The August of Farewells

So many things came to an end in one month, one-half century ago.

It is impossible to overstate how much changed in global popular culture between 9 February 1964 when The Beatles first appeared on U.S. television and 22 August 1969, when that same band, looking like they’d aged ten years instead of five, posed for their last publicity photos. Styles of hair and dress that would have been unthinkable in the U.S. around the time of John F. Kennedy’s assassination had become commonplace, and would get even stranger in the succeeding decades.

I would later learn the band was indeed all together in one room the following month holding contentious meetings, from which John Lennon eventually walked away. The exact last day is unknown, only that it was sometime between 15-19 September. The story is here, but for my purposes, I’ll count The Very Last Day of The Beatles as 22 August.

You see it in their faces. They had just put their final album to bed two days before. Few people realized how utterly final Abbey Road was; Let It Be, the “new phase Beatles album” was the salvaging of an aborted project the winter before. When they had crossed the street for its iconic cover on the 8th, recording engineer Geoff Emerick noted that the chosen shot was of them walking away from EMI Studios. They were done.

The world’s first superstar rock band was finished in time for the leaves to start changing, before the new decade brought its numerous fads and fashions of music and dress, from earnest long-haired singer-songwriters to spangly dressed disco divas to spiky-haired punks. More than a mere “dream” was over. It was the end of a five and one-half year-long era that changed nearly everything.

No one seemed to know it at the time, though, not even The Beatles themselves. It’s poignant to note that no one thought to call it over until April 1970 when Paul answered in the negative to a question in a promotional interview for his solo album regarding whether he would consider working with John Lennon again. To be fair, by 22 August 1969, maybe only Ringo could imagine them all together in the studio again. 

It had been a long, intense ride since their days as teenagers taking the bus to wherever they needed to go in Liverpool. Now they were almost 30. It was ending sometime. It may not have ended well, but half a century down the road it’s apparent it ended when it had to.

The last photo of them all together, ever. I’ve noted this before, but it’s interesting that the two now long-deceased ones are the ones looking away at something else.

I smile to think that, as a teenager in the far more creatively and culturally diverse 1970s (thanks to the 1960s, mind you), my two biggest wishes were for The Beatles to get back together and for new episodes of a revived Star Trek. Thank God neither happened. These core bits of what would eventually become worn-out, chewed-over, flavorless franchises ended when they had to. And their endings marked the end of the beginning of whatever it was that’s led us here.

To mash things up a bit. I don’t know who made this, but my hat’s off and my glass is raised.

On what was either 26 August or the day after Labor, the last re-run of the original Star Trek was broadcast on U.S. network television. I haven’t been able to find precise listings for those specific months, but the last month of summer seems a fitting month to consider that all over. I wonder what famously cringe-inducing third season episode repeated that Tuesday night. The struggling sci-fi TV show that would eventually become a huge franchise over ten years later died with a whimpering of embarrassingly awful scripts and dinner theater budgeting amid a rapidly changing cultural landscape.

I note the passage of Star Trek on network TV primarily because it marked the ignoble end of an era of imaginative television that encompassed The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, The Wild, Wild West, Irwin Allen’s sci-fi shows, et al. Television might get more “sophisticated” in the 1970s with urban sitcoms and Norman Lear’s reworkings of BBC shows, but it would never have the sense of weird, wacky, good-natured fun one got from most television in the 1960s.

James Bama’s 1966 promotional art, featuring
a “pulp” aesthetic impossible to imagine for anything
in the 1970s, save for that movie that came out
in May 1977. Even that original Star Wars was one of a
kind in that regard, and, like Trek, it never replicated
that original excitement. Yes, “inb4 Empire Strikes Back,”
my favorite movie, but you can’t imagine what it was
like seeing that first one after so many dark and
depressing things between 1970 and 1977.

Star Trek is oft praised for its presumably rare optimism about the future, but it was far from the only television show expressing that. The Robinsons may have been Lost in Space, but they were having a good time. Admiral Nelson’s and Captain Crane’s Seaview dealt decisively with whatever rubber-suit strangeness it came against in their Voyage to the Bottom of Sea. Any darkness and back-stabbing intrigue were the work of foreign agents, but the good guys always triumphed. There was none of the cynicism you saw, say, exactly ten years later in the movie Alien. Captain Kirk may have directly disobeyed Starfleet on occasion, but only on very special occasions, because Starfleet and the United Federation of Planets were honorable organizations.

By August 1969, all that, too, had passed. Passing with it was an make-do/can-do aesthetic of filming television sci-fi that required the viewer to meet the set designers and effects people halfway. For all the remakes and rehashes and re-imaginings to come, this particular flavor of magic would never spark again.

It couldn’t. The very environment which had spawned it had changed. The world of August 1969 was markedly different from the world of August 1968, which in turn was markedly different from August 1966. You get the idea.

As with The Beatles one-half century later, it’s impossible to imagine new episodes of original Star Trek sallying on into 1970. Even as the show’s popularity exploded during the show’s syndication in the following decade, those original 79 episodes were all she wrote. There would be no more because there could be no more.

I’d have preferred the standard flyaway shot into the generic void from the original effects but I must admit this final shot made especially for the “Turnabout Intruder” remaster, in honor of the last original Star Trek episode, is nicer.

Somewhere in the middle of all that a thing called Woodstock happened. It was a music festival that the promoters lost all control over (and quite a bit of money) that marked the high-water mark of the hippie scene. The band lineup was a Who’s Who of those whose stars would rise with the next decade as well as those who would soon pass into memory.

Truth be told, there really isn’t much to say about Woodstock except that it was a music festival that marked the beginning of many music festivals to come, much better managed and far more tightly controlled. When Woodstock happened—and for maybe four or five more years, when disco would put that lie to rest—people believed that Music Can Change the World. Oh, the insane, blank-eyed naivete of it all!

The generation everyone loves to hate when they’re not hating on Millennials. Most of it’s well-earned, I’ll grant that.

Looking back, though, it’s easy to see how people came to feel that way. The new pop music, with its new sounds and arrangements, if it aggravated and terrified the oldsters so much, it had to be doing something right. And speaking as an old duffer who remembers those old duffers of the past—I’m here to tell all you New Traditionalists out there who want to revive the old architecture and mores of days gone by, people threw all that good old stuff to the wayside because no one gave them any reasons to hang onto it other than, “‘Cause I’m yer elder, and I done told you so! Now turn that dang noise off and git back to wuck!”

And then our wise elders sent our jobs overseas. The jobs they couldn’t send overseas, they depressed the wages on by bringing people into the U.S. to work. But they got a handle on controlling—and milking—large crowds for music festivals. So there’s that.

And the music, well, whatever you’re into, it’s something to just get you through your day, however that’s going.

Hendrix was one of those you wondered how he would have turned out had he lived. Jim Morrison and The Doors were clearly finished after L.A. Woman, but Hendrix might have made a career clear through the 1970s for his tremendous talent and willingness to explore.

This isn’t so much an exercise in nostalgia as it is noting that, for one narrow window of time within one numerical decade that happened to coincide with The Beatles’ U.S. television debut in 1964 and their dissolution in 1969, a lot came and went. Much was changed forever. Network television went from broadcasting in black-and-white to color, for one. For a fun exercise, consider all the popular television shows that came and went. Some of the best remembered ones, e.g., The Munsters, The Addams Family, Batman, barely lasted two seasons. There was the spy craze, the “camp” fad, all those sci-fi shows. The movies from that time frame are another thread altogether.

Few people seem to remember what a big deal it was for a man to wear his hair any longer than a buzzcut. “Izzat a man or a woman, I cain’t tell! Hyuck!” By 1970, a few brave souls were sporting locks over their ears. I still remember seeing grown men losing their composure at the sound of the most anodyne pop songs on the radio up until 1978.  But everyone else knew at the time these old men were just ridiculous. They were on their way out, thank God, and not a minute too soon.

There was actually a time when the music one listened to and how you wore your hair was a political statement, much like the U.S. flag decals in the curve of the lower left rear windshield that said at once, “I support the war in Vietnam because @#$% communists and you stupid longhair hippies, too.” The sides were squaring off, between the Establishment-worshiping squares and everyone else who was sick of being yelled at by blustering, authoritarian old fools with more skeletons in their closets than clothes.

I’m old enough to remember when wearing an American flag on the butt-pocket of your jeans was an invitation to fight you some PATE-tree-otic Amurricans who didn’t cotton to no disrespect to the ol’ Red, White, and Blue, no sir! Up until about 1974, but that’s just me. And, yes, these same people would be scandalized by the above image. Pornography! On one hand, I could see where they were coming from. On the other, what a sadly skewed sense of priorities. That’s why that attitude died out.

August 1969, as The Beatles wound up their last full-band recording sessions and posed for one last set of publicity shots, as the last of the Star Trek third season reruns broadcast on NBC, as The Who played the entirety of Tommy for their largest audience so far and Jimi Hendrix redefined the “Star Spangled Banner” for a generation defined by electric guitar... fifty years ago was the end of the beginning. 

If people keep coming back to all this, it’s because there hasn’t been a whole hell of a lot else as gobsmackingly original since. Most of your all-time greats of anything are one-offs, and these just happened to one-off all at once. 

It’s nobody’s fault, really. Just the way things happened. It is what it was.

It Was Sixty Years Ago Today

It was only the beginning of the greatest artistic collaboration in Western culture in the last century or three. Attention must be paid. 

July 6 fell on a Sunday 60 years ago. A church in the northern port city of Liverpool, England had an afternoon outdoor party, where they let the young folk play their skiffle music — a kind of rocked-up country sound that was all the rage in England at a time when New York and Los Angeles media didn’t yet possess the means to dictate taste and fashion to every corner of the world. A 15-year old boy mulling around the audience looked up and saw these kids on the stage, looking just as they do in the photo below, taken at that very event. The bandleader was 16-year-old John Lennon (that’s him in the middle, ten long years away from the mutton-chop sideburns and granny glasses of Sgt. Pepper), who lived in the nicer side of town with his aunt because of some family issues. Paul wanted in on the band, so he borrowed a guitar from someone and played “20-Flight Rock” for John. The two got along well enough, so Paul was in, and the most momentous Sunday outdoor church party in modern history came to pass. Sixty years ago today....

So much began right here among these children.

Later, Paul would suggest this kid he rode with on the schoolbus to come in — yeah, he’s only 14 years old, but listen, he plays a mean guitar. John was skeptical, but George Harrison played a notoriously difficult instrumental piece called “Raunchy,” and not only earned his place in the band, but as lead guitarist, as he was demonstrably more skilled and confident in his playing than either John or Paul. (Paul later got stuck playing bass because George was too good not to be on guitar, and bandleader John wasn’t giving up his ax. So Paul took up the bass, developed his own style of playing, and set the example for bass-playing frontmen for half a century on forward.)

I mention all this because one thing all the documentaries and TV specials and retrospectives always fail to get across is how young they were when they all met. They were mere boys, from the not-so-great areas of a not-so-great town, who, running on nothing more than their enthusiasm for playing and singing would go on to become the most influential singers and songwriters of the 20th century, and beyond. And it all started at this church party. Sixty years ago today.

A Few Words on Today's Birthday Boy

George Harrison would be 71 years old today.

Imagine waking up and you’re 21 years old and the lead guitarist for the biggest band in the solar system. That was George Harrison 50 years ago today. Keep in mind that it was just weeks ago his band had assumed ownership of the US—and the world—on The Ed Sullivan Show. Not bad for a kid who drew pictures of guitars while in class and disappointed his parents by slagging off vocational school and joining a band with that smooth-talking older boy he rode the school bus with. (Today that boy is known as “Sir Paul.”)

Portrait of the artist as a young punk. As a council house-
raised son of a bus driver, George Harrison was even more
authentically punk than son-of-foreign-service, upper middle-class
poser Joe Strummer.Yeah, George had that going on, too.

Wrap your head around the fact that George joined John and Paul’s band at age 14, based on the simple fact he could outplay both of the older boys on the guitar. He would later go on to introduce the world to the sitar and the Mellotron, and though he labored in the shadow of two of modern popular music’s all-time greatest songwriters, it was he who wrote Frank Sinatra’s all-time favorite song, “Something.” (In a sour twist, Sinatra believed the song to be written by Lennon and McCartney. Ob-la-di, ob-la-da.)

In later years George would form a band based on an impromptu singalong during the recording a track at Bob Dylan’s Malibu beach home. George would later crow, “I’m in a band with Roy Orbison!” And he was. (Keep in mind the Beatles’ first hit, “Please Please Me,” was John Lennon’s attempt to write a Roy Orbison song. Producer George Martin suggested the band speed the song up, which they did.) George was also in the band with Bob Dylan. And Tom Petty. And the guy from Electric Light Orchestra. The Traveling Wilburys were a supergroup model that’s been imitated, but never successfully, and certainly absent such a cleverly assembled lineup (Dylan and Petty singing backup together was genius). 

Oh, and George also invented the concept of the benefit concert. He got the notoriously cranky Dylan out of semi-retirement to surprise the hell out of everyone and play a set of his classics at the Concert for Bangladesh.

You’d think John Lennon would have been the one who connected with Dylan, but, no. That was George. The man who gave Monty Python millions of dollars so he could see the end of The Life of Brian, because he’d read the partially completed script and thought the concept hilarious. Of all the Beatles, George had the most fascinating network of friends and co-workers.

George has been gone for going on 13 years now and it’s just as well he beat the rush. The surviving giants have shrunk in their old age, as old people are wont to do. He lived a hell of a life in a hell of an age. Today I raise a toast, not to absent friends, but to missed glory.

Of course, as his bandmate John pointed out, we’ll always have the records. This is my favorite George Harrison song from his time with The Beatles. It opens with an even more jarring guitar than “A Hard Day’s Night,” then gets psychedelic with the Mellotron and more layered guitars. “It’s All Too Much” is one of The Beatles’ most delightfully weird recordings—and it was one of the throwaway tunes that ended up on the original Yellow Submarine soundtrack.



Happy Birthday, George. You are missed.

Late Night Thoughts on Having Watched Another Cheesy Beatles Special

About a CBS TV special called The Night That Changed America, and realizing how lame everything is one half-century down the road. So this is the future. Oh, well.

I didn’t stick around for all of it. Her fabulous foam and fireworks-shooting fun bags be damned, I was not under any circumstances going to be in the room when Katy Perry butchered “Yesterday.” It was bad enough seeing how awful Annie Lennox looked doing “The Fool on the Hill,” and hearing how sadly shot her own voice is. 

Cheesy Beatles tribute specials seem to be a staple of Sunday winter nights—I remember an especially awful one hosted by Tony Randall in 1978—but this one was especially special, as it marked the 50th anniversary of the night that sold a million guitars, when The Beatles first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Sir Paul and Ringo were there, reminding me of George Carlin’s acid observation that “the wrong two Beatles died.” No, seriously, good on Sir Paul and Ringo for not getting shot or dying of throat cancer. But watching all these top o’ the line professionals embarrass themselves trying to belt out John’s vocals and or play George’s guitar lines only pointed up how much these men are missed.

There is nothing quite like being so forcibly reminded that a), you’re old, and, b), it’s over. The Truly Greats have left the building. Poor Adam Levine was forced to reveal how thin his voice is compared to John Lennon’s, and how tinny his band Maroon 5 sounded trying to pull off “Ticket to Ride.” Watching Joe Walsh (and good on him for not killing himself, too) struggle with George’s simple guitar parts on “Something” was painful.

The best part was watching Ringo having the time of his life playing the crowd as he sang “Yellow Submarine.” Naturally, Paul had to murder “Hey Jude” one...more...time! and I was disappointed to see Ringo backed up on drums by the same big guy Paul used for his band at the Super Bowl in 2006. 

That was why I’d watched, incidentally. I wanted to see Paul and Ringo play together again. A couple of old guys singing the old songs. And that’s pretty much what I got. Hooray for old guys—but especially for the young lions they once were.

In this photo from the TV special I am reminded of the Great
Bukowski’s inquiry regarding literary writers like himself
and Hemingway: “Where are our replacements?”

We observe a half century since a TV event changed a culture, and are thus reminded nothing like this will ever happen again.

At least Paul and Ringo and all the Hollywood people had a good time. The best I can say about it is it’s a relief to get back to my own keyboard and get back to work.

It Was 50 Years Ago Today

It was a Saturday, just like today. George came down sick, so he was back at the hotel recuperating, hoping to get better in time for that crucial Ed Sullivan Show appearance the next day. A hell of a thing, your band’s second day in a major market it needs to crack—the USA!—and you come down sick.

So John, Paul, and Ringo went out for a photo shoot in Central Park, somehow evading the crowds that had swarmed them since landing the day before. Look across the pond at the building in the near background on the right, nearly obscured behind the bare limbs of the trees. Sixteen years later the man on the far left, John Lennon, would be shot dead in the courtyard of that apartment building known as the Dakota.

Of course, they couldn’t know that. Just as they couldn’t know 50 years ago to this day that they stood on the eve of making history. Here, their lead guitarist is sick. they’re making the most of it enjoying the sights of New York, they’re hoping he gets better in time for the big show tomorrow night. History has all the time in the world to catch up to them.

Ob-la-di, ob-la-da. La-la how the life goes on....

Old, Flat Pop: A Belated Rant on the 2014 Grammys

The Grammys kicked off a week which included the President’s State of the Union address and ended in a fat mixed bag of a Super Bowl. I know, it was a week ago, it’s over, no one cares. Still, there’s something about it bothering me. I’ll try and make this quick.

One of the Big Deals going down at the Grammys this year is Sir Paul McCartney nominated in five categories—and winning all of them. The Lifetime Achievement was a gimme and maybe 30 years late at that, but the one that got me was the award he won for that song he did with the survivors of Nirvana, “Cut Me Some Slack.” This thing got a universal “Cram It” on the “Crank It or Cram It” segment of my local metal station when it debuted, but it won the Grammy for Best Song or whatever.

“Cut Me Some Slack” was a very enthusiastically played mediocre song with tossed-off lyrics. I’d completely forgotten about seeing this performed on Saturday Night Live last year until hearing it won the Grammy last week. I expect no one will remember this song until they’re reminded of it reading this post. Maybe I should apologize, but it’s really a harmless thing. You honestly will forget it all over again once you’ve moved on.

Keep in mind the Grammy Awards supposedly represent the best of the best of the music industry. But did it ever?

Be it noted for the record that I stand second to no one in my love for The Beatles. Paul McCartney’s natural talent for melody and songwriting—his very presence and enthusiasm—were integral to the greatness we’re still talking about one-half century later. That’s a natural fact. 

What’s also a natural fact is McCartney’s prodigious songwriting skills evaporated with the end of his band Wings sometime in 1979 or 1980. Since his first wife Linda passed away in 1998 he’s evolved smoothly into the jovial elder statesman he is today, playing his hits of yesteryear, making us go “awww!” every time he releases something new, even though no one plays it on the radio, nor buys it.

Call this period his “Sir Paul” phase. One wishes him all the best, it’s wonderful knowing he’s doing what he loves, etc., but let’s be honest. No one has bought his last two dozen or so albums. They get lots of love in the media, but they don’t chart. So why are we giving them awards like  they’re the best thing to happen to music all year? Because that’s what the Grammys are supposed to represent, right? The best in music?

Sir Paul, ironically, reminds us that the greatest lesson of all the great lessons The Beatles taught us is to go out on top. Make your Abbey Road and walk away leaving your audience wondering what might have been. (What most certainly would have been if they’d stayed together: a sorry bunch of old has-beens riding on a half-century of old glories, like the once fearsome, now merely quaint Rolling Stones.)

Compounding the irony is something I’ve always said regarding awards of any sort, my bunker-buster missile of a rhetorical question being: “How many Grammys did The Beatles win?”

There’s always some smug prat who will immediately reply, “Two! Best song, ‘Michelle,’ 1965; Best Album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967!” 

A buzzing/razzing noise should interrupt this prat before you scream, “Wrong! The correct answer to ‘How many Grammys did The Beatles win?’ is ‘Who cares?’ The true Immortals don’t do it for the awards.” As plain ol’ Paul McCartney he was too busy making pop history to worry about shiny dust catchers on the mantel.

As for the rest of the show, it hardly bears talking about. No one will be talking about these “artists” one-half century down the road. 

Man, this is one hard winter.

John Lennon’s Final Tour de Force

After 40 years of listening to their music I can say I am not a mere fan of The Beatles, but a student. I understand them better now as four distinct individuals who were bigger than the sum of their parts, but in the earliest years I was a John partisan. 

John Lennon was the difficult one. The hard-drinking, sharp-tongued, not-so-cute one. The older boy Paul and George had to impress to get into what started out as his band. The bomb-thrower who dared note that his band was bigger than Jesus on a broadcast interview. That gifted-mad composer who gave the world “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “I Am the Walrus,” and “Revolution 9.” John was the natural choice for a budding young iconoclast like myself.

Christ! You know it ain’t easy....

Even that curious business with Yoko Ono—how, by all the natural laws in the universe, does a wealthy, famous Man With Options become such an abject emotional slave to a woman who is so far from conventionally beautiful? The man even defied rock-star logic. 

I considered it the rankest injustice that John never was as popular than Paul—and it did not escape my notice that most people didn’t even think about John until after he was shot in December 1980. Over the years, however, it’s become easier for me to understand and accept that there are good, very reasonable reasons John never cracked the top of the charts with the ease Paul did. 

John’s solo career had its moments, but it was never entirely about the music. It was about exorcising demons (“Mother”), and making Grand Statements (“I Don’t Want To Be a Soldier,” “Imagine,” “Power to the People,” “Working Class Hero,” etc.) when it wasn’t about professing his love for Yoko. By name, God help him!

John wrote some fine anthems for the ages after 1969. But it’s not summer-fun sunshine, hangin’ by the pool, throwin’ the Frisbee, drivin’ down the boulevard, makin’ out with your girlfriend music like Paul’s was. 

That’s not to say Lennon wrote bad music. It was different music. It seems to me that there were a lot of air bubbles in his creative line as the years went by, however, and I can’t help wondering if Lennon wasn’t running out of creative mojo early on. It’s been noted that, late in The Beatles’ life as a band, that John had complained to Paul that he couldn’t keep up with Paul’s output. (To be fair, I think Paul was finished as of 1979. Once Wings was done, so was his songwriting.) 

Released 29 October 1973, though I mostly
associate it with the Christmas season that year.

John had one last burst of Beatles-worthy brilliance, though, and that was the title track/lead single from his 1973 album Mind Games. It sounded at once bombastic and dreamlike through a single speaker on the AM radio when it first came out. The 2010 remaster is a revelation on the headphones. Beneath the three-note octave-spanning riff on the strings that anchors the song are a reggae guitar, a very McCartney-esque bass, and any number of odd things going on. 

If nothing else, I’m reminded that John Lennon, even if he had never formed The Beatles, would still have been one of the greatest rock vocalists of all time. He blew us all away in 1963 with “Twist and Shout.” Ten years later he sings “Mind Games” and takes it to another level entirely. Listen to what John does with the word “love” near the end of the coda. Don’t try this at home, kids. Musically, creatively, and artistically, John Lennon never got any better after this. 

The Singing Dead

While watching a herd of zombies go by, you see an old friend shambling and moaning among them, and you say, “Hey! You’re still here?”

Henry Rollins sorta-kinda reviews David Bowie’s latest album in his LA Weekly column. I say “ sorta-kinda” because he doesn’t speak of individual tracks. Rollins was mostly struck by the impression of “defeatist bullshit” he got from the album art, which is the cover of Bowie’s 1977 classic “Heroes” with a large square cut out of the middle, the word “Heroes” crossed out at the top, and “The Next Day” printed in the white space of the cutout square. 

The closest he gets to talking about the music is here:

The Next Day has a studious emptiness to it that reminds me of 2003’s Reality. It is musically dense and lyrically dark, but lacks the cool distance of Heathen. The production is solid to the point of being uninteresting. The songs are so competently tracked, it sounds like no one in the band has ever met. There is an after-the fact feel to this album that I have heard on later albums by The Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney. They are all great artists, but their records often sound like they are just putting in time at the mill.

Bowie has ceased to risk injury and now issues albums, however sporadic, from a safe place. That being said, The Next Day is definitely worth checking out.

There is a wealth of issues in the above passage I would like to address. First, and with all respect to Mr. Rollins, the only reason to check out Bowie’s new album is to find the One Song worth keeping. If it’s there, that is. Unless you have multiple sources of income like Mr. Rollins you’re best advised to find a stream of the album, find the miracle, then download that one and only song.

Heathen and Reality were notable only for the miraculous existence of one “keeper” song on each. Heathen had Bowie’s cover of The Pixie’s “Cactus,” and Bowie’s driving arrangement and powerful voice (poor Black Francis never had a chance) makes Bowie’s the definitive version. Reality had the pounding, rhythmic hook and catchy sing-along chorus of “New Killer Star”

The rest is forgettable. Not the kind of stuff that makes you leap from the couch screaming to get that abomination off your speakers. You want to like these songs. You hear what might be a promising hook. 

We never make ignition, though. “No life, no gamble,” as the Great Bukowski observed of mediocre literature, and hold that thought. These songs are inert matter. You don’t hate them. But it’s nothing you want to sit through again. Life is short, and this thing actually sucked a little of it out of you for wasting your time, not even being worthy of hate.

“Bowie has ceased to risk injury and now issues albums, however sporadic, from a safe place.” Again, with respect to Mr. Rollins, that’s not it. I don’t hear anyone risking metaphorical injury on Ziggy Stardust or Aladdin Sane when Bowie was at his peak, and certainly not on the fabled Berlin trilogy, which to me was a nice, if spotty postscript to a run of solid albums from Hunky Dory to Station to Station.

It’s the songs. It drives me insane with frustration that people don’t recognize this. It was the primary lesson the Beatles taught us. The Beatles would have faded with their own fashion if all they had was haircuts and boots and collarless suits. None of them were virtuoso musicians. Whatever edginess they had came from reaching into the past for musical ideas, such as the major 6th chord that they ended “She Loves You” on, which producer George Martin initially derided as “too Andrews Sisters” and asked them to leave off. 

But they kept that musical anachronism in service of the song. And it worked, not for its own sake, but because “She Loves You” was a great song. One great song out of many. Thank goodness the Beatles quit when they did. Which, by the way, is the second lesson we get from them. If they had stayed together throughout the 1970s and beyond, the quality would have suffered.

There comes a point that, no matter what your level of genius and creativity are, you run out of juice. We don’t like to admit this but it’s true. David Bowie’s music doesn’t suffer because he doesn’t “take chances,” whatever that means. It’s not the production being so “solid to the point of being uninteresting.” I’m not the least bit interested in the production of “Rebel, Rebel” on Diamond Dogs or anything else I dig. It’s the hook, the groove, the roar of blood—the artist’s and yours—in the ears you can only get from the songs. Bowie’s later albums suffer because he doesn’t have anything as cool as “TVC 15” or “Suffragette City” to work with. He ain’t writin’ ‘em like that anymore. He can’t. 

I have a modest proposal: let’s see if we can get a satellite radio channel for our old heroes. We’ll call it Not Dark Yet after the 1997 Bob Dylan song. (”It’s not dark yet/But it’s getting there.”) It’ll play all the tracks from after the sell-by dates of the artists, which should be a fun game all to itself. For instance, do we start playing McCartney post-1986 or post 1980? Did the Rolling Stones cease to be relevant after 1981’s Tattoo You or 1989’s Steel Wheels?

Rock stars in their prime are on fire. Once the creative
mojo runs out, they’re no more than ashen husks
walking without the sense to fall down.

We’ll have all the latest by McCartney, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, James Taylor, the Cars, Steve Miller, Devo, with the modern Frankensteinian reconstitutions of Lynyrd Skynyrd and suchlike to fill things out. We can listen to this with the same sort of duty we have when we visit our aging relatives at the rest home.

And when we click it off—because no one can do this all day, if for a half-hour—we’ll swear to ourselves we’ll never let this happen to us. To become an empty shell beneath time-shriveled skin cranking out stuff that sounds like us, but isn’t. Because at one time we were alive, we couldn’t help but strike sparks when our fingers took to our chosen instrument. But to live and breathe and to not strike those sparks...you can’t help wondering if the unlucky ones who succumbed to overdose, murder or suicide were that unlucky. 

Entropy is a fact of existence; everyone of us is born to grow old and die. It’s that long, slow fade before the end we’ve yet to deal with. Bowie is finished. So is Paul McCartney. So are Sir Mick and the Stones. They simply haven’t gotten around to dying yet. Which makes listening to them play really awkward. My point is we should acknowledge that.

If we really want to depress ourselves, let’s ask ourselves the question the Great Bukowski asked in regard to himself and Hemingway: Where are the replacements? 

Apocalypse? You’re soaking in it.

This is one of the standout tracks from what may as well have been Bob Dylan’s last album, as far as I’m concerned. The sentiments expressed in the song articulate the general theme of 1997’s Time Out of Mind — and, most conveniently, this post.