When I’m in the middle of a dream/stay in bed, float upstream

Posted: June 3, 2016 in music
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Black Tie White Noise
1993
Black Tie White Noise Extras
2003
David Bowie

If I’m dreaming and I’m not satisfied with the dream I’m in, I rewrite it. I rearrange the plot and reinforce the dialog. When I’m awake, I do this with movies and TV shows. You’ll know it if I do this with you in conversation because I’ll give you new pages to read. I’ll advise you on where to stand and maybe suggest a wardrobe change.

A few nights ago I dreamed that someone had hired me to play drums for David Bowie. This was for an album Bowie had already recorded. (It was a dream, OK?) I was so concerned that I stopped the dream (I was still dreaming while I stopped the dream) and demanded to know which album. There are some that don’t interest me. There are some that could stampede Donald Trump’s hair. At least one should be stored in an ice volcano on Pluto.

I was also concerned about my ability to play. Though I’m competent (or at least annoying) with two pencils on a conference table while I’m waiting for a meeting to start, I haven’t played the drums since I was a teenager. My parents’ plan to keep me out of the Vietnam War was to have me learn to play an instrument. Then if I were drafted into the army, the Pentagon would assign me to a band. Simple. Why didn’t everybody do that?

I thought the drums would be easy to learn, but a year of instruction made it clear that I was never going to be a drummer, not even on a bad Bowie album. I turned 18 just in time for the last draft, but none of us from that year were called up. Today I serve my country as a blogger. It even says “Blogger” on my uniform.

Bowie’s version of The White Album
One thing we bloggers fight about when we fight about music is an artist’s best album, worst album, and last great album. Bowie almost managed all three in the same decade. His best albums live in the 1970s. His last great album was Scary Monsters in 1980. His worst album lurched into the daylight in 1987 – the unfortunately named Never Let Me Down.

After that one, Bowie barricaded himself in his Fortress of Silentude for six years. He opened the 1990s by marrying a model and stabilizing his life. David and I must be like chocolate and peanut butter because this was almost exactly my experience around that time, not counting all that stuff about music.

Bowie’s next album was Black Tie White Noise (1993). BTWN is not a great album, a return to form, or an innovation. It’s something I don’t associate with Bowie: It’s fun. It’s his most fun album.

BTWN has its quota of menace and paranoia, but even when it’s dark, happiness lurks behind every shadow. Happiness springs from his extraterrestrial sax playing (producer Nile Rodgers said that Bowie “painted” with the sax rather than played it) and from the chaos of musical styles on this disc: rock, pop, dance, terrific covers of Cream’s “I Feel Free” and Scott Walker’s “Nite Flights,” two symphonies for his new wife, Imam, and one avant-gardey track for of all you self-conscious hipsters.

Bowie issued several new versions of this record over the next 10 years, removing songs and adding others (including “Real Cool World,” which he wrote for the movie Cool World). You could theorize that with all this fiddling, Bowie was trying to improve the original pressing. I say that’s just a theory. I say it was too much fun not to.

Black Tie White Noise Extras, a collection of dance remixes, was released on the 10th anniversary of the original. BTWNx dropped five of the original 12 songs, added “new” tracks, and remixed all of them, some more than once. I loved most of the first record and I love most of the remixes.

(I don’t know why, but nobody changed a note in the only blank in this bandolier: the avant-gardey “Pallas Athena.” Here are all the words:

God
Is on top of it all
And that’s all it is.
We are praying.
Athena, Athena
Athena, Athena
Athena, Athena
Athena, Athena
etc., etc.

This stinker, which I admit has a kick-ass drum track, somehow survived every lineup change since 1992.)

This is a fun record in any version. It doesn’t matter which you choose, just choose already. As Kirk said to Balok in “The Corbormite Maneuver”: “We grow annoyed at your foolishness.” Or was he talking to Trump? Maybe I’m dreaming.

Random Pick of the Day
EMF, Schubert Dip (1991)
Hard rock with a scoop of hip-hop and a bedrock of danceability. “Unbelievable,” an unbelievably happy rock song, hit #1 in the U.S. and the U.K.

Schubert Dip is notable for “Unbelievable” and for the unstoppable expression of just being alive as only five guys in their 20s can express it. The first two tracks, “Children” and “Long Summer Days,” jump at you like puppies that haven’t had their walk today. The rest of the album sags – a 25-year-old can only go so far on all that natural energy – but come on, you can’t say no to an album that includes audio clips of T.S. Eliot and Bert & Ernie.

Random Pan of the Day
The Pretenders, Packed (1990)
Most of the album sounds like Don Henley. That’s OK for Henley, but Chrissie Hynde can do better. Her cover of Hendrix makes me dislike Hendrix. Pack this one away.

 

Alarmed

Posted: June 2, 2016 in music, Record reviews
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Electric Folklore Live
The Alarm
1988

If in 1988 you had wanted to make a movie about U2’s early years, you could’ve hired The Alarm to play them. They were Welsh, not Irish, but they were all inspired by The Clash and were intensely righteous. The Alarm sounded like U2. They sounded like U2 on the day they strummed their first note and I’ll bet they sound like U2 today. Middle-aged U2.

The Alarm were good. They weren’t built for a marathon, like U2, and they weren’t able to evolve, like U2, but they could be magnificent in a sprint. Like U2. Plus the gentlemen in The Alarm had serious hair.

The Alarm

Electric Folklore Live is The Alarm’s answer to U2’s Under a Blood Red Sky (1983). On the first three tracks they go head-to-head with U2’s legendary live album and emerge with a draw, including one first-class pop song: “Rain in the Summertime,” a bouncier version of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” (by, of course, U2).

Sadly, Electric Folklore has three more songs, and the quality drops like a ball rolling off a table. Well, that saves time! Once you’ve played the first half of Electric Folklore Live, put that record down and go check out two other songs by The Alarm: “The Stand” and “Sold Me Down the River.” Then I recommend you go directly to the album that The Alarm failed to record but U2 did: The Joshua Tree (1987).

If The Alarm came to Portland and played the Oregon Zoo Amphitheatre, I would probably go. The tickets would be way cheaper than tickets to U2.

Random Pick of the Day I
Siouxsie & The Banshees, Kaleidoscope (1980)
If you want an artist who can whip up a mood of despair and sometimes carry a tune, Siouxsie is your girl. I enjoy these glimpses of hopelessness because I’ve spent so much of my life working in corporate America. Feeling buoyant, joyful, vivacious? Give Kaleidoscope a chance to let some of the air out of your life.

Random Pick of the Day II
John Cougar Mellencamp, Uh-Huh (1983)
John Mellencamp’s early career was a struggle. His record company changed his name to Johnny Cougar and forgot to tell him. Sorry, kid, our bad. All of his early albums feature glamour-boy photos of him as if he were David Cassidy’s smarter younger brother. Critics dismissed him for sounding like Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Bob Seger, and The Rolling Stones. I refused to buy his records. How do you survive such a storm of disdain?

Mellencamp can’t write as insightfully as Springsteen, Petty, etc., and thanks to my boycott he was practically living out of a cardboard box. But he was persistent. By 1983 he had managed to sneak his real name onto his albums. Critics were reconsidering his work. Even I started to like him.

Uh-Huh is a good place to start some Mellencamping. It has some solid songs in the first half, particularly the opener, “Crumblin’ Down.”

Random Pick of the Day III
R.E.M., Life’s Rich Pageant (1986)
Once or twice a year I trip over Life’s Rich Pageant and I ask myself, How did I get here? How do I work this? This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife! Then I ask myself, Why do I own this record? It packs several things I dislike inside one jewel case:

  1. Music by R.E.M., the most self-important, humorless band of the 1980s. (USA division – U2 takes the title in the U.K.)
  2. Michael Stipe’s monotonal, monocultured voice. You get more emotional nuance from Weird Al singing “Another One Rides the Bus.”
  3. The song list is hard to read plus it’s in in the wrong order double plus it doesn’t mention the one song that was a hit.

But then I start to play it and by the time I get to the last track I’m eager to hear the first one again. R.E.M. had an immense talent for being boring, which is why I forget them for most of the year. But it’s hard to imagine an ’80s Hall of Fame jukebox that doesn’t include at least half of what’s on this disc, including “Cuyahoga,” “Hyena,” “Begin the Begin,” and that hit I mentioned, “Superman” (the one song they didn’t write and that Stipe doesn’t sing).

No Trump jokes tonight. I was making myself ill.

 

Almost famous

Posted: June 1, 2016 in music, Record reviews
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Boomtown
David + David
1986

David Baerwald and David Ricketts were Californians with musical roots in Bruce Springsteen’s The River. They called themselves David + David on Boomtown, their only album.

David Baerwald and David Ricketts should not be confused with David Whitson and David Phillips, two Texans who also recorded one album: the country-rock A Song for You. Those Davids called themselves David & David.

David + David and David & David should not be confused with the David and David who are two guys at my postcard club. Those are way other Davids.

David + David’s Boomtown is a chronicle of folks going nowhere during the Reagan years. Springsteen and David + David are good at observing losers, but only Springsteen can find their nobility. Springsteen’s people may be headed for defeat, but they’re going down in a last-chance power drive. David + David’s people are slipping quietly into that dark night.

Time has not helped this record, unless you swoon over synthesizers. As singers, the Davids are serviceable. They don’t take chances, except once when they rap, but it passes quickly. They’re the infielder you send into the game in the sixth inning when your regular guy pulls a hamstring. And the song “Ain’t That Easy,” sung from the point of view of an abusive boyfriend, is creepy. The romantic violin doesn’t help.

However: The writing often pops. On “Swallowed By the Cracks,” the line “We would talk through the night/about what we would do/if we could just get started” is a descendant of Pink Floyd’s “No one told you when to run/you missed the starting gun.” On “Heroes” they rhyme “bad guitar players” with “dewy-eyed teenage dragon slayers.”

The opening track, “Welcome to the Boomtown,” briefly broke into the Billboard Top 40. It’s the kind of song that college radio stations adore…for a couple of semesters. It’s also the only song I know with “succulent” in the lyrics:

So I say, I say welcome, welcome to the Boomtown
Pick a habit, we got plenty to go around
Welcome, welcome to the Boomtown
All that money makes such a…suc-cu-lent…sound

I guess time travel really is possible, because after tripping over “Welcome to the Boomtown” recently, I not only recognized it, I was immediately transported to a drizzly night in Seattle in what must’ve been the late ’80s, waiting in the doorway to get into a Ballard club with Special D. The club was playing a mixtape, and “Welcome to the Boomtown” drifted out of the PA system like a lost soul.

This record is worth a listen. But maybe not on Date Night.

Naturally, the first name of the man who produced Boomtown was Davitt.

Same era, different results
Wall of Voodoo, Call of the West (1982)
The Nails, Mood Swing (1984)

Wall of Voodoo’s specialties were alienation, hopelessness, and robotic laments. Singer Stan Ridgway sounded a lot like The B-52s’ Fred Schneider. When I first heard their song “Tomorrow,” I thought it was The B-52s. “Tomorrow” is a catchy tune with a galloping rhythm à la Men At Work’s “Down Under.”

Wall of Voodoo would be a whisper today, known only to ethnomusicologists, were it not for “Mexican Radio.” The guitar explodes off the starting block and the lyrics leave fun syllables in your mouth:

I wish I was in
Tijuana
Eating barbequed iguana
I’d take requests on the telephone
I’m on a wavelength far from home

The Nails had some serious skills, and Marc Campbell, their singer, had a big, distinctive voice. Their material was not up to their talent. They generally kept things dark and quirky, but they brightened up on “88 Lines About 44 Women.”

Deborah was a Catholic girl,
she held out to the bitter end.
Carla was a different type,
she’s the one who put it in.

There’s humor in this song, as well as motels, money, murder, madness, but it all ends sweetly:

Judy came from Ohio,
she’s a Scientologist.
Pomegranate, here’s a kiss,
I chose you to end this list.

Boomtown isn’t as good as Springsteen’s debut, Greetings from Asbury Park, but it showed potential. And yet nothing happened. Wall of Voodoo and The Nails together released 10 undistinguished albums. Why not David + David? Timing? Connections? The turn of an unfriendly card? “Mexican Radio” and “88 Lines About 44 Women” will live forever on comps of ’80s music. “Welcome to the Boomtown” will not.

My only thought here is that “Mexican Radio” propels and “88 Lines” makes you laugh. “Welcome to the Boomtown” haunts. When excavating the past, which would you’d rather be? Propelled, amused, or haunted? And that’s not haunted as in “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” but haunted as in somebody’s going to die. Alone.

Well, what’s fame anyway? David Bowie wrote a bitter song about it, but he said later that he didn’t care anymore. “I think fame itself is not a rewarding thing. The most you can say is that it gets you a seat in restaurants.” And the chance to lead the Republican Party. I’d prefer a seat in a restaurant.

 

Ain’t that peculiar

Posted: May 31, 2016 in music, Record reviews
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The Complete Motown Singles, 1959-1972
Various artists
2005-2013

In 2005, Universal (which owns Motown) began re-releasing every Motown single ever made. Volume 1 covered 1959-1961. The end of the series, volumes 12A and B, covered 1972. These 14 years set loose a tidal wave of 2,000 songs. When I heard about this, I was STOKED.

Sadly, most of the songs I swam through in this series are not good. For every famous track by Martha Reeves, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, The Four Tops, The Temptations, The Supremes, and Smokey Robinson & The Miracles there’s a Who’s Who of the ignored and the unknown. There are also plenty of lackluster tracks by Martha Reeves, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, etc. Some of those songs didn’t deserve obscurity (Barrett Strong’s “Money”), but most are right at home in that unlit cul de sac.

The first couple of volumes of this series are interesting in that they show how Motown founder Berry Gordy was willing to try anything to produce a hit song. (Even surf.) AllMusic.com opines that hearing the classics alongside the not-so-classics helps us to hear the former in their original context and appreciate them anew.

But the boys (it’s mostly boys) writing for AllMusic.com are nerds who are still living in their parents’ basement. They have nothing better to do than listen to 2,000 songs, most of which had the staying power of a Republican governor running for president, and argue over bass lines, back-up singers, and catalog numbers.

What I discovered with these comps, each of which has about 150 songs, is that I only have so much time left on this planet. I tried listening with deep attention, but it would take me months to digest 150 songs, and anyway I have to go to work in the morning. I started clicking Skip after 30 seconds or a minute of something that struck me as uninspired or derivative so I could wade ashore at last with a good song. And you know what? I appreciate the classics just fine!

I don’t want to skip 15 forgotten tracks to get to “Indiana Wants Me,” then do it all over again for “Ball of Confusion” and “War” (which I did with the 1970 edition). Sure, “Indiana Wants Me” is above average, but in this crowd it’s a towering inferno!

Today’s lesson: Producing a hit record is harder than Chinese algebra.

Any one of these volumes is worth a chunk of your time. They’re like your own personal radio station. Except if you owned this station, you’d yell at the program manager, “You’re fired!” Sad.

Random Pick of the Day, barely
Various artists, Blue Note Salutes Motown (1998)
Twelve Motown classics redone by a major-league lineup of jazz musicians. The results are mostly quiet…too quiet. The voltage meter jumps modestly with guitarist Earl Klugh’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” However, the female chorus tells us three times that they heard it “on” the grapevine. If you can’t get something as simple as a preposition right, I suggest you go back to your seat and study. Another guitarist, Charlie Hunter, tries to get his arms around “You Keep Me Hanging On.” He manages to let all the anxiety out of the song, plus he gets upstaged by the vibes player.

There are two tracks I can recommend, both originally from Marvin Gaye. The first is organist John Patton’s “Ain’t That Peculiar” (which is so good that Blue Note should salute John Patton). The second is “What’s Going On,” which belongs to the sax player, Adam Kolkers.

Two tracks aren’t much out of 12, but these two are good enough that I’m keeping the disc.

(Shot of redemption: This isn’t Motown, but Charlie Hunter triumphs with his cover of Nirvana’s “Come As You Are” on his 1995 album, Bing Bing Bing!)

 

I don’t know if the cotton is high, but our hedge sure is

Posted: May 30, 2016 in Miscellaneous, music, Record reviews
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As I write this here in the United States, we’re nearing the end of the three-day weekend devoted to Memorial Day. This is my favorite holiday, the holiday with an entire summer up its sleeve. The weather has been abfab and the house projects ended well, without the traditional two extra trips to the hardware store. The writing flowed, the dog charmed everyone at the beach, and as always the music is the best.

We trimmed two of the hedges that border our yard. Whenever I hack my way into these walls of vines, leaves, branches, and the mysterious dark spaces loved by raccoons I remember again why the Germans hid behind them on D-Day.

We sorted through shoeboxes of old photo prints, slides, and negatives. (What can you do with negatives today? Sew them into a Victoria’s Secret sarong?) Here’s a photo I found that stands in for my mood this afternoon. It’s Emma, our first dog, on a hike called West Cady Ridge in the Central Cascades of Washington, probably in late spring 1995:

The joy of being a dog
The joy of being a dog.

Of course, what’s a holiday weekend without a box from my Dad? Among the treasures I don’t know how I ever lived without were four spindles of string from the 1960s:

Spindle City
Free to good home, moldy atmo included.

All this string (one spindle holds twine) comes from an age when packages were routinely strung up. Pies, cakes, and donuts from a bakery always arrived in a flimsy cardboard box tied with string. Packages from department stores and even supermarkets were often hog-tied as if they might bolt if they had a chance. Four spindles of string – nothing’s getting away from me now.

If you live in the United States, I hope your Memorial Day weekend has gone at least as well as mine. I mean that sincerely, whether you support Donald Trump or a rational human being. Thanks for reading along, and welcome to: Big Week!

Random Pick of the Day
Miles Davis, trumpet, Gil Evans, arranger and conductor, Porgy and Bess (1959)
The highlights are what you’d expect – “Summertime” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So” – but the whole album is grand. Do you believe in heaven? If there is one and you end up there, you’ll be hearing this disc a lot.

Random Pan of the Day
Bad Religion, 80-85 (1991)
These Southern California political punks are harder-hitting than The Ramones, but 30 years on both bands have the same problem: Every song sounds the same. Thirty years have turned Bad Religion into a Weird Al parody of themselves. It doesn’t help that the drumming reminds me of Fred Flintstone’s feet slapping against the pavement to make his car go.

If you had lived in SoCal in 1980 through ’85, these 28 tracks would fill you with nostalgia; you’d be back on the streets in no time, though you might not remember what it was you used to do there. I couldn’t get all the way through them, but I must honor Bad Religion for the title of their 1983 debut: How Could Hell Be Any Worse?

 

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