Posts Tagged ‘Prince’

Play that funky music, white boys

Posted: October 19, 2014 in music, Record reviews
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The Best of Rare Earth
20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection
Rare Earth
2001

[Editor’s note: Last week I took on Prince’s Parade. Next up is Sign ‘o’ the Times, which requires more thought. Also, the World Series is about to start. While I’m doing all this extra thinking about Prince and baseball let’s take a look at a much simpler topic.]

Rare Earth was a white Motown group with three superpowers:

  • They were expert interpreters of black R&B.
  • Their drummer, who was 3’ taller than anyone else in the band, was a terrific soul-shouter.
  • They began every song like they owned the world.

Unfortunately, they had a fourth power: a knack for getting lost three minutes into every song. They were like the party guest who never knows when to go home. This talent is most apparent on their cover of “What I Say.” For the first three minutes they run Ray Charles right off the road. They played another four minutes. They shouldn’t have.

The Best of Rare Earth is a disc for the most passionate Rare Earth fan. That’s why the first song is not their powerful three-minute hit, “Get Ready” (1969). No, it’s the 21-minute wall of blubber that the hit was carved from, like a burger from a buffalo. I can’t believe that anyone other than a specialist would willingly listen to this track more than once. I have – when my friend Jeff invited me over to his house one day after high school, and again last week when the CD arrived from Half.com. A 500-year interval is about right.

OK, so Rare Earth was long-winded. The late-’60s/early ’70s was a time of gusty musical winds. How do our boys stack up against their contemporaries?

  • They lack the discipline of The Byrds (the live version of “Eight Miles High”), The Rolling Stones (“Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’ ”), and Santana (“Black Magic Woman”).
  • They’re loose like Creedence Clearwater Revival (“I Heard It Through the Grapevine” and “Susie Q”), but they can’t bring things to a satisfying close the way Creedence can.
  • However, they don’t play funeral marches like Mountain (“Nantucket Sleighride”) or psychedelic plasmodium like Steppenwolf (“Magic Carpet Ride”) or Quicksilver Messenger Service (“The Fool”).
  • Their musicianship is superior to Iron Butterfly (“In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”) and The Grateful Dead (just about anything).

Actually, they remind me of The Allman Brothers, even though the Allmans are closer to the blues and Rare Earth is closer to jazz. Neither group knows when to cry “Hold, enough!”

[Editor’s note: All of these bands are better than Yes.]

Racial profiling
I have serious trouble with six Caucasians singing an ode to their African-American swamp mama in the album’s closer, “Ma.” Nevermind that it’s 17 frakking minutes long. Forget the lyrics. (Ma raised 13 kids on her own, but always sent them to church because that’s what Pa would’ve wanted? Pa only showed up once a year for sex, but he was religious? Which religion? Ma should’ve shot him 12 kids ago.) The dudes in Rare Earth are white. They didn’t grow up in a shack and their lives were never restricted by the color of their skin. Why don’t they sing something from The Sound of Music?

Surely Universal could’ve used the space hogged by “Ma” for the radio edit of “Get Ready” and maybe some other track from Rare Earth’s best effort, Rare Earth in Concert (1971), which came in a cardboard sleeve that looked like a hippie’s knapsack.

Summing up
The Best of Rare Earth gives us “I Just Want to Celebrate,” “Born to Wander,” and “Hey Big Brother,” which fit just fine in any Classic Rock rotation. If you can handle all 11 minutes, “(I Know) I’m Losing You” is rewarding. It’s slower than but similar to the Temptations’ hit “Ball of Confusion.” Rare Earth’s producer, the late Mr. Norman Whitfield, co-wrote both tunes, as well as “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone.” (And “Ma.” Anyone can have an off-night.)

Rare Earth rocks harder than Blood, Sweat & Tears and plays better than J. Geils. You can go straight from Rare Earth to any jazz-fusion outfit of the 1970s. Give them a try. But be ready to push Skip.

Today’s Randoms: 1968 Jazz Edition
OK everybody. Here’s some vocabulary to help you talk like a jazz critic!

Set: The songs (or cuts) you intend to record.
Reading: Your cover of somebody else’s cut.
Date: If you record the cuts at a concert or all in one day, it’s a date.
Platter: The medium on which you record the set. Also called “sides.”
Wax: You wax the set onto the platter. As in “The best set he ever waxed!”
Lay down a groove: Play your part in a song so it can get waxed onto a platter.
Burner: Any Hammond B3 organist who waxes a funky platter has laid down a burner.

Thumbs-up
Frank Foster, Manhattan Fever
Fascinating sides from Foster, who played for years with Count Basie and led the band after Basie’s death. On Manhattan Fever, you get jazz you can almost dance to, some great soloing from Foster on the tenor sax, experimental stuff I skip no matter whose name is on the cover, and amazing drumming from Mickey Roker. I want to have his baby. Foster waxed some funky titles: “What’s New From the Monster Mill,” “You Gotta Be Kiddin’,” and the killer cut “Little Miss No Nose.”

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Jimmy McGriff, The Worm
Mr. McGriff played the Hammond B3 organ, so you know how I’m going to end this paragraph. The Worm is a funky, fun platter with many highlights, particularly the cuts “Keep Loose” and their reading of “Think,” which I only knew from Aretha Franklin’s performance in The Blues Brothers. (Aretha co-wrote the song.) “Girl Talk” is a slo-mo groove that deserved a good waxing. Nine musicians contributed to this set; the cumulative effect is of a swinging jazz orchestra. Burner!

Worth a mention
Hank Mobley, Reach Out!
Mobley led hard-bop marauders in dates with names like No Room for Squares (1963). They tried a more commercial sound for Reach Out! I can’t fault musicians who want to make some money for once, but I doubt the public tossed much bacon onto this platter. Mobley’s heart wasn’t in it.

But Reach Out! is notable for the band’s reading of The Four Tops hit of the same name – the only time I’ve heard anyone else give this cut a spin. Fun but klutzy, with people getting lost in the groove, particularly the drummer, who may have believed he was in another song. Lily Von Shtupp put it best in Blazing Saddles, when she complained that men were always “coming and going and going and coming…and always too soon!”

 

Women not girls rule my world

Posted: October 12, 2014 in music, Record reviews
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Parade
Prince & The Revolution
1986

If I were a sensible person, I would’ve listened to Prince’s complete works first, identified continuing themes, drawn some tentative conclusions, and then, armed with this global perspective, returned to his debut and started the project.

NFW. I didn’t do any thinking at all, I just started bloviating as soon as I cued up track 1 of his debut, For You. Here I am eight albums later and I have outrun my personal Prince database. I only knew two songs on Parade and things aren’t going to get any better with his next 200 albums.

Parade is another soundtrack; this movie is called Under the Cherry Moon. Prince wrote the music, directed, and took the starring role as a gigolo. Of course he played a gigolo. I’ve always wanted to list “gigolo” as my occupation on my tax forms, but my tax preparer does not favor this plan and my wife has raised key objections. Under the Cherry Moon is another film that will never invade either hemisphere of my brain, although if there’s an afterlife, I suspect they show Prince’s films on a continuous loop.

Parade marks the high point for The Revolution and their influence on Prince’s records. (I’ve avoided writing about Wendy Melvoin, Lisa Coleman, and the many other talented musicians, mostly women, Prince has worked with because that would be a whole other project.) But if their influence here was to direct Prince toward a cabaret style that varies between pretentiousness and the aural equivalent of an eye test where everything is out of focus, then it was definitely time for Prince and The Revolution to break up. Which they did, after this record.

Some of these songs are boring. I had never connected the words “boring” and “Prince” until I heard “Under the Cherry Moon.” I can’t make it to the end of that one and it’s not even three minutes long. So instead let me point out the songs that are not boring, because they almost save Parade. And I don’t want to make The Revolution into the fall guys here, because they had a hand in the better tracks, too.

“New Position”
Shows what Prince can do when he strips out the orchestra and all that other frou-frou stuff. The lyrics are straight out of the ZZ Top planet, but ZZ Top could only dream of being this funky.

“Girls & Boys”
The B-52s if they’d been trapped in the wild and raised by David Bowie.

“Mountains”
This song is awesome. I’ve read that critics in 1986 complained that Parade was too “European.” What did they mean? Where were these critics from, the Ottoman Empire?

I mention this because “Mountains” reminds me of the music of a gentleman named Peter Godwin, who actually is from that place called Europe. Godwin had a couple of dance-club hits in 1982, “Images of Heaven” (banned video of naked women pretending to hang from crucifixes – that is so cool) and “Baby’s in the Mountains.” His disco, which was built on sedimentary layers of synthesizers, is not bad, though the lyrics never rise above Hello Kitty. Allmusic.com calls his first solo effort, Images of Heaven, “an interesting synth-pop artifact.” That’s what people will call me after I’m dead. Fun fact: Godwin’s voice is close to David Byrne’s.

In “Mountains,” Prince has taken Godwin’s “European,” shallow disco sound and improved it 500%, though not the lyrics, which barely budge from middle school.

“Kiss”
I have about six Prince songs that are my #1 favorite. Like this one. “Kiss” may be the best booty call of the last century – sexy and romantic. Rolling Stone ranks it 464 on its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. This makes me sad, because “Smoke on the Water” ranks higher on their stupid list. Once again, Prince demonstrates how to write a hit record and save money by not hiring anyone to play bass.

“Anotherloverholenyohead”
This is the funniest song here, at least to me, because “Anotherloverholenyohead” sounds like Prince making fun of Yes and their absurd dance hit, “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” OK, he probably didn’t set out to make fun of Yes and I’ll bet he hasn’t devoted more than 10 seconds of precious brain time to them in his life, which is more than I can say for myself. But this is still pretty funny.

Parade is not Prince at his best, though there are some astrophysical moments here. I give him credit as always for his willingness to try something new. I can’t imagine what he’s about to throw at me. I should’ve peeked.

1986 Scoreboard
Parade didn’t place in the Rolling Stone sweepstakes, but the critics voted “Kiss” the best single. Their readers voted for Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer.” Here are the critics’ winning albums:

Winner:
Graceland – Paul Simon

Runners-up:
So – Peter Gabriel
Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band Live/1975-85 – Bruce Springsteen etc.
True Stories – Talking Heads
Strong Persuader – The Robert Cray Band
Raising Hell – Run-DMC, whoever they are
Life’s Rich Pageant – R.E.M.

The readers voted for Bruce for the second year in a row. Their runners-up:
So – Peter Gabriel
Life’s Rich Pageant – R.E.M.
5150 – Van Halen
Invisible Touch – Genesis

Today’s Randoms: Female Debut Edition

Thumbs-up
Keyshia Cole, The Way It Is (2005)
Ms. Cole might be the model for Ke$ha and other urban-dance-contemporary-fake-R&B horrors. She didn’t mean it! She doesn’t have Beyoncé’s voice, but how many people do? This record is not for me, but it’s definitely for someone – I can hear how good she is.

Thumbs-down
Lykke Li, Youth Novels (2008)
Some striking music here, particularly “Complaint Department,” but I can only take so much of a woman in her 20s singing like a 13-year-old. The late Amy Winehouse would’ve blown through this set like Comet Hale-Bopp.

I report, you decide
Lorde, Pure Heroine (2013)
Ella Yelich-O’Connor was 16 when she recorded Pure Heroine. The list of good teenage pop stars is short: Aretha, Stevie Wonder, Steve Winwood, the Everlys (just barely), Simon & Garfunkel (as Tom & Jerry), Esperanza Spaulding (I’m guessing here), and Mozart. The list of bad teenage pop stars is long and I refuse to type any of their names.

In which camp does Lorde reside? Her lyrics sound interesting but deliver little; that’s not necessarily a drawback in the pop music game. Musically, she’s as slick as Steely Dan, as calculated as any boy band. Everything about this record was designed to suction the money out of your PayPal account, but it’s done with such class and skill that I listened to nine of the 15 tracks before I decided it was getting monotonous. Lorde can sing, that’s for sure.

If I can stand it, you can. Play it.

 

 

And if the elevator tries 2 bring u down, go crazy – punch a higher floor

Posted: October 5, 2014 in music, Record reviews
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Purple Rain
Prince & The Revolution
1984

Purple Rain is the soundtrack to the movie of the same name. This soundtrack rocketed Prince to the level just below worldwide godhood – an orbit occupied at that time by only two North Americans, Michael Jackson and the ghost of Elvis. (Madonna joined Michael and Elvis later that year when she unleashed Like a Virgin.) Purple Rain has some slow spots. But when it’s good, it’s hammer-you-like-Mjölnir good.

As a critic, I should do my homework, but I was never good with after-school assignments. I haven’t seen the film. As much as I love this guy’s music, I know that Prince’s real topic is Prince. I can handle that on an album but probably not with visuals.

But it occurred to me last week when I saw Boyhood that I should do a soundtracks week, and if I do I might revisit this issue. I already have the following films lined up: Purple Rain, Stormy Weather, Almost Famous, Footloose, Backbeat, The Wiz, The Crow, The King and I, Fast Times At Ridgemont High, Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, Dazed and Confused, Romy & Michelle’s High School Reunion, Krush Groove, ’Round Midnight, Rocky Horror Picture Show, High Fidelity, Chicago, Kansas City, Escape From New York, Meet Me in St. Louis, Viva Las Vegas, Head, Shaft, Great Balls of Fire, Where the Boys Are, Never on Sunday, all of the Batmans (or at least the one scored by Prince), anything where they play AC/DC’s “Back in Black” or “Highway to Hell” before the big battle, and Amadeus.

[Editor’s note: My wife has asked me to mark on the calendar the weeks I’ll require for this project so she’ll know when to fly to Kauai.]

On Purple Rain, “Let’s Go Crazy” kicks things off in typical kick-you-in-the-posterior, kick-things-off Prince fashion. I can only borrow a phrase my late father-in-law learned back in the 1940s when he wanted to express his appreciation for an attractive woman: “What a tomato!”

I often skip “Take Me With U” and “The Beautiful Ones.” They’re too earnest. But I don’t skip “Computer Blue,” which is funky, danceable, and (I think) told from the point of view of a man who lives inside a computer. He’s kinda blue. This is another song that David Bowie would’ve killed for 30 years ago.

“Darling Nikki” is sex. That’s all. You don’t dance to it, you scare your parents with it. An aspirational number for every gender, particularly female-type persons who grew up under the sway of Madonna or (God help you) Britney. The final minute is dumb. It was dumb in 1984 and it’s still dumb in 2014. There. It had to be said.

“When Doves Cry” has no bass player and doesn’t need one. How many confessional, soul-flayed-open, bass-less songs that compare the singer to his father and his lover to her mother go straight to #1? I like Prince best when he’s more light-hearted, but I can’t help liking this song.

“I Would Die 4 U” is a good rocker, but it’s really the set-up for “Baby I’m a Star,” which goes nova within seconds. This is one of the songs I want played at my memorial service.

Hey! Look me over
Tell me do you like what you see?
Hey, I ain’t got no money
But honey, I’m rich on personality

OK, big finish
And finally, “Purple Rain.” For once, Prince ends rather than begins an album with the title track. I suppose this was the music for the triumphant, light-washed and love-filled final scene in the film, and I suppose if I’d been in the theater for it, it would’ve given me chills. All 9 minutes of it. Listening to it as I have all these years without the movie in front of me, I always wish it were shorter. Well, it definitely sets a mood, and there’s a guitar onslaught halfway through that would’ve caused Huey Lewis or Night Ranger to spontaneously combust. Send the violins off to somebody else’s house and I’d be a lot happier.

It was with this record that I finally recognized the twin messages of empowerment and reassurance in Prince’s lyrics. I heard this 20 years later in Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way.” When I launched this blog after one of her concerts, I wrote that she was “Prince in a bikini.” I shouldn’t have been so flippant. Lady Gaga is not one of the many young women Prince has mentored, but she’s definitely his heir. Also, Prince has probably worn a bikini.

You knew this was going to happen
I should’ve figured that when I started out to review every Prince album ever made, he’d strike back by making more. Sure enough, he has a new album. If I had chosen Sir Paul instead of Prince, the same thing would’ve happened.

Scoreboard
Just as 1999 ran into the buzzsaw of Thriller, this year Purple Rain was overwhelmed by Born in the USA. Not many albums can stand against Born in the USA and not look silly. Purple Rain is one.

Rolling Stone’s best albums of 1984:

Winner:
Born in the USA – Bruce Springsteen

Runners-up:
Purple Rain – Prince
Private Dancer – Tina Turner
How Will the Wolf Survive? – Los Lobos
Learning to Crawl – The Pretenders

In 1984, Rolling Stone gave their readers the vote. They too went for Born in the USA in the top spot. These were the runners-up:

Purple Rain – Prince
1984 – Van Halen
Sports – Huey Lewis & The News
Eliminator – ZZ Top

Nobody picked Amadeus. Dudes!

Random Pan of the Day
Prince, Around the World in a Day (1985)
A good album from anyone else but a disappointment from Prince. (Be fair: How do you follow the stupendiosity of Purple Rain?) For the first time in years, the opening track of a Prince album doesn’t rock the house. “Around the World in a Day” doesn’t even knock on the front door. “America” is too much like “Baby I’m a Star,” this time with a few remarks on poverty (he’s against it). The religious-themed songs (Prince became a Seventh Day Adventist around this time) don’t make me jump up and shout “You go, God!”

The one song that’s up to Prince’s standards is “Raspberry Beret,” which sounds vaguely like Michael Jackson territory. I like it, but The Jackson Five would’ve done it better. (The J5 could never have written lyrics anything like Prince’s, though.)

R.I.P.: Paul Revere, 1938-2014. Thanks for the kicks.

We are now making our final approach to satisfaction

Posted: September 6, 2014 in music, Record reviews
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1999
Prince
1982

Is there a better way to open a prom, a wedding, a bar mitzvah, an election, a Supreme Court hearing, the Ring cycle, or yet another Christmas production of the Messiah than with “1999”? You’re smiling just thinking about it, just like you do when you hear The Rolling Stones start up “Start Me Up.” We humans have been wired to be happy when we hear “1999.” How can we not? The first words on the record are spoken by God! That’s a God I can get behind.

“1999” is going to be huge forever, but I predict a surge in 2099. In case I don’t make it that far, I want one of you to grab your personal anti-grav fanny pack and hit the dance floor in my memory.

Prince names his third album in a row after the opening track and each time the opener gets better. How do you follow an overture like “1999”? Before we answer that question, let’s take up another: What makes Prince’s records sexy? I have a theory, which I will illustrate by comparing him with two of his peers, Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson.

My theory, which is mine: Why Prince is so Lovesexy
1. Funny guy who makes fun of himself: Prince yes, Mick says who, Michael no.
2. Really wants to have sex with you: Prince yes, Mick yes, Michael not applicable.
3. Really wants you to enjoy it: Prince yes, Mick says what, Michael not applicable.
4. Willing to be vulnerable: Prince yes, Mick just left with a groupie, Michael yes*.

* When he was younger. Way younger.

The first half of 1999 is the house party
“Little Red Corvette” gives us a breather after “1999.” The macho narrator at the song’s conclusion who wants to tame your “little red love machine” started far short of that:

I guess I should’ve closed my eyes
When you drove me to the place where your horses run free
’Cause I felt a little ill when I saw all the pictures
Of the jockeys that were there before me

The sweet-sounding “Delirious” comes next, with plenty more car imagery. “1999” is my favorite Prince song, but so is “Delirious,” and also the next one, “Let’s Pretend We’re Married.” It takes almost a minute for that one to get going because the man knows he’s got us.

The second half of 1999 is the private-club rave
Five and six tracks in and we’re still smoking. “D.M.S.R.” (dance, music, sex, romance) and “Automatic” are some of the best funk ever recorded, but these songs are long – 17 minutes together. (“Let’s Pretend We’re Married” runs seven minutes but feels shorter.) After the headrush of the first four songs, they bog things down.

“D.M.S.R.” is an amalgam of Johnnie Taylor’s “Who’s Making Love,” Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ’Till You Get Enough” (without the string section), everything by Ohio Players, and of course Prince. The synthesizers are the stars, but everyone’s playing them in the ’80s, including The Rolling Stones – listen to what they do the following year on “Undercover of the Night.”

“Automatic” takes on the computer-chipped Gary Numan at his own frigid game. David Bowie of the Station to Station/Low/Heroes period would’ve killed to write a dance groove like this one – but Bowie would never have let it run loose for 9 minutes.

A pause while we consider a sex act
Could it be that Prince was writing 8- to 9-minute rhythmic dance songs because he wanted to create a soundtrack for the average length of intercourse? Or what men think is the average length of intercourse?

Now stop considering a sex act
The air leaks out of this album with “Something in the Water (Does Not Compute),” which is like a serious version of The B-52s, which is like a terrible idea, and “Free,” which offers no surprises, which for Prince is a surprise. Teddy Pendergrass, Rod Stewart, and even Supertramp could’ve recorded “Free” while they were walking from their car to the front door of the studio.

Prince tries to seal the leak but gets mixed results with the final three tracks. “Lady Cab Driver” (this being a Prince album, you know how the ride went) rocks, but not over the entire 8 minutes. “All the Critics Love You in New York” is a dues song; at least he held off for five albums before birthing one. But “International Lover” is a strong finish. The spoken word ending, which includes the title of this post, is funnier and sexier than Mick Jagger’s knight-in-shining-armor shtick at the end of “Emotional Rescue” (1980).

Wanna be startin’ something
1999 was released just one month before Michael Jackson’s Thriller, the biggest-selling record since the invention of the sackbut. I said a while back that I’d take Prince over Michael for career performance and Michael over Prince for peak performance. Thriller is Michael’s peak, and it’s Mount Everest. Prince has to settle for Mount Rainier. No shame in that; Rainer has many neighbors and dwarfs all of them.

1999 is my favorite of the two, but Thriller is the better album.

Rolling Stone’s best albums of 1982:

Winner (tie):
Nebraska – Bruce Springsteen
Shoot Out the Lights – Richard and Linda Thompson

Runners-up:
Imperial Bedroom – Elvis Costello
1999 – Prince
The Blue Mask – Lou Reed
Marshall Crenshaw – Marshall Crenshaw

Random Pick of the Day
The Rolling Stones, Sticky Fingers (1971)
The Beatles are #1. The Rolling Stones are #2. Why is this? Because The Beatles were original. The Rolling Stones are not. The Stones excel at other people’s genres (including disco but excluding punk). They didn’t invent hard rock, but Sticky Fingers is the best hard-rock album this side of Paradise. It’s easily worth the entire Pearl Jam catalog. Take away “You Got to Move,” a blues cover (oddly, for them, it’s not a good one), and this record is almost perfect.

Random Pan of the Day
The Rolling Stones, Undercover (1983)
By this point the Stones were well on their way to becoming the Christmas fruitcake of popular music. The only salvageable song on Undercover is “Undercover of the Night.” It would’ve fit well on their last good album, Some Girls (1978). The rest is crap.

A few years ago, I set out to listen to every Rolling Stones record in chronological order. After I listened to Undercover I was so annoyed that I dropped the project.

Compensation: If you type in “Undercover” on Rhapsody, you also get an electronic dance trio by that name. They play dancified covers of big ’70s pop hits, including Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street,” Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September,” and Foreigner’s “Waiting for a Girl Like You.” They’re not bad. They’re better than Foreigner!

 

Written with a pencil on the spot

Posted: August 31, 2014 in Miscellaneous, music, Record reviews
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4

When I was visiting my parents in July, I spent some hours tunneling through decades of debris in the old family mansion. My assistant was my 12-year-old nephew, Jared. We had hard hats, headlamps, rope, pickaxes, specimen bottles – everything you need when dealing with your parents’ lifetime store of stuff. My main goal was to not lose Jared back in the 1950s.

Jared wasn’t impressed by most of what we found that afternoon. I think he was hoping for something that had fallen off a passing comet and that Dad had trapped in the back yard and boxed up in the basement. About the only thing that interested him was an electric, plug-in calculator that only printed on one side of a roll of paper tape. Jared, who lives in a wholly digital world, thought it was cool that a machine could leave a printed record of its work. Either that or he just thought it was cool that I let him take it apart.

But I found something I thought was cool: Pencils.

Toward the end of our expedition we uncovered Dad’s buried office-supply ammunition dump. Among the billions of staples and petrified erasers and rubber bands that no longer band and gummed labels to label things that no longer exist, were unopened boxes of pencils he’s been accumulating since World War II:

Bygone pencils
In case you’re wondering, an old pencil’s value on eBay is approximately one dollar in U.S. money.

I was thrilled to find these, though I couldn’t say for sure why. When I don’t have a computer in front of me, I have a pen in my hand. But there’s something about pencils, and their fragrance, that makes you happy. Like skipping. You can’t skip and not be happy. You can’t open a box of pencils and not feel happy looking at all that unsharpened potential.

Crayons
I’ll use these extra-thick crayons when I write to emphasize my characters’ emotional traumas.

I brought some boxes home in my luggage and vowed to try writing with pencils. Why not? Two writers who have meant a lot to me, Thomas Wolfe and John Updike, used pencils.

Thomas Wolfe holds two important records in American letters:

  1. Most posthumous novels: 2 (The Web and the Rock and You Can’t Go Home Again)
  2. Most bad writing from a great writer: I figure it’s about 50-50.

Wolfe, who was six and a half feet tall, used the top of a refrigerator as his desk. He wrote with a pencil almost as thick as a crayon to scrawl 20 or 25 words on a page. He then swept the page off the fridge and started on the next. Then there’s Updike, who wrote Couples and three of the four Rabbit books with a pencil. So who am I to argue?

“Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.” (G.K. Chesterton)
The first thing I noticed about writing with a pencil is that the physical process is exhilarating. The feel of the pencil in your grip, the paper under the point, the lead wearing down, your words spooling out from under your hand. Some of these pencils were of a diameter that no longer fits inside modern electric pencil sharpeners, and I don’t have one of those crank models with the different aperture sizes. I had to whip out my pocketknife and whittle these guys to a point.

The second thing I noticed about writing with a pencil is that it’s goddamned slow. We are not accustomed anymore to slow. We live in a world where our computers occasionally ask us if we want to “disable add-ons and speed up browsing.” Some of those add-ons are adding an extra 0.2 seconds to our browser load times. Accursed add-on! From Hell’s dark heart I stab at thee!

However, I do love revising, and writing with a pencil reminded me of writing with a pen and, when I got the story off the ground, moving to my typewriter. Later I wrote with a pen and moved to my computer, and for years now the computer is where I’ve started.

But this pencil thing was interesting, and not just from nostalgia. A couple of pencils and a pad of paper work better for me on a plane because the airlines have taken away all the space I once had to write with my laptop. Pencil and paper works better for me at my favorite coffee spot. And if you love to revise, you’ll love pencils, because what you just wrote with a pencil is in no way ready for public viewing.

You can also doodle with a pencil. Try that in Word.

I’m not going to replace my computer with pencils, but they’re a welcome change-up. As for my nephew, a retired gentleman in his hometown has been teaching Jared how to whittle. Cool is not reserved for what’s online.

Random Pick of the Day
Fitz and The Tantrums, More Than Just a Dream (2013)
1960s soul meets alternative rock, assuming anyone can define “alternative.” If you love whistling (and I know you do), you’ll love “The Walker.” The album’s closer, “MerryGoRound,” is a throwback to Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound.

Random Pan of the Day
Prince, Controversy (1981)
Coming off the success of Dirty Mind, I would’ve expected better. The title track is a towering inferno, offering an inescapable dance groove and a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. C’mon, isn’t that what you want to hear at a club? But musically, the rest of this album lies down and stays put.

These songs are about sex or social protest, or sex and social protest. When Prince sticks to sex he’s on surer ground, particularly on “Jack U Off,” in which he volunteers to help sexually frustrated females: “I only do it for a worthy cause/virginity or menopause.” After side trips to “the movie show,” a restaurant, and “your momma’s car,” he demonstrates his egalitarian nature:

If you ain’t chicken baby, come here
If you’re good, I’ll even let you steer
As a matter of fact, you can jack me off

Unlike Springsteen, who hit his stride with his third album and didn’t falter until he released Lucky Town and Human Touch in 1992, Prince’s fourth album doesn’t sound good after Dirty Mind. But on his next album he parties like it’s 1999. Until then.

Random Wife of the Day
This weekend, Special D is touring the gritty, industrial, culturally backward wasteland that is Seattle. Hope she can find a decent cup of coffee. In case you’re reading this: I have conquered the wisteria.

Random Video of the Day
If you haven’t visited my video yet, please do! True, it’s one minute and 11 seconds of your life that you’ll never get back, but what were you going to do with that time except watch cute animal videos? (Many thanks to Loyal Reader and Southern Industrialist Corncobb for the link.)

 

 

 

 

 

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