Friday, March 20, 2020

Top Ten Most Overrated Albums

Number of the Beast

I’ve always loved Iron Maiden. Many have called them overrated, then as now. Certainly they got a little carried away with ego and image; they are the sole inspiration for parody in Spinal Tap.
            Whether this album best represents all of those things that were overblown about them, I don’t know. Certainly it’s a great album, one of their best. I just think that people focus on it too much. What’s disappointing is, it’s the first Maiden album that does not have an instrumental; and the first without Paul Di’Anno. Now, Bruce is a great singer but as he was still under previous contractual obligation he couldn’t even contribute his amazing songwriting abilities to the meager extent that Steve Harris would later permit. Also, as Nico has not yet joined on drums I must say, the chemistry between Bruce and
Clive Burr is less than stellar—‘Run to the Hills’ is the exception that proves the rule; overall that bouncy tom-tom sound worked much better with Paul’s sharp, angsty vocals, whereas the lineup that coalesced for Piece of Mind was their most sophisticated, and probably the most talented metal band of all time.
            The title track is worn-out; aforementioned ‘Run to the Hills’ is always fun to sing along to with friends, ‘Hallowed be Thy Name’ is of course their greatest song ever and ‘Total Eclipse’, co-written by Di’Anno is probably Maiden’s all-time heaviest song.

Some Girls

Some Girls has been quoted as being the last truly great Rolling Stones album—well, not quoted; but people have said that.
            And I get what they mean: it is the end of an era, the Stones finally letting youth and their earlier stardom go. The thing is, though, it just isn’t true. Tattoo You and Steel Wheels are far better albums—more mature, more heavy, more masculine—more consistent: there are really only a couple good tracks on Some Girls.
            Keith’s ‘Before They Make Me Run’ is the absolute highlight. ‘Shattered’ is cool. ‘Beast of Burden’, alright. But ‘Miss You’ is played out; I had a Puerto Rican coworker who found the breakdown rap mildly offensive and irritating—as far as disco they do a better job on ‘Emotional Rescue’, thanks of course to Bill Wyman.
            The title track is not just sexist and racist—it’s boring. And is it ‘Just My Imagination’ or is Mick getting too old to seem cute doing his little English covers of Motown songs?

Appetite for Destruction

OK, it’s probably one of the greatest rock debuts of all time. ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ and ‘Paradise City’, all great songs, still play on the radio daily. I’m just tired of hearing people talk about, “It’s their greatest album”! Use Your Illusion, anybody? If you wanna admit that the only thing that makes it “better” is the fact that Steven Adler’s on the drums, fine! at least you’re being honest; and maybe you’re right... but if it’s because your measly brain can only handle songs about sex and drugs and not contemplate war, social dislocation, megalomania, love and other more philosophical considerations just go back to your AC/DC!

The Doors

This, too is one of rock’s timeless debuts. ‘Light My Fire’ and ‘Whiskey Bar’ are staples of classic rock radio. ‘The End’ is iconic through its use in Apocalypse Now and as the inspiration for epic rock from ‘Dream On’ to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. Above all this record captures the time (’67) place (Los Angeles) and feeling (duh!) better than any other.
            The problem is that by holding it up critics have asserted the band’s subsequent efforts fall short—and this is untrue. From the spaced-out perfection of Strange Days and the prog-rock experiments in the studio that led to the commercially successful Waiting for the Sun, to the brilliant orchestration and proto-hip-hop of Soft Parade and all-on rock of Morrison Hotel and L.A. Woman, not to mention the excellent live shows turned out on the occasions Jim wasn’t too messed up to perform, the Doors never looked back.

Kind of Blue

Kind of Blue truly is a great album. Perhaps the greatest. Still; it represents a certain whitening and stagnation of jazz taste, even if made by a predominantly black and forward-thinking ensemble. Miles himself hated being pigeonholed by this release, even as it helped him to reach a wider audience, whom he exploited to finance his expensive tastes.
            John Coltrane is neither at his worst nor his best. There are definitely Miles records where Trane’s solos are simply embarrassing. But here, he is the least remarkable of the group.
            Bill Evans, despite adding so much to the texture and atmosphere of the record (his intro to ‘All Blues’ is a highlight) is shown up by Wynton Kelly, who only plays on one track, the bluesy ‘Freddie Freeloader’. And the closer, ‘Flamenco Sketches’, which is given two takes on modern Cd releases, is boring, and disappointing next to the full realization of the incomparably superior record, Sketches of Spain.
            This album helped to kick off the modal jazz craze, but for all that, despite its authentic jazz elements, where are the drum, the bass solos?

Exile on Main Street

Yes, another Stones album on the list…maybe I’m trying to say something? What if we listed the most overrated bands?

            Anyhow, Exile is a sprawling mess. And why do we romanticize the fact some rich English chaps don’t wanna pay their taxes? There are two good songs on this heroin-soaked-cotton-ball of an album: ‘Tumbling Dice’ and ‘Happy’

pretty much everything by Bach
other than the Organ Works

Why are classical listeners so obsessed with Bach? As if he were the apotheosis of Baroque, rather than its contrapuntal decadence?
            The answer, I think, lies in the eugenic, anti-Catholic bias of Anglo-Teutonic protestant tastemakers in the English-speaking world. The Italians, even the least of them, were vastly superior to this uptight Lutheran, and the early Baroque far more pure than the late. At the same time I’d rather hear J.S.’s son C.P.E. Bach most days than his father.
            To be fair, there are a few choral masterpieces and, again, the organ works are divine, incomparable and in a class of their own, though I’d throw in Wagner’s arrangement of the Wedding March from Lohengrin.

The Ring Cycle

Speaking of Wagner, he only followed through in finishing this quartet of nonsense at the unremitting prodding of his benefactor, mad King Ludwig of Bavaria. Wagner at one point wanted to produce the piece annually at no charge for the benefit of the common man, socialist that he was, in a wooden theatre constructed specially for the occasion and burned to the ground after the third night. Rather, at his wife’s insistence and, ultimately, direction, he got Bayreuth with high ticket prices exclusive for the well-t-do whom Wagner despised.
            Siegfried has its moments; the rest of it is boring. The overture to Das Fliegende Holländer has all that is great about The Ring, condensed into actual music.
            Lohengrin is divine. Tristan und Isolde heavenly as well.
            No doubt The Ring has helped to inspire more cultural works in the last century than any other musical composition, from Tolkien to Star Wars. Nonetheless; it is far from Herr Kapellmeister’s finest.

Led Zeppelin IV
or Zoso

I take it back, then—the Stones are not the most overrated band. This scrawny, effeminate shrieker and the drunken buffoon of a drummer who only knows one beat utterly ruin the ingenious creations of the studio musicians: bassist/keyboardist/mandolin master and junkie/sex-pervert guitar player; except perhaps on ‘The Battle of Evermore’, the only good track on this absolutely (and literally) God-forsaken album.
The horrible, overrated ‘Stairway to Heaven’ is probably only so popular because Bonham doesn’t play for most of the song—and yet, paradoxically, the song only gets good at the end, when the drums come in.

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

The rest of this list is meaningless. Great music enjoyed by sensible individuals.

Here we have something of another order altogether. How the greatest rock band, under the obvious and indiscreet influence of the most wonderful drug churned out this garbage is beyond me.
There are precisely 1.5 good songs on this record: the incomparable harmonic joy of ‘Lovely Rita’ and Lennon’s part of ‘A Day in the Life’.

            

Monday, February 24, 2020

Hitchin' by Alex Silberman

         Hitchin’ might be the best non-scholarly work to come out of Cambridge since the so-called ‘New England Summer’ literary revival of the late 19th century. I, myself had always wanted to be a modern-day Kerouac — but Alex Silberman beat me to it (the fact that he actually went out “on the road” helped).
         I bought my copy in cash after drinks with the author at the Field, outside of Central Square.
         ‘That an $1.50 buys ya a cup a coffee.’

         It doesn’t hurt that I know a few of the characters in the book—and his depictions are spot-on. But really, Hitchin’ says something very deep, about life, about America—about youth, and its afterlife; how youth lives on in adulthood.
         As Alex hitchhikes across the country west he meets an assortment of weird and wild characters (perhaps none more so than himself) and like a Rorschach you can see what you want in it; to me some themes that pop up are the dichotomy between family (biological or otherwise) and loneliness. Despite the dire straits some are in or habits and lifestyles these are Sly Stone’s “Everyday People” who stop to pick up our author and detail their relationship problems, addictions, dreams, beliefs and wisdom. Silberman quotes a few aphorisms, or “advice” told him by a guy named Brandon, which could probably be stretched into a whole chapter, or maybe a book in its own right.
         Our protagonist lives among, and yet apart from all these people, maintaining individual self-consciousness while partaking in the flux of action and conversation. As Nietzsche writes in The Birth of Tragedy, ‘every artist is an “imitator,” that is to say, either an Apollonian artist in dreams, or a Dionysian artist in ecstasies, or finally…at once artist in both dreams and ecstasies; so we may perhaps picture him sinking down in his Dionysian intoxication and mystical self-abnegation, alone and apart from the singing revelers, and we may imagine how, through Apollonian dream-inspiration, his own state, i.e., his oneness with the inmost ground of the world, is revealed to him in a symbolical dream image.’* 
        
         As we meet ‘the young the old and what have you with other displaced characters’ and more through ‘different worlds not colored in such Nuevo modernist, veiled progressive, technocratic finery’ we see another side of the American Dream. If Silberman cannot change the world he seeks to live outside of it, and yet right in the heart of it at the same time. Still, without the corporations he reviles who would manufacture the cars that give him a lift, who would ship the cardboard boxes from which he makes his signs, and who would operate the fast-food joints he stops in to use the bathroom?
         Alex inhabits a world (call it Cambridge, call it the second decade of the 21st century) where people are defined by, and hung up on, their sexuality—therefore, as many do I think, he accepts gays and transsexuals unquestioningly but is adamant in his own heterosexuality, defining himself in the process but it is palpable his lonely lust on the road as he heads west throughout the first part of the book, ‘Momentum from point A to point P, from the Atlantic to the Pacific.’
         In many ways though, he is just a normal guy—the first half of Hitchin’ is really the story of the people he meets on the way; very strange characters at times caught up in all sorts of situations. He judges the system, not individuals—he leaves that to the reader. Still there is often enough the sense of a struggle in these lives between sin and redemption. They change their lives, overcome addiction, deal with infidelity, return to or run from children, spouses, obligations and home:
         and it’s to home, ultimately, that Alex must return. The Pacific Ocean is his destination, his goal—once he reaches it he seems devoid of purpose, flitting about impulsively looking for connection, settling for shallow sex. It is at this point in the book that we confront Silberman himself, without the phantoms of all these other lives whose stories seem transiently fascinating. And here, the writing itself takes a different turn. Silberman’s narrative is defined by naiveté side-by-side deep wisdom; his prose at times simple and matter-of-fact, bordering on social-media-English, yet achieves true brilliance in unique phrasing and often enough is profound in its very simplicity.
         Hitchin’ does not answer the question, “What’s out there?” so much as it raises new questions about what’s inside and between us, how we define ourselves and relate to each other in this modern world where connection is a click away and yet the people we live with may be farther from us than the other side of the country.  
-G.T. Evans


*trans. Walter Kaufman


Aside from the Nietzsche all quotes are taken from Hitchin’

Wednesday, February 12, 2020

Raymond Daniel Manczarek

         “Raymond Daniel Manczarek. Born 2/12/39. Musician: organist.” These were Ray Manzarek’s answers to a film crew’s questions “Name, Age, Occupation” on the Doors’ ’68 European tour. His singer’s response couldn’t have been more different. Name: “Uh, Jim” Occupation: “Umm..?”
         The stoic, Apollonian, business-minded father figure and the inspired, prodigal Dionysian child were like Yin/Yang; that tension was the embryo of a band that would change the world and, for a brief moment, be on top of it.
         Someone born on today’s date is an Aquarius. The water bearer. The visionary. But as the 3rd decanate* of Aquarius he is ruled by Venus; therefore drawn to the finer things, the luxury of L.A. “We’re gonna make a million dollars” Ray said to Jim when he first heard Morrison sing some of his songs on Venice Beach in 1965. Maybe Jim didn’t want to be a rock star; but Ray made it happen. No one did more to push the myth, not only of the band but of Morrison as incarnation of Dionysus. From the 80s till his death, not ten years ago, Ray promoted the image of the band and their departed singer to new generations of youth, encouraging them to venerate the cult of personality that Jim himself so despised and distrusted. Thanks Ray; you kept the door open all these years.
         A Polish kid from Chicago drawn to the blues at a young age, the only white boy sneaking in to those sweaty clubs, but also a classically-trained pianist influenced by his countryman Chopin, by Bach, Kurt Veil and the suggestive expansiveness of cinema, Ray Manczarek was truly a one-of-a-kind keyboardist. Funky yet avant-garde, no white rock band at the time had anything like him; he is to a great extent what set the Doors apart from the common two-guitar lineup of the day, not to mention his left hand replaced the bass player most groups relied on to hold things down. “There will never be another one like you”, Ray; without him one can’t imagine a group like Santana, Deep Purple or Blue Öyster Cult, or a host of prog rock bands—even the melodic death metal of Amorphis plainly owes a debt.



*A decanate is a ten-degree division of the zodiacal circle. Therefore each sign has three decanates which last approximately ten days each.

Thursday, January 2, 2020

John Densmore - Let Me Say This About That

         John Densmore may be the greatest drummer in rock n’ roll history. He’s certainly one of the most underappreciated—okay, Lars Ulrich and Ringo get hated on a lot more; but John could actually play, man*…for one thing, and this is the most important, his timing was impeccable, I mean he was so deep in the pocket his nails scratched lint, but as a jazz musician he knew when to ride behind the beat to add drama or come in ahead to build tension, when to accent an unexpected syncopation with a well-placed rimshot. I know Jim Morrison sometimes complained about John’s drumming, and part of this was Jim’s egotism and musical ignorance but I think a major point of contention was sometimes he played a little faster onstage than Jim wanted and Jim, with hand gestures and sometimes verbal cues, would try to get John to slow the band down. Of course it’s normal for a band to be nervous or excited and play faster live than they do on record, and usually after the first number or two this would even out, for the Doors at least, more so than other bands. In any case John had perfect rhythm and tempo in the studio and set the atmosphere on many tracks, much as bop great Art Blakey did with his Jazz Messengers or sidelining for legends like Miles Davis.
         John’s favorite jazz drummer was Elvin Jones (as were Mitch Mitchell’s of the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Ginger Baker’s, of Cream), famous among other things as John Coltrane’s drummer for years. As a performer Jim Morrison had much in common with Coltrane; they were both spontaneous and unpredictable, yet repetitive to the point of obsession, capable of transcendent lyrical beauty or profound philosophic depths but also prone to loud obnoxious shrieks of rage and unquenchable pain and searching. They both had a sympathetic soul in their drummer, who responded intuitively through the highs and lows of every performance, matching each note or word with its exact percussive complement. 

         Densmore had his own distinctive beat with tom-tom eighth-notes on ‘2 &’ and a clipped snare on the ‘4’, used on songs such as ‘The Crystal Ship’ and ‘When the Music’s Over’. I cannot be sure where he got it but nearest I can tell the earliest example of this particular beat was on Mary Wells’ ‘You Beat Me to the Punch’. The real amazing thing about John in the Doors was not how he set such a great beat for the musicians but how he could incorporate an almost extra-metrical sense of dynamics to emphasize, not only the cadence but the feel of Jim’s poetry, its sonance and meaning. In this he is wholly unique and I do not think Morrison could have conveyed his voice so authentically with any other drummer.
         From the opening number of their first album, ‘Break On Through (to the Other Side)’ which Densmore kicks off with a jazzy bossa nova for the verse, switching into a straight backbeat in the chorus, to the structural development and emotional emphasis he builds with cymbals during the last verse of ‘Summer’s Almost Gone’, from marching beats and 12/8 flamenco rhythms to the pulse with which the Doors helped lay the foundations for prog, punk, heavy metal and even proto-hip-hop, John Densmore shall be heard as long as there is rock.








*Actually I love Ringo and Lars; I don’t think the Beatles or Metallica could be what they were without them and in fact I had started writing a piece about them several years ago, but never finished it.