This may sound completely sacrilegious, but I’ve gradually come to the conclusion that Phil Spector was massively overrated as a producer. His records sound terrible. The Wall of Sound turns out to be a muddy mess. There’s too much echo, yet the records also sound muffled. The instruments hit the listener like an undifferentiated, cloudy mass. I mention this because I’ve noticed that a lot of Bee Gees records and singles have a kind of canned sound that feels like an attempt to replicate Phil Spector’s claustrophobic, compressed vibe. It seems like they didn’t really update themselves technologically until well into the 70s. …Alone Again from 2 Years On is a great song that has me thinking now that the real connection is not between the Bee Gees and Beatles but rather between the Bee Gees and the Beach Boys. The lusciously creamy harmonies make my heart flutter. And yet, the song doesn’t quite enter into the realm of the sublime because it’s so hard to connect with something that’s so distant sounding. About half way through the song, you can just barely hear a George Harrison-like guitar guiding the melody along. It’s the kind of thing that’s right up my alley, and I try with all my might to sift that guitar out. But the recording just makes it impossible. It’s still a lovely tune, but it also feels like a missed opportunity to do something truly great…
While my sister was in town taking care of me in the aftermath of my knee surgery, we had occasion to listen to a lot of Bee Gees music. I’d actually been thinking a lot about the Bee Gees recently due to Robin Gibb’s recent passing. I love the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack a lot, but it tends to obscure all the great songs they had previously, particularly their 60s and early 70s output, when they were quite simply the best Beatles imitators around and acted as an Australian answer to the Fab Four. Coming up with a list of the ten greatest Bee Gees songs is pretty tough since one could easily come up with at least twenty-five really great ones. So how about something a little easier, like ten Bee Gees songs, in no particular order, that are among the many that demand to be heard? That sounds pretty good to me. …Today’s offering is from Odessa, a record that looms quite large in my memory because I had it when I was a kid. It seemed larger than life with its red (fake) velvet sleeve and gold stamped lettering, as good a testament as any, I now realize, to the ascendant self-importance of pop in the late 60s. The thing about Odessa that’s so interesting is that it has a lot of the pomp that characterized the transition from pop to rock, yet the music remains light (not in a bad way) by the standards of when it came out in 1969. Make no mistake: Odessa is a bloated double album with a fair bit of bombastic filler, but the good songs are nimble, infectiously melodic, and might even make you cry a little if you’re not careful…
I’m saddened to learn that Bobby Sutliff, best known as a founding member of Mississippi’s Windbreakers, was recently in a bad car wreck and suffered serious, potentially life threatening injuries. I hope he makes it through this. His guitar playing, which is something on the order of Richard Lloyd meets Bob Welch meets Jim McGuinn, is just the thing for those of us who worship the totemic power of guitars and spend much of our lives in search of the perfect solo played with perfect tone. Sutliff is one of those guys who just seems to know intuitively how to get exquisite sound from his axe. Lyrically, Sutliff rarely if ever veers from the boy-meets-girl-and-turmoil-ensues scenario, but that’s ok because it’s a scenario that never gets old for me, probably because it speaks so clearly to my lived experience. And Sutliff is so good at transforming heartache and heartbreak into sublime, guitar-infused music. …The Windbreakers (it's a terrible name for band, ain't it?) worked with Mitch Easter but failed to ever gain any sustained presence on the airwaves beyond the college campuses of the 80s and early 90s. Still, the band was every bit as talented as REM, the Feelies, the Bongos, Let's Active, and all that jangly stuff we love so well. So much of chart success is a random crapshoot, being in the right place at the right time, and it somehow never happened for the Windbreakers. Sutliff went on to make a handful of very good solo albums that all more or less sound like the Windbreakers, including a few post-millennial albums, each of which is worth having, especially if you’re a guitar junkie. The man still has it, and I’m sending him my good healing vibes, hoping he makes a quick recovery and can continue to bless us with his considerable talents…
This ain’t rock ‘n roll, this is GENOCIDE! …Until about two or three years ago, Diamond Dogs was not an album that resonated with me at all. I dismissed it as the bloated and pretentious corpse of glitter rock. But then I had a moment of clarity and it’s since become one of my favorite Bowie records precisely because it’s the bloated and pretentious corpse of glitter rock. And it’s so much more than that, too. It’s really hard to categorize. One of the things that’s fascinating about the album in developmental terms is that, far as I can tell, it’s the first time we hear Bowie sing with the Soctt Walker-esque croon that subsequently became such a distinctive part of his sound. The loose concept / story organizing the songs is some kind of apocalyptic dog-man sci-fi thingamajig. It doesn’t really matter. It’s obviously the product of the overambitious bombast that inevitably walks hand-in-hand with cocaine addiction. But in Bowie’s hands, overambition is not the same thing as overreach, and bombast is not the same thing as pretentiousness. And even if the album is a bit pretentious, it’s ok because it’s David Bowie and David Bowie is allowed to be pretentious…
The vibe on Diamond Dogs is exceedingly dark, a perfect signpost for the post-Viet Nam cum Watergate malaise of 1974. When I think of 1974, I think of life as an episode of Kojak, knee-deep in sleaze and disillusionment and cities crumbling under the dead weight of the Great Society. It’s a world in which the economy is almost as stagnant as the overall socio-moral rot permeating the air. But there are pockets of vitality within the grimness. Inside that huge Lincoln Continental you're driving, for example, there’s an eight track player, and among the tapes you can play on that player - along with the Ohio Players, the Stylistics, Barry White, the Spinners, the Ojays, and the Chi-Lites – is Diamond Dogs. At first you may think that Bowie is an outlier among all this soul music. But actually, while Diamond Dogs still has the residue of glitter here and there (Rebel, Rebel being the most obvious example), the record also marks the point at which Bowie begins the process of re-fashioning himself into a white soul singer. The history of rock ‘n roll is filled with white attempts to be black. Many if not most of these attempts have had cringe worthy results. But this is Bowie we’re talking about. He gets it. The guitar that powers 1984 is all the proof you need. It’ll make you feel like you’re a character in Shaft, afro and all. Shut yo mouf!
…Bowie took black motifs and made them his own. It doesn’t sound forced. He knows he’s white. He’s not trying to be black. He’s just a white guy who loves black music. Bear in mind that Mods loved American R&B in the 60s, so Bowie is in a sense reconnecting with his roots, and he’s doing it in a way that’s so much more convincing than his covers album.
…Diamond Dogs is a remarkably diverse record as well, and yet it coheres. This coherence is no mean feat when you stop and consider that this is also where Bowie begins to fall down the rabbit hole of coke-fueled psychosis. Bowie’s singing inexplicably got better the more blow he did. I guess things like that were possible in the nihilistic atmosphere of the 1970s. You’ll be shooting up on anything, tomorrow’s never there. That pretty much sums up the lurid ethos Diamond Dogs expresses so masterfully…
Cover tunes are a tricky and frequently irritating rock ‘n roll convention. More often than not they’re meant to convey the artist’s ‘influences,’ and as such they serve as a way of drawing attention, first and foremost, to the artist’s great taste. The cover tune, in other words, is less about the song and more about the artist who’s borrowing it. We get it. You’re extremely eclectic with taste ranging from Pere Ubu to the Kinks. Throw in a little guilty pleasure stuff, some Bacharach here, some Kiss there, and you’ll end up with just the right balance of earnestness and ironic distance, and the distinction between the two will be slippery enough to win you the award for the hippest, most opaque guy on the planet. The other thing is that the vast majority of covers are inferior to the original versions. There are scattered exceptions, but most of the time a cover tune just seems like wasted effort, particularly if an artist covers a tune that was already just about perfect the first time ‘round, like when Bowie covers Here Comes the Night, featured on his covers album, Pin Ups. None of Pin Ups is at all compelling. I understand that he was trying to camp the songs up, filtering them through the polymorphously perverse Glitter thing, but it just doesn’t work well. What Pin Ups shows more than anything is that Glitter, at least Bowie’s version of it, was tapped out by late 1973. As I mentioned in some recent posts, we can already hear things running out of steam on Aladdin Sane. Pin Ups finds Bowie reaching back towards his Mod days – he covers The Who, The Floyd, Pretty Things, The Kinks, The Easybeats, among others - and when an artist looks backwards for inspiration in this way it’s usually indicative of creative inertia. There is still some residue of the Ziggy era on the subsequent Diamond Dogs, but a new sound and a new set of concepts begin to emerge on that the album. It also doesn’t hurt that the music on Diamond Dogs is stunningly good in parts. But we’re not there yet. For now we have Pin Ups, a rather dull collection of covers that represents what was arguably the only time in the 70s when Bowie’s artistic vitality was nowhere to be found…
