Orange Crush

You know, even as a huge fan, I find it easy to forget just how hard these guys could rock.

But, man, they really did tear it up at times.

Revolution

A very knowledgable music fan with usually outstanding taste once casually said to me that the Beatles weren't really rock, that they were pop. I just stared at him for several minutes until he went away.

I mean, really.

I don't believe the whole "world's greatest rock 'n roll band™" nonsense started until after the Beatles had broken up. And with good reason. Compare and contrast and only one band comes out looking like a serious contender for the title, and it ain't the Stones.

Blank Space

So. Like a lot of people, I've been anxiously awaiting Ryan Adams' new album ever since he announced he was recording it about a month ago. A new Adams LP isn't exactly an unusual thing, given that the guy may be the most prolific artist of the past few decades, or at least in the same general league as Prince and Springsteen. But this one was unusual in that he was recording a complete cover of the Taylor Swift album 1989. And given how fine an album that was, the prospect of Adams covering every song in the style, as he said, of other artists such as The Smiths was highly intriguing.

Well, it's here. And the redoubtable Stereogum put it well when they wrote:

One of society’s great blights is the plague of sensitive acoustic-guitar-slinging white guys playing ironic-not-ironic covers of big, sparkly pop songs. Every once in a while, some dipshit will come along and attempt to convince you that Travis’ “Baby One More Time” or Ted Leo’s “Since U Been Gone” is the best version of the song. These people are psychopaths, and you should back away from them very slowly. The myth of the acoustic-white-guy cover is that it reveals a song’s hidden strengths, or maybe lays bare its insipidness, by stripping away all the attention-grabbing production trickery. Whatever the aims of Travis or Leo, whether the covers were affectionate or not, all they succeeded in doing was peeling away the force and immediacy of a couple of great songs. It’s not a new phenomenon, either. In his book Positively 4th Street, David Hadju wrote about how Joan Baez, in her coffeehouse folk days, used to play spare, mocking covers of Frankie Lymon songs, a tidbit that made me disdain Baez more than countless road-trip hours with my parents ever could. (Ain’t like Baez ever recorded a song as enduring as “Why Do Fools Fall In Love.”) But with all this in mind, it brings me great satisfaction to report that Ryan Adams’ new album-length reimagining of Taylor Swift’s 1989 is not a part of this loathsome tradition. We can debate its merits all day, but Adams knows what some of us know: 1989 is a shining, laser-guided new-pop masterpiece, a personal vision rendered with blockbuster scope and virtuosic panache. He wasn’t going to improve it in any way. It just wasn’t going to happen. But he could reflect it through the lens of his own experience and put his own stamp on it. And that’s what he did.

Indeed he did.

(And, for the record, I love the Travis cover, although it can't touch the Spears original—although, to be fair, there aren't a whole lot of records that can.)

As with the fantastic Richard Thompson cover of Britney Spears's "Oops, I Did It Again," Adams is neither covering this ironically nor attempting to imbue it with artistic credibility. Adams is clearly a legitimate fan, which means he understands that there's no need for him to try to argue in favor of its merit, since that's obvious to anyone with ears and an understanding of popular music.

What he does do, by stripping it back, is make undeniable what was already obvious, which is that it's simply a great damn song—great lyrics, great melody, set over the top of (basically) the chords to "Hungry Heart." (Which is, itself, not a terribly uncommon chord progression.) And since Adams is a finer singer than Swift—and I don't mean that as a slam; how ordinary if pleasant her voice is was one of the things that was so likable about Swift in the first place—that gives the recording an extra boost to compensate what has been lost in the decrease in volume. And the Nebraska-era Springsteenian fingerpicked guitar meets "Here Comes a Regular" strings is a fabulous way to have arranged the song.

The thing is that I've listened to it a dozen times now and I feel a little sicker each time I do. Because it's one thing when übërfamous twenty-something pop star Taylor Swift sings it and, no matter how not closely we may follow her various romantic adventures, we can't help but have some idea of the biographical basis and instinctively get the tongue-in-cheek nature of the lyrics, even if that tongue's being bitten from a bit of bitterness over the unpleasantness of having your every emotional move chronicled by the paparazzi as though the fate of the entire earth hinged on who you're dating this week.

But it's something else entirely when a middle-aged white guy sings this same song. No matter how lovely his vocals—and they are—this middle-aged white guy can't get past how creepy the singer is, how at best he's a really skeevy skeez hitting on someone way younger and more naive, and more likely he's a raging douche—and very possibly a literal psychopath. Suddenly the long list of ex-lovers is transmogrified into the famous Shakespeare aphorism "if everyone you meet is an asshole, odds are, you're the asshole." I can't stop wondering why any female would ever be with him, and I want to tell the one he's currently singing to to please for the love of god run as the best-case scenario is that this manchild is almost certainly going to devastate you emotionally and very possibly end the night dancing to himself in front of a mirror while wearing your skin.

Which isn't to say it's a bad record. Just the opposite. Adams has taken a great song and come up with a great cover. And it's instructive to note some of the liberties he took with the lyrics, such as changing "'cuz we're young and we're reckless" to "so goddamn reckless," or the fact that he eliminated entirely the bridge, which goes:

Boys only want love if it's torture 
Don't say I didn't say I didn't warn you

A good call on his part. The entire song is.  It's just that it makes me feel ill. Maybe that's all me, but I find it hard to believe an artist as intelligent, learned and thoughtful (if himself not a little self-destructive) as Adams didn't have some idea that was an impression that could easily be given. It's fascinating and eerie and I can't stop listening to it but I really wish I could.

[ADDED JULY 2020: revisiting this five years down the road, I feel oddly and unhappily prescient.]

All Right Now

Not so much.

I grew up on classic rock. AOR was a mainstay. Despite owning all the Beatles LPs, for instance, whenever one of the local rock radio stations would hold one of their "all Beatles all the time" holiday weekends, playing every Fabs song in alphabetical order, I'd leave the radio on for the duration. Aerosmith, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Doors, Black Sabbath, the Eagles, Deep Purple, Styx, these were my lifeblood in junior high and high school.

Even at the time I had more sophisticated tastes as well. In addition to the Beatles, there were the Rolling Stones and the Who, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen and David Bowie and Jackson Browne and Pink Floyd. There was also a fair amount of prog, which, hey: the heart wants what the heart wants. Later, I got into jazz and punk and post-punk and alternative and classical and so on and so forth.

I was a music fanatic pretty much since I can remember. Sousa music in the park on the Fourth? I'm there. Cocktail pianist at someone's wedding reception? I'll just sit and watch. And yet for the first few years after I graduated college, I more or less did without music, as my stereo and CDs and LPs were down in Greensboro, North Carolina and I was up in New York City. So I had a walkman and a few dozen tapes, but that was about it. And this when grunge was just starting to explode, so there was some mighty interesting stuff happening, and I missed much of it.

A few years later, I got back into music again for a few years, from around 1993-1995. But then life intruded once more and I pretty much had to duck back out. And when I resurfaced, in the late 90s, I found myself consumed by jazz, listening to almost nothing but for a few years. After that, it was classical, which was almost all I listened to for several more. (Oh, Shostakovich, you are the seductive one.)

And then it was the mid-Naughts and rock and roll pulled me back. I caught up on a lot of the stuff I'd missed and more: thanks to a pair of books (1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die and 1000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die), I got invested in really investigating some major artists I'd only had collections of before (Aretha Franklin, the Byrds) or artists about whom I'd heard for literally decades but never listened to before (Nick Drake and Elliott Smith, both of which...WOW. Hawkwind and Tim Buckley, which...not so much).

But I also made a point out of seeking out current artists. So I fell deeply in like to love with the Decemberists and the Wrens and Bon Iver and Iron & Wine and Smith Westerns and Kathleen Edwards and Japandrois and Low and Janelle Monáe and Tennis and Real Estate and Camera Obscura and Kanye West and so on and so forth. There is so damn much damn good music coming out these days. I decided that, no hard feelings, Steve Miller Band, but I really don't need to ever hear you ever again; I listened to you for literally hundreds of hours growing up, and that was good enough. If I ever need to hear "Fly Like an Eagle" again, I can almost certainly "hear" the entire thing from beginning to end with my mind's ear.

But after a few years the excitement of discovering started to wear off just a bit, and I had to realize there was one problem with most of today's best artists, or at least, the ones I'd discovered: almost none of them...welll...rocked. They were often exquisite, gorgeous, sophisticated, warm and inviting...but sometimes you just really wanna hear someone kick out the jams, you know? Sometimes you wanna hear "That's the Way" and sometimes you need to hear "Achilles Last Stand." And give 'em their due: classic rock often did just that. It rocked.

So much as I didn't particularly want to listen to Bad Company again (cf. Steve Miller Band), I had to admit my appreciation for their rockitude, for Paul Rodgers' killer voice, for the great (so great!) drumming of Simon Kirke, for the killer riffs of Mick Ralphs. So when "All Right Now," by Bad Company's predecssor, Free, came on the other day, I kinda smiled. It's got that great voice, that great (so great!) drumming, and the absolutely fantastic guitar riff by Paul Kossoff.

And then I listened to the lyrics.

There she stood in the street
Smilin' from her head to her feet;
I said, "Hey, what is this?
Now maybe, baby,
Maybe she's in need of a kiss."

I said, "Hey, what's your name?
Maybe we can see things the same.
"Now don't you wait, or hesitate.
Let's move before they raise the parking rate."

All right now, baby, it's a-all right now.
All right now, baby, it's a-all right now.

I took her home to my place,
Watchin' every move on her face;
She said, "Look, what's your game?
Are you tryin' to put me to shame?"
I said "Slow, don't go so fast, don't you think that love can last?"
She said, "Love, Lord above,
Now you're tryin' to trick me in love."

All right now, baby, it's a-all right now.
All right now, baby, it's a-all right now

Maybe it's because I've got a bunch of daughters. Maybe it's because the world has changed. Maybe it's because I have. But these lyrics are just so damn rapey. And I don't think it's an either-or proposition, not in a million years. But if it is? If I have to choose between rock that rocks but is rapey or rock that doesn't rock but isn't? I'll go with today's more laid-back artists, in a heartbeat. 'cuz no matter how great the voice or riff or drumming, this is just gross.

Kashmir

I've been wondering: how does watching bands like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and self-proclaimed golden gods Led Zeppelin turn into what are undeniably old men affect our view on aging? I mean, look at these guys:

Let the sun beat down upon my face

They're old. (Well, three of them are.) They look great, each in their own way. Jimmy Page looks incredibly cool (if incredibly sweaty), John Paul Jones appears to be a decade younger than the others—closer in age to whippersnapper Jason Bonham—and Robert Plant looks like one badass beach bum who's barely been out of the sun since the 70s. He looks cool. He looks great. But he's old.

Does seeing the cute Beatle get increasingly jowly and obviously dye his hair make us feel our mortality all the more, or is the fact that he's still playing (wonderfully) to stadiums full make us feel like there's no need to get put out to pasture at the ripe old age of 64?

I don't know. And I'm not really going anywhere with this. I just wonder what effect, if any, it's had on those of us who grew up listening to rock and roll as time marches on, both for us and for the bands we listened to back when we was young.