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.