What’s your personal Rock ‘n Roll Hell, be it an actual moment in your musical life or a vision thereof?
Jun 052009
KingEd
Apr 202009
I owe the Philadelphia Library (Cottman Avenue branch, to be exact) an apology. And some money. I used to transfer SEPTA buses to and from school at that spot. There was a pretty cool record store next to the library with punk and new wave records. A couple days a week I’d stop in the store and marvel at the records, posters, and buttons. It was at this store I’d buy the latest copy of Trouser Press, which was tapping me into a way out of the doldrums of late-70s rock ‘n roll. One day I actually stopped into the library instead. I was researching something for a class, when I noticed that the library had records — and so the research was put on hold. Flipping through the bins I found a copy of an album I’d been reading about, Television‘s Marquee Moon. I took the record home and quickly became so entranced by its hypnotic, woven guitar parts and impressionistic lyrics that it became part of my permanent collection. About 10 years ago, I finally removed the album sleeve from its thick, plastic protective library sleeve and accepted the fact that I would never return it to the library.
While a lot of the punk bands I was getting into tapped into my boyhood love of energetic, mid-60s British Invasion music, Television took my understanding of punk rock back to the hippie rock I used to listen to in my uncle’s bedroom, more expansive stuff like Traffic and Jimi Hendrix. The rocking songs, like “See No Evil” and “Friction,” contained twin-guitar riffs and short, explosive, melodic solos worthy of Jeff Beck-era Yardbirds and early Hendrix. The mid-tempo songs, like “Venus” and the epic title track, built slowly, doubled up on themselves, and allowed me to sit in my shade-drawn room and drift off as I did as a young boy listening to “The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys” on my uncle’s 8-track.
The sleeve for Marquee Moon didn’t give much information, but one thing I noticed was credits for who played what solo. I learned that most of the driving, biting solos were by Richard Lloyd while most of the cleaner, spacey solos were by Tom Verlaine. During the verses, though, there was no telling who played what. For an aspiring punk, flashy guitar heroes had become a joke. Television found a way around this, allowing us to absolutely love the guitar heroism while not getting bogged down in the notion of guitar heroes. It was an approach that showed a way forward for punk rock, that suggested there was a future after all. I hope the Philadelphia Library can understand my moral lapse.
For whatever reasons Television was unable to capitalize on their smoking debut, releasing a fairly flat follow-up album and then, 14 years later, a reunion album that smoothed out the fluid rhythm section of bassist Fred Smith and drummer Billy Ficca. The band would tour, on and off, over the next 14 years, but a fourth studio album would never arrive. Lloyd quit Television in 2007, and has since kept an active pace, touring and recording with his own band, The Sufi-Monkey Trio. We talked in anticipation of his tour, which brings him to Philadelphia today, and he explained his big move. “Television commands good money when we play live, but we hadn’t made a record in 14 years, and you know, Tom is impossible to deal with.” Lloyd explains that it was time to finally move forward. “In order for me to sort of go my own way, you know, I couldn’t have a first loyalty, which I had maintained for 35 years to Television. If I was working on my own projects and Television wanted to do something, I would drop what I was doing for Televison, because I had made a magic circle around Television, but Tom didn’t respect it, and so what.”
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Feb 112009
This Saturday — AKA Valentine’s Day, for all you lovers out there — Shawn Kilroy & The Dream Queens (Mike “Slo-Mo” Brenner, Jamie Mahon, Jenny Prescott, and Mark Landlord) debut Hessian Love Songs, the final installment of a trilogy of albums that started with 2004’s Neon Gate followed by Thai Stick Dragon, at Philadelphia’s Tritone. As might be expected of Kilroy (that’s Townsman shawnkilroy to us!) – whose bio counts him as a “lover” along with the usually lonely combo of musician, singer, artist, film-maker, and thinker – ladies will not be charged admission.
Lover that he is, Kilroy’s never shied away from proclaiming his affection for England’s proto-goth, mid-’80s, moody pop — bands like Depeche Mode, Orchestral Manuevers in the Dark, and Love and Rockets. Much of that time and place scared the bejesus out of me when I would go upstairs at Revival to take a piss, making sure not to knock anyone’s line of coke off a urinal. Revival was a mixed bag in Philly’s rock and dance scene during the late-80s, but I loved it. Downstairs, in a big, open, noisy room in what used to be a Swedish sailor’s church, Revival put on underground rock shows: Camper Van Beethoven, The Mekons, The Godfathers, Tuxedomoon, Pere Ubu… Flaming Lips played there in support of Oh My Gawd!, when they were three barely known, hippie Okies playing teenage garage-band Floyd and Zeppelin soundalikes with bassist Michael Ivins operating a smoke-and-light machine with his feet. The sound pounded off the room’s exposed marble, plaster, and tile…in a good way. BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM!
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Dec 042008
The disappointing outcome of Rock Town Hall’s latest Mystery Date got me thinking: Ever follow an instrumentalist in a band for years and think to yourself, “Boy, I’d love to hear what this cat could do on his own!” Continue reading »
Nov 022008
Get a load of those guns!
Each new release by Lou Reed promises a mix of beauty, truth, horror, and mostly unintended humor. That’s a big part of why I’ve hung in with the guy through so many stilted, hectoring albums, such as the spiritually rock-bottom Rock ‘n Roll Heart, the squirm-inducing Mistrial, and the critically prematurely acclaimed New York, an album that within a few years of its release played like a grainy rebroadcast of an outdated CNN current events show.
Reed never ceases growing up in public, and when we catch him at a relatively fruitful stage in his development he’s still loaded with so many rough edges that even his most ardent fans disagree about the fruitfulness of a given album. Reed’s 1973 rock opera, Berlin, is a good example of this. Following his breakthrough, David Bowie-produced Transformer album, Berlin was panned by many critics as a bloated, forced, doomfest. Rock fans hoping for a catchy hit single to follow “Take a Walk on the Wild Side” were ignored. Slowly the ornately arranged album gained a better reputation, first through its “train wreck” appeal, then perhaps, through a grudging acknowledgment that although the album is a bloated, forced, doomfest, so are hopeless relationships of the variety of the album’s down-and-out protagonists, Caroline and Jim. I never understood the appeal of mopey bands like The Smiths, but I do my share of moping, and in my book Berlin is as good as any album for working through a case of the bad vibrations.
In 2006, Reed announced that he was going to perform Berlin in its entirety at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse with a monster band of loyal Reed contributors, including Fernando Saunders, Rob Wasserman, Antony, and one of the original Berlin guitarists, Steve Hunter, best known as half of the legendary Hunter-Wagner guitar duo from early Alice Cooper and Reed’s live Rock ‘n Roll Animal band! It was a night that no Reed fan within a 90-mile radius should miss, and of course I missed it. Luckily, this release is a document of that show and accompanies the release of a Julian Schnabel-directed DVD of the proceedings, Lou Reed’s Berlin.
This grand, hyped-up live staging of an ancient, already grandiose rock opera easily could have been a disaster as a live CD, but it’s not. The band stays true to the album’s arrangements, but minus the album’s ’70s studio thud, some of the more visceral parts of the arrangements, especially Hunter’s guitar fills, are allowed to breathe. This adds a lot to the brassy numbers, like “Oh, Jim,” which threatens to break into a mid-70s Stones coda, and “How Do You Think It Feels,” one of the original album’s at-best guilty pleasures. The limited, declining quality of Reed’s voice and the need to project cuts both ways. Quiet, introspective songs that benefitted from the lush mush of Bob Ezrin‘s cluttered studio production don’t translate as well. The biggest disappointments for me are “The Kids” and “Men of Good Fortune,” on which the live-audience performing Reed can’t manage to sound as isolated, bitter, and paranoid as he manages to sound on the album’s “head mix.”
The payoff moment for me, however, is the live performance of “Sad Song,” always my key song on the record. Reed struggles with the tender opening lines, but all is forgiven when the bombast of the band backs up the chorus’ succinct couplet, “I’m gonna stop wasting my time/Somebody else would have broken both of her arms.” The care Reed, Ezrin, and the band take in preserving the album’s arrangements make this affair work as a night of finally fulfilled rock opera.
This album is now playing in streaming audio on Phawker Radio. Click the link at the top of this entry to link to Phawker.
Sep 232008
It’s good to hear a band make something worthwhile out of the scrapheap of Yamaha DX-7 synths and Linn drum machines that was the ’80s. Whether sounding like Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark on human growth hormone on “Halfway Home” or INXS with the shades pulled back and a window opened on “Crying”, human hands firmly guide the mouse. Unlike Gnarls Barkley, another practitioner of Silicon Soul, there’s a muscular sexuality at the core of TV’s productions. Like mid-period Roxy Music, you can take this band to a fancy restaurant but you suspect all sense of decorum is out the door once back at your place. Guitarist/producer David Sitek deserves a lot of credit for the success of this album. An affectless, wheezy, 4-note bass synth pattern underpins the Prince-worthy party of “Golden Age”. It’s a subtle triumph of minimalism that ties back to Brian Eno and David Byrne’s subversive commercial highwater marks. The album closes with “Lover’s Day”, with a martial snare beat and an orchestral coda worthy of the Portsmouth Sinfonia.
TV On the Radio, “Golden Age”
Sep 092008
Since founding Silver Jews with with college friends Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich, songwriter/poet/cartoonist David Berman has rolled stoned, gathered a little moss along with a rotating cast of indie-rock contributors, hit rock bottom, toured the Promised Land, saw the light, and built an accomplished body of earthy, intelligent work. Over the years, as the band’s recordings moved from lo-fi to a matte finish country rock, Berman’s deep, wry, downbeat delivery remained a constant. In 2006, after years of not touring and surviving the lowest point in his personal life, Berman took Silver Jews, including his wife Cassie on bass, on the road for the first time. The tour would take the band as far as Israel. June saw the release of Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea (Drag City), the title of which refers in part to Berman’s restored eyesight following a cornea transplant. In the liner notes Berman supplies tablature so we can play along with the album and, if we’re not already hip to it, realize that the music is ours, not some complex mystery.
RTH: What are five songs that might ease the suffering of your local jukebox?
DAVID BERMAN:
“Long Hot Summer” – The Style Council
“A Few Things Different” – Kenny Chesney (trust me on this one)
“Borrowed Angel” – Mel Street
“Rainy Day Woman” – Waylon Jennings
“Moments in Love” – Art of Noise
RTH: You’ve worked with a shifting cast of musicians. Do you have your next set of recording musicians in mind while writing? How much do you expect the musicians to execute your visions for a song vs how much you expect them to shape the song?
DAVID BERMAN: Some songs find me specifically coaching, but in those 5 to 10 days of practicing the songs in a circle, the band even criticizes itself or I’ll ask them what they think if x does y. There is some negotiation among the players and then there is the amount of figurative talk I’m feeding them about the song. I’ll try to explain the setting and mood with comparisons or correlations in the leadup to the first practices or as we go along. Until the basic tracks are down nothing is finalized, and so I never have to be stuck with a player’s part I don’t like. Not to mention they are all very smart and fluid, and one way or another “get me”, so a lot of this just happens silently and invisibly.
RTH: You include the chord progressions for the songs on your new album, Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea. What secrets will be unlocked when I start playing along with the album?
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