Rock And Roll, Part 2 [OR "Radio Gaga"]

I was thinking again today about this Almost Famous and "Whatever happened to my Rock & Roll?" [a Black Rebel Motorcycle Club tune, by the way....] conenction and another thought struck me. [Ow!] Specifically I was thinking about Sapphire's speech where she's talking about 'falling in love with some silly little song...' and how I used to hear all this great music. "Invisible airways crackle with life / bright antennae bristle with the energy / Emotional feedback on timeless wavelengths / Bearing a gift beyond price almost free..."

Then I though about Marty's son - the 15 year old drummer dude - [and maybe some of your kids] don't know about radio. They don't know how we used to live to get to a radio after school. "Busted out of class / Had to get away from those fools / We learned more from a three minute record than we ever learned in school..." They don't know of a time when you couldn't log onto a computer and download a song.They don't know about DJs and waiting [AND waiting ... AND waiting] for the DJ to play your request... if they ever really did.

Marty, a real go getter and at one time a music business management major [in a class with Trisha Yearwood at Belmont, right?] used to call and talk to all the DJs and program managers. ["Why do you play this? Why don't you play that?"] What do today's kids know about program managers? Anyone else remember on WKRP when the 'consultant' came in and said his 'service' could program the music [i.e. make up the play-list] better than Andy? Well that's what radio became. It's all programmed from one coast or the other and it's all the same all up and down the dial, unless you hit a college station or a real independant like KXT here in DFW. There's no such thing as a regional hit anymore. You can't have Tommy James' Hanky Panky suddenly break out in Pittsburgh and then begin making national waves. You can't have Celeveland or Detroit breaking a band like Rush or Meat Loaf or the J. Geils Band. It's all down to one guy giving the thumbs up or thumbs down for the whole nation!

I don't know how it was where you grew up. I grew up partially in the north when AM radio was king. AM radio then was a lot of top 40. My parents are fairly young so I was also exposed to some stuff via the miracle of the 8 track, and I still have a fondness for a lot of those bands - Steve Miller, Elton John's Madman Across the Water, Bachman Turner Overdrive, Creedence Clearwater's Pendulum, the Ohio Players' Honey... When I moved to Texas, I found FM and AOR [Album Oriented Rock if you don't recall or never knew]. Yeah, some hits like Cheap Trick, Tom Petty, the Rolling Stones, ELO, Jackson Browne, the Eagles - but also some stuff a little more out there... Billy Thorpe's Children Of the Sun, Zebra's Who's Behind the Door, the Kings' The Beat Goes On / Switching To Glide, the long version of Slow Ride and of course those deep cuts of Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, the Who and lots of ZZ Top in Texas. Plus you could get things that seemed to be regional, like Joe 'King' Carasco's Party Weekend.

In DFW there were three stations that were the rock and roll champions - KEGL [The Eagle or Eagle 97 - originally they were Z97 and a little more AOR, but they went a little more pop in the early 80s and kind of fell off my radar], 98 KZEW - The Zoo and Q102. The Zoo and Q102 had a long running battle for supremacy. Q102 had the wild men of the morning, BNo Robert and 'Long' Jim White [still on the air here, now at 92.5 KZPS, still slinging tyhe same old songs on 'classic rock radio. Good God, how many times can you play .38 Special before you just want to shoot yourself?], while the Zoo threw up the smarmy, wise guy, Steely Dan of the radio LaBella and Rody. John Dillon on mid morning on the Zoo - I'd listen while grading papers as a TA my senior year. Sally Diamond on 102? Tempie Lindsey on the Zoo afternoon drive, Redbeard [who got great guests - he got Joe Walsh to cover for him one week while he was on vacation] on Q102. Evening on the Zoo was Chas Mixon...I'm blanking on the Q person - not bad for 25 to 30 years ago. You can see what an impact radio had on me!

But that was what I had - of course I had some records and a tape deck in my car, but radio was still good enough where you could cruise and listen to the radio. Now I get in the car, spin around 12 FM stations twice in three minutes and push a CD in. Partially this is because I have become my parents: I've heard that so many times if I hear it once more I'm gonna throw up. I never thought I'd get sick of some songs, but now I have songs I will willingly give up days at the end of muy life not to hear again. Dream On by Aerosmith? Three days. Kashmir by Led Zeppelin? Maybe two. Wonderful Tonight, Tears In Heaven by Eric Clapton and Layla [Derek And the Dominos] - take a week. Candle In the Wind by Elton John - two days. When the Zoo was flipped in the winter of 88, the war was over. The Zoo had been trying some other stuff - incorporating newer music both from the college end like R.E.M., Kate Bush and XTC and some of the 'Metal' like Dokken, Poison, Tesla, etc. I guess it didn't work. Or maybe Belo was tired of them. After that it seemed like there was nuthin' good on the radio, no matter what station you were tuning to. And that's when I became a tape junkie.

But what saddens me with the loss of radio, is the loss of the magic moments that sometimes happen. The first time something new comes blasting out of those speakers - the first time you hear the Black Crowes' Jealous Again or U2's Sunday Bloody Sunday or the Foo Fighters' Monkey Wrench or Pearl Jam's Evenflow and you go "What was THAT?!?" Or maybe you hear a song you've heard before, but this time it clicks and you go "Oh. OH! Now I get it." Or the DJ pulls some moldy oldie that you haven't heard in ages - or maybe you never heard and it sends you scurrying to the record store [or I guess iTunes now]: Dylan's Shelter From the Storm, Springsteen's The River, the Who doing Summertime Blues, Aerosmith's Rats In the Cellar, Neil Young's Powderfinger, Joe Walsh's County Fair.. or almost anything by the Kinks or Johnny Winter or Frank Zappa or PiL or X or Roxy Music... Where will kids find out about such things? It's what Michael Leone did for me and I try to pass it on. I guess people who make connection with the music will always find someone to say "You should check this out." At least I hope so.

I Miss My Rock & Roll

"These people want you to write sanctimonious stories about the genius of rock stars and they will strangle everything you love about it. They're trying to buy respectability for a form that is gloriously and righteously dumb. And the day it ceases to be dumb is the day it ceases to be real. Then it just becomes an industry of 'cool.'"
- Lester Bangs to William Miller, Almost Famous

Whether the real Lester Bangs uttered these words or words to this effect to a very young Cameron Crowe somewhere about 1973 will never be known except to the two persons involved in the conversation. Or is this Crowe's view from a standpoint almost two decades later as he wrote Almost Famous? Or some combination of both? Having the 20/20 hindsight and a review of the history of music from roughly the start of the rock and roll era, the words strike me harder this time I view the film [on Turner Classic Movies!]

Having read some Lester, the words are in line with Lester's thinking. And he was right - 'They" won. When the suits got the numbers from albums like Frampton Comes Alive, Rumours, Hotel California and [shudder] Saturday Night Fever, the war they had been fighting to have that blockbuster album that everyone "had" to have was won. And it did become and industry of 'cool,' heavy emphasis on 'industry.' There's a reason the record companies were taken over by big multinational conglomerates like Sony and Phillips in the 1980s. There was money to be made. And eventually, this is what killed the 'record company' or the 'music industry.' Being tied to an old business model, it wasn't able to adjust to the new technology once the CD was no longer the prime medium of delivery of the product [music]. Except to hard core idiots like me who still like holding the plastic and reading liner notes. But even I am slowly succumbing to the lure of the download, having hit up the Rhino and Merge websites for a few digital music purchases this year. [If Sony /Legacy would set this up instead of trying to make me go through Amazon, it would be a great day for music!]

I look back at the 1980s now... yes there was a lot of dumb resurfacing - some on purpose [The Replacements], some accidentally dumb [Poison] - and a lot of pushing 'cool.' At Sound Warehouse, we had a monthly music sampler the corporate pushed on us to make sure it played every two hours or whatever. Basically, someone had an album they were pushing and paid some dollars to get 'guaranteed airplay.' [Now you can't do that on radio - that's 'payola' and highly frowned upon, but to push it in the store? *sigh* This was the 80s and I guess greed was still good.]

I have been working on a maddening and enlightening set of projects - for myself really - making car CDs of two of the three major eras of my music listening. One is called 8 Track Flashback, covering an era from the late 60s to about 1980. The other is called Walkman Favorites, covering from about 1978 to about 1995, when cassette was my primary source of music playback - mostly in my vehicle. And I wonder as I wander though, looking for the tunes: Why that album? Why Then? Why was the world ready for [insert album] at this time and not before? And why not [insert more obscure band and/or album]? Why Frampton Comes Alive? Why was Springsteen / Born In the USA so huge in 1984-85, but when the follow up came out [Tunnel Of Love] it sank? Why did Billy Joel connect with so many people? Yeah, Billy made some good albums between 1977 and... say 1984, [and he made 52nd Street, which had its hit singles, but otherwise - bleh.] but why? Why do most casual music fans only know about one or two Thin Lizzy songs, but a whole wealth of the Zeppelin catalog? Why did Metallica explode into what they are while Megadeth or Anthrax are 'also rans?' Why R.E.M and not the Long Ryders or Lone Justice? Why are Pete Townshend and Andy Partridge so smart and Paul Westerberg the 'brain damaged cousin'?

Which is not to say I haven't enjoyed hearing some older stuff I haven't visited in a while. But side 2 of Billy Idol's Whiplash Smile? Uh... no. And I was so excited when that came out, too. Why do I still like side 2 of Billy Joel's Glass Houses so much? Or the Cars Panorama? How come me and Marty [and now Marty's 14 year old son] seem to be the only people who love the Black Crowes Amorica?

To Be Continued [or not]....

"I used to get a little speed, you know - a little cough syrup. And I'd just sit and write for hours. 20 pages of nothing but dribble on Coltrane or the Faces. Just to fuckin' write."
-Lester to William again, Almost Famous

In honor of the publication of Rolling Stone's Top 100 Beatles Songs, I have put together my own little list for your approval [or not], in as close to an order as I can muster. Now RS included cover tunes in the catalog, I have opted not to. I have also not opted to go to 100. I'll stick to 33. This leaves a lot of really good stuff off, but I think this is a good 'Desert Island Beatles' list. And so: 1. A Day In the Life 2. Strawberry Fields Forever 3. Hey Jude 4. Tomorrow Never Knows 5. Dear Prudence 6. Help! 7. Day Tripper 8. Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds 9. Here Comes the Sun 10. Penny Lane 11. Paperback Writer 12. She Loves You 13. I Am the Walrus 14. For No One 15. Helter Skelter 16. Ticket To Ride 17. You've Got To Hide Your Love Away 18. If I Needed Someone 19. Oh! Darling 20. Let It Be 21. Dr. Robert 22. Lady Madonna 23. Nowhere Man 24. I Feel Fine 25. When I Get Home 26. What Goes On 27. In My Life 28. Mother Nature's Son 29. You Can't Do That 30. This Boy [Ringo's Theme] 31. You Won't See Me 32. I'm A Loser 33. Julia

The Curmudgeon I Have Become

It's September 12th [well 13th now - and good morning to you!] and the start of the football season. And while I consider myself a fringe fan - really a fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers more than "Football" or the NFL. But a week in - two if you count college football, and you might as well - I am all ready worn out by it all.

First, I live in a major sports market that has none of my favorite teams in any sport. The Dallas [Arlington? North Texas?] Cowboys? No, thanks. But from the day training camp starts until their exit from the season, whenever it is I am awash in the media hype about them. Not just the sports stations but the tie-ins to supermarkets and all the news broadcasts. The only thing that wears me out more is the American Idol minute on the local Fox station. American Idol has NO FUCKING PLACE on the news. *sigh*

I can take or leave baseball. When I was a kid I was a Pirates fan but 18 or 19 losing seasons leaves a bad taste in your mouth. I watch some, a couple innings here or there but never the Yankees or the Red Sox. God I hate them both.

In hockey, I like the Pittsburgh Penguins. I stuck through some terrible seasons between Mario and Sid the Kid, so I am glad to see them return to respectabilty. But I find the Dallas Stars 'fan' is as fair weather as the Dallas Cowboys fan. It only took one short, loud-mouthed fan to turn me off of them. Thought I respect them. I liked Sergei Zubov, Mike Modano, Daryl Sydor...

I don't follow basketball at all, so who cares. I hate that the NBA playoffs take over T.V. when the NHL playoffs are so much more exciting.

Anyway, it's two weeks into the season and I'm all ready tired of football. Because there has to be a game on every night now. College football on Monday - Labor Day at that! Tuesday night, Thursday night, Friday, Saturday, Sunday - just TRY and get away from it! But if there's not a game [or replay of a game] on, there's the NFL show ot The Cowboys Press Conference Show or The Analysis Of the Week Past Show or the Predictions For the Next Week Show or The Injury Show ["Well Doc, thanks for that update on the cause and treatment of Turf Toe! Coming up next: 'The difference between a groin strain and a quad strain!"]

And as I say every year, Chris Berman... is there any worse whipping than his "WHOOOOP!" or "HE -- COULD -- GO -- ALL -- THE --WAY!"?

As if it wasn't bad enough with college and pro games, ESPN is now showing high school games. HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL ON NATIONAL TELEVISION?!?!? Give me a break. What the hell are we teaching kids with this? I see this and I am reminded of the great line from North Dallas Forty: "Every time I start thinking this is a game, you tell me it's a business; every time I start thinking it's a business, you tell me it's a game! It's driving me crazy!"

I can't watch the games right now. I can't take the Chinese Water Torture of the pace of the game, especially the last two minutes of a half. [Which is PART of the reason I can't watch basketball, but I just find basketball BORING. Dribble, dribble pass, pass, shoot, basket. Ho hum!] I can't take six replays of the play I just saw while they huddle and call the next play. I certainly can't take all the talking. Yap yap yap! "That grass sure is green today, isn't it Fred?" "It sure is really green grass, Tom. I once played on some greener grass in Cincinnati in 1997, though..." Zzzzzzzzzzzz.

So good viewing, football fans. I'll be watching NCIS and The Big Bang Theory and waiting for the NHL to start up again.

Rock And Roll Nights

In a sweaty bar
In a formerly grand theater
At the local grass bowl or civic arena
The band kicks it off
The band kicks it off

We rise to our feet
Greeting the wall of sound with a roar of approval
A wall of guitars! Guitars!! Guitars!
And the band revs it up
The band revs it up

Tales of the outsiders
Tales of the cutters
The lost souls and junkies
And the power of music
The crowd cheers each one
And sings the sing along songs
I don't know the man
Or Craig Finn's big plan
But on a warm July night
I'm in for the ride

The band blows the roof off
We're back on the streets
Ears ringing loudly
The crowd all abuzz
Comparing to others and seeking the next beer
The communal ritual is over for now
Encore! Encore!

Revisiting the Music Library

I was remaking my Stones CDs for the car last week since I gave away my last set to a nice young man who had 'never heard a whole lot of the Stones.' Well, I fixed that for him. [Just as I fixed young Nate Fowler's lack of Beatles. I don't understand how someone can call himself a musician - a ROCK musician - and NOT like the Beatles. Well, at least he found a song to like - John's I'm Only Sleeping. My gateway to the Beatles was Hey Jude... when I was 12!] And since I couldn't use the stored projects on my external - new computer, drive letters changed, DON'T ASK- I wound up doing them again from scratch. Which is kind of fun because you really have to go through the catalog again to fill out 4 CDs [27 albums on my drive - almost 50 years for the Stones! And their last, A Bigger Bang really isn't bad. For comparison, I did 3 Beatles CDs for the car off 15 CDs. But I love the Beatles that much!]

When I got to disc 4, I noticed I had a lot of tracks from Exile On Main Street. And they kept off some of the stronger tracks from the late 70s albums [Black & Blue, Some Girls, Emotional Rescue]. Now a lot of critics and 'people who know' things will tell you that Exile the Stones best, but I have never agreed. It's very very good in spots, but the Stones loose energy about three quarters of the way through it - just where the album needs an energy boost. But, since I hadn't listened to the album in its entirety in a long, long time, I loaded it into the MP3 player this weekend.

The first two sides [or tracks 1 - 9 on you CD] contain some of the Stones best music. Add track 10, Keith's Happy, which used to kick off side 3 of the vinyl and it's a brilliant album on its own. Rocks, Off, Rip This Joint, Casino Boogie, Tumbling Dice [!!], Torn and Frayed - just absolutely classic Rolling Stones. Sweet Virginia is okay, Sweet Black Angel, less so, could probably have been cut. But after Happy, you get Turd On the Run - interesting as an upbeat blues, good harp work from Jagger, but ultimately mediocre [and with a rare songwriting credit for Mick Taylor]. Ventilator Blues is okay - much like filler that would pop up on Emotional Rescue or Black and Blue - maybe better than Hey Negrita from the latter. I Just Want To See His Face is just awful. Let It Loose is a track I like, but I could see it being cut. The album closes again with a blast of classic Stones again - All Down the Line, Stop Breaking Down, Shine A Light and Soul Survivor.

I have to say the experience of having the album up close in my earbuds hasn't changed my opinion of the album as a whole. I appreciate the difference between Keith Richards and Mick Taylor a whole lot - Taylor plays the really pretty parts in the left ear while sometimes Keith is muddy in the right ear but really locking everything down with little licks. Check out the difference on Rocks Off. Both play really excellent slide but in different styles. Also in the earbuds, background vocals become clearer. Still, this needed to be a three sided album, like Johnny Winter's Second Winter, or trimmed to one really strong single album. Lord knows Goat's Head Soup would have been improved with a few of these songs.

On a separate note, as part of my ongoing conversion of my vinyl to MP3, I had a chance to review Billy Idol. Rebel Yell is an extremely good record,. but it was the follow up, Whiplash Smile, that really scrunched up my nose. And I know why, now. All the good stuff is on side one! Side one - World's Forgotten Boy, To Be A Lover, Soul Standing By, Sweet Sixteen [merely okay] and Man For All Seasons - all good strong rock and roll stuff. But side two? Maybe worst complete side ever. All the songs have ten or fifteen second fade outs and there's not a real drum on the whole side as far as I can tell. There seems to be no emotion to it at all. I probably played it like twice when I first got the album and never played it again. Did Idol know he only had to grab you with the first side? Who knows?

NHL Notes

As we enter the last week of the regular season, my Pens sit in 2nd in the east and atop the Atlantic Division. Which is great because it means we'll get some team struggling to enter the playoffs like the Rangers or Boston. I'd hate to see Montreal because their goaltender is getting hot. Speaking of goaltending, I think it's biting the Philadelphia Flyers at exactly the wrong time. You cannot go 2 - 6 - 2 down the stretch like this. I don't think they're going to make the playoffs. Which should be fine because Ovechkin and the Caps would have destroyed them in the first round anyway.

In the west, Marty's Nashville Predators are solid in 5th place and unlikely to get passed. Unfortunately, that's going to put them up against the Cinderella Story of the owner-less Phoenix Coyotes, who haven't made the playoffs in a decade! I told all of you Dallas Stars fans that Dave Tippett wasn't the problem and did not deserve to be fired! But because you did, he's taken these nobodies - well, Shane Doan. Ilya Bryzgalov, Ed Jovanovski and a bunch of nobodies - all the way to 4th in the conference. he even had them as high as second and leading the Pacific division when San Jose went into their tailspin coming out of the Olympic break. How's Dallas doing? Oh yeah - 12th in the conference and missing the playoffs - AGAIN! They need to rebuild anyway. They have no puck moving defenseman since Sergei Zubov went back to Russia. The top five in the west remain strong - teams that no one wants to face - but Detroit remains a dark horse at number six. They've been riding rookie goalie Jimmy Howard [25 games in a row - and apparently for good reason because Chris Osgood is losing to the Flyers in the third right now] and they are the best team since the break.

Pirate Radio

All right, well I guess I'll see any movie about rock and roll with Phillip Seymour Hoffman in it [and probably Jack Black now that you mention it because I sat through School of Rock on DVD], because this was cheesy. But it was cheesy in an okay way. If you ignore plot and story and all and just concentrate on the soundtrack.

But somehow, it touched a nerve. Otherwise I wouldn't be sitting here at 245 am and listening to Dusty Springfield - yeah, I said it, Dusty In Memphis after hearing a song on the soundtrack. I must have had a stroke or something because I was singing the Rascals' Groovin' during a bathroom break. That's totally not my speed.

Anyway, it just reminded me of the days when radio ruled. I came up at the end of the golden age of AM - yes, children, my nieces and cousins children, they used to play MUSIC on AM radio way back in the 70s, when your parents were in elementary school. Top 40 am radio, catching Casey Kasem's American Top 40 every week. Times when you could hear Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder and Earth Wind and Fire right alongside Hall & Oates and E.L.O. and the Eagles and the Steve Miller Band.

I found FM radio with it's more rigid formats when we moved to Texas in 1977. If AM was a great melting pot, you didn't hear Led Zeppelin, Zebra - remember Who's Behind the Door? - Foghat, Cheap Trick or Pink Floyd on AM radio. They didn't have hits. And I don't remember AM radio personalities - jingles maybe, but not personnel - but I remember a lot of the old KZEW and Q102 crew. Because you listened to the radio when you got ready for school, on the bus if someone brought a radio, when you did [or, in my case, did NOT do] your homework and you listened right up until it was lights out time. The you got up the next day and did it again.

Sure, about my junior year we started getting the Walkman and everyone had a cassette player in the car to blast their Zeppelin / Van Halen / Sammy Hagar / Rush / Judas Priest /etc. But we still spent a lot of time listening to the radio.

I'll still never forget the day the music died for me. It was Christmas of 1989 and I was working the overnight shift at Target - overnight stocking during Christmas with Rich Schulter - where you at now Rich? Rich introduced me to Queensryche's Operation Mindcrime. Anyway, we listened to the Zoo [KZEW] overnight, until the black girls came in at 6am and changed all the radios to K104. Anyway, just before the day shift came in, the Zoo switched from rock and roll to Christmas music and no DJs. By New Years they were something else - I don't even remember the new format because it was so traumatic. Q102 hung on as the last real Album Oriented Rock [AOR] station for a couple more years, but the times had changed. By 1992, I was listening to nothing but taped in my car.

So what's the point, your thinking. Why am I wasting my time with this? Well, there was a time when radio used to be important and occasionally I miss those days. There used to be songs about radio -Queen's Radio Gaga sums up the feeling about 1990, but the Ramones asked Do You Remember Rock and Roll Radio. And I still remember rock and roll radio.