Reggie Dwight and Davy Jones
A couple-three years ago I bought Goodbye Yellow Brick Road from Amazon. I’m not sure why I did it– it was right around the time I purchased CD copies of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and Station to Station, and I think I must have said, “oh, what the hell.” I mean, I’d never owned the record on vinyl, and I never cared much for Mr. John thirty years ago. But I’d also just seen Cameron Crowe’s very average Almost Famous, which brought the very average tune “Tiny Dancer” back into circulation, so I went rooting around Elton’s early albums, looking for “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters,” a song (from 1972’s Honky Chateau) I always considered better than decent. (I’m talking about the music, of course, not those hackneyed lyrics– remember, we drummers couldn’t care less about the lyrics.)
Well, over the short term, that purchase was a terrible mistake. For weeks afterward, folks, I was presented with Amazon e-mails telling me that the people who’d purchased Goodbye Yellow Brick Road had also purchased the whole Parade of Lite Horribles, from Rod Stewart to Billy Joel to Phil Collins to Michael Bolton Himself. Panicking, I quickly ordered all of Brian Eno’s ambient albums as well as some Soul Coughing to throw Amazon off the scent. (Actually that’s not true– I’d owned Eno before that, and I listen to those ambient CDs all the time when I’m working, particularly Ambient 4/ On Land. Highly recommended for all ages!) But over the longer term, as I actually began to listen to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road for the first time, I began to think all manner of things about Elton John.
First, that he’d already begun jumping the shark in 1973. That much seems obvious in retrospect, now that he’s joined forces with the Disney Stable of Schlockmeisters and has foisted hideous soundtracks for El Dorado and The Lion King on our innocent, unsuspecting children (just try to listen to “Someday Out of the Blue” or “Can You Feel the Love Tonight.” Go ahead. I dare you). But those of us who listened to the radio thirty-odd years ago will remember that Elton John still had all kinds of rock credibility in 1973, getting massive airplay not only from the top-40 WABC-AM in New York but also from the coolest “progressive” rock in the metro area, WNEW-FM. After GYBR, it gets pretty rancid pretty fast: Caribou (“Bitch is Back,” “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me”), Captain Fantastic (“Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” “Meal Ticket”), Rock of the Westies (all of which is cringe-inducing, but perhaps it is one of the small triumphs of political correctness that we are no longer subjected to Elton and Bernie asking, in “Island Girl,” “tell me what you wantin wid de white man’s world”).
But he hasn’t quite lost it yet on Yellow Brick Road, and that’s what’s so curious: it’s as if he loses it and gets it back here and there, song by song, verse by verse. Take a minor song like “Grey Seal”: it opens with the kind of ridiculous tinkling piano arpeggios one associates with motivational corporate videos, then come five crashing chords, and you think that maybe the corporate video will actually turn out to be a Barry Manilow-scored extravaganza. And yet the verses are surprisingly good, easily the equal of any of the catchy pop melodies he’d written to that point. The choruses suck, and the bridge couldn’t be cheesier. But still, forty-eight or fifty nice, hummable bars ain’t bad. Likewise with entire songs: “I’ve Seen That Movie Too” does not suck, whereas the very next tune, “Sweet Painted Lady,” explores new realms of suckitude (and do I hear a trumpet and a harmonium in that “orchestral arrangement”? aren’t there laws about this kind of thing?)
The same is true of the double album (hey kids, remember “double albums”?) as a whole: “Funeral for a Friend/ Love Lies Bleeding” has some great passages, “Bennie and the Jets” is unlistenable; the verses of “All the Girls Love Alice” actually rock (drummers: check out Nigel Olsson’s curious dotted eighths on the bass drum, which always sound like they come just a nanosecond too early in the bar, and give the song a nice stutter-step), whereas “Jamaica Jerk-Off” is an utter embarrassment. And what I find most intriguing is the back-to-back pairing of “Your Sister Can’t Twist (But She Can Rock and Roll)” and “Saturday Night’s All Right for Fighting.” They’re both neo-“rock” songs, and consciously so, the one trying to evoke the structure of feeling of 50s rock, the other sounding like a canny quotation of an early-70s kickass rock song about drinkin’ and fightin’ rather than the Real Thing (despite Davey Johnstone’s infectious opening riff, which really does sound like the Real Thing). Elton had done the neo- thing before, most obviously in “Crocodile Rock,” which wasn’t too bad (attaching the Diamonds’ “Little Darling” pretty deftly onto a soft-power-chord chorus, and of course announcing its ersatz status in the title), but for some reason “Your Sister Can’t Twist” sounds like the work of the annoying guy who approaches the drama club and says, “hey, everyone, let’s do the History of Rock for the high school spring musical! I’ll write all the songs in different ‘rock’ styles! It’ll be great!” (See, under this heading, Billy Joel’s Innocent Man– oh, hell, see half of Billy Joel’s entire bloody oeuvre). When I first heard it on this nice personal CD player here in my study, I broke out in the cold clammy sweats and thought, “oh my God, I know where this road leads– it leads straight to Jim Steinman and Meat Loaf! Stop! Stop it now!” Imagine my surprise when I read the 1995 liner notes by John Tobler, who says this was “possibly yet another song which influenced Jim Steinman.” Gaaaaaaah! But to this day, I can’t quite say why it is that one of these neo- songs still works for me, and the other makes me break out in the cold clammy sweats.
OK, so now that all that’s on the table, here’s my thing about David Bowie and Elton John. The former has vastly more credibility than the latter, and has for the past twenty-something years or so. Sure, Bowie gets some grief for raiding everyone else’s glam this and velvet-underground that (in fact, some of this blog’s very own commenters have given Bowie grief for this, I believe), but please– he wouldn’t be the first man or woman in popular music who served as a kind of Universal Recipient of cultural devices forged elsewhere, and he certainly hasn’t devoted his senescence to working with the likes of Tim Rice. And I should add that Ziggy Stardust is among my favorite albums (I simply skip over “It Ain’t Easy”) and Station to Station is among my favorite things that should have been EPs but were bloated into LPs that aren’t fooling anyone. Right up there with the second and third efforts of Declan McManus, I think. Nonetheless: at this distance, the similarities between these guys seem to be much more compelling than the divergence of their career paths since the early 1970s.
Both have an exceptional ear for melody: though you may be sick of hearing “Daniel” and “Your Song” by now, both are really quite crafty, and even though “Lady Stardust” and “Wild is the Wind” are of another order– glam-opera epics rather than quiet singer-songwriter fare– they’re all about their melodies, too. Both guys emerged in the late 1960s and then went on insane, white-hot songwriting tears, putting out seventeen albums by 1973 (eight by Bowie, nine by Elton). Both, of course, work under stage names, because their original names were too boring and straight. And both were basically done within a few years of redrawing the pop map.
Oh, now here come the howls from the Bowie diehards: what about Lodger? don’t you get the whole motif of Scary Monsters? and his latest work is his most searching and innovative yet! Give it a rest, folks, this humble blog is having none of it. We’ll go with you as far as Heroes (by which point Elton had released the turgid Blue Moves, signalling far and wide that he was permanently down for the count), but no further. And don’t even mention the appalling Let’s Dance, an album that sounds like someone doing a Bowie Revue and whose title song is almost as undanceable as Orleans’ “Dance with Me” (by common acclaim– that is, Janet’s and mine– the least danceable song ever to appeal to “dancing” in its title).
Instead, rather than debate when exactly David Bowie stopped being important to the development of modern popular music– four months after Elton John or four years– let’s give both men credit where credit is due: they were flamboyant, prolific, talented songwriters and performers at a time when AM radio was completely up for grabs (you remember– Malo’s “Suavecito” one minute, Wayne Newton’s “Daddy Don’t You Walk So Fast” the next, then “Oh Happy Day” by the Edwin Hawkins Singers, followed by “Candida” by Tony Orlando and Dawn) and FM emerging from the shadows. Although Elton could never have written the edgy “Panic in Detroit” and Bowie would never have written the dirge-like “Philadelphia Freedom,” they each helped, in their own way, to make the Western world a queerer and a better place to be. For that, the Renard News Channel thanks them!
Next on the Renard News Channel: the deadly Beinart Effect, and how to counter it!
AND AN UPDATE in response to comments: the next item in this series will be a disquisition on The Hitherto Unremarked Similarities between Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick and Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life. Readers are welcome to begin writing that one on their own.
I’m waiting for KC or Horowitz to have a go at this…
Posted by on 03/15 at 06:36 PMOne of the ways i have always judged the quality of the music i choose to experience has been to make every effort to see the particular group or individual live, up close, and in person performing. Dissolving the unnecessary visuals of performance production values is important so that i can just listen to the live music. Seeing the two of these bands live back in the early 70’s led me to find wholehearted agreement here with your point. Bowie’s music was filled with the raw real passion of rock, risking to play the material uniquely rather than mimic the album. Elton, even playing songs that were more emotionally visceral, kept trying to emulate the Stones tours, by formulaic renderings of album cut after album cut. Ironically he was able to improvise more later in his career during live performances, but only as a solo artist, or as a guest performer. Bowie understood that the band played the music, Elton seemed to want the audience to care only that he created it.
Posted by on 03/15 at 07:04 PMAs a kid growing up in small town Nebraska, it was exciting to hear the word ‘Bitch’ on the radio. And I remember watching Bowie on Midnight Special (I think) and thinking he was a total freak. But I was entranced. It was good to realize there was more to the world than my Dad’s Marty Robbins records.
Posted by on 03/15 at 07:06 PMcoupla things:
Am glad there is a new post at MB.com so I can quit doing my very bad “blurter John” imitation below.
As for double-albums from the same era, I was once the proud owner of “Wings Over America.” Quite horrible, in retrospect.
Incidentally, and this is the Roxanne Cooper tie-in, the first album I ever bought myself was “Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy.” I chalk that selection up to my pre-teen fixation on the bad-ass Hieronymous Boschesque jacket art.
Posted by Roxanne on 03/15 at 07:08 PMWas anyone else’s Christmas ruined the year Bowie sang with Bing Crosby? Bing was taping a holiday special in London and wanted to get a “young star” to perform. One his kids (presumably the one who hadn’t been abused) suggested Bowie and, though Bing had never heard of him (this was in 1977!), or maybe because of it, he brough him on for two duets. Bing told an interviewer four days after the taping that he considered Bowie “a clean cut kid and a real fine asset to the show.” Unfortunately for Bing, he didn’t get to see the show aired, since he croaked a month later. So I guess the story does have a happy ending after all.
Posted by on 03/15 at 07:16 PMDon’t worry, Rob. KC will claim that I have called conservatives “queer” insofar as I did not distinguish them from the general heading of “the Western world.” Then I will make fun of this claim and ask him to retract it, whereupon he will find Kathleen McCormick’s very hostile review of The Employment of English (and no, I never published a reply to that one) and use it to prove that I just can’t take a little honest criticism. Horowitz will then point out that my discussion of Elton and Bowie fails to repudiate Lynne Stewart and Mohammed Atta, even though both musicians are “affective leftists” with only two degrees of separation from Ward Churchill, and he will conclude that I don’t understand the meaning of “affective leftist” because I am lazy, tenured, and unable to read.
There! I hope I didn’t ruin the suspense for you.
Posted by Michael on 03/15 at 07:16 PMAnd don’t even mention the appalling Let’s Dance, an album that sounds like someone doing a Bowie Revue
And the less said about the execrable “Little China Girl” the better.
and whose title song is almost as undanceable as Orleans’ “Dance with Me” (by common acclaim– that is, Janet’s and mine– the least danceable song ever to appeal to “dancing” in its title).
Hey, good call. “Safety Dance” and “Dance, Dance, Dance” nestle snug in between the two.
And now I’ve got Grace Jones songs going through my head.
All of ‘em.
At once.Posted by Chris Clarke on 03/15 at 07:28 PMeven though both musicians are “affective leftists” with only two degrees of separation from Ward Churchill,
Former Interior Secretary James Watt is two degrees of separation from Ward Churchill.
Posted by Chris Clarke on 03/15 at 07:30 PMDear Sir,
Though I am many decades past the college classroom please let me say, respectfully, how much I would have give to have had a professor like you.
I was at school in the Eisenhower years which followed hard on the House UnAmerican Activities outrages and nearly everyone on campus lived in fear of their positions, if not lives.
Unfortunately I see the return of those times hastened by cable “news” and the ignorant pundits that populate it. I am not sure this is a proper way to contact you but I felt compelled to give you my word of praise and encouragement. I have a grandson who will be off to college in three years. God (in whom I do not really believe) help him if men and women of your mind have not survived to hold sanity’s place until this dark age passes.
Thank you for your defiant intelligence and your courage.
Sincerely,
Eloise BradleyPS: I found you through The Rude Pundit. I am a fan of his although for a lady of my years sometimes his language could be off-putting. However I have only to recall the words of Mark Twain who stated “under some circumstances swearing offers a release denied even to prayer”.
If these are not those times, then when? How could ANYONE be more rude than those presently in power?How could mere words exceed the vile nature of these times?
Posted by on 03/15 at 07:53 PMBoth Bowie and Elton John were clearly sellouts in an obviously utilitarian way that most people associated with the 60s were not. This, they share with a number of US contemporarires like “The Eagles”. The tendency for performers to emerge as “strictly commercial” and get even more so was a departure from people who had emrged a few years before them. Elton John was obviously more commercial, but Bowie clearly stayed on the comfortable side of odd. Both Bowie and Sir Elton began as singer-songwriter-folkie types, although Elton John always had a writing parner. Sir Elton’s early ballad-ish single, “Empty Sky” (occasionally played 30 years ago, never played now), was far better than most of his later output. I’ve never heard Bowie’s folkie stuff, so I don’t know what he was like in that idiom.
“Yellow Brick Road” really was the last listenable Elton John album. I’d forgotten about “Grey Seal” which was infectious despite all its cliched elements. It gets no airplay, while drek like “Philadelphia Freedom” (ecch!) does. Bowie went through many changes, with different looks and sounds, and, to some extent, diffeernt audiences. “Pressure” was the last song of his I really liked. He was definitely more truly experimental than Elton John, but hardly an innovator.
Saying they were queer misses an important point---both quickly retreated from their semi-pioneering admissions of bisexuality. Bowie was really too wierd and chamelion-like to be hurt much by it. His fanbase was the more edgy of the two. Elton John’s fan base was more middle of the road and it really did seem to hurt him, although he eventually became something of a gay icon. Bowie has played up a hetero image ever since. Elton began to get queenier and queenier, but it was a long time before anyone heard anything more about his personal life.
Posted by on 03/15 at 08:07 PMAll right. Comparing Bowie with Elton John—and then, as Rich does, with The Eagles! O. My. God. To paraphrase The Dude: “I hate the fucking Eagles.”
The difference, of course, between Bowie and Elton is the difference between a body of excellent albums and a handful of tolerable songs. Hunky Dory, Ziggy, Aladdin, Pin Ups, Station, the Eno trilogy, Scary Monsters: those are amazing albums qua albums. Man Who Sold the World, Diamond Dogs, Young Americans: most 70s artists would frig themselves with a salmon to have those albums, but by Bowie’s standards, half-rate. Berube hates *Let’s Dance*, but I’d argue it’s a gorgeous album hiding behind some truly hideous production. Check out M. Ward’s remake of the title song to see just how haunting and beautiful the song could have been had Bowie not been doing lines of Clorox off of Chic’s collective bee-hind.
To increase the cultural capital: comparing Bowie and Elton is like comparing Faulkner and Ring Lardner. Virginia Woolf and O. Henry. Pynchon and Tom Robbins. Oy vey.
Posted by on 03/15 at 08:29 PMThanks for the extended cultural-capital comparisons, Dr. Larry! Quite apart from taking this discussion to the Next Level (Pynchon and Robbins-- good one!), you’ve reminded that I wanted to close this post with “Next in This Series: The Hitherto Unremarked Similarities between Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick and Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life.” I’ll go post an update right now!
Posted by Michael on 03/15 at 08:41 PMI’m waiting for KC or Horowitz to have a go at this…
Professor Johnson is bolting scare quotes onto the word “analysis” even as we sleep. Be prepared.
Eh, …which one was Reggie Dwight again?
Posted by on 03/15 at 08:59 PM(hey kids, remember “double albums”?)
Well, there is Outkast, right?
Posted by on 03/15 at 09:00 PMNo, that’s a double CD. I’m talking about those big cardboard folding things that people used to line with tinfoil and use as tanning devices or marijuana-cleaning surfaces. Not that I would know anything about cleaning marijuana. Or tanning.
Posted by on 03/15 at 09:27 PMAaaaarrgh!
You had to remind me. I graduated from high school in 1975, and you know what that means. My senior year was marred by bell bottoms, white boys with afros, and radio stations and school dances with nearly nothing but Elton John. Except when I was cruising the loop in Renton with my stoner buddies, and then it was Zep and “Smoke on the Water” and Queen.
Bowie was a respite, so it hurts to see him criticized now.
Posted by PZ Myers on 03/15 at 09:30 PMDavid Bowie j-t-s after his guitarist, Carlos Alomar, left.
Posted by on 03/15 at 09:34 PMI saw Nigel “Tasteful and Consistent” Olssen first when he appeared as a spokesdrummer for an early-eighties version of Casio’s LD-50 digital drum pads (I think). That guy looked cool! I bugged my dad to give me one of his Elton John tapes. My dad lent me some EJ type cued up to “Philadelphia Freedom.” How do you clean puke off a Walkman? It’s harder than you think.
Maybe (since you’re on Eno) I guess Paul Thompson’s buttclenched performance of “Out of the Blue” on Roxy Music’s “Viva!” counts as pretty much the same thing? Though Eno’s not on that album.
Posted by Jason on 03/15 at 09:41 PMFootnote for Michael’s readers under the age of 35: marijuana used to come with little round balls called “seeds” in it, which you had to take out before smoking.
Posted by Chris Clarke on 03/15 at 09:45 PMWhere’s the part about Beinart?
Posted by on 03/15 at 09:46 PMWell, PZ, the place of Queen in all this is very interesting. When I was 14-15, those of my boy peers who feared and despised Bowie’s aggressive gender-bending (yet adored Mick Jagger, apparently oblivious to the fact that Mick could be as pansexual as Bowie) turned to Queen for what they thought was good hard cock rock. Ah, the irony of it all! Oh, the humanity! And that’s why the sexual license of these figures is important in retrospect (though Rich, comment 10, is completely right about Elton’s slow trajectory toward gay icon status, and Bowie’s aggressive, post-glam, Imam-assisted heterosexualization), at least to me-- the first fitful queerings of pop just happened to coincide with my own first flickering awareness of the world of polymorphous human desires. And it’s been sex with pans ever since! (What happened to Pan the Goat-Boy? He livened up this place so.)
Vachon, Carlos Alomar was great, but so were the other musicians backing Bowie over the years-- including famed E-Streeter Roy Bittan, whose work on Station to Station drives songs like “TVC15” just as he drove Springsteen’s “Backstreets.”
And Chris, as I recall, Acapulco Gold had no stems no seeds that you don’t need. It was --pffffffft-- bad-ass weed.
Posted by on 03/15 at 09:49 PMYeah, my friends and I had heard of Acapulco Gold, and of the new stuff coming out of the legendary Mendocino hills called “sinsemilla,” but us Buffalo State College stoonts generally lived on Windowsill Shake budgets.
Posted by Chris Clarke on 03/15 at 09:55 PMNot to nitpick, but Wings Over America was a triple album. There’s that one side that’s Linda’s tambourine solo…
As for Elton, “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” was greatly abetted when the 8 track shifted from 3-4 midsong. The pregnant pause of that delay ratcheted up the bathos in mysterious ways.
As for Bowie, he did help Queen do the only good thing they ever recorded (sorry, Wayne and Garth). But I’m not sure that’s a point in his favor.
Posted by George on 03/15 at 10:03 PMWhat happened to Pan the Goat-Boy? He livened up this place so.
Fair Calphalon at water’s edge lays dead
Victim of cruel Arachne’s poison.
The air around him is heavy with flowers:
She slew him when
he discovered her vile network.Posted by Chris Clarke on 03/15 at 10:08 PMAnd that’s why the sexual license of these figures is important in retrospect (though Rich, comment 10, is completely right about Elton’s slow trajectory toward gay icon status, and Bowie’s aggressive, post-glam, Imam-assisted heterosexualization), at least to me-- the first fitful queerings of pop just happened to coincide with my own first flickering awareness of the world of polymorphous human desires.
The lines between what was straight, what was gay, and what was something entirely different were never more blurry than the 80s, Mr. Berube.
We had Michael Jackson as the epitome of pop coolness, we had the pink-bandanna-clad members of Poison as tough guy rockers, and a straight man who wore makeup (Robert Smith, not Boy George) writing some of the best songs in the decade while everyone thought that he was the freak of the bunch. I survived the 80s in the cocoon of suburban childhood, but had I been old enough to understand what was really happening, I’d probably be slightly more insane than I am now.
Posted by thehim on 03/15 at 10:28 PMMike mate
For me, the great leveller was Zappa. Put on Bongo Fury or Weasels Ripped my Flesh, and anything that was pap became instantly luminescent, sucking so hard that it disappeared up its own orifice.
Then there was Led Zeppelin, who made the glam boys appear like a transvestite review miming Gloria Gaynor songs.
Few rock artists can sustain a credible output in the face of the insatiable demands of the industry, and the Glam rockers were always largely showbizness anyhow. Bowie once described himself as a ‘media manipulator’, and the industry is littered with 15 minute famous dudes who got it right for thirty bars, while camping/sneering/imitating druggies/ or just acting godlike while tossing their hair furiously.(Who were those guys who’d fly there hairdresser to wherever they were touring to give them $800 haircuts? Duran Duran?)
But it was dear old misogynist Frankie Z who put the industry into context with “We’re only in it for the money","Hot Rats” “"Touring can drive you crazy” (Two Hundreds Motels), Just Another Band from LA,and the ultra-jazz parody to rock transition “the BeBop Tango”,(Roxy and Elsewhere).
And that’s to say nothing of the insightful perspective he gave us into American society with such odes as ‘the Illinois Enema bandit”, “Falling In Love Is A Stupid Habit”, the ode to ‘Potato Headed Bobby’, the delightfully named “Poofter’s Froth Wyoming Plans Ahead” and “Half A Dozen Provocative Squats”, describing the mating rituals of young women, (probably his favourite subject).
Next to Frank, 70% of the industry turn into ‘the 1910 Fruitgum company’ and toodle into the past like an ice cream truck’s music box jingle.Posted by waldo on 03/15 at 11:25 PMCool, Michael, I’m with you on Ziggy Stardust and Station to Station. Fine, you don’t wanna know about Let’s Dance , but you’re skipping over Bowie’s most innovative, intringuing record with Eno, Low. I know it’s not his most enjoyable album, but along with Ziggy it’s the only one I ever find myself listening to from beginning to end. I relate to it more than to Heroes, which these days sounds a bit untimely in its optimism. Cheers,
Posted by Idelber on 03/15 at 11:33 PMOh, and I thought Calphalon were my Pans.
Posted by Carol on 03/15 at 11:45 PM"Benny and the Jets” unlistenable? Call me sentimental, but....a three-day drive from California to Denver with a bizarre stop in Bryce Canyon where my friends and I were serenaded by a fruitarian park ranger with a haunting whisper of a voice, a tape of whom circulated among us for years until it wore thin (far better than those other dastardly fireside songs by Michelle Shocked)...we park in Brad’s driveway in the suburbs in the foothills and he summons us to his basement where he moves aside some blankets to get at his turntable, still working after years away at college, and he puts on a record that he won’t let us see and tells us to hush up, and the record starts popping and there’s that volumnous sound of the piano chords that can only be THAT SONG.........rhunk...rhunk...rhunk...rhunk...rhunk...rhunk… for no reason at all, and Brad just points at the turntable and smiles. We’d been listening to Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, The Fruitarian Ranger, and the Meat Puppets for three long, greusome days, and THIS is the song he plays? It brought tears to my eyes. Maybe it’s just that the Grateful Dead makes anything sound good.
Posted by BP on 03/15 at 11:48 PMUm, Michael, we need to talk.
Everything by Stevie Wonder is crap compared to Jethro Tull’s “Thick as a Brick” (1972) or my all time favorite, “A Passion Play” (1973). I will wait for your explanation as to how “Songs in the Key of Life” is comparable to “Brick” but I can’t believe you will be discussing either musical composition or musicianship.
Better to compare “Brick” with “Kind of Blue” by Miles Davis or “Rhapsody in Blue” by Gershwin.
Long live progressive rock and by that I mean: Gentle Giant, King Crimson, Genesis (the Gabriel years), National Health/Hatfield and the North, PFM, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Jethro Tull, Yes, Camel, Bruford, and of course Zappa (though Zappa is hit and miss after the “Roxy and elsewhere” album in 1974). And heck, I’ll throw in Van Der Graaf Generator--and early Kansas (up to “Leftoverture") just to provide another American group besides Zappa and the Mothers.
There are other wonderfully talented prog oriented bands, such as Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever (Chick Corea’s band), Weather Report, Daryl Way’s Wolf (John Etheridge on guitar! Wow!!), Banco, Renaissance, etc. and guys like Alan Holdsworth who went in and out of jazz and rock.
And please don’t put Journey, Styx, Boston, and Necktar in the prog category. Rush barely made it at their “best,” and as you can tell from the quotes, they don’t make it as far as I can see, though other prog fans disagree.
But, Stevie Wonder? Sheesh. Let me put it another way: You can’t rip Billy Joel and then say anything nice about Stevie Wonder. Unless you’re a moron like Robert Christgau of the Village Voice, who once called King Crimson one of the 10 worst rock bands while touting...ready...it’s coming...the O’Jays. Talk about Steppin Fetchit music. My God. Oh, wait. I’m back to Tull. “People what have you done...?”
Posted by on 03/16 at 12:58 AMOh, dear. Can the Rick Wakeman-Alan Parsons Project-Mike Curb Congregation comment be far off?
Posted by Roxanne on 03/16 at 01:03 AMRoxanne-- this is entre nous, of course-- I have a plan to conquer the world. I call it the “Alan Parsons Project.” It involves entire continents of people trying to dance to “I Wouldn’t Want to Be Like You,” and that’s all I can say here. Write me off-line for the details!
And for the record, the cover of Captain Fantastic is worth any pre-teen’s fixation. Would that the music were appropriately Bosch-esque (this would have gone well beyond Zappa, waldo, and right into Captain Beefheart territory), instead of being self-absorbed, self-citing crap the like of which you find on blogs these days.
Posted by Michael on 03/16 at 01:10 AM"Ziggy Stardust” was certainly light years better than, e.g., “Mad Man Across the Water”, but Bowie was certainly self-conciously commercial in a way that, e.g., Jefferson Airplane or The Kinks, never were. Hence, my “selling out” comment (#10) and the analogy to the Eagles, whom I never liked and would never compare to Bowie, musically.
In the world of die-hard rock fans who came of age in the mid-70s, there was a core group of people who wanted to believe in someone, as a performer (or as a group). I was not one of these people, but I certainly knew quite a few. They wanted “their” version of The Doors, Bob Dylan, etc., i.e., performers who had provided that transcendent object of identification in the then-recent past. Instead, they got people like Bowie who showed genuine talent, but had “inauthenticity” baggage. In his case, that meant jerking around the media and changing his style with almost every album. Eventually, many of those “seekers” turned to reggae, Willie Nelson-ish country music, emerging people in jazz (Flora Purim and Gato Barbieri come to mind) or (later) new wave, after flirtations with various performers that usually lasted an album or two.
As for sexuality, the 80s were different ballgame than the 70s. Until the early/mid-70s, gays were largely invisible in all areas of the performing arts (and in society, in general), although gayness was visible to anyone who wanted to look. First, there was a wave of gay jokes (comedians, minicing and doing effeminate dialect). Then, gay bars suddenly became cool even for some outward “phobes” as disco went mainstream. The revelations about Bowie & Elton John were huge news when they occurred and part of this shift. Sir Elton’s lame attempts to retract his statements and Bowie’s sudden heterosexuality also reflected the fragility of this environment. In reality, no one really wanted to know about Elton John’s personal life (and no one still really wants to know) whereas even those who were “creeped out” about Bowie would gladly have heard more.
The first really gay song to get airplay was by a band called “Crack in the Sky"--- the name was something like “He’s a Dancer”. Unlike The Kinks’ “Lola”, there was nothing tongue-in-cheek and there was no ambiguity like Jefferson Airplane’s bisexual “Triad”. By the 80s, it was common for people to have “out” gay friends and formerly gay talismans like earings on men had lost their identification with sexual orientation. Boy George, Poison, etc. were tame and mainstream compared with what came before them.
Posted by on 03/16 at 01:19 AMThe first really gay song to get airplay was by a band called “Crack in the Sky”
Now playing at a Hard Rock Cafe near you.
Their 1976 “Animal Notes” wasn’t a horrible album.
Posted by Chris Clarke on 03/16 at 01:26 AMNot many here sticking up for Elton. I sure as hell won’t.
I like that Bowie once described himself as a “closet heterosexual”, and that he wanted to be the opening act for the Smashing Pumpkins, and that he included a Pixies cover in his most recent tour.
Tell me to select a post-1970 artist, and I’ll choose Bowie. What can I say? I’m a hopelessly biased fan… and I still hold that Tin Machine rocked.
Posted by oyster on 03/16 at 02:34 AMMy left-wing blog irony-radar is totally broke down, like Ishmael’s yellow back radio. Mitchell, are you joking? I can’t tell anymore.
Christgau may have overstated his case against King Crimson, but come on! The O’Jays *Back Stabbers* and *Ship Ahoy* are gorgeous examples of Philly Soul (speaking of which, those Soul Jazz Philly comps are perfect, like everything else Soul Jazz assembles). And in Christgau’s own words, Adrian Belew is really nothing more than a good addition to other people’s bands.
Still, I do have a soft spot for some prog—Magma kicks much ass. Only the French would have an operatic band led by a percussionist (sorry Michael) who writes lyrics in his own made-up language (check out The Ruins—Japanese bass and drums duo—who pair up with a crazy synthesist and opera singers on *Symphonica* for a contemporary tribute to the greatness and horror that is MAGMA!!!).
For me, it’s European “space-rock” that fills the pretention-gap most people look to prog (or free jazz or serialism) to have filled. Can, Neu!, Faust, Kraftwerk (Lester Bangs at the Kraftwerk concert should be in the Norton American II anth).
One last thing, re gender and Bowie/Elton. There’s a great Bangs piece about hanging out backstage with Lou Reed, listening to a Ron Wood solo album (fer chrissakes!). Lester says, “I saw you with some girl the other day.” Lou says, “How’d you know it was a girl?”
Posted by on 03/16 at 03:36 AMC’mon, Mike, not even “Cat People”?
Posted by on 03/16 at 03:52 AMI know I’m late to the argument here, but I got a couple of things to add. I think most of my ambivalence with Elton John is actually annoyance with Bernie Taupin. Elton John is a good singer, interesting piano player, and downright crafty composer (I mean that in the best way). As Michael already mentioned, he has a great melodic gift, although in his later years, like most aging pop musicians, he’s gone back to his old wells a few too many times. But the lyrics are usually what make me cringe, so I blame his famous collaborator, Bernie Taupin. While I give Taupin credit for trying to be different, to get out of the satyrian rut that plagues pop music (how many different ways are there to imply “I wanna have sex with you/her” without actually saying it?), many of his lyrics just seem weird and pointless.
Secondly, anybody wants to take on Stevie Wonder, you got to go through me first. Nobody in modern pop music has had a better gift for melody. Lyrically, there are some problems, sure. But musically, there’s only a handful of pop musicians that compare with Steveland Morris. My list of those - Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Prince, Andy Partridge. Thick as a Brick always baffled me, but there’s some Tull that I like. In my world, both “Skating Away on the Thin Ice of the New Day” and “Ebony Eyes” bring me great joy and are in heavy rotation on my Platonic Ideal of a radio station. Call me Rodney King, but can’t we all just get along (and groove)?
Posted by corndog on 03/16 at 08:39 AMWhat you don’t realize is that Alan Parsons really is the Eye in the Sky, looking at all of us, reading our minds, and he is not pleased.
Posted by norbizness on 03/16 at 09:58 AMWait, I’m still recovering from the shock. You’re a drummer??? But you’re so SMART!
Posted by Susie on 03/16 at 10:31 AMI dunno, I think Kiki Dee is the real connection between Bowie and John.
Corndog, I got your back on the battle line for Stevie Wonder. Jethro Tull woulda been fine had they’d gone the way of Big Star--burn bright and burn out, all hail the wall of sound. (Alex, you were right on last week.)
Posted by on 03/16 at 10:39 AMI’ve always liked David Bowie but Elton John didn’t do anything for me.
I’m a Brian Eno fan, too. I listen to “On Land” when I’m writing. It reminds me of where I live, especially “The Lost Land” and “Dunwich Beach, Autumn 1960.” If you like that kind of music, you’ll like Biosphere. I listen to “Substrata” when I sleep and when I’m writing. Excellent music.
Posted by Trish Wilson on 03/16 at 11:01 AMCorndog: Glad to “go through” you on Stevie Wonder. If we’re going to be snarky about Billy Joel (poor Billy just went into a rehab following an injury), then you can’t throw flowers down at the feet of Stevie Wonder. Both write pap (modern commodified popular music) and that’s all, unless one goes to the Christgau school of inverted hip racism where blacks are superior beings who know how to sing and dance better than whites.
Dr. Elasmo: As with Corndog, you and Christgau can’t diss Adrian Belew (actually, my favorite Crimson bands were in the 70s, not the ones with Belew) and then say anything positive about the O’Jays. A fine example of “Philly Soul”? Folks, let’s get a grip. It’s pap, pap, pap. Arguing about Elton John vs. the O’Jays vs. Billy Joel is only making music company executives laugh. None of these so-called “artists” are doing anything but pushing product like soap or peanut butter through a distribution network that turned music into a commodity.
It is only when one gets into the realm of Gentle Giant or Miles Davis that one can speak of music theory, musicianship, and composition. Otherwise, arguing about Stevie Wonder v. Billy Joel is like arguing over who’s better: Penelope Cruz or Cameron Diaz. Sheesh.
Oh, one more thing: If anyone wants to get anti-intellectual in a pose that will resemble Sean Hannity, perhaps we ought to remember the intellectual whose blog we love and we’re commenting on. I can tell you one thing: Hannity probably loves Stevie Wonder and the O’Jays--which supports my view as to why their music can be analogized to Steppin Fetchit movies. And Billy Joel? Rudy Vallee anyone? Go ahead, let’s start the calls that I’m racist and/or elitist.
Posted by on 03/16 at 11:39 AMActually, Gus Dudgeon is the real connection between Bowie and John: she produced some of Bowie’s early stuff, I believe. And Trish (and lots of other people), I hope I haven’t given the impression that I really like Elton John. I think Dr. Larry had it just about right up there in comment 11 ("the difference, of course, between Bowie and Elton is the difference between a body of excellent albums and a handful of tolerable songs,” though a couple of Elton’s are a good deal more than tolerable). And I agree that “Dunwich Beach, Autumn 1960” is quite beautiful. I’m also fond of “Tal Coat” and “Unfamiliar Wind,” myself. But the Smash Hit of the ambient series, for me, has to be “Ascent (An Ending)” from the Apollo record. Absolutely, breathtakingly ethereal.
And I was only kidding about Stevie Wonder and Jethro Tull, everyone, though if you want me to scare up some kind of argument that those albums represented the last significant pieces of work in those artists’ careers, all else being completely unequal, I suppose I can do it. Maybe mid-May?
Posted by Michael on 03/16 at 11:42 AMIt is only when one gets into the realm of Gentle Giant or Miles Davis that one can speak of music theory, musicianship, and composition.
Oh, please. Gentle Giant was a palpable Tull wannabe.
And I was only kidding about Stevie Wonder and Jethro Tull, everyone, though if you want me to scare up some kind of argument that those albums represented the last significant pieces of work in those artists’ careers,
I was a huge Tull fan back in the day, so this is a rather painful thing to have to say, but I think this blog should develop a hypothesis - call it the “Thick as a Brick hypothesis” - that postulates a yardstick of musical worth which we calculate by taking the time spent on writing and producing the music on an album and dividing that by the time spent writing and producing the album cover.
Posted by Chris Clarke on 03/16 at 11:49 AMSomehow my boozy 2AM confessional (excellent 20-year-old Calvados, decaf chaser) didn’t post. I saved it but, Jesus, I don’t even know that guy.
I’m always struck, in our little music chats, by the fact that people who weren’t even born when this stuff was new are so often insightful and so rarely befogged by contemporary sensibility. On the other hand, time and place of first hearing has to make a difference. Hearing Ziggy in 1976 was different from hearing it in 1972, even with fresh ears. Speaking of Davy’s “inauthenticity” in hindsight is different than the dismissal at the time, in an era where seriousness was signalled by wearing jeans instead of stage outfits.
I never got the point. What’s “Summertime Blues” if not cartoonish? Or Chuck Berry? Even the Fabs had more than a touch of it. It seemed like a poke in the eye to the Doobiefication of rawk at the time, and I’d already heard Roxy Music (and Davy will never be Bryan, or Brian). Unlike them, I never thought he’d last.
Elton, eh. I bought the first one because my high school squeeze loved “Your Song”. It was over for all of us before the next one came out. Elton’s ability to emote and the good bone structure of a lot of his stuff only rarely overcame Bernie Taupin. Little Stevie had an easier time of it, as his lyrics always just seemed tacked on, not self-important dreck.
Oh, and Michael, Soul Coughing rooolz, dude.
Posted by Doghouse Riley on 03/16 at 12:02 PMMichael,
re: potential future Jethro Tull analysis:
I really don’t mind if you sit this one out
(sorry, couldn’t resist)
Posted by on 03/16 at 12:09 PM...call it the “Thick as a Brick hypothesis” - that postulates a yardstick of musical worth which we calculate by taking the time spent on writing and producing the music on an album and dividing that by the time spent writing and producing the album cover.
And the “Songs in the Key of Life” Corollary? Total running time divided by number of days between the announced release and the actual appearance?
Posted by Doghouse Riley on 03/16 at 12:18 PMMichael - suspense? What suspense? The triumphant victor’s always a foregone conclusion in these epic sagas, anyway!
Posted by on 03/16 at 01:50 PMfor professional ethics purposes i must disclose that i am right now testing one of my personal “internets” hypotheses here on y’all...i will continue to moniter this thread, and let you know if it ends up in support or refutation.
oh--and i still carry around one beat-up old double-album from way back: Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (yet another in the “after this the band quickly became all but unlistenable” genre.) i can neither confirm nor deny to what uses said album cover was ever put, recreationally.
-L.
Posted by on 03/16 at 02:37 PMOK, Librarian, but have you completed your “Ethical Use of Human Subjects-- Blog Version” paperwork?
I believe a couple of people mentioned The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway last week, in the course of reminding me that Phil Collins is or was a talented drummer. True enough, but thoroughly beside the point, since last week’s post on artists who should have been one-hit wonders said nothing about people who play their instruments well but should stay the hell away from the vocal mic and the pop charts.
Just saying. Tull’s Barriemore Barlow was a crafty drummer, too.
Posted by Michael on 03/16 at 02:59 PMMitchell Friedman,
I don’t think you’re racist or sexist, but I don’t think you’re anywhere near right, either. If one takes your logic seriously, one can hardly stop at prog, which is not particularly complex for twentieth-century music, and which is often conceived and marketed in very much the same commercial spirit as other forms of pop spectacle. Instead one has to confine oneself to a diet of Xenakis and Ferneyhough.
The reality is that complexity is orthogonal to quality, and that prog, like any other style, can be brilliant (Henry Cow, some King Crimson, some VdGG, U Totem, Doctor Nerve, Happy Family, The Muffins, Soft Machine, occasional Yes, early Oldfield, probably others I’m forgetting to list), wretched (ELP, PFM, most Rick Wakeman solo albums), or anywhere in between (viz. the aforementioned Jethro Tull, who I mostly quite like, and most of the other bands you listed).
I don’t know Stevie Wonder’s music very well, but I’d certainly take “Superstitious” over anything ELP ever put out. I trust it’s obvious that this has nothing to do with anti-intellectualism.
And I’ll join in the growing consenus that Bowie spanks Elton. If you know what I mean.
Posted by Tim Walters on 03/16 at 03:01 PMTull’s Barriemore Barlow was a crafty drummer, too.
Agreed. He’d kind of have to be to keep up, at the point he joined. The first three albums with Clive Bunker on drums actually hold up better, these days, if you ask me, which you didn’t.
Posted by Chris Clarke on 03/16 at 03:13 PMEno’s “Ascent (An Ending)” is phenomenal. I have four of Eno’s albums on my iTunes: “Music for Airports”, “Music for Films”, “Apollo”, and “On Land”. I like them all, but “On Land” is my favorite. I especially like to listen to “On Land” when I’m going for walks along the cliffs around my neighborhood. Great view of the Atlantic ocean, and great music to listen to while I’m walking.
Posted by Trish Wilson on 03/16 at 03:17 PMI think the secret weapon on the early Tull albums is Glenn Cornick’s bass. Nothing against Jeffrey Hammond-Hammond (is that name a deliberate Pythonesque joke, by the way?), but Cornick had a really nice touch.
Posted by Tim Walters on 03/16 at 03:33 PMMitchell, I’m not sure you can use “commodification” to distinguish good music from “pap.” The Gamble & Huff Philly music machine was, of course, just that: a hit making assembly line. Just like Motown. But if you listen to the arrangements, the tasteful musicianship, the social consciousness mixed with ass-hypnotizing dancability, I don’t think you can write Motown or G&H off as “pap.” Guinness, too, is mass-produced, but it’s still the greatest. Most prog is, on the whole, a nostalgic, nationalist phenomenon arising out of the English “return to the volk” scene: Robin Hood and ye olde Renaissance fair instead of riots in the street, unemployment, racism, immigration, etc. It’s attempt to be “artistic” and “intelligent” really just signals a return to late 19th-early 20th century Romantic music cliches: it’s all Holst, not Schoenberg or Cage or Crumb.
As far as Miles Davis goes, I agree with you: in his own words, he’s a real muthaf--ker of a musician. But don’t kid yourself that his art was divorced from commercialization and an ear to the ground. Read his oral biography (with Quincy Troupe as the amazing editor): from the Birth of the Cool to the 70s sludge fusion, Miles was always looking to increase his audience as well as his bling bling. (Check out the passage where Davis discusses opening up for—get this—the Steve Miller Band. Every night, Davis’s band would show up late, forcing Miller to go on first; and then Davis would blow the audience away. Bill Graham accuses Davis of “disrespecting Steve Miller,” which Davis finds hilarious.)
Adorno makes the moronic argument that the “beat beat beat of the tom toms” of jazz is the same as the marching feet and black-boots of facism. As if any mass expression of emotion must necessarily become violent. But I’ll trust the crowd at the hipster dance club with my back well before I’d trust the Beckett critics. Or the audience at the 48th annual Yes reunion tour (now featuring five bassists and thirty-five solo performances!). Some of the best 20th century art, in my opinion, has managed a tightrope walk between the commercial and the “artistic” - one reason I prefer, say, *The Philadelphia Story* to, say, *Jules & Jim*, or Duke Ellington over John Cage, or John Ashbery over Charles Bernstein.
Posted by on 03/16 at 03:46 PM(hey kids, remember “double albums”?)
Do I remember double albums? The Beatles’ White Album, The Stones’ Exile on Main Street, Elton’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Bowie’s double live album from the Tower Theater in Philadelphia, Yes’s Tales from Topographic Oceans, The Clash’s London Calling, PIL’s Second Edition, and Prince’s Sign ‘o’ the Times (the last vinyl LP I ever bought) were all part of my extensive record collection before cross-country moves and new technology forced me to part with most of them. During the late 70s/early 80s I owned and loved everything by Bowie, Roxy Music, Bryan Ferry and anything produced by or starring Eno. I think Scary Monsters is the last good Bowie album, especially for “Scream Like a Baby,” but Low and Lodger were the ones I listened to most, probably because of the Eno ambience. Now I think Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs are his post-Ziggy masterpieces - Aladdin for the amazing mix of piano and guitar (on “Time,” “Panic in Detroit” and “Aladdin Sane"), Diamond Dogs for the lyrics and the overall weirdness and queerness. Thanks, Michael, for stirring the memories.
Posted by on 03/16 at 03:52 PMI hear a trumpet and a harmonium in that “orchestral arrangement”? aren’t there laws about this kind of thing?)
No. On page one of the full score of Strauss’ glorious Salome, that very combo is used and since Strauss is one of the 3 or 4 greatest orchestrator’s who ever lived (along with Rimsky, Schreker and Debussy), it’s a given that it’s OK.
Thank you Mitchell for your ringing defense of prog rock. I disagree with you about Stevie Wonder--Innvervisions is a great album--but Gentle Giant were/are a great band (as are ELP and PFM, for that matter!). And to the commentator that compared them unfavorably to Tull: The Giant were there first, in 1970, fully formed; Tull were still a blues-y/folk band at that point--the whole “Elizabethen rock” thing that is the commonality of the two bands was still 2 years away with Thick as a Brick, though I admit that Aqualung has hints. I’ll take In A Glass House over the whole Tull catalog, if need be, much as I love prog-rock era Tull.
Oh, and Mitchell, leave the O’Jays For the Love of Money alone--one of the best basslines ever, great lyrics and a killer arrangement played by a killer band, the MFSB collective in Philly.
For all you Elton doubters, get Tumbleweed Connection. It’s a great album, honest; no hit singles from it, though some of the songs became FM staples. It’s not a fair comparison, in my view, as Elton was very much a “singles” guy v. the more album oriented Bowie (though, of course, there’s a lot of co-mingling between the two spheres for both). If we are to take in the whole of the two men’s careers as people rightly bash Elton for a lot of his post-Yellow Brick Road output, the continuing amnesia of Bowie-philes (I’m one--the Hunky Dory > Diamond Dogs run is great) regarding his hideous pre-Space Oddity stuff needs to be factored in.
Posted by on 03/16 at 04:04 PMOh, please. Gentle Giant was a palpable Tull wannabe.
That remark betrays quite palpable ignorance, but since I’m not much of a GG fan, whatever.
Tim Walters: Hammond-Hammond was a joke name; his real name was Jeffrey Hammond. Way to go with the Cuneiform Records namechecks. Complexity’s being orthogonal to prog is demonstrated clearly by bands like Orthrelm—Mick Barr doesn’t know from prog, and doesn’t consider himself prog (though Weasel Walter does consider him prog—there was a good article in some SF alt-weekly a while ago about “brutal prog”, a term Walter invented), but there’s no doubt that he plays some pretty damn complex music.
Still, I do have a soft spot for some prog—Magma kicks much ass. Only the French would have an operatic band led by a percussionist (sorry Michael) who writes lyrics in his own made-up language (check out The Ruins—Japanese bass and drums duo—who pair up with a crazy synthesist and opera singers on *Symphonica* for a contemporary tribute to the greatness and horror that is MAGMA!!!).
Actually, Tatsuya Yoshida’s main Magma-copying outlet is the currently-on-hiatus Koenji Hyakkei; their three albums are like the Ruins Symphonica except even more in a Magma-aping vein.
One of the funniest things in recent years, as proggier and proggier bands get wide reviews in hip-like publications (pitchfork, say, or dusted) is the contortions the reviewers go through either to avoid calling something prog (sure, it has a bassoon solo and the time signatures all involve prime numbers, but it’s not prog, because it doesn’t suck/then I would be a loser, QED), or to acknowledge that it’s proggy or outright prog—but not the bad kind! “Prog is bad” is such a critical commonplace that its increasing commonality (what was postrock if not the prog that dare not speak its name?) is leading to some awfully odd reviwing. Dusted has actually been very good about not falling into that trap, and calling things accurately—they just published a long review of a new King Crimson box.
Posted by ben wolfson on 03/16 at 04:30 PMSorry if this is a consecutive post-thing, but this arrived as I was editing the above for typos and HTML:
Most prog is, on the whole, a nostalgic, nationalist phenomenon arising out of the English “return to the volk” scene: Robin Hood and ye olde Renaissance fair instead of riots in the street, unemployment, racism, immigration, etc. It’s attempt to be “artistic” and “intelligent” really just signals a return to late 19th-early 20th century Romantic music cliches: it’s all Holst, not Schoenberg or Cage or Crumb.I think you’re incorrect about the roots of prog rock. It had three factors:
1. The post-Sgt. Pepper devaluing of the 45/single as the focus of a band, making albums the preferred method (thus allowing expanded musical statements).
2. It was a musical reaction to the all-pervasive British blues-boom era, with it’s mock-black moves and boring 12-bar strictures. All the classic prog rock bands contained musicians that had played in blues/r&b bands for years to pay the rent and they resented the focus that the lead singers got while they were forced to play stuff that they could play in their sleep. It was very much the backing musicians of soul/r&b/pop singers seizing the means of production, saying “We’ve spent years practicing and we deserve our chance to shine, 3-minute pop songs sung by singers who get all the attention be damned”.
3. It was also a reaction against the by-then pretty discredited hippie ideals. “Robin Hood and ye olde Renaissance fair instead of riots in the street, unemployment, racism, immigration, etc.” is a wildly inaccurate take on the lyrical concerns of most of the great prog bands. Their lyrics are strewn with social commentary: Tarkus is anti-war and anti-church; the whole of Three Friends deals with the English class system; the song Get ‘Em Out by Friday is a putdown of corporate greed; Perpetual Change was a pro-environmental statement and so on and so on. The cliche that prog lyrics are all about Tolkien and fairies bathed in the celestial light type things is simply wrong. The prog bands dealt with things going on in England and the world in the early 1970’s, it’s just they didn’t make a fashion statement of it like The Clash or Gang of Four did (I love both bands, BTW). Their focus was on the music, not the lyrics but they also realized how important singing and lyrics were.
As for Holst? ELP covered Prokofiev and Bartok and Ginastera; Yes revered Stravinsky and Sibelius; Robert Fripp of King Crimson was a fanatic about the Bartok string quartets and so on. Again, it’s a cliche that they all wanted to be Vaughn-Williams--there’s more of a modernist, 20th century bent to the music than most people allow.
As for it not being “Schoenberg or Cage or Crumb”, I would say that’s almost impossible in the context of rock music. 12-tone rock music? Using chance and the I-Ching to determine compositional structure? Using micro-tonality on a Gibson Les Paul? I think that’s setting the bar awfully high for the prog bands when no-one virtually no one else was doing those things during the early 70’s. Sure, Eno’s Oblique Strategies are very Cage, but how many serialist rock songs from 1970-1974 (the prime prog-rock age) can you name? How many 1/4 tone songs *ever*? Bit of a strawman there, in my view.
Posted by on 03/16 at 04:33 PM"First, that he’d already begun jumping the shark in 1973. “
Totally off topic, but that line reminded me.
On “Arrested Development”, a show that was good, but is plummetting in a power dive of quality that could shear the wings off an F-16, Henry Winkler has a small part. In a scene on a dock, with a smile at the camera, he hopped over a dead shark and walked off screen. It took a few seconds to register, then I lost it.
Posted by on 03/16 at 04:33 PMAt what point do we deploy Bart Simpson’s famous threat: “Start diggin’ some nerd-holes”?
Posted by norbizness on 03/16 at 04:39 PMJim’s comment 60 doesn’t even address Canterbury, which neither his comment nor the one to which he responds can account for.
As for “it’s all Holst”, well, that betrays a very FM-radio understanding of prog. The Rock in Opposition bands weren’t about pastoralism: listen to Henry Cow’s Western Culture or In Praise of Learning (with its alternations between noise improvs and stirring calls to class warfare), Univers Zero’s Heresie, or the Stormy Six’s Macchina Maccheronica and tell me where you hear the Romantic cliches.
12-tone rock music? Using chance and the I-Ching to determine compositional structure? Using micro-tonality on a Gibson Les Paul? I think that’s setting the bar awfully high for the prog bands when no-one virtually no one else was doing those things during the early 70’s.
Henry Cow did the first two of those. I don’t know when Fred Frith’s Guitar Solos was recorded but he definitely employed microtones on that album. Hell, even King Crimson went in for atonality and relatively free improv (including past and future Derek Bailey collaborator Jamie Muir for a brief period in 1973).
Posted by ben wolfson on 03/16 at 04:41 PMThat remark betrays quite palpable ignorance,
Exactly right. I went and looked up some actual info after Jim pointed out that mistake, and am chagrined.
What I should have said: “I liked Tull better than Gentle Giant when I was 14.”
Posted by Chris Clarke on 03/16 at 04:52 PM(1) CONTENTIOUS THOUGHT:
Station to Station is among my favorite things that should have been EPs but were bloated into LPs that aren’t fooling anyone.‘Stay’ (which gets a surprisingly bad rap) is a beautifully-crafted song, not least because of Earl Slick’s guitar work.
(2) PROVOCATION TO FURTHER RESEARCH:
Reggie is fine as far as he goes, but the Bowie/James Brown strikes me as far more intriguing. Those guys were seriously listening to each other. (WARNING: A full investigation is not recommended for the weak of heart. With the Godfather you’ve always gotta take the bad with the bad.)(3) UNDISPUTABLE FACT:
NOBODY can touch Stevie Wonder. Genuis is forever, so it makes no difference what his detractors happen to ‘think’ of him.Posted by on 03/16 at 05:13 PMLots of interesting comments on the Bowie/John comparison, and some interesting digressions, too. First, a factual point: Bowie didn’t write Wild Is the Wind. It was taken from a film, and the music is by Dimitri Tiomkin. Second: I was fascinated by people’s reactions to Let’s Dance. I think it’s uneven, but the best stuff is great. If the title song isn’t danceable, so what? Is anybody paying attention to the horn arrangements? They’re amazing! Lastly: I have mixed feelings about Stevie Wonder, but his best work is awesome. Anybody who disses Living for the City just isn’t listening.
Posted by on 03/16 at 05:20 PM"OK, Librarian, but have you completed your “Ethical Use of Human Subjects-- Blog Version” paperwork?”
of course. and also my Conflict of Interest forms as well. in triplicate. with attachments. all filed upstairs with Admin. and now i have obtained implied (if not exactly informed) consent from my subjects. we’re good to go.
and as of comment #66, this conversation continues to stand in defiance of Part II of my prediction, and is thus in rare company and i am impressed (you confirmed Part I by opening this topic yesterday, which is why i am now interested to see what the results will be regarding Part II.)
if i manage NOT to overly contaminate the whole thing by interfering like this…
and thanks for reminding me of “Get ‘em Out By Friday”, Jim--now that song will be in my head for the rest of the day…
-L.
Posted by on 03/16 at 05:36 PMBen and Jim, you make some excellent points. I was trying to score with a bit of a strawman back there. But as a former prog fanatic, I’m not sure I still completely agree with you.
Re politics, being “anti church and anti war” is not quite up to snuff to really address the creepiness of the 70s. For every “Get Em Out By Friday,” there’s a “Watcher of the Skies,” “Can-Utility and the Coastliners,” and a “Supper’s Ready”—not to mention all of *Nursery Crimes* and *Trespass*. The mainstream prog bands—ELP, Genesis, Yes, Renaissance, Mike Oldfield—strike me as exceptionally escapist and “Albion” centered. The very notion that rock music needed to be purged of “black elements” and stuffed full of compositional bombast to earn cultural capital weirds me out. I don’t think it’s a racist music; but it’s a music that appeals to certain myths and signs of “taste” without actually displaying taste. Prog at its worst—Yes and ELP—is a conspicuous consumption of “culture” without any true scale to balance the contemporary costs of that “culture.” The Roger Dean cover art for Yes says it all, for me: imaginary landscapes devoid of human life. Fictional colonies to replace the real ones lost in the 60s and 70s. I’m making a bit of a ridiculous argument here, but I don’t want to historicize prog simply in terms of technology (the LP vs. the single) and biography (individual musicians rebelling against their r&b backgrounds).
Units like Henry Cow have always struck me as closer in spirit to Can and early Zappa—exploratory music still grounded in the blue noise that is rock. That’s where you go to find serialist rock music, btw.
But the difference between these two camps is huge. The idea that tiresome synth solos and bombastic orchestral-style arrangements would make rock music “intelligent” or “intellectual” is just grody-to-the-max. I enjoy Zappa’s early pretensions to “composer status” because he deflates his Varese moments with lyrics about TV dinners and Reagan concentration camps and doing the nasty with your daughter on the White House lawn. If only Yes or ELP had some self-deflating moments! Genesis at least could be purposely silly.
Posted by on 03/16 at 06:26 PM"Genesis at least could be purposely silly.”
Dr. Larry--they were almost nearly ALWAYS purposely silly, at least under Peter Gabriel’s direction. that was largely the POINT. it was *theatre!* and pompous and fun...i don’t see how any man can stand on stage wearing an evening gown and a FOX’S HEAD and imagine by any stretch that he is being taken seriously about anything. no matter how many drugs are involved. if anything, they were making fun of themselves as English “prog rocker” wind-bags from boarding school.
and i LOVED them well after i was 14...until i was 18 or 19, even.
-L.
Posted by on 03/16 at 07:39 PMEven more than last week’s thread, this one has resurrected all kinds of musical memories and opinions. Re: Stevie Wonder---his talent was never fully recognized by people who bought “Thick as a Brick” or “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway”. He showed a real talent for experiementation at a time when Motown acts were largely slipping into mediocrity and irrelevance. Even his early output was quite varied: “Fingertips”, “Hey, Love”, “Uptight”, need I say more.
Re: Zappa. How can you beat “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It”? The most explicit lyrics of today seem tame by comparison.
The discussion of Tull leaves out the song that probably first got them attention on FM radio, “Teacher” which is much better than the outrageous but ultimately icky “Aqualung” or the pop-pap “Skating Away”. All the airplay that “Aqualung” received 30 years ago tells you how narrow radio has really gotten.
Mike Oldfield and “Tubular Bells” was a definite nadir of symphony rock. ELP’s stabs at classical or neo-classical music mostly were failures that seem even more awful now. But songs like “From the Beginning” are deserving of another hearing. Dr. Larry’s critique of the “Yes” cover art and the music in general seems applicable to some of the pop literature of the time---Tolkien (he said expecting brickbats to be thrown), not to mention stuff like Jonathan Livingston Seagull. I tried to read some of the stuff, but couldn’t. The plotless, sometimes formless fiction of the era was a more rewarding literary form.
Posted by on 03/16 at 07:48 PMThank you to the prog fan commenters, including Dr. Larry, for restoring my faith that some of those who read the Berube blog also love prog rock from the era of the 1970s.
Sorry to Michael, our host, for not getting the joke about Stevie Wonder and Tull’s “Brick” album. I went back to it and it sure didn’t read that way to me. But, I admit to being sensitive in having to defend prog rock since the 1970s against idiot rock music critics such as Hilburn of the LA Times, Palmer and Maslin at the NY Times, the aforementioned Christgau, countless morons at Rolling Stone magazine, and complete screw ups such as Lester Bangs. It ends up being like trying to defend the late I.F. Stone on Fox News. Even when you knock back the attacks, you look like you’re arguing over ancient trivial matters--or as one commenter quoting St. Bart of Simpson put it, “Start diggin’ some nerd-holes.”
Sigh.
Can we get back to Wolfowitz...at the bloddy World Bank?!
Posted by on 03/16 at 07:55 PMHey Mike
Guess I’ve been worded on Zappa...at least we agree on Horowitz.
Posted by waldo on 03/16 at 08:14 PM(and you are still defying my hypothesis, despite a close brush there in comment #33...)
Posted by on 03/16 at 08:24 PMMitchell,
Did you really mean to compare the music of Stevie Wonder—who fought the Man (Barry Gordy, who was black as well) to win artistic freedom; who campaigned hard and long to create a national holiday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr.; who sang with dignity and passion about issues important to black people; who’s music was and is very popular with black people as well as with whites—do you really want to compare his music to Steppin’ Fetchit movies, which depict black people as stupid and subservient, and which have been almost universally denounced by black people?
Leaving aside his music, which is brilliant. His capacity for musical counterpoint blows most post-swing pop music away, Zappa and prog rock very much included. (The horn riffs at the end of “Superstition”; the vocal riffs at the end of “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing” . . . )Posted by John S. on 03/16 at 09:05 PMp.s. to Mitchell,
I’m with you all the way on the need to get back to Wolfowitz & the World Bank; find these music discussions extremely frustrating. I mean, what’s a guy like me to do, who loves Ornette Coleman and John Philip Sousa and Edgard Varese and Stevie Wonder and Led Zeppelin and Barry Manilow too? (I like Barry better than both Reggie & Davy, but that’s just me, right?) & I got no beef w / prog rock either, though I usually would prefer it with different words.
Posted by John S. on 03/16 at 09:10 PMI mean, what’s a guy like me to do, who loves Ornette Coleman and John Philip Sousa and Edgard Varese and Stevie Wonder and Led Zeppelin and Barry Manilow too?
John S., you’re a man after my musical heart, although I’m not sure I can follow you all the way to Manilow. You’re always welcome to come by my blog and talk music and I know I’ll be coming by yours as well. We polymorphically perverse audiophiles should stick together.
Posted by corndog on 03/16 at 09:25 PM(and you are still defying my hypothesis, despite a close brush there in comment #33...)
UNIVERSITY PARK, PA, 18 March 2005 (Reuters) - A new Theory of the Internet that some say could replace the famous “Godwin’s Law” was announced here today.
At a joint press conference in State College, Pennsylvania, two self-described “bloggers” - one identifying him- or herself only as “Librarian” - announced the establishment of Palumbo’s Law, named for 1970s-era musician John Palumbo.
“It’s a unique discovery,” said “Librarian. “The data were touch and go there for a while, but we’ve cooked the books sufficiently to assure further grant funding for continued research.”
Put simply, Palumbo’s Law states that as blog comment threads grow longer, the probability of a commenter inadvertently switching the genders of pronouns in a Crack The Sky song title approaches one hundred percent. John Palumbo was a singer and guitarist with Crack The Sky, a progressive-album-oriented-rock band popular in the late 1970s.
Michael Bérubé, the other blogger at the event on whose blog the discovery was confirmed, was jubilant. “I’m really excited to have played a role, however involuntary it may have been at first, in this study.” Asked about commercial applications of Palumbo’s Law, Bérubé responded that those were “currently under discussion. I’m hoping to be granted subsidiary naming rights, along the lines of ‘Palumbo’s Law… as seen on michaelberube.com!’”
Asked about reports that some of their research indicated the possibility of yet another Internet Law having to do with spurious comparisons of Jethro Tull and Gentle Giant, Librarian declined to answer. Mr. Bérubé, after some hesitation, told reporters “You have to understand: blogs have a sort of open-door policy as a rule. You can’t really keep people from showing up and saying whatever silly thing pops into their heads.”
Reached at their homes by Reuters, both Palumbo and Jethro Tull flautist Ian Anderson refused comment.- 30 -
Posted by Chris Clarke on 03/16 at 09:30 PMLet’s keep it up, people. Defying Part II of Librarian’s hypothesis was fun, but the crucial test comes in Part III. I’m counting on all of you, even the Genesis-Gentle Giant Consortium.
And yes, Casey, “Wild is the Wind” wasn’t written by Bowie. Thanks for the correction. I even went back and checked, because I was so sure (when I wrote this post) that “Word on a Wing” was the non-Bowie song on Station to Station. I apparently crossed them up entirely, and thus posted a Blatant Factual Error to this humble blog. I hate doing that. My memory must be going-- must be all that tanning I did with those double-albums. (Fillmore East! “Statesboro Blues,” dude!)
And Mitchell, this shy and resolutely non-partisan blog has nothing to say about Wolfowitz at the World Bank. Bolton at the UN, now that’s a travesty. Bolton should’ve been disposed of after that cover of “When A Man Loves A Woman,” with the shrieking and the cheesy (or clumpy) key-change before the final verse.
Posted by Michael on 03/16 at 09:47 PMJohn S.,
Billy Joel is most likely a liberal Democrat and was certainly a leftist radical in the late 1960s and early 1970s. However, that didn’t stop most people at this web site from attacking his music. To suddenly protect Stevie Wonder for his political views strikes me as a “Maude Finley” approach of protecting the blind, black guy while dissing the white guy (does Billy Joel get any dispensation if it is true that he is a child of Holocaust survivors?).
Also, I didn’t compare Stevie Wonder’s music to Steppin Fetchit movies. I compared the O’Jays’ music to Steppin Fetchit movies, just as I would compare much of the Wayans’ brothers and early Martin Lawrence to blackface vaudeville. The pervasiveness of the pap commodification of music is such that we can draw some distinctions, after all. This fight over David Bowie and Elton John, when comparing their entire output, still strikes me as little different than a fight over whether Penelope Cruz or Cameron Diaz is a better actress.
Finally, prog music is far superior in terms of objectively verifiable parameters of composition, music theory, and musicianship. We can say we like all sorts of bands and music, as I enjoy listening to the Dead Kennedys, Green Day, Blink-182, and even some of Public Enemy, among many other examples. But let’s not lose sight of the difference between the pap-pop and more serious musical endeavors such as be-bop jazz, classical music, or progressive rock.
Posted by on 03/16 at 09:55 PMMitchell, John. Dear friends. Let us not squabble. This timorous blog hates conflict. Surely you must realize this by now! Then again, we’re not fond of the invocation of “objectively verifiable parameters” when it comes to music, either, because (a) we are decadent postmodern latté-drinking cultural relativists who bristle at the invocation of the objective in matters of taste, and (b) we think Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman are brilliant beyond measure when it comes to musicianship and music theory and we still want to get off the bus after Coltrane’s Transition. And what goes for prog rock goes a fortiori for Dolphy, Coleman and company. The older I get, Mitchell, the more I realize that good, smart melodies in the octave, in our sadly impoverished major/minor modes (no phrygian or mixolydian middle eights), in bloody 4/4, even, have plenty of fine music theory about them as well. Give me Lennon’s “I’ll Be Back” and I’ll be happy, really I will.
And adducing the political backgrounds of artists-- be they Stevie or Billy-- is of limited use here. When we want to get all Zhdanovite on people, we ask why it is that Billy Joel would blame Allentown’s decline on “the union people” throwing coal away. But under ordinary circumstances we’re strict musical formalists, all of us in this rhetorical third person, concerned more with whether an artist can pull off a chorus/ bridge transition as lovely as the one in Mr. Wonder’s “As” (the one that underlies the lines “Until we dream of life and life becomes a dream/ Did you know that true love asks for nothing") than with whether he or she voted for Al D’Amato or Liz Holtzman in that NY Senate race in 1980.
OK! On to Phase III!
Posted by Michael on 03/16 at 10:15 PMCHRIS CLARKE STOLE MY RESEARCH! WAH! PROVOST!
actually, while i fear that Palumbo’s Law may indeed be much funkier and hipper than the theory i am ACTUALLY testing, MY theory, if proven, will be far more important in advancing the body of Internet Theory as a respected & professional discipline.
also, checking back to the previously mentioned “should have been one-hitters but were not” thread from the other weekend, which i missed entirely due to accidently having a life in the Real World that day (happens rarely, no need to snark at me,) i have to say that in the case of THAT thread, you strayed DANGEROUSLY close to supporting my thesis, and yet, in the end, somehow you pulled off an escape…
could this be the ‘blog that proves the rule by its exception? we shall see.
and now, i have to challenge Chris Clarke to a duel, to regain my academic honor.
choose your weapon, sir and/or madame.
-"Librarian"
Posted by on 03/16 at 10:29 PMThe clumpy key change at the end of the Michael Bolton cover of “When A Man Loves A Woman” is immortalized (along with countless other such musical maneuvers) at one of my favorite musical websites, the Truck Driver’s Gear Change Hall of Shame. It’s an entire site dedicated to such useless key changes, complete with musical samples. Enjoy!
Posted by on 03/16 at 10:42 PMchoose your weapon, sir and/or madame.
Tough call, but I’ll choose “madame.”
“Sir"s usually pop off prematurely.En Gender!
Posted by Chris Clarke on 03/16 at 11:21 PM"Live at the Fillmore East” was the ultimate “reclining in the quad and getting some rays” album. “Statesboro Blues” and In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” are indelibly tied to those wonderful lazy afternoons in my memory.
OTOH, there should be a moratorium on certain terms, “commodification” being one of them. My research area (HIV prevention) gets into a lot of research (and pseudo-research) of sex work and the like which seem to take old social structures derived from feudalistic economic systems and make them up-to-date and somehow part of dialectic materialism. If you could have power over a class of women (and probably, more quietly, some men) you could have sex from them, for which they received somthing, however meagre in return. As for this topic, there has always been crap music and it often sells. And there has always been great artistry and it has sold, too. This nothing peculiar to music. I’m sure there were “bad bards” who were just as popular as Shakespeare, in their time. And I would guess that Bill Shakespeare’s elite fans had guilty pleasures almost as awful as the Electric Light Orchestra.
Posted by on 03/16 at 11:28 PMReal quick: Bowie’s version of “Wild Is the Wind” is based on Nina Simone’s version on the gorgeous *Wild Is the Wind* LP (which also has Simone’s version of “Lilac Wine,” on which Jeff Buckley based his cover).
I love to play Nina Simone and Jimmy Smith back to back. The woman-man and man-woman: androgyny without all the glitter lipstick and tight trousers.
Posted by on 03/16 at 11:28 PMMitchell,
I wasn’t protecting Stevie Wonder’s music from criticism on the basis of his political views, I was protecting the comparison of his music to Steppin Fetchit movies on the basis of his political views and on the basis of the inherent dignity of his music, and the inherent dignity of his persona as a musical performer, which his political activism—not just “views”—is part of. This goes for the O’Jay’s too, whose songs and presentational styles had dignity too.
You said, “I tell you one thing, Hannity probably loves Stevie Wonder and the O’Jay’s—which supports my view as to why their music can be compared to Steppin Fetchit movies.” If you don’t see why the comparison is deeply insulting . . . (Voice trails off in pity and incomprehension . . . )
I really like some Billy Joel songs too, and I like Rudy Vallee a lot. And ELO too—no guilt here!
And—counterpoint is one of Michael’s dreaded objectively verifiable musical whatzits. And Stevie Wonder had (has?) a brilliant gift for it. Check it out—Glenn Gould practically called it THE most important musical gift, or at least the one that rocked his world most rockingly. (I THINK that’s how he put it—have to look it up.)
Posted by John S. on 03/17 at 12:00 AMThis Years Model and Armed Forces should have been EPs? Whew, I have to get off the bus there…
Posted by Scott on 03/17 at 01:23 AMWhile I recall Thick As A Brick very fondly, don’t overlook some of Tull’s Living In The Past: Wond’ring Again, Life is a Long Song, Nursie. I think part of the reason is, quite simply, the capo.
I agree with Michael in that the older I get the more I appreciate a good melody.
Posted by on 03/17 at 01:48 AMJohn S.
Mea culpa on my adding S. Wonder to my Steppin Fetchit movie comparison in an early thread. I honestly forgot I flamed at that point in the thread. I still don’t think S. Wonder’s too good, but that’s something we’ll never come to an agreement on. I also remain adamant that the O’Jays are in Steppin Fetchit land. I cringe when I hear them the way I do when I see an old film where the black guy goes “Massa, massa.”
And Michael, I too love melody. The reason I love the progs over ‘60s Ornette Coleman and Coltrane is precisely the organization of the compositions of prog rockers and their melodic quality. It is why I am not as much a fan of some so-called Canterbury bands such as Henry Cow and Soft Machine, by the way.
That’s all. Sorry to speak so much on this thread. I love my progs--and they’ve taken so much abuse over the decades from too many highly paid rock critics who know so little about music theory that I wind up screaming in their defense.
Best to all.
Posted by on 03/17 at 02:58 AMMitchell, it’s been years since I’ve heard “Songs from the Wood,” but every once in a while I get a hankering. Next time I see it in a used CD shop & have a few bucks to spend, I’ll pick it up. A couple years ago some highly competent local rockers put together a prog cover band—calling themselves “Minstrels in the Gallery”—and it was really fun to see them.
I just checked out the 29 second excerpt of “Thick as a Brick” on the Amazon site, and that was intriguing too. 29 seconds is pretty funny.
Posted by John S. on 03/17 at 03:32 AMJust wondering. Have there ever been any women in rock ‘n’ roll?
Posted by Roxanne on 03/17 at 03:33 AMWow, Michael, them’s a lot a words writ about a couple a hack musician types. And you start it all out with a slam on Almost Famous and Tiny Dancer. Can’t believe I read the whole (well-written) thing.
Other than that, keep up the good work.
Posted by on 03/17 at 03:38 AMRox, I think there was Chrissie Hynde. And, of course Siouxsie, and the Slits, and Tina Weymouth, and Poly Styrene (Marion Elliot) of X-Ray Spex (whom I will always love for “The Day the World Turned Day-Glo"). But in the early 70s, if I recall correctly, most women-- with the salient exception of Patti Smith-- were busy blogging.
Posted by Michael on 03/17 at 08:29 AMMichael: the heck with Horowitz and Wolfowitz, please post the prog take as early as possible. As the discussion above indicates, there is much to clarify.
I wouldn’t claim to be a prog expert, but I have heard all of the following LPs in their entirety:
ELP, “Welcome Back My Friends”, or whatever it’s called
Pink Floyd, “Dark Side Of the Moon”
Moody Blues, “Days Of Future Passed”
The Who, “Tommy”plus a decent helping of the aforementioned Yes and Jethro Tull. And I wouldn’t trade an album by any of them if I had to give up Backstabbers by the O’Jays. Wouldn’t think about it even for a second.
There’s a lot of good music on the periphery of progdom: Roxy Music (Eno period), the Fiery Furnaces. But a defense of a central prog band like ELP or Pink Floyd? Let’s just say it would have to be mind-blowingly counter-intuitive to convince me.
Posted by on 03/17 at 09:18 AMI always thought the direction of any internet discussion of pop music declined eventually, Godwin-like, into a heated rehash of precisely how much each participant loved/hated/ didn’t mind once upon a time the Grateful Dead, just as all talk of computer problems inevitably reduces to get a Mac/oh, shut up about that/Linux, dude.
Remarkable focus in the community you’ve gathered around yourself, Michael, seeing that the bait was tossed way back there in comment 29, and no one bit, chosing instead to go on (and on) about other musical matters entirely. Ninety-plus comments has to be a new WWW record.
Well done, that. Nice beat, too.
Next up on Renard: Bérubé quotes Bolan quoting Berry: “…meanwhile, I’m still thinking…
Posted by on 03/17 at 09:42 AMDave always had good piano players, Rick Wakeman played keyboards on Hunky Dory, and “Warren Peace” (who was that?) on Aladdin Sane was great.
How I miss the days when pop songs required knowledge of the Kabbalah to decipher lines like “from Kether to Malkuth” - on some Bowie song, can’t remember - is it from Station to Station? (Need more RAM, brain is full, can’t remember anything these days.) On second thoughts, maybe not - don’t want to encourage Madonna. EVER.
Posted by on 03/17 at 09:52 AMRox, I think there was Chrissie Hynde. And, of course Siouxsie, and the Slits, and Tina Weymouth, and Poly Styrene (Marion Elliot) of X-Ray Spex (whom I will always love for “The Day the World Turned Day-Glo"). But in the early 70s, if I recall correctly, most women-- with the salient exception of Patti Smith-- were busy blogging.
Thank you for not mentioning Meatwood Flack.
And let’s toss Deborah Iyall on to that pile. And the two good songs that Heart released.
Posted by Chris Clarke on 03/17 at 11:01 AMi know this thread is exhausted, but i have to say: beefheart and the magic band rocked twice as hard as zappa and the mothers.
and bowie peaked from station to station to scary monsters, but at best, he was only 5 minutes ahead of his time.
Posted by on 03/17 at 11:24 AMMost of the music I listen to isn’t rock and roll, but quite a few of the groups are lead by women. I think Dido’s “No Angel” is rock. Some people think Gwen Stefani and No Doubt ruined ska but I like it. For some unusual rock, try Poe’s “Haunted.” The lead singer is female but I don’t know her name. I like Lamb, which is trip-hop. Louise Rhodes is the lead singer. I think Lamb’s best songs are “Gorecki” and “Gabriel”. I was fortunate enough to catch Squirrel Nut Zippers (and lead singer Katherine Whalen) in North Carolina while working on a movie. This was before the retro-swing crazy and the band caught on. I saw them several years before anyone had ever heard of them. Diane Arkenstone’s “Aquaria” and Miriam Stockley’s “Second Nature” are New Age. I’ve always liked Jade4U from Lords of Acid and Praga Khan, and they are techno. I also like Sarah McLachlan. I even listen to piano, and I prefer Keiko Matsui and Liz Story over some of the guys, like Peter Kater.
Posted by Trish Wilson on 03/17 at 12:11 PMGiven the recent direction in her work, it’s easy to forget how brilliant Liz Phair once was. Can’t have a sub-thread about women in rock without mentioning her.
Posted by on 03/17 at 12:13 PMyou’re right, ben. she showed such promise.
Posted by on 03/17 at 01:00 PMYeah, but that Ethan Hawke messed with her head.
Posted by Roxanne on 03/17 at 01:01 PMI am stunned--STUNNED!--that Uriah Heep has yet to be mentioned.
Posted by on 03/17 at 01:19 PMI am stunned--STUNNED!--that Uriah Heep has yet to be mentioned.
Palpable Tull wannabe.
Posted by Chris Clarke on 03/17 at 01:21 PMWasn’t John Wetton in Uriah Heep? Waste of a bassist.
Posted by ben wolfson on 03/17 at 01:21 PMOh, women in rock now. Yep, Liz Phair’s first two were damn fine, and I liked a couple of things on whitechocolatespaceegg too; Syd Straw, L7, Kim Gordon, Julianna Hatfield, Melissa Auf Der Maur, all good. I thought we were talking about thirty years ago. Sorry about that.
Gotta write the Beinart thing now. Besides, if this goes on too long someone’s gonna nail me for not mentioning Barbara Hudson of Ultimate Spinach.
Posted by Michael on 03/17 at 01:28 PMJewlia Eisenberg & Carla Kihlstedt rock.
Posted by ben wolfson on 03/17 at 01:30 PMKim Deal, Kristen Hersh, PJ Harvey, Sleater-Kinney . . .
Posted by on 03/17 at 01:47 PMI think most women rockers cancel their recording dates and album releases because they’re too busy preparing to be denied an interview for a Harvard physics job.
Posted by on 03/17 at 01:53 PMBack to ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’…
When GYBR came out, I was scratching out a living by doing day labor. I found that while ‘Bennie and the Jets’ may be a crappy song, it’s unmatched in the annals of rock as a tune to hum when your shoveling dirt. Try it the next time you dig a slit trench.
Posted by on 03/17 at 02:18 PMSorry MB, this is OT.
In case you folks haven’t seen it yet, this is the work of a genius.
Posted by Roxanne on 03/17 at 02:56 PMDon’t know much of Bowie, but I think that Let’s Dance (the title tune) and China girl are excellent. Shows how well Stevie Ray Vaughn could play if he took his head out of 1968.
Couldn’t “Let’s Dance”, just have a touch of Irony? Hellava better tune than “Danicng Fool”.
Roxane, Mike did not have to lead you through some 80’s, 90’s nihilists to mention women rockers, he should have referred you to Elton Johns’ drinking buddy Kiki Dee. If you have ever heard her sing “I got the music in me” you would be quite impressed.
Posted by on 03/17 at 03:37 PMMarshall Chapman was a good female rock and roller back in the late 70s...now she seems sort of rockabilly, but that’s ok too...not a whole lot of name recognition though
Posted by Carol on 03/17 at 03:46 PMwell, looks like peter ramus was conducting his own highly UN-ethical and secret research project on this conversation as well. and, the observation he was testing is, like mine, a cousin of Godwin’s Law. i too must commend our host/all of you/all of us, on a remarkable ability to return again and again to a given topic with almost obsessive determination!
i think we can declare an end to the test. you have not only managed to avoid the Ramus G. Dead Love/Hate Trap, but also to defy…
Librarian’s Thesis:
PART I--All electronic conversation, if given enough time, will eventually come around to the subject of music--regardless of the original purpose of the forum or the nature of the participants.
PART II--Once said conversation moves into music, it will, regardless of genre or period, given enough time, eventually follow some path which leads to discussion of Bob Dylan.
PART III--Once arriving in the land of Dylan, the conversation will remain there until the bitter end (which is oddly enough still predictable via Godwin,) no matter how many chances it has for escape.
and even though you defy me with observable behavior, that is still my belief, and i’m sticking to it! sooner or later, i will be proven right...i will be watching!
now, Chris Clarke, if you are taking up the Madame, then i guess i am going to be left holding the Sir...so it shall be honorifics at noon Friday, then? i warn you, i will be avenged.
-L.
Posted by on 03/17 at 05:34 PMI’m very late here but I can add something new. Which is the better space song - EJ’s “Rocket Man” or Bowie’s what I like to call “that Major Tom song” because I can never remember the name? I graduated high school in ‘76 and never got past “that Major Tom song” in the Bowie catalogue. It still gives me hives. I know I never gave him a fair chance and by the time I was older and wiser “Let’s Dance” was on the radio and it didn’t do anything to change my mind. Although inexplicably “Put on your red shoes and dance the blues” is one of those absurd song lines I will never forget.
Since I never have really thought of David Bowie and Elton John as being in the same genre, the (subconscious?) link between those space songs is the only one I can figure that got Michael started on this.
It is time to confess that I own both the vinyl GBYBR double album and the CD. But I can explain. I got the CD because it is so easy to skip past all of the truly horrible crap Michael mentions. There are whole sides of the double album I think I only played once. I would play the Funeral For a Friend side, then play Grey Seal and skip to Harmony and I was done. I’d have to say that all of Elton’s albums are like that. The iTunes music store would have saved me a lot of money in the 70’s.
For me old Elton John songs are so associated with that time in my life - learning to drive and blasting the AM radio - that I will always like them even though I know better. And “Funeral For a Friend” was one of the first songs I heard on that wild new invention FM radio. Now that rocked. That and Frampton’s “Do You Feel Like I Do”. So you can see that I am forever damaged.
Posted by on 03/17 at 08:24 PMPART II--Once said conversation moves into music, it will, regardless of genre or period, given enough time, eventually follow some path which leads to discussion of Bob Dylan.
Posted by Librarian on 03/17 at 04:34 PM
uhm, who is bob Dylan?
Incidentally, OT. For all ambient fans.
this download from magnetophone is one of the better recent ambient piece.
http://www.epitonic.com/artists/magnetophone.htmlThis Brazillian guy, lunasigh, also has incredible ambient. (well it’s free)
the multicoloured coral formations upon her skin (4:34)
http://music.download.com/lunasigh/3600-8618_32-100407952.html?tag=articlePosted by on 03/17 at 09:06 PMPART II--Once said conversation moves into music, it will, regardless of genre or period, given enough time, eventually follow some path which leads to discussion of Bob Dylan.
B-but that’s kind of tautological right? I mean once they get to the point of discussing music they’re almost by definition talking about Bob right?
Posted by Jeremy Osner on 03/17 at 09:30 PMDr. Larry, points taken about the wonderful Henry Cow viz serialism, Fred Frith and microtones and King Crimson in general.
Nice to see the Canterbury lads get a shout in. Caravan in particular are a fine, fine band. Another really terrific band that’s not part of that scene was Strawbs, esp. the Grave New World > Ghosts period.
I went to MOCA Los Angeles’ Visual Music exhibit today. It’s about painters/visual artists influenced by music, the most notable person being Kandinsky. They had rooms playing stuff like a long section of Joshua Light Show stuff and so on. One of the visual sections had a soundtrack by Soft Machine that was *very* trippy, very much “Soft Machine play the UFO Club” kind of stuff. It’s before they became the jazz-rock behemoth that most people remember them for; I’ll have to track it down.
If only Yes or ELP had some self-deflating moments!
Well, Jon Anderson routinely mocks his hippie personae but Yes *is* pretty po-faced. ELP on the other hand...I mean, naming an album after slang for “blow job”, writing songs about transvestite nuns, rubbing Moog ribbon controllers between one’s ass cheeks on stage and using a rotating piano while a tape plays Chopin’s “Revolutionary” Etude seems to me to be pretty “self-deflating”. Sure, it’s not writing songs about yellow snow and Suzy Creamcheese, but ELP are painted as these “serious artistes” types by their critics more than they or their fans ever would; Robert Fripp fits that bill more than E, L or P. That’s what I remember about ELP shows as much as the music and stagecraft, is just how much fun they had.
Posted by on 03/18 at 01:13 AMHey, wasn’t that me with the Frith/Cow/Crimson/Canterbury stuff?
Posted by ben wolfson on 03/18 at 10:56 AMLibrarian, your Phase II is probably truer overall than my own formulation.
Reminds me of the time I saw Dylan and the Dead at Oakland Coluseum in fact.
Let me just go search up my notes here a minute…
Posted by on 03/18 at 11:41 AM"Well, Jon Anderson routinely mocks his hippie personae but Yes *is* pretty po-faced. ELP on the other hand...I mean, naming an album after slang for “blow job”, writing songs about transvestite nuns, rubbing Moog ribbon controllers between one’s ass cheeks on stage and using a rotating piano while a tape plays Chopin’s “Revolutionary” Etude seems to me to be pretty “self-deflating”. Sure, it’s not writing songs about yellow snow and Suzy Creamcheese, but ELP are painted as these “serious artistes” types by their critics more than they or their fans ever would; Robert Fripp fits that bill more than E, L or P. That’s what I remember about ELP shows as much as the music and stagecraft, is just how much fun they had.”
Ah, what a difference three decades make. Those of us old enough to remember such things recall that ELP and their fans were quite proud of their classical music pretensions and took seriously tiresome sound of synthesizers, rubbed between ass cheeks or otherwise. Even ditties about yellow snow (hardly Zappa’s best work, though his most accessible) hold up better than most of this stuff. Their antics and their music are just more 1970s kitsch. “Yes” had far fewer pretensions and never had any remotely similar ambitions.
The Dead were always overrated (esp. as muscicians), but the 99% of the public who weren’t dead heads knew or susupected that, anyway. Or simply didn’t bother to pay attention. Perhaps that’s why we haven’t had that spirited debate about their music.
Posted by on 03/18 at 11:59 AMThe Dead were always overrated (esp. as muscicians)
Oh, I don’t know. I think their early work on Drosophilia stands up pretty well.
Posted by on 03/18 at 12:21 PMKim Deal, Kristen Hersh, PJ Harvey, Sleater-Kinney .
Posted by Terence on 03/17 at 12:47 PMAdd Solex, Peaches, and Le Tigre for me.
Posted by on 03/18 at 03:18 PMalthough both Wet B. Ear & Jeremy are snarking about Dylan in posts #116 & #117, they pretty well illustrate WHY my Dylan model, when followed, still manages to conform to Godwin in the end.
peter--i saw the Dylan/Dead tour in Philly in...uh...summer of...mmmm...’87? (and that’s all i plan to say about THAT in THIS forum.)
-L.
Posted by on 03/18 at 04:45 PMCaptain Fantastic—good pinball machine, fair album....
J. Tull—No. S. Wonder—Yes.
Yes (Rick Wakeman, etc)—No. Mott the Hoople—Yes.
Joan Jett—YES!
Posted by on 03/18 at 07:10 PMalthough both Wet B. Ear & Jeremy are snarking about Dylan in posts #116 & #117, they pretty well illustrate WHY my Dylan model, when followed, still manages to conform to Godwin in the end.
Posted by Librarian on 03/18 at 03:45 PM
But that’s just age and locality dependence I think? It is possible to discuss a lot of great music without even touching Dylan. He certainly has great influence in late 60’s rock scene, but there are other musics beyond his influence. Take hip-hop and electronica for eg. These two big genres would develop just fine without Dylan.
eg. a pointless exercise. I would say these names are far more influential than Bob Dylan in Rock history: Chuck Berry, Elvis, John Lee Hooker, Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, Public Enemy, Brian Eno, Slint, Matmos ...
so picking any of those names above is jsut as good as picking Bob Dylan.
my random 2 pennies
Posted by on 03/18 at 07:42 PMwet b.--
i don’t disagree about the relative influence, love Public Enemy, etc.
i think the reason why so many online conversations head first into music, and then into Dylan, has more to do with the common frame of reference than with any artist’s merit or stature, deserved or otherwise.
if you are online, currently, and communicating mostly with fellow US folk, the conversation (if it doesn’t degenerate into a flame war, or is otherwise ended,) will seek a common level, which given the predominate ages, educations, etc. of the bulk of the folk out here on “the internets” tends to end up being the subject of music--we can almost ALL find something to say about music. and then, after that, who doesn’t have SOME thing to say about Bob Dylan?
i’ve just watched it happen all over the place, and it’s become a kind of game for me: how long before we end up deconstructing Desolation Row, you know?
i suppose it might be more useful as a test of the forum, rather than a Theory of Internet...it might also be more of an indication of the kinds of people i just tend to keep on running into out here?
in any case, you are now enlisted to watch for this phenomenon and report back! i must know!
-L.
Posted by on 03/19 at 04:15 AMElton John blows David Bowie out of the water. David did not have close to the musical breadth, and his voice and instrumental ability was dependant on studio gimmickry (at least in the 70s), but he WAS better at the shock value. Granted, neither has had an original thought for almost 30 years.
And Joan Jett stole all her persona from Leather Tuscadero.
Posted by on 09/07 at 01:07 PM
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