Archive for June, 2014

It never gets easier

Posted: June 22, 2014 in Dog reviews, Miscellaneous, music, Record reviews, Writing
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Cleo at her command post
This dog is guarding the house.

We had to put our dog Cleo to sleep yesterday. She had been gradually losing control of her back legs, but her descent had accelerated and she was spending more time just sitting, inspecting the grass around her and taking sensor readings of the air. It was five months to the day since I first saw her wobbling at high speed around the pen where she was being held. How can one undersized corgi become an oversized part of your life in just five months?

On her last day, Cleo slept on the bed, ate lots of treats, rolled in the grass, took a few steps on her favorite trail, charmed one last stranger, and (briefly) chased a squirrel. That would be a good day for most humans. I’ll miss the war she waged against the chickadees in our backyard, the way she swam through the undergrowth in the forest, and how she would kick me awake at 3am because she was dreaming about chasing down a moose. Like most of us, in her dream life she was invincible.

Cheryl Strayed wrote in Wild, “The universe takes things away and never gives them back.” But the universe also gives you gifts. Cleo was a gift to us in a dark hour, and we’ll never regret taking a chance on her.

Cleo's tulip parade 041414
Tulips on parade.

Horace Silver, 1928-2014
Horace Silver was my favorite jazz pianist, though I didn’t discover him until his 1996 release, The Hard-Bop Grandpop. The man was a jazz institution and I came to him very late in his career. Two earlier albums that I know and can recommend are Blowin’ the Blues Away (1959) and especially Song for My Father (1964). RIP.

I was dreamin’ when I wrote this/forgive me if it goes astray
Let’s change the mood here. The Prince Project is on hold (just when were getting to the most notorious albums) because I am once again participating in the Clarion West Write-a-thon. I’m not going to blog about it because doing that last summer was insane. Instead, I’m signing off. See you on August 2. Enjoy your summer!

Random Pick of the Day
The Beatles, Revolver (1966)
Four things strike me as I listened to Revolver after many years of not listening to it:

One is that The Beatles embarked on 14 separate explorations of new musical pathways and brought each of them home in a concise 2-3 minutes. Arcade Fire or Pink Floyd would still be playing.

Two is that the album begins with something as mundane as taxes and ends with the Tibetan Book of the Dead. (Do the Tibetans read any fun books?)

Three is that “She Said She Said” would fit into any alt-rock radio playlist in 1986, 1996, 2006, and probably in 2166.

Four is that The Beatles’ experiment with Indian music is like punk’s flirtation a decade later with reggae – interesting, but only to a point, which in The Beatles’ case will come the following year on Sgt. Pepper.

A must-own album. But you already do.

It’s you I really wanna drive

Posted: June 12, 2014 in music, Record reviews
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Dirty Mind
Prince
1980

Chapter 3 of the Prince Project. I really should’ve thought of a better name for this.

Here we are with Prince’s third release, Dirty Mind. In just three seconds short of 30 minutes, Prince creates an irresistible dance album and, by my guess, the first sexually explicit (yet still funny) mainstream album.

I never was the kind to make a fuss
When he was there
Sleepin’ in between the two of us

He played almost every note himself. And he was just 22!

Although Dirty Mind has more rock to it than his first two releases, it’s still a disco album – the best ever recorded. It’s as if Prince has mastered all the disco idioms and can now not only play them flawlessly, he can do whatever he wants with them.

“Dirty Mind,” “Uptown,” and “Partyup” are seamless, unstoppable, and oh-so-danceable. “Dirty Mind,” the opener, is guaranteed to pump up your jam. “Uptown” is everything The Trammps wanted to do with “Disco Inferno” but couldn’t because they were basically not very good. “Partyup,” the closer, is an anti-war dance number. The writing on this one isn’t exactly J.D. Salinger (“They got the draft/I just laugh/Fightin’ war is such a fuckin’ bore/party up”), but who expected this on a party record?

Prince doesn’t stay within the safety of the disco ball’s glittering glow, either. “Head,” the moving saga of a man who receives oral sex from a woman who is on the way to her own wedding (“I came on your wedding gown”), is R&B, while “Sister” shows that Prince had been listening closely to the Nick Lowe/Dave Edmonds roots-rock movement…though those guys never wrote about incest. “When You Were Mine” is a peppy number about the end of a ménage à trois that was covered most famously by Cindy Lauper on her debut and most obscurely by guys I vaguely remember from my first years in Seattle, Hi-Fi (on their 1983 release, Moods for Mallards).

Dirty Mind is the first Prince album that demands to be played loud. Now this is what I call sweatin’ to the oldies.

What I was doing at 22: The only thing I’m going to mention is that in the year I turned 22, I saw an amazing performance by Harlan Ellison. First he and his typewriter spent the afternoon in the window of the Avenue Victor Hugo bookstore on Boylston Street in Boston, writing a complete short story. That evening he gave a talk at MIT that lasted almost four hours (about the length of a Springsteen concert) and was never less than riveting. It went on so long that the buses stopped running and I had to walk four miles back to my apartment. I kept thinking, I could do that! I haven’t – but I’m still game to try.

Rolling Stone’s best albums of 1980:

Winner:
London Calling – The Clash

Runners-up:
The River – Bruce Springsteen
Remain in Light – Talking Heads
Doc At the Radar Station – Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band
Le Chat Bleu – Mink De Ville

Random Pick of the Day
Killing Joke, Wardance (1980)
This album scared me in 1980. It was murky and nihilistic. It made their cousins, Gang of Four, sound about as scary as the Partridge Family. Thirty-four years later, it seems clear and crisp. Killing Joke is in complete control. I’d buy Wardance just for one song, “Requiem.”

 

Orchestral maneuvers in the hood

Posted: June 11, 2014 in music, Record reviews
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A few nights ago, the Seattle Symphony and Seattle homey Sir Mix-A-Lot performed the latter’s 1992 magnum opus , the subtle and insightful “Baby Got Back.” (“My anaconda don’t want none/Unless you got buns, hun.”) How can anything this stupid be this funny?

AllMusic.com critic Steve Huey writes:

Seldom does a novelty song spark such a fierce cultural debate: “Baby Got Back” touched on hot-button issues of race and sex with a cheerful, good-natured crudeness that was guaranteed to offend. Was it a token of appreciation for women whose body types were rarely given positive cultural attention, or just another sexist objectification? Was it an indictment of narrow, white-dictated beauty standards that left many black women (and the black men who loved them) out in the cold, or did it simply build up one type of woman by denigrating another?

What “Baby Got Back” has got is unimaginative writing and lots of it (700+ words). The music isn’t even as good as MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This,” and frankly, no one cares that he won’t let you touch it. Plus the dancers in the official “Baby Got Back” video are models. They don’t actually got back. That’s right, in a video celebrating women with generous derrierès, you can’t actually show women with generous derrierès. Federal law.

But I’m seriously impressed that after 22 years, “Baby Got Back” is so closely integrated into the mainstream that when Sir Mix-A-Lot encouraged the ladies in the audience to join him onstage, about three dozen stepped right up. They were mostly white, mostly in their twenties, and they knew most of the moves from the video.

So give a cheer or two for Sir Mix-A-Lot, a rap pioneer and a very hard worker, for sparking this fierce cultural debate. I hope he sells lots of tickets for the Seattle Symphony. But I doubt it.

Random Pick of the Day
The Breeders, Last Splash (1993)
The Breeders, a band led by the sisters Kim and Kelley Deal, follow the grunge pattern closely: the singing sucks and the guitars sound like you’re standing in front of a speaker with a punctured diaphragm.

But The Breeders are way above the alt-rock standards of the 1990s. Amid the stop-and-start of the fuzzed-out guitars they deliver a sweet pop song, “Divine Hammer,” which is easily within the range of The Bangles, and a semi-sweet, “Cannonball.” “Saints” is a gleeful grunge tune built on the chassis of “A Hard Day’s Night.” And “Drivin’ on 9” is, of all things, country.

Last Splash is a rare example of an album that gets better as it goes along.

Random Pan of the Day, sort of
Various artists, Songs of the Civil War (1991)
Not officially connected to the Ken Burns’ Civil War series of 1990, but definitely inspired by it. I owned this CD but only played it once. It was too sad. Also, our ideas of what a song should sound like have radically changed. With Judy Collins, Hoyt Axton, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Richie Havens, Waylon Jennings, and plenty of other expert interpreters. The 25th and last track is “Taps.”

 

The wild, the innocent, and Prince

Posted: June 10, 2014 in music, Record reviews
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Prince
Prince
1979

I believe I missed Prince’s second album when it was released, as I was occupied with punk and the theory that it would be easier to initiate sexual relations with punk girls compared with disco girls. (No.) Too bad, because this is a fine disco disc. The one lasting number on it is “Sexy Dancer,” but it should last awhile, and the other songs would be popular if played as a unit at a party…if you could go back and host that party in 1979.

The album’s closer, “It’s Gonna Be Lonely,” shows some emotional depth in its story of a break-up. One verse hints at something much deeper:

I betcha thatcha never knew
That in my dreams you are the star
The only bummer is that you always want to leave
Who do you think you are?

Prince was 21 when he released this record, his second, and you can hear him struggling with the disco/smooth-R&B straitjacket – just as you can hear the 24-year-old Bruce Springsteen struggling to break out of folk-music prison on his second album, The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle (1974).

On Prince, you can’t tell if Prince wants to be Lionel Ritchie, Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes, or some kind of disco conglomeration. They’ve even photographed him on the album cover to look like Ritchie. But on his third album all hell will break loose, just as it did with Springsteen.

What I was doing at 21: Living in Boston, writing bad science fiction. This is already getting old.

Rolling Stones’ best albums of 1979: The Rolling Stone critics got lazy that year. They gave Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps album-of-the-year honors and cited no runners-up.

It’s not as if they had a small pool of candidates: How about Pink Floyd’s The Wall, The B-52s’ The B-52s, The Clash’s The Clash, Graham Parker’s Squeezing Out Sparks, Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall, The Police’s Reggatta de Blanc (the Coldplay of their day), Donna Summer’s Bad Girls, The Buzzcocks’ Singles Going Steady, or even Sister Sledge’s We Are Family? And look at all the crap, led by Foghat, Foreigner, and The Captain & Tenille?

They called Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk” the single of the year. What where they smoking, and can I have some?

Those critics better shape up for 1980.

Random Pick of the Day (but it was close)
Various artists, Day Tripper: Jazz Greats Meet The Beatles Volume 1 (2009)
Two standouts, both on piano: Ramsey Lewis’ “Day Tripper” and McCoy Tyner’s “She’s Leaving Home.” Guitarist Wes Montgomery gives “A Day in the Life” the atmosphere of listening to records at midnight with the lights off. Unfortunately, at the 4-minute mark of this 6-minute song he gets up to get a drink and trips over The Moody Blues.

The rest of this disk explains why there was no Volume 2.

Random Pan of the Day
Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1962)
Recorded in 1959 for the French film, but not released in the USA until 1962. “No Problem” is a terrific tune. Unfortunately, you get four versions of it on this disc, as well as two versions each of two lesser songs, “Prelude in Blue” and “Valmontana.” There are only 10 tracks on Les Liaisons Dangereuses and eight of them are variations of each other. The repetition wore me down.

 

Let the Prince project begin

Posted: June 8, 2014 in music, Record reviews
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For You
Prince
1978

Prince Rogers Nelson had already consolidated his name to Prince by the time he released his debut in 1978. The only reason to listen to this album is that Prince was only 19 when he recorded it in 1977. Much of it sounds like second-string disco; “Just As Long As We’re Together” made me think of Tavares and Ohio Players. “Soft & Wet” tries to be sexy, but the most daring thing about it is the title.

The only song that hints at what lies ahead is the closer, “I’m Yours,” a rock/dance hybrid, and even that one didn’t exactly challenge Hall & Oates for radio domination. At this point, Prince can’t even out-punch KC & The Sunshine Band. But that day is fast approaching.

What I was doing at 19: Living in Boston, attending Boston University as a journalism major, writing bad science fiction. I read 53 books, my second-highest season total, though I might’ve done better in grade school when I raced through all the Peanuts collections. I don’t know – I didn’t start my lifetime reading list until the summer I turned 16.

Rolling Stone’s best albums of 1978:

Winner:
Some Girls – The Rolling Stones

Runners-Up:
Darkness on the Edge of Town* – Bruce Springsteen
Running on Empty – Jackson Browne
This Year’s Model – Elvis Costello
Road to Ruin – The Ramones
Misfits – The Kinks

* My friend Andy Krikun bought this one when it was released, took it home, played it, memorized it, and told me the next day it was “a Faulkner novel.”

Random Pick of the Day
Salvatore Bonafede Trio, Sicilian Opening (2010)
Italian jazz pianist who occupies the sonic terrain between the hard bop of Horace Silver and the Peanuts playfulness of Vince Guaraldi. His free-style version of The Beatles’ “Blackbird” is the highlight. He also covers “She’s Leaving Home,” and improves on it by simply omitting the lyrics.

For Salvatore, The Beatles “have got in my life tiptoe.” Hat tip to Loyal Reader Laurel for unearthing this delightful quote.

Random Pan of the Day
Röyksopp & Robyn, Do It Again (2014)
Röyksopp is two guys from Norway. Robyn is a gal from Sweden. Together they make dance grooves from a deep freeze. The synthesizers will take you back to the 1980s; Robyn’s voice will jerk you back to today. There are only six tracks on this release and most of them run on too long and are not actually danceable.

If you listen to a lot of electronic dance music, you’ll recognize many of the effects. “Do It Again” is the main attraction, but Robyn, who has a global following, has done far better (“Dancing on My Own” and “Get Myself Together”).

 

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