OK Boomer Gets His Groove On

Shower thoughts while leaning back in my desk chair, a schizoid warm/cool/warm again spring breeze blowing over me from the open window in the Season of the Plague Panic.

Does anyone remember when they were young and when asked their age, would say, “__ and a half,” as if that half-year meant something? It was something kids I knew did up until age 10, if not a little earlier, in the late 1960s. I have no idea if it’s something children still do. I don’t recall hearing any of that from my own when they were small in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

I passed the halfway mark of my 59th year earlier this month. Lord willing and the Chinese Kung Flu don’t git me, I’ll be 60 years old soon. Although I was born late into the generational frame known as the Baby Boomers and identify more with Generation X in values and outlook, I’m old, and all old people are Boomers. The science, as they say, is settled.

What more Boomer thing, after all, to seek out and purchase most of the Creedence Clearwater Revival catalog on compact disc as I did for my birthday last autumn? 

The first four albums, which arrived the day after my 58th birthday. Cosmo’s Factory, the most popular and highly regarded of the discography, will be added later, but for my money Willy and the Poor Boys on the far right was the band’s masterpiece.

I was listening to “Sweet Hitchhiker” from the 20 Greatest Hits CD (the only CCR disc most people have—hey, 20 songs, and you know ‘em all!) sometime in September and I was put out by the awful sound. Didn’t they make remasters of these? Thank God, they did, back in 2007. There was a box set, out of print, naturally, and, oddly, that’s the only way you’d get a remaster of the infamous final album, Mardi Gras, also known as “John Fogerty’s Revenge,” which still has two of Fogerty’s best songs on there, “Someday Never Comes” and “Sweet Hitchhiker.” I solved that issue by downloading remasters of these tracks in mono. I had no idea people were still recording in mono after 1968—and these tracks are from an album released in 1972!—but there it is.

Anyway, I got all of them except for Pendulum, the penultimate album, and Mardi Gras. I might yet pull the trigger on them, if only to round out the catalog, but I’m happy with what I have. It’s a rich treasury of hard rocking Americana practically invented by a former National Guardsman who declared to his brother, “I am not going back to that car wash!” when his leadership of the band was challenged. John Fogerty was/is the genuine article. Unlike what passes for Great Artists today (in the tradition of those horrible singer-songwriters of the 1970s, and hold that thought), he did not grow up in upper middle-class wealth and comfort. 

I ordered my copy of Cosmo’s Factory in December. It arrived on top of a 28 lb.of cat kibble. I’ve been practicing avoiding going out long before it was cool.

I’m only two discs away from the complete CCR studio discography. The deep cuts on these albums were all I ever dreamed of and more. Such an astounding run of creativity in four years. Yes, four years.

Which brings me to the Never-Ending Funeral for John Prine, the Wuhan Deathflu’s most (sorta) famous victim. Most people didn’t know who John Prine was or what he’d done until last week, and those who did, for the most part, didn’t know he was still alive until he wasn’t.

Prine went to folk music school, which sounds as bourgie as it gets to me, but he did at least do some time humping sacks of mail for the U.S. Postal Service, where he famously wrote all of the songs on his first album. If he was faking the empathy demonstrated towards the characters in his songs, as Bruce Springsteen did, the Prine, like Springsteen, did a master-class job of it, and it’s just as well that Springsteen should appoint himself Mourner in Chief.

What gets me is I’m seeing one video after another posted to my Facebook feed by people doing one tribute after another. I suppose an algorithm thought I’d be interested. No problem. Except each and every one of these people paying tribute to the late, great songwriter is...I’m not sure how to put it. Let’s just say they have never met, nor would ever go out of their way to meet the kind of people John Prine saw on his postal routes. They’re of the untouchable caste to these Brahmin singers, fit only as pitiable subjects for song, sung with as much earnest poignancy as can be mustered for maximum virtue-signalling points.

“Priced for the PEOPLE!”...the kind who think nothing of blowing nearly $80 on a CD that hasn’t had a remastering since 1990. They’d do better to spend $449.00 to hear sad songs about poor working people on vinyl.

With respect to Prine, who truly was a fine songwriter worthy of the accolades, my inner Holden Caulfield rages at the reminder of how shamelessly phony so many our much-lauded singer-songwriters are. Again, you’d have never known Prine was alive at all until all these sad-faced clowns in their boutique bespoke clown shoes showed up to hang their brand on his aw-shucks Regular Guy ethos when he passed.

With all the notices of yet one more Sensitive Girl Singer from the mean streets of McMansionland doing the umpteenth hundredth cover of “Angel from Montgomery” it’s past time I called on Facebook to block these notifications as “Irrelevant.” Which, sadly, they rather are. 

I’m not of their caste either, just another old white guy in flyover country. Don’t I have a meth addiction to attend to? (No “Sam Stone” weepies for you toothless trash!) Therefore....

Rip the tracks, make multiple backups, and keep the discs themselves in a cool, dark place. Unless you don’t care about someone else taking away your favorites on the streaming channel because news has come to light that someone heard the bass player say a bad word in 1985.

By way of rinsing the metaphorical dirt from my handling of the above subject, I turn to a most fortuitous recent acquisition. It’s especially fortuitous because box sets don’t last so long; when they’re gone, they’re gone. Fortunately, the entirety of The Cars’ discography was still available to me as of last month. This is six albums for the price of two high-end in-demand CDs, or three regular (and rapidly disappearing) catalog CDs. They appeared within mere days, too, despite having ordered these a week after the onset of the Chinese Bat Soup Plague Panic.

The Cars’ discography covers a full decade from 1978 through 1987, plus the surprisingly good Move Like This, released in 2011. Now I have them all. I’d always wondered what Heartbeat City and Door to Door sounded like, as I’d found The Cars’ mid-1980s output to sound weirdly dated, as most ‘80s music sounded to me. That sound was already going out of style in 1987 by the time their last album came out, so you can literally hear the end coming. 

You also hear it beginning. Here’s something most people never realize: Elvis Costello’s classic first album came out in 1977, the year before The Cars’ debut. Debbie Harry and Blondie exploded all over the radio with “Heart of Glass” the same time “Just What I Needed” went into rotation on the radio. Again, we’re talking 1977, 1978. The Cars’ sophomore set, Candy-O, which might as well be the second disc in a double-album with their first, dominated most of the college parties I attended in the autumn of 1979.

Yet all of the above musical outfits, despite breaking in the mid- to late 1970s, are thought of exclusively as ‘80s bands. They were considered “New Wave” when they started—The Cars, with their mix of heavy, shreddy guitar and funhouse synth, particularly embodied the genre—yet that scene was over and forgotten by 1981. Shake It Up, coming on the heels of the third album speed-bump Panorama, arrived just in time to send it all off—also, just in time for MTV, when it was dedicated to music videos.

Their biggest success was with 1984’s Heartbeat City and “Drive,” the song that I grew quickly tired of upon moving to Atlanta that summer. That particular album translated well onto the then-new “compact laser disc” as the contemporary rock radio station touted it.

It was another three years before Door to Door, but aside from the times having changed, and poised to changed more, with the arrival of Guns ‘n Roses debut album and the precursors to grunge beginning to make noise, it’s easy to hear everyone losing their enthusiasm on the album. There are moments that recall the old days, such as the radio hit, “Tonight She Comes,” but as the tracks wear on it’s clear it’s over.

It had been ten years, and although it was an uneven run, The Cars had their own sound and personality and did much to improve the state of radio back when that was something we listened to. 

My old Sonic Stage platform may not be the greatest, but I’m used to it. Note the duplicate albums in The Cars section at top. Those are the HDCDs that came out many years back that some say are the best remasters.

 

It stands to reason that if I’m old enough to have seen child stars like Drew Barrymore and Christina Ricci grow into buxom sex bombs and fade away into middle age and menopause, I should see entire careers come and go. Between Creedence and The Cars and all my other old friends from way back in the day, I’m keeping myself entertained.

Are Compact Discs Going the Way of the 8-Track?

“Doin’ me a concern,” as the meme goes.

I moved from Columbia, SC, to the big city of Atlanta in mid-July 1984, hoping to turn my recently acquired college degree into an adult paycheck. One of the rock/pop stations there boasted of its (severely limited) playlist “from the compact laser disc.” Compact. LASER. (ooo-weee!) Disc. Small and shiny silver, they made the big black vinyl LP records, even the picture discs (a brief fad) look cumbersome and antiquated. 

No more going over your records with a corduroy dust wand or whatever they called those things. No more degaussing the static. (There were actually little pistols you pointed at the record to do this. Squeeze the outsized trigger slowly, then let it spring back slowly.) No more of that snap, crackle, and pop you got regardless of how hard you worked at cleaning the thing. 

And CDs would last forever! You could never wear them out, like you could the best cared-for vinyl you were dumb enough to wear out beneath a needle. 

This was all hype, of course. The auditory quality and volume levels of those first digital remasters were all over the place, depending on who did the transfer of analog to digital. With few exceptions—The Doors’ and The Grateful Dead’s catalogs are the most notable in my experience—CDs made in the 1980s through the early 1990s are best avoided. The sound is subpar, especially in regards to tape hiss that was often carelessly allowed into the mixes.

The discs weren’t indestructible, either. Compact discs might not melt in a hot car, but the heat could cause a reaction in the chemicals holding the plastic laminate to the microgrooved tinfoil and render the disc unreadable. I didn’t start buying CDs until 1990, and I’ve noted that in the not-quite 30 years since then, some will not play on some systems. My computer’s Blu-ray drive can’t read them. That chemical I spoke of degrades over time, depending upon how well you store your CDs.

They were great while they lasted, though. They got the sound and everything else right just in time for streaming to kill the format—or, rather, give the people who take our money for the music an excuse not to permit us our own hardcopies. It doesn’t matter. I’ll hang onto mine, and get what I can while I still can.

Doors and Dylan, with even more Dylan on the rack behind me. How boomer is this?

We bought our first CD player in the summer of 1991. It had a cassette you could load six CDs into, and shuffle function. This enhanced my music listening experience immensely. For one, I could listen under my favorite circumstance, namely, inebriation, and not risk damaging vinyl discs and record player needles alike trying to find a song. Also, with all my songs on shuffle, I could get as close as I could to my perfect radio station. I always liked making mixtapes with juxtapositions of The Go Go’s and Black Sabbath, for example. Here, a computer chip was doing it for me.

That smug proto-hipsters hated them made me love them all the more. I find the triumphalism of the “Vinyl wins!” crowd pathetic inasmuch as it’s been over one-hundred years since the invention of the phonograph. The technology should have improved beyond needle-to-groove. We need a more stable medium with which to store our music. The fire at the warehouse in Los Angeles in which many precious master tapes were destroyed demonstrated the importance of getting the best digital imaging of everything out there, and making copies far and wide. 

As it is, I need to make a checklist of albums I’d like on disc. If I outlive the discs themselves, that will be fine, especially at my age. I’ll be ripping them for maximum quality, of course. But it’s nice having those little shiny round things around. When you can find them, that is. Many all-time great albums have already disappeared into either trendy vinyl or streaming. It’s a matter of time before disc players become impossible to get even for custom-built personal computers.

It’s the twenty-twenties, baby. Whatcha gonna do? Adapt and overcome, as always.

Colorado Man Gets His Werewolves Direct From London

A short story long on lessons of our changing cultural and economic landscape. Also, werewolves and headless Thompson gunners.

There’s a months-old draft of a post describing my personal history with the compact disc as the medium goes slowly extinct. Recently, I had an experience ordering one that I thought would make for a fine anecdote within the longer piece. However, that piece is too long and has languished too long already. I might as well attempt making those same points here.

Ever since I realized last summer that compact discs, even copies of recent album remasters from mere months before, were becoming harder if not impossible to acquire—my copy of The Cars’ Shake It Up remaster from a year back came from Germany!—I’ve made a point of keeping a lookout for the now-classic (might as well call it “classical”) rock/pop albums from my youth. For some reason it occurred to me to look up Warren Zevon’s Excitable Boy on Amazon, and I learned that a 2007 Rhino remaster was available for five dollars and change.

It wasn’t on Prime, though. Why? This is the album with “Werewolves of London” on it; even people who didn’t grow up in the 1970s know and love this song. Still, at that price, and with a stack of discount points burning a hole in my digital pocket, I added it to an order that included a calendar, an aluminum reusable pump-spray bottle, and a four-pack of compressed air in cans.

With my rewards points added in the cost for the CD was zeroed out on the overall manifest. That was the good news. The bad news was the CD was shipping from overseas, and was not expected to arrive until the 27th. I was ordering this on the 9th.

I couldn’t complain, as what little I was paying for shipping was also zeroed out. Also, consider this—it came well over a week early, taking all of eight days for a super-discounted compact disc to leave a warehouse in merrie olde England, cross the Atlantic, and then 2/3rds of the United States, through a mountain pass to my little potato farming community in southern Colorado. I never take such wonders for granted. 

Such a strange thing, though. I probably could have found Zevon’s Excitable Boy in Walmart or Best Buy where they still sell them, with an emphasis on Dad rock for cheap. I got the first Boston album and Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell that way. It’s hard to believe there wasn’t a single warehouse in all of North America that didn’t have Warren Zevon’s best-selling album, with a song that was heard as recently as a 16 January episode of the television show Supernatural. (Two werewolves dance to it.) 

There it is, though. Thank you, Amazon UK for coming through. Given the vanishing medium in favor of all things streaming, I’m grateful I could get it at all.

Neil Peart, Percussionist, Lyricist, Essayist, 1952-2020

I know it’s crass to rate such things, but Mr. Peart is the biggest one to die in a while.

Link to original Tweet, in case it still works.

If all you knew about Neil Peart was from the write-ups in online newspapers you would think, oh, a drummer for a band. At least he didn’t overdose. That Peart wasn’t a boozy, druggy mess is one thing. 

What’s left out is that Neil Peart was not merely a drummer, but a percussionist admired by none other than master jazz drummer Buddy Rich. Peart was in the top-tier among his fellow instrumentalists, a peer only to Bill Bruford, Carl Palmer, and the late John Bonham. Peart’s drums did more than keep the beat, they spoke their own version of the story in the song.

A story, incidentally, he wrote. Another omission in the obituaries is what put Rush over the top as a band, namely, Peart’s thoughtful and erudite lyrics. Peart was not wailing for love lost in his songs (although I’m sure he turned out one or two among the dozens he helped write). He was a storyteller who knew how to finesse a complex line. 

Peart also kept an entertaining blog of his motorcycle adventures taken while the band was on tour. If he wasn’t the last man of music and letters to pass away, he was among the last. Rest in peace, Neil Peart. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Random Notes I Made on Music While Drunk

First in a series? I dunno. I’m just going through old journals and picking up stuff. Also, scraps of paper with bold proclamations boldly scribbled in multi-colored felt-tip markers, from back in the day when I took more from the beer than it did me.

I used to be dead-set against the idea of death camps. Reading music magazines in the mid- to late-1990s cured me of that sentiment. To blazes with any given yappy little nuisance insisting I trash all of my lifetime favorites in deference to the Almighty New Thing Ascendant, in this case, the 10,000 names of electronica, now EDM, soon to become synthwave. Ten years earlier I was hating the punks for that same eliminationist Year Zero attitude. All such people deserve a “Holiday in Cambodia.” 

Seriously, how about I like what I like, and let me make up my own mind on whether I like this stuff you like? We could agree to disagree. The best music, like the best comfort facilities, is always in the privacy of your own home.

I’ve noticed the above sentiment is still alien to people even older than my developmentally arrested self. The ride never stops.

******* 

I realize most people can’t or won’t remember it as such but post-Nirvana radio was a freaking joy to listen to in the Clinton years. It was a Silver Age of Popular Radio, much like the Golden Age of the mid-1970s, when you could hear a song representing any given popular genre. Grunge, power pop, acoustic pop, diva singers, synth bands, and even the big band/swing revival and the Latin-tinged stuff all over 1999, closing out a decade that started with a surge in New Age ambient pop and Gregorian chants. It was all there.

* * * * * * *

The guy who sang lead for the 70s R&B group The Spinners was the William Shatner of R&B singers. This occurs to me while listening to “Then Came You,” the collaboration they did with Dionne Warwick in 1975. It’s not the cadence, it’s the attitude. It takes a certain type to pull it off.

* * * * * * *

The Cardigans’ “Cloudy Sky” from Emmerdale recalls Frank Zappa’s “Peaches en Regalia.” Nice trick for this Swedish power pop outfit.

I would know something about Frank Zappa. Among others.

Returning to the present day, I’m enjoying my new music setup. It’s quite something to be able to throw complete albums at a playlist—a three terabyte hard drive provides options a single gigabyte MiniDisc cannot— and decide which of the deep cuts are just too awful to be borne. In some cases, I’ve left off the obvious hits, along with a lot of songs I’ve been listening to for years and years and needed a break from years ago already, lest I begin to hate them.

I’m hearing new songs by old favorites, and it turns out the best of these old favorites can’t go wrong. It’s energizing to be excited about music again after so long. I might have to write some more on this later.

Where two complete albums by 1970s’ outift Big Star meet the nigh-complete discography of Cocteau Twins. (Cocteau Twins’ first album is just too hard on the ears.)

The Passion of Sgt. Pepper

A landmark popular music album reconsidered over one half-century later. When what’s taken as your best is really the beginning of the end.

On 1 June (2 June in the U.S.) 1967, The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. As this album with the colorfully striking and instantly iconic cover appeared after a relatively long, quiet stretch after calling it quits on years of touring, Sgt. Pepper was considered a comeback album. Strange as it may seem to us in the distant galaxy of the early 21st century, but it had been over three years since the band had appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, and in the hurried-up world of the emergent global popular culture of the mid- to late 1960s, The Beatles were already considered old hat and on the way out.

As the album was called Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and as Paul McCartney was hyping it as The Beatles pretending to be another band entirely, the album is also considered the first “reinvention,” or rebranding of a popular music act—and, given the circumstances, just in the nick of time. As always, to fully appreciate this requires an understanding of the way things were when world superstars like The Beatles were a brand new phenomenon.  Consider the world of February 1964, when “the loveable moptops” in matching suits played on Ed Sullivan, versus the world of June 1967. Google the images. 

Hint: They looked nothing like this three years ago, not even the year before.

Now realize that, with what most critics consider The Beatles’ peak as a band, they had all of two years, two months, and 22 days to go until they were over. The last time the four men would be all together in one place was for the final promotional photo shoot at John Lennon’s Tittenhurst mansion on 22 August 1969. They had just exhausted their last bit of tolerance for one another on their last album, Abbey Road, finished just days before. Look at those photos and flash back two years before, then three years before that. It’s curiously apropos seeing that black-and-white world turn into fuzzy color. (Coincidentally, The Beatles’ previous album, Revolver, had a black-and-white art motif versus Sgt. Pepper’s blasts of blues, pinks, reds, greens, etc.)

I disagree with the generally accepted notion that Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was The Beatles’ peak. All the hype stripped away, Sgt. Pepper was a better-than-average Paul McCartney album with very special guests and the most painfully mediocre songs of his Beatles career. 

But it was so well-produced! Ahead of its time! Revolutionary! 

Please. “Fixing a Hole”? “Lovely Rita”? 

“When I’m Sixty-Four,” while cute, is yet another one of Paul’s “rooty-toot songs” as described by producer George Martin, and more scornfully as “granny music” by George Harrison. When John Lennon was asked what his contribution to the song was in his final interview for Playboy magazine, he sniffed that such a thing would never occur to him. (The song was indeed all Paul’s, as he’d composed “When I’m Sixty-Four” when he was 16 and still living at home.) The best I can say for it is it’s a relief following the tedium of George Harrison’s twangy-dangy, boop-bop-bop of “Within You Without You.” Finally, something with a melody!

A somewhat deceiving image. George was famously bored throughout these sessions. Ringo had so little to do he learned to play chess to pass the time. They were no longer four guys learning songs to play for a show. It was more like two, sometimes three guys seeing how much studio jiggery-pokery they could load up their own songs with. They still had many classics to record, but it would only get worse from here.

Imagine if the quasi-metal stomp of “It’s All Too Much,” recorded during the Pepper sessions, but discarded for 1968’s Yellow Submarine soundtrack, had opened side two instead. I imagine a much better album. Even John Lennon’s contributions, aside from “Lucy in the Sky,”  “Good Morning, Good Morning” and the much ballyhooed (because much produced) “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” seemed forced to me. (The White Album, in which they practically all made solo tracks, is where Lennon would really shine in this declining phase of the band.)

Yes, Sgt. Pepper had “With a Little Help from My Friends,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” and the greatest John Lennon and Paul McCartney collaboration to end them all, “A Day in the Life,” but this album was the beginning of the end. The Beatles’ last album as a cohesive band was Revolver. At the beginning of June 1967 the band was no longer touring, founder John was psychologically checked out as leader, and Paul was much too eager to take over. With the band soon to lose the guidance of manager Brian Epstein, as of June first, The Beatles had all of two years, two months, and 22 days left as a working entity.

I know I’ve mentioned that fact already.  My contrarian take on one of their most iconic albums aside, I simply can’t get over how much quality work did get produced, and over such a short, febrile period of changes in fashion and attitude. We’ll never see such times again, let alone such a band.