R.I.P John Klezdy

You probably never heard of John Klezdy, even if you live in Illinois. You probably never heard the band for which he was lead singer, the Effigies.

These things make me sad because the Effigies are, in my not-so-modest opinion, one of the greatest unsung bands of my lifetime.

What really saddens me, though, is that John Kezdy died Saturday at the age of 64.

His death doesn't just sadden me, though: it angers me. I'm not sure why. He died a few days after he crashed into a van while cycling and I think I'm pissed because accidents are mostly preventable. I'm probably also pissed that we live in a world where a kick-ass songwriter and singer can perish without his music having reached the millions of people who need to hear his music, even if they never knew they needed it.

But I think I'm mostly pissed because John Klezdy is dead while so many overrated, overblown, and overexposed mediocrities breathe on, churning out sonic manure, sometimes to great acclaim.

John Klezdy died too fucking early. Fuck this world.

My Obsession Now: The Old 97's, "How Lovely All It Was"

Most people listen to the Old 97's because of lead singer and songwriter Rhett Miller. I like Miller well enough as a singer and he has certainly penned his share of terrific songs for the band. However, the guy whose contributions I anticipate most eagerly is bassist Murry Hammond. From "W. TX Teardrops", my introduction to his vocal stylings, right on through today, I always look for his gem of a song on each album. I'm grateful as hell that he, at least, keeps the alt-country spirit alive in the band.

In the case of The Grand Theatre, Vol. 2, that gem is "How Lovely All It Was". I first heard this album during a long drive a couple of years ago. When this track came on, I almost forgot I was driving. I found myself hitting the "back" button so often, I finally pulled over and set the track to repeat. It accompanied me for the last three or four hours of the trip.

As with many of his numbers, I'm not quite sure what exactly he's singing about: the lyrics are a little oblique, just as the song's title is. The atmosphere, though, is reflective and a bit mournful, which suits my recent mood to a T.

This is my best guess as to the lyrics that resonate most:

If I don't see you again this way tomorrow
And my body doesn't break under the sorrow I swallow
I'll see you one old tomorrow
By and by

...

We're movin' on: you know that we've got to, man
How lovely all it was, how lovely all it was
The sun moves up and on, and so must we, my friend
How lovely all it was, how lovely all it was

(The ending, with just Murry singing to an acoustic accompaniment, sounds like it could have been a studio outtake from his solo album.)

I'm currently wallowing in the past and while it's kind of refreshing to dig up these particular memories, at some point I'll have to move up and on. How fortunate that Murry will be there to remind me.

Okay, 2016, enough already

First you take Bowie. Now you take Prince?

You take anybody else, it had damned well better be someone who has no more to give.

My Obsession Now: Dream Academy, "Life in a Northern Town"

It seems like the right time of year for this pretty tune. It's cold and crisp and (finally!) rainy here, at last making me feel like I could be in the little town of the video.

Huckabee being sued over song

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is being sued over his campaign's unauthorized playing of "Eye of the Tiger".

I detest Huckabee's fundamentalist, intolerant stance on many issues. Even so, I kind of feel for the guy.

"When the person made a complaint, there was an offer made to pay him and issue an apology," said the presidential candidate, who continues to struggle in the polls and was demoted to the undercard debate in Milwaukee. "We don’t want to run somebody’s music who hates my guts. I get that."

I'll take him at his word on this. It does kind of suck that an apology and restitution wasn't enough. (Caveat: we haven't heard from the plaintiff, one of the song's writers. Maybe the campaign didn't handle the negotiations well and honked him off somehow.)

That said, political campaigns, particularly Republican ones, have a habit of playing songs first and seeking forgiveness later. Reagan's campaign infamously used "Born in the U.S.A." without asking Springsteen (and apparently without understanding the lyrics, which are scathing toward the simpleminded patriotism he espoused); Trump used Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World" and R.E.M.'s "It's the End of the World As We Know It" without asking. Huckabee is neither Reagan nor Trump (though he exhibits some of the least savory aspects of both), but I suspect he's reaping the music world's resentment of the trend.

Musicians have good reason to hit back at politicians' unauthorized use of their music. First, copyright enforcement has to be vigorous or the holder risks losing the copyright. Second, musicians risk being linked to the politicians in people's minds. Artists of any stripe live and die by their reputations: they have to guard those reputations as carefully as any brand.

Maybe if Huckabee weren't so polarizing a figure, or the context of the song's unauthorized use hadn't been a rally for Kim Davis, one of the most polarizing figures in recent memory, he might have been able to settle the matter quietly. We don't know. The bottom line, though, is that a lawsuit was always possible. He and his campaign knew that. So when I say "I kind of feel for the guy", the emphasis is on "kind of".

R.I.P. Danny Schechter

"Danny Schechter, the News Dissector" was how I heard Danny Schechter introduced on the airwaves of WBCN ("The Rock of Boston") back in the mid-1980s. He was a wizard of editing, putting together audio collages that sent pointed messages about politics, society and social justice. He contributed heavily to the album and single Sun City, which I celebrated over four years ago. The Wikipedia article on the record is fascinating for the details Schechter himself provides, though unfortunately his quotations are unsourced and for all I know are apocryphal.

The News Dissector passed away last Thursday at the age of 72.

R.I.P. Sista Monica

Monica Parker, who performed as a blues and gospel singer under the name Sista Monica, passed away on 9 October 2014. She was 58.

You probably haven't heard of her, but she got some exposure here in the Bay Area. She had a powerful voice, one I liken to Shirley Johnson, and I absolutely loved it. KCSM's Kathleen Lawton dedicated the first forty-five minutes of "Crazy 'bout the Blues" tonight to Sista Monica and it was glorious (though sad). She absolutely owned her songs with her big, muscular, confident pipes.

She left us too soon, but at least her voice will remain with us.

Random thoughts for 12 July 2014

• There is no justice in a world where all four original Ramones die before Keith Richards.
• Israel's ultra-Orthodox religious fundamentalists and hard-right hawks have made the country thoroughly unlovable. The illegal settlements are bad enough, but this pointless rocket/missile exchange with Hamas over the teens each side has slaughtered ... are right-wing Israelis too blind to see what a dead-end strategy they've embraced?
• Andy Lopez was a 13-year-old killed by police last year because officers mistook his replica toy gun for the real thing. Some have cast the shooting as racially tinged and an example of police brutality, but I think this was simply a terrible mistake. I understand the family's outrage. However, the onus here is on the toymaker: if you make a realistic replica of an AK-47, you're simply inviting a tragedy like this. ThinkProgress has a good recounting of the story.

What is it about this album?

David Rice's "You ruined Neutral Milk Hotel: Nostalgia, millennials and the return of Jeff Mangum" in Salon is about whether his onetime boiling-hot obsession with Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea can survive seeing NMH's guiding spirit, Jeff Mangum, live in concert.

More so than anything else I can point to, the album holds the power of genuine mythology. It’s not just mythic in scope, theme and reputation; it feels like a body of mythic experience, animated by some original energy from before the Common Era. Whoever or whatever authored the album feels as remote in time and space as the Big Bang, and as omnipresent.

I, too, was captivated by this album when I first heard it in 1998. Yet to this day, I can't quite figure out why. Rice's explanation doesn't cut it for me, as it seems to be more about the lyrics than the music itself. The words wash over me, comprehensible (Mangum is the farthest thing from a mumbler one can imagine) yet not really delivering a message that my mind registers.

If it's purely the sound, what is it about the sound? Am I a huge horn slut (the brass is quite prominent)? Is the musical saw the equivalent of heroin? Some of the songs, like "Holland, 1945", give me the same pleasure as Phil Spector's "wall of sound" production; that could be a factor.

I don't get why this album gets under other people's skins, either. I don't go out of my way to bring this album up in conversation, but it seems like whenever I do (among musicphiles, anyway), the other person has heard it. Not just heard of it, but heard it. And the loves/not-loves ratio is high.

There hasn't been a Neutral Milk Hotel album since In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Maybe that's because Mangum doesn't quite know why it works, either.

Making it simple for Beyonce

I don't really give a shit about Beyonce or her music. However, in re: her justification for sampling NASA's communications at the moment of the Challenger disaster, I have to comment.

According to Forrest Wickman at Slate, Beyonce's apology (quoted by Wickman) says in part:

The song ‘XO’ was recorded with the sincerest intention to help heal those who have lost loved ones and to remind us that unexpected things happen, so love and appreciate every minute that you have with those who mean the most to you …

Wickman says the song is about mortality, not just "a failed relationship" as some news outlets have claimed, and the difference puts the sample in the proper context for it to make sense.

I haven't heard the song and I'm not going to, because based on her intentions I already know she fouled up.

The Challenger disaster wasn't her tragedy. If she had lost a loved one in the explosion, maybe she'd be entitled to write a song about that.

But she didn't lose anyone in that tragedy. The song isn't even about it. Taking her at her word, the song just abstractly urges us to make the most of our time with our loved ones. That's nice.

Unfortunately, she decided to give her song some emotional heft by referring to a very non-abstract disaster. And that was crass.

Beyonce, your intentions are irrelevant. Using the Challenger audio clip was exploitative. Some might even say it was cruel. There were a million other ways you could have driven home your point. Why the shuttle explosion? (The cynic's answer: because there was a readily available audio clip. Duh.)

Admit that you made a serious error in judgment, remix the song without the clip, and move on.

"Sun City", the video

A while back I waxed rhapsodic about the anti-apartheid protest song, "Sun City". The video is online.

It would be hard to mess up this powerful piece of music, but this video almost succeeds. Many of the singers marching through the streets look as if they know how stagey and inauthentic their lip-syncing is. Worse, the dancing makes them look like they're partying rather than protesting.

Yet intercut with these inept sequences is powerful imagery. An animated fist rips the screen as if it were a poster, revealing in the jagged tears footage from South Africa that includes peaceful protests, police beatings, funeral processions, and oblivious vacationers in the showcase South African resort of the song's title.

I was reminded of the song in the wake of Nelson Mandela's death. He and it have nothing in common except that they're both linked to "South Africa" in my mind. Even so, the song reminds us of what South Africa once was and why Mandela mattered.

Stan Ridgway today

I caught Stan Ridgway live the other night at San Francisco's Red Devil Lounge (a cozy spot that I liked very much, by the way).

He put on a good show, but it was a decidedly low-key affair. There are any number of reasons for this, I suspect — not being backed by a major label, an elaborate touring group is likely beyond his reach, for one thing — but the main reason almost certainly is that he simply is no longer young. Midway through the show I realized that he looks like a grandfather. It's startling to realize that he is, or will be, fifty-nine this year.

I miss his more energetic performances of classics like "Camouflage" (and hey, Stan, what was the point of dropping the lines, "Well, I was gonna ask him where he came from when we heard the bullets fly / Coming through the brush and all around our ears / It was then I saw this big Marine light a fire in his eyes / And it was strange but suddenly I forgot my fears"?). I'm happy, though, that his voice remains more or less unchanged, and that he seems to have found reliable bandmates in Pietra Wexstun and Rick King.

I was pleasantly surprised to hear "The Roadblock" and "Knife and Fork", less well-known songs I've always enjoyed. Another pleasant surprise was "Lost Weekend", an unusually relaxed Wall of Voodoo number it has been years since I heard him perform live. It was a hoot to hear him forget a couple of lines from "Drive (She Said)" since I've always found that one difficult to memorize. (In contrast, "Camouflage" is easy despite being twice as long.) "Call of the West" was a highlight, in no small part because it brought out a little of his younger, edgier self.

He also did one or two numbers from his most recent studio release, Mr. Trouble, but I've already forgotten which. This is not to slight the album: I simply hadn't heard it before the show so I wasn't familiar with any of the songs. In fact, based on my couple of listens, Mr. Trouble's new material seems to be top-notch. I share the AllMusic reviewer's disappointment, though, that there isn't more of it: only six of the ten songs are new tracks, the remaining four being from a 2010 live show.

Ridgway hung out at the merch table after the show to chat and to sign autographs. Contrary to rumors I heard many years ago, he seems to be a genial and approachable man; he patiently listened to me blurt out that I'd been a fan since 1986 and was happy to sign my copy of Silly Songs for Kids, Vol. 1.

Ridgway continues to put out intriguing, sometimes fascinating music. I'm quite glad to have stuck with him as a fan for all these years.

McFerrin's take on "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot"

Bobby McFerrin's "Swing Low", his version of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot", is getting what passes for heavy airplay on the local jazz station. That's too bad, because his rendition saps the life from the old spiritual.

McFerrin took what I have always heard as a plea from a strong, dignified protagonist to end his suffering in this world, and drained every drop of dignity and strength from it. He croons it like smooth-jazz dinner music. Ew. Really, that's my instinctive response, to shy away from it as if it were rotting food.

Don't lie in your song

Ever since I first heard Conor Oberst's (Bright Eyes) "No Lies, Just Love" a number of years ago, I've been ambivalent about it. The subject is attempted suicide, always a winner in my book. The ending was a letdown, but that didn't fully explain my reaction.

Tonight it finally hit me: the song is a lie, from beginning to end.

It's virtually a parody of the suicide motif. Oberst's narrator asks his family to forgive him, says his (still unstated) act was not their fault, delays his plan in order to enjoy a spring day, then cancels it altogether when his friend threatens to follow suit. The song ends with the narrator, fully redeemed, holding a baby in his arms, promising the newborn "no lies, just love".

Horseshit.

A good suicide song doesn't have a happy ending.

A good suicide song doesn't ignore the suicider's pain.

A good suicide song doesn't deliver a stupid moral.

You want to know a good suicide song? Try "The Ledge" by the Replacements or "Song for Adam" by Jackson Browne.

You want to write a song against suicide? Fine. Say something meaningful in it. Truly believe life is worth the living. Say so in a way that convinces me, too.

Don't claim somebody guilt-tripped your protagonist into pulling out of the deed. Don't have your protagonist solemnly swear to be a force for life and love as he stares into a baby's eyes. In other words, don't write Hallmark-card drivel.

You don't contemplate suicide unless you're in deep, deep pain. You don't stop thinking about suicide in a flash. If you survive — either because you never quite reach the brink, or your attempt fails — the pain remains. As a songwriter, the least you can do is to respect that. Paul Westerberg and Jackson Browne did.

I don't happen to believe suicide is wrong. I think there are times and reasons it could be a valid response to pain, physical or psychological. I know most people don't agree. I know most people think everything that can be done to prevent it, should be done.

I'm okay with that.

What I won't stand for is sentimentalizing it.

No lies, Conor.

Terriers theme lyrics

I got on a jag, listening to the Terriers theme song again. (See my first paean to the show, my snarky note on its cancellation, a brief postscript I couldn't resist, and even a stumbling prior note on the theme song.) It got me wondering what unsung (ahem) genius did the vocals.

Turns out somebody answered that back in early 2011. Actually, the answer came courtesy of composer Robert Duncan himself on Twitter:

Yes, that's me singing, whistling, playing trumpet and barking through a megaphone :) everything except drums...

And of course, he wrote the lyrics, too.

I'm still bitter it was cancelled, but at least the episodes are on iTunes.

Crazy 'bout the blues

... on Friday nights, anyway, when Kathleen Lawton or Greg Bridges is spinning them on 91.1, KCSM-FM.

Crazy 'bout the Blues has been running on Fridays from 9-midnight (Pacific) for decades now — though I can't be sure since I used to tune into Bridges' blues show at the same time on the sadly defunct commercial jazz station, KJAZ. (Darned if I can remember the name of his KJAZ blues show. Maybe "All Blues"?) It's a hell of a way to wind up the week.

Just tonight, for instance, Big Joe Turner electrified me with "The Chill is On", then the Queen of the Blues herself, Koko Taylor, about ripped me open with her buzzsaw of a voice on "I Got What It Takes". Talk about a one-two punch! It left me reeling in delirious happiness.

Whoa. The Slide Brothers' "Catch That Train", a gospel-tinged call-and-response number, captivated me so, I forgot to post this....

Wisdom from Wayne Shorter

From a New York Times piece about saxophonist Wayne Shorter's upcoming new album, Without a Net:

“To me there’s no such thing as beginning or end,” Mr. Shorter said. “I always say don’t discard the past completely because you have to bring with you the most valuable elements of experience, to be sort of like a flashlight. A flashlight into the unknown.”

The key is to understand what "the most valuable elements of experience" are. Mindlessly keeping what was is not the point. You have to think.

That's the main point I wanted to make. The following is just an amusing side note, concerning pianist Danilo Pérez's initial discomfort playing with Shorter.

“It was scary, to be honest,” Mr. Pérez said of his early experience in the quartet. “It was a shock to put myself into a situation where I had no idea what was happening. Even when I listened back, I felt like an outsider: ‘What is that? What key are we in?’ ” He gradually made adjustments, including one to his practice regimen: for two or three hours at a stretch he would watch Tom and Jerry cartoons with the sound muted, making up a score.

My Obsession Now: The Lucy Show, "Ephemeral"

A lot of alternative music released in the 1980s had a quite distinctive sound. There's a lot of reverb, a lot of layered guitars but little guitar-wanking; a certain melancholy tinges it even as rhythms are mid-tempo or faster.

A friend tipped me to The Lucy Show's "Ephemeral (This is No Heaven)", a song I'd never heard. In less than a minute, it had slipped into the well-worn conduits blazed in my mind by the likes of Wire Train, U2, the Smithereens (yes, them) and especially the Chameleons UK, with faint echoes of post-Bauhaus Peter Murphy and the Church. It's a gloriously different sound from the constipated AOR of the 1970s, consciously rejecting the diluted blues that had made the Stones so powerful but which by the end of the decade had been warmed over too often by too many imitators and had lost all its vigor. The new sound was cold and suggested the impersonal mien of the electronic machines then making their presence felt everywhere. It was not music that you loved, not at first. Significant mental rewiring was required before you could imagine it being "familiar" and therefore enjoyable. Only the thorough exhaustion of all life in the old sound could have accounted for the success of the new.

I like the vague sense of foreboding carried by the minor key melody. I like that the vocals are much less prominent than in your average AOR song, and almost seem to be trying to break the surface of the guitar-painted soundscape. I like that the guitars shimmer and ring like multitudinous bells, filling the air but leaving the instrumentalists very much in the background: a known presence yet still invisible, like the wind.

It's a curious reflection of my own mental journey, I suppose, that when I contrast this with the contemporary pop music I hear, the latter comes up absurdly short. Today's pop mines rhythm and blues, funk (by way of hip hop), country, and even folk, but for all its conscious sourcing, the end result falls terribly flat: it universally reads as stagey, inauthentic, and emotionally void. By comparison, even an obscure band like The Lucy Show seems to be saying something interesting with "Ephemeral". I suppose the difference lies not in the eras but in The Lucy Show being obscure and "alternative" (back when the term actually meant something) while the pop I dislike is, well, pop, calculated and produced to within an inch of its life. The comparison, then, is unfair inasmuch as a decent struggling artist is always going to seem more authentic and interesting than a performer that has sanded off all the rough edges so as to turn off the fewest possible potential fans.

Anyway, if your mind appreciates the curiously anomalous sound of '80s alternative, you could do much worse than "Ephemeral". I have been obsessively replaying it online, hoping against hope I don't burn myself out on it before I can make it to Amoeba and search the cut-out bins.

Live music

I used to go to live music shows all the time. It wasn't a regular thing with me: I didn't go just to go out. But whenever an artist I liked, or even one I only sort of liked, or even one about which I was curious, came to town, I'd generally head out to wherever he/she/they were playing — nearly always a small club, and almost never anyplace that held more than a thousand people — and enjoy the night out.

As the years went by and I got busier at work, I went out less, but I never stopped altogether. In the last few years, though, I can count the number of times I've seen live music on one hand.

Every so often I've wondered what changed. Certainly a contributing factor has been age: I'm more easily worn out, I'm more jaded than I was when I was twenty-five or thirty. An unexpected but not unwelcome shift in my interests toward reading has also taken its toll. I'm also a lot less connected to the music scene than I was (though I was never an insider or even an exceptionally well-informed music maven) — again, due to changing circumstances. And frankly, straitened financial circumstances have played an outsized role in my entertainment decisions.

Yet none of these explains my reluctance to attend the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, the amazing and free three-day open-air music festival sponsored by an astonishingly generous philanthropist, the late Warren Hellman, that is chock-full of musicians I love. It took my abortive attempt to catch Conor Oberst this afternoon to make me understand the change in my habits.

For me, music is a communion. It's a means of releasing emotional energy that otherwise is inexpressible. The thing is, as I've gotten older, I've gotten more sensitive to the intrusions represented by other people. And those intrusions disrupt the communion.

It's not that people, by and large, are trying to ruin my enjoyment. They can't help that their polite request for me to move aside so they can get through the crowd shatters the delicate sense of contentment the band had managed to induce in me. They don't mean for their (generally insipid) conversations to keep me from losing myself in my favorite song. It's not their fault that I listen harder than they do to music.

The people jamming the Rooster Stage (I think) this afternoon were enjoying Oberst, I don't doubt. It's just that all the things they were doing while they were enjoying his performance were driving me insane. The incessant chatter (can you really be listening to the music while you're jawing away?), the choking cigarette smoke, the jostling — it all made any effort to sink myself into Oberst's music a bad joke. And if I couldn't lose myself in his music, why was I there? I own his albums. I don't need to see him (especially as a tiny dot hundreds of yards away) to enjoy listening to him. My attempt to enjoy his performance amounted to standing on the grass with sore feet and a burgeoning cough from the damned smoking all around me. And the same story holds true, in slightly different form, at an indoor performance at a club.

I'm old enough that I will no longer suffer a mediocre experience at a live show (however stellar the actual performance is) simply to be able to say that I was there. And my definition of a mediocre experience is, the music didn't transport me to a happier, more exhilarating place. That won't happen if other people keep intruding on my attention, making me notice them rather than the performer(s).

At last, I understand why I hardly see live music any more.

Sugar pop, 2012

For people my age, (the manufactured pop group) the Archies' "Sugar, Sugar" is the prototype for a certain kind of pop song: one so addictive, so innocently pretty, and, if you'll forgive the vulgar racial note, so white, that it can only be thought of as musical sugar. It takes a lot of behind-the-scenes skill and effort and production wizardry to produce such a song: like white sugar, sugar pop is highly processed.

2012 has produced a fine sugar pop ditty in Owl City's and Carly Rae Jepsen's collaboration "Good Time". The song itself is unbelievably catchy, and the video is a pitch-perfect accompaniment that maintains the song's youthfully innocent tone. Is there a performer who looks more girl-next-door than Carly Rae Jepsen? And there's something about the way she twice enunciates "down" in one verse — she slightly elongates the first part of the "ow" sound and then abruptly clips the whole word off to fit the rhythm, making it sound more like "daown" — that is distinctive and, to my ears, charming.

The high you get from sugar pop songs is fleeting; they can be overexposed to the point of triggering a backlash (I remember Hanson good-naturedly participating in a SNL takedown of their sugar pop ditty "Mmmbop"); and you will hate yourself six months later for having gone nuts over one (the analogue to the sugar high crash), but it's damnably difficult not to get caught up in them.

And you know what? I still like "Sugar, Sugar" all these years later.