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It's a funny thing about rock stars.
You'd think that so many of them have the world on a string, the tiger by the tail, or whatever you'd otherwise choose to call it.
Let's talk first about the lifestyle, or at least what we know about it as outsiders living vicariously through reading about it in the Random Notes section of Rolling Stone, or maybe seeing it in the nude pictures of Keith Richards lying on some beach in France we see showing up on the Internet.
And just for the record, if that particular image grosses you out, you are by no means alone.
Anyway, you'd think a life of selling millions of records, living in English countryside mansions, dating 20-something year-old super models into your 60s, and pretty much having the world as your personal oyster would be enough, right? Well, think again.
You see, for the select handful of rock royalty who have actually scaled the top of the mountain, there remains that one elusive final hill to climb, and that my friends, is artistic redemption.
It's one thing to top the charts on Billboard, but it's quite another to have the sort of pretentious types who sip wine at art galleries poring over your every word as though it were manna from heaven itself.
Even so, many have tried.
For rock stars like Mick Jagger, David Bowie, and Sting, for example, acting in films has represented the the most obvious avenue towards this type of validation, and as could be expected the results have been decidedly mixed.
Jagger, most notably, is back singing "Jumping Jack Flash" for the umpteenth time after getting mixed reviews in movies from Performance and Ned Kelly, to Freejack. Bowie did a great job playing himself in The Man Who Fell To Earth, and the less said about Sting acting in movies like David Lynch's production of Dune the better.
Of these, Sting alone refuses to give up however. He's spent the better part of the last two decades trying to reinvent himself as a solo artist dabbling in everything from jazz to Gregorian chants when all most of us want to hear is "Roxanne" with the Police one more time and not have to pay 300 bucks a ticket for the privilege of doing so, I might add.
In so doing, Sting joins the likes of people like Peter Gabriel, Paul Simon, and especially David Byrne who seem hellbent on cramming culture down the throats of fans who would much rather hear "Burning Down The House" or "Shock The Monkey" one more time.
You know what I mean? Good.
Because rather than piss off all of the South African or Brazilian union musicians who play on records by Sting and David Byrne, I have a rather novel idea. Follow the poets.
Tribal rhythms and all aside, rock and poetry is the one combination which has worked best over the years to satisfy the need to reconcile commercial success with artistic credibility for attention starved rock stars.
Elvis Costello can record vanity projects with the Brodsky Quartet, and Paul McCartney can write his symphonies, but let's be honest here. Nothing works for rock stars quite like poetry.
Some rock stars are in fact naturals at it. For that you can reference Lennon, Dylan, Springsteen, and even Bono (at least on a good day). Others? Well they fake it really well.
The most obvious example here is Jim Morrison. By all accounts, the one-time Lizard King spent his final years wandering the streets of Paris in a boozed-out haze trying to connect with his inner Rimbaud, and left us with An American Prayer.
Drunken ramblings about a "Lament For My Cock" aside, that album actually has an oddly haunting, hypnotic quality to it too, played as it is to the surviving members of the Doors providing a lounge-jazz music backing soundtrack.
Of those rock stars who are still among us though, I would point towards Patti Smith and Tom Waits as the two greatest living examples of artists who combine the thought of poetry with the thump of rock and roll with any degree of success.
Patti Smith's landmark debut album Horses alone stands as something which qualifies her for goddess status. Nowhere in all of rock and roll will you find something that combines the raw punk rock urgency of her take on "Gloria" with the gorgeous stream of consciousness poetry of the amazing nine or so minutes of "Birdland" (a tonal poem, which to best I can figure has something to do with being taken up in a UFO). It is an absolutely spellbinding album.
Patti's work has been spotty since coming back in the '90s, but Horses is a masterpiece that on its own qualifies her as one of the true greats.
And then there's Tom Waits.
Waits is a different animal entirely. After writing songs that became hits for people like Linda Ronstadt in the '70s, Tom Waits has spent the better part of the last three decades traveling down the darkest streets and alleyways of the world, and singing about them in a voice choked with cigarettes, whiskey, and God only knows what else.
Over the years, Waits has taken on the character of everything from vagabond drifter to carnival barker, to create a persona that is truly unique in all of music. Even someone as mighty as Bob Dylan has been compared to him in the voice he has taken on in his most recent albums.
If there is any guy alive who sings about the seedy underbelly of society with legitimate street cred, it is Tom Waits. Sometimes, I even find myself praying for the guy, he makes it all seem so real. An advance listen to Waits' forthcoming Glitter And Doom Live (review forthcoming) is in fact what inspired this article.
The second disc which consists entirely of "Tom's Tales" is particularly good.
If true artistic credibility means the ability of the listener to live vicariously through the words of the artist, then I defy anyone to find an artist more credible than Tom Waits.
It's all about putting it into words.
Whether you are a person who frequents blog sites on the internet, you own a personal blog, or you even write articles on websites like this one, you've probably heard about the FTC's intention to more closely regulate such things by now.
Established in 1914 by the Federal Trade Commission Act to promote consumer protection and combat anti-competitive practices, the Federal Trade Commission is the government agency charged with making sure all is fair in love and trade as relates to the American consumer.
More recently however, the FTC has represented three letters striking fear into the hearts and minds of bloggers everywhere, as the agency has begun to take steps towards regulating the wild, wild west world of the blogosphere.
Specifically, as of December 2009, the FTC will begin requiring full disclosure of any payments made to bloggers in exchange for product endorsements.
Such payments would include not only monetary compensation, but also the products bloggers often receive for review purposes which in theory could mean anything from cars, trips, and the like, to the CDs, DVDs, and books thousands of bloggers routinely write about every day at sites such as Blogcritics Magazine.
So what does this mean for people who review music CDs and such on the internet? Perhaps a brief history lesson will help put this into the proper perspective.
Promotional albums or "promos" in the industry vernacular have in fact been part of the way business is done by the music industry for a very long time now. In addition to the thousands of writers who receive them for review purposes, they are routinely sent out to radio programmers and DJs as well as what is left of the music retail community.
They are not only used to help determine which new releases get written about, but also what gets played on the radio, and what gets pushed in record shops through things like instore play.
They have also from time to time been used as an accepted form of currency in the record business, which has produced its own fair share of scandals over the years.
Although I wasn't actually around to witness it first hand at the time, I am old enough to remember the original payola scandals of the fifties and sixties as a student of music history.
The "pay for play" scheme was a big enough deal back then to prompt congressional investigations, and bring down a number of key figures, including no less than Alan Freed, the radio pioneer generally credited with coining the term rock and roll. Some of the scarier stories from this period also included rumors of organized crime types shaking down radio programmers who refused to play along.
By the time I was actually working within the record industry myself (in the eighties and nineties), the practice of payola had been supposedly cleaned up. In truth, it actually just shifted itself around a bit. This is where the idea of promos as an acceptable form of currency largely came into play.
On the surface, promo albums as a movable form of something with an actual tangible monetary value are essentially worthless because they are clearly marked as such. In the days of vinyl albums, they were marked with big white labels stating they were not for sale and were intended solely for promotional use, and the jackets also usually had some sort of hole punched in them.
These days, promo CDs go a step further through things like the practice of watermarking, and even more detailed labels stating that the recipient agrees to return the item to the sender meaning the record label or PR firm at any time upon request.
Still, this has not entirely stopped the underground promo trade, as any routine visit to sites like ebay will demonstrate. Back in the nineties, it was also not at all uncommon to see new releases being sold at used record shops a few days before the street date.
I have very specific memories of going to such shops when I lived and worked in the record business in L.A. back in the nineties. If you knew where to go back then, you could easily pick up something like the new Snoop Dogg release (to cite a specific memory) on the Thursday before it came out because promo copies usually were sent out on that day. In the case of the aforementioned Snoop Dogg release, I can actually remember running into a low-level record executive I knew at the time unloading the cargo at one such shop.
What was even more common than underpaid industry types pocketing a few extra bucks by selling promos however, was the use of free-goods or "cleans."
Back in those days (before the creation of the industry reporting system system Soundscan), chart positions were reported to trade publications like Billboard using an honor system. The trades would call selected music retailers and ask them to report their sales figures for the week, which in turn would help determine chart positions as they appeared in the following week's magazine.
Since chart position in theory anyway influences both radio airplay and record sales, the practice of sending out unmarked "clean" product to retailers to put on sale (usually at a ridiculously low price) soon became a fairly common one. The idea here was that putting these items on sale would help influence chart position and thus, boost sales and airplay.
Although the practice began with independent labels and promoters, before long most, if not all of the majors, were also willing to play along. For the music retailers who reported sales figures, this was a "win-win" situation as it boosted their low profit margins, and in a few cases also provided underpaid employees a source of extra income.
In a rare case of the record industry policing itself, the practice of using "cleans" as a form of usable currency was halted (or at least, drastically curtailed) by the introduction of the Soundscan reporting system in the early nineties.
This system of scanning actual record sales was universally adopted by both the trades and music retailers, and the old school way of relying on word-of-mouth sales reporting was eliminated virtually overnight. Although some retailers probably found ways around the new way of reporting sales by actual scans, chart positions were now made largely far more accurate, and reflective of the actual marketplace. In doing so, another congressional payola investigation of the record industry was most likely averted.
The most immediate effect of all this back then, was how it changed the complexion of the record charts themselves. Country and hip-hop both of which were always under-reported genres anyway went overnight from being the industry's best kept secrets, to coming out of the closet as being the big-sellers they in fact had always been. In that respect, you could probably call Garth Brooks the first superstar who was essentially made by Soundscan.
So how does all of this relate to the present FTC ruling? In all honesty, outside of providing a history lesson, it probably doesn't. There is a big difference between what are traditionally referred to as promos, and the clean copies which were once used to manipulate chart positions and sales figures.
In today's world, a CD used for promotional purposes has been rendered virtually useless in terms of it having any monetary value. The CDs are in most cases clearly stamped with things like "not for sale" and "must be returned upon demand" which gives them a value of exactly nil. In other words, there is no widespread "blogola" here to speak of.
The practice of watermarking on many of these items also makes them something undesirable for most music fans to want to actually add to their collections. When you factor in the fact that many music companies are now delivering their promotional music to writers and bloggers through digital means, their value as a tangible, sellable item is likewise reduced.
That a collectors market for rare, promotional material continues to exist and probably always will, is however an undeniable fact. Any routine ebay search for something like "Beatles remasters" for example proves this to be true
Still, my best guess is that the intent of the FTC is more targeted towards those who still receive big-ticket items like cars, trips, and flat-screen high-definition TVs, than it is towards the lowly minions who blog about the CDs they receive on sites like this one. Even in this case, my understanding of the new FTC regulatory practices is that they are intended mainly to go after the big companies sending out the goods, rather than the bloggers who write about them.
Although there are exceptions, bloggers are for the most part unemployed or underpaid folks who do what they do largely for the love of doing it.
Speaking of which, if anyone out there reading this would like to employ my own services, I'm currently in the market seeking opportunities. My new sign reads "Will Blog For Money."
September 19th 2009 09:44
Okay, so here's the deal.
I'm as excited about The Beatles Remasters boxed set as anybody. Unfortunately, living on the salary of a starving music editor pretty much precludes me from purchasing the whole damn thing right now...which sucks, because I've been salivating for it like the die-hard Beatles nut I am since last week.
That's the bad news.
The good news is that the kind folks at the record label sent me a really nice two-disc sampler to check out. Often, these promotional samplers are badly thrown together sorts of affairs that barely scratch the surface of what such massive undertakings have to offer. Not so in this case.
With 32 tracks spanning the entire career of the greatest rock band in history, this sampler actually offers a great cross-selection of the entire work. And, beyond that, it is certainly a nice little collectors item, and one which only further whets my appetite for the boxed set that I will someday surely buy once I can actually afford it anyway.
But let's get down to brass tacks, shall we?
Because there is both good and bad to report about this much lauded remastering job. Most of it is as thankfully great as advertised though. The first thing you notice about these remastered recordings is that they are both louder, and quite a bit brighter sounding than what we've heard of the Beatles catalog since its sole transfer to CD back in 1987.
This has a particularly noticeable effect on the Beatles early work. "I Saw Her Standing There," to cite one example, literally puts you in the room with the band which means the guitars crackle like never before.
It also means that the vocals have a bit of a weird echo to them however, which becomes a bit irritating on a song like "Please, Please Me." In that case, though, a never-before-heard guitar accent however saves the day. Even on the so-called "middle period" recordings like "Day Tripper," the vocal echo is a little bit irritating but the rest of it is so damn clear it doesn't really matter.
The good news here, though, is that despite all of the high end here (and on the early recordings, especially, there is lots of it), Macca's bass also comes through like never before proving that even back then he was one of the best. More than that, what these remastered early recordings reveal is that the Beatles were one hell of a rock and roll band.
But...Oh...My...God! The acoustic guitar strums on songs like "This Boy" and "Things We Said Today" are magnificent. Likewise, George Harrison's lead guitar has never rang so clear as it does here on songs like "And Your Bird Can Sing."
Unfortunately, such magnificence comes once again at the expense of more of that reverberating echo on the vocal harmonies (except in the case of "And Your Bird Can Sing," where Lennon's voice is out front where it belongs). Again, McCartney's bass is for the most part likewise put nicely front and center here on the songs I've mentioned.
Right about now, incidentally, I'm starting to sense a trend. Wasn't Sir Paul himself involved in the actual remastering?
For McCartney fans, this will be a good thing but for fans of the Beatles vocal harmonies, a little less so. Still, there is no denying the general improvement soundwise. Echo aside, the sound has much more of a live feel to it. As advertised, it does really put you right in the studio especially compared to what came before this.
Once I do eventually purchase this boxed set, one of the things I will be most anxious to hear is the soundtrack to Help! which has always been one of my favorite Beatles records. Something about all those James Bond-ish instrumentals bumping up against the Beatles I guess.
Unfortunately, the sampler I got doesn't include what may be my favorite Beatles song from that album, "The Night Before." It does however include the often overlooked John Lennon gem, "You've Got To Hide Your Away." Like the other songs I've mentioned here, the acoustic guitar sounds just delicious both clear as a bell, and crisp as a box of Rice Krispies. Snap, Crackle, Pop, baby.
Lennon's "Rain" is likewise a revelation here his vocal is rightfully put out front, but never at the risk of one of Paul McCartney's best-ever bass performances. I can't wait to hear what they did with the other side of that original Beatles single "Paperback Writer." By the time we get to Revolver, the harmonies on "Here, There, and Everywhere" are absolutely pristine.
But now, we get to the really good stuff.
By the time of Sgt. Pepper, the Beatles were expanding not only their minds, but their music as well. "Being For The Benefit of Mr. Kite" might seem like a minor track from that album. But here it is an undeniable standout. The sonic layers that envelop the listener play like a kaleidoscope of sen-surround magic. The carnival calliopes and what-not are such that one can literally lose themselves within them. It's like hearing a song you might have overlooked back then as I mostly did as a thirteen year-old Beatles fan for the first time.
The songs from The White Album represented here likewise exhibit newfound depth. McCartney's bass on "Glass Onion" which I never really even noticed before rumbled through my speakers like an eighties NWA gangsta-rap joint.
By the time of Yellow Submarine's "Hey Bulldog," however, I had to literally drag my jaw off the floor. The stereo separation is nothing less than amazing. The backing vocals are occasionally buried a little, but everything else is as clear as a freaking bell...the guitars, the bass, and, well, you know...
But McCartney's bass is the real star here. Still, Harrison's guitar, Lennon's vocal, and even Ringo's drumming which is probably some of the most underrated in all of music by the way can each be heard on their own like never before. "Hey Bulldog" is, on it's own, worth the price of admission.
And then there's "I Am The Walrus." This has always been one of my favorite Beatles songs, and here it sounds positively amazing. The reason I always loved this song is because of the layers of depth which at the time it was released were pretty much unprecedented for a single.
On the remastered version, each and every one of those layers becomes newly alive from the cellos and what-not, to the weird backwards-masked vocals at the end from "Everybody Smoke Pot" to the song ending "I Buried Paul" (which fueled the "Paul Is Dead" rumors, and which Lennon always insisted actually said "Cranberry Sauce.")
I've always divided the Beatles into distinct eras pre and post Sgt. Pepper. For those who favor the rawer sound of the band's early years, The Beatles Remasters put you right in the middle of the recording studio. There are flaws which mainly boil down to the echo. But the recordings here also sound brighter, crisper, and clearer than ever before.
For fans of the Beatles more intricate latter recordings like Sgt. Pepper and The White Album, you will hear levels of depth here like you've never heard.
Based on this 32-song sampling, if you are a Beatles fan, do not walk, but run like hell to get this. You won't be sorry.
September 10th 2009 23:19
What a drag it is getting old.
Okay, so it was actually the Stones who wrote that line. Regardless, it was still the Beatles who actually changed my own life, for better or for worse
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Talk to most any longtime Radiohead fan, and they will tell you that the band's glory years came in the mid-to-late nineties with albums like The Bends and OK Computer the latter of which has been hailed by many of those same Radiophiles as one of the greatest records ever made.
Me? I don't buy it. Not to take anything away from OK Computer it's an amazing record to be sure. OK Computer is dense, complex, and full of really great songs like "Karma Police" and "Paranoid Android
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Like many of you reading this, my first reaction to the news of Ted Kennedy's passing Tuesday night was one of sadness. But also that it had been expected, ever since it was first learned that the Massachusetts Senator had brain cancer last year.
On a deeper level though, it really feels like the final chapter of an era has finally been written. Camelot is over once and for all
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I can remember it like it was yesterday.
There was me and my two pals sitting on the front porch of my house in Seattle in 1992. Bruce Springsteen had just released two new records Human Touch and Lucky Town and we were listening to them on the porch that hot spring afternoon over a few beers. The three of us agreed that neither of them were very good, even though we were hardcore fans
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Rock music and religion have always made for the strangest of bedfellows, yet the two of them are inextricably linked both historically and, as odd as it may seem, even artistically.
Despite being often referred to as the "devil's music" by some of the more fringe elements of the Christian right for example, rock and roll has a rather long and storied tradition of having roots in the church. It's fairly common knowledge for example, that early rock and roll pioneers like Elvis were as influenced by what they heard in southern churches, as they were by the "race records" they heard on the radio
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Ian Hunter has a new solo album coming out next week, and I couldn't be more delighted.
Chances are you don't know Ian Hunter by name, but you do know his songs. Although he never sold quite as many records as his most obvious influencesDylan, the Stones, and David Bowieor for that matter, even as his one-time Mott The Hoople bandmate Mick Ralphs did with Bad CompanyHunter's songs occupy a unique and permanent place in rock history
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So I guess now that Michael Jackson is dead and buried, it's okay to talk about this. Oh wait, he's not buried yet? Well I guess that's okay too. The bottom line is that Michael is gone, and with him is an era that like so many others which have passed before it, we will never get back.
I held off on writing down my thoughts about Michael Jackson for a specific reason. I wrote the original news story for Blogcritics, updating it from the original reports of a heart attack, to the eventual reality pretty much by the minute as it happened -- which during at that first hour or so was occuring by the minute
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Comments (1)
Comment by Glen Boyd
on Reconnecting With My Inner Creedence
The Rockologist
If you read this could you please give me your current email address? Its changed so often Im not sure I still have it. And to answer your question, I didnt see CCR in Hawaii...my parents had me grounded at the time. I was so pissed I can even still remember the date...Nov. 1, 1969.
-Glen