British invasion: 12-12-12 Concert
Posted: December 15, 2012 Filed under: Music, Rock and roll, TV, radio | Tags: 12-12-12 concert, British invasion, Left-handed, Music, Sandy relief 3 CommentsTime for some upbeat news today. So here are some thoughts, reportorial and critical, of the 12-12-12 concert.
The concert was scheduled for four hours and thankfully, the producers didn’t cut it off at four. If they had, we would have missed Billy Joel, Chris Martin, Kanye West in his leather kilt — and the final Brit of this British invasion: Sir Paul McCartney. But no curfew wasimposed and the concert ran almost six hours. I was hoping for one of those all-artists-on-stage-for-a-rousing-finale finale, but that didn’t happen. Instead, Sir Paul brought a crowd of firefighters on stage and saluted them for their heroism during Sandy. It was a fitting end for a great concert.
Bruce Springsteen led off with thematic songs rather than his big hits: “Land of Hope and Dreams,” “Wrecking Ball” and “My City of Ruins,” the latter written about Asbury Park but highly relevant today. Then Jon Bon Jovi joined him for a duet of “Born to Run.” Read the rest of this entry »
Quick cuts: recent films, music, TV
Posted: December 8, 2012 Filed under: Movies, Music | Tags: blues, Celtic punk, Christmas music, jazz, Movies, Music, Politics 3 CommentsHere’s to better Christmas music, some Chicago blues, and a few films, including two special foreign ones.
The Pogues’ “A Fairytale of New York.” Are you sick of the constant din of soapy, sappy, sentimental Christmas songs? I have come to loathe all Christmas music. Except for this one. I love the Pogues and their Celtic punk music (think Sex Pistols married to the Chieftains) and this song is perfect if you’re sick of holiday schlock music. In fact, it’s the 25th anniversary of the release of this Christmas classic. The Guardian features a story about the creation of the song http://bit.ly/UpYjra and also describes the great video version. Here’s a link to the “A Fairytale of New York” video described there. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1nxmt_the-pogues-a-fairytale-of-new-york_music#.UMQTsTlQT8h
(Image is the album cover for my CD of Essential Pogues.) Read the rest of this entry »
Aging rockers, parrots, new art forms
Posted: November 27, 2012 Filed under: Digital life, Music | Tags: Music, Parrots, writing 2 CommentsMusings of the week on three intriguing cultural topics.
Leonard Cohen is on tour with his new Old Ideas album. (I haven’t seen him yet on this tour, but I’m working on it.) The great poet-songwriter is 78 now and playing three-hour concerts. (Do you hear that, Mr Springsteen? You’re only 63 and playing three- and four-hour concerts on this tour. So stay in shape for your 70s.)
Leonard is a charming showman and puts on a wonderful show with his nine musicians. Here’s a link to Gary Graff’s review of last night’s Detroit concert. I’ve loved Leonard’s songs for years (although I did not discover him in the ’60s) and particularly enjoy his quirky, self-deprecating lyrics. Yes, his songs are sometimes sad and sometimes deal with the darker side of life, but as Graff says “those who think they’re just depressing aren’t listening closely enough.” In “Going Home,” he sings (some would say sort of sings)
I love to speak with Leonard
He’s a sportsman and a shepherd
He’s a lazy bastard
Living in a suit ….
He will speak these words of wisdom
Like a sage, a man of vision
Though he knows he’s really nothing
But the brief elaboration of a tube
My favorite line is in “Anthem” from the album The Future, where Cohen points out “There is a crack, a crack in everything, That’s how the light gets in.” There’s a new biography of Cohen by Sylvie Simmons, which is on my holiday wish list.
Parrots. Ok, what is it with parrots? Two of my favorite writers — Julian Barnes and Michael Chabon — seem to be fascinated with them. In Chabon’s slim and brilliant book The Final Solution, an African gray parrot (nameless like everyone in the book) speaks German and reels off lists of numbers. Barnes’ book Flaubert’s Parrot deals entirely with which of two bright green stuffed parrots named Loulou was the inspiration for Flaubert’s story Un Coeur Simple.
Now I’m reading Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue in which another African gray parrot named Fifty Eight is the constant companion of a Hammond B-3 player named Cochise Jones. “Every so often Fifty Eight, whose public utterances tended to be musical, would counterfeit the steely vibrato of his owner’s B-3, break out into a riff, a stray middle eight….” Chabon’s book is full of plots and subplots, major and minor characters, and I’m not sure it’s going to hold together until the end. But his prose is scintillating.
New art forms
I’m exploring two of them that arise in this late internet age. A recent New York Times article by Julia Turner explained the scope of the Twitter hashtag. “#InPraiseOfTheHashtag: How a gimmick developed as shorthand on Twitter blossomed into a poetic literary genre all its own.” When I tweeted a link to the story, I closed it with #hashtagsthenewhaiku.
It’s a poetic challenge to write a clever or poignant haiku in 17 syllables; and it’s an equal literary challenge to write something meaningful (and interesting to others) in 140 characters. My notion is to start writing tweets as literature, not just politics and music.
The second creative new art form is the fake product review. There’s a flurry of hysterically funny reviews of silly products on amazon and other sites. The first that I saw yesterday are for a banana slicer — a tool that I’m sure you will crave for your kitchen. Read the reviews and see what you’re missing. Then Brockeim “Playful Literary Adventurer” compiled his reviews for various products on amazon.com. From the review for Slimfast: “Each of the 23 vitamins and minerals sang out to me, called me their friend….” Prose reminiscent of Walt Whitman surely. I’m choosing my products for review now. (But author friends note: I will still do serious reviews of works that warrant that treatment.)
Live or Memorex?
Posted: November 10, 2012 Filed under: Music, Rock and roll | Tags: Music, radio, theater 2 CommentsIn the antediluvian days of cassette taping, one company’s tagline was “Is it live or is it Memorex?” Their message was that the recording on their tapes was so true you would think you were listening to live music. Which of course is balderdash. Or the modern day equivalent.
Sound purists would say it’s all in the quality of the sound. Ok, that’s important. Studio performance or concerts recorded on vinyl may well be the best available recorded sound. And modern recording technology can strip out some of the sound between the sounds to create files that fit on our walking-around devices. We are willing to sacrifice sound quality for portability. Or as Bruce Springsteen said in his SXSW speech, “… the records that my music was initially released on gave way to a cloud of ones and zeroes, and I carry my entire record collection since I was thirteen in my breast pocket.” Read the rest of this entry »
Thinking of the Jersey Shore
Posted: November 1, 2012 Filed under: Music Leave a commentThe Jersey Shore is one of my favorite places in the world, for several reasons. I love New Jersey (if Chicago was a state, it would be New Jersey) and it’s beautiful to be near the ocean. And of course, the area has all those Bruce Springsteen landmarks and memories. All Springsteen fans have been watching the Hurricane Sandy reports with special interest. There are many images of storm destruction up and down the Jersey coastline but these two photos made the impact of the storm particularly meaningful.
Here’s a link to the first photo, by Brian Donohue. http://ow.ly/i/14Wje It shows underwater street signs at the intersection of 10th Avenue and E Streets in Belmar, NJ. This is the eponymous E Street, from which the band took its name. The 10th Avenue in the song “Tenth Avenue Freezeout,” however, is in Manhattan. This photo is me at the same intersection a few years ago.
The second photo http://tiny.cc/ey03mw shows that the famous Stone Pony is still standing, but surrounded by devastation. It was just six weeks ago that we strolled around this neighborhood and heard music at the Pony. (Photo by Victor Bubadias, courtesy of Blogness on the Edge of Town: A Bruce Springsteen Blog.)
We know that a lot of the Asbury Park boardwalk is torn up but some of it is still in place. I’m hoping to find out what happened to Madame Marie’s shop on the boardwalk (“… the cops finally busted Madame Marie for telling fortunes better than they do….” from “4th of July, Asbury Park [Sandy]).
Backstreets has a short report here. Thanks to Chris Phillips, editor.
From backstreets.com/news: GREETINGS FROM ASBURY PARK, HALLOWEEN 2012
Down the shore everything’s definitely not alright, as Hurricane Sandy left two million New Jerseyans without power and caused extensive property damage from Cape May to Keansburg.
In Asbury Park, the boardwalk is torn asunder and adjacent businesses have suffered heavy losses. The north end beyond Convention Hall was hit especially hard, but the building itself seems in decent shape. Unforunately the same cannot be said of the Casino, which took a pounding from both wind and surf. Interior walls that had been shored up with plywood are torn off, and the concrete platform on the eastern side, where a skating rink once stood, is caved into the sand. Repairs will be costly, and it is not clear what action will be taken to save Asbury Park’s historic boardwalk landmarks, as master developer Madison Marquette has been dragging its heels for several years even before the storm. Fortunately, the legendary Stone Pony seems to have survived with minimal damage.
– October 31, 2012 – Lisa Iannucci reporting
My top 20
Posted: October 29, 2012 Filed under: Music, Rock and roll Leave a commentAnyone who’s not a Bruce Springsteen fan may went to quit reading now.
Backstreets.com, one of the top fan sites, has a message board titled BTX. A member named Jamesy recently invited others to submit their All Time Bruce Top 20 Songs — from which he will do the analysis and post results in January. I finally submitted my list today:
1. Thunder Road
2. Racing in the Street
3. The River
4. Born to Run
5. Incident on 57th Street
6. Promised Land
7. Rocky Ground
8. Because the Night
9. Death to My Hometown
10. Shut Out the Light
11. Streets of Philadelphia
12. Jungleland
13. Tenth Avenue Freezeout
14. No Surrender
15. Land of Hope and Dreams
16. Ghost of Tom Joad (2012 version)
17. Badlands
18. City of Ruins
19. The Price You Pay
20. Red-Headed Woman
And of course, as soon as I submitted it, I thought oh for heavens sake, why did I put Badlands at number 17 and what about Spirit in the Night, Rosalita, For You, Shackled and Drawn, Wrecking Ball, Tougher Than the Rest, Atlantic City, Brilliant Disguise, Born in the USA, and a dozen more.
Bruce Springsteen has written hundreds of songs over the last ~40 years. Most of them are in commercially recorded albums (studio and live) but many exist only in bootleg recordings that fans make at concerts. (This is not illegal, as someone suggested to me recently. Bruce and other musicians don’t discourage bootlegs. It is a violation of his IP rights to make copies of those commercially recorded albums for other people. That’s why I have bought six copies of the Wrecking Ball album so far — to give to friends with whom I was going to concerts.)
If you want to take a look at this BTX thread or submit your own top 20 list, here’s the link. http://tiny.cc/zofymw
David Byrne, reinvented
Posted: September 29, 2012 Filed under: Music, People Leave a commentSome performers keep doing the same thing for decades. They relive their past successes over and over again, to the delight of their longtime fans, who only want to hear the old favorites. Some performers (and fans) are more adventurous. They constantly develop new music, perform in new formats with new bands, and even reformulate their past catalog to the point of unrecognizability.
Bruce Springsteen is in that latter category. He plays with new bands, in new musical genres, and constantly writes new material and revamps old. And so is David Byrne. The frontman for the late great Talking Heads is a curious, creative, ingenious performer who seems to enjoy playing with new material. He has proselytized for bicycling in cities all over the world (including via his book Bicycle Diaries) and even turned a building into a musical instrument. http://tiny.cc/aggglw
Listen to the words!
Posted: August 23, 2012 Filed under: Music, Politics, Rock and roll Leave a commentJim DeRogatis posts a great article on the meaning of music and its bleed over into politics. He describes the Pussy Riot event and provides lyrics to the song that offended Russian authorities. (Also see the post No Pasaran! for a photo of the Pussy Riot three.)
And he reviews the Paul Ryan claim that he’s a fan of Rage Against the Machine. http://www.wbez.org/blogs/jim-derogatis/2012-08/what-words-mean-101817 …
33-1/3 books
Posted: July 23, 2012 Filed under: Music 1 Comment33-1/3 books
They’re not new, but I wanted to post a comment about this gem of a book series for those who haven’t discovered it. Each book is written by a different author and describes on important music album in detail, often track by track. The publisher is Bloomsbury Publishing and you can find a list of all those published on the 33-1/3 Wikipedia page, among other places. There are 85 or 90 of these little books now and they’re available from the usual booksellers for ~$10-12 each.
I just finished Jonathan Lethem’s 33-1/3 on the Talking Heads’ Fear of Music and it deepened 
my appreciation for that album and that band. Lethem talks about first hearing it as a 15-year-old in Brooklyn in 1979. Later he quotes something he wrote in 2003, which gave me shivers. “I played the third album by Talking Heads, called Fear of Music, to the point of destroying the vinyl, then replaced it with another copy. I memorized the lyrics, memorized the lyrics to other Talking Heads albums, saw Talking Heads play every chance I got… At the peak, in 1980 or 1981, my identification was so complete that I might have wished to wear the album Fear of Music in place of my head so as to be more clearly seen by those around me.”
That was so much like my reaction to first hearing Bruce Springsteen in 1984 (I know, I know, I was a little late to the party). And that’s how I reacted to the Born in the USA album, as well as others over the years.
And yes, I’ve also read the 33-1/3 book on Born in the USA by Geoffrey Himes. And I just got the one on Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited (one of my favorite albums) by Mark Polizzotti.
I believe in rock and roll
Posted: July 18, 2012 Filed under: Music, Rock and roll 2 CommentsI believe in rock and roll. I believe in serious things too, like the First Amendment, the democratic process, three-day weekends, and free wifi. And I believe that some day the Cubs will win the World Series. But today I want to tell you why I believe in rock and roll.
I was a grownup — you could even say middle-aged — before I became a rock and roll fan. Most people become rock fans when they’re young, but among my friends in college, jazz was the only cool music. We listened to cool west coast jazz and bebop. We were all really serious about jazz.
Then one day in 1984, I hooked up a TV set to cable TV for the first time and discovered MTV. Those were the days when MTV programmed music videos day and night. I was mesmerized — by Michael Jackson, the Police, Prince, and most of all, by Bruce Springsteen. His Born in the USA album was a huge hit and the title track plus Dancing in the Dark played in regular rotation.
I began buying Springsteen records and then CDs, but it was years before I attended my first Springsteen concert. I don’t know why it took so long. My nephew, a lifelong fan, took me to my first Bruce concert. It was a life-changing, magical experience.
The lyrics to his songs had always spoken to me but now his voice, his movements, and all the keyboards, drums, guitars and saxophone of the E Street Band spoke too. I was caught up in the experience with thousands of other fans, singing, dancing, clapping and yes, sometimes crying. A live rock and roll concert is loud, emotional, cathartic, exhausting and exhilarating. Recorded music can never come close – it just reminds you of the real thing.
Now, 13 years after my first Springsteen concert, I’ve attended 28 more, six of them this year. My saner friends ask, “Aren’t they all the same?” No, each one is different. Each one is full of surprises. And the crowd at each one is a moving, singing, celebrating community. At each concert, Bruce recognizes some of the political issues of the day in his music and his commentary. That’s how he creates a community that believes in the power of rock and roll.
(Photo at left from my first concert 9/27/99 — Bruce with the Big Man. Photo © Chicago Tribune. The ticket is faded but mine.)
Today, I’m in post-retirement mode and my belief in the power of the music hasn’t changed. Most of the time, I go to concerts with friends or relatives. But even when I go alone, I still feel that power that joins us in the spirit of rock and roll. In this divided world, that’s not a small achievement.
Decades ago, Don McLean wrote “American Pie,” a classic rock song about “the day the music died” — the day of the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper. McLean sings, “Do you believe in rock and roll? Can music save your mortal soul?”
I’m not sure about the soul part. But I’m positive about the magic of rock and roll.
_________________________
Note: This essay was submitted to This I Believe and accepted for the organization’s essay library. It now appears here. http://thisibelieve.org/essay/120141/
This I Believe, Inc., was founded in 2004 as an independent, not-for-profit organization that engages youth and adults from all walks of life in writing, sharing, and discussing brief essays about the core values that guide their daily lives.
nancy bishop's journal 