April 19, 2022: The Power of Creativity (And Loud Guitars)

I’m a firm believer in creativity – the more the better. Long ago in an English Lit class taught by a professor with fire in his eyes and froth on his lips I read a passage from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage that went, “‘Tis to create, and in creating live a being more intense, that we endow with form our fancy” … something like that. It hit home like the first chords of Graceland, and I’ve tried to live that intense being ever since.

It’s been hard, with kids and jobs that didn’t exactly inspire or honor creativity, and the quality of the creating hasn’t always been top-shelf, but I’ve persevered. Which is the long way around to say I have a new “album” out called Search For Tomorrow, which you can access here: https://soundcloud.com/kick-the-ball/sets/search-for-tomorrow

It’s not a real album of course, just another flight of fancy, but it’s the tangible product of an ongoing need to create, a need that I hope to keep satisfying to my last breath.

If you like semi-interesting songs and loud guitars played without an overabundance of skill, it’s right up your alley. I hope you like it, but I also hope you understand I didn’t do it for you. I did it because I had to.

Dec. 4, 2018: Christmas Music

It’s been a long time since we wrote about travel music. It’s sort of strange, since travel has almost always been conducted to a soundtrack, whether it’s Judy Garland warbling her way down the Yellow Brick Road or a million Dylan, Springsteen, and CCR songs cranked to the max with the windows down and the in-car singers shamelessly belting along.

Given that it’s the holidays, and there’s a compulsion to play the old standbys before they’re mothballed, we thought we’d combine the two topics and provide a list of 11 holiday songs that fit the requirements of good automobile music without deviating from the holiday theme. Feel free to contribute more as you see fit.

The Kinks, “Father Christmas”: Once described as the best modern Christmas song, “Father Christmas” adds bells and crunchy guitars to a nicely snarky Ray Davies lyric about beating up Santa in a parking lot – and if that’s not entirely perfect, it’ll do. Note: Don’t confuse this with Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s “I Believe In Father Christmas,” which has many merits, but absolutely zero extortion.

Bruce Springsteen, “Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town”: The one song on this list that stands a risk of being played to death, it’s still a hoot because of its sheer exuberance. Springsteen and his band are on top of the world and having the time of their lives – and if exuberance and joy aren’t what Christmas is all about, they’re a start. And how about the Big Man on sax?

Freddy Fender, “Frosty The Snowman”: An obscure cut off a really obscure album (A Tejano Country Christmas) this might be the version that makes you appreciate the wonders of the Zombie Precipitation Monster once and for all. Fender’s bilingual lyric is matched stride-for-stride by Flaco Jimenez’s killer accordion. The rest of the album’s a mixed bag of coal and chocolate, but for one cut at least Fender rules.

Chas and Dave, “Auld Lang Syne”: Two half-cocked cockneys singing “Auld Lang Syne” over and over again. Doesn’t sound like much fun, but the song’s pub-rock beat, barrelhouse piano and relentless energy finally win you over. Featured on an absolutely great soundtrack album from an absolutely abysmal movie (Party Party, if you must know).

Chuck Berry, “Run Rudolph Run”: The one and only Christmas song by the poet laureate of the duck walk. “Out of all the reindeers you know you’re the mastermind”: Where does he come up with this stuff?

Nick Lowe, “Christmas At The Airport”: Elvis Costello's first producer may have over-mellowed since his “Cruel To Be Kind” days, but he redeems himself temporarily on Quality Street (2013), a cornucopia of Christmas delights that includes this absolute gem. How can you argue with any song that includes the lyric, “Don't save me any turkey/I found a burger in a bin”?

The Ronettes: “Frosty The Snowman”: We apologize for being duplicative, but you’d be hard-pressed to tell that the Freddy Fender version and Phil Spector’s magnum opus contain any of the same DNA. Ronnie Spector’s version from the seminal A Christmas Gift For You album features tambourines big as windmills and vocals recorded at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. It’s the most dramatic “Frosty” ever, and if that strikes you as a little silly, just listen.

The Turtles, “Santa and the Sidewalk Surfer”: A goofy near-outtake that’s buried on a couple of Turtles compilations, though you can dredge it out of Spotify once you know what to look for. A poorly disguised Flo (or is it Eddie?) imitates Santa over a surf-guitar beat while a little kid begs him for a Waimea Bun-Buster Surfboard – oh, and some Band-Aids. Because when he busts his buns, he’s gonna need ‘em. A hoot.

The dBs, “Feliz Navidad”: Looser and poppier than the original – neither of which is a bad thing – this version by new-wave vets Chris Stamey and Peter Holsapple captures the singalong sprit that makes Latin pop’s gift to the Christmas canon such a holiday earworm.

Stevie Wonder, “What Christmas Means To Me”: Totally irrepressible Motown Christmas joy.

The Pogues, “Fairytale of New York”: The best dysfunctional Christmas song ever, but also a song you can beller any time of year. Shane MacGowan slurs the verses, Kirsty MacColl nails the bridge, and everyone joins in on the chorus. This song had us at “It was Christmas Eve, babe/In the drunk tank.” It always will.

Nov. 21, 2018: “Don’t Let Them Break You Down,” Graham Parker

All of us listen to music in part for its cathartic qualities. There wouldn’t be headbanging music if people didn’t occasionally want to bang their heads.

That need for catharsis is one of the reasons I was drawn to ‘80s punk, new-wave, and (especially) power-pop music. I was feeling their alienation; I craved the release that came from turning up Elvis Costello or the Replacements to dish-rattling levels. Sure, I had my Paul Simon moments, but when someone with a British accent started snarling I was right there with them.

(Still, I have to admit: I was not the DJ who stole The Clash’s Sandinista from the campus radio station. I also didn’t steal Tusk, though I would have been tempted more by the latter than the former. Even then I had a thing for warped pop music.)

Right at the top of my list of cathartic British New Wave was Graham Parker and the Rumour. I loved the early stuff, Heat Treatment and Howlin’ Wind; I loved the take-no-prisoners backing band and Parker’s punky but soulful vocals. And then after a couple of missteps came Squeezing Out Sparks, one of the great rock albums, period, end of discussion, new graf.

Crank your stereo, drop the needle on “Discovering Japan,” and then peel yourself off of the wall three minutes later. It’s like that.

(Also from that time period: GP and The Rumour’s yawping deconstruction of the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back,” on which Parker comments: "I met Michael Jackson not long after and told him I had done a version of the song. He looked at me like I had just spoken to him in an alien language.")

Parker found love and moved to New England, of all places, sometime in the ‘90s, and his work got spotty: Always great lyrics and vocals, but much less of the punch-in-the-gut accompaniment that made his music so compelling.

Later Parker has its moments, though. Consider “Don’t Let Them Break You Down,” the A-side kickoff to Parker’s up-and-down 1988 release, The Mona Lisa’s Sister.

At the start of the second verse Parker sings as only he can, “Some people are in charge of pens/Who shouldn’t be in charge of brooms/They have the nerve to rip up a man’s life/In a paragraph or two.”

Well, there you have it. The perfect couple of couplets for anyone who’s been in corporate America. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve returned to that verse, and it always makes me feel – not better exactly, but like someone understands.

The rest of the song’s a muddle, and the instrumentation needs to be punchier, but those lines won’t go away, can’t go away. They tell it like it is, like it really is, in a way that allows you to stand there and take it.

I can’t write songs like Graham Parker, or sing like him. All I can do is listen – over and over and over, until I’m good for a while.

Oct. 20, 2018: Vic and Sade Redux

It’s weird when the subject of the reduxment is below, not above, the reduxing, but such is the world of inline digital content.

Anyway, last month I went to the State Historical Society of Wisconsin and read Vic and Sade scripts for the better part of a morning. I didn’t get very far – a couple months at most out of almost 20 years of scripts, and I’m a fast reader. However, I came away more convinced than ever of Paul Rhymer’s brilliance.

The scripts have aways read pretty well to me. (See for yourself here and here.) But to read the original blue mimeographs and see the pencilled annotations and the note the date – the date, one day following the next, five days a week of this sustained comedic excellence – is to realize that the State Historical Society is sitting on the last untapped pool of literary oil from the rich, deep fields of the ‘40s.

Just you watch: Someday someone is going to tap into this field, and people will see what they’ve been missing for decades, all emanating from the small house halfway up in the next block.

Who knows? It might be me.

But it’s not just me. I shared my experience with the legendary Maggie Thompson, the extraordinary co-editor of the meticulously crafted weekly, Comics Buyer’s Guide (always be careful where you place the apostrophe). She’s read many of them too; she understands. So does Michael Tisserand, author of Krazy, the wonderful biography of George Harriman, creator of Krazy Kat. And so do many, many others.

For now, read the few publicly available scripts and click on the links to listen. Soon, you may have the chance to do much more.

Aug. 20, 2018: Bob and Ray and Vic and Sade

Humor is incredibly hard to write. I know; I've been trying for the last 50 years. So I should probably be put out when people are funny naturally, or when they seem to be funny naturally when they're really scripting it in such a natural way that it's impossible to tell the written from the made-up.

Such is the case with these two gems from the radio age.

Of the two, you're more likely to know Bob and Ray. They crossed over well into the TV age, were frequent guests of David Letterman (back when he had hair, and it was dark), and even guested on Saturday Night Live. Their old shows (which you can find on archive.org, in places like this) have a little too much of the here-and-now to them, but collections of their skits (found in the same place) have a timeless roopiness that plays with the medium, the message, and the fact that a lot of the people local media outlets dredge up to fill dead air are crackpots, curmudgeons, or both.

It's Stephen Colbert, only back a ways.

However, you don't have to be an historian to appreciate the goofball character of "Matt Neffer, Boy Spot Welder" or "Aunt Penny's Sunlit Kitchen," the perpetually unsuccessful actor Barry Campbell, or the inane coaches and athletes (straight outta ESPN) who came to visit sportscaster Biff Burns.

Vic and Sade were a little different story. This show was scripted by Paul Rhymer, the Preston Sturges of radio writers, and was essentially a show about nothing ... nothing but the off-center characters that populated a small Illinois town.

There was shiftless Hank Gutstop, second-in-command in the local lodge, the Sacred Stars of the Milky Way; daft old Uncle Fletcher, who lived only to tell stories about equally odd people in places like Boone, Iowa, or Sweet Esther, Wis.; Fred Stembottom, whose tires were perpetually flat and whose garage or basement was always in need of some manual labor (supplied by Vic, of course); and the friends of Vic and Sade's son Rush, including Smelly Clark, Blue-Tooth Johnson, and Nicer Scott.

The show had to fill 15 minutes every day, so there's a soothing repetition to some of the episodes that makes them flow along gently, like an Illinois stream, so you almost overlook how funny they are.

You can actually find more than 100 old episodes of Vic and Sade the same place you find Bob and Ray, at Archive.org. It's a world treasure; support it. If you want scripts, they're at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

Listening to Bob and Ray and Vic and Sade doesn't make me feel jealous; it just makes me happy. And that's the way it should be.

Aug. 1, 2018:  "Be Real," Doug Sahm (Sir Douglas Quintet)

In order of last week's blog post on authenticity, we present the Official Theme Song of Authenticity. It's a great song, perfect for listening to on a summer afternoon.

And it's worthy cause. Doug Sahm was one of the most genuine, talented, and creative musicians around, and a wonderful human being to boot.

Enjoy.

July 19, 2018:  "Boy In The Bubble," Paul Simon

How many experiences have you had that just blew you back in your chair, like those old Maxell ads, and made you shake your head, exhale explosively, and say, "Wow!"?

I can think of maybe five: Hamilton (which you can read about below), two records, one poem, and one book.

I won't spoil any of the others since we talk about music and books all the time here, but I want to talk about Graceland.

These days the words used to describe Paul Simon's magnum opus are "bright," "catchy," and "bouncy" – all good things for music to be, but not the words that described it when it first came out, when the keyword was "revolutionary."

Musical genres had not been mashed up quite like this before – and not African street music, the music of apartheid and the townships, and not mashed into progressive pop music with the instrument at the center being the accordion.

Paul Simon knew that; for months he debated whether he should even release Graceland, that the world might not be ready for something so genre-crushing coming from the creator of increasingly softer stuff like "50 Ways To Leave Your Lover."

Thank God he did.

When you drop the needle on Graceland, which is how it should be listened to the first time, the first notes you hear are from an accordion – but they're not the accordion music that might be familiar to a Midwest or Cajun youth. They're two-finger chords, fifths or sixths.

Then the drum hits, like someone dropping an anvil onto the deck of an airplane carrier from 100 feet. BOOOOOM! Then the drum hits again, lower this time, all while the accordion plays those same sonorous chords.

Finally the bass comes in – acrobatic, crashing like an antelope through the veldt, like no bass line most people had heard before, underpinning those weird accordion intervals and thudding drums, and then once the thing finds its legs, it lurches forward into Simon's soothing voice uttering his typically fragmented lyrics.

Sometimes Simon is too arcane for his own good; not here. Here, above the loping bass and crashing drums and persistent accordion, his staccato images of terrorism, fragmentation, technology, and hope are stereoscopic and ultimately beatific.

"These are days of lasers in the jungle," he sings, "a loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires and babies," and thoughts turn to Bill Gates and Barack Obama, Warren Buffett fixing healthcare and and Elon Musk wanting to tunnel the world, and even Mark Zuckerberg wanting to put satellites into space to bring Wi-Fi to the masses. 

There may be no lasers in the jungle in those plans, but that's not the point. It's metaphorical and prescient, and it's brilliant.

Yeah, wow. I heard it and had to catch my breath, several times over. And even now, when the streaming playlist swings around to this song I turn it up as loud as the traffic allows, to hear those two-finger chords, the anvil drums, the antelope bass line, and the message of hope in a fragmented, messed-up world.

Graceland, indeed.

July 2, 2018:  "Karma Chameleon," Culture Club

I like the song, okay? It shouldn't be a crime against humanity to like "Karma Chameleon" and to let it be an earworm all it wants. If you're looking for crimes against humanity, there are so many other more worthy candidates. 

That's not it at all. What gets me about this song, and has for 30 years, is the video. Can someone please tell me what the heck Boy George is doing in Mississippi in 1870?

And what happens to him after the video? That's what I really, really want to know.

June 19, 2018: "Lady (Put The Light On Me)," Brownsville Station

Brownsville Station was a blues-rock-boogie band that had one huge hit ("Smokin' In The Boys' Room"), one minor hit (this), and not much else, save for the Hasil-Adkins-meets-Rod-Serling choogler, "The Martian Boogie." The band was fronted by Cub Koda, a sawed-off strutter with Philip Johnson glasses who was a walking encyclopedia of blues, rockabilly, doo-wop, R&B, and early rock.

Cub made me a cassette of his favorites that started with a commercial, of all things – the garage band Girl Trouble screaming their paean to Mosrite Guitars.

I got to know Cub through my work on the record-collecting magazine Goldmine, and what initially started as a sort of diva-and-grunt relationship ("You can't change the grammar on any of his columns!", I was told on my first day), evolved into a friendship built around great-but-obscure music, guitars, and writing.

I hung with Cub once, at his boyhood home in the rural Detroit suburbs – not far from the Jiffy Baking factory, if memory serves – and we had a wonderful time swapping primitive songs on crappy guitars.

Cub was a diabetic, and that got him way too soon, but I still have the cassette, and the T-shirt, and a lot of the amazing music he made.

As for this song ... flanged drums. That is all.

June 14, 2018: "Alexander Hamilton"

In case you need to get the taste of Taylor Swift out of your mouth, permit us to offer you Broadway – historical rap based on a scholarly biography, but Broadway nonetheless. We watched Hamilton two nights ago, and it was an experience – not a Broadway experience but a mountaintop rock-show experience, just this side of a Jimi-Hendrix-at-Monterey-Pop experience. And the thing was, everyone else in the audience felt like they were part of an experience, too.

I've been to a lot of Broadway shows. The best of them were instantly memorable, immersive, breathtaking experiences. However, they were Broadway shows; everyone in the audience knew they were Broadway shows – great Broadway shows, but still – and everyone onstage knew it.

However, when Alexander Hamilton spoke his name two nights ago – just spoke his name, nothing more – the audience erupted with a fervor and excitement the best Springsteen show would be hard-pressed to match.

What followed in the next two-and-a-half hours went beyond breathtaking to life-changing.

I don't know how the opening-night crowd in New York reacted to that moment; for that matter, I don't know how the opening-night crowds reacted to Oklahoma, West Side Story, or any of the barrier-breaking shows in the history of the theatre.

All I know is how the crowd reacted to an average Tuesday-night performance of Hamilton in Chicago. They were ready to tear the theatre apart. And to me, that's the definition of a phenomenon.

June 1, 2018: Taylor Swift

For real. Even though it was forced upon me by a pack of 16-year-olds on a 12-hour drive back from Knoxville, Tenn., and the Destination Imagination Global Finals, the fact remains that if you love pop-rock – with "pop" being used as originally intended, as shorthand for "popular" – early- to mid-period T-Swift is about as good as it gets these days. The hooks are hooky, the instrumentation and arrangements are imaginative (casting bubblegum pop as country – imagine that!), and the voice has that winning breathiness that can take you at least as far back as Michelle Phillips. 

Just to get a feel for the Circle of Pop and the timelessness of a good hook, if Taylor Swift had Lindsey Buckingham playing guitar she'd be Fleetwood Mac. If Nick Lowe produced her she'd be Carlene Carter. If she was on Stiff and palled around with Tracey Ullman she'd be Kirsty MacColl.

Also, if you listen to the early stuff, the move to the later, "darker" Swift isn't surprising at all. It's all in there.

May 31, 2018: Armchair Boogie, "Armchair Boogie"

Love it when a local band makes good. These guys have been around for a couple of years, mostly playing out in Wisconsin, but they deserve a broader audience. The music is best called "alt-bluegrass," along the lines of the Punch Brothers. The musicianship is high, the harmonies are solid, the songs work, the CD's cheap, and the bass player used to be one of my students. Go buy it.

If you're really brave, you can catch my original material on Soundcloud here ... and watch for me performing this material live at a venue near you!