Old Dogs, Revisited

Well, here's a different kettle of fish -- new albums (sorta) from The Beach Boys and Jethro Tull (or more properly, "Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson"), 50 years on for The Boys, 40 years on from the original Thick As A Brick (TAAB), and I think 45 years or so from JT's first album.

The good news: not terrible in either case.

Let's face it, nobody expected anything from The Beach Boys. Name their last good album, then count how many albums they managed to squeeze out since then. Product, product, product, with no sense of quality control. Then there's the whole inter-band strife (troubled genius Brian vs talent-free egomaniac Mike Love is the USA Today/pap digest version). Oh, and a few of the Wilson Brothers died. So now what? Once again, Brian is writing to a deadline (the tour starts tomorrow!! Where are the songs!!) And the results are...surprise! Mixed!

"That's Why God Made the Radio" relies a lot on Brian Wilson's touring band, so they know how to give a good approximation of those golden Beach Boy harmonies. Add Mike Love's nasal whine, but cushioned with pillows of background vocals, plus he's miked pretty close, so not much straining -- and we have, well, this year's version of The Beach Boys. There are 12 songs, 4 of which are really good, 2 aren't terrible, and the rest are not bad. Yeah, I know -- but this could have been a total wipeout! There are cute touches: we hear some of Brian's favorite sounds in the mix (tack piano, bass harmonica, bicycle bell), but the predominate theme is nostalgia and the sunset of our lives. Several of the lyrics refer to "can we just go back" (remember "Do It Again"?)

Most of The Beach Boy albums were suffused with melancholy; it was couched in 'summer is so short and the sun's going down', but us sensitive types figured it out. On "That's Why God Made the Radio", I'm not sure if The Beach Boys are underlining this theme for the rubes, or if they're just figuring it out themselves: "Hey, summer's gone -- it's a freakin' metaphor for life!!"

That said, I really enjoy the 'single', "That's Why God Made the Radio", though why it sounds like "Theme from Midnight Cowboy" confuses me. And the last 3 songs are really good; "Summer's Gone" is one of Brian's best songs, hampered by the too-too much arrangement, but the opening wind-chimes, and the fade-out wind-chimes/ocean surf -- if that's Brian's last production, he can go out a champ.

Then we have "Thick As A Brick 2". I've listened to this in bits, so I'll just give first impressions. But, some background first: the "Aqualung" album broke Jethro Tull big time, follow-up "Thick As A Brick"?: one 'song' spread over 2 sides of an LP. Parody of prog-rock excess or Ian's ego exercise? Discuss. In any case, it was a massive hit. 40 years on, why a sequel? The critics will have a field day! (Umm, a critic hasn't written about Jethro Tull since  Johnny Rotten was in short pants.) 

First, this isn't really a sequel; it follows the life story (or rather, the options) of the 'author' of the original -- oh hell, why am I writing this? If you got this far, you know the story. Here's my first impression: Ian looks back musically, trains a new crew to  approximate the JT sound, and he writes his musical version of Joyce's "Ulysses", via Dickens and BBC kitchen-sink dramas. Heck no, it's not that profound, but Ian's hidden so many musical clues (not just Jethro Tull songs, but Fairport Convention-ish folk appropriations and classical motifs), that it entertains strictly on the whole Spot-the-Clue entertainment aspect.

Sound-wise, this will be a major disappointment if you jump from TAAB to this 'sequel", but if you've followed Tull through the years, you might find this a fun crossword-puzzle of past glories and more recent album tracks. As Ian sang many years ago, "it's only solitaire", and he's done a great job of entertaining us with his own one-upmanship.

   

Serendipity?

I continue at my Sisyphus-like task of paying off credit card debt, but sometimes theres a silver (ha!) lining -- turns out I've earned 'bonus points' which I get to redeem for stuff. Woo-hoo!  

Part 2: I've mentioned this before, but there are suggestions (libraries are debating how to handle this)  that CDs are headed for the dustbin (are there still dustbins?) within the next 5-10 years. So...I snap up what I can when I can before the oasis dries up.

Back to Paragraph One: turns out that Best Buy will accept my bonus points! Online, the catalog is a mess: postage stamp graphics, no track listings, just a tiny picture -- good luck!

But I found Peter Lang's first Takoma album "The Thing at the Nursery Room Window" and was reminded how good it was. Under the shadow of Leo Kottke and John Fahey, Peter's work wasn't as popular as it should have been, so I was happy to get a copy again. And, surprise, surprise, there was a Skillet Lickers album available too! Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers recorded in the '30s, and were a major influence on the '60s old-time music revival.

And here's the thing -- Best Buy would NEVER carry these in their stores. Heck, the Skillet Lickers album is on Document Records, which is like this dry, dusty "released in chronological order" label that we library types get all excited about.

And...Part 3: Found Disc One of "The Leroy Anderson Collection" at Community Thrift in Mount Vernon for $2.49. Yeah, I know!! Leroy Anderson wrote entertaining pop-classical tunes like "Fiddle-Faddle", "Plink. Plank, Plunk", "The Syncopated Clock" and "The Typewriter". If I could insert music files here, you might recognize them -- my generation's first exposure to "light classical".  (You'll most likely know him from that Christmas perennial "Sleigh Ride" -- heck, even Phil Spector covered it!)

Of course, you take your chances with thrift stores -- turns out that the Leroy Anderson disc is only part 1 of a 2-disc set. I'm sure it's orphan brother is far, far away, but that won't stop me from testing my luck again.

RIP, Andy Griffith (Goober says "Hey!")

"The Andy Griffith Show" ("starring Andy Griffith!") many times gets lumped into the low-brow TV fare of its day that included "The Beverly Hillbillies", "Petticoat Junction" and all the TV crap that portrayed the South as full of hicks and hayseeds. And that may have been true in the early days of "TAGS" (Andy, mouth full of teeth and cornpone cliches), but soon the show found its rhythm. I sincerely think that there are several seasons (1962-1964)
of "The Andy Griffith Show" that can stand with the best of television.

Those would be the Don Knotts/Barney Fife years. Yes, yes, Don was wonderful in the role, but the way that Andy the actor stepped back and let Don take the spotlight was a great lesson in putting the writing first. My favorite bits seemed improvised -- after dinner, on the porch, Andy strumming his guitar while he and Barney seem to do the southern version of "Waiting for Godot". Gonna watch TV with Thelma Lou, maybe going to the pictures to see "The Monster from Outta Town" -- great, great stuff, played so relaxed and unhurried.

So many favorites, one of which is "Opie the Birdman". Opie, playing with his new slingshot, accidentally kills a bird, her babies now without a mother. Opie insists on taking the place of the mother, Andy implies this may not work out so well... but Opie persists, feeding the babies before leaving for school. Eventually, the caged birds must be freed, and Opie turns to his pa, saying "The cage seems pretty empty", while Andy responds with the classic line "Yeah, but don't the trees sound nice and full" (Apologies if my memory fudges the exact lines.) 


Andy, Barn and Goober have gone to that ol' fishin' hole in the sky, God bless 'em. Thanks so much, guys.

"Retromania"

Recently read "Retromania" by Simon Reynolds, subtitled "Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past". As an official card-carrying geezer, this is familiar territory to me. Listening to radio, I thunder like an Old Testament prophet: "There is nothing new under the sun!" (I may have mentioned it before, but there was an old National Lampoon article that revealed, there only being so many musical notes and only so many combinations, the last new song would have been written in the late '80s.) Reynolds rails (nice, eh?) against the laziness of pop music: find a hit, repeat the formula ad nauseam... Even lesser bands that have nothing to lose by taking a chance couch their music in familiar patterns. It's like I described current popular country music to someone: it already sounds familiar the first time you hear it. Sampling, remakes, tributes -- all of pop music comes under Reynold's withering gaze and comes up wanting. He does, however, have a glimmer of hope: for him, the '60s was groundbreaking, the '70s not so much...he feels newness is cyclical, and we have bright days ahead, eventually. As depressing as I found "Retromania", I did get a great album recommend: "Music Has the Right to Children" by Boards of Canada. It was one of the albums that set Radiohead on their pilgrimage after "Ok Computer" into the wilds of "Kid A". The Boards album came out in 1998, and it was an electronic album that rejected the cold android feel of then-popular electronic pop and instead took a cue from Eno's '70s work. Short vignettes drift across the soundscape, make their statement and move on. These aren't 'songs, but visual events captured in sound. My feeling is that Radiohead learned from this approach and raised it to a whole new level, but I was fascinated to hear some of the compost that Radiohead used to fertilize their new music.

Behind the Scenes

I began buying records in the Beatles era, and in that pre-internet, pre-Rolling Stone time, you had to parse whatever information you could from the LP credits themselves, not always the best source, it turns out. Jump ahead to the '70s: liner notes include musician credits. Many of the same names crop up over and over again, and that's when I learned about studio musicians, professionals hired by the hour to deliver whatever the songs needed. (Later, the "professional" part became the problem for many bands -- too slick for rock and roll? And yet, Steely Dan treasured just that professional slickness to add that sonic sheen they desired so much. Go figure.) As rock bands decided they were indeed bands, the ground shifted. The band members played their own instruments and wrote their own songs. (Here's that Beatles thing again -- oh, and yes, the evolution of the Monkees.) The studio musicians from the Phil Spector/early Beach Boy era were no longer in demand, and there was another crop of long-haired, more 'hip' musicians ready to take their place. "The Wrecking Crew: The Inside Story of Rock and Roll's Best-Kept Secret" by Kent Hartman is about the earlier bunch, guys (and Carol Kaye on bass!) who performed the 'band' functions on Phil Spector sessions, plus records by the Beach Boys, Gary and the Playboys, Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, the Turtles...really, the list goes on and on.

You might hear the same approaches on different sessions -- "She's Just My Style" by Gary Lewis and the Playboys owes a lot to the Beach Boys sound -- because the same musicians played both sessions.

And it wasn't only the musicians; there were songwriting factories (like the Brill Building, home to Neil Sedaka, Carole King, etc.) So what? Well, the book either ignores the elephant in the room, or just leaves the reader to discover it themselves. Here's my take: when the Wrecking Crew played on Phil Spector sessions, we never thought there was a 'band' -- we heard the vocalists plus musicians, as you would a big band or an orchestra. Fine. But when as a pre-teen thirsty for knowledge I pored over those Gary Lewis and the Playboy albums -- they portrayed the photogenic band member playing the bass --which he didn't!??! Example: all these '60s bands mime to backing tracks on Ed Sullivan, say, but they're faking not only that they are playing live, but that they ever played that music at all. Ever. Concert tour sound at that time was so crappy and the venues so ill-suited for amplified music that audiences never noticed that they were getting a poor approximation of the songs they knew from radio.

That was then, right? The whole "band as contained unit" lasted a while, but then MTV arrived, and suddenly you didn't need talent if you looked good. Now we were inundated with photogenic puppets. The session musicians were replaced by studio technology and computer techs, but they still needed songs. The Brill Building was gone, but there were more songwriters just waiting for their turn at the trough. The more things change...

Bluegrass Across the Years

A pair of fairly recent DVDs that show two very different views of the bluegrass world. "Bluegrass Country Soul" was filmed at a bluegrass festival in 1971, and it shows a genre in flux. "Traditional" bluegrass was flummoxed by the popular long-hair culture -- how do we keep current without betraying our roots? I'm sure at the time some of the crossover song choices were considered radical (John Denver! Elton John!!) and it's weird seeing Earl Scruggs in short hair and short sleeves playing with his far more hirsute offspring. We also get to see Ralph Stanley (long before "O Death" but still every inch the patriarch), J.D. Crowe (with a young chubby-faced Tony Rice -- who doesn't even get to solo!), Chubby Wise playing his trademark "Orange Blossom Special" with the biggest grin on his face, and Bluegrass 45, a band of young Japanese men that elicits one of the biggest responses from the crowd. But my favorite has to be the Stanley Brothers. They play like they could do it in their sleep, but I never felt they were phoning it in -- and "Ruby" still has all those hill-holler piercing high notes. Jump ahead 30 years, and you get "Bluegrass Journey", recorded at the Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival in 2000. We get to see performers from "Bluegrass Country Soul" like Del McCoury and Tony Rice, but this DVD includes the full festival experience, which by now includes the special instrumental workshops and the crazy jamming through the night at the official hotel (I REALLY need to get to Wintergrass in Bellevue next year). Highlights for me: Peter Rowan performing "The Hobo Song" that he recorded with Old & In the Way which featured Jerry Garcia and started me on the road to bluegrass, Nickel Creek stretching the boundaries with "Old Cold Coffee On the Dashboard" (oh, wait, it's just a variation on what David Grisman was doing in, umm, 1976, but okay, I still like it), and yes, you guessed it, Tony Rice performing his medley of "Shenandoah" and "Danny Boy". I also love the energy in the hotel, from the lobby where old friends meet again to the hallways and rooms where all the jam sessions happen. The scenes from the International Bluegrass Music Association's "World of Bluegrass" (the bluegrass Grammys) show we're a long way from 1971. Two DVDs, two very different looks at a fascinating culture. And RIP, Earl. His performance in "Bluegrass Country Soul" shows a gracious, humble man, performing with so many of the people he influenced. Priceless.

And the EBTG reissues begin