and (as a very complete artist) Nyro spent a lot of time reading poetry. Small wonder, then, that the liner notes to her anthology, Stoned Soul Picnic: The Best Of Laura Nyro, describe her as drawing from soul, jazz, R&B, blues, folk and modern classical in her own compositions (I'd add gospel to the list). The liner notes go on to list an impressive array of artists who have covered her work, which completely adds to her reputation as a genre-bending songwriter; besides those already mentioned, her work has been recorded by Suzanne Vega, Phoebe Snow, Sweet Honey In The Rock, Chet Atkins, Roseane Cash, Frank Sinatra, Linda Ronstadt, The Roches, Maynard Ferguson, George Duke... The list stretches on and on, resulting in an amazing legacy of respect from her own peers. 

In regards to her own recorded output, she bears at least one similarity to Leonard Cohen in that her legacy of brilliance is built on a relatively small recorded output; from 1967 until 1993, she released only nine albums of studio work, and in 2001 there was a posthumous release of an album she recorded in '94 and '95. Considering this was an era when, say, The Beatles knocked out some eighteen albums in just seven years, you have to figure that what was released had to be pretty spectacular for here to be as revered as she is.

It was.

Her first album in 1967, More Than A Discovery, was released on Verve Records (it was reissued twice after she signed to Columbia Records), and though it's perhaps not her most recognized work, it certainly shows the talent and vision she possessed. Once she signed to Columbia, her next four releases have to be filed in the "as good as it gets" category - Eli And The Thirteenth Confession (1968), New York Tendaberry (1969), Christmas And The Beads Of Sweat (1970) and Gonna Take A Miracle (1971) are crucial to every aspiring songwriter's library. I don't think it's an overstatement to say that these four releases wrote a huge chunk of the foundation for very independent and very soulful female songwriters. Personally, I kind of came aboard a little late; my first exposure to her was her 1976 release, Smile. I sort of knew that she had written some songs for other people, but I wasn't really familiar with anything she had recorded. The cover of Smile is kind of innocuous; there's really no way you could look at that album cover and even take a hint at the power, expression and compassion this woman exhibited. I was completely blown away, and when I mentioned that to a friend who was a longtime fan of Nyro's, she suggested I listen to the previous four albums. "Just set an evening aside, and listen to them right through," I was advised. "Oh...  and be ready for your life to change." 

Truer words have rarely been spoken to me in regards to music. I have to admit, all these years later, that I wasn't able to sit and make it through all four at one sitting. There was too much depth, too much intensity of emotion, too much absolute heart and soul and sweat for me to not go back and re-listen so I could better understand and appreciate the records. Nyro fans all have their favorites, of course, but for whatever reason, New York Tendaberry is the one that hits me the hardest; it took me a couple of good, serious nights to move beyond that one, and to this day is the Nyro album I listen to most often. Laura was heavily involved in the brilliant anthology of her work (though I'd plead with you to just go get the catalog in chronological order!), and I felt something of a kinship with her when I read in the liner notes her saying, "When I was working on this anthology and listening back to that music, I thought 'Oh my God - what a madcap energy. I don't know if I can deal with this.' But it's funny because soon I started to get into it and it was very energizing and a lot of fun. I cried when I heard New York Tendaberry."

After Smile, she released Nested (1978), and then only two more studio releases in her lifetime; Mother's Spiritual in 1984 and Walk The Dog And Light The Light in 1993. Angel in the Dark was the posthumous release. It should be noted that she also released two live albums in her life, and four more live recordings have been released since her death. Of her post-Tendaberry work, Mother's Spiritual is the most moving (in my opinion, of course). It really struck me as I was reading about this amazing woman's life that she had a pretty incredible Mom. She had one son, and after appreciating Mother's Spiritual, I have to think that she carried the traits of being a great Mom forward. 

When I see any criticism of her work at all, I most often read that she was a little "too feminist" for some people's taste. I can't even begin to understand that. By her own admission, she brought "a certain feminist perspective" to her songwriting... but we're dealing with a strong, fiery, intelligent woman. Considering many of her influences and fctoring in her interest with the folk/protest movement of the sixties (and causes she remained activist about for the duration of her life), I would have been disappointed if she HADN'T lent a feminist perspective to her work. She was a brilliant songwriter first and foremost because of the honesty that shone through all her music. I wouldn't ask Woody Guthrie to abandon his crusades for the downtrodden of the world in his songwriting, and neither would I want anything less than complete honesty from Laura Nyro... and I want it to be her honesty.. 

In late 1996, Nyro was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, the same disease that claimed her mother's life. She died on April 8, 1997 at the age of 49. Of all the astounding songwriters in history who we lost at a relatively young age, Laura Nyro would be among the talents I most would have wanted to hear for another thirty years. There's so much more; on the one hand, It feels like it takes so little time to summarize her career, but that's an injustice to her. She was a deep and fascinating human being, and once you begin to know her music, I'd bet most people will scour the web to learn more about the person behind the music. When you listen to her work and it hits "that place" inside you, you realize that even through the small-by-comnparison amount of work she left behind, you will have a friend and companion forever through that music.

* * * * *
The quote you see in the second picture of Laura that accompanies this post is from an excellent interview I found with her. It's from a blog call Stomp Off, which is a consistently good read (http://stomp-off.blogspot.com/). I believe the man who runs the blog is named Chris Andersen, though it's actually kind of hard to find his name anywhere on the blog! Most of the blog is jazz oriented, and he seems to be doing for jazz what I'm trying to do with classic rock - using his obvious extensive knowledge and career experience to share a very golden era of music that means a lot to him.

1970 might have been the year when The Grateful Dead upgraded their status from "cult" to "legend." June of that year saw the release of Workingman's Dead, an album that would have been classic enough for most anybody... but in the opinion of a bazillion Dead fans (including me) they topped it in November with the release of American Beauty.

It's hard to think of these two iconic albums as being "radical" in any way; they're such easygoing records, warm and friendly... but a peek at what was on the charts at the time gives a hint as to how visionary The Dead were. In June, the top 20 albums included The Beatles Let It Be, Paul McCartney's solo debut, the Woodstock soundtrack, Jethro Tull Benefit, and live albums from The Who, Cream and Iron Butterfly. The closest thing to the quieter visage of Workingman's Dead was Deja Vu from CSNY or Bridge Over Troubled Water from Simon & Garfunkel; even there, the former kicked off with "Carry On" and had several rockin' tracks, and Bridge had strayed far from S&G's folkie roots into the realm of huge mega-production. It's hard to recall a mindset where "Uncle John's Band" or "Casey Jones" were bold statements, but using country and Americana influences as the root of your work wasn't a popular notion at the time. The vibe on the album must have been strong within the band, because they did the unthinkable - they used their own instant classic as a base point, refined and even upgraded the approach and released a second defining moment only five months later. The musical climate around them hadn't changed much in those five months; James Taylor's Sweet Baby James was a strong album at the time, but otherwise, Led Zeppelin topped the chart; Santana, Creedence, The Stones, Joe Cocker, Free, The Guess Who... all of them were cranking out their superb mostly-blues based mostly-high-energy breed of rock. American Beauty must have stood out like a beacon in the dark; not surprisingly, it still does.

The Dead seemingly took everything amazing about Workingman and pushed it just a little bit more. Jerry Garcia had become less of a flash guitarist with that album and he backed off even further on American Beauty, choosing instead to fill the space with tasty and appropriate work on pedal steel guitar. The songwriting seemed to become even more focused, perhaps an outgrowth of having lived with Workingman for a while and just plain old getting better at something they were already real good at. There's ten songs on American Beauty, and five of them are mainstays to this day on even the most rigid classic rock formats - "Ripple" and "Truckin'" were both released as singles (!!), and "Box Of Rain," "Sugar Magnolia" and "Friend Of The Devil" are undeniable cornerstones of a brilliant era. Looking back on both of the albums from 1970, I'd say in retrospect that Workingman was the more daring and radical of the two albums, being the first one so heavily rooted in country, folk and bluegrass, and Beauty is the more comfortable and accomplished of the two.It was obvious the band was happy with the niche they had found, and even just the few months between albums was enough time and experience for them to show The Dead in a more complete, communal light - a stellar example of the whole being greater than the sum of even the most magnificent of parts.

For me, American Beauty is one of my two favorite Dead albums (In The Dark is the other). I think all the music people I know have a half dozen or so albums in their life that they have bookmarked as "everything is okay" records - albums that give you the perfect, warm feeling conveyed by  music which is part of the fabric of a person's life; this is way high on my list. "Box Of Rain" sets the entire tone of the album masterfully. I've looked at this track in a lot of way in my lifetime; I love the idea of having a box of rain that I can call on when I want it or need it, even if that strays a tad from the focus of the song. Come to find out, it was created to be a very therapeutic piece of music (always has been for me). Phil Lesh's father was a victim of cancer, and Lesh was dealing with the impending loss of his dad at the time. According to lyricist Robert Hunter, Phil "wanted a song to sing to his dying father," and had composed "Box Of Rain" in it's entirety except for the words. Hunter went on to say it was one of the easiest lyrics he ever wrote; Phil did indeed sing the song to his father and, appropriately enough, it also became the first Dead song to feature Lesh on lead vocal. 

"Friend Of The Devil" is as perfect a song as you can get for a variety of reasons. Easy on the ears, fun to sing along with, and the outlaw-running-from-the-police lyrics work on so many levels. They're allegorical to what the band must have felt at the time - doing things their own way, having to stand up for the right to do so, aided by the devil who betrays them in the end... and beyond that, it's just a damned fun story. "Sugar Magnolia" would have to be in the top ten all time feelgood songs from the Dead (or anyone). The gorgeous melody line is complemented with beautiful, restrained playing and one of my favorite collective vocal performances from the band ever - such a study in harmony singing! Lyrically, it's as pretty an ode to a lady as you're going to find - "She's got everything delightful, she's got everything I need / A breeze in the pines and sun and bright moonlight, lazing in the sunshine, yes indeed..." are a lovely contrast to "She don't come and I don't follow," giving a nod to both the beauty and independence of the lady. Sunshine, daydream, sunshine, daydream...

Both "Operator" and "Candyman" fall into the category of Comfortable Songs. They don't get mentioned anywhere near as much as the album's Big Five... and what an amazing record when these are the filler tracks! They're standard Dead beautiful, lush in harmony and melody, and I can't imagine the album without them.  "Ripple" is, to me, the perfectest diamond on the perfect necklace, a song that embodies everything good about The Dead, the hippies and my utopian vision of how life could and should be. "Reach out your hand if your cup is empty... and if your cup is full, may it be full again" is as simple beautiful as it gets; the vocal and musical treatment invite the listener to the porch to set with friends and laugh long into the night. "Brokedown Palace" has always hit a place deep inside of me, and when I moved to Memphis, it became even more personal (if that was possible). I left a place I had lived for decades that no longer felt like home, and the first time I stood on the banks of the Mississippi River after moving, I sang "Goin home, goin home, by the riverside I will rest my bones... Listen to the river sing sweet songs, to rock my soul" to the river itself. I felt like I was home... and when I turned to walk back to my apartment, there was somebody I had never seen before (and probably haven't seen since) who smiled at me and said, "That was nice." I was right. I was home.

"Til The Morning Comes" and "Attics Of My Life" are, again, Comfortable Songs. They pair so well together, and though they go at it from different angles, they seem oddly similar to me. Both songs reach inside to play off the combination of memory and anticipation, and again, both do so with such beautiful harmonies! The Dead get a lot of credit for a lot of things, but in my opinion not enough credit for their vocal work. The album closes with "Truckin'" - and could you BE any more Dead than this? It's as close to a rocker as the album gets, and the lyrics are completely autobiographical (for an awful lot of bands who are constantly on the road). Can't help but to love Garcia's melody lines on this one, of course, and the vocals are a mishmash of storytelling and whimsy. There's a lot of trial and tribulation to the song if you look at it in a literal sense, but there sure doesn't sound like a whole lot of regret here... and, of course, we get to take "what a long, strange trip it's been" with us as one of our last memories of the album.

I've been listening to American Beauty since shortly after it was released, and I don't think there's any accurate way to measure the pleasure and joy I've taken from the record. While reading about it for this post, I learned something that I imagine most Deadheads have known for most of forever; if you look at the album cover, the wording spells both "American Beauty" and "American Reality," by design. I grinned like a fool when I read that - more than forty years on, and I can still see a little something different that I never saw before in this album. But then again... masterpieces are like that.

Lagniappe

American Beauty was at the center of one of my all-time favorite moments in my record store. It was a bit of a lazy day in the middle of a week, and Beauty had just started playing in the store; it felt right for the day, and it was in high rotation forever and always anyways. A mom and her daughter came into the store, and momma was dealing out a ration of grief. She was lecturing her kid up one side and down the other about her devil music, and how it was going to lead her down the wrong path. I rankled particularly when I heard her use The Grateful Dead as an example, as in, "And what's with listening to bands with names like The Grateful Dead? Can't you even see how evil that is?" The grief went on and on for fifteen, twenty minutes. Finally, as they were leaving (no purchase made), momma looks at me and says, "Thank you for playing such nice music in your store. I wish my daughter would take a lesson from you. What is this you're playing now?" "It's the Grateful Dead, ma'am." I snuck a peek at the daughter who was out of her skin with glee and having a hard time masking it. Momma looked at me and said, "No, really. What is this?" I took the CD out of the player and handed it to her. She looked at it, handed it back to me, and said angrily, "You did that on purpose!" Now, even though the album was playing when they walked in, you can't pass up that golden an opportunity, so I replied something like, "Sorry, but sometimes people need to have their face rubbed in their own stupidity." I never saw either of them again. A shame... I was sure hoping daughter would stop back in some day...

A few trivia bits about the album... This was the first time David Grisman and Jerry Garcia had worked together in any capacity; they bumped into one another at a baseball game, and Jerry invited David to the studio to help work on the album... It was recorded at Wally Heider's studio, which Phil Lesh describes as being "jammer heaven" during that era. The Dead, Paul Kantner and Grace Slick, Santana and CSNY all regularly hung out at the studio. Now... there HAVE to be tapes somewhere, right?... This was the final Dead album for Mickey Hart until he returned to the band in 1974... According to Deadbase X, "Sugar Magnolia" was the second most-played song by The Dead in their concert career, logging 596 performances ("Me & My Uncle" was their most played tune in concert with 616 performances)... I don't know why I find this to be so hilarious, but "Truckin'," with all the drug and arrest and outlaw references, was recognized by the United States Library Of Congress as a national treasure in 1997...

What do Blondie, The Clash, Elvis Costello, Patti Smith, The Police, The Pretenders, REM, The Ramones, The Sex Pistols, Talking Heads and U2 all have in common? Two things, at least - all of them were considered "new wave" when their careers began... and oh, by the way, all of them are now in the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame. Somewhere along the line, new wave got ripped off. For a lot of people, mention new wave music and all that comes to mind is stuff like "Electric Avenue" or "Walking On Sunshine," admittedly commercial fare more suited for dance floors and the flavor-of-the-week club than any real place in history. Somewhere along the line, all that got remembered was Devo's flowerpot hats and a lot of guys wearing skinny ties and sports jackets with their jeans - yet the contributions and the attitude shifts that resulted from the broad term new wave have affected music history in a multitude of ways.

First and foremost, of course, is the sheer volume of music that was released. A large part of that is due to the fact that "new wave" was a pretty loosely defined term; it really started out as a description of (mostly British) punk in the middle seventies; after that, it sort of shifted to music that was heavily rooted in the look and feel of a lot of roots rock and roll - simple, clean, and very DIY. As time and the press went on, new wave morphed and evolved until it eventually became sort of a catch-all for a lot of music that was outside of either the top-40 mainstream or the already-constricting album rock format... in short, anything the press didn't really understand or couldn't categorize became new wave. By the time all was said and done, new wave included (at various times and from various artists) pop, power pop, synth-pop, technopop, industrial, ska, new romantic, goth, post-punk, house, and even artists who might be labeled as hip-hop or funk these days. I've seen it written that "new wave" was essentially dance music that relied heavily on synthesizers... but Elvis Costello and REM and The Police and The Pretenders and a myriad of others were all classified as "new wave" back in the day, and if anything, they were the anti-synth faction of what was at the time new music (a rebellion within a rebellion). 

An interesting result of the vagueness of the term and the lumping of just about anything misunderstood into the genre is that new wave made very serious inroads into both pop/top 40 and FM/album rock psyches. In regards to pop music, it wasn't unlike disco in that dance clubs had a pretty solid effect on the charted music of the day. What at first was a near clique-ish club of miscreants and outcasts who went thrifting to find their cool outfits and haunted little clubs who would play this "new music" soon turned into charts filled with hit singles from the likes of Human League, The B52s, Duran Duran, REM, Blondie, Soft Cell... and egads! Even the flowerpot boys, Devo, scored a gold single! As time went on and reputations grew, a lot of agonizing decisions had to be made by radio programmers, perhaps even moreso in the album rock genre. I was out of radio by the time new wave hit it's fullest and most dominant stride on the airwaves, but I was there at the beginning, and I remember the resistance I got from the higher-ups for playing Elvis Costello, REM and even The Cars at first; it actually has a lot to do with why I got out of radio, young and rash as I was at the time. But even in album rock and soon-to-be classic rock formats, a funny thing started to happen... U2 started going multi-platinum and selling out arena tours around the world. The Cars got moved up to the tops of the "anticipated new releases" listings. Elvis Costello made it eternally difficult for programmers... he was selling a ton of records, he was garnering massive and very interesting press (his was the first "El Mocambo" type show I can recall that got a lot of attention, something even The Rolling Stones copied) and yet... where on earth did he fit, radio-wise? His sound was rock, sort of... his attitude was punk, sort of... except he dressed a little nicer and wrote these really intricate songs... My oh my, what's a radio station to do? As with all things, eventually the music dictated the course that had to be taken, and a huge part of the stigma of being "new wave" was removed. Eventually people stopped using the label at all. U2 and The Police were no longer new wave bands or alternative bands or whatever bands; slowly and surely, they just became great bands, acceptable to a LOT of different formats and a lot of varied elements of the consumer base. In that regard, to my perception, "new wave" was one of the most successful movements in the history of rock music.

You also cannot ignore the changes in the culture of the music industry brought about in large part by new wave artists. This I can separate into two distinct categories - recording and marketing. From the recording point of view - a recording studio had become quite the beast by the middle '70s. Bands were jockeying for million dollar advances so they could record an album; exceptional and/or trendy producers and engineers became as sought after, fought over and expensive as exceptional and/or trendy musicians. There were running stories in Rolling Stone and Creem about the progress of the new album by whoever, and things went pretty quickly from The Beatles kicking out eighteen albums in a seven year span to new albums taking two years or more to record and release. It was the apex of the monolithic industry beast controlling the music; as such, it became near impossible for the guy with a guitar down the street to have any hope.

That had to change, and it did, and I honestly think the new wave movement had a LOT to do with it. It seemed like it was almost overnight, but suddenly enough, a bunch of bands decided they didn't want to join that race to owe the rest of their lives to a record company. They had music, they were angry, they were excited, and they wanted it recorded now, wanted it in the hands of whatever fans NOW. DIY (do-it-yourself) was re-introduced into the fabric of rock and roll because a lot of punks and early wavers didn't have the desire or the cash to play the record company game. They wrote music, they went into the studio, they played it, recorded it, released it and made some more, and it was a WHOLE lot quicker and cheaper than the industry norm had become. From a fan/consumer point of view, it got very exciting again - the old dinosaur (heh heh heh) rock mags had to be discarded, and information had to be gotten from new, hipper places with their ears closer to the ground. Labels were springing up overnight (and going under just as quickly), so if you wanted new music from a favorite artist or in a style you were fond of, it often took more than a trip to Tower Records or Best Buy to be able to find what you were after. 

Marketing experienced a similar sort of revolution, and again, the DIY ethic made its mark. While it might be nice to have Annie Leibovitz take photos for your album cover, have it designed by a huge New York ad agency, and have the whole package released in symphony with a well-thought out marketing strategy, this again takes the whole animal out of the hands of the people it's supposed to represent - the musicians. The thought process was similar - if I can go into the studio and record this myself, why can't I take some pictures and scissors and glue and make the sleeve for a single or the poster for a concert myself? They could and they did. It kind of went hand in hand with the explosion of personal computers and the huge advances in desktop publishing that were taking place at the time - a computer made it far less essential that you have expensive designers at your beck and call. It even made it a whole lot more immediate. This whole "get it done" ethic permeated so much of the early new wave scene - it not only revitalized what was becoming a very tired, sterile atmosphere for creating music, it gave a lot of hope back to the twisted neighborhood geniuses of the world. Thank the stars for that, because music has built its history on their backs.

Of course, as with so many good things, it wound up eating itself alive again. A huge part of that was wrapped up in three letters - MTV. What was at first a concept and revolution in itself evolved into the very thing it was formed to revolt against - corporate rock that satisfied the investors first. It sure was a lot of fun in the beginning, though. Music videos to promote your stuff? It gave a whole new dimension to the music, gave creative minds another outlet. It was, again, an exciting new toy, like a constant Christmas morning for music junkies, and there's absolutely no doubt that bands like Duran Duran, Ultravox, Talking Heads and (eeeeek! It's THEM again!) Devo not only kept it interesting, but essentially built the machine and wrote the rules. It didn't take long, though... MTV was such a huge and seemingly immediate success (sure feels that way in retrospect) that soon enough, video wasn't even an option anymore for a new release. Million dollar budgets for single song videos began to get written into the plans, and all over again, hot directors and screenplay writers got snapped up. "Coming soon" was a hot topic for the news shows on MTV... and yeah, the chameleon had done nothing more than eaten its own tail.

I guess it had to happen, and in a lot of ways, it's happening again (and I assume it will do so again and again and again as needed). I know for fact that as a fan, a radio programmer and a retailer through the new wave assault, I found it to be a breath of fresh air for my ears, eyes and rock and roll soul. When I hear "new wave," I don't think of walking on sunshine (puke!)... More often then not, I think of the attitude and freedom of spirit that characterized Woodstock (look the record company beast in the eye and claw it out if possible). I think of the music that I might not have had and the friends I might not have made if somebody hadn't stepped up and said, "It can be done different, you know." Defying what is and making something new from it is, to me, the ultimate spirit of rock... so new wave? I say, "Hail! Hail! Rock 'n roll!"

Lagniappe

Since I was involved in so many facets of the industry during the height of new wave, I'm sure I got more satisfaction out of it than many. It also put me in an interesting position as a radio programmer in the fairly early stages of the movement. When Elvis Costello's second album, This Year's Model, was released, the song "Radio Radio" was the single or focus track or whatever it was called. What a dilemma! I was a huge fan of Costello's, especially through the first three albums... but "Radio Radio" is, of course, a song that is VERY disparaging of a medium I also respected and loved (and was a part of!). I was the Music Director of a huge station at the time, and the decision was almost solely mine; do I play the song or not? I thought long and hard about it, and eventually decided to call Costello on his own challenge. Instead of "Radio Radio," I played "Pump It Up" as the focus track (it got me yelled at by a couple of prominent record company guys... all the better, in its own way). The song had a long life and went pretty high on our little intra-station chart. A little while later, Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe and Mink DeVille went on a much-publicized tour, and I had the pleasure of seeing the show. Costello (with The Attractions) was the headliner; he was an amazing performer, building his set and the crowd excitement, until at the "appropriate" time, he broke into "Radio Radio." The reception by the crowd was lukewarm, at best, just like when a guy plays an obscure album cut during his concert. I was very close to the stage, and there was a distinctly puzzled look on Costello's face - he had been winning this crowd, and now the tour-de-force wasn't getting it? As it worked out, "Pump It Up" was, I think, the next song played, and the crowd went nuts, as though he had finally gotten to the hit song. I smiled to myself a little (okay, a lot), though it gave me a LOT of cause to think about how true Costello's words were, and just how much power over the careers of people and the path of music programmers held. After the show, I was one of fifty or so people waiting at the stage exit door to get an autograph. When Elvis finally left the building to our delight, I handed a record to him for an autograph, and quickly said, "I'm the FM programmer in town. I chose not to play 'Radio Radio' and picked 'Pump It Up' to play instead." I swear it, Costello looked at me with a little sly smile and said, "Well done." It's as vindicated as I've ever felt in my life.

New wave also put me in a position to do what I feel are two of the best interviews of my journalism career (neither of which I have any access to at this point; I was a really, really REALLY lousy archivist in my youth). I was writing for an alternative/new wave mag at the time, and through them got to sit face to face with Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale of Devo. They were intelligent, insightful, hilarious, and made for a really good article (and yes, if anybody has a copy of Dogfood Magazine with my interview-based Devo article in it, could you send me a photocopy? Pleeeeeze??). An odd quirk - Mothersbaugh said maybe ten words during the course of the actual interview. If I looked right at him and prefaced a question with, "Mark, I'd be interested in hearing what you think about...," he would listen, smile and turn to Casale, who would answer the question. After the interview, Mark and I got to talking about music in general - as you might expect, he's a huge fan of synthesizers, and we got to talking about that a lot. Ultravox had just released their Vienna album in Europe, not yet in the states, and when I mentioned it to Mothersbaugh, he expressed how anxious he was to hear it. I told him I had it on tape in my car; his eyes bugged out. We wound up sitting in the car listening to and discussing Vienna in its entirety, which almost made him late for the show. I gave the tape to him, of course.

My interview with Patti Smith was one of the highlights of my career. It was on the release of her Easter album, which I still consider to be one of the greatest rock records ever made. A couple of years earlier, she was forced to take a hiatus from music when she was performing live during her Radio Ethiopia tour and fell from the stage, severely hurting her neck (she was in a neck brace for quite some time). I was at the show where she fell (Curtis Hixon Hall, Tampa... opening, of all things, for Bob Seger). Easter was a very triumphant return to music for her, and I was beyond excited for the chance to talk to her on the phone. Now, Patti was a journalist herself early on and didn't have a lot of tolerance for "what's your favorite color?" type questions; I was a fan from the start, and prided myself on the fact that she would get good questions from me. I was told I had only 20 or 25 minutes to talk to her (she was in San Francisco on tour at the time), so right off the bat I hit her with what I felt was a pretty well thought out question in regards to her lyrics and attitudes. She gave me a very brief five or six word reply, and I was crushed. I had to make a very, very quick decision; I honestly didn't want a crap interview with her, and decided I'd prefer no interview at all as opposed to a bad one. I took the biggest chance of my journalistic career when I told her, "Patti, that's a bullshit answer. If you prefer not to talk to me, I'll understand... but if you do choose to do this interview, please give me the chance to show you I'm not just another journalist." There was a LOOOOOOOOONG pause... and then she gave me a very detailed, deep answer. We talked for 90 minutes or so. I hung up the phone elated and exhausted.

While thinking on the life and work of Lou Reed, I posted to my Facebook page, "even though I've been a fan for what feels like forever, it's still impressive and almost a surprise to review his body of work. This man was essentially The Beatles of New York blunt reality." I can't honestly think of a better opener than that.

The accolades that have been written about the man haven't really surprised me; both as a solo artist and a founding member of the Velvet Underground, his legacy as a gut-level innovator has been firmly established for a long, long time. Even though the Velvet Underground was in their time a commercial disaster, the power of their influence extended well beyond the records they sold. For all the change and innovation that took place in the late sixties, VU was the band most often cited by a lot of artists who followed as showing that art in the form of music didn't have to be classy or ethereal. It didn't even necessarily have to be beautiful. What carried the Velvets into history was sheer, brutal honesty in their approach to making music. The harder it hit, the rawer it got, the more nerves it hit and underbellies it exposed... the better it got.

Like probably thousands and thousands of others, I've gone back over the past few days and allowed myself the pleasure of revisiting Reed's catalog of work with my ears and eyes. The passion felt by his fans has been amazing to me, and I've also been pleasantly surprised by the sheer volume of tributes he's received. That gets even more interesting when one looks back on what the rock press said about his work as it was being released; while there were exceptions, of course, Reed for the most part got mediocre reviews on his work, and considering his stature got trashed by the press far more often than most. Even Transformer, arguably his most prominent solo work (and, of course, almost everyone learned because of Lou that it was kinda fun to walk on the wild side) garnered a lot of mixed emotions. Yet, all four Velvet Underground albums that Reed was a part of as well as Transformer and Berlin from his solo catalog made Rolling Stone's 500 Best Albums list... and Reed continued to draw admiring crowds for his recordings and live performances well beyond a point where most artists hang it up and ride on their legacy. This suggests two things; one, that his work was far more deep and complicated than it appears on the surface or on first listen and, as such, takes a while to truly appreciate... and two, that Reed was a poet and artist who understood, aimed at and connected with humanity and had very little apparent desire to coddle the critical community. He was honest for the good, bad, ugliness and beauty of that honesty and, thinking on it, that's the characteristic of his music that made him real to me and undoubtedly to millions of others.

Rehearing his work reminded me over and over again that so much of what made him amazing to me seemed to rarely surface in the media. He has been and will continue to be lauded for that brutal truthfulness of his (and rightfully so), but so much is being left out. As a good rule of thumb, when you find an artist of Reed's intensity, it extends into every facet of his work. For example, the anger of his heroin observations are matched stride for stride by the simple and perfectly beautiful honesty of his love songs. What?!? Lou Reed, love songs? Yeah... he could write 'em (check out "Love Makes You Feel" from his first album) and he could sing 'em ("Love Makes You Feel" from the first album, or "Perfect Day" from Transformer are amazing examples). The same devotion to simple honesty that makes "Heroin" a kick in the gut is not so far removed from the wide-eyed child-honesty of his affectionate forays... and it's a large part of what defines a complete artist.

That's not to say that all of his reflections on love were positive. Since the 1973 release of his Berlin album (one of his most poorly reviewed releases when it was new, by the way), I've had the most extreme love/hate relationship with the record as with any I've ever heard. Why do I love the album? Because, for an exploration of the absolutely hellish depths that failed love can plunge a human soul into, Berlin is one of the most brilliant albums that could be made. Lou Reed has proven time and time again with his music that even in the depths of misery there can be a certain artistic beauty found, and that attitude is taken to the extreme here; it's an attitude that I have to say I've embraced for much of my own writing and photography. Why do I hate the record? Because he did it so well. Because every successive song hits me harder. Because I've rarely felt hurt from music like I feel hurt from these songs. Because it's done so fucking well that it never fails to take me to places I don't care to visit often. It's that... good, I guess is the word... I don't listen to Berlin often; I probably hadn't heard it in a good ten years before listening over the past day, and it's still one of the most artistically brilliant and difficult listens I can think of, perhaps only ever equaled by Joy Division and their album Closer.

And yet, that's just another facet of the day/night that is Lou Reed. You know what else I rarely saw him get any credit for? His sense of humor! Nowhere is this more evident to me than on Transformer. While a lot of the credit for the amazing clash between the verbal and the sonic needs to go to producers Mick Ronson and David Bowie, I can't even begin to think of anybody besides Lou Reed who could have delivered this gumbo of razor rock, sideshow imagery, cabaret production and back alley attitudes with any effectiveness at all, much less made it the classic it is.*** I bought the album the day it was released and loved it immediately... but I wondered for a long, long time if there maybe wasn't something a little wrong with me because I spent as much time laughing with this record as I did thinking about it. I mean, seriously? Vicious, you hit me with a flower? Shaved his legs, then he was a she? A little sing-song cabaret number about a New York telephone conversation? Tubas? Freakin' TUBAS on a Lou Reed album? Brilliant! Made me laugh, made me cry, made me think, still does... and now I no longer think there's anything so wrong with any of that.

I can't think of too much he did in his career that I can find fault with. His last recording that I know of, Lulu (with Metallica) is to my ears, in a word... terrible. But, is there anything so horrible about a man approaching his seventies who wants to see what happens when you collide two railroad trains on a track? Gotta offer my respects for the effort. Even his most notorious effort, 1975's Metal Machine Music, holds a certain dignity within the framework of his attitude. For a work that's generally thought of as "unlistenable" (for those not familiar, the album is over an hour of nothing but electronically generated audio feedback; no songs, no rhythms, no progression, nothing but noise), there certainly are more than enough stories, opinions and legends to go around. I read that the album was an angry reaction by Reed to his record company's demand for another album to be written and recorded quickly in order to capitalize on the momentum he had regained with Sally Can't Dance. I read that Reed defended the work as a serious and intentional piece. I read that he admitted that the list of instruments in the liner notes is purely fictitious and intended as parody. I read that even though he considers it to be a very serious album, he was also "very stoned" when he conceived of and created it. I'm sure we'll never know the truth, and in reality, it's just not that important. For whatever reason, he made the album, he stood by it and he moved on.

That's not such a bad legacy. Thank you, Lou Reed, for making me think, for making me cry, for amusing and abusing my psyche. Thank you for the extremes of emotion you inspired in me. Thank you for sharing your visions of hideous beauty and carefully crafted truth. Thank you for elating me and for pissing me off. I'm thankful I have such a huge body of your work to keep referring to over and over again for the remainder of my own days. I suspect I will do so often... and I'll not apologize for how I react, just as I think you would have preferred it.

* * * * *
***Okay... maybe Tom Waits... wouldn't it be astounding to hear Tom Waits do his remake of Transformer?
* * * * *

By way of a postscript here... I actually once listened to Metal Machine Music all the way through in a single listen, sort of in response to a challenge issued by Lou Reed himself. When it was released and all the critical caca was hitting the printed fans, I read somewhere that he challenged anybody anywhere to listen to the record all the way through and then look him in the eye and tell him it was worthless. Oddly enough, through the swirl of noise and cacophony, I really did find some value to it. I occasionally enjoy true avant industrial music (Z'ev, Throbbing Gristle, Survival Research Laboratories) and this is certainly a solid companion to that movement; it even inspired an idea for a piece I want to compose and record someday. I wrote a letter to Lou Reed care of his record company; in the letter, I said I had listened to the album all the way through and would welcome the chance to discuss it with him face to face.

The rascal never answered my letter.

He started his career as the guitarist for one of classic rock's most successful early pioneering bands, began his solo career with five consecutive gold albums and has established himself as a guitarist, bluesman and producer of note... yet far too many people tend to dismiss Robin Trower as "that guy who used to sound like Hendrix."

Indeed, for all the musicians the rock press has ever done disservice to, Trower's name has to be high on that list. Hendrix influence? Undoubtedly; Trower himself notes that experiencing Hendrix in concert changed his approach to guitar playing, and both players are heavily influenced by the roots of American R&B. But a Hendrix clone? No way, and as such his early label as "The White Hendrix" is, to my ears, a complete misnomer. That's where the disservice lies - it sells him short, much like saying Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker were both blues guitarists... so they must sound the same, which would be unfair to both Waters and Hooker. Likewise here.

Trower, born in March of 1945, has actually been a working musician since 1962 (!!) when he formed a group that eventually became The Paramounts, a band that included Gary Brooker. They disbanded in 1966; Brooker went on to record the anthematic "Whiter Shade Of Pale" with Procol Harum, and Trower joined his old bandmate in 1967. He stayed until 1971 and appeared on the band's first five albums. Upon leaving Procol Harum, he formed a four piece band that included bassist James Dewar; the combo was short-lived and never recorded, but Trower retained Dewar (and added "lead vocalist" to his responsibilities), recruited drummer Reg Isadore and in 1973, the Robin Trower band was born. Isadore was replaced by former Sly and the Family Stone drummer Bill Lordan between his first two albums; this lineup remained consistent for four records, usually considered Trower's best known work - in fact, the first five studio albums of Trower's solo career all went gold. Rustee Allen (another Sly alum) was added on bass for the next three releases, which got Trower to the '80s. From that point on, with some thirteen studio albums already under his belt and his roots and style both well documented, Trower has followed an interesting musical path that has allowed him to both capitalize on his successes and further explore his love of blues and R&B.

When he collaborates, he chooses his projects well. Twice now, he has worked closely with ex-Cream bassist/vocalist Jack Bruce, resulting in two early eighties albums and another in 2008. The two seem to share very similar roots and passions in regard to American R&B, and they work very well together. Similarly, Trower has worked with Bryan Ferry as both a guitarist and a producer. On the surface, this seems like a very odd match... yet, both again share a deep felt love for similar musics and they work well together both in the studio and on stage. Trower got very high praise from Ferry in a 1995 interview I did with the latter, saying, "I really enjoy working with Robin. He's a real gentleman, and obviously he comes from the same generation as me, so even though we've used our musical influences in different ways, we have the same sort of musical education. We have a very similar grounding in black American music, both of us being big R&B fans. He has a lot of attack to his playing, a very passionate musician."

Ferry isn't alone in regards to high profile musicians offering their praises. On a CD reissue of an early Trower album, none other than Robert Fripp offered the following in the liner notes: "Robin Trower is one of the very few English guitarists that have mastered bends and wobbles. Not only has he got inside them, with an instinctive knowing of their affective power, but they went to live inside his hands. It is the rare English guitarist who has been able to stand alongside American guitarists and play with an equal authority to someone grounded in a fundamentally American tradition... I toured America in 1974 with Ten Years After top of the bill, King Crimson second, and Robin Trower bottom. Nearly every night I went out to listen to him. This was a man who hung himself on the details: the quality of sound, nuances of each inflection and tearing bend, and abandonment to the feel of the moment. Later, in England, he gave me guitar lessons." When Sly Stone's rhythm section hangs with you for years, when Bryan Ferry uses you as a musician and producer, when Robert Fripp seeks you out for guitar lessons... I'd say you're just a little bit more than a clone of Jimi Hendrix.

In addition to his collaborative efforts, Trower has released an impressive series of blues-based recordings that truly underscore his deepest affections, including a 2013 release entitled Roots And Branches (doesn't look like he's stopping any time soon!). His blues recordings garner near universal raves for the clarity, form and pure passion of his playing, and in my opinion he deserves every accolade and more. 

* * * * *

Music junkie that I am, researching these articles is a lot of fun for me, and of course the greatest pleasure comes from giving myself the luxury of listening to an artist's work as I research and write. The thought that kept coming to my mind over and over as I enjoyed Trower's work was, "I really do have to wonder how much the Hendrix schtick from the press hurt his career." I know, I know, five consecutive gold albums is nothing to sneeze at; neither is a comparison to Jimi, but I really, honestly believe that Trower is so much more than all that. Who really knows what Hendrix might have accomplished had he lived longer, but it's not difficult to envision a career path similar to Trower's, experimenting with various collaborations and exploring the roots of the music he loved. Including his work with Procol Harum and Bryan Ferry, I count THIRTY studio albums in Trower's career, and it's pure pleasure to take the time to listen to his chronological development. 

As a band, Procol Harum was indeed among the founding fathers of classic rock, and you can really hear Trower's development through the five albums he was a part of. By the time Broken Barricades was recorded, it felt like Trower had reached his peak within the group; PH was often a majestically near-artsy band, but Barricades was more guitar-driven than their previous releases. Being the Trower fan that I am, I guess it's no mere coincidence that it's my favorite album from that group. In retrospect, it also seems the perfect time for Trower to have gone his own way - I think both he and Procol Harum were able to continue developing more fully due to the split.

His post-Procol work has has blown me away on so many levels! When he goes power-trio, he exhibits a command of aggression and attack. When he does blues, I love his uptempo work for his incredibly melodic and tasty leads, and I really groove on his slow, deep passionate pieces. Now and then (and not often enough for me!), I hear good, funky nods that betray what must be an extensive knowledge of his soul roots (he references James Brown as a huge hero, with an appreciation for Brown's bridge between blues and rock 'n roll). He also does an excellent job of choosing musicians to surround himself with. While I'd love to hear him sing more (check out his lead vocal on Procol Harum's "Crucifiction Lane" from the A Salty Dog album; this man is a bluesman...), I also can't knock his choices for singers (which may also allow Trower more room to concentrate on his playing. I'd love to ask him sometime). It was a very wise move to make James Dewar his vocalist from the start of his solo days; Dewar was at times nearly as responsible as Trower for helping to define that early band's gruff-yet-sleek style. Furthermore, working with Jack Bruce is a win for everybody; again, they meld seamlessly together within an obviously shared vision, making me think that Bruce was a whole lot more of the reason for the excellence of Cream than he ever got credit for.

I wouldn't mind it at all if Trower decided some day to record an album of what he considers to be some of the soul/funk favorites of his life. With his perfect combination of know-how, ability and good old fashioned soul, I bet he'd knock that right out of the park. Then again, as I mentioned before - thirty albums and counting, an ever-continuing legacy of excellence in whatever he's pursuing at the moment... I strongly suspect that whatever comes next will be nothing but sheer delight.

Laniappe

I've seen Robin Trower in concert twice, once in Buffalo, NY (March, 1971) and once in Orlando, FL (March 1995); the first time, he was with Procol Harum on the Broken Barricades tour and the second time with Bryan Ferry on the Mamouna tour. I sincerely hope to see "Robin Trower" in concert some day...

For those who might like a quick little audio introduction to Trower's career, scoot over to Spotify or wherever and build yourself this 50 minute playlist for a peek at what the man can do. This is in NO way comprehensive, nor is it meant to be; it's also not meant to be a "greatest hits" compilation. I picked a few significant points in Trower's career and chose one or two tracks from each of the albums that I feel are representative of what he's capable of. It's a very nice listen, if I do say so myself!

• 01 Simple Sister (with Procol Harum, from Broken Barricades)
  
• 02 About To Begin (Bridge Of Sighs)
  
• 03 Lady Love (Bridge Of Sighs)
  
• 04 Some Rain Falls (Long Misty Days)
  
• 05 Messin' The Blues (Long Misty Days)
  
• 06 Roads To Freedom (Victims Of The Fury)
  
• 07 Victims Of The Fury (guess...)
  
• 08 It's Too Late (BLT)
  
• 09 Don't Want To Know (with Bryan Ferry, from Mamouna)
  
• 10 Just Another Day (Seven Moons)
  
• 11 As You Watch Each City Fall (What Lies Beneath)
  
• 12 Buffalo Blues (What Lies Beneath)

Broken Barricades was Trower's last album with Procol Harum, and it's the one where I feel his depth and influence were most felt within the band; completely classic guitar work on the track I picked. Bridge Of Sighs is probably his best known work; I chose two cuts that show a real diversity in his style of play and writing. Long Misty Days was right near the end of the era where he got compared to Hendrix so much; the first track I chose is about as Hendrix as he ever sounded, the second hints strongly at his future blues work to come. Victims Of The Fury is my favorite Trower album and I picked my two favorite tracks. BLT and Seven Moons were both recorded with Jack Bruce, and both albums give a terrific insight into how much Bruce really shaped the sound of Cream (look for a future Dinosaur feature on him!); these two tracks are an interesting daydream into what Cream might have sounded like with Trower as their guitarist. Mamouna was an important album for Bryan Ferry; the track I picked shows Trower's funky, soulful guitar and really showcases his American R&B influences.

In the early to mid 1970s, David Bowie had been Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and The Thin White Duke; by 1977, it seemed there was one thing he truly longed to be... and that was David Bowie.

Looking back on his discography, it's nearly unbelievable to comprehend the body of work he released in a single decade. Bowie's '70s was an avalanche of masterpieces: The Man Who Sold The World, Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs, Young Americans, Station To Station, Low, "Heroes" and Lodger, PLUS two live albums and one of the finest cover/tribute albums ever recorded (Pin Ups). The pace and intensity of that sort of creativity was only magnified by Bowie's own dedication to the characters he created; he was to rock theatre what Brando was to film. He didn't sing about Ziggy and Aladdin; he became them, mind, heart, body and soul. It's no wonder, then, as the decade rolled into it's last trimester that Bowie was exhausted, physically and artistically. When he moved to Los Angeles to record 1976's Station To Station, cocaine addiction also entered the picture. It was clear he needed a radical change in his approach to living, so he chose to move to Berlin; he was quoted as saying, "There's oodles of pain in the Low album. That was my first attempt to kick cocaine, so that was an awful lot of pain. And I moved to Berlin to do it. I moved out of the coke center of the world into the smack center of the world. Thankfully, I didn't have a feeling for smack, so it wasn't a threat."

Berlin was perfect on several levels. Many of Bowie's artistic/cultural interests have deep roots in Berlin, and the city had the added benefit of virtual anonymity for the rapidly-burning-out star. Bowie again: "For many years Berlin had appealed to me as a sort of sanctuary-like situation. It was one of the few cities where I could move around in virtual anonymity. I was going broke; it was cheap to live. For some reason, Berliners just didn't care. Well, not about an English rock singer anyway." A longstanding interest in German electronic music (he often cited Neu! and Kraftwerk as strong music preferences just before his move to Berlin) had to make the decision to live there even easier. All the elements were in place; his own natural brilliance, the desire to continue exploring new musical avenues, being surrounded with a cultural heritage that appealed deeply to him, the ability to be relatively anonymous... and so work on Low began.

It's impossible to put the brilliance of Low and "Heroes" into perspective without considering the 1977 music world for a moment. Electronic music was still essentially either a novelty or a genre reserved for odd folks, geeks and avant-guardians. Taking a peek at the top selling albums of the year shows the scene dominated by either "mainstream" classic rock acts like Fleetwood Mac, Boston, Bob Seger, and Steve Miller or the near peak of the disco and pop soul trends (remember, Saturday Night Fever was a 1977 release!). The closest synthesizers got to any mainstream acceptance was as flourishes in ELP or Pink Floyd albums or the already mentioned near-novelty status of something like "Autobahn." Artists who were using synths to make serious artistic music were few and far between, and those who did were not generally well-known. Bowie called on Brian Eno to work with him for the sessions (pretty much going with one of the best there's ever been in the field of electronics) and hired Tony Visconti to engineer and co-produce the album (regardless of how often it is incorrectly reported, Eno did NOT produce either Low or "Heroes").

* * * * *

I've long been one of the odd folks and geeks enthralled by electronic music, and even being very aware of the influences that led to this album (maybe even moreso because of just that), Low hit me right between the eyes on first listen... and some thirty six years later has never let up. What still astonishes me about both Low and "Heroes" is that both can be listened to and enjoyed to this very day and still sound incredibly contemporary. That's no mean feat, especially in the world of electronic music where falling prey to fads and gimmicks makes it easy for older recordings to sound... well, old. Not so with these releases; not only have they stood the test of time, but a critical listen now shows that a lot of foundations for a lot of music to come was laid in these recordings.

According to both Bowie and Visconti, Low was indeed reflective of a very low period in Bowie's life, and the overall mood of the album reflects just that without becoming drowned in moribund self-pity - an artistic achievement indeed! It's a near perfect example of what a collaboration between the right artist and technical person can produce; as much credit goes to Visconti for the stunning sonic achievement of these two albums as to Bowie himself. This is evident from Low's opening moments; the instrumental "Speed Of Life" assaults the listener with an explosive drum sound that honestly just hadn't been heard prior to the release of this album. Those huge, aggressive drums are augmented here (and for the remainder of the first side of the album) by a virtual jangle of guitars and keyboards; for me, one of the greatest strengths and fascinations of this album is the idea that these songs always sound like they're on the verge of just falling apart at the seams, yet they never do. The tension and passion are merged with rare mastery.

"Breaking Glass" continues the assault, this time with vocals. Even on my first listen, I strongly suspected that many (most? All?) of the lyrics to the album were spontaneous poetry, and researching the recording reveals that a lot of the album was an in-studio creation. That makes sense philosophically; it seemed that a lot of Bowie's artistic frustration may have come from being too thought-out, too precise, and so going into a studio with an idea of a feel that he wanted to convey without a specific means by which to do so would be both creative and therapeutic. Certainly, reading the lyrics to Low shows them to be essentially simple... yet somehow, they convey strong and lasting images, amplified by Bowie's performances. Knowing he was going through a very troubled period, lines like "Don't look at the carpet/I drew something awful on it" leave a lot of room for the listener's imagination to fill; likewise, there's plenty of a sort of vague-yet-specific distance to lyrics like "You're just a little girl with grey eyes/Never mind, say something/Wait until the crowd cries." Even "Sound And Vision," at least the best-known title from this album (Bowie reprised it for his box set release) seems to find him curious and confused about his own immediate future as he sings, "I will sit right down/Waiting for the gift of sound and vision/And I will sing, waiting for the gift of sound and vision..." The first side ends with another aggressive instrumental, "A New Career In A New Town," and perhaps the song's title is as telling as any lyrics could ever be. It's a wonderful bookend to the opening track, once again chunky and complex, everything held together with smoke and mirrors but remaining concrete through to the end.

Side two is a completely different album. Where the first side is seven quick-hit tracks with uptempo leanings, side two is four brooding instrumentals that obviously draw heavily on Eno's experience with dark electronic music. While "Warszawa" and "Subterraneans" both have vocals, they're non-lyrics that use Bowie's voice as another instrument to complement the tone and sombre feel of this music. Again, even on first listen, this was a sonic wallop that I couldn't get out of my psyche for months at the time... and have never, ever completely lost. As a rule, when reviewing music of this nature, it's easy to fall back on the "you'll either love it or hate it" decree, but to my experience, these pieces are a rare exception. Many is the time I've played this side to an initial negative response, only to be told that the moods and melodies have found a way to haunt themselves into memory, and could we give it another listen, please... It's as though the influence of the decadence and inherent sadness that permeates so much of German art found its way into Bowie's head and heart through these pieces. Still, for all the obvious melancholy, repeated listenings reveal rays of hope that shine through the gloom; if ever there was a blueprint for fighting to find the goodness in despair, side two of Low is the absolute prototype.

* * * * *

It's interesting to note that "Heroes" was released nine months to the day after Low, as if one was the child of the other. While I wasn't necessarily surprised that Low received generally good reviews, I was surprised that it found commercial success, and I've long wondered if Bowie was equally surprised. Regardless, he kept pretty much the same core crew together for the recording of "Heroes," and while Low was mainly recorded in France with only a little of the work done in Berlin, "Heroes" was start-to-finish completed in the latter city (in fact, the only one of the Berlin Trilogy to be completely recorded there).

Where Low was an incredible insight into the mind of an artist tired and confused, "Heroes" is a more aggressive approach to Bowie's creative doldrums. It sounds to me like Low was the therapy and "Heroes" was the beginning of fighting against the depression in order to defeat it. While the album is again a combination of uptempo lyrical songs and more introspective instrumentals, the songs seems better developed and more intentional. The ratio is also a little different; there are only three of the more brooding pieces here, all on side two, and even those are framed by two pieces way too structured to be included on side two of Low. Also, Bowie brought in genius guitarist Robert Fripp for the sessions. It was an interesting choice at the time; Fripp reportedly considered himself retired from music at the time the album was being made, and it was actually Eno who called him and invited him to play. Reportedly, Fripp's reply was, "Well, I don’t know because I haven’t played for three years, but if you’re prepared to take a risk, then so am I." Risk well taken and well rewarded; the aggressive guitar work adds a lot to the upbeat optimism of "Heroes" (and thankfully, Fripp did NOT retire from music).

This one gets in your face right away with "Beauty And The Beast." I highly doubt these pieces are spontaneous, lyrically; the ironic imagery throughout is simply too strong, too well thought out. Here, Bowie seems to be almost chiding the clash between his own creativity and depression as he declares, "Something in the night/Something in the day/Nothing is wrong but darling something's in the way... My-my, someone fetch a priest/You can't say no to the beauty and the beast." The attitude of challenging his sensitivity versus his stagnation is a constant theme throughout the album, but in a very healthy "time to beat this" sort of way. "Joe The Lion" has some wonderful vaguely surreal images that still seem to speak to Bowie's impatience with his own psyche, and the side-closing "Blackout" merges some of Fripp's most melodic work on the album with more of Bowie's superb lyrical explorations; "To the cage, to the cage, she was a beauty in a cage" leads to "If you don't stay tonight, I will take that plane tonight/ I've nothing to lose, nothing to gain... I'll kiss you in the rain." Is Bowie using images of forbidden romance as an allegory to his own conflicted feelings about his future? Perhaps the only real nod to utter hopelessness comes from "Sons Of The Silent Age." Philosophically, this track belongs more on Low than "Heroes," but sonically, it simply works better here. "Sons of the silent age pace their rooms like a cell's dimensions/Rise for a year or two, then make war... Sons of the silent age make love only once but dream and dream/They don't walk, they just glide in and out of life." It's the only real blow to the general optimism of the album, yet somehow Bowie makes it work and makes it fit, even considering the confrontational nature of the rest of the album.

All this, of course, is sandwiched around the album's iconic title track. "Heroes" is a performance that is even unique to Bowie's own storied and chameleonic legacy. Besides the power of the images (lovers in the shadow of the oppression of a wall, THE wall) his vocal work conveys everything from storytelling to hope to desperation. Contrast the optimism of the opening verse, where Bowie the Storyteller shares with near serenity that "We can be heroes, just for one day" with the climax of the song, where's he's pleading with himself and his lover, now nearly shrieking, "And the shame was on the other side/Oh, we can beat them, for ever and ever/Then we could be heroes, just for one day." It's almost the same lyric, but the meaning is so very different; it goes from a coo into a lover's ear to becoming an anthematic slogan for lovers who must fight for that love against all odds. Calling it Bowie's most powerful performance is probably an injustice, as he's had so many, but you'll be hard pressed to find this much emotion wrung out of words presented anywhere by anyone.

As with Low, side two is a different sort of album, though not as radically different as the first time around. "V-2 Schneider" is an instrumental, but sounds almost playful by comparison to Low (and, come to find out, is a bit of a tribute to Kraftwerk's Florian Schneider). The next three pieces ("Sense Of Doubt,:" "Moss Garden" and "Neukoln") are soundtrack-style instrumental pieces. Still, of the three, only "Doubt" hints at the overwhelming sadness of Low's second side; "Garden" has some Asian overtones sprinkled in that give it quite a bright, hopeful feeling and "Neukoln" has more of a sense of mystery to it than pure sadness. The side and album close with "The Secret Life Of Arabia," and it's an almost cheerful close to a couple of albums so deeply invested in emotional intensity. The tune is catchy, the lyrics don't really mean a whole lot and the production borders on pop-happy. It leaves the listener feeling hopeful and upbeat, and I truly think that's exactly what Bowie wanted here.

Now as then, Low and "Heroes" are an intensely emotional journey through one of the great artistic minds in the history of modern music, and are among the most telling and compelling looks into the agonies and triumphs of artistic creation you'll ever have the pleasure of hearing.

LAGNIAPPE

Bowie toured extensively to support these two albums (Lodger wasn't released until 1979, the first time in a decade he hadn't released studio albums in consecutive years), and I worked every contact I had to try and land an interview with him. I was told he was supposed to play Atlanta on the tour and that I should be able to interview him at that show... but the Atlanta date was cancelled, and with it went my chance at an interview (Bowie played Memphis on the tour; I guess I moved here too late). He remains one of the top three on my list of those I've never interviewed but would most like to (stated with the knowledge that my top three list has about ten names on it)...

The imagery in the song "Heroes" is so intense! It was gratifying in my research to find that the story of the song had some basis in real life. Quoted from an interview conducted by NME in 1977: "There's a wall by the studio - the album having been recorded at Hansa by the Wall in West Berlin - about there. It's about twenty or thirty meters away from the studio and the control room looks out onto it. There's a turret on top of the wall where the guards sit and during the course of lunch break every day, a boy and girl would meet out there and carry on. They were obviously having an affair. And I thought of all the places to meet in Berlin, why pick a bench underneath a guard turret on the wall? They'd come from different directions and always meet there… Oh, they were both from the west, but they had always met right there. And I - using license - presumed that they were feeling somewhat guilty about this affair and so they had imposed this restriction on themselves, thereby giving themselves an excuse for their heroic act. I used this as a basis…"

I found it surprising, especially considering the seemingly eternal popularity of the song "Heroes," that Low actually did better on the charts than "Heroes" did. Low hit #11 on the U.S. Billboard album chart and #2 on the UK chart; "Heroes" got to #3 in the UK, but only #35 in the U.S... Funny funny - Nick Lowe released an EP in 1977, which he released under the title, "Bowi."

James Douglas Morrison wanted to be a filmmaker and a poet; I believe in my heart and soul that if he HAD to be a singer, he wanted most to be a blues singer. L.A. Woman, the sixth and final Doors studio album (I have a hard time counting releases Morrison never knew anything about...), showed that he could have been a brilliant bluesman, an interesting compliment to already having established himself as a brilliant poet.

The late sixties were, of course, well noted for the predominance of anti-heroes in the music of the time. There was revolution in the air, there was LSD in the Kool-Aid and the music reflected all of it. Even for all that, The Doors were a pretty unique breed of anti-heroes. Their music was a revolution of its own; there wasn't really a lead instrument in the band, but if you had to name one, most would say they were a keyboard-driven band. Furthermore, they had no bass player, a rarity for any band, much less one who counted blues as among their many influences. Their compositions were an incredible mish-mash of stylistic influences - at various times, you could hear blues, touches of jazz, nods to hard rock and even classical stylings. Their lyrics had the uncanny ability to fluctuate between pop-culture common and writings that carried allegory and deep philosophical and literary references. 

Then there was Jim Morrison himself, perhaps the ultimate anti-hero. When he made the decision to live his life as an artist, everything I've ever read indicates that he was classic in every sense of the lifestyle - intelligent, extremely literate, a seeker's mentality, a man filled with equal combinations of self-loating and soaring ego, a self-destructive performer who hated his art as much as he appreciated it and was forever torn between wanting to elevate and destroy the foundations of his own music. Add to all that his iconic looks, his early sense of "rebel style" and a voice that could question, berate, educate and mystify and you have probably the only frontman who could have taken The Doors to the heights they reached.

Morrison was a hero to me for his words, his performances and his attitude, and all three are evident with L.A. Woman. The band roared into the '70s with Morrison Hotel, which won great praise for it's rawness and intensity. By then, Morrison's exploits (both within and outside of The Doors) were legendary; in 1970 alone, he toured with the band in support of Morrison Hotel, faced trial in Miami for "profanity and indecent exposure" during a 1969 concert (convicted, $500 fine, six months in jail, remained free on $50,000 bond), played the Isle Of Wight Festival (along with the likes of Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Miles Davis, ELP and Sly... dayam!!)... and recorded L.A. Woman. The band went back on the road to begin showcasing the album even before its release, but played only two dates. In December of 1970, Morrison had an apparent breakdown on stage in New Orleans, slamming his mic stand into the stage numerous times until both were severely damaged, then sitting down and refusing to perform for the rest of the show. It was his last public performance; the band, by "mutual agreement," decided that Morrison needed to retire from performing. In March of '71, Morrison took a leave of absence from The Doors; in April, L.A. Woman was released, and on July 3 of that year, I lost my hero.

* * * * *

What a swan song! If Morrison Hotel was lauded for its grit and ballsiness, L.A. Woman took it to a level not even the diehards could have expected. Easily their most blues-influenced album, the album (almost 49 minutes long, by the way - pretty lengthy by 1971 standards) kicks off with the in-your-face "The Changling," and by song's end, it's obvious that the band is feeling this one as much as they ever had. The vocal becomes more impassioned as the track progresses, and by the time it fades has become a classic Morrison scream-growl. "Love Her Madly" was, to my ears, the only blatantly commercial nod on the release; while the feel of the track doesn't necessarily fit the rest of the demeanor here, it's still a great single... and how good is an album when this is a (koff koff) "weaker" track?

"Been Down So Long" and "Cars Hiss By My Window" were a one-two punch that hit me hard the first time I ever heard them and still do to this day. These two songs were my realization that Morrison was possibly on his way to becoming one of the greatest white blues singers currently recording. I'd always been a casual blues fan, but it's not too much of a stretch to say that these two tracks are in a large way responsible for my diving into blues as a genre. "Down" is an aggressive and combative blues, a classic approach of confronting sadness with anger and resolve, and it almost immediately became one of my favorite vocal performances ever from Morrison. "Hiss" is a perfect follow, only cementing the blues legacy so obvious here, a slow blues, melodic and approaching steamy in its delivery. 

The album's title track (along with the closing "Riders On The Storm") re-established the epic storytelling abilities of the band. The songwriting in both cases ranks with the best efforts of The Doors and, not surprisingly, both have become classic tracks. To this day, they fascinate and enthrall in their ability to take a solid melody and combine that with words that tell a story and paint a picture. Both are tracks I've heard a thousand times in my life, and I doubt I'll tire of either after having heard them a thousand times more. It's worth noting that "Riders" has been inducted into the Grammys Hall of Fame for special significance to recorded music; while I don't put a lot of creedence in the Academy's judgement during their yearly awards, their lifetime achievement citations are generally solid, and it's good to have this piece so honored.

"L'america," opening side two, is an almost surreal photograph, an eerie look into Morrison's perception. This is my favorite lyrical piece on the album - when read, the words simple enough, but when presented against the contrasting musical backdrop (alternating between musical images of haunted houses and carousel horses) they most remind me of the near-mystical Doors that I fell in love with. "Hyacinth House" is a wonderful piece that balances beautifully between classic Doors vague imagery and the blues foundations of the record, enjoyable via interpretation or just simple listening. "L'america" and "Hyacinth" are another one-two punch, and do an incredible job of cementing The Doors' legacy as an insanely talented band not terribly restricted by style. 

I've always considered "Crawling King Snake" to be the clearest view into what Morrison wanted to be as a performer by the time L.A. Woman was recorded - it sounds to me like a man in love with the blues, giving his heart and soul in a classic performance. If you listen close, you can even hear his voice almost failing towards the end of the song, and I think that only adds to the effectiveness. "The Wasp (Texas Radio And The Big Beat)" is another piece of seminal Doors lyrical mysticism, full of stoned, immaculate images and probably my favorite pure poetry on the album. I've always loved how Morrison chose to narrate most of the track; his speaking voice had so much power and authority to it that it made the words all the more credible; his speak-sung lyrics always sounded to me like the ones he most believed in. 

Over the course of years, I've had little arguments with myself, sometimes thinking the order of the last three tracks should be rearranged to "Wasp," "Riders" then "King Snake."  The album still plays well that way, and I thought it was a nice analogy for the band's mindset of the time, highlighting some of their finest ever image poems one right after another and then closing with a strong blues...

...but in the long run, I think The Doors got it right, and that may well be the understatement of the century.

Lagniappe

Jim Morrison was my first ever rock 'n roll hero; when he died, it was the only time in my life that I sat and cried over the death of someone I hadn't actually ever met. 1969 was pretty much my year of discovery for music; 1968's Waiting For The Sun was my first Doors album (which I discovered just before the 1969 release of The Soft Parade; it was like getting two brand new albums almost at once) and I rapidly made my way backwards through Strange Days and The Doors. In high school, I toted Morrison's published book of poetry (The Lords And The New Creatures) with me like the religious kids carried their bibles, and my best friend in high school was the only other kid I ever met who had even heard of the book. We'd sit at break times and scour the pages, discussing passages in the writing and doing what we could to work Morrison's imagery and attitude into our own writing. As a senior in high school, my English and writing instructor was a very cool lady; she was quite aware of Morrison's work as a writer. I thought at first this worked against me in a big way - the only "C" I ever got on a writing project in my life was from her. I was trying so hard to mimic Morrison's style that I went overboard, and the "C" came with a note that said, "Morrison has already been published. If you ever want to be recognized as a writer, you better learn how to be you." Typically, I was mad as hell at her for a little bit... until I realized she was right. In that regard, I'm as grateful to Jim Morrison as to any writer I've ever admired; I got called out for trying to copy him (though I'm almost sure Morrison was unaware of that).




The original cover for L.A. Woman (vinyl, of course) was an excellent bit of packaging. The corners were die cut rounded and the yellow part of the cover was actually a piece of yellow plastic film. The picture of the band was printed on that yellow piece of film, which was glued behind a cut-out in the red part of the cover. I don't know for how long the original cover was manufactured, but later, the expense of producing the cover forced the record company to change it to a standard style printed cover, no cellophane. When I had my record store ('80s and '90s; we sold mainly used records), I used to get a pretty significant amount of money for pressings of the album with the original cover, often $25 or more - a "regular" copy went for $4...

From bluegrass to glam, from folk to progressive, The Strawbs musical journey has touched a lot of bases in their almost half CENTURY of existence. Yeah, you read that right - the band was founded in 1964 and though there have been enough personnel changes to fill a small phone book and enough shifts in style to baffle most musicologists, the band exists, records and performs to this day.

How odd was it for a British band in 1964 to aspire to be a bluegrass band? I couldn't find any other references to such in my research (and I'd be happy to hear from any of my bluegrass pals who know better), but back in '64, Dave Cousins founded The Strawberry Hill Boys. By 1967, however, the band's focus had slowly but surely shifted to their own material, drawing heavily on Cousins' excellent songwriting and strong influences from the rapidly emerging British folk-rock scene. In those days, Sandy Denny (well known for her later work with Fairport Convention and Fotheringay) was a contributing member of the band; they even recorded 13 songs together in 1967, but the band couldn't find a record deal and the album was essentially forgotten until the mid-70s when it was issued in an effort to capitalize on the later successes of both Denny and The Strawbs.

A little piece of music trivia - The Strawbs were the first UK artist to be signed to the very successful A&M (Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss) label. Their first two albums were heavily folk-influenced, and though A&M was an American label, the discs were only released overseas until a double-album re-issue in the States in 1975. The band received strong reviews for their first album which waned a bit with the second; while they played a lot of live shows, their record sales weren't yet impressive. Then the merry-go-round of musicians began. Trying to document the personnel history of the band is a yeoman's task indeed. If it were written in short, you might say that after their second album, Dave and Tony were joined by Rick, Richard and John; Rick was replaced by Blue, then Tony was replaced by another Dave; Richard, John and Blue left to be replaced by a different John, Rod and Chas; the other John and Rod were replaced by Robert and another Tony, though Tony II was replaced soon thereafter by Andy... and that (deep breath) covers the 70s... (Note: there's an excellent personnel history, including a chronological listing and a great visual timeline of the band's players at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawbs - there are some amazing names there, but be forewarned... it will take you a while to read it!).

Whether it was due to the constant flux of personnel or the incredibly diverse interests of Dave Cousins (the only constant member of the band), The Strawbs released a series of albums that were of consistently high quality and were well received; as a justified result, their legacy began to grow in earnest.  As the founder and only constant in the band, singer/songwriter/guitarist Cousins deserves a lot of attention and acclaim. His talents as both a performer and composer (obviously) span a lot of styles; as a vocalist, he can effectively use a very nasal style which would lend itself to a bluegrass band (and having heard some of the early recordings, they would have been a very good bluegrass outfit), can softly intone a gentler ballad full of emotion or can summon up power and passion when the mood and/or topic of the song needs such. Of course, those vocal talents would be less impressive without superb material to interpret, and Cousins has delivered more than his share of classic tracks to the world of music, another factor in being able to seal his and the band's longevity. It's always nice to have a wealth of acclaimed material to fall back on when you take it back out on the highway.

Once the 70s (and their most successful era, at least as public figures) had passed, the band remained generally active and creative. They essentially disbanded right around 1980, but reunited for an appearance on a Rick Wakeman television show (he's the "Rick" referenced above, by the way), which further resulted in an invitation to reform and headline the 1983 Cambridge Folk Festival. They did, and it was still a very good band. While they never again reached the heights of popularity they achieved during their classic years, the group gigged and recorded occasionally from that point forward. In 1993, they staged a "25th Anniversary Tour" in the UK, had something of a quiet period after that, reprised the success with a "30th Anniversary" bash in 1998 (which I would have LOVED to have seen - several of the bands noted line-ups performing outside on the same day... dayam!), and have, again, toured and recorded with some regularity since. Besides the obvious talent involved, The Strawbs have used their diversity to great results as well; they now perform in two distinct versions, an electric band (essentially the mid to late '70s version of the band) and as an acoustic trio. Since 2006, both versions of the band have toured, they've recorded and released albums and DVDs, they celebrated a 40th Anniversary, and show little sign of losing the desire and ability to continue enchanting a very devoted group of fans.

I'm admittedly one of those fans. I became aware of The Strawbs in the midst of what most consider their classic period, the vintage '70s material. In truth, for my money, the Strawbs had a four album run that rivals ANY in the recorded history of rock or classic rock - From The Witchwood (1971), Grave New World (1972), Bursting At The Seams (1973) and Hero And Heroine (1974) is a quartet of releases almost unmatched for that or any other era. Back when I was having to record my albums to cassette to listen to in the car, I would often make custom "best of" compilations of bands for road listening; when I tried to make a Best Of The Strawbs tape, I found that I wanted to use all but three or four songs from those four brilliant albums... so heck with it, I just taped them in their entirety, and was forever glad I did. This was the era that saw probably the greatest diversity in showcasing their talents. From The Witchwood ("A Glimpse Of Heaven," "The Hangman And The Papist") was right at the tail end of their first folksy era; Grave New World ("Benedictus," "Heavy Disguise") confused critics with a more powerful and produced sound - are they rock? Progressive? What's going on here? Bursting At The Seams ("Lady Fuschia," "Part Of The Union," "Tears And Pavane") continued in the neo-progressive trend, though still with doses of folk and mythical imagery; Hero And Heroine ("Shine On Silver Sun," "Round And Round," and the title track) took it a logical step further, merging synthesizers to great effect. This quartet of albums runs the gamut from powerful to gentle, from subtle and allegorical to bluntly aggressive accusation. 

Then, now, and hopefully always, I put The Strawbs on my short list of Favorite Bands Ever.

Difficult as it is to believe, Buddy Guy hasn't always been a household name. For nearly forty years, he was one of the best and most in-demand studio guitarists in the world of blues. Then, on the heels of an oft-repeated quote from Eric Clapton and an album that finally got Guy his much deserved notoriety, he became... well, Buddy Guy! This article was originally published on September 20, 1991 and was based on an interview I conducted with Buddy about a week before that.

Buddy Guy

Until recently, George "Buddy" Guy might easily have been called "the greatest unknown guitarist in the world," but on the heels of one of the smokin'-est blues albums in memory and nearly forty years of live and studio work... well, it seems that Buddy Guy is finally an overnight success!

Born in Louisiana in 1936, he was already gigging in local blues bars at the tender age of 17. A few years later, he relocated to Chicago in order to better showcase his talents and "take on all comers." Quickly befriended by Muddy Waters, he soon made his mark as the most in-demand guitarist in Chicago, recording with the likes of Howlin' Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson and nearly every bluesman of the era whose name has been elevated to legendary status. "Whenever somebody would make an album, they'd always say 'just get me Buddy,'" he recalls."They knew when they called me that I would come in and do what they wanted, which was to play good but not get in their way."

The experience of playing with such a wide variety of talent helped define his own creativity by not locking him into any one style. As one might expect, Guy became anxious to make a name as something more than a session guitarist. "I was thinking all the time I was in the studio that I'd someday have to get a style of my own, and all of a sudden all these super rock friends of mine were saying 'Buddy, I wanna play like you!' Shit, it took me forty years for someone to tell me I did have a style!"

Like every legend before him, he hit the road. In his most renowned incarnation as half of the Buddy Guy/Junior Wells duo, Guy made a fair living but was never really able to expand beyond small halls and nightclubs. He remembers, "That's hard 'cause you've got to play the house twice and we were getting cut short on the sets. I finally started feeling it 'cause people started saying, 'Oh, they're getting old, now they're not gonna play long.' People would say, 'Buddy, why won't you play?' I'd say that I wanted to play, but the owners were saying we had to cut it at forty or forty-five minutes between me and Junior.

"Now, that's not enough for the fans who think enough of you to come out and spend a couple of bucks. You're supposed to give them their money's worth. That's part of what's wrong with our society now. Nobody's getting what they pay for. We had to go our separate ways because I wanna play two hours, three hours a night, even four hours if necessary. And that's working fine for me now."

Since becoming a solo artist, Guy has played every major blues festival on four continents, opened a very successful club in Chicago, earned praise from peers, fans and critics alike... and yet somehow managed to remain criminally under-recorded. The few sessions caught for posterity were more often than not of poor quality, mainly due to a lack of empathy from the people responsible for the recordings. "I never got a chance to play my own ideas," elaborates the guitarist. "Throughout my career, I was in the studio doing the playing, but the producers in charge of making the records pretty much controlled everything. I lost a lot by not saying, 'Forget you. I'm playing Buddy or nothing at all.' I never did do that. Some guy would tell me to sound just like any of the other people playing, and I knew that just wasn't gonna make it, but I never did anything about it."

Finally, after years of lamenting the fact that he never had the chance to do the record that was inside him, longtime admirers Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck came to the rescue. "I went to Europe to get noticed again and got with some friends who were pulling for me. They put me in a room and told me not to play anything but Buddy and nothing else. Well... I got a few good licks out of it!"

Talk about understatement! The sessions resulted in Damn Right I've Got The Blues, an album Buddy Guy says he literally waited for twenty years to make. Beck, Clapton and Mark Knopfler are among the luminaries who lend a hand, with Beck making perhaps the most memorable contribution on a sizzling rendition of the classic "Mustang Sally." For the most part, though, it's the stuff that blues history is made of - a supremely talented guitarist just letting it fly. Barely stifling his pride, Buddy notes, "I keep hearing good things about my album, which has never happened before. I don't know... if I keep hearing all this, I think I'm gonna start getting excited." Is the end result everything he had hoped for? "To be honest, I know it's good but now I've gone and gotten superstitious. I refuse to listen to it for a while because I don't want to put a jinx on it. You can't go counting your chickens before they hatch. Tell you what, though... I figure in about ten more days, I'm gonna get a six-pack, grab my wife, head to the basement and, well, I'll get my enjoyment out of that record then!"

One might think that after such a long struggle for recognition (it's been over twelve years since his last album), Guy might become disillusioned with the music, but it simply isn't so. "I just don't want to let the blues die," he declares proudly, "and if I can have some hand in that, I'll be damned happy. Of course, after twelve years I was getting a little shaky. I was getting kind of nervous, but I wasn't gonna quit playing. I still had my fans inviting me to New York or Europe or Japan or Australia, and I was thinking that I could help keep it all alive by that means, by playing for a lot of people. I'm not afraid to tell anyone, 'If you don't want to like me, don't come see me,' because I intend to make you like me. That's what I've always tried to do in person. I try to blow you outta there if you come to see me. After Eric made the quote in one of the magazines that he thought I was the best guitar player alive - which I don't accept - then I felt a little pressure on me whenever I went out to play. But I've had kids come up to me after I play and tell me, 'You know, Eric didn't lie.' That feels good, and it's just people like that that keep you playing no matter what."

It seems a sure bet, then, that as long as there's a stage, a guitar, a few fans and people like Buddy Guy, the blues will never die. Characteristically, he's quick to point out that he's not the only one to think like that. "I think that we've got to thank people like the late Stevie Ray Vaughn and Bonnie Raitt, Robert Cray, Eric and Jeff, because you know whatever they do is gonna be good and gonna get listened to. That helps everyone. That keeps the blues alive." So in a field seemingly filled to bursting with talent, what does a young practitioner of the blues need to know to succeed?

"Just like anything else, you gotta work hard at it. Don't ever think you're so good that you don't have to play! People want to see what you can do. I still compare the music scene to an athlete. You can have a superstar, but some other guy can be tearing it up while everybody's waiting around on this superstar. You can't stand around, because some other cat's gonna come along who will win a lot of games, you know? I think you gotta get out there and show 110% of yourself. If you believe in yourself and can reach down for something extra to make the downs you're bound to hit into ups, you'll be just as hot as you wanna be."

Lagniappe

Buddy was an easy man to interview. He was personable, fun, and very very humble, and also had a ton of great stories about the myriad of blues people he had worked with. As I recall, my interview with him went on for well over an hour, and I sincerely wished that I had been given more column inches to fill. I also wish I remembered at least some of the stories he told so I could share them here. Upon hanging up, I had an immediate sense of being grateful for having spoken to a man who was a living, walking history book and was genuinely pleased to share that history.

Of course, I had to ask him about Eric Clapton's quote ("Buddy Guy is by far and without a doubt the best guitar player alive... If you see him in person, the way he plays is beyond anyone. Total freedom of spirit.") and it really, truly seemed to embarrass him. He asked as a favor that I not dote on that in the article (understanding that it needed to be mentioned). He said more than once that Clapton was a genuinely nice person and was too generous with his praise in that quote.

The photo is from the back cover of the CD booklet for Damn Right I've Got The Blues. It's the photo that was used to accompany the article when it was published. It was unusual to use a photo from a CD booklet, but we had two reasons for it - first, of course, it's a great photo... and second, the promotional photo we got from the record company was so badly damaged in the mail it was unusable! Thank the stars for good scanning skills...

Bob Dylan has written a lot of songs and made a lot of records. For my taste, this is by far the finest album he ever recorded. Blood On The Tracks, released in 1975, was his fifteenth studio album; since then (if you count Basement Tapes and his Christmas album), he has released twenty more studio recordings. I read a lot of music journalism, and for many Dylan albums, I've seen the phrase, "his best since Blood On The Tracks." However, I honestly don't once recall ever reading "as good as" or (perish the thought!) "better than" Blood. That alone is quite a tribute.

It's probably only fair to admit that I missed out on the early rise to notoriety of Bob Dylan. I was seven years old when his debut was released, and still only eleven by the time Blonde On Blonde (now my second favorite Dylan album) came our way. My earliest years discovering rock were dominated by textural and progressive-ish bands on the one hand and by early hard rockers on the other, and all of my "folkie leanings" back then were eaten up by Simon and Garfunkel. It was already the early seventies when I got around to giving proper homage to the Dylans, Mitchells and Cohens of the world; needless to say, I had a lot of catching up to do. Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid was the first "new" Dylan album I paid attention to while it was still new, followed by Dylan and Planet Waves. Considering his already-glimmering legacy to that point, it was probably the worst possible time to jump on the Dylan train; I doubt I'm alone in thinking that those are among the weakest albums he released. I remember a lot of discussions back then among Dylan fans as to whether or not he had any more great albums left in him.

Then... POW! Blood On The Tracks.

I've read so much about the album; the making and re-making of most of the songs, the debates about whether or not it's autobiographical and/or a self confession (Dylan says no, son Jakob says yes, and I'm not about to spar with either one of them), plenty of long discussions about "Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts," and in truth, very little of that ever played into my passion for this record. At the core of it, these are simply beautiful songs, both sonically and lyrically. It's easy enough (and warranted) to talk about Dylan the poet; very few in history and even fewer in music history have been able to wring so much emotion and imagery out of the English language. Blood was the album that made me aware of Dylan's abilities as a tunesmith; the melodies throughout the album are haunting for their beauty and simplicity. For me, one of the things that makes this such an effective album is that the songs work so perfectly together as a whole - it's an incredibly silky flow from track to track - and yet stand equally well on their own as individual songs. The consistency of the album is even more interesting when considering it was recorded in two different sessions a couple of months apart in two different cities (New York in September, 1974 and then Minneapolis in December). 

Several of my all-time fave Dylan songs are contained here. The album's opener, "Tangled Up In Blue," is one of those perfect Dylan classics, every bit as good a poem as it is a song, and the lyrics are a permanent part of my memory now. "Idiot Wind" is one of the best vocal performances by anybody ever; that trademark, knowing sneer as he wails, "I-i-i-i-i-idiot wind, blowing every time you move your mouth..." takes an already great lyric and elevates it to classic. The album's closing tracks, "Shelter From The Storm" and "Buckets Of Rain" almost feel like one song to me; the similarity in analogies and the lilting delivery of the lyrics make this perhaps the best one-two closing punch of any Dylan release.They're two of the tracks I play most often as individual songs outside of an album listen.

Picking my personal highest and lowest points on the album is a cinch. "If You See Her, Say Hello" is not only my favorite Dylan song, it's one of my favorite songs ever, period. The melody is stunningly beautiful and superbly produced, the lyrics completely tear at my heart, and Dylan's vocal on this track is so honest and so sincere that it still makes me hurt to hear him sing it... even after having heard it a thousand times. Conversely, "Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts" is the only song on the album I'm not always completely overwhelmed with. It's probably the most often discussed song from the album, and I think that had a little something to do with making it my least favorite track here; I honestly don't care who the characters are supposed to represent, and if I'm not completely in the mood to hear it, it's as close to tedious as the album ever gets. All that said... it's still a stunner of an epic, and to have to be that nitpicky about a track to even find a hint of something negative to say only speaks again as to the brilliance of this release.

Perhaps the greatest factor in the legacy of this album is the absolute timelessness of the themes. It matters not whether it is or is not about Dylan and his life and family; the heartbreak, the hurt, the longing, the musing as to the whys and hows of relationships ending... these are all topics common to everyone everywhere. They're the ultimate fodder for a master of words at the top of his game, and whatever the inspiration was for these songs, Bob Dylan nailed them as nobody else could. It's a perfect record.