rock candy

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For several weeks now I’ve been contemplating buying a Telecaster. I learned a little bit of guitar when I was a kid, but didn’t have the patience to stick with it. Over the years, I’ve picked it up on and off again, just for kicks, but now I’ve become obsessed with at least cultivating some competence. It’s not because I dream of ever performing in front of anybody (though my sister tells me that it can be a total chick magnet), but rat

her that it’s just so satisfying to be able to play for myself and my cat in the solitude of my bedroom. So anyway, I have my eyes on a Telecaster, which in my mind is the perfect guitar in its design, versatility, and, most importantly, tone. I’ve been making several trips a week to the guitar shop in Pasadena, waiting for the prices to come down after x-mas, but ogling the guitars in the meantime, anticipating the moment of ecstasy when I pull the trigger, take the thing home, and can wake up every morning and feel so blessed to finally own a Telecaster…a fucking Telecaster!

…Last night at the guitar shop, I plugged in and played all the riffs I’ve learned or re-learned over the past few months – Day Tripper, Cinnamon Girl, Substitute, Rebel, Rebel…and No One Knows, the Queens of the Stone Age song that has one of the greatest riffs of all time. A guy working at the shop gave me the thumbs up and said “Queens!” (dudes who work in guitar shops always seem to be hard rock lads). It made me feel good because I can never tell whether I’m playing the riffs in recognizable form. We got to talking about QOTSA, and about Josh Homme, and Kyuss, Homme’s first band. One of the biggest disappointments of my life is that I had a chance to see Kyuss live in the mid 90s and passed it up. I just didn’t like their stuff at the time, and I still think their last album, And the Circus Leaves Town, is the only one that’s any good. It’s certainly their most accessible. But even when they’re accessible Kyuss remain extremely heavy, both in their sound and their overall vibe. The reason Queens of the Stone Age are so damn good is that Homme dispenses with some (though certainly not all) of that heaviness, maintains the hard edge, but also adds incredible melody lines and hooks. He has a poppy sensibility that he never really had a chance to hone during his time in Kyuss, and he pays a lot of attention to crafting great, self-contained songs. Homme does admittedly go over to the dark side with some regularity, but QOTSA resonate most with me when he keeps things tight and tuneful. And needless to say, the guy is a master of the catchy riff. And he’s also very intelligent from what I can tell… When I mentioned to the guitar shop guy that Homme’s guitar often seems like it’s tuned down a full step to get that low vacuum cleanerish sound of his, a la Blue Cheer, he laughed and said, “dude, he has that thing down at least a step, sometimes close to two.” Tonight’s song is a case in point. It starts out innocently enough with with some hash brownie sounding meanderings on a guitar and a weird repetitive bicycle bell. But what at first sounds like sloppy farting around quickly crystallizes into a lead pipe of a riff, replete a discombobulating tempo change. There’s a lot going on here, yet somehow, improbably, the melody remains just barely intact, and I mean just barely. And listen to how low to the ground those guitars are! It almost sounds like a tractor pull… Kyuss’ is generally way heavier than anything I wanna spend a lot of time with these days, but I’ve been thinking about music that’s hard and tuneful. QOTSA are one of the great hard and tuneful bands, and it’s interesting to trace Homme’s approach to making this type of music back to its roots…

occasional dream, two

This occasional dream thing is turning out to be more occasional than I had planned… Janine is another example of how the Bowie Sound was at work from a relatively early point in the man’s career. Many of his signature tricks of the trade are already in use, albeit without their subsequent assuredness, and they all serve to intensify the emotional impact of the music: The distinct expressiveness of the singing; the manic self harmonizing; the acoustic guitar used as a rhythm guitar; the shimmering tambourine running through the chorus… I never used to care much for any of Bowie’s stuff prior to Hunky Dory. The folky space hippie persona of Space Oddity, which turns sharper and heavier for The Man Who Sold the World, just didn’t do it for me. Hunky Dory always seemed like a huge leap forward to me, one that rendered his previous efforts irrelevant. I still think it’s an enormous advance from his first three full-length albums, but starting with several great songs on Space Oddity, Janine being my personal favorite, you can hear his sound developing right there in the grooves of the record. A number of the chord progressions he uses would be right at home on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. This is what makes Space Oddity such a fascinating album to listen to. It’s kind of a test run. It certainly wouldn’t be my Desert Island Bowie Record, but neither is it one that the obsessive fan can easily ignore…

on the (middle of the) road to new wave

One final Scott Walker post is in order, this one from the 1975 Walker Brothers reunion. By then, Scott Walker had abandoned much of the Euro Romantic ethos, at least for the time being, in favor of a more conventional Middle of the Road approach. But No Regrets nevertheless has a very interesting melody line, no less pleasing for being so subtle, and Walker’s distinct croon always draws me in and gets me to pay attention. The song brings me almost full circle back to where I began reflecting here on Walker’s music. A few years after No Regrets was recorded, Walker rediscovered the Euro thing with Nite Flights, offering it now in a compelling New Wave idiom that suggested he’d been paying close attention to Krautrock, Eno, David Bowie, and Roxy Music, just as each of them seem to have paid close attention to him. But No Regrets still seems light years away from New Wave romanticism, or perhaps not so far away at all…

the dawn falls hard on my face

I’m still thinking a lot about Scott Walker. Thanks for Chicago Mr. James might be his poppiest song. The melody gets inside your head and stays there. His echo-heavy Euro romanticism remains present, along with the blue wistfulness he does so well, but now there’s the added dimension of an irresistibly catchy hook. Listen also for his harmonizing with himself, and for the way the chorus rises up a tone or so towards the end. I especially like the strange chord change he throws in for the line, And you needed more / than the smile I wore... Even as Walker evolved and embraced the pop life with increasing enthusiasm, he remained entirely unique. A handful of artists have been inspired by Scott Walker, but nobody has ever really replicated his amazing approach to making music…

warmth and compassion

Rhymes of Goodbye is arguably Scott Walker’s finest moment as a performer. By the time he got around to recording the songs for Scott 4, he was at the peak of his creative power. The songs on the album are quite a bit more accessible than what you get on Scott 1, 2, and 3, combining his distinctive Euro-Romantic crooning with lovely, melodic melancholia, and the songs take a step towards folk pop and away from what up until then was Walker's occasionally dicey penchant for maudlin show tunesy-type fare. It’s a welcome artistic evolution and makes for some of the warmest music you’ll ever hear. I’ve been fascinated by Scott Walker on and off again for almost 20 years, and for a lot of his music my obsession comes more from the head than the heart, but with Scott 4, and especially Rhymes of Goodbye (which, fittingly enough, closes the album), the music has an added emotional depth that cries out for repeated listening. My favorite part of the song is the verse that goes…

The Bells of our senses can cost us our pride
Can toll out the boundaries that level our lives
Can slash like the sunlight through shadows and cracks
Our nakedness calling, our nakedness back

I'm not quite sure what he’s saying with this, but I know it’s something good, and the glockenspiel that punctuates it is a perfect little flourish that adds to the song’s soothing magic…

what if...

Scott Walker’s music puts me in a European frame of mind, whatever that means. I guess for me it means “romantic”, “philosophical”, “weighty”, “deep”, “sophisticated”, “contemplative”, and all the rest. John Paul Sartre. The Welfare State. Krautrock. Films as opposed to movies. Good coffee. Skinny people… Europe is not just not America but also un-America, if that makes sense. It doesn’t surprise me at all, for this reason, that the European Union is crumbling. It’s the logical result of Europe trying to be more like the U.S. I knew integration would fail. Europe can’t be like the U.S. because it’s so eminently…European, meaning that it’s everything America rejects. And this is why Scott Walker had to embrace Europe. He’s an American – an Angeleno to be precise – who turned himself into a Euro. The music has an undeniable ex-pat feel about it, though it doesn’t eschew Americana in a self-righteous way. There was simply no way Walker could have realized his vision in an American context, but a lot of his stuff would be right at home with the music Jonathan Schwartz used to play on WNEW-AM. It’s music I could very easily play for my parents and I bet they’d dig it if they don’t already know who he is. …Tonight’s selection really gets to me, especially the line, are you sorry that you met me? When you love and lose, the answer to this question is so often ‘yes’, but it raises all kinds of interesting counterfactual questions. They’re European-type questions. They inspire deep reflection and ultimately make you recognize the potential fatefulness of every move you make…

P.S. - Oops, I did it again. I wrote about a song without checking first for its availability on youtube. The one I wanted to play for you is Best of Both Worlds, from Scott 2, but instead we’ll jump to Scott 4 and do Angels of Ashes. Enjoy!

the lonely romantic

I generally like my music to pack an immediate pleasurable punch and tend to resist stuff that's overly arty, but I make exceptions for the likes of Scott Walker, David Bowie, Peter Hammill, and a few others. ...If you're not in the right mood, Scott Walker can sound like Stephen Sondheim on crack. But if you're feeling lonely, reflective, and wistful, you might very well identify with Walker's melancholy romanticism, and you may find the heroic aspect of his music uplifting. There's a tragic component to what he does as well. When I hear Scott Walker, the epic grandiosity of his approach to making music puts me in the frame of mind of a solitary seeker, one who craves a deeper connectedness to people, fears it may not be possible, but makes the quest for it a central part of his life's journey all the same. Check out the soaring orchestral arrangement in tonight's song and the deep echo effect of the production. It's dreamy and expansive, and it still gives me goose bumps every time I hear it...

only one promise, only one way to fall

David Bowie is a singular, entirely unique talent. I say this while also recognizing that he’s a textbook example of the postmodern bricoleur, assimilating a diversity of styles, making each one of them his own, without ever settling for too long into a fixed way of doing things. I mentioned yesterday that, in spite of his incessant stylistic slippages, Bowie’s body of work is held together by a series of recurrent melodic structures that together constitute something like a signature David Bowie sound. It’s difficult to pin down where these structures come from. In part, they’re the product of sheer genius. I don’t use the ‘g’ word lightly, mind you. I’ve read as much Foucault and Barthes as the next dilettantish jack of all trades, master of none, but I do believe there’s such a thing as genius, and I’m convinced that Bowie is one of them. He’s a paradox: A genius assimilator. And as such, his melodic tendencies come not only from genius but also from what the pop music cognoscenti like to call ‘influences’, a word I don’t happen to like in this context, hence the derisive quotes. But there's no doubt that Scott Walker is one of Bowie’s biggest…influences. There’s an interesting dialectic at work between the two men. Scott Walker had a profound impact on David Bowie – not just the melodies but also the theatricality of the music, the decadent romanticism of his worldview, the idealization of Europe, etc, etc – and then Bowie, in turn, had a deep impact on Scott Walker. It’s somewhat akin to the reciprocal relationship between Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Byrds. …The Walker Brothers’ Nite Flights is virtually impossible to find these days for less than a few hundred bucks, unless someone “shares” it with you from a file sharing website. It’s too bad because the album features some of the greatest New Wave songs of all time. The album has four fantastic tracks, the standout being the majestic title track. Have a listen to it and see if you can hear the dialectic at work. To my ears, the song would fit perfectly on any album Bowie recorded during the second half of the 70s. …Over the next few days, I have a feeling I’ll be thinking a lot about Scott Walker, without whom David Bowie would likely have had a very different career arc, one that would not have subsequently fed the stunning second (or perhaps third) wind to Walker’s own career…