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…
Touch the fullness of her breast, feel the love of her caress, she will be your living end… I may be a little down on Aladdin Sane at the moment, but Lady Grinning Soul is one of the finest songs Bowie ever did, one where he really comes into his own as a vocalist. Part of Bowie’s distinct genius comes from his ability to achieve emotional immediacy within a more generally detached standpoint. If this seems contradictory, it is. It’s a funny little trick he pulls off. He filters everything through performance, adopting the McLuenesque conceit that the medium is the message, and this gives things an element of artifice and fakery, yet he makes each of his incarnations feel like organic outgrowths of who he is, even though a clear concept of who he is elusive. This pretzel logic of personality, if you will, peaks with the Berlin trilogy, where Bowie’s pain and alienation cross a threshold into stunted numbness, only occasionally breaking out into a full venting of human suffering, but always at the precise moment where the acute emotionality will achieve maximum impact, most memorably from the third verse of ‘Heroes’ onwards. The capacity to be at once distant and intimate is another unifying aspect of Bowie’s best work, and Lady Grinning Soul certainly fits into this category. The song feels like an elegy to a fallen age, She’ll come, she’ll go. But the end of the glitter era, the death of Ziggy Stardust, isn’t mournful. On the contrary, it’s pregnant with new possibilities…
Raw Power is more about atmosphere than it is about good music. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, of course, but separating them in this case is the only way I can explain why the record appeals to me. With the exception of the first two tracks, Search and Destroy and Gimme Danger, the songs are kinda ho hum. But the record’s dark and deeply nihilistic vibe, a continuation of what we get on Fun House, makes up for the mostly mediocre music when judged strictly as music, if that makes sense. One of the received ideas about Raw Power is the notion that Bowie ruined it with a muddy, messy mix. Sure, it’s not the greatest sounding record in the world. But I’ve taken the Pepsi Challenge with the Bowie mix and the updated ‘should have been’ mix side by side and I’m here to tell you that there’s really not much difference between the two. It’s a big myth. If anything, the Bowie mix is more appropriate because an album like Raw Power ought to sound as washed out as the guys who are playing on it. And maybe I get a little defensive when it comes to David Bowie, but another thing that bothers me is the commonly circulated idea that Bowie’s only contribution to Raw Power is his ‘shitty’ mix. All you have to do is listen to the acoustic rhythm guitar and the tambourine on Gimme Danger and you’ll know that Bowie has his finger prints all over the record, directly and indirectly. A number of the songs actually sound like outtakes from Alladin Sane. The two records are perfectly complementary. They were released within several months of one another in 1973, and while each is imperfect, perhaps necessarily so, they both also make the high hopes of 60s idealism seem naïve and remote. A rainy Saturday afternoon spent listening to Raw Power and Alladin Sane, and then perhaps viewing The Parallax View, The Conversation, and The King of Marvin Gardens, would really put you in a malaised, early 70s frame of mind, probably not altogether different from the frame of mind you find yourself in these days when you choose to not live in the past...
First things first: Is this not the greatest picture you've ever seen? I love Ronno's fat Windsor knot and what appears to be the icky English food the two of them are eating. Thank God for the great Mick Rock, who took so many of the memorable Bowie photographs of the Ziggy era...
Alladin Sane has diminished in my estimation somewhat over the past few years. It’s the natural cycle of things. I go hot and cold on most records. There’s only a small handful that I never get tired of. One complaint I have about Alladin Sane is that it’s such a poor sounding record, probably because a considerable chunk of it was recorded in the midst of the whirlwind days of Bowie’s 1972 tour of America. But also, while the record features several fantastic songs, it’s not quite up to the previous two or three releases when taken as a whole. I guess this slippage is interesting in and of itself in that you can really hear the glitter thing start to run out of gas. The record has an exhausted feel to it, quite different from the sense of a new force in ascendance one gets in listening to Ziggy Stardust. Don’t get me wrong, though: For just about anybody else, a record of the quality of Alladin Sane would be a career high. Fair or unfair, the bar is set so much higher for Bowie. I might even venture to say that Alladin Sane is his weakest record of the 70s, though ask me again next week and I might very well tell you it’s one of the greatest records of all time… One of the things I like to think about when I hear Alladin Sane is Bowie’s burgeoning relationship, at the time, with Iggy Pop. But for the life of me, I see no resemblance whatsoever between Iggy and Che Guevara…
Fun House is one of the nastiest records ever made. A mere three years removed from the Summer of Love, and coming out of Detroit via L.A., the “songs” ooze with sweaty sex, and they conjure up images of burned-out factories, race war, and creepy-crawly drug freaks who come to your house in the middle of the night and cut you open. Ron Asheton is not an especially accomplished guitarist in technical terms, but he has exactly the right feel for this type of music, imbuing it with its dark vibe by simply cranking things up all the way so that they create primal sounds that leave the listener feeling keyed up and edgy. But it’s not an unpleasant sensation. It’s actually quite freeing, all the more so because Iggy is that freakishly toned idiot savant who somehow makes nihilistic self-destruction seem appealing. Fun House is not a record anyone’s gonna wanna play every day. But when you’re in one of those moods where you feel like you need to break someone or something, play this one real loud and get ready for an experience beyond catharsis…
I have, at best, mixed feelings about Lou Reed. I recognize his ‘importance’ and yada yada yada, but there’s something about the guy that puts me off. It’s the pretentiousness, the orneriness the arrogance, the unpleasantness. You’re a rich rock star, Lou. You get paid to play rock ‘n roll to fans who admire what you do and just wanna know a little bit about what goes on in your head. Why you gotta be such a dick? Are you really that unhappy and/or self-important? I guess sometimes that’s what makes the artist an artist. It’s a personality type that’s hard for me to warm to, but then again I’m not an artist so maybe I simply don’t understand. I don’t need to love the people who make the music I listen to as people, necessarily, but in Reed’s case his repellent qualities come across in enough of his music that I tend to approach his stuff with my guard up… Having said all this, Reed has had his share of great moments. I love the Velvet Underground and will periodically play the title track on Coney Island Baby and a few tracks on Street Hassle, Blue Mask, New York… If a good Lou Reed song pops up randomly on my iPod, I’ll usually take the time to listen to it. He made a lot of music with the late Robert Quine, a guitarist I’ve always admired, so he’s definitely got good taste. …But Transformer, released in late 1972, is in a class by itself. It’s a record that sends my imagination soaring. This is probably because I’m a Bowie freak and I like to imagine what it must’ve been like in the studio with Bowie and Ronson. Their production work is first rate and played no small part in eliciting some of the best performances of Reed’s career. Andy’s Chest, a much tamer version of which Reed had previously recorded with the V.U., is my favorite track on Transformer. Ronno’s trash guitar is mischievous and oh-so-satisfying. And then there’s Bowie’s backing vocals. They’re hard not to notice. That’s the thing about Bowie and backing vocals. He definitely wants you to know he’s there. Nobody ever said the guy wasn’t a total diva…
All the Young Dudes is one of the two or three greatest songs David Bowie ever wrote. It comes at the peak of Bowie’s first creative explosion between late ’71 and mid ’73. That he gave the song to Mott the Hoople, perhaps recognizing that Ian Hunter would lend it just the right combination of defiance and world weary vulnerability, says so much about Bowie’s self assurance and burgeoning capabilities at the time. Here’s a man who knew that there would be plenty more where this came from, enough to share with worthy beneficiaries of his artistic largesse. There are hundreds of songs that move me. Rarer are the ones that transport me, and rarer still are the ones that transport me and get me to feeling like I imagine it must’ve felt at the time they appeared on the scene. All the Young Dudes is one of those super-rare songs. The melody is perfect, especially in the chorus. I love the signature David Bowie/Ronno hand claps and tambourine. And the lyrics have a beatnik scat quality about them. Boogaloo dudes… He dresses like a queen, but he can kick like a mule, it’s a real mean team… Speed jive, don’t wanna stay alive, when you’re twenty-five... But despite this nod to the past, the song is undeniably in and of the early 70s, another instance where Bowie transforms the failed promises of the 60s into something distinct and path breaking. It’s amazing to think that at this point he’s still one of the young dudes and only just getting started…
Bill Nelson is a bit pretentious, but boy can he play guitar. If Mick Ronson had been classically trained at a music conservancy, he’d be Bill Nelson. Classical training, mind you (or at least playing that sounds classically trained), makes for a bad mix with rock, more often than not, to the extent that those who’ve been formally schooled tend to be overly ambitious and given to conceptual overreach. Progressive rock is what happens when rock ‘n roll flirts with classical structures and motifs. I’m ok with some progressive rock as long as the ridiculousness and self-importance are reined in. Like, for example, Yes don’t temper their ridiculousness. I have a friend who’s been trying to get me into Yes for years. I don’t have the heart to tell him it ain’t ever gonna happen. I think he’d be crushed and feel rejected. People get very emotionally invested in the music they love. I know I do. If you told me there was no way you’d ever like the Byrds, or David Bowie, or the Beach Boys, or the Lovin’ Spoonful, I’d probably tell you there’s no way we can be friends. I digress… As its title suggests, the first Be-Bop Deluxe album, Axe Vctim, is a guitar lover’s fantasy come true. The Be-Bops are progressive rock, but they come from the segment of the genre that initially had toes in glitter and eventually made a transition to New Wave. The thing about Bill Nelson that’s so exciting to me is that he maximizes the potential of the guitar like very few others are able to do. And he’s able to make it sound so effortless. How the hell does he get that unbelievable tone? I’ve tried in my own amateurish way to replicate Nelson’s sound with my Tellie, but it takes a tremendous amount of talent and know-how to get a guitar to sing like that. Also, there’s the problem that Nelson’s sound relies quite a bit on natural distortion, which requires that you crank things up as high as they’ll go. Doing this isn’t practical for a strict bedroom jammer like me. The windows in my house would shatter and my cat would run away. And I have neighbors. So all I can do is daydream about the awesome phallic power one must feel in getting a guitar to hum and whine and explode in the manner of Bill Nelson. …If you love and worship the guitar as much as I do - if it’s one of the few things that bring your life meaning, continuity, pleasure and happiness - then you can’t not have Axe Victim in your collection. Nelson’s playing is a unique and perfect blend of tarted-up glitter and classical aspiration. The guitar in his hand becomes a gateway to the sublime, and I become an all-too-willing axe victim…
One of the things that hits my aural g-spot, if a man’s man like myself can be allowed to have such a thing, is the crispness of the acoustic guitars on Bowie’s early 70s output. Even Hunky Dory, written largely on and for the piano, has some of the cleanest strumming you’ll ever hear. This cleanliness, as it were, reaches a zenith of sorts on Ziggy Stardust, but still remains quite remarkable over the next two records (not including Pin Ups, an album I don’t have much time for). And there’s a reason things sound as distinctive as they do, namely that Bowie plays the acoustic parts on a Gibson 12-string guitar. I have a cheapie 12-stringer myself and I must confess that I find it very difficult to play. But if I’m having one of those days where things are going well and I get in the right groove with it, I really don’t wanna go back to a mere six strings. On the other hand, though, I can’t put the thing down fast enough when I’m having a less than stellar day, so demoralizing it can be when I fumble with the guitar and get nothing but horrible sounding fret buzz. Bowie had a knack for making his 12-stringer sound muscular, godly, and just fucking perfect. But his is not a typical 12-string sound in the manner of Jim/Roger McGuinn, or George Harrison, or Johnny Marr, all of whom rely largely on jingle-jangle arpeggios to get their distinct brand of 12-string magic. Bowie makes his 12-stringer sound like an otherworldly six-stringer, like the best six-stringer you ever heard, a guitar with tone you can otherwise only dream about. I don’t know how he does it. Rock ‘n Roll Suicide - which along with ‘Heroes,’ Ashes to Ashes, and All the Young Dudes, ranks as my favorite Bowie song - is the quintessence of what the 12-stringer sounds like in his hands. What makes the performance all the more impressive is that, by the time he gets to the third verse, the bizarro chord and key changes come so fast and furious that it’s shocking to me more people haven’t commented on Bowie the guitarist. …I fear that the 12-string guitar has become more obscure and rarified with the passage of time (not that I’m really up on the NOW in music, it’s just an intuitive feeling I have). If I’m right, it’s really too bad. It’s an amazingly rich instrument…at least it is when the right person is playing it. David Bowie is the right person...
Since I’m thinking so much about the guitar these days – its potential, approaches to playing, ways of learning, tone, sound, vibe, feel, etc. – I thought it’d be fun to use this space as a way to think out loud and articulate my views as they evolve. This is strictly something I’m doing for myself to work out my ideas, but if readers get something out of what I have to say, all the better. …One of the ways I learn is by trying to assimilate the sounds that hit me on an emotional level. Technical prowess, as an end in itself, doesn’t move me at all. I think of a band like King Crimson and the two guitarists who shaped their sound so distinctly, Robert Fripp and, later, Adrian Belew. Both are unbelievably gifted players, but both strike me as being technicians. Neither plays with what I would consider any real emotion. Actually, though, that’s not true. They’re both capable of playing with feeling when someone else’s vision dictates the approach. So they’re both good session players. Some of the most memorable David Bowie songs from his New Wave period – basically the five-year stretch from Station to Station to Scary Monsters – feature great, emotionally affecting playing from Fripp and Belew. Fripp’s playing on Teenage Wildlife, for instance, is quite visceral, and he’s also made great contributions to some of Brian Eno’s best music. But in the context of King Crimson, with some exceptions, the playing is dry and lifeless. You feel as if you’re listening to an infinitely complex but also bruisingly dull lecture on music theory. I want the opposite of this. Technical expertise with no heart is always forgettable. The antidote to this is the late Link Wray, who played with nothing so much as furious passion. His playing conveys deep inner pain but somehow induces ecstasy in the process. It’s like flossing the sensitive regions of your gums. It hurts, yet there’s something about it that makes you wanna do it more. Wray’s playing takes me to the same masochistic threshold. It’s ugly, and it’s beautiful; it’s angry, and it’s joyful; it’s a big, mean bully, and it’s your outsized guardian angel who protects you from bullies. He keeps things very simple. “Rumble” is really just three or four chords and a pentatonic scale, but he creates an unmistakable sound, which he apparently discovered by poking a hole in his amp with a pencil. One wonders if this was some kind of stand in for self mutilation. He was half Native American, and proudly so, which likely accounts for the intense anguish that comes across in his playing. Nothing like being the wretched of the earth to inspire raw feelings of betrayal and oppression. Those who can turn this into great art are the truly gifted people in the world. There’s not much virtuosity involved in Wray’s playing. He doesn’t need it, and this gives hope to all of us who want to be able to play but are all too aware of our limitations. …My other passion in life besides music is baseball, and I’ve always had a huge soft spot for players who overachieved simply on the basis of heart and grit, guys like Larry Bowa, Brian Downing, Darryl Porter, Tug McGraw, Rusty Staub, Wally Bachman, Tim Salmon...It’s the same with guitarists. Don’t get me wrong: I love me my Clarence White, Eddie Van Halen, and Johnny Marr, just as I love me my Tom Seaver, Nolan Ryan, and Keith Hernandez. But while all these guys have or had incredible ability, it’s the passion with which they play that makes them great. Link Wray plays with passion above all else. If he has a distinct approach it’s simply to play with unbridled feeling and intensity. Have a listen to this performance of “Rumble.” Try to imagine the dark, sinister vibe it created in 1958, and then marvel at how fresh and ferocious it still sounds 20 years later. He plays it especially slow here, which suits the song just fine. It’s incredible stuff. It puts you in the dark parking lot, out back behind the bar, face-to-face with a tall, lanky sick fuck with a shaved head and a thousand-yard stare, interrupted only by a tiny little sadistic glint. He’s swinging a heavy chain in a way that tells you he lives for this shit. He loves breaking heads open and watching pools of blood form on the pavement in the same way most guys love having their cocks sucked. The hard, dull steel is about to smack you in the face, knock your teeth out, break your nose. You might even feel one last boot to the stomach before evertything goes black. There’s nothing you can do about it. Nothing. But that’s ok. It’s gonna be such sweet, sweet pain…
