Archive for the ‘Record reviews’ Category

Rhiannon rings like a bell through the night. That’s super annoying.

Posted: March 24, 2014 in music, Record reviews
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Just Tell Me That You Want Me: A Tribute to Fleetwood Mac
Various artists
2014

Mick Fleetwood and John McVie were hard-working members of John Mayall’s Blues Breakers. When they decided to form their own band (everyone who worked for John Mayall in the 1960s formed his own band), they discovered that their true skills were not playing the drums and the bass, respectively. The one thing they did better than anything was finding talent.

They started off by recruiting guitarist Peter Green. Peter Green is one of our unsung Jewish guitar heroes, the guy who was hired to replace Eric Clapton when Clapton left the Blues Breakers to form Cream. (What a résumé entry: “Replaced Eric Clapton while maintaining band productivity.”)

Green took Fleetwood Mac in a blues-rock direction, naturally, but Fleetwood and McVie were looking for something more lucrative. They got rid of Green and hired two singer-songwriters, Robert Welch and Christine Perfect, who began the band’s transition from blues to pop. (Perfect later married McVie.)

Fleetwood and McVie eventually ditched Welch and brought in two more singer-songwriters, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. That, as Ruk the android declared on a memorable episode of classic Star Trek, was the equation. In the mid-’70s there was no band bigger than Fleetwood Mac. Everywhere I went, everyone seemed to have Fleetwood Mac (1975) and Rumours (1977) in the plastic crates that held their records. I owned Fleetwood Mac and Rumours. Yes, it’s true. I spent money on Fleetwood Mac records, I didn’t change stations when Fleetwood Mac songs came on the radio, and I put coins in jukeboxes so I could hear really dumb stuff like “Monday Morning” and “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow.” You can understand why I’m a snob today. I have much to atone for.

(In 1992, the Clintons used “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” as their campaign theme song. Fleetwood Mac immediately reformed and went on tour. I will never forgive the Clintons for this.)

By the early 1980s I’d shaken off Fleetwood Mac the way a dog shakes off water after a swim. I came to believe that the final word on Fleetwood Mac was sung by The Rotters in their insightful single, “Sit on My Face, Stevie Nicks.” But then I encountered this tribute CD. Once again, I’ve been proven wrong. You’d think I’d be used to it by now.

Just Tell Me That You Want Me (this terrific title is a line from one of their worst songs, “Tusk”) is a collection of talent so deep that Beck isn’t even mentioned on the cover. He’s buried in the credits. Most of the interpretations are sincere, some are quite imaginative, and only a few are duds. Just Tell Me That You Want Me scores far higher than I expected.

What’s good
You can tell who the muscle was out there because 10 of these 17 songs were written by Stevie Nicks. For my money, the finest performance is turned in by Marianne Faithfull on Nicks’ “Angel.” Ms. Faithfull can turn any fluffy pop song into the King James Bible and as usual she doesn’t disappoint. Bill Frisell, another huge talent not noted in the advertising, plays guitar. He spends the last minute and a half of the song ascending into heaven. I rate this disc a Buy for “Angel” alone.

Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top provides the vocals on Peter Green’s “Oh Well.” You can hear the ghost of John Lee Hooker in his growls. The New Pornographers turn Christine McVie’s “Think About Me” into a fun Beatles romp. The Crystal Ark, a band I’ve never heard of, convert Lindsey Buckingham’s unlistenable “Tusk” into something I almost like. Two names I’m learning about, Matt Sweeney and Bonnie “Prince” Billy, create a beautiful cover of Nicks’ “Storms.” St. Vincent, a name you can’t avoid hearing these days, turns “Sisters of the Moon” (Nicks again) into a hard, almost dirty rocker. I never thought I’d connect adjectives such as “hard” and “dirty” with Fleetwood Mac.

Another band I don’t know, Best Coast, was assigned Nicks’ “Rhiannon,” Fleetwood Mac’s signature song. Though Best Coast stays close to the original, I’m highlighting this track because their singer, Bethany Cosentino, sings like a female Johnny Cash.

Of course, you can’t discuss Fleetwood Mac without complaining about something. For one thing, the cheap paper CD holder was designed to spill the CD out of its sleeve and onto the floor of your car just as you’re changing lanes. But I have something bigger in mind.

Robert Welch: Fleetwood footnote
Robert Welch was not an unappreciated genius and I’m not launching a crusade on his behalf. In 1994 he re-recorded his Greatest Hits and managed to de-improve all of them. But he wrote the only two original Fleetwood Mac songs I still like: “Future Games” and “Bermuda Triangle,” so I feel I should say something in his defense.

“Bermuda Triangle” is the closest this band ever came to a dance number. It would’ve been a perfect song for The B-52s, who would’ve injected 10ccs of humor. (Welch believed he was warning the public about a hazard to navigation.) This song is not covered on Just Tell Me That You Want Me.

“Future Games” is. I know that not all who wander are lost, but the boys in the band were lost in the dreamy, meandering “Future Games.” Still, this 8-minute song pre-dates Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon by a year and Pink Floyd acknowledges it as an influence. With better editing (or fewer recreational drugs?), “Future Games” could’ve been one of the decade’s classics. It’s good, OK?

In their cover, MGMT sings the lyrics through a vocoder to produce a computer-like voice. An old computer. Like Matthew Broderick/Ally Sheedy WarGames old computer. Neil Young tried this in 1982 with Trans and got nowhere, and he’s a god. Even Gary Numan, who is a computer, never tried to sing like one. MGMT made a huge mistake and I’m glad this record’s producers stuck this thing at the end so it’s easy to skip.

Don’t stop thinking about Fleetwood Mac
A tribute CD should show you an old band in a new light. Just Tell Me That You Want Me, like Various Artists for the Masses, the Depeche Mode tribute, accomplishes this mission. Despite “Future Games” and a couple of other miscues (“Silver Springs” sounds as if it was recorded in the bathroom of a bus station), let me just tell you: You want this CD.

Tomorrow night, Sins of the ’70s Week continues with: Chicago. Colour my world, dudes!

 

Antique Parent Land

Posted: March 23, 2014 in Miscellaneous, Record reviews
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In February, Special D and her best friend spent a week on Kauai. I spent five days with my parents in southeastern Massachusetts, where the temperature never left the frozen zone and I crunched across snow like stale pie crust. You can see who got the better end of this deal.

Happy cat roommates
Irving, Gloria, Elliot

Mom and Dad are doing well for two people on the high side of 80. The main question every hour is, “Where’s Elliot?” (The answer is, “Right there.”) They watch the Red Sox in the warm months and Downton Abbey in the cold months and Animal Planet and the World War II channel the rest of the time. They have their favorite breakfast place and their favorite lunch place and at night they’re cozy in the run-down house I grew up in.

Until recently they sold hardware and housewares from two tables at an indoor flea market. Dad has at last sold the business and I no longer have to worry about him hurting himself hefting heavy boxes or of getting an emergency call from the flea market owners that my mother or my father or both have collapsed and would I please fly across the country NOW. Plus the new buyer is carrying off all of the junk that filled two units in a warehouse and most of the basement of the house.

(Consumer report: If in the past I promised you a random box of mystery crap when I inherit my share of my parents’ estate, fear not. The house is still packed full of stuff – the cat never runs out of places to hide – and I will find you a 1960s clip-on tie or something brown or orange and made from velour.)

Always 1982 in Somerset
In the house of my parents it is always 1985.

Among the things my Dad has done that I have not is live in the same place all his life. In 1939, when Dad was 12, his father took him into a new lumber yard, started by a man who had failed as a tailor. Over the decades the lumber yard became a hardware store and branched out into appliances and moved a couple of times. The founder died and his four sons took over. The baby of the bunch, Lester, is the last man standing. He’s 90. The place is run by Lester’s son, who Dad told me recently is a “very nice boy.” I realized later that this very nice boy is at least my age.

Dad has visited this temple of tooldom almost every Saturday since he came back from the war. Generations of store employees have known my father. They’ve heard him talk Yiddish with the owner and they’ve brought him coffee. Sometimes he even helps a customer. Last week, Dad went to his “third place” – his equivalent of the barber shop, the pool hall, the coffee place, the gym – and told everyone he had retired. The staff was relieved, as they all had the same worries that I did, but they had tears in their eyes too and they made Dad promise to come back. He surely will. He loves the coffee.

They don’t make life like they used to
In 1946, flush with his last Army paycheck, Dad marched in and bought his first power tool:

drill

It takes a physical effort to use one of these metal-hulled tools. The metal is cool to the touch in the hottest weather. Drills from this era have no safety features. Modern drills have a trigger lock. That wouldn’t have been considered good sportsmanship in 1946. If the motor in a modern drill overheats, it shuts itself down. If the motor in a drill from the 1940s or ’50s overheats, it shuts itself down by burning itself up. Plus you have to buy a separate attachment to make it go in reverse. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Coming attractions
Visiting my ancestral home has stirred up old memories and unresolved issues. So for the next few days I’m going to take a look back. Starting tomorrow: Sins of the ’70s Week. Our first contestants: Fleetwood Mac!

Random Pick of the Day
Chet Atkins, Chet Atkins Picks on the Beatles (1966)
Amiable, with some interesting guitar work, but not too much interesting guitar work. The harmonica, drums, and piano all get their licks in, too. Top tracks for me are “I Feel Fine” and “A Hard Day’s Night.” “Things We Said Today” shows some easy-going bossa nova influence, and “I’ll Follow the Sun” sounds almost Hawaiian. With liner notes by George Harrison.

Random Pan of the Day
Various artists, Harpsichord Greatest Hits (1995)
Harpsichords are charming…for about 5 minutes. After that I feel as if Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy have gone outside, leaving me indoors with the more boring characters.

First down and forever

Posted: February 3, 2014 in Miscellaneous, music, Record reviews
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Years and years ago, when I worked at Seattle Weekly, when there were still wolves in West Seattle and humpback whales in Elliott Bay, when the grunge scene was an ordeal because it was always raining and the flannel shirts we wore soaked up the wet, before the motor car, before the wheel, before light rail, before we had to worry about the oral-sex requirements of sitting presidents, or reclining presidents, the editorial staff of our brave paper took turns writing the calendar section. For me that meant three tours of handling the sports listings.

My first tour was in the summer of 1989 and that went all right because I only had to work with baseball and I know baseball. I made fun of the Mariners (“When the meek inherit the earth, the M’s will be out of town”) and various college squads, reported on bike treks and road races and boat shows, encouraged people to play more chess, and ran a trivia contest that was won by a guy who used to work with my wife’s ex-husband.

My second tour, in 1993, was more of a challenge because baseball season was ending and football was beginning. I don’t care for football. I’ve been to one professional football game, in Boston, when the New England Patriots were still the Boston Patriots and they played in Fenway Park, home of the Red Sox. (This was not my idea – my Cub Scout pack dragged me along.) At one point during that icy afternoon I was handed a hot dog, which tasted as if it had been cooked in Nova Scotia and mailed to the ballpark, and like Charlie Brown I desperately wished there was a baseball game in front of me.

What was I going to do with football? Fear not! I had three advantages:

1) A book of football quotes I found at the library that I could use to fill valuable column inches. (“Football combines two grim features of American life, violence and committee meetings.” – George Will)
2) The Seattle Seahawks had an abysmal season in 1992, winning a mere two games. They were not poised to set the world on fire in 1993.
3) My trail had been blazed by a feature that ran in the 1980s in the Big Papers called “The Bottom Ten,” which focused on, if memory serves, the bottom ten.

Yes, the script wrote itself:

8 Sept. 1993: “The Raiders take time out from vacationing in Seattle to slice the Seahawks into lunchmeat. Next loss: on the road vs. the Patriots. At home vs. LA, 9/12 at 5. Catch the action on TNT or, if you have some consideration for your family, simply listen on KIRO-AM 710.”

15 Sept. 1993: “In Massachusetts, the Seahawks visit ‘Old Ironsides,’ Bunker Hill, Lexington and Concord, and, eventually, the stadium where the Patriots have gathered to shoot them full of holes. Next loss: on the road vs. the Bengals.”

Seahawks fans (the few who bothered to read this drivel) (the few who knew how to read) occasionally protested what I had to say, usually through an angry, anonymous fax. I wish I’d saved them. They had all been scrawled with felt-tip markers.

I should mention that I regularly lauded our basketball team, the consistently excellent Sonics (“The Sonics chase the whores of Babylon out of LA, then fly to Phoenix to extinguish the Suns”) while stick-checking our minor-league hockey team, the Thunderbirds (“The underpowered Thunderbirds are towed onto the ice to start the second half of the season”).

My last turn at bat, so to speak, was in 1994. In my final appearance in the sports pages I wrote:

“What have I learned? Chiefly, that if society is up to its neck in sports, it’s because sports answer a profound need in society. However, if an intense interest in the Seahawks is part of that need, then society is, without doubt, sick.”

Perhaps society is just a little bit healthier this morning, because yesterday the Seattle Seahawks reversed 38 years of misadventures and won the Superbowl. It’s taken them 20 years, but they’ve taught me a lesson: that back then I should’ve volunteered to write the sports listings every football season. I didn’t know how good I had it.

In December of 1993 I wrote of the Seahawks, “And now, a team that needs no introduction, mainly because no one wants to meet them.” What can I say post-Super Bowl except that it’s the Seahawks, our very own oceangoing raptors, who now fly the highest. They are at the top of their profession and the top of the world, or at least that part of the world that plays U.S. football. Congratulations to them and to their fans, who God knows have endured much. I certainly didn’t help.

Random Pick of the Day
Joe McPhee, Common Threads: Live at the Tractor Tavern (1995)
Mr. McPhee is too avant-garde for this listener, but in honor of the Seahawks I wanted an album recorded in Seattle, and we spent many New Year’s Eves dancing at the Tractor Tavern, and McPhee, a sax player, was influenced by a woman who played the accordion, so it had to be Common Threads. Believe me, if there was an album about the Seahawks or even the Seagals I would’ve picked that one.

Random Pan of the Day
Various artists, Denver Broncos: Greatest Hits, volumes 1 and 2 (both 2001)
These albums actually exist, featuring Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Molly Hatchet (never as good as Molly Ringwald), and of course John Denver. Get this crap out of here.

Don’t forget old acquaintances? Don’t tell me what to do

Posted: January 7, 2014 in Concert reviews, music, Record reviews
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Here’s one of my many life goals: To be all ready to go on New Year’s Eve. Not just dressed to go out – I always aim to have my desk cleared, my body humming along like Ken Griffey Jr. rather than Boog Powell, and my big projects for the year lined up and waiting for me to dive in.

Some years I’m ready, or at least I’m close. Not this year. I gave up yesterday and finally started 2014. Happy New Year, everyone! Thanks for reading this blog, even though I’m pretty sure I insulted you last year and I’ll insult you this year. I wish you all health and prosperity and plenty of good music in the next 12 months. Which brings me to my last musical topic of 2013, the band we saw on New Year’s Eve.

But first: When did New Year’s Eve become a public party? When did people start gathering in clubs, taverns, and dance halls to listen to loud music and drink like it’s St. Patrick’s Day?

F. Scott Fitzgerald mentions raucous New Year’s Eve celebrations in his books, but I can’t recall reading anything like that in earlier authors – for example, Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, William Dean Howells, Ambrose Bierce, or Stephen Crane. If H.P. Lovecraft liked to party, he kept it out of the papers.

Here’s another question: What makes a good New Year’s Eve band?

While Special D and I have extensively researched this topic, I’m not about to speak for her. Here instead are three of my ideas:

1)      Please practice, and not just the stuff you play the rest of the year. Learn “Auld Lang Syne.” Federal law requires you to play it at midnight so it would be a good idea to memorize a couple of verses, or at least write them down in big block letters.
2)      You must have a sense of humor; not everything is about you. Your audience will begin to evaporate at one minute after midnight. Maybe they want to finish the evening in their bathrobes eating ice cream; maybe they want to copulate at home rather than against one of your speakers. It’s not a comment on your musical talent.
3)      Original material is good, but on New Year’s Eve we mostly want to hear pop songs we already know. Don’t fret if you massacre one or two originals. That’s part of the fun. If you wreck them all you’ll antagonize an army of idiot bloggers.

Not a whiter shade of pale
When we suited up on New Year’s Eve, Special D added her boa to the fancy black number she wore. White Fang was pleased to be let out of the Nordstrom bag where he usually lives. He practically growled with antici…pation. We then headed uptown to a hall called The Secret Society where they had two bands and two djs waiting for us. The band I want to mention is called Brownish Black.

Where most bands might offer one unusual characteristic, say double the horn players or double the guitarists, Brownish Black’s lineup included three horns and two singers. That’s plenty of firepower right there, but they also fielded a bass player who played barefoot. His flashing white feet were particularly striking when he started marching in place. Rounding out the personnel was a drummer who looked like Justin Timberlake and a guitarist who looked like he’d left Pearl Jam due to artistic differences.

I was very impressed that this visually striking outfit met my first two requirements but totally trampled the third. Brownish Black plays R&B, soul, and funk that they wrote themselves. I believe I heard one cover, maybe two, in two hours of music. (They were probably able to get away with this because they only played until 11, when the second band took over.)

We loved their music, which I can only describe in terms of artists from the ’60s and ’70s:

If everyone in Big Brother & The Holding Company were black, and
if the leads were sung by Aretha Franklin and Peter Wolf, and
if you could borrow Rare Earth’s or James Brown’s horns, and
if everything were written by Sly Stone and Otis Redding,
you’d end up with Brownish Black. Plus the female singer loved White Fang.

I did hear one outstanding cover, but that was from the second band, Satin Chaps. For their opening blast they gave us a funky version of Deodato’s 1972 cross-over hit, “Also Sprach Zarathustra (2001).” They couldn’t quite translate Deodato’s jazz-fusion into dance music, but I have to give them a shout-out for trying.

Best conversation of the evening
This happened in the men’s room, of all places. Ladies, we don’t have substantive conversations in there. There was one urinal and there were several of us waiting for one inebriated gentleman to finish. When he turned and saw the line, he said, “Oh, sorry fellas, I was reciting poetry.”

MAN IN LINE: What poem?
POETRY LOVER: The one where the guy’s wandering in the fucking woods.
2ND MAN: “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”?
3RD MAN: Robert Frost.
POETRY LOVER: I love this club.

Robert Frost, by the way, was once arrested for dancing nude in a fountain on New Year’s Eve.

Random Pick of the Day
The Smiths, …Best I (1992)
The Smiths, …Best II (1992)
Twenty-eight songs by one of the most excellent bands of the 1980s.

I was looking for a job and I found a job
And heaven knows I’m miserable now

Morrissey says the right thing, always.

Random Pan of the Day
The Smiths, …Best I (1992)
The Smiths, …Best II (1992)
They could’ve done this on one disc! The filler they’ve included illuminates The Smiths’ biggest problem – how little their sound varies. Plus there’s no excuse for including “Oscillating Wildly,” the most boring instrumental in the history of boredom and instrumentals.

OK, it’s 2014. As The Smiths sang, “Please please please let me get what I want!”

Night of the hunter

Posted: December 22, 2013 in music, Record reviews
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The Biggest Prize in Sport
999
1980

When I moved from Boston to Seattle in 1980, I didn’t know anyone closer than Los Angeles. That was one of Seattle’s attractions. Soon after I arrived and found a job and a place to live, I turned my attention to finding a vital resource: women. To meet women, I developed a simultaneous, two-step strategy:

1) I joined science fiction fandom and went to lots of conventions.
2) I followed the local music scene and went to lots of cheap concerts in small clubs.

The fandom idea was a spectacular success – I eventually got a wife out of it, and a pretty gone one, too.

I had mixed results with the cheap-concerts maneuver. My best opening line, “What do you think of these guys,” which I had to scream into the ear of the woman of the moment against the full volume of whichever band was playing, most often led nowhere. But it did cause me to think of lines that women could use on me with 100% expectation of victory:

“What do you think of these guys?”
“How about this weather?”
“Are those Armani?”

Most of the bands I saw in those days were made up of males who were about as clueless as I was, but I did see some bands that really impressed me. One such was 999.

This British outfit formed in 1977 and is still on a stage somewhere, even though they’re older than dirt (as well as dust, mud, soil, and earth). They’re known for two milestones of first-gen punk, “I’m Alive” and “Homicide.” When I saw them, I was surprised at how many of their supposedly punk songs were danceable (like “Homicide,” which you can find on – can you believe this title? – Punk’s Not Dead – 30 Years of Punk).

999’s album The Biggest Prize in Sport doesn’t have either of these songs, but it’s the one I know best. With the exception of one track that’s devoted to reggae, a punk preoccupation at the time, it’s a rock ’n’ roll romp. “Hollywood” was close to a hit in the USA, but several songs on this set are even better, especially “Fun Thing.”

(Bonus: Their song “Lie Lie Lie” is a direct steal from Zager & Evans’ “In the Year 2525,” while “Stranger” owes a lot to The Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” by way of The Ramones and The Clash.)

The Biggest Prize in Sport is a great party album, but it probably won’t help you clueless guys pick up chicks. If they’re old enough to remember 999, they’re old enough to see right through you.

Same as it ever was
You may ask yourself, why didn’t I mention 999 this past summer when I was reviewing bands with numbers in their names? That question is easy to answer: I’m an idiot. Just ask most of the women I was hitting on in the years 1980 through 1982. In fact, not only did I forget a band I’ve actually seen and always enjoy, I also forgot all of the following:

3rd Bass
This crew of white hip-hoppers from the late ’80s/early ’90s were approximately 1,000 times better than their Caucasian contemporary Vanilla Ice. Their big hit was “Pop Goes the Weasel,” which samples the horns from Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer.” Sort of clever, sort of monotonous. The song I like is “The Gas Face,” which is hilarious, though I have no idea what it’s about (and I’ve read the lyrics twice).

Radio 4
An alternative band from the ’00s that I believe has gone out of business. Of course you can never tell about these things; 20 years later these bands are back on the road, in new costumes but with the same plots. Sort of like Star Trek movies. The one song I know by them is “Party Crashers” (2004), a rocker that has nothing to do with the Owen Wilson/Vince Vaughn movie The Wedding Crashers (2005).

The Five Stairsteps
A soul family act, contemporaries of The Jackson 5, who had a mega hit in 1970 with “Ooh Ooh Child,” usually written as “Ooh Child” even though there are definitely two “oohs” in this unforgettable song.

Hundred Reasons
There’s no telling who these guys are. They’re English, they were hatched in 2002, they play metal, they play indie rock, they remind me of Seattle in the ’90s, they seem to be hiding somewhere. I like them for their peculiar cover of The Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now?” and for “If I Could,” which sounds like Soundgarden flossing Candlebox out of their teeth.

Happy holidays, everyone! In our next, very exciting installment, I’ll report on the New Year’s Eve dance Special D and I are suiting up for and what we heard when the organizers unleashed their star attraction, DJ Hippie Joe.

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