Disco

One of the other subjects discussed in Twilight Of the Gods is Disco Sucks! Night at old Comiskey Park in Chicago. [Read about it here]. Saturday Night Fever had thrust dance music into the popular culture and white bread America tried to dance again and to dance one has to have dance records. One dances at a discothèque, so dance music of this style became “Disco.”

 

“Disco” became a dirty word when it became synonymous with “popular culture.” The hatred of “disco” for most people was not about racism other than the fact that a lot of minorities [blacks, Latinos] were now getting played on the radio. The “hate” was about the supposed sameness of the beat and how one could not escape that beat… for a couple of years anyway. 

 

For me, I think the dislike stems from the fact that I can’t dance - more likely, I don’t because I’m afraid of looking foolish. I suspect that this is why a lot of rockers hated dance music.

 

Some of the hatred of Disco comes out of the fact that for a couple of years, “Rock” seemed to disappear from the radio. I’m sure even Robin, Maurice and Barry Gibb got sick of hearing themselves every third song on the radio, even though their accountant didn’t. But I say seems to have disappeared for a reason. The top selling singles of 1978 includes artists like the Rolling Stones [although it is the disco-ish Miss You], Queen, Eric Clapton, Wings, the Sweet, Meat Loaf, Foreigner, Kansas, Bob Seger, Styx, ELO, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Bob Welch, Boston and Steely Dan.

 

In those years, I claimed that I didn’t like “black” music, but a few years later I recanted. I had always heard and enjoyed black artists. My mother was an original Motown soul freak! She brought artists I adore into the house – the Ohio Players, Marvin Gaye, the Four Tops, the Temptations, Smokey Robinson. She brought in Donna Summer, Diana Ross, Earth, Wind & Fire. I still don’t know why we never had any Al Green albums but we didn’t. The AM radio I grew up on freely mixed Alice Cooper, Al Green, Jerry Reed, the Jacksons, Paul McCartney & Wings, Leo Sayer, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band… but I hated disco and some of those records still turn me off. On the other hand, I do have the Bee Gees, KC & the Sunshine Band, Parliament, Raydio, EWF, Barry White and Teddy Pendergrass in my collection. They play music that can be danced to and got played in discos but I have returned to them for the groove of their music.

 

Barry White’s It’s Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next To Me for example has a beat and groove so insistent it can NOT be ignored. I like listening how he arranges and builds the song. Kicking off with just a simple beat – kick drum and bass, piano chords on the beat to establish a foundation. Then guitar flourishes – not lines, just chords to get your attention – and the strings swell up to set the melody line. The snare and Barry don not even enter the song until the 1:15 mark [of the album version]. The strings swirl round behind Barry then the horns come up and punctuate and accentuate and Barry’s smooth foghorn whisper just holds it right in the center. It's a master class in building a song. It’s the same thing Isaac Hayes does on Part Time Love or Theme From Shaft. Yet Isaac Hayes is revered great soul artist and Barry White is a punch line. Do I want the full six and a half minutes of Barry? Not every time, even though I will groove through all for 8 and a half minutes of Part Time Love every damn time.

 

Am I likely to ever embrace what was once known as “Disco?” Parts of it. I can admire the Bee Gees harmonies, I can admire the Latin tinged grooves of Harry Wayne Casey [KC] & the Sunshine Band, once in a while I can sing along with Funkytown... Let’s just say it’s as unlikely as me ever buying the Yes collection.

Deep Ellum On A Wednesday Night

Rock and roll is no longer polluted with cigarette smoke. 

Of course I have been to shows with the outdoor smoking corral at arenas and venues but I really noticed it Wednesday night at Three Links. Considering that the bans on smoking are down to smoking in the privacy of one’s own bathroom [with the fan on!], this really shouldn’t surprise me. But I very, very rarely venture out to bars or shows anymore.

Jesse Malin is out on tour and made a rare stop in Dallas at this relatively tiny place. Considering it’s an almost unknown artist , it’s Wednesday night and the [basketball] Mavs are opening the season over at the big, big arena and the World Series is on featuring the Astros [not the local team but Texans will cheer for almost anything Texas related], it’s a tough draw but more than a few of us lingered about. 

Brother N8 turned me on to Jesse by handing me 2010’s Love It To Life.  Short catchy songs mixed with slower numbers and it flowed together so well that I could and did play it on repeat on longer, slower shifts at work. I jumped on 2015’s New York Before the War and loved it almost as much. 

Walking through the crisp October night through the far east side of Deep Ellum past old haunts with new names, a couple of them boarded up {Clearview] or closed for the evening [Trees] leaving a notably dark hole in the forest of neon and LEDs. But somehow Dada still hangs on, one of the last surviving rooms from another century.  Somewhere in the pavement there are ghosts of many, many fun [but in retrospect really stupid] nights hopped up on [mostly] beer, [occasionally] white crosses and youth. 

There was one young lady who never stopped moving while the music played. She never stopped hopping, bopping, twisting, jiving, etc. I thought she has a small backpack with a design but I never got a good look. At one point she had to take off her glasses but throughout the whole night she carried a three quarters empty glass of something in her right hand. She moved so that it never spilled which was amusing because at one point she was swaying, holding her drink and trying to take a photo with her phone all at the same time. And since there was no smoke, occasionally I would get a waft of her perfume [or her Teen Spirit, ha ha]. Watching her moving and having a time almost made this overweight, grey haired spectacled fool hop and bop as well. 

As for Malin and his band, they came out and played a dynamic mix of old school rock and roll, Malin’s wistful ballads, Otis Redding soul [She Don’t Love Me Now, which found Malin up on the bar at one point] and a cover of the Clash’s Rudie Can’t Fail. He dropped in a story about being on stage at Shane MacGowan’s 60^th birthday celebration [between Bono, Johnny Depp and Nick Cave and becoming the bearer of Shane’s Lifetime Achievement trophy], looked back at friends, family and others who passed over the last year and escaping the winter blues in L.A. led him to record his new record. 

Walking back to the car, we reflected how a last minute decision to go to the show has been a great decision [I had found out only two days before]. Dealing with Dallas’s traffic, funky freeways and trying to find legal parking space in Deep Ellum had been worth it for the 80-90 minutes of Malin recharging our rock and roll batteries again. 

And New York Before the War [which Malin played a lot of] has been in my CD player ever since. 

Rock is dead they say.. Long Live Rock

“To absent friends, lost loves, old gods and the season of mists… and may each and every one of us give the devil his due.”  -Neil Gaiman

One of the rituals of air travel from Pittsburgh International is walking the bookstore. What caught my eye this time was Steven Hayden’s Twilight Of the Gods: A Journey to the End Of Classic Rock. Lordy, you know I am a sucker for rock and roll books! A journey to the end of rock and roll? Yes, please!

Hyden isn’t really saying that “Rock” is “dead” but more like the end is in sight for the Classic Rock era style and performers of that style. Just as McCartney and the Stones are the last links to the original era [albeit the tail end of the original era] of “Rock & Roll” before it was  ______ [insert easily understood generic label lice ‘Acid/Psychedelic, ‘Hard,’ ‘Soft/Smooth/Yacht’] Rock which would further be broken down to bits like “Thrash Metal,’ ‘Death Metal,’ ‘Doom  Metal,’ ‘Lipstick/Hairspray Faux Metal.’ 

And just like the original Rock & Roll took the blues from the Delta and Chicago and merged it with the country out of Nashville into a ‘new’ sound, what is listed under “Rock” today has taken bits from the Classic Rock era and merged it with the Indie [i.e. non-commercial] revival, Americana, Grunge,  hip hop, etc and is now something that sounds nothing like what I as a “Classic Rock Era” guy think “Rock” should sound like. [I had deduced this about oh, 1994 when Green Day  arose and Pearl Jam told me via Vitalogy that “This is not for [you]” Me.  And Pantera. And Korn. And Limp Biscuit and “Nu Metal.” ]

But Hyden’s main argument is that those 60’s and 70’s originals [Stones, McCartney, Bruce, Elton, Aerosmith, etc.] are on their last legs. They may be playing great, having fun and raking in the cash on the road or at casino residencies in Las Vegas but at some point, the last classic rocker will perish [even Keith Richards] and all we will have left is the Myth, the Legend and the Legacy of the Classic Rock era.  

 Hyden notes “When people say ‘Rock Is Dead,’ they’re making a statement about themselves – they’re saying ‘This thing that once mattered to me is now dead to me.’

I will use the personal example of Wilco. Wilco up through 2001’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was one of those new, exciting bands I got into. But 200’s A Ghost Is Born was weird, a misstep IMO. [Jeff Tweedy’s addiction to painkillers explained some of this weirdness but not enough for me to forgive or enjoy that record.] I enjoyed 2007’s Sky Blue Sky enough to buy 2009’s Wilco [The Album]. Which is an okay album I guess – it just don’t have anything particularly exciting or memorable. Or upbeat. 2011’s The Whole Love seemed a return to YHF / Summerteeth. [I really enjoy the 12 minute Dylanesque One Sunday Morning.] But Star Wars [2015] seemed too left field and I just decided to jump off the Wilco train once and for all. Was Jeff Tweedy asking too much of me to follow all of his weird little left turns? Was I just no longer interested in committing myself to immersing myself into a record and learning to love those little quirks and left turns the way I used to? In reality, I think a little of the former and a lot of the latter.

Just like revisiting Ric Ocasek’s solo work when he passed. Ric’s solo records are pretty good “pop” records, really not far from The Cars’ records. But We the Public At Large weren’t ‘into’ that anymore. We would rather enjoy our blasts of the late 70’s / early 80’s Cars [the familiar] than sit down with something new. The same way that when the Who will say “here’s something from our new record” on this tour the queue for the bathroom and the beer stand will suddenly fill up. Had Ric brought in the ever loyal Greg Hawkes and three other guys and called them “The Cars” we might still be hailing Fireball Zone as a “great return to form for these guys.”

The next sentences after the “dead to me” is this:

The flip side is that every year there is a new group of teenagers for whom the world is being created just as they’re discovering it for the first time. Anything that existed before them might as well have been around forever.

My own journey through rock is well documented here and there. I was brought up in the “Classic Rock” era and there are albums that my parents had that are the bedrock of my musical knowledge.  Jo0e Cocker, Elton John, Creedence, Three Dog Night, BTO . There were thing that were new then that became the substructure of – Frampton, Steve Miller Band, Ohio Players, ELO, the Cars. And as a teen in love with the music I went back to the 60s and found the Beatles, those early Rolling Stones records, the Door, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi, Zappa, Trower, Zeppelin… those bands and people that FM radio had been filling me up with when I was listening instead of doing my homework.

 Hyden himself was brought up on the Classic Rock his parents played but was also young enough so that a band like Weezer was to him what The Cars are to me – one of those “my era” bands that you follow thorough their career . I guess it seems weird to me that like my neighbor Matt who has “Classic Rock” knowledge but whose musical history actually started with say the Red Hot Chili Peppers Blood Sugar Sex Magic or Pearl Jam’s Ten. Kids in his high school were listening to bands that make me cringe – Nickelback, Creed. But to him, Nickelback strikes the twinge of nostalgia that I get hearing A Flock Of Seagulls or Devo.

I admit it and not that this is a surprise to anyone – I DID name my blog Chaz Is A Music Snob after all – I am a music snob. Like my musical guru J. Michael Leone, I remain tied to my era and while there may be things that come along that I enjoy [the Hold Steady and Black Rebel Motorcyle Club for example] by and large I am contented to fill in the holes in my 70s – 80s era. Delving into Jethro Tull and the Moody Blues – two bands I swore that I hated - and finding some of it enjoyable is beyond something I would have thought in 1995, 2000, 2010… There is still a permanent order at Born Late though that if I come in asking for Yes to lock me down, call the men in the white suits and my mother.

This doesn’t mean that I’m going to get into 1990s Van Halen [OR David Lee Roth] or 80s Jethro Tull but I am still finding stuff that I can get into.

But like Rock & Roll morphed into “Rock” what is music now really has no interest for me. I don’t consume new music like I used to. I don’t really even consume old “new to me” records like I would have. I make my own little “Classic Rock” CDs that I can stand with little Boston, little Styx and deep cuts of Skynyrd, Zeppelin, etc.

There will always be the people looking for the next thing to blow their mind – and they find them, God bless them. Some of them will be the children of my neighbors who will one day look at me in awed wonder and ask “Did you REALLY see Neil Young and Sonic Youth back in 1992? Can you tell us more about Deep Purple?”

I guess that this little book helped me define how I feel about what I have felt missing from my musical life. Hyden sums it up very  eloquently:

Classic rock will always be my country – it’s where I come from, and the place that still feels like home in spite of the countless ways my life has changed since middle school . That doesn’t mean I can’t see or criticize the flaws – the suppression of women and colr, the glorification of alcohol and drug abuse, the reactionary conservatism, the endless Woodstock retrospectives, the phony Satanism, the drum solo, the stubborn sleaziness of Gene Simmons. My love for classic rock is complicated but remains undying.

I wish I had said that. Check that book out.