Reading another anti-Band treatise on RTH reminds me of this idea for a thread I’ve been nursing for a while.
Alleged sacred cows like The Band and Pet Sounds get subjected to routine scourgings, here and elsewhere. After a while, do (or can) these totems (re)gain underdog status?
Some food for thought:
1) In the non-rock-nerd world, isn’t The Band treated as borderline footnotes, what with the measly three songs of theirs that make it onto Classic Rock-radio playlists? (At least, that’s what I remember from the late ’80s-early ’90s.)
2) A few weeks ago, waiting for The Wrestler to start, I heard the song “Pet Sounds,” over the theater’s sound system. And it sounded great!
3) Sometimes I wonder if expectations are too high for these titans. And then I wonder how these expectations got so high. How much of it is hype, and how much of it is how people process hype? Lately, I find the 24-hour-news industry especially deplorable, with their junkie-like need to construct an instant narrative for a news event that actually needs time to play out. I think sometimes there’s an analogous need to devise an instant narrative when an artist releases something that is somehow wanting.
4) Then I get to thinking of an old comment from Mr. Mod that I should’ve countered back when the thread was active:
As someone who was never much of a fan of Westerberg’s music (I hate to keep prefacing my comments like that [not really]), one of the things I find fascinating in this discussion is the notion that Westerberg had much room to grow.
I’m not sure “room to grow” has anything to do with anything. I like it when artists make good music, and when they don’t repeat themselves. I don’t think that’s the same as “growing.” Every musician has their limits. Isn’t making good music in some ways a matter of simply avoiding or obfuscating one’s deficiencies, even for the great ones?
There’s a lot to chew on here, Oats. Thanks. I’ll try to take a few initial bites.
4) Let me start with what I said some time ago about Westerberg and what you’ve now said. I can’t remember the exact context, but I think ‘Mats fans were bemoaning Westerberg’s long period of cranking out mediocre-to-bad albums – or cranking out nothing whatsoever. Was there a sense, among ‘Mats fans, that Westerberg had somehow “failed” to live up to expectations? That’s how I recall the discussion and where my quote fit into it. If that’s the case, what my words probably meant was the guy was saddled with a mediocre band and he didn’t have a lot to say or write that he probably already hadn’t said or written. This may be the case with most artists, but I don’t think it’s wrong to point it out when applicable.
And yes, I do think that “room to grow” has something to do with something. Without it the music any artist makes can still be “good,” but after awhile it’s going to be as pointless as yet another George Thorogood album, won’t it? I mean, is there any reason on earth to buy a Ramones album after their one slight change of pace, Pleasant Dreams (I think that was the title)? What does it say about someone who owns – and listens to – every Ramones album? I’m sorry if I’m offending anyone, but we’re supposed to grow, grow old, and die as people. We can’t live in some suspended state and I don’t know if rock bands should try to maintain that state for more than a couple of albums. It’s one thing if they CAN’T do anything else, but some bands can try to do something new and choose not to. I’m not sure how often I’m able to accept that.
Now, by “growth” and development and whatever else you read into what I’m saying, I’m NOT saying bands need to do the musical equivalent of a Madonna or Bowie makeover. In thinking more about how my feelings on Westerberg may tie into this, let me share the harshest judgement I’ll make on him with very little evidence beyond the music he did with the Replacements and a few interviews I’ve read: I perceived him as an artist of small spirit. By that, I mean he struck me as a guy who was great at bitching and moaning but had no real desire to jump into the flow of life and let his music profit from those experiences. Maybe his music would have gotten worse for the experiences, but at least he wouldn’t have been turning out the same three songs four times over on every album. Maybe his more recent work – and life – is more enriched. I hope so. The guy he used to be seemed like the guy I never wanted to be.
1) In the non-rock nerd world, yes, The Band probably is a drop in the ocean. In the rock nerd world I think critics too quickly inflated their worth before enough people who had ears had a chance to hear them for themselves. I grew up with them, thanks to my uncle giving me the brown album when I was about 7 years old. That album is tremendous. Anyone who disagrees is wrong, but that’s cool. I’m the guy who’s always railing at those Byrds albums. Music from the Big Pink is good but highly overrated. The other albums mostly blow – as recordings – but they justified their career and, with the help of Scorcese, solidified a legacy worthy Look in The Last Waltz. The live performances of those songs and their backing of the guest musicians are the next best thing to the s/t album they ever did, in my opinion. Their other two live albums – Rock of Ages and their half of the one they did with Dylan, Before the Flood – are also better examples of all the stuff that Springsteen would get credit for doing.
2) That’s great to hear.
3) Expectations should be high for artists. It’s a sign of our enthusiasm. Then it’s on us listeners to have the balls to reconsider and see if their favorite artist in fact was onto something new or necessary.
Hey Mr. Mod,
Thanks for taking a shot at my rather scattershot post.
I don’t want to turn this into another endless Westerberg-related post, but that’s exactly how I felt about him pre-2002.
I guess what I object to WRT “room to grow” is that it somehow implies that we listeners know what’s best for artists, what they should be doing, who they should and shouldn’t work with. I’m as guilty of it as anyone.
My other big objection towards “room to grow” is that I don’t know what artist is a positive example of showing room to grow, besides someone obvious like The Beatles. Elvis Costello, who made room to grow into boring jazz operas and other genres that he really isn’t good at? Paul Weller? The Clash? Anyone?
But does this ever happen? Like, if an artist releases “bad” albums, then starts making “good” ones again, the reaction isn’t usually: Hey, the artist needed to go down that seemingly bad road to get to someplace good. It’s usally more like: The artists SUCKED! for a bit, now that artist is back to making me happy. Again, I do it too.
Not sure what all this has to do with The Band and Pet Sounds, though.
Oats, I think an example of an artist who grew – and may still be growing – over time without making unfathomable stylistic leaps is Dylan. Starts out as a cocksure folkie singing lots of protest songs and making other Grand Statements that only a really young person could make sincerely. Turns into some wiseass-yet-sensitive rock visionary. Takes a post-“motorcycle crash” detour to a few years as a Backwoods Philosopher. Then he does his Traveling Clown Show, his Born Again phase, his Born Again Again phase, and so forth. All the while, he’s essentially playing “Dylan music.” He never really abandons his sound. There’s no psych album by Dylan, no New Wave album, etc. I think the growth that Dylan displayed for a 20-year run was an expression of who he was internally rather than your Costello example, which might be akin to an Olympic biking champion deciding that he now wants to be an Olympic bobsledder. Does that make some sense?
As for your other question, YES it happens. I just wrote something about this happening with Nick Lowe, didn’t I? Maybe I didn’t phrase it exactly as you put it, but he went through a long period of trying to recapture something that couldn’t be recaptured, and then he finally seemed to move on and grow up. His new music that I like as much as his old music is not a “return to form,” it’s a type of growth.
As for The Clash, until Combat Rock I think they progressed just fine. Love the first album. Think half of Give ’em Enough Rope is bogus. Love London Calling. Love Sandinista. No album repeats itself, and I think they found new ways to express themselves – and new things to express – as they went through their brief career arc.
I do not know 4 people (outside of you guys of course) who know more than 4 songs by The Band. I saw them play an empty room at a radio convention in 1996. I could not believe I was in the same room as they were, yet 95% of the people attending the convention went out to eat on their corporate accounts and missed a one hour show (post Robbie, but still!)
Pet Sounds sounds great every time to me….
Paul Westerberg is yet to make a solo album that is 1/10 as good as the last 4 Replacements records…yes this is frustrating to his fans. We want either something NEW / original and GREAT or something that sounds like 1987 and is as well written and recorded. Instead we get things that are not groundbreaking, nor near as good as his past, just a slightly duller version of the last one – and the soundtrack to the cartoon movie was garbage, I think I deleted the download I bought.
Expectations used to be too high, then after not reaching them over and over, many artists have gone to the “drop a quick one” method (Costello, Springsteen, McCartney) where I think they are trying to lower the expectations. Not sure if reaching a low expectation is better than failing to reach a high one.
Wow, what a great thread. At the risk of screwing up a thread where every post is a gem, I’ll add my two cents.
As far as Westerberg goes, I’m with jungleland2 all the way. The only solo Westerberg song I can remember off the top of my head is “Dyslexic Heart” which was one of the first solo songs (if not the first) that he did and to me it’s an all time Westerberg classic. Nothing else stands out like the ‘Mats stuff. (Of course, I gave up on him more than a few solo albums ago but nothing I’ve read or heard tells me he’s any different.) And I think right up to and including that last ‘Mats album (much maligned round these parts) he was still at the top. That said, I’m not much for the ‘Mats pre-Let It Be either.
Dylan is a great example. Dylan never doesn’t sound like Dylan whether it’s folk, electric, or that Desire mariachi era. But in a way, he never sounds the same; perhaps that’s the genesis of the old marketing slogan of “Nobody plays Dylan like Dylan”. I’m not one to think the last three albums match in any way so much of his earlier catalog but I do think they are a culmination of all the ways that Dylan has always sounded like Dylan in the 30 years preceding those albums.
I’ll throw out Ian Hunter as someone who hasn’t grown but has still maintained my interest. His last album, Shrunken Heads, suffered only in that it followed Rant which was his best ever album, 30 years into his career. And yet you’d never listen to it and something from Mott and think there was 30 years between them.
Where would you put Neil Young in this? Has he grown any? It doesn’t seem so. Without listening to much he’s done in the last 10 years, I’ll make the totally invented statement that there’s not much of real value since Rockin’ In The Free World. But he seems to have earned the right not to grow even as he wanders stylistically and even as fans really seem to care only about the continually delayed Archive series.
Oats mentioned the Beatles as an “obvious” example. In a way that’s true but in another way it’s a false example. Maybe the growth issue is just another reason we can all be happy they called it quits when they did. They didn’t stick around long enough to face the growth question or maybe it’s that they didn’t stick around long enough to face the post-growth issue.
It’s gotta be tough to be a successful artist as far as this topic goes. What is a McCartney to do? There is no need to so anything from a material needs point of view. And yet, he’s a musician, that’s all he’s ever been. And obviously the need for adulation and validation is still there, nevermind he’s had more validation than any living musician (maybe excepting Dylan). So he keeps putting out “typical” albums while dabbling with concertos and firemen. It’s hard to fault him.
I’m losing any focus this had, time to stop…
OK, Mod I loved your initial reply to Oats regarding artistic growth and the path of one’s life. And I gotta say your comment of Paul W. being of “small spirit” is speculation but that seems to be pretty astute observation to me.
Growth is kind of like Woody Allen’s line to Keaton in Annie Hall..paraphrase (Relationships are like sharks, they have to keep moving or they die. I think what we have here is a dead shark).
To go off topic..Woody is on par with the theme you bring up. Only he’s tried a variety of different styles of movies but his themes and conclustions seem to largely be the same ones he had back during the height of his career. The films start to feel a bit stuck in place and well, dead. That’s how Paul’s solo output seems overall. Maybe not dead but in need letting some fresh air being let in the room.
Right on about Woody Allen, underthefloat. Last night I finished watching Broadway Danny Rose with my oldest son. What a great little movie, so full of life. I really miss that Woody.
Moving away from comedy has helped Woody in recent years. The comedies he made in the ’00’s are pretty dire. Working at his pace has gotten him to film #40-something, it not hard to feel you’ve got a guy psyche mapped out once he reaches this point.
I don’t think Westerberg is of “small spirit.” I think that would be a horrible thing to be. Maybe he aspired to be like his idols, and in his case his idols weren’t the Led Zeppelin’s and Rolling Stones of the world, but the Big Star and Marc Bolan’s of the world. I’m not sure what’s meant by growth here, but Westerberg certainly doesn’t sound like Hey Ma or Hootenanny these days. Should his growth convince him to tackle a pretty solid blues album? He did that. He seems pretty content these days and I think he’s terrific. Then again, I think the best Mats stuff is up through Pleased to Meet Me and what followed is pretty spotty, including Paul’s fist few solo albums. I think he’s been as good as anyone since the first Grandpaboy ep. I think he writes about what he knows and I like that.
I think Prince is a classic example of an artist who’s gone through several stages of under- then over-ratedness. I think now he’s stuck in perpetual under-rated mode.
Uh… I don’t know about Prince, BigSteve. I think his last couple of albums, though good, weren’t nearly as AMAZING as the critics told us they were. Just because you make records as good as or better than everybody else — well, if you do that in an era when nobody is making particularly noteworthy music, you’re not producing particularly great art.
Maybe Prince under-rates himself. Also you’re taking his albums as the sole barometer of his artistry. I haven’t seen Prince play live in something like 27 years, but I think maybe live is where he shows what he can do.
I’m coming to this discussion late, but I want to suggest that we should consider two different models of what it means “to grow.” I admit that I’m borrowing my initial thinking on this from the world of literature, but I think it applies to music as well.
Some writers “grow” not by perpetually trying on new styles and approaches, but by developing and deepening their original approaches. Wallace Stevens is a good example of this, or Flannery O’Connor. It’s an approach to growth that always runs the risk of just doing the same thing over and over, but it’s still a growth model.
Other writers are more inclined to always be taking new approaches, or new projects. Gertrude Stein, for instance, writes more or less every kind of literature there is, she just does it her own way. But each project is very distinct.
Westerberg, Richard Thompson, and Iggy are some good examples of the former types, and each of them runs the risk of falling into ruts in which new albums offer nothing new, yet each manages, at times, to invent new aspects of musical approaches that they’ve been doing their whole careers.
Hey mwall,
Yet another very solid observation in this thread.
That dynamic is very true in film too. I mentioned Woody Allen as having been a repeat theme offender. Yet, some of my fav directors have themes and/or styles they tend to revisit over and over. Yet, it somehow works.
And Bowie is an example of the Gertrude Stein type? He’ll play glam rock, art rock, hard rock, drum&bass, singer-songwriter, etc. with no clear thread running through them except that it’s him.
I’m not sure art can be described as something like a Five Year Plan.
Musicians, I think, have a harder time changing genres than writers, because no one can really modify his/her voice and musical ability.
Whenever I hear Elvis Costello trying to do country or jazz, I get the feeling he’s trying unsuccessfully to get out of his own skin.
In the case of Westerberg, the assumption seems to be the artist is responsible for “growing” (as if it were simply a result of self-determination). And yet, there are as many exterior factors. Westerberg got caught in the trap of major-label expectations: he was supposed to write hits that would somehow get on corporate radio (years before Nirvana finally broke down the barriers).
Later in his solo career, you can see his affinity with lo-fi bands like GBV that happened to be on an indie label that was open to their ideas. That opportunity did not exist at the time for Westerberg in the Mats.