- Posts tagged Rock and Roll
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"Up and Coming like an elevator...later": Rock & Roll's Future is now
"I saw rock and roll future and it's name is..."
Ah, famous words from a famous man, John Landau. Who was he talking about? None other than Bruce Springsteen. Landau used those words the first time he saw Bruce play live. That was a different time. Rock and Roll, having recently emerged from it's nacent phase, was, by all accounts, beginning to calcify. Bruce, and Tom [Petty] for that matter, were R&R's future whether they knew it or not. The future was still bright then.
Today? The future isn't so bright...and we've certainly stopped wearing shades. The music industry is in a state of confusion. The role of the big record labels is up for grabs, the fucked up concert/touring scene and the true effectiveness that long tail has on the industry...all of these factors are having impact on the fragile infrastructure. Who is losing here? Big labels and touring conglomerates. Who is winning here? The fans...free music and bargain basement convert ticket prices are becoming the norm. Who is still not sure if they are winning or losing? The artists.
The balance of power has shifted to the artists. The rise of the DIY artists is at it's peak. Anyone can make music, connect through social media and use online distribution tools to sell their stuff. Yes, the power has shifted to the artists...but is that a good thing? Power comes at a cost. While this was, well, empowering at first, it just isn't easy to do it all. Still though, in spite of all of the industry confusion, power-shifts and pounds of flesh...new artists are still having a go at it.
The other night I saw Leon Russell play a gig a the Jazz Cafe in London, England. Leon is no newbie. No sir, he has paid his dues and played his ass for many a year. He's part of Rock and Roll's past. The opener for Leon that night was a young English kid by the name of Ed Sheeran. I am certainly not going to go so far as to make a Landauian statement about Ed Sheeran, but I will say that young guys like Ed are small part of what Rock and Roll's future needs to be about.
He sang this one the other night. He left home and moved from Surrey to London on his own. He wrote this on his first night in London...
Ed came on the stage solo with just his guitar and foot pedal loop gizmo. He had presence. He was comfortable in his skin and was extremely affable and gracious. He rattled off six or seven songs, each one his own work. He told stories in between each song about the songs or his experiences when he wrote them. He told of one he wrote when he was in L.A. he made mention of the fact that he could not drink due to his age while in the States. "Oh shit", I thought...this guy is quite young. Actually, Ed is still a teenager...19 years old.
Ed is young, but he doesn't sing and play like a kid. What he lacks in total experience he makes up for with exuberance. He is a product of DIY band culture. He creates loops on stage and plays to them to create a much more full sound for his songs to settle in to. Ed says that at an early age [!?] that he was "deeply effected by everything". Well, I guess we all are, aren't we? At only 19, Ed still has many experiences out in front of him to write stories about. It was refreshing to see someone 'going for it' and not getting caught up in it. He seemed grounded and took all the hype around him with tongue firmly planted in cheek. In one of his songs, he shrugs off the hype with a bit of indifference, "They say I'm up and coming like an elevator...later". Ed's future is bright.
There are lots of Ed's out there. Always have been. We can only hope that with all of the bullshit that prevents Ed's from enduring the already tough road of living out a rock and roll fantasy, that they still keep trying. Rock and Roll was never really about the future anyhow. It is and was about impulse, passion and self-expression. Those are the characteristics of now not later. As any Ed can tell you, you can dream big, but the future is now.
Check out a couple more vids from Ed:
A very cool program that shows Ed performing in London's St. Pancras Station
Ed sang this one as well.
Lou Reed pulls no punches: The Glitz & Glam, Grit & Grime of "New York"
It's six minutes past Midnight on Friday night in London. There are two dogs at my feet, I have a tumbler of Wild Turkey on the ready...but, I feel like I am skulking the back alleys and boulevards of New York City.
I'm in the mood to stand in shadows in a drizzling rain, smoke cigarettes and ask strangers for the time. I don't like cigarettes, but I feel like smoking a few right down to the filter. I don't really care what time it is, but I am anxious because I know something is about to happen...and I just don't want to caught by surprise.
Whenever I think of NYC I think about wee hours of the morning and a "real rain that will come and wash all this scum off the streets". I saw Taxi Driver before I ever went to NYC It had a profound effect on me. I can't think about NYC without thinking of those early morning scenes of cabs driving along desperate streets with clouds of steam seeping up from manhole covers and Travis Bickle telling he is "waiting for the sun to shine".
Every time I go to NYC I feel small. When I walk out of Grand Central Station, I get the feeling that I just drank Alice's potion that makes here shrink to the size of a short-stem rose. Though I have been there many times, I am stilled awed by the city and the stories it tells. That is what I find exciting...the stories that come from the glitz and glam, grit and grime dichotomy of this end-all-be-all, King Archetype of the "Big City".
NYC: Iconic. Ironic. Exotic.
You know who spins a true-grit, tell-it-like-it-is NYC story? Lou Reed. He pulls no punches. He walks that glitz-grime dichotomy line like cat burglar.
I am on my third front to back listen of Lou Reed's "New York" album and I can't get off the ride. Actually, I don't want to get off the ride. I don't listen to Lou a lot, but when I do, I get stuck in. Especially into this album. How can I not? Lou tells me that I have to.
On the back of the album (and I am listening to this on vinyl), Lou informs us: "It's meant to be listened to in one 58 minute (14 songs!) sitting as though it were a book or a movie".
Those instructions are printed on there in black and white. Like a book, you can't read just one chapter. Like a play, you can't watch just one act. Like a crime you can't convict on one clue. This is an album. A front to back, start to finish, sum of parts album. Make the time for it...
On the back of the album Lou also tells us, "You can't beat 2 guitars, bass, drum". Damn straight, Lou.
And that is a good way to sum up this album: NYC stories of glitz-grime told in black and white honesty using the bare bones of the rock and roll sound.
"I'll take Manhattan in a garbage bag" - "Romeo and Juliette"
I took Lou's advice and I have been listening back to front and getting caught up in his NYC travelogue. Lou vents harsh on aids, the homeless, political hypocrisy and the zero-empathy, relentless struggle of growing up on the grime side of the NYC equation. It's an intelligent and biting tongue Lou uses with great effect.
The album hit the streets in 1989 (21 years ago!?!). When it was released, Lou said, "this is as good as I get". That is the blunt honesty that runs through all of Lou's work. That blunt honesty is what makes this album work for me.
Does anybody need another million dollar movie.
Does Anybody need another million dollar star
Does anybody need to be told over and over
Spitting in the wind comes back at you twice as hard
- Strawman
Here are a few of my fave bow-down tracks of the album:
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There is one other Lou album that forces me to listen to it: "American Poet". It is a 1972 live NYC radio show performance. This is balls-out rock and roll. Lou told us on the back of the New York album jacket: "You can't beat 2 guitars, bass, drum". He's obviously been following that edict for along time. Listen to these '72 performances...they are pure rock and roll!.
"Walk it and Talk It" is Chuck Berry on pills. "White Light/White Heat" straight up Eddie Cochran. And "Rock and Roll" is, well, 2 guitars, bass and drum bare bones R&R truth.
Make sure to have a listen to these as well:
Stolen Melodies, Copped Riffs and Royalty Robberies: What do T-Bone Walker, Chuck Berry & Keith Richards Have in Common? (The RIff)
My wife is nowhere near the music fan that I am. She does not know (or care to know) a fraction of what I do about the songs and the story behind them are concerned. She does, though, have quite an ear for music.
She regularly surprises me when she will say, "hey, this sounds exactly like such-and-such". She asked me one time, "don't these people get mad when someone else plays their song and claims it as their own"?
Oh, boy. That is a can of worms I'm not sure I want to open up?! On second thought, why the hell not...
The history of recorded music is full of various stories about stolen melodies, copped riffs and royalty robberies. Some of the stories are legendary:
John Fogerty was sued (unsuccessfully) by his old CCR label, Fantasy Records, for sounding too much like himself! Fantasy said that "Old Man Down the Road" sounded too much like "Run Through the Jungle" and that Fogerty was plagiarising himself. What a joke. Fogerty had to go to court to defend his style. Hear for yourselves:
In an even more maddening example, Neil Young was sued by Geffen Records for not sound like himself enough. How can anyone say this about Ol' Neil?! They way the man shifts musical directions, you'd think the moon is controlling him as it does the tides (I love Neil for this reason). When Neil put out "Everybody's Rockin", Geffen sued him for making "uncharacteristic and uncommercial records". Ok, ok, maybe "Ol' '80's Cantankerous Neil" wasn't trying to break new ground with this one, but to be sued by his label...? Here is a little ditty from that album:
And then there is this story about the Aussie band, Men at Work, that is making the headline news. You all remember their 80's hit, "Land Down Under", right? How could you not remember that jaunty, lilting, flute melody in it? Larrikin Music Publishing managing director, Norm Lurie, remembers it to...from his childhood. Larrikin is now suing Men At Work for back & future royalties on the song. They claim the flute part comes from the refrain of an old Aussie children's song, the "Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree".
Check out this link to see/hear the similarities between the two. When done watching, please proceed to vomit in your lap. This lawsuit is a joke, too. Post Script: I lived in in Sydney for five years...Vegamite sandwiches are good.
Crazy stories, hunh? Can you imagine if the guy that wrote "Happy Birthday" had it copyrighted!?! We'd all be in court!
There are many, many, MANY other examples like this. Sadly, most of them are about money. What I want to do is celebrate influence. A few months ago I wrote a post about artists wearing their influences on their sleeves.This may be a quasi-Part II to that one. In that post I quoted two people:
Neil Young: "It's all one song". (read here for the story behind that quote)
Hunter S. Thompson: "I've been plagiarising all my life. Its called learning".
And that is exactly what it is, isn't it...learning. You like/listen to someone. They have an impact on you. You are influenced by them. You take on some of the characteristics in your own playing. You develop your own sound from this. Is this stealing or is this influence?
Case in point: where would we be without T-Bone Walker, Chuck Berry and Keith Richards? My guess is the insane asylum from having to listen to Pat Boone for a decade longer than we should have.
Let's have some good ol' music fun with influence using these three R&R behemoths.
T-Bone Walker was an early pioneer (in the truest sense of the word) with the electric guitar sound. Once he plugged it in, he made that fiddle squeal and sing out like no one had ever heard before. Surely that would influence young hot-shot guitarists; and it did. Hendrix stated that T-Bone was a big influence. Even more importantly, Chuck Berry sites T-Bone as one of his two biggest influences (Louis Jordan being the other). We all know Chuck's sound, right? Yes, but was it really Chuck's in the first place? Listen to this T-Bone cut, "T-Bone Boogie", that predates any Chuck recordings:
"WOW", right? Chuck has bitched and moaned for years about how he got robbed by people stealing his sound. Most famously, he sued the Beach Boys for stealing the riff from "Sweet Little Sixteen" and won (check out this cool site called, "Sounds Just Like" for a Berry/Beach Boys comparison). Yeah, Chuck, I guess you were influenced by T-Bone. Have a listen to one of Berry's Great 28, "Bye, Bye Johnny". Sound a little like, "T-Bone Boogie"? Hell, yes.
Now we all know that there are a lot of "Chuck's children out there playin' his licks" (thanks for that lyric, Bob Seeger), none more famously than Keith Richards. Keith is an unabashed Chuck disciple. Keith has said that all he wanted to do when he started out playing was, "to sound like Chuck Berry". Chuck's riffs are found all throughout Keef's playing with the Stones and with his solo band, the X-Pensive Winos. Here is a track off his first solo album, "Talk is Cheap". Listen for those Chuck riffs like they "were ringing a bell". Also, Johnny Johnson, Chuck's long-time pianist is on this track pounding out on the 88's.
There are way too many Chuck/Keef stories to talk about here. You should watch the most excellent movie, "Hail, Hail Rock & Roll" to get a feel for the relationship Master and Pupil had. Here is a clip of the two Gunslingers "learning" how to play "Carol".
There you have it: influence in all it's rock and roll glory. It is cool to listen to those three songs in succession to see how that guitar riff has evolved. Can you think of any other great cascading riff lineage?
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Bonus Cut:
While we're at it, here is one last example: the Bo Diddley Beat. Bo's Beat was the new sliced-bread and may never be topped. Here is an early Bo classic and a song by the Allman Brothers from the same name:
