It’s that time of the year when everyone is reviewing their favorite musical releases of 2011, and we at Rock Town Hall should be proud to add to the fray. Although I’ve been thinking about my entries for the last few weeks, I’ve continued to be haunted by themes of Simon Reynolds‘ Retromania and our discussions about Moving Forward in our consideration of younger musicians and recent bands. We tend to not discuss a lot of new music on this site, and often it is in relation to previous bands or previous styles. However, I am the first admit that when I listen to new music, I’m always reminded of other records. While I hope we don’t only listen to bands because of their aural similarity to those that come before, I think that the experience can be a bridge to enjoying the music to a greater degree. With these hazily-drawn ideas on display, I give you my three favorites and additional honorable mentions from 2011.
Moon Duo – Mazes: A splinter group from San Francisco’s Wooden Shjips, Moon Duo play highly addicting, droney, psychedelic garage rock. While their sound is not particularly new (see Suicide, Spacemen 3), I like that they are a dueling long hair male/female team. I’ve always been a fan of that Farfisa sound, but there’s something about watching a curtain of black hair swinging in time with the music that kicks it up a notch. And the guy’s deadpan voice is additionally mesmerizing.
Real Estate – Days: This album got a lot of press which is odd given what an intimate record it is. The somewhat hushed vocals, the chiming guitar: the sound evokes the color green to me. Each song is melodic and a nice mixture of cheerful and wistful. The single, “It’s Real” will stick in your head (in a good way). For fans of Felt and The Go-Betweens.
Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks – Mirror Traffic: Malkmus’s first Jicks album that really sounds like a band. The songs cover a variety of styles, some Pavementesque, others a la Steely Dan, and a couple Sweetheart of the Rodeo-era Byrds. But the very pleasant surprise here is Beck Hansen’s production: his understanding of their mutual stream-of-consciousness lyrics style takes this record to greater levels. (Honorable Mentions follow the jump!) Continue reading »
Our recent wake for Andrea True and her disco classic, “More, More, More,” exposed one of the finer things about the song: its use of the cowbell. This lowly instrument has been the butt of Saturday Night Live skits but over time has made a resounding impact on the rock world. I ask you, can we list all songs that feature a cowbell? And can we determine, once and for all, what was the first song to highlight its use?
I’ll start us off with Ian Drury‘s “Reasons To Be Cheerful”
The recent rifts over Billy Joel had me yearning for something that we all could agree on. I stumbled across this series of videos from an episode of Eight Days A Week, a British music talk show. Not only did it offer a well-spoken and coifed Green Gartside, a grey but tactful Nick Lowe, and rock critic/pseudo groupie Janice Long, but the discussion covered such a wide assortment of musicians circa 1984 that it seemed that we all could find something to love.
In part 1, we have the conundrum of a whether a member of Culture Club‘s solo attempt is any good. We move along to some footage of The Clash at Shea Stadium and discussion of the jettison of Mick Jones.
In part 2, we have fun the Liverpudlian way, with Echo and the Bunnymen.
And in part 3, we hear about Pogue Mahone and other pub bands of the time.
Along the way, we are also treated to references to Neil Diamond, Elvis Costello, The Moody Blues, and the latest band to jump the pond, REM.
Last night, Mr. Royale and I joined some friends to hear a couple of tribute bands. First up, a Rolling Stones cover band with a very spry Jagger impersonator. Then, the Led Zeppelin tribute band.
In general, I’m not a big fan of tribute bands but in the case of these bands, for which I am highly unlikely to fork over big bucks to see the remaining members totter around and play their hits from 30 or 40 years ago, this was something entertaining to do. Eighteen dollars seemed a decent price to pay to listen to some renditions of music I enjoy.
I have to admit I haven’t been to see a tribute band since, say, 1981, when I went with a friend to Arizona State University to hear whatever was the touring version of the “Beatles.” So I assumed that the gig would include some guys dressed up and aping the mannerisms of their chosen band.
Instead, we were treated to the oddist mixture of spectacle and fakery. The members were dressed up to look like the original musicians, circa 1974 or so: long-haired wigs, unbuttoned polyester shirts or suits, turquoise jewelry. And they played instruments (to my untrained eye) that also resembled those of Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham. But it was the lead singer who broke my heart. While he wore the long, blond locks and the tight, tight jeans of Robert Plant, and sang with an impressive range of vocal technique, when he opened his mouth to talk, he lost me. I believe we were listening to the Joey Buttafuoco Robert Plant. Although he professed to be Robert Plant, that accent, most notable when pronouncing the /r/ sound, was just too distracting. Mr. Royale, being kinder than me, believes that it was his English accent. Ha! And then the moves. Mr. “Plant” had only four: the “Stretch the Microphone Chord Over the Head,” the “Lemon Thrust,” the “Hair Toss” and the “Modified Rock Iwo Jima.” It was tiring and lacked any sense of sex appeal.
Granted, I’ve been a few times to see a local ’80s cover band. That band seemed to not take themselves very seriously, and in spite of their Worst-of-the-1980s’ fashion stylings, were highly enjoyable.
Please help me here. How important is it for the tribute musicians to look and sound like the originals? Are you able to get past the imperfections of appearance or mannerisms in the show? Is it really only the sound that matters? What is the difference between a cover band and a tribute band?
A couple of weeks ago, Mr. Royale and I were able to see one of our favorite music critics, Simon Reynolds, discuss his most recent work, Retromania, and field general questions about music and his other books. The man is well versed in a wide range of musical topics, having written about the Post-Punk era, the “Blissed-Out” era of the late ’80s and early ’90s, rave culture, gender influences in rock, and hip-hop culture. Mr. Royale and I arrived a bit early at the bookstore for the reading and noticed him already there browsing the stacks in the music section. We approached him and started chatting, and he was kind enough to answer some of our nosey questions. For instance, his favorite music writers/books include Griel Marcus and Wompbopalubomp, by Nick Cohn. He got into the music writing business indirectly, first studying history at Oxford but continuing his interest and discourse about music, especially in relation to some of the 20th Century French philosophers. He also likes science fiction, and his wife, who is also a music critic, started out by publishing a Duran Duran fanzine.
A central thesis of Retromania is that there is no innovation in music now and that we are overly fixated in looking backwards and making ironic winks to previous time periods. There are technological advances, but they not used to further music, just make it sound like what has come before. He hates mixes/remixes/mash ups as he feels they don’t offer anything new. He despairs about reunion tours, rock museums, and retrosound. He gave an example that if a new writer wrote in the style of Faulker, walked around dressed like Faulkner, and quoted Faulkner all the time, we would laugh. But when musicians do it, it’s given a pass. However, he admits that he is ambivalent about his theory and wrote the book to engage others in discussion about his perceptions.
After the talk, he agreed to field additional questions from The Hall, including some sent in by my trusty colleagues. I submitted several via email and he promptly wrote back.
Rock Town Hall: I’ve read some interesting research that suggests that half of all humans tend to peak early in their creative/artistic growth, and half are of the “slow and steady wins the race” type. Examples of these two types might include, say, Prince on the one hand and Jackson Pollock on the other. One flamed out with astonishing brilliance fairly early in life, and the other didn’t paint anything of interest until he cracked his personal creative code in his 50s. I think one of the reasons the field of pop music lacks so much creativity is because the prevailing A&R system only recruits young talent—a strategy that virtually guarantees that most pop music artists will be relevant and interesting for only a brief time. I believe the pop music industry is ignoring all the “late creativebloomers”—50% of all potentially great music makers—and I think that most people who are only latently brilliant when young don’t think they’llever “make it” in pop music, so they stop trying. Of course, I understand issues related to sex appeal, spending habits, and so forth are at the root of the “recruit only when young” method, but… I’d be curious to get your thoughts on this.
Simon Reynolds: Hmmm, that is interesting. I don’t know if it connects to my preoccupations in Retromania, though, because a lot of older artists are still recording, either for major labels or in the musical indie leftfield, which is what most of my attention is on—and I don’t particularly hear great breakthroughs coming from the older set! But it’s true that record companies did use to invest in talent long-term more, they had the equivalent of “mid-list” artists as in the publishing world, an artist would be allowed to put out album after album after album. And they developed artists, like Kate Bush, who was very young when she started, was put on a wage, and put up in some kind of house or apartment with a piano for a year or two to develop her thing. EMI saw as a female Pink Floyd or something, a long-term major artist. This kind of development I’m sure still goes on but is more likely to be grooming and dance lessons, and all the other things required to be a transmedia-dominating pop star. And artists tend to get dropped really quickly if they don’t make, which must be crushing to many people who are talented and would bloom later.
RTH: I am having a hard time formulating this question, but if you look at the history or jazz or blues or other forms of music, don’t they all reach a point where they are pretty much “played out,” at least as phenomena with massive audiences, and become niche entertainments and recyclers of the past? What makes us think that rock music is immune to these cycles of growth, evolution, and diminution? I am not suggesting you are trying to make that case, by the way. But there are jazz bands that go around and play the music of various bygone eras, or in the general style(s) of past eras; there are jazz artists striving to create something new that is still part of the tradition, but for the very few people who are interested, etc. Will rock as we (vaguely defined, older people “raised on classic rock”) understand it not go the same route, if it hasn’t already?
SR: Yes, there is a case for the argument that musical genres, or major musical movements—jazz, rock, hip hop, electronic dance—have a kind of life-cycle. First phase is the emergent one, where often the music is considered juvenile or lowly in some way (jazz being connected with lowlife, brothel music). Then it breaks through to wider acceptance and becomes the dominant popular music of its age, influencing everything else that’s going on. Then you have the fragmentation phase, where it is looking for ways to develop and it is itself influenced or even looking for influences: one way is to combine with the more recent popular styles and dance rhythms (in jazz’s case that would the ’70s fusion era, when it combined with rock, funk, etc), another way is various paths of extremism or abstraction (free jazz, fire jazz, non-idiomatic improvisation, etc); there is also another kind of fusion, which is merging with musics from outside the American tradition (in jazz ECM did with various European flavours and world/exotic flavours, also people like Don Cherry did similar kinds of moves). Then the final phase of the music is a kind of classicism—in jazz terms that would be Wynton Marsalis and Lincoln Center and the critic Stanley Crouch, the idea of building on a very strong knowledge of and basis in the past, a return to fundamental principles (so in jazz, according to Marsalis and Crouch, that is “blues” and “swing”). Jazz players stop trying to look trendy (all those ’70s fusion snazzy threads!) and dress in suits and ties again. This kind of neo-classicism in jazz tends to blur into a heritage mindset, where it’s all about the classics, almost like the classical music world idea of repertory, whether it’s old performers wheeled out again onstage or it’s young, very respectful and reverential players playing the classic tunes. And indeed the argument is that jazz is America’s classical music. So there is an emphasis on preservation and history: books, documentaries, museum exhibitions. And even with composers and players making new music, the music teems with ghosts of its earlier glory days. Well you could see similar four-phase narrative unfolding within rock and even in hip hop and rave culture.
RTH: Is there an artist you most regret “not getting” at first who you would eventually dig years after you first had the chance?
Everyone has their decade and judging by recent RTH threads, the 1960s topped many people’s lists for the Best Era of Rock. And although I appreciate the music of the 1960s, a large part of my heart is saved for the ’80s. Much of this connection reflects my personal experiences growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, followed by the watershed experience of receiving my first copy of the Trouser Press Record Guide. But as I’ve become older, I continue to listen to and think about a lot of this music.
So I offer this bridge to our fellow Townspersons who may sneer and consider the 1980s an era of ridiculous fashion and over-the-top musical groups. But it didn’t necessarily start out that way. I paraphrase the mighty Simon Reynolds in his stellar history, Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984, that 1978–1982 rivaled the years 1963–1967 in the amount of amazing music, the spirit of adventure and idealism, and the way the music was connected to the social and political events of the era.
Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present the Post Punk Years:
The Kills. The Killers. The Liars. The White Stripes. The Hives. The Ravonettes. The Black Keys.
Mr. Royale and I have noticed that many of the new garage-y bands have affixed a “The” to the start of their name. It seems to be a nod to some previous rock era (’50s–60s) when band names began with “The.”
But then there is another retro era (late-’60s–’70s?) when bands started to dispense with “The” as a start to their name. Cream. Fleetwood Mac. Procol Harem. Iron Butterfly. Love. Pink Floyd. Steppenwolf.
What happened to take away the “The?” And how radical was that? Am I missing something here or was there a paradigm shift? Who was the first band to go it alone and ditch the “The?”
For the musicians among us, how did you decide whether to append the “The?” Was it a way to create a “look” or signifier to a previous rock era? A friend who was in a pseudo-well-known band in the ’90s shared that it was very important that the “The” not be attached to the start of their name. Ditto Pixies, Talking Heads, et al.
And then there are the bands whose names start with Thee…
