The word is about, there’s something evolving
Whatever may come, the world keeps revolving
They say the next big thing is here
That the revolution’s near
But to me, it seems quite clear
That it’s all just a little bit of history repeating
Ray Charles Robinson singing a Leon Russell song in 1999, in Frankfurt Germany. He was about 70 years old then. He hadn’t lost anything off his fastball.
There’s a convergence of material and audience and performer on display that’s pretty rare. You can hear a pin drop while he’s singing. You couldn’t hear a plane land when he’s finished.
Little Village. It only lasted a year or two in the nineties, and then disbanded. The songs sound a little bit too much like a committee wrote them. But I’d be hard pressed to come up with more firepower on a stage than:
John Hiatt (guitar and vocals)
Ry Cooder (guitar and vocals)
Nick Lowe (bass and vocals)
Jim Keltner (drums)
In music, the total has to be more than the sum of the parts, I guess.
This is the greatest concert I’ve ever heard of. It makes Woodstock look like Monday night in a Chinese restaurant lounge in Milford, Mass. Don’t ask me how I know what that’s like.
This video gets pulled from YouTube faster than I can keep up with it. The video quality in this one is set on Etch-A-Sketch through a periscope, but you get the idea. The whole thing is sublime.
The main performers are a spoof. More to the point, they are a metaspoof. There’s layers to it. They are pretending to be Russians who are pretending to be American. They’re actually Finnish. If you know anything about Finland, you know how extraordinary this performance is. The concert in the video is from 1993. Think of that. Some Finns in a band called Sleepy Sleepers started mocking Mockba when the Soviet bear starting losing its fastball. Not long after, the Berlin wall came down and the world was a better place for everyone, especially Russians.
Finns and Russians fought some wars, I tell you what. What you’re watching is the implacable becoming placable. That’s a real Russian military band performing with Finns in downtown Helsinki. It’s glorious, every which way. To return to my comparison to Woodstock, it’s as if the National Guard from Kent State sang backup for Hendrix with Nixon conducting.
The band is the Leningrad Cowboys. I adore the description of the band in Wikipedia. Genre?
That’s a lot of attempts to avoid admitting you have no idea what to call it.
Rock music is stupid. Stop blustering. Admit it. C’mon. You know in your heart I’m right. You just don’t want to admit it. Repeat after me: It’s stoopid.
Why can’t you just embrace it? It’s dumb, but it can be dumb fun. There’s no dumber fun than Happy Together by the Turtles. You can tell The Turtles were trying to stretch the limits of banality they could pawn off as a pop song. Me and you, and you and me… The Fluorescent Leech and Eddie knew rock was dumb, and they loved it, and they took it up a notch or three.
Finland’s a big place without many people in it. Essentially, the entire country went to this show. No one was claiming they were going to save the world with three chords and some caterwauling. They simply noticed the world had already been saved, and had a party. And that party was a stone groove.
None-hit wonders.Guided by Voices could half-fill a tent show or swamp a converted sweatshop barroom for twenty years or so. They had one recognizable song I know of. This is it. I’ve come to the conclusion that everybody has one garage rock hit in them. It’s inborn, like a vestigal tail or an appendix, and about as useful. People who can produce more than one are rare indeed, and need not be discussed here. No matter what, both the audience and the bandmembers keep expecting another tune worth the tap of a toe to be vomited forth, but it never shows up.
Because everyone knows, correctly, that they have that one song in them, they look at the mess on the stage in whatever club they’re in and grumble, “I could do that.” The modern music store industry is based on getting every single male human being to buy $25,000-worth of Les Pauls and trash cymbals and attempt to make one coherent noise in their mother’s garage, and then quit. If you enter the music store wearing a Guided by Voices T-shirt, you’re already doomed. You’ll buy anything.
To people like Guided by Voices, who have had their cup of coffee in the almost-big leagues, comes a kind of peace. No matter what, for one brief shining moment, they slipped the orbit of the portion of the home or the freestanding building designed and constructed to house a vehicle or vehicles, but never does because it’s got your goddamn son’s goddamn drum set in it.
Just as an aside, I might point out that the Unorganized Hancock version of Game of Pricks is immediately the definitive version of the tune. Watch the 12-year old drummer, then search the Internet for other versions of the song. No one can hold a candle to him. Nobody.
I used to play in a Happy Hour band that played Stump the Band with the audience. We had to stop when Massachusetts made Happy Hour illegal. No, really, that happened. My life is one long list of vocations, jobs, life callings, and hobbies that were made illegal. If I were smart, I would have started out doing illegal things right from the get-go. Illegal pays better.
Anyway, we’d wait for the audience to get some tonsil polish in them to loosen them up a bit, and then I’d drag the microphone out front and start interviewing people like a game show host. If that wasn’t working out — because everyone was too rowdy, or not rowdy enough — we’d play Stump the Band. The drummer would challenge the audience to call out the name of any one-hit wonder band that had had a top ten song in the past thirty years, and we pledged to play a minimum of ten recognizable seconds of it. A lot of times we’d play the whole thing if one of us knew half the words.
People would really, really, really try to stump us, which was a fool’s errand. We were pros, and the 1910 Fruitgum Company, or Cannibal and the Headhunters held no terrors for us. Guys that had giant record collections and tape on their glasses would try to stump us over and over again, but that sucked for everyone. The rest of the audience had no idea what the song was even if we did play it, so we mostly ignored those guys and waited for a pretty girl to yell out TEE SET! or something. Truth be told, we always ignored guys for any number of reasons, and no girl ever asked for some dirge nobody would recognize. They asked for fun stuff, like THE TEE SET! PLAY THE TEE SETTTT WHOOOOOOOOO!!!!
They always asked for their favorite oldie, something their big sister or their mother listened to when they were little. And without fail, we’d ruin it utterly and forevermore for them by playing it perfectly but mucking around with the lyrics. Once you hear it perfectly wrong, you’ll never hear it right again.
Sing it with me! RALPH BELLAMY, I’M IN LOVE WITH YOU!
For seven seconds it’s like Christmas Day. Then it’s dark again. Then it’s dark again.
I (used to) play the electric bass. It’s not a bass guitar, although everyone calls it that. There actually is an instrument called a “bass guitar.” It has six strings and is tuned lower than a regular guitar, but it’s not a bass. A bass is that doghouse with the four strings. The electric kind hangs on your neck and gives you a bad back (left side), deafness, and a couple hundred bucks a night for as many nights as you’ll show up, because every other person in the world is an unemployed guitar player. Own a bass and you’ll always work.
That’s what my brother told me all those years ago. He actually knows how to play the thing properly. Everything I learned about it he taught me in one afternoon in his freezing cold, decidedly downscale apartment in Providence RI. I never had to learn anything other than what he taught me that day, and I’ve forgot half of that, and I could still work every night if I wanted to. I don’t. No one owns one, shows up, and plays bass — instead of monkeying around like the guitar player they wish they were on the wrong part of the neck.
But you need bass lessons, and I’m busy and don’t know how to play, and my brother’s busy and in lives in LA, so we’re stuck with YouTube. I’ll teach you everything you need to know, right now.
You have to play the blues first. It’s easy. Just shut the hell up and never venture past the fifth fret. There are only three chords, and if you play with John Lee Hooker he’s not even interested in all three of those; I did, and he wasn’t. Muddy Waters will show you how:
That’s the first song I played for money three days after my lesson. I stunk, but everybody else did too, but they practiced so they had no excuse. The audience was drunk, what difference did it make?
You can actually practice, and you can hang all sorts of musical drapes on that framework. Like Miles Davis’ friend Paul Chambers.
This song is a mere bagatelle; hell, two or three cloned kids can play it.
But you’re a hack whitebread dude. You gotta eat too. Duck Dunn will show you the way to play in barbands where the all the fights are merry and the dancing is violent:
Nuffin’ to it. But what if you want to play pop music? Well, it’s really just tuba parts from the music hall. Macca gets it.
He sings OK, too. Remember, no matter how bad you sing, make sure there’s a microphone in front of you or you’ll make less money than the other guys. Even Ringo figured that out eventually.
But you need rock music, too. The thudding kind, not the Beatles kind. You only need to learn one song –any song– by any one of a dozen bands with guys that go to Chest Hair Club for Men. Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Lynyrd Skynyrd; makes no nevermind. This is as good as any:
If you want to play like a real bass player, you’ll have to devote your life to figuring out what the hell got into James Jamerson to make him play like that on all those Motown records. Good luck. How Einstein came up with the special theory of relativity is an easier poser.
Got all that? Me neither. I used to try to play like 10 percent of that and had to sing over it, too. The seizures are getting better, now.
Reggae bass playing is easy. Just play like James Jamerson, only backwards.
But you’ve got to learn one lesson, and learn it fast: Girls don’t want any of that. They want to dance, and they don’t want it too sophisticated. This was the National Anthem of girls in a tube top right up to the present day: Easy, too. The song, I mean:
See, even Helen Reddy will have an extra sloe gin fizz and get jiggy when that’s going on.
There you have it. You’re qualified to make a crummy living from 8 PM to 3 AM three nights a week and two weddings a month. Hope your girlfriend has a comfortable couch.
What’s that? Country music? Which country? Our country? Don’t bother. There’s only two notes, and neither is all that compelling.
I like The Big Lebowski a great deal.
It’s passed through many phases of public interest. Like Spinal Tap, no one paid much attention to it when it came out. Since it was ignored, those who seek thrills in liking unliked things picked up on it. Vanguard becomes cult, cult becomes church. People now pray regularly in the church of The Dude.
Intellectuals have sought to understand both the movie and the resiliency of the interest in it. Only Groundhog Day has garnered more attempts at amateur and professional analysis of mundane subjects that seem to be important. They aren’t, in and of themselves, so you can look pretty silly testifying that you know why it’s popular, and popular in that very specific way: grown from seed, not top-down popularity. No one humped The Big Lebowski into widespread popularity, at least not that I can see. Lady Gaga, and Katy Perry, and Bieber, and Madonna, and lots of other people you could name are completely contrived assaults on your attention and your wallets. Lebowski is the other way ’round. The audience demanded that the makers of the entertainment pay attention to it with as much vigor as they bring, well after the fact. I think Star Wars is kinda like it in a way; I’m fairly certain George Lucas thought he was making a trifle. It is a trifle, but it made a trillion or so. It’s not like Lebowski, though, because Lebowski is a good movie. But the subtexts and touchstones that resonate with the audience were likely hidden from the view of the makers in both cases. They discovered gold while scattershot mining for tin.
I am not going to dissect The Big Lebowski here. When you take apart the frog to see how it works, the frog can’t jump for you anymore, and I need this frog to jump. I want to enjoy it like a normal person. I want to enjoy it like an Al Green song. I don’t want to know what key it’s in.
I tried to explain something to my musician son the other day. I had a hard time. The concept is nebulous. You have to ken it peripherally. If you try to look right at it, it can’t come into focus. It’s as much art as science. Hunch-y, really. I tried to describe to him what makes a song have “legs” — a term we used to use to indicate that a song is potentially useful to a performer by its very nature.
OK, so the Clutch Cargo of Country™, George Jones, had a big hit with this one back when Minutemen still rode dinosaurs to the Post Office to use the only telephone in town. That fact alone isn’t going to cut any ice at the disco, brother. Besides, he didn’t write it. He had to spot the legs in the song in the first place. If you want to glom onto the esssence of the song, and milk it to go along with your own performance cookies, the song needs to have legs. It’s got to be the framework for entertainment. It has to allow others to produce their own artifact, not just trade on the previous artifact.
https://youtu.be/hCUj5yUB0nA
The wrong people have to be able to “get over” with a song with legs. The sum of the component parts have to add up to more than the parts themselves. So you become a kind of vivisectionist, taking songs apart to see what makes them go. But just like taking that frog apart in science class, the frog doesn’t work anymore if you take it apart. The animation comes from somewhere else. To choose a song that’s going to have legs, you have to understand the frog well enough to replicate it, but you can’t kill it while taking it apart. That’s why it’s so hard to know what’s going to work.
You had a disc jockey at your shabby, expensive wedding because you didn’t want music; you wanted a list of cultural artifacts, laden with the context of your memories of what you were doing when they first came out of the radio. You wanted to eat at Musical McDonalds ™ because you wanted to know exactly what was on the menu before you entered the building. You didn’t want to rely on a chef, even a world renowned chef, because improvisation is fraught with peril. Something might happen, and your wedding would be on YouTube for all the wrong reasons — the only reason anything is on YouTube. To perform a song that has legs, you have to make the audience forget there’s another version of it they prefer for a little bit.
You’re on to something in your selection if a wave of nervous laughter passes through the audience at first, finding, perhaps, a delicious irony in the resurrection of a hoary old thing, and then the dead silence of rapt attention has to follow it.
So you search without looking directly at anything, the way a man searches for a mate in a bar. Sometimes you find exactly what you’re looking for, and the audience thinks to themselves: What a cute couple they make.
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