Tuscon Train

This is an unexpectedly effective cover of one of Bruce Springsteen's great songs of this century. Steven alters the melody in small but effective ways, and his voice is as accessible as it's ever been. And—no surprise, given his skills—the arrangement is fabulous. 

Comfortably Numb

I have to assume Dave Gilmour sent his part in with the understanding that Ice-T would use the bits he liked best. 

Which apparently, and understandably, was the entire thing. Having a Gilmour solo underneath the entire song was inspired, especially since he sounds absolutely invested. 

RIP Slim Dunlap

 The man who did a great job replacing the irreplaceable—an original Replacement—has left the stage.

"That's all there is." 

Everybody Hurts

This. 

This is how it's done. This is a cover. 

“I could really feel the heaviness of the song and I wanted to inject a little touch of hope and light into it,” Green said in a statement. “There’s always a presence of light that can break through those times of darkness.”

Mission more than accomplished, Reverend. 

 Michael Stipe added, on behalf of R.E.M., that “this is an epic moment for us.”

So say we all. 

Remembering Kris Kristofferson

“For his busy dreams were filled
With the rooms he’d yet to build.”
— Kris Kristofferson, “Darby’s Castle” 

 It’s funny, I can tell you with near-letter perfect precision at what point in my life I came to love my favorite bands and artists.

The Beatles happened in 1980, the year I turned 12. It was the first adult band I became devoted to, a devotion that lasts to this day.

I had a huge Doors phase in 1980-81, as was required by law. It ended sometime around 1982.

Led Zeppelin, the Kinks, Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix were favorites in junior high and early high school. I continue to love them all to this day.

I had my prog phase in high school, again as required by law. Yes and Genesis leading the way, with ELP picking up occasional steam. I am still a fan of much of it, indeed.

R.E.M. was late high school and into college, and they remain a favorite. Same for Bob Dylan, Sam Cooke and Stevie Wonder.

The Replacements were college, thanks to my partner in crime on this blog. They remain the most important band in my life, along with The Beatles.

Later came Nirvana and Pearl Jam, Living Colour, Soundgarden and Sonic Youth in real-time, as they occurred.

My point to this rambling? All of these bands hit me on a deep level at the time, and most of them continue to do so today. (Sorry not sorry, Doors.)

But none of them, not one, goes as far back holding a place in my life as Kris Kristofferson. No, with Kris, I remember his music dominating my life as deep as I can remember, all the way back to age 4 or 5. Thanks to my parents, who were (and still are) huge fans.

I thought about this yesterday when I got the word that Kris, that rogue outlaw American poet who often came across as William Blake appearing in The Wild Bunch (with the rugged amazingly good looks of an Errol Flynn, Clint Eastwood or mayhap even Harrison Ford) died in Hawaii at age 88. I was deeply saddened. But also, so very appreciative that his music has dotted my personal soundtrack for 50 years.

“Me and Bobby McGee,” “The Silver Tongued Devil & I,” “The Pilgrim. Chapter 33,” “For the Good Times” and more, they were songs I knew by heart not long after I learned to ride a bike or tie my shoelaces. As a child, they were there and I am sure I got tired of them. But once I hit late high school and college, I couldn’t help but be blown away by the poetry in those words, the gruff honesty, the self-realized beauty that Kris could always find.

His story is familiar to many. Born in Texas, a brilliant English student who became a Rhodes Scholar. Then it was off to a stint in the Army as a helicopter pilot and successful training as an Army Ranger, following by a time teaching literature at West Point. But Captain Kristofferson wanted to be Kris the songwriter, so he gave that up to head to Nashville to claw and scrap his way to get before anyone in the industry who would listen. Along the way, in a stumble nowhere near exclusive to him, he developed serious dependency problems with alcohol and heroin. He beat them back in time, but not without major struggle, something he wrote about frequently and, well, beautifully.

“He’s a poet, he’s a picker,

He’s a prophet, he’s a pusher,

He’s a pilgrim and a preacher and a problem when he’s stoned.

He’s a walking contradiction,

Partly truth and partly fiction,

Taking every wrong direction on his lonely way back home.”

-                   - The Pilgrim, Chapter 33

“Taking nothing back to show there,

For these dues I pay.

But the soul I almost sold here,

And this body I’ve been giving away.”

-                   - The Other Side of Nowhere

“All he’s good for is getting in trouble,

And shifting his share of the blame,

And some people swear he’s my double,

And some even swear we’re the same.”

-                    - The Silver Tongued Devil and I

Those are words written and delivered hard-earned and, in most cases, hard-won. Kris Kristofferson was gifted, seemingly from the early going of his songwriting career in the late 1960ss, with a level of self-awareness that usually takes years, maybe even decades. His problems were active as he wrote them, yet still he wrote on, sidling up to anyone who would listen to share—and hopefully sell—his words to the right person.

The network of friends he built was, to say the least, impressive. Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings became brothers to him and later formed outlaw country band The Highwaymen with him. Ray Price and Roger Miller and, most famously, Janis Joplin recorded his songs with high levels of success. Once he started putting his own albums out with a staggering one-two punch of Kristofferson (1970) and The Silver Tongue Devil and I (1971), he was a star. Other top-selling albums would follow, as would a celebrity marriage to Rita Coolidge and a Hollywood career that saw him in disparate films like Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and A Star is Born. His appeal was wide—he had great looks, rugged toughness and this sweet, clanging heart that he never hesitated to display full force on his sleeve. Not unlike John Lennon and Bruce Springsteen did back then, or Paul Westerberg, Kurt Cobain or Jason Isbell later would.

For me, it was the words. I’ve always loved writing of any kind and have long been a sucker for musical lyrics ahead of almost everything else. It’s why Dylan, Lennon/McCartney, Springsteen, Westerberg and Cobain are heroes of mine. I love those who have this ability to take these intimate, often painful thoughts and turn them into poetic magic. Kris could do that, as both a young man and an old man.

In “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” he wrote about desperate love and the need for connection above all, even if that was all there was. (“Let the devil take tomorrow, Lord tonight I need a friend.”)

In “For the Good Times,” he broke your heart with a literal tale of the end of love, yet trying to salvage one last grasp of what they once had. (“Don’t say a word about tomorrow or forever—there’ll be time enough for sadness when you leave me.”)

On maybe his most autobiographical song, “Sunday Morning Comin’ Down,” he examined all that’s lost or thrown away by real and present forces in his life, and found a way to make them poignant. (“Then I headed back for home and somewhere far away a lonely bell was ringing. And it echoed through the canyons, like the disappearing dreams of yesterday.”)

On “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again)” he gave a raw and gorgeous look at what love really is, whether it works or not. (“Waking in the morning to the feeling of her fingers on my skin. Wiping out the traces of the people and the places that I’ve been…Dreaming was as easy as believing it was never going to end, and loving her was easier than anything I’ll ever do again.”)

Much later in his life, on the terrific album This Old Road and the sage advice of the title track, he was an elder statesman with wisdom that came with plenty of scar tissue. (“Look at that old photograph, is it really you? Smiling like a baby full of dreams? Smiling ain't so easy now, some are coming true, nothing's simple as it seems.”)

And on arguably his greatest song, “Me and Bobby McGee” (named for the woman who worked as a secretary at Monument Records, though not written about her), he gave us a travelogue of the heart that went straight across the U.S.A., a story of doomed love that he still told with heart-swelling affection. (“Somewhere near Salinas, Lord, I let her slip away, looking for the home I hope she’ll find. And I’d trade all my tomorrows for one  single yesterday, holding Bobby’s body next to mine.”)

There are more throughout his expansive catalog that I can’t do justice to here in this space. But the simple guitar, the gravelly and grinding voice and that poetic, bursting heart always carried the way.

It was Kris Kristofferson who got in Toby Keith’s face when the young country punk tried to chastise him about his “lefty” politics—the exchange had to leave the late Mr. Keith feeling more than a little rattled. It was Kris Kristofferson—and Kris Kristofferson alone—who stood alongside Sinead O’Connor at the 1992 MSG Concert for Bob Dylan when she was being booed by a crowd that should have known better. It was Kris Kristofferson who so loved the opening lines of Leonard Cohen's seminal "Bird on a Wire ("Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free.") that he commented he wanted them written on his tombstone. And it was Kris Kristofferson who actually thanked Johnny Cash and June Carter-Cash at the beginning of a confessional song of recovery (“To Beat the Devil”), because it would have been incomplete of him not to do so.

Maybe country isn’t your thing, maybe an unpolished voice and difficult subject matter isn’t what you’re looking for. If not, I get it, but you’d be missing out on what Kris Kristofferson always had to offer. It was based on experience, failure, success, loss, heartbreak and triumph, sometimes all at once. It was based on an American life lived, in every sense of the word. 

If his compadre Johnny Cash was the 20^th century Walt Whitman—as I have seen him accurately described—then Kris Kristofferson may have been our Henry David Thoreau, with his life steeped in actions taken regardless of the outcome and lessons learned, no matter how hard.

My buddy Steve, with whom I attended a Kris Kristofferson concert in 2006 in Northampton, MA, when we were spellbound to finally see a hero singing his greatest songs right there in front of us in real life, texted me after news of his death yesterday: “Our heroes are dying of old age.”

Amen for that. Seven years ago here, I lamented the passing of Chuck Berry with the observation that old age is promised to no one in rock-n-roll. But Chuck fooled ‘em all, against the odds, and so did Kris. God bless them.

At the top of this post, I quoted a line from Kristofferson's song “Darby’s Castle” that has driven me for years, and especially over the past year, when two friends have challenged me to write creatively for a little bit every day. I have done just that, and it’s one of the best decisions I’ve made.

But that line is pulled from what becomes a terribly sad song. A man loves his wife and builds her this palace, and it becomes his life’s work. But one night he discovers her cheating on him and, despite the years of painstaking work to build the castle, “it only took one night to bring it down, when Darby’s Castle tumbled to the ground.”

So. Not a happy story. But that line was written to describe Mr. Darby’s obsession, of how consuming his personal passion project was. "For his busy dreams were filled with the rooms he'd yet to build."

And it speaks straight to me about the need to create, the excitement of facing a blank page in any art form—painting, music, dance, writing, acting, comedy, anything—and the joyful mystery that comes with creating something new. An artist friend of mine calls it “the uncertainty of creation,” and she’s right. We don’t know what’s coming next, but we know we have to seek it out. Because that’s what makes our hearts keep beating.

It works for me every day, and I like to think it worked for Kris Kristofferson. To have a gift as great as his for writing and storytelling is amazing. To use it the way he did, to work through the joys, sadnesses and horrors of his own life? It was a blessing.

Thank you, Kris. Thank you.

Like a Rolling Stone

 So a while back I wrote:

I've heard a few good covers (Jimi Hendrix, Green Day), a couple okay (the Rolling Stones' version actually was better than I'd expected if still not exactly transcendent) and a bunch of terrible (John Mayer, sure, but David Gilmour?! What were you thinkin', man?), but few if any great. 

And I don't know what the hell I was thinking. Because this cover is not good. It's absolutely great. 

I think what I missed the first time is that element that takes it from good to great. 

It's not Bille Joe Armstrong's vocal delivery, which is indeed great and has a similarly punkish attitude as the original did, even if their nasally vocal tones sound nothing alike. 

It's not Mike Dirnt's typically great bass playing, laying a perfect foundation over which the others can go anywhere. 

No, what makes this cover great is Tré Cool's typically incendiary playing. His post-post-punk playing gives the cover the kind of energy that the Bobby Gregg gave the original—especially that opening snare shot that, as one fan put it, "sounded like somebody kicked open the door to your mind"—but updated for a new century. 

As the bard once said, "play it fucking loud." 

Remember Love

I've been a Beatles fan for well over 40 years now and I don't think I'm just flattering myself when I say I'm a pretty hardcore fan at that. And yet today is the first time I've heard this utterly gorgeous song.

Obviously, John Lennon's trademark guitar picking behind Yoko Ono's diaphanous vocals certainly helps make the recording more immediately appealing to a Beatles fan. But the minimalist lyrics, Ono's vocals and, most of all, her billowy melody are the highlights of a song that should be far, far, far better known. 

He's Guilty

Guilty. 

Guilty. 

Guilty. 

Guilty. 

Guilty.

Guilty. 

Guilty. 

Guilty. 

Guilty. 

Guilty.

Guilty. 

Guilty. 

Guilty. 

Guilty. 

Guilty.
Guilty. 

Guilty. 

Guilty. 

Guilty. 

Guilty.

Guilty. 

Guilty. 

Guilty. 

Guilty. 

Guilty.

Guilty. 

Guilty. 

Guilty. 

Guilty. 

Guilty.

Guilty. 

Guilty. 

Guilty. 

Guilty.

I'm Waiting for the Man

 This is the coolest thing I've seen/heard from Keef this century. His low-key approach, the fact that we all know whereof he speaks, and the lack of vocal fireworks on the original, make this a killer combo. 

Jump

This is pretty amazing. Beyond the novelty factor—which is considerable—it works this way so much better than I ever would have believed. I especially appreciate the tiny bit of tapping towards the very end of the solo. But it's really the general vibe of the cover that shines, as well as the more harmonically interesting if less overtly virtuosic nature of most of the solo. 

One

I don't know how I missed this at the time but I surely did. Eddie Vedder covering "One" for U2's Kennedy Center Honors. 

The song's abridged. The tempo's a bit too fast. And it's maybe the finest vocal performance I've ever heard Eddie Vedder give, and I believe I've heard everything official studio recording and dozens and dozens of hours of live material from him. 

Bono seems to be nearly vibrating as he listens and it's hard to blame him. 

Faithfully

I'm a big fan of the generations that had the extreme misfortune of following mine. Huge fan. I'm Team Millenial and Team Gen Z all day. All. Day. But what they seem incapable of understanding (as with a distressing percentage of my own generation, and most of all those...you know...Boomers) is that Journey pretty much sucks. Arguably as a band and definitely as a corporation. 

Look, I've come around on "Don't Stop Believin'," in large part because the drums are phenomenal and the structure is weird, and that's more than enough to overcome the arena rock platitudes and geographic sloppiness. Also, to be fair, it's truly hard to come up with a stadium stomper as powerful and enduring. So. 

But in general Journey is the anti-Beatles. They are five insanely talented musicians who together produce significantly less than the sum of their parts. 

Except...I really like some of their stuff. Which doesn't mean it doesn't suck. It just means that blind pigs and being a certain age and all that. So no matter how awful the video for "Separate Ways" is—and it is—the song's pretty kickin'. 

And even as my most sneering, as only a teenager can be (or one who remains terminally teenaged into his dotage), I always liked "Faithfully." I liked the backstory about Jonathan Cain's wife asking if he was ever tempted to cheat whilst on the road, and how he wrote this lovely ballad in reply. (The fact that he did indeed subsequently cheat on her, leading to their divorce may take some of the shine off the song but, hey, trust the art and not the artist and all that, right?) 

One of the delightful surprises over the past decade is watching as Miley Cyrus not only seems to have pulled herself out of what looked like a disaster spiral but has subsequently revealed herself to be one hell of an artist. I can't claim to be an expert, having heard fewer than two dozen of her songs, but every cover I've heard her do has been at least good and some have been extraordinary. 

Such as this casual walk through "Faithfully." The ease with which she dips in and out of it while talking with the audience at the famed Chateau Marmont is striking. And her husky voice is a wonderful counterpart to Steve Perry's crystalline vocals on the original. 

Cleveland Rocks

Ohio's had some issues this century. But as songwriter Ian Hunter said, "the inspiration for 'Cleveland Rocks' goes back to the old days when people used to make fun of Cleveland. Cleveland was 'uncool' and LA and NYC were 'cool'. I didn't see it that way. Lotta heart in Cleveland."

Damn skippy. 

Androgynous

Just earlier today I was thinking about how little I care for harmony. It's not that I dislike it—I often love it—but I care less about it than I do about timbre and texture and rhythm and, most of all, melody. In fact, when it comes to multiple vocals in popular music, I greatly prefer to have entirely separate vocal lines which perhaps sometimes interlock and perhaps sometimes don't than to have richly layered harmonies. 

Which is why I was shocked by just how much I love this cover of the great Replacements song. I assume it's mainly due to director Ione Skye. (I'm a big proponent of the auteur theory.) 

What About Me

 It's such a strange thing when someone mentions a song you've never even heard of, much less heard, and then it starts and you realize, oh, I heard that maybe a dozen times back when I was about 13 and not since and yet it's been rattling around in there all this time. 

Where the Streets Have No Name/Can't Take My Eyes Off of You

So I heard this maybe once or twice back in the day but had somehow entirely forgotten it had ever existed until today. 

I learned about it because I stumbled across an article that mentions that when it first came out, apparently Bono released a statement asking "What have we done to deserve this?" 

I at first assumed it was entirely in jest, especially since "What Have I Done to Deserve This?" is also the name of a Pet Shop Boys song. 

But listening to the track again, I have to think it was at least partially real. In fact, even for a Bono sliding so heavily away from his famous sincerity and into the ironically ironicalness in which he seemed to revel for most of the 90s, it's not hard to believe that to have a popular band he likely enjoyed and respected as the Pet Shop Boys release a piss-take on one of his most special hurt. 

And it's a bit hard to argue that it could be anything but a piss-take. It's not so much how they approach the song, which is an upbeat dance arrangement that actually manages to emphasize just how catchy the original melody is. Nor is it the vocal approach, which has been described as deadpan, and maybe so, but seems heartfelt if not terribly emotive. 

No, it's the part where it segues into the Frankie Valli classic "Can't Take My Eyes Off You." Which is a fine pop song, and one I've always absolutely loved. But the point of an interpolation (or medley or mashup or whatever) is to shed some extra or greater or at least interesting light on each individual part. And while I love "Can't Take My Eyes Off You," it's not only not exactly Dylanesque lyrically, but it doesn't seem to have any aspirations in that direction. Like much of the Four Seasons' work, it hews far more closely to the 50s or early 60s lyrical style, content with "moon/June" rhymes, and with no thought deeper than "you're really pretty and I would like to sleep with you." Which, hey, it's one of the prime human emotions and when it's set to a melody as catchy as this one, that's more than good enough for me. 

But "Where the Streets Have No Name" shoots far, far higher, taking on class warfare and ruminating upon where, if anywhere, one can truly find God. Now, it's possible the song does not achieve its goals as fully as the Valli song does. But there's no question its artistic goals are significantly loftier. 

And by melding the two, the Pet Shop Boys are either showing that they're determined to themselves tear down the walls that separate low art from high(ish) art, or they're sneering at the idea of a pop song even thinking of trying to be so pretentiously lofty and, possibly, at the very famous and famously pretentious lyricist. Or perhaps they're incapable themselves of seeing the difference between the two songs. Or maybe they really are simply suggesting there's no difference between the two. 

Toothbrush / Trash

One of the things which never gets old about being a music fanatic (well, so far, at least) is how way can lead to way. You're reading a piece about a favorite artist and they mention some other artist, whom you've never even heard of before. And because we currently live in the age of miracles, you can just search for this new artist—the band Mount Eerie, which is apparently largely the work of Phil Elverum—and you discover he's been recording since the beginning of the century and you've just missed him. So you zip on over to YouTube and not only the song mentioned but indeed the entire album (2017's A Crow Looked at Me) is available, thanks to the artist himself. And you dive in and a bit later you hear a song and it just hits like a gosimer wrecking ball. 

And thanks to that websearch, you know that this album was not only written in the wake of his young wife's death but indeed in the room where she died, using her own instruments. 

Today I just felt it for the first time

Three months and one day after you died

I realized that these photographs we have of you

Are slowly replacing the subtle familiar

Memory of what it's like to know you're in the other room

To hear you singing on the stairs

A movement, a pine cone, your squeaking chair

The quite untreasured

In between times

The actual experience of you here

I can feel these memories escaping

Colonized by photos narrowed down and told my mind erasing

The echo of you in the house dies down

October wind blows

It makes a door close

I look over my shoulder to make sure

But there is nobody here

I finally took out the upstairs bathroom garbage that was sitting there forgotten since you were here

Wanting just to stay with us

Just to stay living

I threw it away

Your dried out, bloody, end-of-life tissues

Your toothbrush and your trash

And the fly buzzing around the room

Could that possibly be you too?

I let it go out the window

It does not feel good

I can't say I enjoy this song and yet at the same time I love it. 

Can't Find My Way Home

Imprinting is a powerful force. It's not unusual for someone to permanently feel that whatever they first heard/saw/read is and always will be The Best Version or The Right Way. 

Certainly, I've found again and again that's how it so often is for me. The first cycle I heard of Carl Nielsen's symphonies were conducted by Neeme Järvi and I fell deeply in love from the opening bars. I've since heard a dozen other cycles, many of which are objectively better—if such a thing is possible, and I think it is—but the Järvi still holds a place in my heart that those superior versions can't quite displace. 

So with what is by far the best Blind Faith song, "Can't Find My Way Home." My first time hearing it was the live duet Eric Clapton played during the 70s with later hitmaker Yvonne Elliman. Its lovely, laidback, slightly woozy feel pulled me in and I was a goner. I'm not sure why it hit a teenage me so hard but, hey, music's mysterious. 

I was already a big van of Steve Winwood, thanks to his brilliant from stem-to-stern solo LP, Arc of a Diver, so when I could scrape together the money, I excitedly bought the Blind Faith LP...and was about as disappointed as I've ever been in a record. 

That a talent as huge and assertive as Winwood should take center stage was perhaps not surprising, but it was still a letdown that Clapton disappeared as much as he did; rather than a collaboration, the album was closer to a Winwood outing with famous friends playing along. And, unfortunately, one of those friends was Ginger Baker, who reminds the listener over and over again why Clapton had recently decided to stop playing with Baker. For all his own talents, there's a reason virtually none of his collaborators played with Ginger on a longterm basis. I mean, Winwood's the reason Ginger joined Blind Faith, and it doesn't seem coincidental that aside from a brief stint together in Ginger Baker's Air Force, they never really played together again.

 

Baker's brushwork is fine if unexceptional. His tom asides are actually kinda cool. But the explosive splashes he adds are just awful—jarring and tasteless. The twin guitar work of Clapton and Winwood—a greatly underrated guitarist–is lovely but it's not enough to push away the feeling that this is an exceptionally meticulous demo rather than the better final product it would later become. 

Such as this acoustic outing from decades later, as a nearly 45-years-older Winwood plays with delicacy and uses his otherworldly voice with dexterity and discretion.

 

Which, I guess, is to say that imprinting is a powerful force. But it's not the end-all and be-all, because I'd take solo acoustic Winwood over any other version any day, terrifying fire crackles and all. 

Who's Next/Achtung Baby — Going Bigger

Two legendary bands, at seemingly the height of their respective greatness, 20 years apart. Yet neither were satisfied with the enormity of their success and wanted to go bigger, newer and yes, even better.

And somehow they did.

The bands were The Who and U2. The years were 1971 and 1991—two absolutely monstrous years in music. And they each put out an album that signaled far and wide that the bands that the masses once new had changed. And a different era was underway.

Who’s Next. Achtung Baby. Absolute 100% bona fide game-changers. Any list of the greatest and most important albums in rock-n-roll history has these two albums on it. And if it doesn’t, the list is incomplete, almost stupidly so.

And here’s one more beautiful thing The Who and U2 had in common with these albums. The bands knew they were entering untouched territory, and they knew they had to let the listeners know that from the very start. 

So from the first seconds of opening tracks of those two albums, “Baba O’Riley” and “Zoo Station”—both amazing tunes, to be sure—our speakers and our ears were flooded from the get-go with sounds we had never heard from either band before. And holy cow did it get our attention. And still does today, to anyone listening.

Think about it. 

The epic synth drone which lifts “Baba O’Riley” up to some space-age plain the second the needle drops on Who’s Next was a brand new frontier for The Who. They had done some fine albums and all those great and taut Maximum R&B singles and then in 1969, with Tommy,  they invented the rock opera and created an album that seemed to almost swallow their identity…mostly in a good way. But they needed to move on and looked even bolder, brasher. Even bolder and more brash than Tommy had been two years earlier; after all, The Who had dabbled splendidly in longer-form narrative before Tommy (“A Quick One While He’s Away” in 1966, “Rael” a year later). But they had never, EVER tried anything like this before. 

And those sounds that open “Baba O’Riley,” that hypnotic and circular Lowery organ pattern which seems to have been dreamed up as much by Arthur C. Clarke or Stanley Kubrick as by Pete Townshend, damned if it didn’t work and take the listeners on an uncharted journey. No one could have expected it, but within seconds we couldn’t imagine music without it.

Fast forward 20 years. Now how about the volcanic industrial sound that drops into our laps about three seconds into “Zoo Station,” a sound so thunderous and forboding it almost sounds like the musical version of The Big Bang. This was not "traditional U2", awash in reverb and shimmering delay and spiritual and political forthrightness we had come to know and deeply love, played majestically from Boy through The Joshua Tree. This was cataclysmic sonic mayhem, all metal and stone and echoes and shadows and distortion. U2 had conquered all worlds by 1991, even trotting out the highly subversive and (according to at least this writer) highly underrated multi-media experiment of Rattle and Hum in 1988. But now, much like The Who in 1971, they needed more, and they got more. 

And much like “Baba O’Riley,” it all sounded like world-building, because it was. For “Baba” it was a gateway into the aimless, miasmic plasma of the 1970s and out of the (fictitious) Age of Aquarius. For “Zoo” it was a guillotine to the Reagan-Thatcher years of despotic, plastic self-virtue (laid in musical form by years of empty-headed Aqua Net-pasted glam metal) and an invitation to blaze new trails across previously neglected human wastelands. In every sense of the word this was music of change.

And neither exactly occurred in a vacuum—both came out at momentous times in rock-n-roll history amidst staggering competition, and still were able to not just stand on their own, but stand victorious and proud amongst the very very best musical offerings of their respective years. Or most any years.

I mean, 1971. Look. LOOK at the kind of the music their counterparts were offering:

• Marvin Gaye – What’s Going On
• Led Zeppelin – Led Zeppelin IV
• Joni Mitchell – Blue
• Rolling Stones – Sticky Fingers
• John Lennon – Imagine
• Sly and the Family Stone – There’s a Riot Goin’ On
• David Bowie – Hunky Dory
• Funkadelic – Maggot Brain
• Carole King – Tapestry
• Allman Brothers –At Fillmore East

I mean. I mean!

Not to be outdone, 1991? Well…again, just look:

• Nirvana – Nevermind
• Metallica – Metallica
• R.E.M. – Out of Time
• Matthew Sweet – Girlfriend
• Michael Jackson – Dangerous
• Public Enemy – Apocalypse 91: The Enemy Strikes Back
• Dinosaur Jr. – Green Mind
• Pearl Jam – Ten
• A Tribe Called Quest – The Low End Theory
• P.M.Dawn: Of the Heart, of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience

Those are a couple of Murderer’s Rows of musical years, and sure, maybe some of those albums were as good as Who’s Next and Achtung Baby, but none of them—NONE of them—were better. 

Both offered a promise of a new day, a new musical awakening, with those opening tracks, and both delivered. Because of course it didn't stop there. In addition to the epochal starters each album contained arguably the respective bands’ greatest songs (“Won’t Get Fooled Again” and “One”), some statement of purpose masterpieces (“Behind Blue Eyes,” “Song Is Over” for the Who, “Mysterious Ways,” “Until the End of the World” for U2”) and, yes, some familiar musical territory done with as much muscle and gritty agency as ever (“Bargain” on Who’s Next, “Even Better Than the Real Thing” on Achtung Baby).

They were gutsy moves. Two of the greatest bands ever, each having reached pinnacles they couldn’t have imagined when they were starting out years earlier. Each wanting more. And each getting it.

It’s unfair to offer that they never would be that good again, because how do you top sheer once-in-a-lifetime masterpieces? Hell, if they didn’t equal those efforts they came pretty close—All That You Can’t Leave Behind, Quadrophenia, The Who By Numbers, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb—and that’s saying more than something. But those efforts they churned out in 1971 and 1991 remain sui generis works of art. And if there’s one thing that art does, it lives. Does it ever.

The Who and U2 live forever in those opening generational strains of “Baba O’Riley” and “Zoo Station.” The music explains why, as it always has.

Message in a Bottle, Stewart Copeland, and Artistic Blindness

I've been an obsessed music fan for more decades than I like to consider, and one thing that has hit me over and over is just how wrong so many great artists can be about their own art.

Today's installment: drumming great Stewart Copeland's absurd opinion of his own performance on the Police's all-time greatest song:

“There are some things I would have done a little different now,” said Copeland. “There are too many drum overdubs. It’s such a great song, and then it comes to the end, and [if I hear the song on the radio] I’ll switch over to another station because I screwed up.”
However, Copeland isn’t taking all of the blame for the over-the-top drumming in the hit’s last few seconds.
“Where was Andy [Summers, Police guitarist] at that moment?” he mused. “Andy was a really good filter, because we all overdid it, but then usually Andy would say, ‘No. Too much. Too much. Less is more.’ And he was usually right. Where was he when I needed him at the end of ‘Message in a Bottle’?”

It's a fascinating insight...until one listens to the recording in question, at which point Copeland's POV is unambiguously revealed to be completely and totally wrong.

(Sidenote: how silly does a drummer look air-drumming? Even the great Stew-Cope can't make that look cool. Fortunately, the World's Coolest Man—and at that point he really was a serious contender—is next to him in a bowtie to take quite a bit of the heat.) 

I mean, seriously, just listen to this guy! He could have gone on like, unaccompanied, for another twenty minutes and it still wouldn't have been enough.