A: now. Right now. Now we're talkin'.
Showing posts with label New York. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New York. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 21, 2020
Monday, September 11, 2017
16 years later
New York. First and foremost in our hearts. For now and for always.
Can't believe it's been 16 years.
We will never forget.
And we will never stop loving you.
"Dream of life..."
We will never forget.
And we will never stop loving you.
"Dream of life..."
Saturday, June 9, 2012
If You See Her, Say Hello
I choose my dishwashing music carefully. Horrifying as the notion might have been to the younger me, this is the time of the day when I get some of my closest listening in. Of course, back then, I was single and able to have music playing around the clock if I so chose, not having to worry about anyone's sensibilities but mine, with the freedom to be selfish in my auditory habits I felt like, so maybe the younger me should just shut up.
Anyway. On this night I've chosen the magnificent two night stand by one Mr. Bob Dylan in New York City back in late October 1994.
The then-five-year-old wanders in for a drink. She stops and listens. Narrowing her eyes, she asks, "Is this a joke?"
I loves me my Dylan, but it's not an unreasonable first reaction, at least to his post-Under the Red Sky material. As George Martin once said, someday she'll understand.
Anyway. On this night I've chosen the magnificent two night stand by one Mr. Bob Dylan in New York City back in late October 1994.
The then-five-year-old wanders in for a drink. She stops and listens. Narrowing her eyes, she asks, "Is this a joke?"
I loves me my Dylan, but it's not an unreasonable first reaction, at least to his post-Under the Red Sky material. As George Martin once said, someday she'll understand.
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Psycho Killer
David Byrne turned 60 the other day. The local radio stations played a pretty fair amount of Talking Heads in celebration. At least, I assume they did, because I only listen to the radio when I'm in the car, which is usually not more than a few minutes per day, and I heard a pretty fair amount of Talking Heads.
Which is a pretty swell thing to hear. My brother once remarked that on balance Talking Heads may be the most popular band ever, in that they may not have had a whole lot of people for whom the Heads were their absolute number one all-time band, but unlike U2 or Led Zeppelin or even the Beatles, there was virtually no one who actively disliked them and pretty much everyone really liked at least a few of their songs.
I've always liked Talking Heads and sometimes really, really liked 'em. Never quite verged into "love" territory, I don't think, but always had just oodles and boodles of respect and admiration and even a kind of fondness for them; I mean, how can you not find their combination of downtown NYC cool mixed with total geekiness endearing?
And, like most people I knew, I was pretty crazy about Stop Making Sense when it came out, both the film and the soundtrack. And none of it was more slap-you-upside-the-head awesome than the solo performance of "Psycho Killer" that opens the set. It's an amazing rendition and a fantastic opening.
We should have known then the band's days were numbered.
I've been watching a Talking Heads concert from Rome, their 1980 Remain in Light tour. It's an amazing document and a great show, filled with wonderful performances of great songs. But it's not a Talking Heads show, not really. Adrian Belew is just a monster guitarist. But a putative Talking Heads concert where he gets at least two or three times as much attention on every single song as any Talking Head not named David is not a Talking Heads concert. And the same goes for killer keyboardist Bernie Worrell or extra percussionist Steve Scales or vocalist Dolette MacDonald or, for pete's sake, their second bassist. Their second bassist. Yes, Busta Jones is a phenomenal bassist, clearly far better than Tina Weymouth. But that's not the point, now, is it?
Despite my love of Elvis, Dylan, Springsteen and Bowie, I've never—or at least very rarely—subscribed to the "great man" theory of rock and roll, where a genius is so singular that he or she is able to create masterpieces in isolation; in fact, it's because of my love for those gentlemen that I haven't subscribed, as all of them did almost all their best work when collaborating, at least to some extent. Whether it was Elvis with his original trio or later in Memphis, produced by Chips Moman, or Dylan being spurred on by Mike Bloomfield or the Band or relative unknowns from Minneapolis, or Springsteen being kicked in the ass by Jon Landau on his third album or being convinced by Steven van Zandt to release his demos for Nebraska as is, all of them benefited massively from collaboration.
The various Talking Heads, including Byrne himself, seem to acknowledge he was coming to be seen very much as the dominant personality in the band, and understandably—he was the singer and the lyricist and wrote somewhere between much and most of the music, depending upon whom you listen to, and that's just how those things go. But I guess I'd stack what the others have achieved outside the band with what Byrne has: Tom Tom Club had more commercial success and creative influence on later artists with their first few releases than Byrne's had in the past 25 years and, not that money counts for anything, I'm willing to bet Jerry Harrison made significantly more money in the 90s just as a producer than Byrne did as a solo artist.
Which isn't to say Byrne wasn't right to follow his muse, or that he should have stayed in a band that was no longer, in his own words, fun any more. I guess it's just that it's a shame it didn't last longer and, more important, that a reappraisal of just what talent is and does is long overdue, especially when it comes to this band. And that when it comes to the creation of great rock and roll, that guy playing the keyboards or rhythm guitar in the band very likely isn't just some guy playing keyboards or rhythm guitar behind some singular genius.
Which is a pretty swell thing to hear. My brother once remarked that on balance Talking Heads may be the most popular band ever, in that they may not have had a whole lot of people for whom the Heads were their absolute number one all-time band, but unlike U2 or Led Zeppelin or even the Beatles, there was virtually no one who actively disliked them and pretty much everyone really liked at least a few of their songs.
I've always liked Talking Heads and sometimes really, really liked 'em. Never quite verged into "love" territory, I don't think, but always had just oodles and boodles of respect and admiration and even a kind of fondness for them; I mean, how can you not find their combination of downtown NYC cool mixed with total geekiness endearing?
And, like most people I knew, I was pretty crazy about Stop Making Sense when it came out, both the film and the soundtrack. And none of it was more slap-you-upside-the-head awesome than the solo performance of "Psycho Killer" that opens the set. It's an amazing rendition and a fantastic opening.
We should have known then the band's days were numbered.
I've been watching a Talking Heads concert from Rome, their 1980 Remain in Light tour. It's an amazing document and a great show, filled with wonderful performances of great songs. But it's not a Talking Heads show, not really. Adrian Belew is just a monster guitarist. But a putative Talking Heads concert where he gets at least two or three times as much attention on every single song as any Talking Head not named David is not a Talking Heads concert. And the same goes for killer keyboardist Bernie Worrell or extra percussionist Steve Scales or vocalist Dolette MacDonald or, for pete's sake, their second bassist. Their second bassist. Yes, Busta Jones is a phenomenal bassist, clearly far better than Tina Weymouth. But that's not the point, now, is it?
Despite my love of Elvis, Dylan, Springsteen and Bowie, I've never—or at least very rarely—subscribed to the "great man" theory of rock and roll, where a genius is so singular that he or she is able to create masterpieces in isolation; in fact, it's because of my love for those gentlemen that I haven't subscribed, as all of them did almost all their best work when collaborating, at least to some extent. Whether it was Elvis with his original trio or later in Memphis, produced by Chips Moman, or Dylan being spurred on by Mike Bloomfield or the Band or relative unknowns from Minneapolis, or Springsteen being kicked in the ass by Jon Landau on his third album or being convinced by Steven van Zandt to release his demos for Nebraska as is, all of them benefited massively from collaboration.
The various Talking Heads, including Byrne himself, seem to acknowledge he was coming to be seen very much as the dominant personality in the band, and understandably—he was the singer and the lyricist and wrote somewhere between much and most of the music, depending upon whom you listen to, and that's just how those things go. But I guess I'd stack what the others have achieved outside the band with what Byrne has: Tom Tom Club had more commercial success and creative influence on later artists with their first few releases than Byrne's had in the past 25 years and, not that money counts for anything, I'm willing to bet Jerry Harrison made significantly more money in the 90s just as a producer than Byrne did as a solo artist.
Which isn't to say Byrne wasn't right to follow his muse, or that he should have stayed in a band that was no longer, in his own words, fun any more. I guess it's just that it's a shame it didn't last longer and, more important, that a reappraisal of just what talent is and does is long overdue, especially when it comes to this band. And that when it comes to the creation of great rock and roll, that guy playing the keyboards or rhythm guitar in the band very likely isn't just some guy playing keyboards or rhythm guitar behind some singular genius.
Friday, April 20, 2012
What's Your Favorite Colour, Baby?
In September 1988, all alone on a Friday night, I walked into an old Army hangar on the campus of the University of Connecticut to watch a band I had never heard of play music I never knew existed.
I walked out with my head spinning. And a need to shout to the world that I had just seen the coolest, craziest, most impossibly different band on the planet. Alas, I didn’t do that. Though I did tell plenty of people about it. I really had no clue how to describe them.
They were loud and fast, kind of like heavy metal but so much better than what was passing for “metal” at the time (and what was inexplicably dominating the airwaves). They were edgier, angrier, and way more real. A cross between metal and punk, with a hearty dose of funk to back it all up. They had a dervish of a lead singer whose voice wasn’t at all screeching like most metal of the day, but clear and brutal, menacing and intoxicating. They had a guitarist who seemed to perform calculus on the guitar – that was the only way I could describe his lightning-like precision and mystifying ability to still produce actual, well, music. The two-man rhythm section was tight and lethal as Muhammad Ali’s fist, somehow able to not only keep up with the mayhem, but also propel it along. It was all so unreal.
Oh. Also? They were black. All four of them. Four black men in a rock band, playing a molecularly perfect mix of heavy metal and punk and funk. In 1988, you need to understand, this just...wasn’t...common.
The band was Living Colour. And I was their new Number 1 fan.
I mean, finally! A band that could rock way harder than the countless poseurs of the day – Warrant, Winger, White Lion, whatever the hell that bullshit “supergroup” of asshat Ted Nugent and that dude from Styx was called, they were all awful. Yet the kids I went to school with at the UConn ate it up. But this – what Living Colour was doing – was the real thing.
Singer Corey Glover. Guitarist Vernon Reid. Bassist Muzz Skillings. Drummer Will Calhoun. They even had cool names. All by themselves they would lay waste to an era of hair and vanity, excess and faux rebellion. Even better, they were from New York. Can’t get more real than that! This was the sound of a new era that would send Sebastian Bach slithering back to the primordial ooze that had grown tired of having him crash there.
Only…not really. They never did get to do that. Nirvana did! Oh, did they ever—kicked all of those clowns in the balls but good a couple years later, ruining their top-of-the-bill careers and relegating them forever to the dog track of oldies circuits.
But that’s a different story for a different time. No, Living Colour didn’t change the world as I thought they would that night, and as I really thought they would a few days later when I bought their absolutely mesmerizing debut record, Vivid. But for a while they sure as hell seemed destined to. They had it all – talent, attitude and a boatload of the anger that has always created so much of the best of rock-n-roll.
I’ll admit, the night I saw them, before owning the album, I walked out of there not exactly humming the tunes. Even though yes, they were hummable, I would come to realize. But it was more of an explosion to me, like watching a fireworks show that went on 10 feet from you for 75 straight minutes. Do you remember each individual starburst of magic? No. But you sure as hell recall how the night felt, and looked. And, in this case, sounded.
When I did get the album, my instant love affair was confirmed within seconds of the opening track, “Cult of Personality,” a razor slash through every inch of phoniness the plastic 80s had brought us. (“I exploit you, still you love me.”) These songs were three-dimensional, apparitions that jumped from the CD player and splatter-painted your walls like Jackson Pollock. And they all said something.
“Cult of Personality” and its rollercoaster of sonic mayhem was their statement of purpose, an announcement to all that this wasn’t anything you had heard before, and to get the hell out of their way.
“Middle Man” and “Glamour Boys” were fascinating indictments of the industry, with Muzz doing things on the bass to backup Vernon’s SAT-level solos that could have gotten him arrested in some parts.
“Desperate People” was the rawest look at the failure of the Reagan-era War on Drugs I had ever heard, each chord change thumping like an axe-handle to the solar plexus. “Which Way To America?” and “Open Letter (to a Landlord)” addressed poverty and helplessness with the same ferocity, the latter demonstrating how melodic they could be, how they were still able to tear the sounds down to their very roots. (“You can tear a building down, but you can’t erase a memory.”)
Hell, they even had a great cover of a great fellow New York band, “Memories Can’t Wait” by Talking Heads. Black people listening to Talking Heads? Black people playing Talking Heads? Black people had heard of the Talking Heads? I was so delightfully, deliciously, delovelely ferschimmeled by all this I could barely contain myself. (Remember, I was only 20 and wasn’t nearly as versed in the cross-racial history of rock-n-roll as I should have been).
And then there was the song, out of all this, that remains my favorite. Towards the end of an album that was such a wall of firepower came “Broken Hearts,” a…ballad? From these guys??? No. No way.
Yep.
An exaggerated hip-hop tinged carnival barker-like opening, replete with a distorted harmonica and snares, suddenly turned into gorgeous, impeccably delivered soul, Glover’s voice snaking through the air as if Marvin Gaye had temporarily taken over his body.
“A breeze reminds me of a changing time and place,
A tear that takes forever rolls down a timeless face.”
Are you freaking kidding me? A line like that in the middle of everything else, so perfect and pretty and seductive? “Broken Hearts” was Living Colour’s way of telling the listeners, “Not only are we tougher than you, but we can be sweeter, too.” And they were right.
Fame came fast for the band. They won awards, made popular videos, appeared on SNL and Arsenio. Got a great gig opening for the Rolling Stones on their 1989 World Tour and, in the opinion of at least this now-aging rocker, blew the Glimmer Twins off the stage. People began talking about that “black rock band” and how fast and crazy they were. And whenever they did I wanted to ask, “Were you there? Were you with me that night in the armory? Did you see it too?” Hoping someone would say yes. A few did and we relished reliving the experience. Most didn’t and that night was left for me to remember as I was, alone and awestruck.
Sadly it didn’t really last, the fame. Their next album in 1990, Time’s Up, had similar moments of brilliance, but was just a little too sprawling and disjointed. Skillings would leave the band and be replaced by a true marksman on the bass, Doug Wimbish (from MY hometown of Bloomfield, CT!), but the band was missing something it had back a few years earlier. Some…thing that rock bands sometimes hold onto, sometimes don’t. Danger? Maybe. Fear of failure? Possibly. A marrow-level connection with each other and the music? Perhaps. I saw Living Colour twice after seeing them open for the Stones, and I enjoyed what I saw each time, but I never saw again what I saw that first time. And hey, maybe that’s on me, as they surely didn’t get less talented. But they seemed to come and go like those fireworks I thought of when I first saw them. Astounding but fleeting.
Did they change the music world? Perhaps, at least a little. Again, Nirvana and their pals from the Pacific Northwest would put an end to the glam stranglehold, but Living Colour’s proof that you could blow it out without compromise and without being afraid to bend genres and styles played a part in shaping the next generation. Listen to Vivid (and some of Time’s Up and their 3rd effort, Stain) and you hear traces of R&B and ska and reggae and new wave and fusion alongside locomotive-paced hard rock, as well as many of the wall-of-fuzz meets pop stylings later heard on Nevermind and In Utero. Music saw more and more cross pollination in the 90s and later at the century’s turn. Maybe Living Colour had something to do with it. Even if they likely won’t ever get into the Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame. (And sidenote? They should.)
Still? Living Colour had it all on that September night 24 years ago – the look, the sneer, the talent and the vision. And to me, it looked like they had everything they needed to change the face of music.
For a while they did, and the future seemed to belong just to them. It didn’t, as it turns out. But Living Colour left a hell of a mark that will be there forever. Beautiful. Tough. Relentless.
Vivid.
I walked out with my head spinning. And a need to shout to the world that I had just seen the coolest, craziest, most impossibly different band on the planet. Alas, I didn’t do that. Though I did tell plenty of people about it. I really had no clue how to describe them.
They were loud and fast, kind of like heavy metal but so much better than what was passing for “metal” at the time (and what was inexplicably dominating the airwaves). They were edgier, angrier, and way more real. A cross between metal and punk, with a hearty dose of funk to back it all up. They had a dervish of a lead singer whose voice wasn’t at all screeching like most metal of the day, but clear and brutal, menacing and intoxicating. They had a guitarist who seemed to perform calculus on the guitar – that was the only way I could describe his lightning-like precision and mystifying ability to still produce actual, well, music. The two-man rhythm section was tight and lethal as Muhammad Ali’s fist, somehow able to not only keep up with the mayhem, but also propel it along. It was all so unreal.
Oh. Also? They were black. All four of them. Four black men in a rock band, playing a molecularly perfect mix of heavy metal and punk and funk. In 1988, you need to understand, this just...wasn’t...common.
I mean, finally! A band that could rock way harder than the countless poseurs of the day – Warrant, Winger, White Lion, whatever the hell that bullshit “supergroup” of asshat Ted Nugent and that dude from Styx was called, they were all awful. Yet the kids I went to school with at the UConn ate it up. But this – what Living Colour was doing – was the real thing.
Singer Corey Glover. Guitarist Vernon Reid. Bassist Muzz Skillings. Drummer Will Calhoun. They even had cool names. All by themselves they would lay waste to an era of hair and vanity, excess and faux rebellion. Even better, they were from New York. Can’t get more real than that! This was the sound of a new era that would send Sebastian Bach slithering back to the primordial ooze that had grown tired of having him crash there.
Only…not really. They never did get to do that. Nirvana did! Oh, did they ever—kicked all of those clowns in the balls but good a couple years later, ruining their top-of-the-bill careers and relegating them forever to the dog track of oldies circuits.
But that’s a different story for a different time. No, Living Colour didn’t change the world as I thought they would that night, and as I really thought they would a few days later when I bought their absolutely mesmerizing debut record, Vivid. But for a while they sure as hell seemed destined to. They had it all – talent, attitude and a boatload of the anger that has always created so much of the best of rock-n-roll.
I’ll admit, the night I saw them, before owning the album, I walked out of there not exactly humming the tunes. Even though yes, they were hummable, I would come to realize. But it was more of an explosion to me, like watching a fireworks show that went on 10 feet from you for 75 straight minutes. Do you remember each individual starburst of magic? No. But you sure as hell recall how the night felt, and looked. And, in this case, sounded.
When I did get the album, my instant love affair was confirmed within seconds of the opening track, “Cult of Personality,” a razor slash through every inch of phoniness the plastic 80s had brought us. (“I exploit you, still you love me.”) These songs were three-dimensional, apparitions that jumped from the CD player and splatter-painted your walls like Jackson Pollock. And they all said something.
“Cult of Personality” and its rollercoaster of sonic mayhem was their statement of purpose, an announcement to all that this wasn’t anything you had heard before, and to get the hell out of their way.
“Middle Man” and “Glamour Boys” were fascinating indictments of the industry, with Muzz doing things on the bass to backup Vernon’s SAT-level solos that could have gotten him arrested in some parts.
“Desperate People” was the rawest look at the failure of the Reagan-era War on Drugs I had ever heard, each chord change thumping like an axe-handle to the solar plexus. “Which Way To America?” and “Open Letter (to a Landlord)” addressed poverty and helplessness with the same ferocity, the latter demonstrating how melodic they could be, how they were still able to tear the sounds down to their very roots. (“You can tear a building down, but you can’t erase a memory.”)
Hell, they even had a great cover of a great fellow New York band, “Memories Can’t Wait” by Talking Heads. Black people listening to Talking Heads? Black people playing Talking Heads? Black people had heard of the Talking Heads? I was so delightfully, deliciously, delovelely ferschimmeled by all this I could barely contain myself. (Remember, I was only 20 and wasn’t nearly as versed in the cross-racial history of rock-n-roll as I should have been).
And then there was the song, out of all this, that remains my favorite. Towards the end of an album that was such a wall of firepower came “Broken Hearts,” a…ballad? From these guys??? No. No way.
Yep.
An exaggerated hip-hop tinged carnival barker-like opening, replete with a distorted harmonica and snares, suddenly turned into gorgeous, impeccably delivered soul, Glover’s voice snaking through the air as if Marvin Gaye had temporarily taken over his body.
“A breeze reminds me of a changing time and place,
A tear that takes forever rolls down a timeless face.”
Are you freaking kidding me? A line like that in the middle of everything else, so perfect and pretty and seductive? “Broken Hearts” was Living Colour’s way of telling the listeners, “Not only are we tougher than you, but we can be sweeter, too.” And they were right.
Fame came fast for the band. They won awards, made popular videos, appeared on SNL and Arsenio. Got a great gig opening for the Rolling Stones on their 1989 World Tour and, in the opinion of at least this now-aging rocker, blew the Glimmer Twins off the stage. People began talking about that “black rock band” and how fast and crazy they were. And whenever they did I wanted to ask, “Were you there? Were you with me that night in the armory? Did you see it too?” Hoping someone would say yes. A few did and we relished reliving the experience. Most didn’t and that night was left for me to remember as I was, alone and awestruck.
Sadly it didn’t really last, the fame. Their next album in 1990, Time’s Up, had similar moments of brilliance, but was just a little too sprawling and disjointed. Skillings would leave the band and be replaced by a true marksman on the bass, Doug Wimbish (from MY hometown of Bloomfield, CT!), but the band was missing something it had back a few years earlier. Some…thing that rock bands sometimes hold onto, sometimes don’t. Danger? Maybe. Fear of failure? Possibly. A marrow-level connection with each other and the music? Perhaps. I saw Living Colour twice after seeing them open for the Stones, and I enjoyed what I saw each time, but I never saw again what I saw that first time. And hey, maybe that’s on me, as they surely didn’t get less talented. But they seemed to come and go like those fireworks I thought of when I first saw them. Astounding but fleeting.
Did they change the music world? Perhaps, at least a little. Again, Nirvana and their pals from the Pacific Northwest would put an end to the glam stranglehold, but Living Colour’s proof that you could blow it out without compromise and without being afraid to bend genres and styles played a part in shaping the next generation. Listen to Vivid (and some of Time’s Up and their 3rd effort, Stain) and you hear traces of R&B and ska and reggae and new wave and fusion alongside locomotive-paced hard rock, as well as many of the wall-of-fuzz meets pop stylings later heard on Nevermind and In Utero. Music saw more and more cross pollination in the 90s and later at the century’s turn. Maybe Living Colour had something to do with it. Even if they likely won’t ever get into the Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame. (And sidenote? They should.)
Still? Living Colour had it all on that September night 24 years ago – the look, the sneer, the talent and the vision. And to me, it looked like they had everything they needed to change the face of music.
For a while they did, and the future seemed to belong just to them. It didn’t, as it turns out. But Living Colour left a hell of a mark that will be there forever. Beautiful. Tough. Relentless.
Vivid.
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