I would so much rather talk about Ella Fitzgerald's 100 years (she was born on April 25, 1917) than Donald Trump's 100 days. The rap on Ella was that she couldn't sing the blues. Maybe
not, but she was probably the greatest interpreter of what has come to
be known as the Great American Songbook.
Here's some proof:
This is what I wrote about Ella a while back when I was doing profiles of fifty jazz albums:
The Songbook series of recordings is essential listening; her live albums are remarkable, especially the classic Ella in Berlin,
and the albums in which she is paired with Louis Armstrong are fun.
But when I feel like listening to Ella, my go-to album is Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie.
In a small combo setting (piano, guitar, bass, drums), she swings,
scats, and settles down for some lovely ballads too. Highlights
include, but are definitely not limited to, A Night in Tunisia, Stella
By Starlight, Jersey Bounce and The Music Goes Round and Round.
I originally wrote this piece on February 1, 2012, after Wilco played a fabulous show at the Warfield in San Francisco. This week they are playing at the Fillmore and I can't wait to see them again.
Dad Rock, my ass. OK, I'll admit that I am over 50 and the father of two, and that when I saw Wilco at the Warfield in San Francisco the other night, I fit comfortably within the demographic most represented -- relatively immobile white men over 40, holding plastic cups of beer and shaking nothing but their heads to the music. So, maybe that's the audience for Wilco these days. But that should not diminish their stature as one of the truly great rock bands or that of their front man, Jeff Tweedy, who is the most compelling singer/songwriters of his generation.
For me, the pantheon of (North) American rock musicians who not only capture the spirit of their time but leave a legacy well beyond it are Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen. If the torch must be passed, I don't think it is that outrageous to think of Tweedy, the 44-year old leader of Wilco, as the one to pick it up. (It is not surprising that along with Billy Bragg, Tweedy (with the rest of Wilco) recorded the brilliant Mermaid Avenue albums based on unreleased material written by Woody Guthrie.)
Jeff Tweedy is an elegant lyricist who crafts deeply effecting, unsparingly
honest songs, often about pain and loss, self-doubt and
self-destruction, and sings them with his nasally but soulful and quite
captivating voice. Part way through the show at the Warfield, he paused to check in with the audience. He somewhat jokingly conceded, "this has been kind of a morbid show so far," and asked, "are you guys okay?" He then added, "we figured if you're here,
you probably enjoy being sad -- at least a little bit. I know I do." One reviewer described the show in a way that aptly describes Tweedy's music generally. Rather than morbid, "it felt like a solemn
celebration . . . the songs themselves may have expressed misery,
but the grace and energy given to them imparted a kind of a buzzing,
heartworn elation."
What makes the Dad Rock moniker so misplaced in my view is that Tweedy and Wilco are not merely an easy throw back to those artists and bands of my generation's heyday. While the influences of the Byrds, the Band, Neil Young, John Lennon and others can be heard, there is also a hard driving, progressive sensibility coursing through the music. Some tunes are simple and straightforward, others
experimental and complex or, as is often the case, a combination as one critic described of "elaborate constructs surrounding their simple melodies."
Tweedy has evolved from when he practically co-invented the genre of alt-country rock in the late 1980s-early 1990s with the band Uncle Tupelo. Wilco's albums over the years have taken very welcome if "unexpected detours" into psychedelia, power pop, soul, R&B and electronica. Or, as David Dye put it, Wilco has
alternated between folk-tinged alt-country and experimental pop,
surprising fans and critics with its sonic inventiveness along the way," and in the process "made some of the finest albums of the '90s and
'00s, while establishing itself as a virtually peerless live band."
Another reviewer explained that "Wilco's great strength lies not just in Jeff Tweedy's world-weary
inscrutability, but the ways he and the band matched those stark,
sometimes startling sentiments to expectation-defying deconstructions of
Americana." Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is now ten years old, but it remains for me one of the greatest Rock 'n Roll albums of all time. As the notoriously stingy Pitchfork beams: "Complex and dangerously catchy, lyrically sophisticated and provocative,
noisy and somehow serene" it is "simply a
masterpiece."
Wilco is known as a great band to see live, a reputation cemented by their release in 2005 of Kicking Television: Live in Chicago, "a recording that doesn't merely retread a band's back catalog, but puts
their songs in a new perspective, and in this case these performances
reveal that one great band has actually been getting better."
The concert at the Warfield did not disappoint. It included several songs from their fine new album, A Whole Love, as well as compelling renditions of some of the band's impressive catalog, including I Must Be High and Shouldn't Be Ashamed (from A.M.); Sunken Treasure, Misunderstood and Forget the Flowers (from Being There); Shot In The Arm (from Summerteeth); Ashes of American Flags, Heavy Metal Drummer (from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot); At Least That's What You Said, Handshake Drugs (from Ghost Is Born), and Impossible Germany (from Sky Blue Sky).
As I waited eagerly for each gem, I was struck by how many more great songs there are in the Wilco oeuvre. Personal favorites not covered on this night included How To Fight Loneliness, She's A Jar, Via Chicago, Jesus Etc, Poor Places, Pot Kettle Black . . . . I could go On and On and On. (Click on the "Wilco" tag below for a sampling.)
Given how Wilco changes up the set list for each show, I was tempted to go see them again at the Fox Theater in Oakland, where they played last night. But two shows in one week for a 50+ year old family man would be pushing it.
Dad Rock? Here's what Tweedy himself had to say about Dad Rock:
I recently had a revelation about it: When people say dad rock, they
actually just mean rock. There are a lot of things today that don’t have
anything to do with rock music, so when people hear something that
makes them think, “This is derived from some sort of continuation of the
rock ethos,” it gets labeled dad rock. And, to me, those people are
misguided. I don’t find anything undignified about being a dad or being
rocking, you know?
Two of my all-time favorite rock albums were released in 1975. Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks and Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run. To commemorate the latter, which came out 40 years ago today, I've revised a piece I wrote a few years back.
I was in 11th grade in 1975. A classmate, Steven Gladstone, was touting an album, Born to Run,
by a guy with the Jewish-sounding name of Bruce Springsteen. Turns
out, Springsteen is a Dutch name, and Bruce was raised Roman Catholic.
No matter. His songs, with their epic stories about the love,
rebellion, and lost innocence of working class folks on the Jersey Shore
resonated with this relatively privileged kid from Long Island. Throw
in a great band, blistering guitar and a soulful saxophone, and I was hooked.
Greil Marcus, reviewing the album for Rolling Stone, described its power and beauty as a revelation:
The song titles by themselves — "Thunder Road," "Night," "Backstreets," "Born to Run," "Jungleland" — suggest the extraordinary dramatic authority that is at the heart of Springsteen's new music. It is the drama that counts; the stories Springsteen is telling are nothing new, though no one has ever told them better or made them matter more. Their familiar romance is half their power: The promise and the threat of the night; the lure of the road; the quest for a chance worth taking and the lust to pay its price; girls glimpsed once at 80 miles an hour and never forgotten; the city streets as the last, permanent American frontier. We know the story: one thousand and one American nights, one long night of fear and love.
What is new is the majesty Springsteen and his band have brought to this story. Springsteen's singing, his words and the band's music have turned the dreams and failures two generations have dropped along the road into an epic — an epic that began when that car went over the cliff in Rebel Without a Cause. One feels that all it ever meant, all it ever had to say, is on this album, brought forth with a determination one would have thought was burnt out years ago. One feels that the music Springsteen has made from this long story has outstripped the story; that it is, in all its fire, a demand for something new.
***
The songs, the best of them, are adventures in the dark, incidents of wasted fury. Tales of kids born to run who lose anyway, the songs can, as with "Backstreets," hit so hard and fast that it is almost impossible to sit through them without weeping. And yet the music is exhilarating. You may find yourself shaking your head in wonder, smiling through tears at the beauty of it all.
***
"Oh-o, come on, take my hand," Springsteen sings, "Riding out to case the promised land." And there, in a line, is Born to Run. You take what you find, but you never give up your demand for something better because you know, in your heart, that you deserve it. That contradiction is what keeps Springsteen's story, and the promised land's, alive. Springsteen took what he found and made something better himself. This album is it.
After devouring Born to Run, I bought his two earlier records -- which were far more spare, but with equally unforgettable characters and stories embedded in Bruce's eclectic, infectious music -- and gleefully anticipated his next
release. But due to legal wrangling with his manager, the next album, Darkness on the Edge of Town,
did not come out for three years, an excruciatingly long time to wait.
But then came the album's eventual release and the Darkness Tour.
Madison Square Garden in the summer of 1978. I had never seen a
performance like it before. There was a relentless energy and intensity
throughout the marathon show. And there was the sheer joy Bruce and
his E-Street Band conveyed on stage and the sincerity of the stories
Bruce told in the lead-up to some of the songs. And, of course, there
were the great songs themselves. When I returned to college in the fall
I was a fanatic, and sought to spread the gospel of Bruce to my friends
by endlessly playing the bootlegs of his concerts that I had obtained.
Then I learned that the tour was coming to my school. My friend Henry
and I, as well as a few other acolytes, slept out overnight for
tickets. We were rewarded with third row seats, and the show remains
unforgettable.
Springsteen sort of lost me with some of his later albums and I can't
say I listen to his music much anymore. But, his keynote address at the 2012 SXSW, reminded me of what I loved about him -- the sweep of his vision, the depth of his passion and his unparalleled music chops. (See The Boss Gives A History Lesson) He concluded his speech/performance with this advice: "Treat it like it's all that we have, and then remember: it's only rock and roll."
Here is the ninth edition of Fair and Unbalanced Radio, consisting of ten previously posted songs:
1. Neil Young and Crazy Horse: Oh Susannah
2. Wilco, Nick Lowe and Mavis Staples: The Weight
3. Jack White: Love Interruption
4. Real Estate: Easy
5. Cloud Nothings: Stay Useless
6. The Walkmen: Heaven
7. Alabama Shakes: Hold On
8. The Shins: September
9. The Kills: Baby Says
10. Bettye Lavette: I'm Not The One
You can always click the radio icon on the right of the blog for the latest playlist.
Bobby Womack, the iconic soul and R&B artist -- and Rock & Roll Hall of Famer -- released his first album of new material in almost twenty years. On The Bravest Man in the World, Womack collaborates with Damon Albarn and XL Recordings' Richard Russell in what NPR's Ann Powers describes as less elegiac than "another step in the fascinating dance of someone who will keep kicking until he can kick no more."
Powers recommends that "anyone who discovers Womack through this fresh start should go back and
explore his many other lives and resurrections; one of American music's
feistiest survivors, he's brought the world plenty of trouble and
delight."
I would start off with Womack's 1968 cover of The Mamas & The Papas' California Dreamin':
Pitchfork has dug into the archives to "revisit some visual highlights from the man's 50-plus-year career." Here's what they came up with: (1) Communication, performed on Soul Train in 1971; (2) Across 110th Street, from 1972, heard here on the opening sequence of Quentin Tarantino's 1997 film Jackie Brown; (3) Lookin' For A Love, originally a hit in 1962 when Womack and his brothers were The Valentinos. This version is from 1974, with three of his four brothers; (4) I Wish He Didn't Trust Me So Much, from 1985; and last, but definitely not least, (5) an acoustic version of (If You Don't Want My Love) Give It Back, a 1971 song performed with Gorillaz in 2010.
Bob Dylan turned 71 this week, on May 24th. Here is the post I wrote last year on his 70th birthday:
Forever Young: Bob Dylan Turns 70
Bob Dylan, born on May 24, 1941, turns 70 years old today. I agree with historian Sean Wilentz
that Dylan is "the most important and influential songwriter" in the
second half of the 20th Century, and perhaps the most influential
artist.
Rolling Stone
published lists of the greatest Dylan songs, and it is hard to argue
with their top 10: (1) Like a Rolling Stone; (2) A Hard Rain's A-Gonna
Fall; (3) Tangled Up in Blue; (4) Just Like a Woman; (5) All Along the
Watchtower; (6) I Shall Be Released; (7) It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only
Bleeding); (8) Mr. Tambourine Man; (9) Visions of Johanna; (10) Every
Grain of Sand. On the other hand, with so many incredible songs over so
many years as Dylan constantly reinvented himself, countless other top
ten lists could have been made that would have been hard to dispute.
So, rather than debate which are Dylan's best songs or albums, I thought
it would be better to just savor the music. Here's a playlist with
some of my favorites, beginning with an extraordinary version of
Dylan rehearsing If Not For You with George Harrison prior to the 1971
Concert for Bangladesh, the movie and album which provided me with my
first real exposure to Dylan. Happy Birthday!
"Taj Mahal opened the untapped potential of the Delta Blues, felt the connection to African soul and island rhythms, and became one of world music's first proponents and champions."
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/05/16/4495523/happy-70th-birthday-taj-mahal.html#storylink=cpy
I first saw Taj Mahal perform in the late 1970s, and have enjoyed his unique blend of roots-blues-world music ever since. In addition to his role in "revitalizing and preserving
traditional acoustic blues," Taj Mahal has taken "a musicologist's interest in a
multitude of folk and roots music from around the world -- reggae and
other Caribbean folk, jazz, gospel, R&B, zydeco, various West
African styles, Latin, even Hawaiian." This "global perspective," while still rooted in the "African-derived heritage of most of those forms," allowed him to "present the blues as part of a wider musical
context."
Here's some exciting news: Sony's Legacy Recordings is celebrating this "groundbreaking artist with a major catalog
reissue project beginning with the release of the newly-curated The Hidden Treasures of Taj Mahal, 1969-1973, an extraordinary two-disc collection of previously unreleased studio and live performances, available Tuesday August 21."
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/05/16/4495523/happy-70th-birthday-taj-mahal.html#storylink=cpy
I've previously written that Wilco is one of the truly great rock bands and their front man, Jeff Tweedy, is the most compelling
singer/songwriter of his generation. (See Wilco Rocks -- And Not Just For Dads.)
Tweedy is an elegant lyricist who crafts deeply effecting, unsparingly
honest songs, often about pain and loss, self-doubt and
self-destruction, and sings them with his nasally but soulful and quite
captivating voice. I don't think it is too much of a stretch to consider putting him in the pantheon of older (North) American rock musicians who have not only captured the
spirit of their time but have left a legacy well beyond, a group that includes Bob Dylan,
Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen.
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is now ten years old, but it remains for me one of the greatest rock 'n roll albums of all time. As the notoriously stingy Pitchfork beams: "Complex and dangerously catchy, lyrically sophisticated and provocative,
noisy and somehow serene" it is "simply a
masterpiece."
Spencer Kornhaber recently wrote a piece in the Atlantic to commemorate the tenth anniversary of this legendary album, what he refers to as the "best rock record of the new millennium." As Kornhaber writes, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot comes freighted with a mythology that can overwhelm the music:
The way it was rejected by one Warner Bros. subsidiary only to be bought by another; the fact that it was streamed online at a time when doing so was unheard of; the acclaimed documentary about its creation; and the spookiness
of the fact that its songs—replete with references to falling
buildings, charred flags, and nameless dread—were originally set for a
Sept. 11, 2001 release.
But it is the music that endures:
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot's triumph was in how it captured a facet
of human nature: the way we all send signals, hoping that someone will
understand them but also anxious about what happens when someone does.
You'll sometimes hear the album get called cryptic, or self-conscious,
or difficult. And that's fine. It's really a soundtrack for the ways in
which people ask to be misunderstood.
Hey, Hey, My My. Neil Young first started playing with the "garage" rock band Crazy Horse in 1968, and they have backed him on several of his greatest albums, including Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, After the Gold Rush, Zuma, and Rust Never Sleeps. Americana, which is due out next month,will be Neil's first recording with the full Crazy Horse line-up since 1996.
Rolling Stone reports that the songs on the album are all classic American folk songs, including "This Land Is Your Land," "Gallows Pole," "Tom Dooley" and "Clementine." "They're songs we all know from kindergarten," Neil said, "but Crazy Horse has rearranged them, and they now belong to us."
The press release explains the concept behind Americana:
What ties these songs together is the fact that while they may
represent an America that may no longer exist, the emotions and
scenarios behind these songs still resonate with what’s going on in the
country today with equal, if not greater impact nearly 200 years later.
The lyrics reflect the same concerns and are still remarkably meaningful
to a society going through economic and cultural upheaval, especially
during an election year. They are just as poignant and powerful today as
the day they were written.
Levon Helm, as aptly described in the New York Times, "helped forge a deep-rooted American music as the drummer and singer for the Band." In his drumming, "muscle, swing, economy and finesse were inseparably merged," as in those three thumps on the bass drum that introduce "The Weight," one of the Band's greatest songs. Some of the more memorable tunes on which he was lead vocals include “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” “Up on Cripple Creek,” and "Ophelia," songs in which "lyrics turned to myths and tall tales of the
American South."
Back in 1984, he described the
“right ingredients” for his work as “life and breath,
heart and soul.” And while his solo career was somewhat uneven, in later years he recorded a couple of really excellent albums, in particular Electric Dirt, released in 2009, which won a well-deserved Grammy Award (as did his prior release in 2007, Dirt Farmer).
Helm died today after a battle with throat cancer.
Here's he is on Letterman in 2009, performing a cover of the Grateful Dead's Tennessee Jed, which appears on Electric Dirt:
And here's a classic from The Last Waltz, one of the great concert films/albums of all time:
Freddie King, the Texas Cannonball, will be posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on Saturday. He was one of the Three Kings of electric blues guitar (with B.B. and Albert), and had a profound influence on many legendary rock guitarists, including Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughn.
Clapton famously covered two of King's great tunes, the instrumental Hideaway (on John Mayall's Bluesbreakers) and Have You Ever Loved A Woman (Derek and the Dominos).
The Shins are not exactly life changing, as Natalie Portman's character in the movie Garden State suggests, but they are one of the truly great indie rock bands, and the release this week of their first album since the excellent Wincing the Night Away in 2007, is cause for excitement.
A New York Times profile of frontman James Mercer describes the Shins as "one of the most beloved alternative bands of the 2000s, exploring
evergreen topics like romantic anxiety and adult growing pains with a
jangly, idiosyncratic sound and Mr. Mercer’s strikingly naked vocals." It says that the new record Point of Morrow includes "some comfortingly familiar moments, " with "newer kinks in the
texture," and a "newfound maturity."
A review in Ology heaps praise on the new album: "The Shins have been too consistently good over the past decade to pick an easy favorite, but Port Of Morrow might
actually be their crowning achievement. . . . The Shins keep getting
bolder, brighter, and better with each new release".
In anticipation, here's an NPR link to a recent concert in New York, which includes some of the band's classic older songs and a few of the newer ones.
Below the break are two promising songs from the new album, which they performed on SNL:
"The purity of human expression and experience is not confined to
guitars, to tubes, to turntables, to microchips. There is no right way, no pure way, of doing it. There is just doing it." -- Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Springsteen delivered the keynote at this year's SXSW. It was an epic performance, a tour de force, a compelling recounting of his musical
influences, a history of rock 'n roll through his unique prism.
Springsteen described his "genesis moment" in 1956, when he saw Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show, and realized "you didn't have to be constrained by your upbringing, by the way you looked, or by the social context that oppressed you." He spoke of Elvis as the "first modern 20th Century Man" who changed how we think about "sex, race, identity, and life," about "a new way of being an American" and "a new way of hearing music."
Doo wop deeply affected Springsteen in the late 1950s-early 1960s, and he demonstrated its power by picking up a guitar and playing a quick segue from a doo wop rhythm to the early strains of his own great tune Backstreets.
Then there was 1960s pop: Roy Orbison ("the coolest uncool loser you'd ever seen") and Phil Spector's Wall of Sound ("He hit me and it felt like a kiss").
Next came the British Invasion. "The Beatles were cool, classical and created the idea of an independent unit where everything could come out of your garage." For Springsteen, The Animals were "a revelation." He played a wonderful version of We Gotta Get Out Of This Place, and confessed "that's every song I've ever written."
He talked about the influence of punk and how the Sex Pistols "shook the earth." They were frightening and challenging, he said, and "made you brave."
He talked about "the blue collar grit of soul music." And Motown, which was "smoother, but no less powerful." There was the "beautifully socially conscious soul of Curtis Mayfield," and other great African American artists who provided the soundtrack of the Civil Rights movement. And, of course, there was James Brown, who he believes is "still underrated."
Springsteen spoke passionately about the special genius of Bob Dylan, who "gave us the words to understand our hearts" and who "is the father of my musical country now and forever."
It took a while for Springsteen to "crack the code" of the music of Hank Williams, but he ultimately discovered its "beautiful simplicity and its darkness and depth." Country music, which he called, "the working man's blues," spoke to him deeply. In it he found "the adult blues, the working men's and women's stories" he had been looking for."
There was a fatalism that attracted him to country music, but something was missing -- "it was rarely politically angry and rarely politically critical." And then there was Woody Guthrie, in whom he found a "fatalism that was was tempered by a practical idealism, where speaking truth to power wasn't futile."
And there you have it.
Springsteen concluded with a story about playing This Land Is Your Land with Pete Seeger at Obama's inauguration and ended with this advice: "Treat it like it's all that we have, and then remember: it's only rock and roll."
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