Ten Records That Made Me Pull Over

Let's be real: Every music nerd worth the name has had way more than 10 of these. This is just the list I remember today.

"Records" because I hate it when people refer to excerpts from classical works as "songs", which they're generally not unless you're talking Schubert. Or Copland.

Can you dig it? I knew that you could. Here we go.

Guinnevere; Crosby, Stills and Nash: Seems to proceed out of Vince Guaraldi's "Cast Your Fate To The Wind", which I knew and loved. There's a little bit of Daphne DuMaurier's Rebecca, and her hapless replacement -- also known and loved -- here too. 

A song that has lost none of its power to haunt this listener, and inspire hope for the rescue of a woman trapped forever in the wooden memories of an inanimate object madder even than Guinnevere herself.

(What A) Wonderful World; Art Garfunkel, feat. Paul Simon and James Taylor: The arrangement was too elevator-friendly by half, but, oh, those voices! Nobody but Crosby, Stills and Nash was singing like this at that time, and that union was always touch and go.

Love Is Like Oxygen; Sweet: Could just as easily have been "Addicted To Love", which provoked the same reaction when I first heard it. And then, I saw that video .... So, Sweet takes it. There's just something about riff rock (Green River, Long Cool Woman, Dwight Twilley's I'm On Fire) that puts your whole day right.

Bonus: Slightly-delusional lyrics. Also, two great riffs in one -- that synthesized, French Horn opener, and the crunchy guitar. 

No apologies.

Stories We Could Tell; Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: I had seen this tour, and was still marveling that some New Wave cat (that'd be Bobby Valentino of The Fabulous Poodles) had sounded every bit as country on the fiddle as Roy Acuff. Then, they released a live version with Valentino as the B side of ... something, and I was done.

Stop Draggin' My Heart Around; Stevie Nicks, feat. Tom Petty: This was smart, it was lean, it was tough, and it boasted a frontwoman.  It's impossible to state how different it was from anything that had come before.

The Köln Concert; Keith Jarrett: A lot of water under the bridge, and a lot of soulless, brunchy imitators can't rob this record of its beauty or its power. A magnificent achievement that captivates from the first few notes. Like being lost in the storm-tossed ocean without ever drowning.

Bury My Lovely; The October Project: Kate Bush without all the silly, rich-girl trappings. Completely, utterly, and appropriately serious, yet just as utterly without pretense.

The Water Music Suite No. 1 in F major, HWV 348: VII. Bourree, Georg Friderich Händel; Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Gerard Schwartz, cond.: Improv, baroque style, courtesy of virtuoso oboist, Alan Vogel. 

I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry; The Holly Cole Trio: A musical banquet of country, jazz, gospel, and old-style hymn singing. The lonesome streak that runs a mile wide through all those genres makes it work in a way some cheap, exploitative "crossover" hit never could.

Tennessee Blues: J.D. Crowe and The New South: From the first, halting notes of the banjo, this George Jones cover announces an unshakable soul sickness of the kind you can only catch when you're forced to act all homey in a place  that makes you feel homeless.

Happy New Year, Everyone

Enjoy the new year, folks. And, remember:

Teach your children well,
Their father's hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they pick's the one you'll know by
Don't you ever ask them why
If they told you, you would cry,
So just look at them and sigh
And know they love you.

Also remember that Jerry Garcia played steel on that track.

The Wary Adoption

It would be easy to dismiss this song as a snapshot of gypset life, circa 1960s, but a closer look reveals so much more:

Trina wears her wampum beads
She fills her drawing book with line
Sewing lace on widows' weeds
And filigree on leaf and vine
Vine and leaf are filigree
And her coat's a secondhand one

As a writer, a painter, a musician, Joni Mitchell, who wrote these words, could also be described as a trained observer. But is that all she's doing here?

Annie sits you down to eat
She always makes you welcome in
Cats and babies 'round her feet
And all are fat and none are thin
None are thin and all are fat
She may bake some brownies today

That she's close enough to see a textile artisan further embellishing the design of a fabric by sewing "filigree on leaf and vine"; around long enough to hear that the resident earth mother "may bake some brownies today", tells us that Mitchell is not just a visitor. These are the quotidian intimacies of home, and these homemakers feel relaxed enough around Mitchell to let her partake in them.

At this point in her life, Joni Mitchell had been a long-time resident of California's Laurel Canyon, but she's not talking about the old familiar. She sings:

Come out for a visit here
To be a lady of the canyon

and it's an invitation she issues just after describing the most private, the most interior-looking canyon lady of the set:

Estrella circus girl
Comes wrapped in songs and gypsy shawls
Songs like tiny hammers hurled
At beveled mirrors in empty halls
Empty halls and beveled mirrors
Sailing seas and climbing banyans

This is not the presumptuous, easy intimacy that visitors and other newcomers often mistake for California casual. This is adoption, instantaneous and all-encompassing, by women for whom sensing kindred spirits is an act of self-preservation. Only on TV would anyone make these private moments public for the sake of putting on a show:

Trina takes her paints and her threads
And she weaves a pattern all her own
Annie bakes her cakes and her breads
And she gathers flowers for her home
For her home she gathers flowers
And Estrella dear companion
Colors up the sunshine hours
Pouring music down the canyon

This is Joni Mitchell with "Ladies Of the Canyon".

The Cultural Myopia of Rolling Stone

Photo: FineArtAmerica

EDITOR'S NOTE: Re-upping this piece from 6/7/16, in light of all the renewed attention to Rolling Stone co-founder, Jann Wenner via a scathing, new biography entitled Sticky Fingers.

These days, Rolling Stone reads like the house organ for popular culture; they love whatever they get for free, and that's all of it. But, back in the day, like Mikey from the legendary, 70s-era Life Cereal commercial, they hated everything.

Rolling Stone writers circa the mid 1970s were so vociferous in their disgust that I, a trained musician, began to question my own taste level. Only recently did I realize that provincialism was rampant at Rolling Stone. If it wasn't from the East Coast -- or possibly the Midwest, if they were feeling generous -- it was scorned.

Never mind that the Eagles; Crosby, Stills and Nash; and the infinitely-creative Joni Mitchell, whom RS once dubbed "Old Lady Of the Year," were writing about experiences as true and real to California as those of Lou Reed and The Ramones were to New York City.

As socially-progressive as the folks at Rolling Stone liked to think they were, the artists they championed were actually quite conservative. They sang about sticking with one's neighborhood, one's tribe, with all the entitlement of those whose tribes and communities hadn't shunned them.

By contrast, the exemplars of the California Sound sang about having to make their own way, choose their own families, make the long trek westward to live a dream that often turned out to be rotten to the core. Their families had turned them out, but Rolling Stone insisted that California rockers were solipsistic and self-involved.

Bruce Springsteen might burn rubber trying to get away from his old man, but he always came back. The Eagles didn't dare come back until they had won:

We're gonna hit the road one last time
We can walk right in and steal 'em blind
All that money
No more runnin'
And I can't wait to see the old man's face
When I win the race

These are the Eagles with "Bitter Creek".