June 2006 Archives

A little behind the beat on this, but when Kozinn makes remarks like this, you can bet people take notice:

A couple of weeks ago Giles Martin stopped in New York on his way to London, and invited me to hear his "Love" mixes on a five-channel surround system at Magno Studios. I was knocked out by some, but I was absolutely floored by the pristine quality and fine definition of the sound. With the compression of the original 1960's productions stripped away, voices and instruments seem real, as if they were in the room. The new mixes wrap you in the group's arrangements and let you hear long-buried interplay that illuminates the Beatles' brilliance. This is a level of detail that simply hasn't been heard outside the Abbey Road studios until now. On "Yesterday" you can hear Paul McCartney's pick hitting the strings of his guitar and the strings snapping against the neck. The guitar solo and the orchestral strings on "Something" had similar clarity and presence, and in the surround version of "I Am the Walrus" the whole kaleidoscope of textures — including an extraordinarily crisp drum sound — made the song quirkier than ever. The mixes of "Revolution" and "Come Together" are incomparably more powerful than the familiar versions. Mr. Starr's childlike "Octopus's Garden" gets a fantastic restructuring that begins with the string introduction to "Good Night" and then places Mr. Starr's vocal, unaccompanied, in a foggy ambience (using effects from "Yellow Submarine" and drums from "Lovely Rita") before the full band kicks into the more familiar arrangement. And a juxtaposition of the drum figure from "Tomorrow Never Knows" and the vocal line from "Within You, Without You" creates a link between those mystical songs, recorded nearly nine months apart.

Allan Kozinn in last week's NYT

Last night in the car, after listening to "Long and Winding Road" all the way through, my 5-year-old said "That was horrible."

TAKE ME TO THE COUNTRY

I had read about this record, but I didn't really expect it to be this good: James Talley's 1975 debut Got No Bread, No Milk, No Money, but We Sure Got a Lot of Love (reissued by Cimarron). It's kind of heartbreaking to think how much talent slips through the system like this. He could be Merle Haggard's cousin.







DON'T LICK THIS TAR-BABY

File under unfortunate headlines: The Dark Side of Chuck Berry
(Ding-A-Ling jokes are way too obvious, kids...)

HAPSLAPPY CLICKS

LaLa.com is oddly addictive, and once CDs start arriving in the mail, it renews your faith in the Hard Copy Format. It's so well thought-through that a lot of the kinks you might expect are already non-starters.

Popurls has swiftly moved into a prominent position, aggregating from six different social bookmarking anchors for a quick-and-dirty look at the day's web trends.

Threadless: magnet for idle minds. Here's mine.

Scott's response to the Observer's list, which has some very odd bedfellows, as Brits usually do. For RCD, TMW gets sandwiched between DISCO FEVER and GLENN GOULD, which pretty much sums up my high school persona:

19. Tell Me Why (Tim Riley): For all the zillion Beatle books that have been published, I think only three have mattered to me: Paperback Writer, the Ian MacDonald title chosen by the Observer, and this, a U.S. counterpart to the MacDonald book--a song-by-song rundown that is slightly more musicological (though not dauntingly so) and far less politicized. A remarkaby clearheaded listen to their records, basically.

SCARED YOU'LL GET A WOODY?

I mean really: you call this a LEAD?!?--

It has been many years since Westerns were essentially black-and-white, cut-and-dried stories of good versus evil: morality tales with lots o horses and guns and one of everything else—a sheriff, an outlaw, an embattled hero, a town drunk, a whore with a heart of gold, a honky-ton piano, and a schoolteacher from Illinois, who found out shortly after arriving in town that, for worse and for better, there was more to life tha book learnin’...

Since the past 12 months have seen Gary Giddins, Sasha Frere-Jones, Alex Ross, and former Voicer Vince Aletti in the critics section, perhaps we should give them a pass on their TV critic...? I mean, we happen to know TOM CARSON IS AVAILABLE, and has won something like three feature-of-the-year awards in a row. Isn't this when an arts editor PICKS UP THE PHONE AND MAKES THE CALL?

In Franklin's entire rave, she DOESN'T MENTION lead player Timothy Olyphant as Seth Bullock, Swear-engine's mirror.

V.

Oh yes, I do recall that statement about Turner. I dunno though... I just don't see her as being relevant any more. What do people talk about when they talk about her--how she survived Ike (but what does that say about her being with him and staying with him in the first place) and her legs. I don't find that very interesting or significant in terms of feminism today. I think of Janis Joplin as being more significant with feminism in rock n' roll than Tina, regardless of a lack of songwriting. She showed that she could do anything with the guys, and I guess that's what's important to me as a feminist.

I don't recall why I made that sweeping statement about Spingsteen being the "only living feminist male rocker." As I've already mentioned, I'm not a fan of Bruce, and reading that chapter didn't make me more of a fan. I mean, I never thought of him as a masogynst. Who does? I've always thought of him as a working-class Jersey guy who writes songs without catchy choruses. But the chapter about Springsteen is about him and his dad, not him and women. That's my beef.

But I think back to what I was saying at first about you ignoring hair metal and other 80s stuff. I think makeup-wearing members of Poison speak more about how rock transforms gender than Springsteen has. Then again, that's the era I know best, so I'm biased. We both are, generationally. I guess I take appearance into account more than you do. I mean, in the MTV age what matters most--the LOOK, or the MUSIC?

laaa deee daaaa
SM from heresyourwater.com/blog

IV.

Don't remember feminism coming up before the final chapters...? That whole section on Tina Turner, where I call her an earlier and more important force for feminist values than Gloria Steinem? That didn't ring any bells? As far as I'm concerned, "feminism" is still CATCHING UP with Tina Turner.

"And if Springsteen is the only modern living feminist male rocker you could think of to write about, that's really sad..." Honestly it's like every time you start pointing out the distance between male and female perceptions, the distance widens... I never said anything REMOTELY like Bruce was the ONLY living feminist male rocker, only that he may be the most important, and as a writer he presents a worldview that I find most worthy of thoughtful critique. He's REPRESENTATIVE of a very strong current in rock'n'roll manhood that goes against most assumptions of the style as a mysoginist, macho stereotype, and for that reason stands out as someone who articulates rock'n'roll values with a fresh take on the ROCK STAR persona. He follows as a type from Townshend in that they both take on the idea of manhood as a subject for their songs... In the sixties, as feminism is brewing, men go into a very confusing state about their response... How to "handle" a woman as powerful as Tina Turner? What does the new feminism do to manhood? If we want to be different from John Wayne, and even Elvis (ultimately), what are the new ideas about manhood going to consist of? At first (Townshend) it helps simply to articulate this confusion; with Springsteen I wanted to draw a broad portrait of this emergent new idea of the modern male. It sounds to me as though Springsteen has ingested rock history and its themes surrounding manhood better than any other figure.

Yeah, I've gotten to know Sleater-Kinney since writing FEVER and I did miss an opportunity there... I really love them, and love how they toy with gender, sort of inverting the Townshend stance. And I can't get enough PJ Harvey, would have liked to go on and on about her, but I had all this history and by that point I was trying to close the damn project... I started out all ambitious, wanting to do an encyclopedia of gender in rock, and had to pare it way back and choose figures I could illustrate ideas through, and use as examples, rather than following persona after persona and noting all the variances along the way.

Presley never wrote his own songs but neither did Sinatra, they both inhabit the music enough that we come to think of the songs as "theirs," and we get to know their inner state through their singing even though they're not composers. Janis didn't write "Bobby McGee" either, but she sure owns it, as surely as Aretha owns "Respect," and pretty much everything else. It's not whether Presley wrote a song but what he projects through it.

And hey, let's not forget Smokey, who articulates this whole "confusion about manhood" idea, which had been mostly a subtext until him.

Back atya, toots. TR

Until i heard CCH Pounder on yesterday's Fresh Air, I hadn't realized that FX's the Shield had won a Peabody Award, those things they give out to Jon Stewart. This year's list includes SOUTH PARK, Brian Williams and the whole Katrina gang, and Scully as Dedlock in BLEAK HOUSE. But can anyone argue persuasively that David Kelley's BOSTON LEGAL ranks with Martin Scorsese's NO DIRECTION HOME?

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

Guyana's Pounder tells TG that she'd never been called a "n*****r" until she acquired an American accent.

MARIJUANA STOCK SOARS

Mark Caro quotes Milo Miles about "When I'm Sixty-Four," just before the Big Split. The question is not how many times will Macca be asked to sing that damn song, but how many Divorce Tours it will anchor.

III.

I agree--"gender" has become a buzzword, especially in academia, and in gay circles. So, were you trying to address the idea that men have no role models and how men relate to feminism? Because I don't recall reading anything like that. In fact, I was startled how little feminism came up when discussing men. It did more so in that last chapter...maybe I just don't remember it, or maybe it's because "feminism" wasn't so mainstream before the mid-70s. I can understand skipping the gay stuff, but then feminism must be repeated for every person discussed. The pages and pages of Springsteen stuff was a mini-bio of him and his relationship with his father through song. I saw nothing applicable to the subject of "how rock and roll changed gender in America." And if Springsteen is the only modern living feminist male rocker you could think of to write about, that's really sad. Same with all the pages on Townsend and the Who--there was barely a hint of anything to do with gender or feminism. It just wasn't clear enough.

I think you also missed on a great opportunity with Sleater-Kinney. I know you mentioned them in passing, but I think they are just as important as PJ Harvey (who should have had several pages devoted to her) if you're discussing modern female rockers. I've seen them several times, and I don't even like their music that much. Their show is amazing, and it's because they are using bands like the Who as a template. Carrie Brownstein rocks the fuck out like she's Townsend, and has said pretty much that he's her role model. When "In the Woods" came out, Carrie admitted that she's always been a huge classic rock fan, and saw no issue with that and her feminism. Some of those interviews may be worth searching for. I know one was in Seattle's free paper.

I think that using Elvis's songs as a way to judge what he thought of women is ridiculous. Did he even pick his own songs? He sang them because he was paid to sing them...maybe he liked them, maybe he believed in them, who knows? He didn't write them, so there is no proof they are from his heart. The songs can mean just as much to an Elvis impersonator. It's just as impersonal.

So really your book isn't about gender, it's about the treatment of women in rock n' roll? Feminism in rock? That seems to jive with the content better than "gender," which is so general.

I don't mean to say that I didn't like it or don't appreciate it as a gift. :) I certainly learned a lot from it. I just didn't learn what I thought I'd learn...

--SM of heresyourwater.com/blog