This week on Rock Town Hall we will take an in-depth look at the Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy. My thoughts—and I’m guessing yours—are too vast to contain in a single thread. This is a film that demands consideration on multiple angles, so multiple threads it will be. Stay tuned, as discussion kicks off later today! In the meantime, if you haven’t seen the movie already, at least watch the trailer a few times.
Magic Alex sighting at the 7:45 mark. Now, if only we could relocate our very own Alexmagic!
Get a job!
Our Mystery Artist, BD, supplies the following notes on today’s track:
“I Just Sit There” is, I think, the hit single from the Job album. It’s tight, succinct, and to-the-point. It also features some great words, co-written with a long-time collaborator who is a member of the RTH family, I believe. I’ll let him speak up and take credit for his contributions if he wants to. In fact, to be clear, he made tweaks to a lot of the word-age you’ll hear throughout the album, and I’ve frankly forgotten where his contributions start and end. So consider him a full-on album co-author if you want. I do remember that one of my favorite lines in the entire album was penned by this guy, and it’s in this song: “I can tell you I once used to care; now my world is depressing a chair.” Brilliant!
To the issue of the backstory: Hrrundivbakshi is largely correct. In this era of online everything-ism, creating an identity that sounds like you’re a secret job-hater who only works to earn money is a very bad thing if you’re in management, which our artist is/was. And even if these songs are not entirely true to life, but rather simply inspired by some of the worst moments in it — the HR professional that stumbles upon them during the inevitable Google name search will not understand that.
Anyhow, thanks for the kind words, and for asking to hear more. Follow along as more details about our hero are revealed. Will he fall in love? Get fired? Kill himself? Or find redemption? All these questions and more will be answered.
We’ve spent many summers in the Halls of Rock, yet I don’t believe we’ve ever determined…once and for all…the best song about summer. Not your favorite song about summer, but the best, objectively speaking, according to the following criteria—and probably then some:
I look forward to settling this debate…once and for all.
Get a job!
I have a friend—a friend of the Hall, actually—and he’s got a problem.
About 10 years ago, after getting laid off, he spent a month or so writing and recording a series of demos for an unfinished album—called simply Job—about his work experience. Now, 10 years later, he’s rediscovered this lost album, and wants to share it with anybody who might care. The unfortunate thing is, it’s a pretty frank examination of just how soul-crushing it can be to, you know, work for a living—which means if he ever wants to get hired again, he can’t attach his name to the thing, which means there’s no real point to finishing it. It’s an interesting existential dilemma, really: is there a point to releasing music unless it’s under your own name? Don’t we do all this creative stuff for essentially ego-driven reasons? And so forth. Anyhow, his need for anonymity is important, because, as it happens, he’s in between jobs again.
I told him: not to worry—the weirdos at Rock Town Hall will understand your need to remain nameless, but will also furnish you with the feedback you’re looking for. He said that would be great, and sent me the tracks to post here. I’ll get one up every few days, so as not to overwhelm.
Oh, and one other thing: this guy (we’ll call him “BD”) tells me that there are a number of tracks on the album that were written in collaboration with a few Town Hallers. He instructed me not to “out” them unless they specifically give the okay—because, again, some of the material on Job is pretty career-hostile.
Make sense? You guys okay with this? If so, here’s the first track, with BD’s impromptu liner notes, explaining what we’re listening to here:
Track number one is called “Energize Me,” and—I dunno, I think it’s pretty self-explanatory. It sets the stage for the rest of the operetta, insofar as it’s spiteful and depressing. Note that I ripped off—sorry, paid tribute to—the almighty riff that starts off Nixon’s Head’s “They Can’t Touch Us.” God, that is such a great song. Please note that this track, like all the others you’ll be hearing, is a demo. So it’s got some rough production edges. Anyhow, “enjoy”—and thanks for listening.
This All-Star Jam is brought to you by Lee Jeans, featuring their new line of drawstring sweatpants.
I just saw that Ornette Coleman has died. I’m not a jazzbo by any means, but he’s one of 3 jazz artists (mid-’60s John Coltrane and Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis) who first opened my thick head to the genre. I still think there’s something special about him, a floating, open quality to his music that goes down easy for me, that doesn’t raise my suspicions over the motives of those jazz chord–playing cats who’d previously failed to move me.
“I don’t want them to follow me,” he explained. “I want them to follow themselves, but to be with me.”
I will likely never understand the theory behind jazz music and Coleman’s harmelodics concept, but it felt like he and his bandmates were playing bits and pieces of nursery songs, devoid of the context of chords. Too much about life is surrounded by context, surrounded by chords. I still find it exciting to hear he and his mates blurt out their little sing-songy melodies. Sometimes they’re in unison, sometimes not. When the music of Ornette really works for me, it just sounds like kids playing on a schoolyard. “Ramblin’,” for instance, is like the sound of kids jumping rope or playing hopscotch.
It wasn’t always jump rope and hopscotch for Coleman. Another favorite is “Sadness,” from the stark Town Hall, 1962 album.
