Friends With (Creative) Benefits: Ira, David, Me, Rock and the Writing of Our Time

It is a rare but happy thing to have a childhood friend with whom you not only remain in touch but still share enough personal connections to keep those early bonds from getting stale. I am fortunate to have two such people in my life - perhaps more, but two who have inspired me to write some thoughts down. Although these two friends of mine have never met, to my knowledge, I share with both of them a special relationship through two paths: rock music, and the written word.

One of them, Ira Robbins, I have know since we attended the same Brooklyn elementary school; we listened to the Beatles together in the auditorium when their first U.S. singles were released, and Ira played some of Bob Dylan's earliest songs for me in his living room. I met David Komoroff when my family moved to Manhattan; he was just slightly older than me, enough to be a major influence in my still developing appreciation for rock music. He introduced me to Jefferson Airplane, some early Stones albums, and Tommy, among many other glories of 1960's rock and roll. While at Stuyvesant High School he led me to my first rock concert - at Carnegie Hall, to see a group called Seatrain, in 1970. About a year later he insisted that we attend a concert at the Filmore East before it closed, where the highlight was a fairly new band called Mott the Hoople.

Ira went on to found the Trouser Press, through which he played a leading role in bringing awareness of the punk and New Wave movements to U.S. rock fans. I wasn't in touch with Ira then - in fact, I discovered his involvement in the early 1980's as I was standing in an Upper West Side bookstore thumbing through a thick Trouser Press record guide, and noticed the name of the editor. This was of some interest to me, since I was at that time playing in a rock band that performed at CBGB's during what was more or less the heydey of the punk era. Ira had also been in a band, and also lived at some point on the Upper West Side, but it was still many years before we would reconnect. Meanwhile, I had also been a journalist, intermittently, even writing the occasional music or film review for small political rags. Later on I spoke at conferences on the philosophical analysis of rock music (and still do this sordid kind of thing). We were leading sort of parallel lives that more or less began with trading baseball cards on a Brooklyn street corner, playing punchball and listening to "She Loves You" on a transistor radio.

When we got back in touch many years later we found that we both once again lived in Brooklyn, that we were both still deeply interested in rock music, and both also making efforts at writing fiction. That has been more than enough to keep us from blowing apart like leaves in the wind again.

David chose a quieter life, having moved many years ago to a small town in upstate New York. We rarely see each other, but from snail mail to email to Facebook we have never been out of touch for too long. David is also the main reason I make a living today as a computer professional: after I became more or less convinced that my rock band would not be the next Beatles, and indeed was not obviously on a path to making me financially self-sustaining as a musician, I looked around for an actual profession. (I was pulling in a small income as a bicycle messenger, which never really struck me as a career for some reason.) David had gone into computer programming, and after a visit to his office and some heart to heart talks I decided to pursue it too. He retired long ago; I'm still at it, for better or worse.

I don't really know David's tastes in music these days, but Ira's are on public view in the online version of the Trouser Press, as well as in his numerous other published writings, and for me in "personal communications", as human contact is euphemistically referred to in footnotes to philosophical papers. What attracted my attention recently - and partly prompted me to write this post - is his recent piece for Salon.Com. Taking a long look at his own history as a rock fan and a record reviewer, the history of Trouser Press and its decline as a print magazine, and the state of music criticism, he defends the position that "record reviews are now brief, upbeat and simple: download these songs, they’re good." By contrast, he brings back some of the more hypercritical views he voiced over the years about bands that rated high on the trendiness scale, and refuses to apologize for most of them. Right on, I say: these days there is always someone (indeed, an entire chorus of someones) ready to tout the aesthetic virtues of anything that does not stink to high heaven of incompetence or banality. Critical opinion in the era of online communication has a snowball effect, to the point where truly independent judgment is difficult at best. A critic who dissed the latest Frank Ocean or Passion Pit album might not lose his job, but he would lose respect because one critic after another lauded it in the kind of capsule reviews you find on Pitchfork and many other sites.

The same applies across the mass arts. Case in point: I just saw Lincoln, Steven Spielberg's latest effort at the socially conscious art film. "103 Academy Awards Minimum!", "One of the Year's .213 Best!", "Daniel Day-Lewis Is the Greatest Actor Since Richard Burton!" shout the critics (or some closely related pap). My reaction: a dubious portrait of a President who always speaks in a grandfatherly voice while presiding over the bloodiest war in history; Spielberg's usual faux-dramatic dialogue with the kind of packaged emotions that worked okay for the story of a stranded alien trying to phone home, but not so great for a beleaguered President trying to make history; modern slang mixed with 19th c. cliches; irrelevant subplots (what happened to the older son anyway?), an otiose epilogue (it was a year after the Senate adopted the 13th Amendment that Lincoln was murdered) etc. etc. Screw critical conformance. Most popular art today is intellectually insulting commercial crap, and even a lot of what isn't is just not artistically successful, however well-intentioned it might be.

Thus, when I see Ira reminding us how little moved he is by the Foo Fighters, a group whose recent album Wasting Light was a kind of cause celebre among critics, or by Sting's solo efforts, and a number of other iconoclastic positions he has taken, I am happy that someone has the guts to say these things so that I don't feel completely alone in the world. Indeed, I only regret seeing him partially back off some of his earlier apostasies: Patti smith's Horses is still unlistenable, IMHO; Television's Marquee Moon has one good song; the Ramones, who Ira, the apostle of punk rock, confesses he initially viewed as "a travesty", were exactly that - they just turned out to be a rather lovable, productive and influential travesty. (For updated 50's-style rock and roll I'll take the B-52's over the Ramones any day.) Okay, I'm a bitch - even punk is not sacred. I'm not sure Ira thinks it is either; he has too much integrity to give anything a pass because it's punk. I also have to admit that I never saw any of those groups live. Maybe I'd be kinder if I had.

One of Ira's main points is that many critics today seem to have barely brushed up on a band's Wikipedia entry before they mouth off about its virtues. (My way of putting it, not his.) It was one of the trademarks of Trouser Press in its day to do obsessive amounts of research about a band before writing it up (or down), and that was before Google was even a sci-fi fantasy, when it was widely accepted that a research library was a valuable asset for civilization. I like this line of thought, but I want to add a caveat: it is certainly possible for a critic to be so intimately familiar with his subject as to leave his audience without a clue what he's talking about. This is why I stopped paying attention to reviews in the Village Voice about 30 years ago - smug verbal masturbation with elusive references to obscure, fly-by-night bands that only 12 people in the world would conceivably recognize. Trouser Press reviews show considerable knowledge about the bands that are reviewed, but the references are generally within the realm of known or available rock history.

It is a little too much to ask that two friends, apart for long intervals over much of a lifetime, rediscover each other with exactly the same musical tastes after five decades of rock music, each with its own character. "Regrets, I have a few" says Ira - no doubt a nod to the famous Sid Vicious hit "My Way" (think I'm kidding?). Well, he might have one or two more regrets if I had my way. For instance, this bit of invective about The Fixx, one of my favorite bands of the 80's, where in 3 short paragraphs Ira describes them as  a "pretentious synth-heavy atmospheric English dance band" ("dance band"?) whose songs are "irritating", "trivial", "wretched", "mundane", "unpleasant" and lacking in imagination. What I miss here is some criteria that might make these judgments more than mere epithets. To take one that has perhaps the greatest appearance of plausibility, a "pretentious" band is one that pretends they have ideas worthy of your attention when they really don't (Rush and Radiohead spring to mind) whereas to me, reading and repeating the lyrics of The Fixx is well worth the effort. (Phantoms, as I have written elsewhere, is a brilliant musical exploration of the concepts of place and personal identity.) Maybe Ira is in touch with another dimension of listening that I'm not - he has, after all, a vastly wider and more intimate knowledge of rock music than I do. All I know is that I can no more think of The Fixx as a "dance band" than, say, the Psychedelic Furs, or Pink Floyd for that matter, and though I will admit that I find a very small number of their songs "irritating", most of their material is deeply satisfying and creative.

Or take this sweeping assessment of Grand Funk and their significance: "the band that killed rock 'n' roll", as Ira sees it. I have to admit, I can't stand 90% of their output. On the other hand, Ira reminds us that "lots of terrible albums have been made by wonderful people", and it's equally true that some of the greatest albums have been made by bands that were generally terrible - they found their groove, so to speak, and lost it quickly. Grand Funk's Closer to Home is high on that list for me, a spark of genius, sandwiched between a lot of really forgettable junk. (Okay, this is weird but... it was a former girlfriend of David's who first made me appreciate this album. Lack of critical distance? Perhaps.) Here I admit to being the odd man out, while Ira elaborates the standard critical opinion (as in this sympatico profile): even on that album, the band was incompetent, unoriginal and tasteless. For me, 6 out of 8 songs on the album are keepers, the other two being innocuous pseudo-soul ballads. And I could not name a song that any of those six clearly imitate. For me, the critical attitude means not only seeing the soft belly beneath the shell of popularity, but occasionally allowing that there's a lonely pearl in it.

The idea that Grand Funk were significant or influential enough to singlehandedly put an end to the Sixties is also farther than I can go. In those days there were a slew of culprits over a few short years - the James Gang, Black Sabbath, Savoy Brown, Deep Purple, and if you weren't feeling particularly generous, Iron Butterfly and Mountain to boot - soon to be followed by Bad Company and such lesser lights as Montrose, Golden Earing and Foghat - who jointly conspired to usher out acid rock and promote a sound that around 1975 began to emerge as heavy metal. There were other culprits as well, regarding the death of Sixties rock - think of Chicago taking over the jazz-rock mantle from bands like Blood, Sweat and Tears and The Soft Machine; the devolution of Fleetwood Mac from the Peter Green blues-rock band to the Buckingham/Nicks pop band; and the conversion of Motown from a vital, relevant sound to a dry disco formula. Similarly, at the end of the Seventies there was a short list - okay, a rather long list - of bands that collectively killed what was good and innovative in progressive rock and turned it into a radio-happy pop sound - think Journey, Toto, Rush, Styx, Kansas, Steve Miller, and Gary Wright, for starters. I think it takes an army to put an end to an era of musical expression, and Grand Funk were at most a highly visible unit.

Aside from that, I really wonder about the characterization of Grand Funk's musicianship as "garage-bred ineptitude" and the way Ira ties it to their working-class origin. For he does draw attention to the striking similarity of this characterization to a fair description of the origins of punk rock. What distinguishes them, he says, is Grand Funk's lack of originality. But if they were not original, I don't understand how they could have played such an outstanding role in overthrowing an era of music. A gang of imitators can't overthrow what came before them, even by doing it badly. Ira also chides them for a late-to-the-game effort at anti-war heroics. Not quite so - Closer to Home, released in the second year of their existence, already has the standard odes to revolution, freedom, love and togetherness that one would have expected in those days. Mark Farner eventually descended into a flag-waving boor, but so what - no one writes off Neil Young's or Arlo Guthrie's early work just because they tilted right later on.

Sometimes Ira's views make me wonder about the very nature of music criticism. For when he says that he doesn't think Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is even a good album, and that he thinks Abbey Road is an even worse one, I want to scream, "But this is the standard by which other albums are judged!" Then I think of Wittgenstein, a philosopher I have studied fairly closely, who says that the one thing of which we cannot say that it either is, or is not, a meter long is the standard 1-meter bar in Paris, which defines the length of a meter. And this is obviously not true of Sgt. Pepper: for although it is probably the single most universally admired piece of recorded rock music, it is certainly not logically impossible to agree or disagree with that judgment. So I guess I should thank Ira for reminding me once again that consensus is not truth and emotional attachment is the opposite of critical objectivity. Be that as it may, to get me to believe that Sgt. Pepper is not at least one of the greatest albums of all time you would probably have to hire Christopher Nolan and the entire Inception team to screw around with my brain.

The inevitable musical differences aside, when Ira rattles off a phrase like "...the schoolyard syllogisms of the 2012 election", which he does with rather frightening consistency in both musical and political contexts, I start wishing that he would publish a Little Red Book of his best lines that I can carry around with me and read when I need to remind myself what contemporary writing should look like.

                                             ********

Speaking of which, Ira's 2009 novel Kick It Till It Breaks is a damn good read and another reason to keep an ear out for him. David has also been a literary type as long as I've known him, and had more of a flair for writing than I did early on. A few days ago, Ira and David had a psychic confluence that I suppose I alone would have noticed: they both posted comments in response to a piece in the NY Times Magazine about the writer George Saunders. "The writer for our time", according to the writer for the Times, Joel Lovell. WTF? Ira and Dave wanted know. How did I end up with a writer for my damn time whom I've never even heard of? Personally I had almost the same reaction - actually, the very same, until a bit of free association led me in another direction.

Almost a year ago I decided that as an aspiring writer I needed to subscribe to The New Yorker, knowing full well that I wouldn't have time to read even half the issues. So I did, and I haven't had time to read even a quarter of the issues. Generally I skim the concert listings, look quickly at the cartoons, check out the poetry (ugh... Ashberry again... talk about inscrutable), see if there are any absolutely essential journalistic pieces (hopefully not, since they tend to be even longer than my blog posts), and finally, lay into the short story. This way I have managed to get through maybe ten or twelve stories. Very few of them made much of an impression as I was reading them, and even fewer stayed with me for more than a day after I'd finished. In fact, exactly one did - a very bizarre tale about a young boy and an old man who do something like exchange tragic courses of life on a winter's day. (I mean literally exchange them, not talk about them.) I wasn't sure if I liked it, and certainly could not imagine what sort of mind could have come up with it. I noted the name of the author briefly, and forgot it soon afterward.

On reading a few paragraphs of the Lovell piece I said to myself, "I'll bet that story about the boy and the old man at the lake was by this Saunders dude." Yes it was. I will not jump on the Times bandwagon about this - the bandwagon that has only recently gotten through inflating Updike after his death into a literary titan, then beating the drums over David Mitchell's latest effort, then rolling the Franzen juggernaut down a hill, and the like. But I will say this: if there is a "writer for our time" it will have to be a writer whose ideas are as complex, tormented, tragic and exuberant as our time, all at once. No other short stories since those of Paul Bowles have struck me as having this kind of depth. I feel that Saunders has some deep grasp of the tragic sense of life, and the particularly ridiculous twist that a system driven by technology and finance capital can give to that situation, as well as an idea (which I dare to claim runs through some of my own attempts at fiction) that love and humor are our only hope for maintaining a semblance of sanity.

I will almost certainly be picking up Saunders' latest story collection, Tenth of December. I will almost certainly be picking up a copy of his friend David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest too. I will almost certainly be reading all this stuff as soon as I get through Ulysses. Don't hold your breath waiting for my review. For those who want to know Saunders a little better though, The Paris Review web site has just published the autobiographical Preface to a new edition of his earlier short story collection; it is quite an inspiring read for an aspiring writer. And one of the Times blogs has an interview with Lovell that sheds a little more light on Saunders.

Well, that's enough blogging for now. Back to Ulysses, Led Zeppelin and other things that keep me from the madhouse. Back to rocking the boat, writing on rock, writing in my rocker and rocking with my typewriter. And to hoping I'll always have good buddies who will prod me with their poignant posts when I get lazy, and challenge my tastes when they start to ossify. Scratch that; my tastes in music and literature already resemble a petrified forest. Which means someone can kick them as hard as they want and do no damage. We can still be great friends.

ABBA Daba Doo: A Hard Look at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

So where has the great green ornithological wonder been hiding all this time? Flying north to avoid global warming? Apparently our Brooklyn parrots are smarter than the average bird. Of course there are a few other reasons, like building my own web sites, which will eventually house this and my other blogs, independent of Googleplex, which is looking more like the ("Don't-be") Evil Empire with every new privacy invasion and copyright issue. (Plus I hate their crappy editor, which manages to screw up font selections constantly; and the fact that I have to sign in with an email address I haven't used in years. On the other hand I give them some credit for standing up to the Chinese censors - a calculated business decision not without some moral weight.) I've also been writing a bit of fiction, with a view to not only becoming the new Hemingway (or should I say Flaubird - didn't he have a parrot anyway?) but possibly making some actual money from my enormous literary talents, though those two goals are to some degree in tension. But before I get into what brings me back to this fabled forum, let me just deal with one practical note.

Due to a rash of the most execrable spam directed at this and some of my other blogs, I have had to move them all to a "moderated comments" policy. I consider this less obnoxious than the little box with the warped and partially obscured random words for you to attempt to decipher. But it may take some time for me to discover your comments and publish them. My policy here, as elsewhere, is to publish every relevant comment, regardless of point of view, unless it descends into vitriolic personal attacks, racist remarks, threats and the like. So please continue to contribute to discussions here, only try to be a little patient as I sort through the dross of autogenerated idiocy to get to your remarks.

So what am I doing fluttering around this blog again? Well, right now, I'm listening to a two-volume collection of ABBA's greatest hits. Does that give you a hint? Anyone who knows my taste in rock from previous PL posts might be a bit surprised. But don't worry - I didn't pay for it, at least. Nor did I pirate or bitstream it; it's all legit, thanks to Lala.com, which I figure I'd better get the most out of before Apple sinks their claws into it. And why exactly would listening to these palindromatic popsters constitute getting the most out of anything? Because they're now one of the benighted members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, that well-known bestower of historical significance in the realm of popular music, and I am (or thought I was) woefully ignorant of their artistic accomplishments. As you probably know, the fabled Swedish blondes and their ex-husbands have landed the high honor of a plaque on the wall, and a bio on the RRHOF web site. Worldwide recognition was not exctly something they lacked before (unlike some of this year's other inductees) having long since inundated every disco from Brooklyn to Byelorussia with their, um, infectious melodies. So it must be the plaque, the renewed publicity, the... approval of Jann Wenner? We'll get to that.

My first reaction to hearing of ABBA's induction was probably similar to yours: Squawck! I mean, Yauwnnn.... But feeling the mantle of responsibility land once again on my shoulders as I began to write, I thought to myself: what if these people are actually right? I mean, what if for all these years I have simply refused to recognize the importance of ABBA, their great contribution to Western popular music? Indeed, do I even know enough of their songs to pass a judgment? Just because they did "Dancing Queen" doesn't mean they're all bad! So I listened, and found to my surprise that I actually know many more of their songs than I knew I knew. I know "Waterloo", though I could not have named it if my avian life depended on it. I didn't know it won the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest until I read it in the RRHOF bio; this, in the Parrot's pecking order, is actually a more significant recommendation that inclusion in the infamous Hall. The chorus is more than a distant echo of the verses of The Foundations' 1968 hit "Build Me Up, Buttercup" (it's the harmony to it, basically) but let's not pretend it isn't catchy. I also know "Fernando", and can't even imagine where I might have been exposed to it so often as to remember it after all these years. I have to admit I actually kind of like it. I know "Take a Chance on Me" and a couple of other bits of trite dance hall trash. I know "The Winner Takes It All", or at least, it sounds a lot like three or four songs I know. In general, though, I must admit that I don't even know most of ABBA's numerous top five UK hits. Or I didn't. Now I do. And sad to say, my impression is now confirmed that in spite of a couple of decent early singles, they are a veritable demiurge of formulaic pop tunes, with vapid lyrics and minimal harmonic interest. Their singing seems to disdain real emotion, their production qualities come down to a guy with a sequencer and their instrumental capabilities are all but nonexistent.

So can 50 million ABBA fans be wrong? Oh, I think there are probably a lot more than that out there. (Including some very big ones over at Rolling Stone magazine; but as I said, we'll get to that later.) So who am I to say they're wrong? They're right, after all; just as the Mozart freaks are right. If you want something to flow in one ear and out the other without requiring much processing inside, a steady diet of ABBA and Mozart is just what you should be taking. (Don't get me wrong, please - archaeologists exploring my desert island are going to dig up quite a few late Mozart CD's; but they'll be digging a long time before they find any ABBA.) But this is not mainly about ABBA; it's about what ABBA represents as an inductee into the Hall - the closest thing we have to a standard of significance for rock music.

To see what I men, compare the following news: just a few days after ABBA was iducted, who suddenly passed away at age 59? Alex Chilton, leader of The Boxtops and longtime vocalist, whose influence and artistry were attested to by many later and more famous rock stars. Chilton will never experience the belated recognition that Iggy Pop has just received. But he arguably should have been honored long before the idea of inducting ABBA had even entered anyone's head. Though well known for only two early hit singles - "The Letter" and "Cry Like a Baby" - those recordings are for many people much more what rock is about than all of ABBA's million-sellers put together. "The Letter" came out in 1967; Chilton was 16 years old, and had a number 1 hit in the greatest year ever for rock music. (The year of Sgt. Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour, Surrealistic Pillow, Disraeli Gears, and a whole lot more.) The song must be one of the most memorable recordings in all of rock; endlessly covered by later artists, it seems to have lost little or nothing after 43 years on the rock circuit, and a good deal of the credit for that goes to Chilton's gripping vocals. Chilton went on to become an influential guitar player as well, and, with or without his later band Big Star, is usually counted as an important influence and early practitioner of both punk rock and alt-country. That looks to me like one guy who was a big force in three major developments in rock music; an accomplishment that has "hall of fame" written across it in gold letters.

Just weeks before "The Letter" started climbing the U.S. charts, across the Atlantic the new group Procol Harum had released "A Whiter Shade of Pale". How do you capture the importance of a 4-minute single on pop radio that was #1 for six weeks on the UK charts in a year that was almost unbelievably loaded with brilliant examples of rock music? One fan has tracked down 900 cover versions of "Whiter Shade of Pale". A Procol Harum fan site cites an article stating that the song is the most played single ever in the UK. (The source for this is British "performing rights group" Phonographic Performance Ltd, which is actually an industry group, so I'm not sure how objective this claim is.) If Procol Harum had done nothing else, they would have earned a key place in the history of rock and roll for this song. Interestingly, though, the importance of the song is not merely in the sales it generated, but in other groundbreaking features: its Bach-like organ introduction, the interestingly obscure but poetic lyrics, the slow, dreamy, almost drunken vocals, and the fact that other than The Doors' "Light My Fire" it was about the longest single released at that time. These qualities can each be traced to important developments in rock. (To name one less obvious one, it was the first of a slew of extremely popular slow, moody tunes that topped the popularity charts in spite of more upbeat competitors - think "Color My World", "Let It Be", "Candle in the Wind", "Free Bird", many others). But Procol Harum, in the course of things, did much more than that: pioneering the use of a full orchestral sound, with Robin Trower taking the possibilities opened up by Hendrix's guitar style in new directions, they helped lay the foundations for the era of progressive rock that dominated the early 1970's. Procol Harum never achieved the level of popularity of groups like the Rolling Stones or even The Doors, but anyone who understands a bit about the history of rock and roll should know that their importance far surpasses their record sales. (For my two cents on the royalties dispute over AWSOP see my earlier post on this subject. In spite of the Parrot's loud squawking, this absurd decision has been upheld by the highest British court.)

Neither Alex Chilton nor Procol Harum have been elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Nothing in that fact says much about Chilton or Procol Harum. But it says everything about the RRHOF. The choices have not been made on the basis of influence or historical importance in any sense; or perhaps the better way of putting it is that to the extent that these factors have played a role, it has more often led to serious errors of judgment than to something that might help the public appreciate under-recognized figures, or less understood lines of development.

Take for example the inclusion of Jelly Roll Morton. He was an early jazz influence - but certainly not an early rock influence. Every form of African-American music from the mid-19th century on was an influence to some extent in every form of popular music in the 20th century. But no rock artist was particularly influenced by Jelly Roll Morton, nor even the early urban blues artists. I have two histories of rock and roll (including the Rolling Stone history!) which do not so much as mention his name, and three histories of the blues, none of which considers him particularly important. He was an early transitional figure between blues and jazz and not particularly relevant to rock and roll. The RRHOF bio even overstates the general consensus on his influence on jazz, and makes no attempt to link him directly to rock. There are quite a few other jazz figures in their list, on very lame logic. Billie Holiday's "exquisite phrasing and tough-tender persona influenced the likes of Janis Joplin and Diana Ross, among others". Excuse me? I find it a bit difficult to come up with one vocal quality in common between Janis Joplin and Diana Ross, but these folks are telling me that Billie Holiday influenced both of them? In any case, it doesn't really matter if she did or not: merely having an influence on someone's vocal style is not enough of a connection to put someone in the RRHOF, otherwise there could be hundreds of unrelated artists equally worthy of inclusion.

Speaking of which, Frank Sinatra is not in the Hall. He actually had several major hits on rock radio, and it's hard to believe his style didn't influence numerous later artists who are in it. He was still a force in popular music when rock was the music of the day, unlike Billie Holiday; and he was more revered by many rock fans than a host of lesser singers who were getting AM-radio play and were offered up as rock artists, from Englebert Humperdink to Burt Bachrach. Frank Sinatra is not in the RRHOF; but Louis Armstrong, Ma Rainey and Miles Davis are. Hmmmm... Maybe Chuck Berry belongs in the jazz HOF? Chubby Checker, who popularized the dance most closely associated with R&R, is not in the HOF. The Weavers, The Chad Mitchell Trio, The Kingston Trio, The Lettermen - those folk groups were the immediate predecessors of the American rock group; not one of them is in. Yet Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Hank Williams and Jimmy Rodgers were admitted on their own. The idea seems to be: let's recognize every major American music trend in the first half of the 20th century, and then later on maybe we'll recognize the people who all those rock musicians actually knew and heard before they became rock musicians.

So where is the logic, oh tastemakers of the Great Hall? There is none. Though if we look the ABBA choice right in the face, along with others included for nothing more than having a lot of hit records (Billy Joel, Bob Seger, Madonna and AC/DC for instance) we may just have to admit that the one criterion that plays an outsized role is record sales. I can't honestly say that it is the only or even the main criterion. After all, Frank Sinatra did sell quite a few records. Celine Dion has sold about 200 million records, but she's not there. Oops, wait a few years please. She has technically been eligible for four years, since her first recording came out 29 years ago, in 1981. But she didn't release a record in English until 1990. There are no inductees in the RRHOF who did not record primarily in English. So give her a few years and I suspect she will be in like Flynn. ABBA, on the other hand, has been charting since the 70's, and occupies the noble position of being just behind The Beatles, Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson in total sales. Now, I'm not saying that sales are not a legitimate criterion to consider. Sales indicate popularity; popularity is sometimes an indicator of quality; though often not. It does suggest a high level of exposure and recognition, which may indicate influence and importance. On the other hand, it may not. It's hard to know what ABBA's influence might be, but I suspect it is less than that of The 1910 Fruitgum Company, pioneers of bublegum rock. Along with The Archies (actually just a bunch of studio musicians), The Jackson Five, The Cowsills, The Osmonds and various other "family" groups who were knocking on ceilings in the late sixties and early seventies, these fruitie types offered a watered down version of what had mainly been gritty, black and white working class music. IMHO, ABBA, in spite of a few catchy tunes (or because they were nothing but catchy tunes) contributed very little other than to take this trend and offer it up as discotheque fare. Not that it was actually disco in its classic form, but it was danceable and bouncy even when the subject was not exactly uplifting ("The WInner Takes It All"). They did not start or significantly expand anything I consider to be of much value in rock, they merely plied the lighter side of pop tastes for a string of hits.

The artists who precede them on the album sales list clearly did something important; many of the artists who follow them clearly did. Queen is next, and though they may not be my favorite group (love Sheer Heart Attack, other than that they're not my taste), they obviously took rock vocals to a level that has rarely if ever been equaled, and they helped make the extended composition a standard of FM radio fare. Someone please tell me about ABBA's similar accomplishments. They were not exceptionally good singers, their instrumentals were forgettable, their songs not pathbreaking in any sense I can think of. For light rock I'll take The Carpenters or Hall and Oates any day. Neither of them have made it in, and I doubt it would look quite as bizarre if they did. ABBA simply represents the dumbing down of taste to the lowest common denominator, diminishing everything that was vibrant, experimental, original or challenging in 1970's rock. They were about as responsible for this as their RRHOF mates Fleetwood Mac, a group that at least had earlier (pre-Buckingham/Nicks) incarnations which would never have gotten in on the basis of album sales, but perhaps deserved to be there for one reason or another. But for ABBA, sales and Top 5 hits are the beginning and the end of what anyone can say about their place in the history of R&R.

Although record sales are clearly a major consideration for entry into the Hallowed Hall, the bigger impression is that the criteria are just haphazard and arbitrary, putting in question whether there are any criteria at all. Consider the Hall's own description of their decision process: "Criteria include the influence and significance of the artists’ contributions to the development and perpetuation of rock and roll." So, that is about as vague as you can get, and gives the nominating committee the flexibility to pick just about anyone they like, and ignore anybody they don't like. As a result, you've got a lot of tangential "early influence" type inductees who really had very little to do with rock; lots of sidemen, blues players, impressarios, gospel singers, and country influences, and yawning gaps in actual rock and roll. Bill Monroe is considered a rock influence in this ever so vaguely delineated hagiography, whereas in fact it is not likely that bluegrass had very much influence even in country rock, as it was quite a while before it even had much influence in country music. Charles Brown was a great blues pianist; I was fortunate enough to see him perform live, a treat I picked for my 40th birthday; but he had almost nothing at all to do with rock and roll. On the other hand, the Rev. Gary Davis, a player who directly influenced numerous major R&R artists (a short list would include Jerry Garcia, David Bromberg, and Jorma Kaukonen) has unaccountably been overlooked. A less obvious, but extremely interesting early urban blues figure would be Tampa Red, who not only inspired some of the bluesmen who inspired rock (including Muddy Waters and Elmore James), but played a style that is oddly modern and upbeat in a way that clearly anticipates rock and roll. Yet he is missing.

So, for that matter, is Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, whose songs provided early material for Elvis Presley, as well as influencing a number of important urban blues artists. While we're on the subject of important early performers who also wrote hits for major rock artists, Arthur Alexander has not even gotten his due in the arbitrary and capricious Hall. Early pop/rock artists who did no more for the medium than 100 artists who are not in have apprently been inducted on no other grounds that that they happened to be early. Thus, I don't need to question the contributions of Gene Pitney, Dusty Springfield or Ricky Nelson to raise an eyebrow that they, and quite a few others like them, are in the RRHOF, when a large number of later artists who were more influential are not in. Ricky Nelson, but not Lou Reed? (To pick a name out of a hat.) Be serious. Better yet, Dusty Springfield but not Neal Sedaka? He not only contributed to her career but had a major, lengthy career of his own, involving artists from The Monkees to 10CC and many more.

The early influences also seem to be more like obvious names to drop than interesting connections. Everyone who had one or two memorable early hits - Frankie Lyman, Del Shannon, Gene Vincent, Bill Haley, Richie Valens - has been duly voted in. Perhaps one or two memorable hits in the 50's is sufficient to claim importance. But if so, why not one or two hits in the 60's? That's when rock really took off and became a major cultural force. There were lots of two-hit wonders then, and some of their songs are as memorable as "Rock Around the Clock" and "Teenager in Love". I've already mentioned The Boxtops, but I could name dozens more. Rather than that, why not pick three: Mitch Ryder and The Detroit Wheels, The Left Banke, and The Foundations. Each, to my recollections had two major hits. Those hits were not just good songs but sounds that we will never forget; and I'll bet a whole lot of people a generation or more younger than me know the bands and would recognize the songs they are famous for. Why are they any less worthy of commemoration than the 50's groups?

Then again, there are groups that had a hell of a lot more hits than that, and were inlutential in some notable way, who are still not in RRHOF. I mean, how can you not have Gerry and the Pacemakers in the RRHOF? They should have been among the first ones, one of the most important Mersey Beat groups, a movement that changed R&R history. Tommy James and the Shondells practically defined sixties acid pop, and to my mind did a lot to make new kinds of sounds acceptable to a wide audience, moving the whole mainstream forward. Almost every one of their hits contained prominent, interesting new uses of keyboards, reverb, rhythm, drums, etc. Where's The Association, with their harmonies second only to The Beach Boys in the 1960's, not to mention several of the most frequently played singles in the history of rock? The Monkees were the first group to use a Moog synthesizer on an album, among other things. Their history alone, from a manufactured t.v. pop group to an independent progressive pop quartet on Headquarters and Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones, is enough to mark them as significant - at least since Ricky Nelson's trajectory seems to make him worthy of HOF immortality (read his bio on the RRHOF web site). Paul Revere and the Raiders wore outrageous costumes long before David Bowie or Kiss; they also had five Billboard Top 10 and thirteen Top 25 hits, and 4 Gold albums, and were Columbia's top selling artist for a while (I imagine Dylan has long since surpassed them). More interesting is that they were hard rock pioneers, spinning serious guitar solos as early as 1965 and later becoming a kind of retro icon for punk rockers. Next up: I'm not sure what's the best way to defend the view that Steppenwolf should be a first round pick for the rock HOF; maybe because "Born to Be Wild" is a strong contender for the anthem of a generation; because "Monster" was rock music's most powerful indictment of the political direction of the country; because they have one of the four or five best live albums ever; or because they too were a group whose style looked forward to the hard rock of the 70's. Whatever, it seems pretty obvious to me that Steppenwolf means every bit as much to rock history as many rock artists of the 50's, and much more than most of those "early influences".

But at least quite a few 60's bands are duly represented: just look at the "B" list - The Band, The Beach Boys, The Beatles, The Bee Gees, Buffalo Springfied. Entire trends, however, are barely represented if at all. It's nice that Iggy Pop and the Stooges finally got in; they were a key source for the punk movement. But even before them there were historically important artists who deserve recognition in this regard, e.g., The Troggs, Marc Bolan (T Rex), and Père Ubu. Early eighties post-punk groups are eligible, but all I see in the Hall are a few of the big hitmakers (The Police, U2). The highly influential Joy Division is MIA, and so are The Alarm, The Jam, Joe Jackson, The Psychedeic Furs, The Cars, The Knack - not to mention all the 2 Tone and Ska bands (The Specials, The Selecter, Madness, The Beat), Rock Against Racism (TRB and others)... the point is, this is a very important era, a turning point in the history of rock with a variety of manifestations, none of which are represented, just the hitmakers. British folk-rock - Donovan, Pentangle, Fairport Convention, Renaissance, etc - is not represented at all, in spite of influencing so many major 70's bands, including Led Zep and Yes. Does this make any sense? Influential guitarists like Roy Harper and Bert Jansch have been passed over, but Leadbelly and John Lee Hooker are there. I think the Hall managers have their priorities completely skewed; you should recognize the people who directly influenced and played rock first, then go and collect the distant cousins who neither knew or cared much about R&R.

I could go on. In fact I will. Let's talk about some of the most influential trends in the history of rock - trends which I will quite frankly say that I don't personally like very much, but whose importance is hard to deny (a hell of a lot harder than that of ABBA). No one person ever invented any form of music, but Barry White came darn close to inventing disco. In any case his influence is undeniable. But as another hugely influential unrecognized group once sang, "he's not there". You won't find Gloria Gaynor, The Hues Corporation, or Diana Ross (as a solo act) in the RRHOF. The Jacksons are in there only insofar as they extend the biography of The Jackson Five. Donna Summer has been denied entry several times. No sunshine for KC and his band either. Forget about The Tavares or the Pointer Sisters. Funk, somehow, is worthy of respect - not only James Brown but Parliament-Funkadelic squeezed in. Marvin Gaye was thankfully worthy of admission. So it is clearly not a matter of excluding artists on the notion that later R&B is not rock. I was never a big disco fan, but to deny that it was a major force in the broader concept of rock music that includes soul, funk, and hip hop is just nuts. I thought I was an ideologue, but if I were in charge of a public-facing institution like the RRHOF I like to think I'd try to be objective. The razor-like excision of disco is just vindictive, whether you were ever a fan or not.

On the other end of the spectrum, let's talk "heavy metal". AC/DC happens to be in the Hall; by no surprise, they are something like 7th or 8th in the list of best selling groups of all time. But they have no other business in the HOF. They were not one of the pioneers of heavy metal, and I doubt anyone could show that they influenced other heavy metal bands more than Kiss or Aerosmith, both of whom were founded the same time as AC/DC but released albums earlier. (AC/DC did not release any notable albums until several years after they were founded.) Iron Butterfly, Deep Purple, MC5, Grand Funk - they belong in the HOF as the early explorers of what became heavy metal. Of course Led Zeppelin is in; who would pay any attention to this museum if they weren't? But they should not be there for their illustrious place in album sales, nor for the popularity of "Stairway to Heaven", but for their virtually reinventing hard rock in 1969 and leading the way into the next decade; for expanding the instrumental sound and introducing radical new techniques on both guitar and drums; and for many other qualities. What similar contributions has AC/DC made? I know - they pioneered a new vocal sound in which the human voice is made to sound like a parrot struggling to escape the talons of a hawk? Sorry, that doesn't strike me as a significant accomplishment. The RRHOF bio of Metallica has one thing more or less right: Black Sabbath "invented" heavy metal (not quite, but close) and Metallica "redefined it in the Eighties". So what exactly did AC/DC do besides sell a lot of records? Probably less than Ozzy did in his solo career. "Huh?" you say, Ozzy's not there? Sacrilege, to an awful lot of rock fans. But neither are Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Motorhead, or Motley Crue (sorry, metalheads, for dropping the cute little umlauts over some of those names) - all of them eligible for many years. Guns 'N Roses? You'll have to wait a couple of years, their first album came out in 1987. But I wouldn't be surprised to see them get in: they're just behind AC/DC and Metallica in heavy metal album sales. (Discounting Zep and Deep Purple as not "pure" metal.) So what will that prove; that the rulers of HOF have carefully considered the merits of any of these bands? Doesn't look that way to me.

More than anything, I am shocked at the total lack of respect for progressive rock in the inductee list. Sure Pink Floyd is there, but not for Atom Heart Mother, I suspect. Genesis has just been admitted; again, I suspect that Phil Collins's contributions have more to do with that than Peter Gabriel's. Just guessing. But to me, a Rock Hall of Fame without the Moody Blues, Yes, King Crimson or Jethro Tull is a complete joke - and all of them have been eligible for more than 15 years. (I could shorten that and say that a Rock Hall of Fame without Jethro Tull is a complete joke, even if progressive rock never existed - since I consider Tull to be far from a pure prog band. But I digress.) That says to me that there is an ideology keeping these bands out. And I can go a bit deeper, because I think prog is so important that I'm not sure some lesser-known prog groups shouldn't be in there. If popularity and album sales are the criteria, then perhaps a group like Gentle Giant does not belong in the Hallowed Hall. But there's a long list of prog rock artists doing highly technical, rhythmically and harmonically complex songs, and I'll bet nearly all of them have been influenced to one degree or another by GG, who did it before any of them. (Not that I'm ignoring Zappa's role here.) I'm not so sure that even groups like Rush didn't get something from them. Can't prove it without a lot of research but my ears tell me so.

Last and certainly least, I hate to mention this, but there's a slew of late 70's groups that I can't stand, and I'd be happy to hear that the guardians of rock's kingdom can't stand them either. But again, if there's a reason for keeping out the likes of Rush, Styx, Journey, Toto, Foreigner, Boston, Kansas, Steve Miller and a crapload of other late 70's/early 80's pseudo-progressive pop, I'd like to see the criteria. Arguably, those groups defined everything in rock and roll in that era that was not punk or "new wave". There are some dim signs that taste has at least some influence in the choice of inductees, e.g., the fact that Steely Dan has been inducted and Rush has not. Then again, Bob Seger has been inducted and 10CC has not; there goes that theory. Anyway, I'm not in favor of a rushed journey down the Styx, but if we're talking about impact, we will be forced to admit that those groups more or less absconded with the FM airwaves for a decade or so.

I'm going to stop, eventually. In fact, I'm not even going to mention several other important trends in rock, all pre-1985 and therefore eligible, which are pretty much unrepresented in the RRHOF, such as glam (Roxy, Bolan, Dolls) or jazz rock (BS&T, Chicago, Soft Machine) or fusion (McLaughlin, Corea, Coryell) or euro (Kraftwerk, Focus, The Fixx) or... Well, either I'm going to stop, or perhaps the RRHOF team should start - recognizing that they have managed to ignore most of what is really significant in rock, while compiling a list of distant predecessors and pop stars. No, they have not ignored history altogether; they have made their motions in the directions of The Clash, David Bowie, and other artists who are not simply popular but seminal. But they have turned their backs on so much else, while digging into the jazz and blues archives and the interesting sidemen and the gurus of one sort or another, then adding numerous artists whose contributions are little more than a list of hits.

Now why is all this? A friend of mine has a simple answer: "Jann's club", he calls it - a short way of saying that Jann Wenner, publisher of Rolling Stone, controls the Hall's membership list according to his own personal taste. Is it true? Hmmmm.... Take a look at Roger Friedman's critique of the 2007 nominee list, if you have the patience to read any more HOF critiques after my longwinded diatribe. (Okay, it's on Fox. If it makes you feel any better, Friedman was fired soon afterward for reviewing a pirated copy of the film Wolverine, and pointing out to readers how easy it was to get hold of. Wonder why Fox might have cared so much about this...) If you don't like that, take a look at some of the comments about Wenner to the same effect on his Wikipedia page.

One comment there, cited from a New York Post interview with Peter Tork, is worth noting: Tork says explicitly that Wenner has personally kept The Monkees out of the RRHOF over the worn-out criticism that they didn't play the instruments on their first two albums. On the first album, that was by understanding with producer Don Kirshner. The second, however, was released without The Monkees' prior consent to this arrangement. In any case, the criticism is not only unfair but ignorant. It's unfair because any number of Motown groups and quite a few rock bands who are in the RRHOF (e.g., The Beach Boys) did not play many (or in some cases any) of the instruments on some of their albums; the use of anonymous studio musicians backing major rock groups on albums was extremely common in those days. And it's ignorant because in fact, The Monkees did play their own instruments in concert, on Headquarters, and to a large extent on Pisces Aquarius Capricorn & Jones and their later albums; because Peter Tork is widely known to be a top notch musician who could have played any instrument in the band and then some (and in fact did play a guitar part on their first album, alongside James Burton); and because Nesmith was not only a competent guitarist but an excellent songwriter with a career that dated from before The Monkees existed. What Dolenz lacked in drumming ability he made up in unique vocal qualities that created the sound of some of the most memorable hits of the 60's. The Monkees may have suffered from the discrepancy between their t.v. show personas as rock stars and their early acceptance of studio backing on the albums; certainly to hold this against them at a time when we have a much broader perspective on the whole era is ridiculous and vindictive.

Wenner's Wikipedia page contains another paragraph with a list of groups he is said to be responsible for keeping out on the basis of personal taste. According to Friedman, "Wenner’s nominating committee consists largely of his current and former employees from Rolling Stone (Nathan Brackett, David Fricke, Jim Henke, Joe Levy, Brian Keizer, Toure, and Anthony DeCurtis). But they have little say over who really is inducted." There are lots of people questioning the objectivity of the Hall's criteria. The Hall's Wikipedia page has more examples of the criticism of Wenner et al., and this Rush fan site has a page of quotes from a variety of rock legends doubting the value of its choices. When The Sex Pistols were inducted, Johnny Rotten wrote a letter calling the Hall "a piss stain" and "urine in wine" and refusing to attend the ceremony. Complaints about RRHOF are usually paired with complaints about Wenner, and often target the overdependence on record sales as a criterion; here's another example. Dig around, you'll find comments like this for most bands that have been snubbed, with especially heavy emphasis from progressive rock and heavy metal fans, who know from the pages of Rolling Stone how much Wenner dislikes those trends. It's hard to find an authoritative source to confirm Wenner's autocratic control of the nominating process, and there certainly are counterexamples to the influence of record sales (another: Chicago has never gotten in) but I have not been able to find anything, by Wenner or anyone else, providing evidence of the diversity or objectivity of opinion among the RRHOF crowd.

And what none of the comments about Wenner point out (which it is therefore my duty as a blogger to do) is that if he has any influence there, much less controlling influence, it is a depressing comment on this personality cult that he has managed to have himself elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame! Yes, shocking though it may seem after what we have just said, the ever opportunistic Wenner, with the help of colleagues who "have little say over who really is inducted", has granted himself not only rock immortality but a glowing biography, in which the only thing that is understated is his role in the RRHOF itself: "He was in on the ground floor with a small group - which would become its board of directors - that began planning the institution back in 1983, and he remains vitally active in its operation to this day." Vitally active indeed!

In short, the RRHOF is not really the generally recognized standard of excellence, influence, or importance in rock. Though it may have begun with a variety of industry heavyweights counterbalancing each other (Ahmet Ertegun was part of the lineup at first, and one source says that his departure was the beginning of Wenner's total reign) it is widely believed to have long since become a personal playground for one outsized personality and a number of his sycophants. And that is a shame, because so many of us believe that rock is one of the most important musical art forms in history, with tremendous variety and vitality, and no sign of its diminishing after half a century (indeed I see signs that it is once again in a phase of expansion and new forms of expression). It deserves a serious institutional standard for its history and iconography, not a cabal of self-indulgent arbiters whose criteria for admission are fuzzy at best and seriously flawed at worst.

So, how could we fix the Hall of Errors? Well, clearly I think there are certain inductees who should not be there at all right now: virtually all the jazz artists, some of the blues, folk and country artists, all rock stars whose sole contribution is a lot of hit singles, possibly some of the less important divas and crooners from the 50's and early 60's. The problem in a nutshell is that there are certain artists whose absence virtually leaps out at you, having been eligible in some cases for as long as 15 years or more, and without any rational explanation of why ABBA or Bob Seger should be there and not them, it puts the whole project in question.

So here, then, is a LIST: call it the NPRRHOFM! (For the acronmyically challenged among you, that would be "Neglected Potential RRHOF Members".) Now, please note: this is not a list of my personal favorites. Far from it: anybody who knows my tastes knows that I can't even listen to half the groups on the following list. Never particularly liked The Strawbs, Roxy Music, or Mott the Hoople. Hate Kiss; not a Sabbath fan. Grand Funk and Queen each have one great album (Closer to Home and Sheer Heart Attack), the rest of both is almost unbearable. Chicago, Alice Cooper - a few songs here and there that I can get into, that's all. I could also offer you a list of favorites who I would not include at this point: Nektar, The Fixx, The Parachute Club and the Gang of Four, for instance. In short, I'm wearing my objectivity hat here (clearly an unknown piece of haberdashery at Rolling Stone) and trying to identify groups I think are important enough in some way to be clear choices for the Hall. My choices are all made on mainly historical grounds, which I would define as:

(a) Influence: artists who were widely admired, imitated or looked to for inspiration among other important artists who came later. (Examples: Alex Chilton, Iron Butterfly, Laura Nyro, The Flying Burrito Brothers)
(b) Defining role for an era, sound or trend: artists whose overall style or sound, or some aspect thereof, is a touchstone for what became a recognized rock trend or genre. (Examples: Gerry and the Pacemakers, The Moody Blues, Blood Sweat and Tears)
(c) Important representative of sub-genre: artists who may not have been the first or only examples of their particular form of rock, but who are widely considered one of the most important representatives of that form (Examples: The Replacements, Tommy James and the Shondells, Boston)
(d) Originality: artists who stood out as unique in some generally admired way. (Examples: Tim Buckley, Jimmy Buffet, XTC, The Smiths)
(e) Key contributions: artists who don't fall into any of the first four categories, but who either took some critical step that expanded the horizons of rock, or created tracks of extraordinary quality (whether or not recognized in popularity or sales), or made very admirable technical innovations, or some similar important contribution. (Examples: King Crimson, 10CC)

I think most of the groups on my list actually have a foot in more than one of these categories. If this or some similar list of criteria were used, I suspect that a lot of the members of RRHOF would not be there, and a lot of others would. But let me say this, by way of charity: I am not against adding a category "(f): Major hitmakers", and bringing in some of those groups at a later time. It is the vindictive excising of really obvious choices like Jethro Tull and the casual inclusion of popular but otherwise unremarkable groups that exercises me. After due recognition has been given to the people who are actually important to the history of rock, let us open the gates to the people who merely wrote some catchy tunes with good hooks and made million$ from them.

Here, then, is the list. I could entertain the thought of removing some of them after hearing arguments from the field, but I'm putting in bold the artists I think it is really bordering on the absurd to keep out at this point. Add your own in the Comments section, and try to observe the criterion of 25 years since their first released recording, as I have:

A - Arthur Alexander, The Association
B - The Boxtops, Blood Sweat and Tears, Tim Buckley, Bad Company, Blue Oyster Cult, Jimmy Buffet, B-52's, Boston
C - Alex Chilton, Chicago, Canned Heat, Alice Cooper
D - Rev. Gary Davis, Neil Diamond, Donovan (Leitch), Deep Purple
E - (Empty for now)
F - The Flying Burrito Brothers, The Foundations
G - Grand Funk, Gentle Giant, Gerry and the Pacemakers, The Guess Who
H - Roy Harper, Herman's Hermits
I - Iron Butterfly
J - Jethro Tull, Joe Jackson, Judas Priest
K - King Crimson, Kiss
L - Love
M - The Monkees, The Moody Blues, John McLaughlin, Mott the Hoople, Motorhead
N - Laura Nyro
O - (Oops, can't think of any)
P - Procol Harum, Paul Revere and the Raiders, The Psychedelic Furs
Q - (?)
R - Tampa Red, Mitch Ryder, Todd Rundgren, Lou Reed, Roxy Music, The Replacements
S - Neal Sedaka, Steppenwolf, Sonny and Cher, The Strawbs, The Specials, The Smiths, Donna Summer
T - Tommy James and the Shondells, The Turtles, 10CC, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
U - UB40
V - (Vote for your favorite)
W - Johnny Winter, Barry White
X - XTC
Y - Yes
Z - The Zombies, Warren Zevon

Remembering 40 Years of Good Times, (during some) Bad Times

Okay, so I said I'd talk about Coldplay. We're getting there - I mean, at least it's a band widely accused of having plagiarized a cut or two. But, disappointment to follow: I'm not going to talk about Led Zep's plagiarism, not even after hearing Bert Jansch play what must be the original version of "Black Mountain Side" a year ago or so. Zep's alleged plagiarism of Willie Dixon and others is old news. So are their other alleged nefarious misdeeds, like beating the crap out of one of Bill Graham's concert managers. In fact I think I've mentioned them before in this blog, so why beat a dead, er, whale? Besides, after watching Jimmy Page pop out of that bus at the Beijing Olympics and perform the next to impossible task of convincing us that we should pay any attention to England after that phantasmagoria of sporting prowess and technical wizardry, I am inclined to let the past be the past.

But not quite. Today, you see, is the 40th anniversary of Led Zeppelin's eponymous debut album. (I know, you thought Eponymous was by R.E.M.; and I thought R.E.M. was something you do in the middle of the night.) After spending the day discussing with my brothers whether this was the greatest post-Beatles album of all time, I could not help but want to add a few thoughts to settle the matter. I'm sure my brothers will agree wholeheartedly that this is the end of it. Not that I dare look at the comments for a year or two.

Actually I don't really want to settle whether this is the greatest post-Beatles album ever. (It's not technically post-Beatles, because Abbey Road and Let It Be had yet to come out, but we all know The Beatles were pretty much history by the end of 1969, the year Zep I was released.) There are, for those of us inclined to discuss such things, a few contenders for the crown - Dark Side of the Moon, being a prime candidate, maybe The Yes Album or Close to the Edge, maybe In the Court of the Crimson King. (If I have to say who the bands are you probably won't appreciate this post much. Please move to the next one, where I promise to mention Coldplay at least once.) Not too many more options, though if you want to push it you could maybe make a case for Born to Run or Never Mind the Bullocks or Nevermind (hey... never noticed that before). No question, though, Zep I is sort of in a class by itself, and all I want to talk about here is why it made the impression it did.

And, let's just say, it did - indisputably, indelibly, left an imprint the size of a cattle brand on the belly of rock music. For me, it was the first album that created a sort of mystical communion with the music: lying behind a bar at my summer camp when I was 14 years old, in a kind of makeshift isolation booth with some pillows on the floor and a set of Koss headphones, I and everyone else on the staff spun it on a reel to reel, vying nightly for a chance to listen. There were other albums - Wheels of Fire, definitely, I think maybe Days of Future Passed was among them, and CCR's Bayou Country (the one with "Proud Mary") but the album that summer was Led Zeppelin. Nothing compared.

And that alone is amazing. This was July-August of 1969. I'm not sure of the exact release dates, but among the other albums that came out that year were In the Court of the Crimson King, Abbey Road, Let It Bleed, On the Thresshold of a Dream, The Band, 2 or 3 of CCR's best albums, Live Dead and Aoxomoxoa, Clouds, Crosby Still and Nash, The Soft Parade, Hot Rats, The Velvet Underground... and that is really just a snapshot. To say nothing of the equally unbelievable output of 1967-8. Yet, coming at the tail end of what my be the three greatest years ever in popular music ("may be" is a concession to objectivity; shine a light in my brain and you're going to see something like "without the slightest shadow of a question, the 3 greatest years that ever were or will be in popular music" - but I have to be more objective since I'm pretending to be a sort of journalist here) Led Zeppelin demanded and got your undivided attention, from the two opening beats of "Good Times, Bad Times" to the last bowed elephant whine in "How Many More Times". Why? What was so special? I suppose this has been answered before, but I don't really care; I'm going to answer it again.

Start with this: those two opening beats - what are they? Where on earth did they come from? What can you compare them to? Nothing, really; but here's what comes to mind: Bill Haley bursting out, "One, two, three o'clock, four o'clock rock!"; the first guitar chord in "A Hard Day's Night"; or Mick Jagger insisting, "What a drag it is getting old..." at the beginning of "Mother's Little Helper". If not that, then the first line of Moby Dick ("Call me Ishmael"); or the opening of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ("Let us go then, you and I..."). Or, the best analogy I think: the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. The point is, it is absolutely as dramatic a statement as you could make, and they did it with two beats. No other album or song intro quite like it in the history of music.

And what happens next? Well, they build. The two beats (dunk-dunk) develop a tail in the form of John Bonham's tap, tap, tap. Then the taps double (dunk-dunk tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap). Then they add a dotted note, and finally, after a perfectly crafted 2-bar drum intro all hell breaks loose. And here already you can pick up, if you are alert, what will be one of the defining aspects of this album: the drums have become an absolutely equal, in fact essential, part of the music. This is not to diminish the brilliant work that had already been contributed by such percussionists as Ringo, Charlie Watts, Keith Moon, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart, Mitch Mitchell, Dennis Wilson, Spencer Dryden, Corky Lang and of course Ginger Baker. Ringo's brilliant work on "Come Together" - a lesson in how to make a "rhythm section" into the essence of a song - came out later the same year, but he had made himself an essential part of other Beatles tunes, starting at least as far back as his dynamic fills in "Boys". Baker and Moon were perhaps the closest to breaking out of the backup role and putting the drums in a place of prominence. But with Bonham and Zep the job was completed, and it was not limited to this song or that, it was a totally defining component of the band's sound. Oddly enough, one of the few songs on which Bonham would ever play a straight backbeat was "Kashmir" - perhaps their most "progressive" tune, where the 4/4 backbeat is intentionally at odds with the 6/4 of the meter hammered out by the guitar and keyboards. Never mind the introduction of 30-minute drum solos, the doubling of the bass drum, or other of Bonham's innovations. By the time he provided that slightly off-center 2-bar lead-in, you could pretty much say that rock had entered a new era.

That was only a part of what happened with Zep I, though. The next big story has to be the voice of Robert Plant. Throughout the album, on nearly every cut, Plant's voice is an instrument. Just as the drums have jumped out from behind the curtain and become an instrument, so has the voice. It is no longer confined to singing. It is not confined, period. It sings, it screams, it wails, it whoops, it slides, it practically fornicates with the rest of the sound. It imitates the guitar, the guitar imitates Plant, they go back and forth - "imitates" is a lousy word here, because this is not "imitation" as in a Bach fugue, but a real blending, melding of voice and instrumental sound, until you cannot tell them apart. There are some nice harmonies here, and the singing itself is comparable in emotional quality only, perhaps, to that of Janis Joplin. (I Got Them Old Kosmic Blues Again, Mama was yet another great 1969 release.) But the story here was not just the singing of the lyrics, but the use of the voice as yet another new instrument.

This alone would be enough to turn a page in rock history. But of course, there was Page and his guitar. For one thing, there could be no question, none whatsoever, that this was the most aggressive guitar playing ever seen. Clapton was great, and those who hold him in higher esteem than Page - for his incomparable tone, his clean and graceful lines, his taste, not to mention the incredible double solos on Wheels of Fire - certainly have an argument, just as there are plenty of people who would rate John McLaughlin higher than Larry Coryell. For me, I like something who takes chances, and gets away with them, brilliantly in most cases, even if he sometimes falls, misses a couple of notes, makes some unpleasant noise. Page took chances no one even thought of taking before, and the result was - well, just listen, if you haven't recently, to the solos in "Good Times, Bad Times", "Dazed and Confused", and "Communication Breakdown", for instance. Paganini, the great 19th c. violinist, was accused of having sold his soul to the devil to be able to play the way he did. Page's solos have bat-out-of-hell quality that has been imitated about a billion times by now, but no mere technician can play rock and roll the way he did. I remember a friend of mine at the time dismissing Page as not very clean, and holding up Alvin Lee of Ten Years After as a better guitarist (Lee's work on the cut "Going Home" is justly famous.) Be that as it may, nothing Alvin Lee, or Zappa, or Jerry Garcia, or even Jorma had done would influence the style of rock guitar playing the way page did. He showed what could be done, in a way that only Jimi Hendrix had done before. If you wish, you could say that Jimmy perfected what Jimi had started. And it all came together, a mature, new, challenging sound, on the band's debut recording!

Page did more than just play fast solos, of course. He practically took the place of two guitarists, turning complex rhthms into leads and leads into the main backbones of songs. He moved beyond the reverb-and-wah-wah effects of the psychedelic era and challenged the echoplex to become part of the aural landscape. In spite of being the godfather of heavy metal, he brought in acoustic guitars with uncompromising fingerstyle technique that retained more than a bit of the feel of British folk music. Easy enough when you are helping yourself to a tune that Jansch had arranged, but "Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You" was to the best of my knowledge a Page original; and there would be plenty more folk material, from "Gallows Pole" to "Nobody's Fault But Mine". Here he was doing anything particularly new - Jorma's acoustic work, Harrison's sitar, and much else preceded him, but there had been a tendency to get away from it in acid rock. The concentration on both acoustic and Chicago-style urban blues brought a sense of roots-rock authenticity to Zep I that few recent groups could claim. Cream, for sure, The Beatles in their early days, Jefferson Airplane to some extent, maybe Canned Heat - but it was hard to miss the in-your-face attention to serious roots music on this album, even as it moved rock onto a whole new platform. At the same time, the technique of bowing the guitar, especially in "Dazed and Confused" and "How Many More Times", lent an almost surreal quality to the music, beyond psychedelic, not yet space-rock, but something totally futuristic and different and fascinating. "How the hell is he doing that?", was the natural reaction, and on finding out the answer - "I didn't know you could do that!" Well - there you go.

I have not even said a word yet about how Page played the blues. Perhaps because I don't have the words for it. Maybe that is best. There have been great blues players since - Stevie Ray Vaughan, George Thoroughgood, many others - but with all due respect, there are few recordings in the history of rock that even equal, much less surpass, the two (properly attributed) Willie Dixon cuts on Zep I, "You Shook Me" and "I Can't Quit You Babe". You can laugh at Page's imitation of Chuck Berry's patented shuffle on stage, but I've heard, I think, every major urban blues guitarist before Page, and I mean from Tampa Red and Lowell Fulson to B.B. King and Muddy Waters, and nobody played the blues quite like that. Of course, they couldn't: because he didn't just play the blues, he used the most cutting edge electronic effects to their full potential, and achieved a new kind of blues vocabulary in doing so. Again, only Hendrix compares as an innovator. And if you have any questions about his taste, I urge you to jump a couple of disks forward to Zep III, put those headphones on, and settle in with "Since I've Been Loving You", one of the most tasteful blues recordings ever made, to my ears.

Have I missed anything? Yes, indeed; a quarter of the band, in fact. No, make that two-fifths, since he was not only the bass player but the keyboard man. John Paul Jones - what can you say? There are so many places where his playing is so crucial to the music, I could almost repeat everything I said about Bonham but substitute "bass" for "drums". Caution suggests that I should not, though: as great as he was, and as important as he was, there were too many others who pioneered that trail, not least of them Paul McCartney. I tend to think that if there is anything McCartney hadn't done with a bass by 1969, then Jack Bruce or Phil Lesh or Jack Casady had. But whatever: from the little fills in "Good Times, Bad Times" to the opening of "Dazed and Confused" to that enormous avalanche of sound that plummets into "Oh Rosie, Oh girl..." in "How Many More Times", Jones was there, a helluva lot more than just a solid bottom. Maybe he wouldn't prove his full mettle until "The Lemon Song" on the next album, but he was already in top form on the first one.

So, how much can you say about a single album? A lot, I guess, since I recently saw a series of monographs on various rock classics for sale in B&N, I think. Come to the PL, folks, we're better and cheaper. But it's time to wrap up, and say goodnight to what is certainly one of the monuments of rock history. There have been some other great debut albums - King Crimson and Blue Oyster Cult, for example. For the most part, though, when you think about it, it has taken even the greatest groups a couple of disks to work up to their full potential. That Led Zep achieved this earth-shaking triumph with their first recording is truly in the realm of the incredible, an Opus 1 equal to the best that anyone else has to offer. To do that and not be a flash in the pan, but go on to record another seven albums packed with brilliant material, that is a feat equalled only by The Beatles, to my mind - and Led Zep's first recording was a greater achievement than anything the Beatles did until at least A Hard Day's Night, if not Revolver. And with that I bid you goodnight.

Winter JazzFest Brings Parrot Out of Hiding

Well, I'm not going to make any grand announcements like "the parrot squawks again", because who knows, this could be a dead parrot bounce. But one reason I quit posting a year ago or more (I guess more) - aside from the big one of starting other blogs and not being able to keep them all up at once - is that I was getting away from the social issues I was really interested in and often ended up writing performance reviews - which was not the original point. And I really want to get back to the heavy stuff. But what always seems to drag me back to the flogosbeer is a good concert or cultural event.

Thus I find myself more tempted to talk about the Jazz Festival I went to last night, and some of the great performances I saw there - or should I say great performers - than about, say, the question of who Coldplay plagiarized, if anyone, or the death of the music industry, or whether Herman Rosenblatt is a horrible person for writing a "memoir" in which the main character (him) turns out to be partly fictional. So that's what I'll do, for openers, only I'll adopt an entirely new practice for this sort of post: keeping it down to what an ordinary person can read in 15 minutes. I know, I know, what an unreasonable demand to impose on myself, I should be more realistic... nevertheless, here goes.

So I said great performers, not always great performances, by which I do not mean that the performers were having an off night. But something was off - usually a microphone. Start with Will Calhoun and his Native Land Experience (which was actually the last act I saw): due to technical problems - which turned out to be a misbehaving mike cable - they ended up having time for only one full number, and then basically (as far as I could tell) improvised for 5 minutes until they were all but literally given the stage hook treatment. That one number (a fairly long one) pretty much brought the house down. And if the last 5 minutes was indeed an improv, it still blew away a shitload of performances by lesser groups. To their credit they attempted to make up for the fact that jazz fans stood around for half hour to hear one tune by tossing free CD's to the audience (sort of the like blasting teeshirts into the stands at a baseball game - of course, I was no more successful at being in the right spot this time than I was at the last teeshirt blast). Their one song, I have to say, left the impression that this is best damn fusion group I've heard since I saw Weather Report at Northwestern 35 years ago. This I say despite the fact that I was ever so slightly disappointed that Pharoah Sanders didn't make an impromptu appearance at the gig. Who'm I kidding? Myself, I guess, but not without cause. Will Calhoun, the incredible drummer (think Buddy Miles, Billy Cobham, Michael Walden, Alfonse Mouzon - that sort of incredible) for Living Color, as well as leader of his own band, recorded five tracks of his Native Land Experience album with Sanders. I saw the Pharoah, too, back in the good old Chicago days . It seemed like a reasonable miracle that he might grace me with his presence again. Alas, no Pharoah, and barely any Calhoun. Nevertheless, an amazing short concert.

Next, take the guy I happen to be listening to right now on Lala.com, Lafayette Gilchrist - incredible piano player, who reminded me of yet another decades-old Chicago-area music experience, Sunnyland Slim at (long-defunked) Alice's Revisited. (If you are getting the impression that the Chicago music scene left more of an impression on me than the illustrious faculty at Northwestern, you are paying attention.) Not that their styles are so similar, Gilchrist is quite modern, and not blind either, but both riveting keyboardists with a few similar moves. Anyway, Kenny's Castaways, the unlikely host of a third of this jazz festival (the others were Le Poisson Rouge, a big space in a charming basement direclty across the street from Kenny's, and Sullivan Hall, another oblong cave around the corner) obviously has little or no experience with acoustic jazz pianists, perhaps having had nothing softer than some alt-country grundge in 30 years, since the piano (such as it is) was miked about two feet above the keyboard, with the lid closed - the predictable result being that you could barely hear Gilchrist at all. Thus, as I was saying - incredible performers, not always great performances, when you take technical and other factors into account. Though, ignoring those factors, the performances that nobody heard were no doubt exceptional. Especially the ones that were merely underamplified.

We also saw (and for the most part heard) Theo Bleckmann (vocalist, in various popular and show tunes backed by expressionistic string arrangements), Jason Moran's Bandwagon (whose style I lack a ready vocabulary to describe, but much of it was impressive), Toshi Reagon and Big Lovely (not jazz, and a bit long on attitude for this sort of environment, but energetic, unapologetic and well-played soul-pop), a bit of Don Byron Ivey-Divey Trio (very creative and refreshingly non-technical contemporary stuff with tenor sax or clarinet), and a dose of Tar Baby (very decent if not exactly earth-shaking post-bob jazz). All this for $25 and a tip for the Sullivan Hall men's room attendant. (I think they're practicing for the 4-star restaurant they'll be opening as soon as the economy improves, at which they'll serve cheeseburgers, onion rings and a goat cheese-mesclun salad with truffle oil).

The festival was sponsored by APAP - no, not Tylenol (I know some of you wiseacres who are not modern jazz fans are just waiting for an opening ) but the Association of Performing Arts Presenters. I'm assuming, from the crowds that packed nearly every concert, especially the later shows (it's the Village, after all) that the presenters made out like bandits, especially if everyone consumed as much alcohol as my small collective of five friends.

As I said, that's what I'm tempted to write about, but I'm not going to indulge myself. Except this time. Because there are issues of Great Social and Political Import that need to be addressed. Though another idea I had when I started PL was to talk about the arts in a context that related to NYC, which I guess I was a bit more successful at. So on that score the APAP Winter JazzFest is more relevant than, say, the question of whether Coldplay stole a riff from Joe Satriani. Nevertheless, see my next post...

Controlled Joy

Anton Corbijn's first film, Control, had its penultimate evening last night at the Film Forum, and winding our way there through the all-hallowed masses in Greenwich Village, it seemed like a damned appropriate thing to do - notwithstanding the fact that it was actually a birthday event for the plumed blogger. Punk, drugs, suicide, convulsions - what could be more fitting than to be here, while the throngs of devils, clowns and less describably costumed souls meandered the streets and made Sixth Avenue virtually impassable?

It is understandable, though not exactly mandatory, that a noted portrait photographer would break into cinema with a black and white film. The colorlessness is also reminiscent of the two-tone punk aesthetic that Joy Division, I suppose, had something to do with, though I don't think of them as being either specifically two-tone or musically in the center of the punk rock sound. In retrospect they seem very much a part of that late-70's British underground sound, regardless of their predilection for a more spare way of filling the sound space than the gritty 3-chord noise of the Clash or Sex Pistols. But the B/W choice for the film seems to have more to do with the emphasis on spiritual penetration and personae (indeed it occasionally reminded me of the Bergman film Persona) than on punk or new wave clothing styles.

Was it effective? Very. In fact, my guess is that the film would not have been half as powerful in color. There are moments of extremely bare emotion, where every shadow (especially those under the eyes of Sam Riley's Ian Curtis character) counts towards the intimacy of the frame. In an odd way, the film's colorlessness also reminded me a bit of A Hard Day's Night, which has moments, at least, that also resemble a blank stare into the eyes of youths whose extraordinary creative energy only partly masks their troubled souls. Not that I think the soul of the young Paul McCartney was half as troubled as that of Ian Curtis, whose suicide at the age of 23 puts an expectedly somber ending on this bit of musical history. But you know, British band, coming up from the underground club scene, Liverpool accent sounds a lot like Manchester accent... whatever. In any case, Corbijn makes full use of his photographic skills here, setting up virtually every frame in a poetic and meaningful way, using still shots to great effect, and generally giving us a bit of an arthouse experience.

And he gets an extraordinary performance from his actors - the appropriate angst from Curtis, industry-specific deadpan from his band, and an outrageously cocky and very funny managerial sideshow from Tony Kebbell as Rob Gretton. I'm surprised he hasn't received more notice for his performance in this film; his perfectly timed delivery made for some major laugh-out-loud moments as well as serving as a kind of - well, control - on the band's (and the film's) constant tendency to slide off into despair and self-negation. Not that his wit or resourcefulness alone can prevent that, but without it there would have been no film - and possibly no band. Samantha Morton has gotten a lot more recognition for her excellent portrait of Curtis's wife Deborah, whose memoir about him indirectly led to this and other recent attention to the Joy Division episode in British rock. Her plain prettiness and working class innocence makes an excellent foil for the tortured self-indulgence of her ascending rock star husband.

In the end, though, this was a film whose individual aspects are somewhat more impressive than the whole. The film's story line attempts to juxtapose the meteoric rise of Joy Division, at least within the world of underground rock (hmmmm, meteor.... underground rock... must be a way to abuse this metaphor a bit more, but I haven't got the time) with the love triangle between Deborah, Ian and his new flame Annik (Alexandra Maria Lara), and to paint a picture of his decline centering around the emotional difficulty he faced in dealing with his early marriage and fatherhood. Or rather, it tries to negotiate that duality and at the same time throw in his battle with epilepsy and the pressures of fame, touring and all that (see my previous post, "Cinema Rocks"). The key shots are all there, the themes are competently articulated, the acting is good - yet it all seems to come down to an excess of sympathy for someone who largely faced the kinds of difficulties that millions of other young men face without hanging themselves from a ceiling rack. What kills Ian Curtis, according to this film, is quite clearly not the pressure of the rock lifestyle or his drug abuse or epilepsy (though that is strongly emphasized in the film) but his torn heart, which cannot completely abandon Deb or their daughter nor break up with the comely Annik. And that is just a bit too pathetic. Get over it, you want to say - you screwed up having a baby too early, now do the best you can for the wife and child and get on with your life. Also, try to stay off the booze and keep working on finding the right epilepsy medication, like the doctor suggested. Can't handle that? Maybe there's something deeper going on. But the superficial emotional situation is not quite up to the climax of suicide.

We do get a bit more, though, and that returns us to one of the film's more commendable features, the on-stage movements of Sam Riley, which more or less perfectly counter-exemplify the title. For Curtis's mock-dancing is so clearly out of control, yet gives you the sense of someone who thinks he is in control, or at least does not quite know that he's out of control, but has in effect so totally merged with both the rhythm and mood of the music he has written that he no longer has much of a self to distinguish from the utterer of the lyrics. This, and its contrast with the normally staid and measured, if someone spaced-out individual off stage, makes for the film's deepest insight into the character and his dilemma; and the epilepsy serves as a kind of metaphor for the inability to separate the ordinary person who ha to deal with the common difficulties of life from the artist and musician who is completely absorbed in the music. So the fits at home remind us that the person is, at bottom, the man on stage, only offstage, and that he cannot control who o what he is even if it means collapse. And when the fits move onstage, and he has to be carried off by band members, this similarly tells us that the cracks in his personal life cannot fail to intrude into the realm of artistic expression.

Finally, then, the movie succeeds in being at least as schizophrenic as its subject was epileptic: succeeding, failing, but succeeding again. If it does not get a perfect score (on the Tomatometer or elsewhere) it is nevertheless likely to be the best biopic we get about this relatively minor band. All in all, a pretty good addition to the annals of rock cinema, and one worth catching if it comes o your town. Especially if it shows on Halloween.