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. 

Garden

 I'm always excited by the prospect of a new Dinosaur Jr album; for my money, they're easily the most artistically successful band reunion ever. And "I Ran Away," the first track released off their new album, Sweep It Into Space sounds like vintage post-Green Mind Dino Jr, which is to say, spectacular. 

But "Garden," the track just released today, is really something else. The new LP apparently has two or three songs written by Lou Barlow, as usual. And they're generally good, although I find to my surprise and disappointment that I almost always like Barlow's solo work better than his Dinosaur Jr stuff; I like his band offerings, generally, but I often love his solo outings. He was ridiculed in their early days for being so emotional, and it sometimes seems to me that his band songs downplay that slightly, but he leans into it on his solo records, with superior results. 

But here he seems to have somehow found the magical combination. It's got that emo Barlow feel, and his more conventional vocals are especially strong here. But it also has a distinctly Sufjan Stevens Carrie & Lowell vibe to it, but with a J Mascis guitar solo. And since perhaps the only thing better than a distinctly Sufjan Stevens Carrie & Lowell vibe is a J Mascis guitar solo, well, this is simply superb. 

Also, the video's pretty groovy. 

Georgia On My Mind

 This'll do. This'll do just fine.