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…

occasional dream, one

On my just completed trip back to New York City for the Thanksgiving holiday, I had occasion, once again, to contemplate the magnificence of David Bowie, from his early days as Davy Jones, a maker of somewhat canned sounding Mod pop, up through songs and albums released within the past ten years. I wrote somewhat extensively (and turgidly, truth be told) about Bowie on my previous blog, which I discontinued in the midst of my 19th nervous breakdown. I was focused back then on albums, but in the time since then I’ve become much more interested in thinking about specific songs apart from the albums on which they appear, so I think I might occasionally post a few thoughts on Bowie songs that continue to capture my imagination, even after all these years of hearing them again and again and again. …Bowie is one of the few artists for whom I will make exceptions to my growing intolerance for explicitly conceptual music, progressive rock, and songs that are hard, heavy, and/or stretched out and windy. …Nowadays when people meet me and ask me what kind of music I like, I tell them that I like guitar-driven pop, and David Bowie. And in a strange twist of taste, it’s precisely when Bowie is at his poppiest that his music is least compelling to me. I’m thinking here of what I regard to be his roughly decade-long ‘lost period,’ spanning from Let’s Dance up to but not including Black Tie, White Noise. I would also include his Tin Machine albums with the lost period. I don’t know why he ever thought it would be a good idea to go grunge. …I had an opportunity to speak with my sister at some length about Bowie while I was staying with her in the Big Apple, and one of the things we both marveled at is that, in spite of the dizzying diversity of musical styles that Bowie has either adopted and made his own or, in some cases, pioneered, there’s an overarching unity to the body of work as a whole. I’m talking here about a David Bowie sound, as it were, a distinct musical thrust that glues together everything from his earliest Swinging London recordings onward. I gave a lot of thought on the flight home Monday to how to articulate the nature of this sound more precisely. More than anything else, I think it comes down to common melodic structures. I looked up a bunch of Bowie guitar tabs on the internet the other night and, sure enough, there are certain things he’s done repeatedly from the very beginning to his most recent recordings. I’m not a musician, so I can’t really describe what he’s doing technically except to say that he’s quite fond of Major 7th chords, and he often likes to substitute a minor chord for a major chord even though the latter would be more conventionally appropriate. I think these compositional tendencies are what give the music its distinct feel, one that’s at once forlorn and ethereal. His songs generally have very unusual progressions with plenty of weird chords or little surprises that take things off the beaten path, much in the same way that you tend to get with the Beatles. And it’s the strangeness of the music, it’s flair for the unexpected, that makes it so enduring. It occurred to me yesterday that the David Bowie sound is generally dissonant, but perhaps part of his genius lies in his capacity to make dissonance sound catchy and infectiously tuneful. …Much of this is, of course, merely mental masturbation on my part, but what else would you expect? I am and always will be Bowie’s biggest fan, not least because his music is so rich and meaningful and thought provoking both in form and content. I just wanna know everything there is to know about how the songs are conceived and executed, what the approach is, who the players are, what the vibe is like in the studio, and how it all reflects some larger social, cultural and/or historical context. I’ll see if I can get at some of this in a weekly feature, an occasional dream, at least for as long as I have the energy.

Originally, I wanted to start out with a few Davy Jones recordings, but I couldn’t find any on Youtube, nor could I find any from Bowie’s 1967 debut as Bowie, so the first one comes from Space Oddity, which is actually a very interesting collection of songs. The music is undeniably based in folk, and there are quite strong hints of the direction he’ll go in for The Man Who Sold the World. The recurrent melodic tendencies I alluded to just now are already in place. The song is the work of an exceedingly English, somewhat posh space hippy, searching for a stable identity and perhaps coming to the realization that stability is far too ordinary for someone with his talent and predisposition…

c'est moi

Phil Seymour’s reinterpretation of Looking for the Magic is the complete power pop package. It’s punchy, perky, androgynous, tart ‘n fruity, and has a deceptively driving beat that makes the whole thing feel coked up, 80s style, but which also gives the song a teenybopper vibe that conjures up images of young girls having a squealing pillow fight. I love the original version of the song, but I think I love Seymour’s rendering more, even though there’s something a bit chipmunkish about it, no doubt an effect created through varispeeding the tape up a few tones. I think what keeps the song from sounding wimpy is that, along with having a great voice – one that manages to sound simultaneously from the Heartland and from the heart of Hollywood Boulevard – Seymour is also a fantastic drummer, not in the ostentatious sense of Neil Peart or Phil Collins, but more along the lines of Charlie Watts or Phil Rudd, guys who just get a full, resonant sound that makes it ok to place the drums very prominently in the mix… As always, there’s also the song’s sentiment, which when combined with its sound makes it just about as irresistible as music can get. The opening line sucks me in right away. All my life I been lookin’ for the magic. Yes. That’s me. It’s my fatal flaw, perhaps, but that’s me! And I have to believe that I’ll ultimately find the magic, because the alternative is simply too dreary. You can’t look for something your whole life and never find it, can you? Or maybe looking for it – for meaning, for redemption, for love, for completion – is enough. Maybe the magic lies simply in the faith that it exists and can be found…

remembering

I know it probably seems sometimes like my blog is little more than a Dwight Twilley fan site, but I just uncovered some footage I’d never seen before of the band (featuring Tom Petty on bass) pretending to play one of my favorite songs. …I think it’s Twilley’s innate grasp of the relationship between pop and heartbreak – the former tending to have the latter built into it – that explains why his music moves me on such a deep level. The theme of tonight’s song is memory. We spend so much of our lives reflecting on the life we’ve already lived. Or at least I do, especially of late as I try to make sense of a short but particularly intense and strange chapter in my life’s journey. When Twilley and Phil Seymour hit the song’s climactic high note, I remember you, it puts me in touch with the way loss can turn what were life’s tender moments into painful memories. The thing that made you so happy is gone, so remembering it leaves you with a chilly emptiness. You get over it eventually. Time heals and gives the clarity that comes with perspective. You come to understand that maybe you weren’t so happy after all. But tonight’s song is sung from the point of view of someone who’s not yet healed. The memories haunt him. If only he could step into a time machine and get a do-over. He’d do a few pivotal things differently, say things he didn’t say the first time around, and not say things he did say but shouldn’t have. But there’s no time machine, no do-over. There’s only memories, which with some distance lose their jagged edges. The events and the people you experienced them with fade away, much in the way the song fades, the main difference being that you can play the song over again. And you will…

elevator going up...

I’m not among those who dismiss the Association as muzak. It’s not that they’re not muzak but rather that muzak needn’t be rejected out of hand. The stuff serves a useful purpose. It calms you down as you anticipate the pain and then dulls the pain when it finally arrives. What’s wrong with that? I think of stuff like the Association and Burt Bacharach as music for folks who were in their 40s and 50s during the 60s, guys like my dad, hip enough to have his finger on the pulse of the now, somewhat, and who might even take a puff off a reefer if it was passed to him at an au courant party, but who would be totally out of place at a love-in. …When the Association are waved off, it’s usually on account of this, but also this, as well as this, and even this. I think all those songs are terrific. Each of them are quasi-muzak tunes, but they’re distinguished by their intricate production and arrangements, their sweet ‘n sticky melodies, and harmonies that are among the most perfect I’ve ever heard. And a lot of their music does indeed put you into a numb trance, awake yet asleep, a state that can be quite soothing under the right conditions. You might just find that you want the elevator to keep going up, up, up, past the second floor (ladies accessories and apparel); past the third floor (menswear); past the fourth floor (linens and cookware); then through the roof and into outer space. Keep the elevator door shut and the compartment ascending higher and higher, up up and away in my beautiful balloon… What’s interesting about the Association is that they eventually assimilated psychedelic motifs. And when psychedelia meets elevator music, the result is sunshine pop. Tonight’s song attests to the excellence of this fusion. It’s certainly one of the more psychedelic songs the Association ever performed, yet it maintains the morphine-like affect that so much of their music offers. It’s the dreamy harmonies that’ll stay with you more than anything, like the first brilliant rays of the early morning sun slowly burning off the overnight fog…

open wide

I found Nick Decaro’s cover of I’m Gonna Make You Love Me on a sunshine pop compilation I bought a few years back. I thought it was so completely wrong the first time I heard it, but now I’ve come around to thinking that it’s actually on par with the original. The two versions are very different in tone and execution. Decaro gives the song a lounge/muzak interpretation. It's strange for sure, but somehow it works, though I could swear I hear the high-pitch whir of a dentist’s drill squealing ever so slightly in the background. The affect is casual and blurry, almost narcotic, and it makes you feel the way you do after the first gin and tonic kicks in. And then there’s the song’s sentiment, the force of will one tries to impose when in the throes of total infatuation. In Diana Ross' hands, you truly believe that she’s gonna make him love her, yes she will, yes she will. But when Decaro sings it, you’re not so sure. You wonder if it’s the liquor talking, expressing the brazen self-assuredness on the way up that, on the way down, will inevitably turn back on itself and become little more than the empty wish it really is...

"sunshine" pop

I'm fascinated by guys who continued to craft great pop music after the tide had turned decisively to rock. That they did this, though, doesn't always mean that elements of rock were eschewed altogether. Pet Sounds and Rubber Soul both have thematic strands that unify the songs, which to me is a sign of the onset of the self-important rock mindset, but they're both also great pop records... My taste is such that the music's meaning gets lost if it's dragged out for too long. Can you think of any song that conveys its meaning more effectively and directly than I Want to Hold Your Hand? I sure can't. ...Curt Boettcher is one of those 60s figures who stayed true to pop. There's not a great deal of information available on him, but he's another guy I would credit with inventing sunshine pop. Along with producing some of the Association's greatest singles, he released two amazing albums of his own, one called Begin under the heading of the Millennium, and the other called Present Tense, released under the name Sagittarius. The latter album, produced by Gary Usher, is tragically under appreciated. I would characterize it as archetypal sunshine pop, yet it has some of the conceptual unity I was talking about just now. I suppose that in the wake of Sgt. Pepper's it would have been almost impossible to make a record where the focus was on the parts instead of the whole. But if you break Present Tense down into its parts, it has four or five bona fide classic pop songs, all replete with lush orchestral textures and lovely multi-layered vocals. The session players are not credited on the album sleeve, which is frustrating because the playing is outstanding. ...What I've started to realize about sunshine pop is that the name can be quite deceptive. Often times the stuff's actually pretty sad. Maybe it's just because of where I'm at right now, but today's song really got to me this morning, especially when Boettcher sings but you'll understand another time, so I guess I'll save my breath. It's the kind of line that seeps into your chest and moves up into your temples, and then you have to struggle to hold back the tears. It's such sweet pain, and I can't make up my mind right now whether to embrace it carefully or run from it as fast as I can...