November 2007 Archives

Dear Tim

My own next project is going to be a biography of Professor Longhair. Having spent fifteen years writing about four of the most famous people on earth, I long for a subject about which virtually every prospective reader doesn't already have a set of preconceptions and opinions. Here again I plan to situate the simple narrative of Longhair's life (as well as his rather spectacular posthumous career) in the social and cultural context of New Orleans and the U.S. in the decades after World War Two. On some level, this will be a book about obscurity and influence. A reminder of the fact that, very often, talented, original, and influential artists do not achieve success. (I love the fact that when I meet someone who hasn't heard of Longhair, I can take out my IPod and play them a four-bar fragment of his music, to which they invariably reply: "Oh, that!") And on another level, I am hoping that this book will give me an opportunity to think and write in an unstereotypic manner about what I regard to be one of the great cultural questions of the last hundred and fifty years, namely: "What is this thing that us white people seem to have about black music, black culture, and black sensibility?"

--Jonathan Gould

Bonus round: This juxtaposition is more insulting to a) classical audience b) comedy audience c) plumber's conventioneers

This book finally compiles many of the images put out by Genesis in the 1990s, with candids from Harrison and Starr's apartment during the shooting of Hard Day's Night, the HDN set with Richard Lester and Pattie Boyd, and a fascinating trip to Liverpool where the Cavern is overrun by beat-bands such as The Undertakers. The Archers, pre-teen lads shot outside Ringo's home, look for all the world like the Fabs as they might have been, in a Liverpool barely changed since the war. The fatalism etched in the faces of Beatle parents tells a story of stoic pride and gobsmacked humility as the world suddenly peeks in...

More Kirchherr photos on flickr...

See also: Jurgen Vollmer's The Beatles in Hamburg 1961

Dear Tim,

I too have blown hot and cold with Max Weinberg - though mostly cold I'd have to say. And I would say the same about Springsteen himself. Come to think of it, this has been an ongoing thirty-year issue for me. When Springsteen first arrived on the scene in the 1970s as John Hammond's next anointed golden boy, I was unimpressed. After all, Dylan had come out with Blood On The Tracks, which struck me with the force of revelation, because the lyric-writing on that record - beginning with the astonishing opening track - raised the possibility that rock songs could truly achieve the emotional resonance and complexity of great short fiction. (Unfortunately, I have since come to believe that that incredible album was a false dawn - a swan song for that kind of songwriting - and not, as I had hoped, the beginning of an era in which anything was possible in rock.) By contrast, Springsteen's early, self-consciously Dylanesque (and carnivalesque) lyric writing seemed like (yet another) return to the hit or miss (though brilliant nevertheless) amphetamine wordplay of Dylan's mid-1960s work. In addition, I thought the playing (and particularly the drumming, though I forget the guy's name) on Springsteen's first album was simply awful. And I became only more unimpressed when, with the advent of Jon Landau, Bruce went on to become the first important rock star to be produced and managed by a rock critic. Part of the problem was that Springsteen was drawing on the same set of influences that I and all the other r&b-based rock musicians I was playing with in those days were drawing on: the gospel-blues continuum that runs from Ray Charles and Sam Cooke to Motown and Stax and then enters rock in a big way with the Band. I immediately picked up on the Levi Stubbs, Rick Danko quality in Springsteen's voice and the piano-and-organ timbre of his band. But, as often happens with other people who share your influences, I didn't like the way he was using them, which hardened the resistance in me.

Then came the cult of the Boss, which from my perspective marked the Sinatra phase of Springsteen's career. To give them credit, there's a particular way that people from New Jersey exalt a particular type of powerful male identity, and it's had a strong influence on popular culture in the last fifty years, first with the Chairman of the Board, then with the Boss, and then of course with Tony Soprano (who, in case anybody missed the point, inherited Little Stevie as his sidekick). And I couldn't wrap myself around that for a minute. By then the E-Street Band was an institution of sorts. What I liked about them was that they sounded like nothing more or less than the loudest bar band in the world. And that, of course, was what I didn't like about them as well, because everything they played, they played with less nuance - in some cases, much less nuance - than their influences. Basically, the rhythm section sounded as if they were striving in every song to reproduce the feeling you and I and everyone else in the Western World got the first time we heard the monumental groove - that snare drum! - of "Dancing in The Street." And from my perspective, they never really got there, though I know that many satisfied listeners would disagree.

So I did what any busy, preoccupied person who was raising two kids and trying to sustain a career in the music business would do: I pretty much ignored Springsteen all through the Reagan-Bush years. And then one day I was talking to my writer friend Elizabeth Lesser, who's a very gentle soul, and I was surprised to hear her talking about how much she liked Springsteen. And I told her I really didn't get it. And she said that she didn't get it for a long time either, and she still didn't like a lot of his early stuff, but had I heard "Tunnel of Love?" Listen to "Tunnel of Love," she said. She may have meant the whole album, but I took her to mean the song. And a few days later, I did listen to it, in the car, only to find about halfway through that I had tears streaming down my cheeks. Over and over again. Now, to be sure, I was then involved in a twenty-five-year-old relationship that (I was just beginning to realize) was coming apart at the seams. But the song grabbed me with the force - now that I think about it - of "Tangled Up In Blue." And in that moment, my hard heart softened for Springsteen. It's not like I went on, or back, to embrace his entire body of work. I still find a great deal of it very hard to take, all that blue-collar angst, and the constant reappearances of his "daddy" (has he ever mentioned his mother in a song? I mean, just once? You can tell by that alone that he isn't Jewish, despite what some people thought at first). And I have little patience with his whole Tom Joad persona, which he first unveiled in some of the other tracks on Tunnel of Love. And I still feel that the E-Street Band plays with all the finesse one might expect from a bunch of guys who hang around the meat locker at Satriale's Pork Store. The ham-fisted Max most of all. But for me, Springsteen has become the sort of artist who can occasionally stop me in my tracks, and there are not many of them left in the field of rock. His masterpiece, in my opinion, is The Rising - the whole CD. I think it's probably the most powerful and meaningful artistic response to 9/11 that I have heard to date, and I was stupefied by his ability to take that on and pull that off. Significantly, however, it was the one album he had made in a very long time on which he allowed someone else to produce. And that points to the thing that you were pointing out: the way his control freak nature subverts the potential of his music. Ultimately, the problem with Bruce is a very Jersey sort of thing. He's the Boss. And he has surrounded himself with musical sycophants. Not that they can't tease him, and the case of Nils Lofgrin, outplay him. And they occasionally generate effects that surprise both him and themselves. But the pecking order in the band is clear, and the hierarchy of talent in the band is clear, and everybody is ultimately deferring to him. It's a closed shop, and that's not a good thing in a group...

--JG

Dear Jonathan Gould,

Yeah I was wondering if that was it: being a drummer you didn't want to come on TOO strong with Ringo... that's okay, it's subtextual, and I gushed a lot in my book. Every drummer I've ever talked to gushes about RIngo, at least the good ones do. I think he's a better drummer than Harrison is a guitarist myself, but then I'm a piano-playing composer, so any drummer with a shred of restraint floats my boat. Except for Keith Moon, who's like a keyboardist on the drums (he wants to save the world).

I don't know the Duke Ellington nearly as well as you do but it brings up an interesting comparison: I've always blown hot and cold with Max Weinberg of the E Streeters, always wishing he'd go for more tom-toms and GET WILD once in awhile. But my sense is his Boss is a control freak's control freak and he plays the way Bruce asks, so Bruce must love that pile-driving snare thing. But on this most recent record Weinberg goes for his tom-toms and it sounds SO GREAT... like I always hoped it would. There's this essay I've long wanted to write about how great Bruce is in so many areas including as a bandleader, only he over-does it (like a lot of things) and needs to let his players have more freedom in some areas. There's too many people up on stage these days, I'd kill to catch him play a trio gig with just Max and Tallent, he could hold down everything he needs on guitar...

Don't get me wrong, I dig Weinberg, I've just always wanted to hear Bruce play with a looser set...

--TR

EDITORIAL TICS
Why do we have editors? To save us all from those annoying TICS that infect language like ants on birthday cake. Couple years back there was an INFLUENZA of sentences that tried to sound, well, hip, by injecting "well"s into the most obvious places to INFORMALIZE the, well, "tone" of the piece. It always came off, well, forced and made the writing seem intractably unhip as could be, but EVERYBODY was guilty of it. STOP THE MADNESS. You want "um" with that?

These days you can't get through a news interview without hearing "...at the end of the day," as if the speaker is finally going to reveal the ultimate truth about a subject but is really just trying to emphasize how banal their conclusion really is. Usage: "...AT THE END OF THE DAY, this Attorney General nominee is all we've got and we've got to stop the hemorrhaging or we'll lose the patient." Or "We all know the Democrats are against this, but AT THE END OF THE DAY they don't have the votes..." Coming in a strong second would be "bottom line," most execrable when used as a verb, as in "bottom line it for me... what's it going to cost?"

QUOTES FROM HEAVEN
Robert Plant, discussing the forthcoming Led Zeppelin reunion to the New York Times: "It's a one-night stand," Mr. Plant said. "I'm taking emotional condoms." Then he changed the subject.

James Traub, describing Barak Obama's advisors and their attitudes towards The Clintons in the New York Times Magazine: "In the meantime, though, they blame their failure to break through on what they see as a combination of Clinton's inspired cynicism and the myopia of a press corps addled by tactics and poll numbers..."

PRESS RELEASE OF THE YEAR
Dear Tim Riley,

On October 2nd we mailed to you a Mimi Hendrix DVD along with a press release on behalf of Universal Music Enterprises. We omitted to label the disc "DVD" and we also misspelled Jimi Hendrix. This was entirely the error of HazMat Media...

Again, we deeply regret any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Sincerely,

Helen Boswell
VP - Client Services
Hazmat Media Ince
Marketing Logistics & Campaign Fulfillment. Done.

Dear Tim,

...Somewhat incredibly, I haven't read Magic Circles; it must have come out right around the time I finally stopped reading and researching and staying current on all things Beatle in order to focus all of my addled attention on finally finishing my book. But now, of course, I'm curious, because you're not the first person to suggest that I really should check out McKinney's book.

As for Ian McDonald, I liked the highly opinionated quality of Revolution in the Head, but I also sensed a certain hauteur (if not outright arrogance) in the writing, which may have made it hard for him to appreciate other people's work.

On the matter of Ringo, the truth is that I've always loved his playing. It may be that as a drummer, I overcompensated for my concern that I might be placing too much emphasis on the role of the drums in the Beatles' music. I've been asked about Ringo in many of the interviews I've done, and I always fall back on my feeling that the Beatles were simply unimaginable without him. To me, he's always represented the essence of musicality in a drummer - great feel, good time, and a focus on serving the needs of the song - without resorting to any of the "drumistics" (as my old teacher Alan Dawson used to call it) that many people confuse with good drumming. Would "Helter Skelter" really have sounded much better if Mitch Mitchell had played on it? I doubt it - and it wouldn't have been nearly as funny. That said, the next time you hear Robbie Robertson talk dismissively in an interview about how the guys in the Band (another of my great loves) never paid any attention to "all that psychedelia" in 1967, listen to "Day In The Life" and ask yourself where Levon [Helms] got his sound. To the extent that there has always been a certain analogy in my mind between the Beatles and the Duke Ellington band - arguably, they are the two greatest "composing" bands in the genres of rock and jazz - Ringo is a little reminiscent of Sonny Greer...

And thanks again for your kind words, Tim...

Best,

Jon

Dear Jonathan Gould,

Whew you got a great agent, serialized in USA TODAY, man that's EXPOSURE. Congratulations on all this, very handsomely produced and marketed product.

But most of all pat yourself on the back... there is so much hard work reflected in these pages, so many long library hours scouring newspaper microfilm and digesting the finer details of the ideas that were alive in the 1960s, very, VERY few people take the trouble to do not just the research the but THINKING to distill it all down into such an accessible approach to HUGE subject. Bravo, bravo, from one writer to another, you have really RAISED THE BAR for the rest of us.

I've been writing a long letter to you in my head but I mean to get this off today, so let me just go through quickly and single out some of my favorite passages so far, and I hope we can chat on the phone soon or something. I think your REVOLVER and SGT PEPPER interpretations are dead bull's eyes, very savvy and insightful readings of those records. I, too, admire Ian MacDonald (although he didn't seem to like TMW), but I think your interpretations extend and amplify what he and others did.

I love so much of your imagery amidst your descriptions: the "Profumo-era chorus girls" in "Taxman" (p. 350); how "when Paul adds a high harmony in the last verse [of "act Naturally"], he sounds like the good singer who lives inside the head of every bad singer" (p. 277). (I'm also surprised that, your being a drummer, you're not a bigger Ringo fan...?)

And while I disagree with you about the arrangement of "Got to Get You Into My Life," it's an entirely persuasive argument. My push back would be: that guitar gathers all its effectiveness off its surprise attack amidst horns -- the CONTRAST from between the way they DON'T emulate Booker T's MGs, and the sudden resplendent power of that Les Paul (?).

I especially like this sentence: "Much of the expressive power of John's singing on the Beatles' early records came from the way the slightest acknowledgment of sensivity or vulnerability seemed like such an enormous CONCESSION coming from him..."

And when you point out that "Lucy" is the first woman's name Lennon invokes in song, it literally made me stop, think, and concede this was an insight that had never occurred to me. And it's very telling, too, not just how it relates to the name of his mother, but how the one of the very next women he DOES name directly is "Julia" herself.

I hope by now you've discovered Devin McKinney's MAGIC CIRCLES, which Harvard brought out a few years back. He's a decent chap and his book is full of wonderful connections, especially about how HELP! presages the death cults of later years...

Well that's me just dashing things off to get something to you... all the best, it looks like Harmony's doing a great job marketing this... let's stay in touch! -- TR