Punk Nostalgia

   CC looked out over a sparse crowd. On the one hand they were 50 or so paying customers. For a Thursday night in a city not really known for a happening music scene since a brief flash a couple decades back, he supposed this was okay.

   The crowd had a lot of younger people. He wondered if he was some sort of ‘nostalgia act’ for a second. But how could that be? Sure he had played one a couple of albums by one of the bands that ‘defined’ a scene that bubbled at a small club in New York back in the mid-70s. Sure, one of those songs was “one of punk’s greatest anthems” [whatever that means]. But that band had self destructed after two records. That singer had gone onto something different and had accidentally killed himself about the time this burg had its flash as a hot town for new music. While one should not disparage ones audience, he wondered what they had come for. Were they thinking that somewhere on his guitar or in its case were molecules of air, sweat or nicotine direct from a small sweaty room circa 1978? Paul Kantner’s hollow body Rickenbacker might have some remnants of 60s nicotine, ashes or maybe even some genuine Woodstock mud in it. But his guitar? He doubted it.

   But a lot of the other people who were there in that scene were succumbing to the things that happen over time. Hell, all of the original Ramones are all ready dead. Only one made it into his 60s. People love connecting to a past that they “missed.”  Some of these people may have been kids when the CBGB scene was going on, but probably too young to remember or get what that had been about. More interested in Saturday morning cartoons and top 40. But the handful of twenty to thirty year olds off to the left of the stage, the ones that would bounce up and down when he played “The Anthem”? He shrugged. Maybe they’d traced back the heroes of their heroes the same way kids had tracked down Buddy Holly, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf when the Beatles and Stones cited them as influences. And now they were here trying to make the connection the way that people tried to connect to a mythical past at Paul McCartney, Who and Stones shows now.

Untitled Works 

As I've gotten older and grayer
And maybe even a little more mature - [maybe!]
Spending life's time in search of a fine line
That rides on the edge
Of "Dying without ever having really lived"
And "Work hard, play harder, die young, look good in the coffin"
Compartmentalizing disappointments, regrets and failures
Seeking a balance on the point of a pin

*    *    *

The truth right now in this:
I am not 'fine,' 'good' or 'okay'
Though I am 'hanging in there'

I feel disappointment in myself
And what I am and am not
Unimportant job, unsatisfying in every way
Squeaking by week to week
I feel a full blown midlife crisis
And I am lonely
So, so lonely
Watching all of you paired off...
Notice I did not say "happily paired off"

I know what choices I failed to make
I know what chances I failed to take
And if in the end what the Beatles said
About the love you take and the love you make
The thimbleful of both seems just about right

*    *    * 

Some day, one day
This body will fail
And the electric pulses
Thoughts, dreams, memory
Will be gone
Forever lost
And those thoughts frozen
Into writing, words
Notebooks decaying back to dust
Internet posts a micron on a hard drive in a basement
Forgotten
A magnetic blip amongst a billion trillion others

Mortality -[For J. Michael Leone and thhose of us left behind]

   It will be a day and it will be just like any other day - some winners, some losers, some just barely staying above water, some slipping under...Those who are not busy being born will be busy dying, playing out the dramas we call life with the all the triumphs, tragedies and ho-hum days. The sun will 'rise' and 'set' and there will be weather and a lot of boring and mundane things will happen.

   Probably 99.99999999999 percent of these events go unnoticed by the world at large, even with the explosion of social media. With seven billion people it's easy to go unnoticed sometimes. But that's not to say things that happen are not important events - it just depends on one's perspective. The bad things seem to carry more weight, have more lasting impact than the daily surviving, the celebrations of surviving to different dates and anniversaries on the calendar.

   We are all at different stages in the journey, but no one really knows the final date - for them or anyone else. Sometimes medical professionals make their best educated guesses, but really that's all it is. When that happens maybe we're luck enough to make contact with someone and relive some old memories and say "goodbye and thanks for making my life special." And you get to be with some other friends doing the same and hang on each other and share some more stories, laugh and cry and wish it wasn't happening knowing full well we all have to go one day and that the best we can hope for is quietly, surrounded by loved ones.

   And then it's over.

   The friends and family gather one last time and then we scatter like dandelion fluff at the end of the summer. Scattered to the wind and back to our 'regular lives.' Back to laundry and dishes waiting to be done, children and pets to be fed, bathed and raised up right and more living and dying.  Some of us will meet again in the odd ritual of waiting like vultures over another ill friend. Some we will bump into hither and yon, some will only be brought bacxk to mind when someone says "Oh you remember Jimmy John Jumpback? I ran into him someplace..." "Oh man, I haven't thought about him in years!" Some will just be a name on a cell in the brain that is never recalled after your high school reunion. Whether I see them again or not, they will go on living and dying but their life events will have as little impact on me as mine have on them. Depending on one's perspective.

   It's been three weeks, Michael and it still seems surreal. Like a weird dream of sorts. But I know it's all true. That night on the back porch with your family, playing your music, there was a physical hole in the room where you should have been standing and holding court. You know the music always gives me a buzz, but it was different this time. You weren't needling me about Mick Taylor being the guy that made the Stones into THE STONES! You weren't praising Billy Gibbons tone and telling me yet again about seeing ZZ Top and the Stones in '81 and ZZ Top blowing the Stones off the stage, "clearly the best band that day, the band that the audience DEMANDED and encore from." The electricity and enthusiasm we shared we so subdued. I picked things you would have loved - Ya-Ya's, ZZ Top, Hendrix At Winterland and the Bon Scott classic If You Want Blood, You've Got it. Do yo know how proud I was when Michelle's fiancee said he should take that one [AC/DC] home? [Of course you do!]

   It was too soon, Michael. I never got to Indiana, PA to visit, see the town of so many tales that you and Bill and Rich told me - glorious spots of misspent youth. I was far too young to remember living there. We never gopt to go to your cousin's place in the Strip District and have Italian deli and cold IC Light. Didn't get to step into the vinyl vault again and relive those albums you and Bill loved and passed on to me to love. No last chance to talk about flinging the Ramones album, the broken School's Out, feeding eggs to Jack the Bird, the hot tub disaster, seeing Buddy Whittington... it was too soon, Michael. It was just too soon!


I hate you for this
"Ironing" / dewrinkling a shirt
In a hotel room
In a town I hardly know anyone
Terrible travels - mine and others
All about paying respects
Asshole. Jag off!
We love you.
You will be missed.

What I Miss About Record Stores and Better Days Long Ago [For Spencer Thompson]

[Does everyone who is getting older lament change? Sure they do. And they tell us about how things used to be better when they were young. Our grandparents did it, our parents did it and now it's good ol' Gen X's turn up at the plate.]

Yesterday, I spent a glorious afternoon in the company of Mr. Nate Fowler. We hung out with his neighbor, had some Jimmie's subs and a couple of beers, shot the breeze, played some tunes, scoped some You Tube and basically just had a blast just hanging out. We get so involved in our lives, our jobs and the other demands for our time that we sometimes forget to just meet up with friends and just do nothing for a few hours.

Nate, having no television connections to speak of, is an online guy, a You Tube freak the way we used to watch MTV when it first came out. He showed me a couple of weird assed things, some trailers for Color Me Obsessed, which I now definitely need to see and some things to keep an eye or ear on like the Weeks [lo-fi shake your ass rock and roll from Mississippi - click here or try this one] or the Biters [from Georgia - 3 guys who look like Joan Jett circa 1977 (and a drummer) and play power pop in the Cheap Trick tradition - see here or see this one.]

So as Nate is free form programming his You Tube clips, the discussion swings to "where do you find this stuff?" Now of course, Nate is a working musician so he meets people and hears things - like the American Fuse playing a show with the Biters last year. But then we swung off down the dirt lane of nostalgia...

Nate and I began reminiscing about the record store. We both worked at the much lamented Sound Warehouse, which was a chain in Texas that eventually got bought and became Blockbuster Music. Now Blockbuster had a good thing going with video at the time, circa 1990 - 1991, but they killed their new acquisition by putting in a dress code - the typical khakis / no T-shirt plus one of those horrible smock in Blockbuster blue so everyone knew you were an employee. Oh, and by the way no earrings and no hair on the collar for the men. Basically, they said 'All of you people who live, breathe, play, know and love the music and thought working in a record store was the coolest gig ever: Get out." I guess it wasn't just Sound Warehouse, it was everything. It was when corporations were buying up record labels and the industry became about numbers - and numbers only. Okay, this gave rise to the "Indie" labels like Sub-Pop and Merge. Record stores were ripe for takeover - so the corporations thought. Then, the super discounters opened up - Best Buy blew the prices of the other chains out of the water. Volume buying and selling and loss leaders. The mom and pop store was killed off pretty quickly after that. The chains were in trouble, but the wheel was still turning. Within a couple of decades, the paradigm shifted to the internet and the labels and the old brick and mortar media outlets [bookstores, record stores and video rental stores] were dinosaurs - millstones around the corporation's necks. So they started closing them. Best Buy is all but out of the CD business - they've shifted to videos / DVD to get people in the doors. I was in Barnes & Noble last week and the CD section is about 1/6 the size it was and there's a lot of discounted stuff there - meaning they're trying to sell of stock - and they will not be reordering. iTunes, Amazon and eBay fill the music lover's need for deep catalog now - assuming that the items will remain in print on hard media. I can see in ten years an even more run of limited physical media for music - CD, and vinyl - and the majority of catalog available only by download. The CD - the future of the music industry in 1986 - dead in less than two generations.


I got Nate his job at Sound Warehouse. Nate had worked at an independent store in Arlington called Fantasia, which later moved down to the strip center by my Sound Warehouse store and became Village Music before being closed. I don't remember if he was still working there at the time, but he would come into Sound Warehouse and shop. And because he had the look [and because we all just wore 'collared shirts' and name badges in those days, nothing much to differentiate the clerks from the general public other than being at the register or carrying a clipboard and/or price gun], people would ask him where stuff was or if we had stuff. And Nate would say "I don;t work here, but I think its over here or over there..." So after I had seen this a couple times, I went up to him and gave him an application and I basically said 'if you're going to help people find stuff you might as well get paid for it.'

People thought working a in a record store was cool because you were surrounded by music all the working day. I'll clue you in - it was. It was super cool. Yeah, there was work involved - inventory sheets, ringing up customers hour after hour and most of us hated working the video department. But one of the things I loved - and I think a lot of us loved - about working in the store was turning people on to something new and then having them come back for more. That's what Nate and I and probably a lot of people my age miss - and the current generation doesn't know about - is the interaction. Personal, up close, face to face interaction. And all that that entails.

I mean it starts casually - usually at the counter. Someone brings up like R.E.M.'s Life's Rich Pageant and the Georgia Satelites. "Hey man, if you like that, you might want to check out drivin' 'n' cryin' or the Bo Deans or this band called the Replacements..." Or someone bringing up Aerosmith's Permanent Vacation and you go "hey there's this new band called Faster Pussycat that sounds almost exactly like Aerosmith but with the rough edges still left on. And Junkyard..."  What would happen after that is that a couple of weeks later they'd come back in, slightly wide eyed and come up to you and say "Dude that Joe Blow album was great! What else do you got like that?" And you'd point them at the next rung on the ladder: X, the Buck Pets, the Cult, the Smithereens, the Rave Ups, Squeeze, 10,000 Maniacs, Oingo Boingo, Guns 'N Roses - I know we were playing the shit out of Appetite For Destruction for a good three or four months before it hit on MTV. You were passing it on. And the customers would do that for us, too. "Man, I've never heard this." "Oh, it sounds like a cross between R.E.M. and Guns 'N Roses." 'Huh, that sounds interesting, I'll have to check that out." And the cross pollination continued....

I dearly miss that interaction, that continual feeding of the flower.

Do I miss "Jan the Dolly Dots guy?" Do I miss "The Twelve Inch Tornado?" Do I miss the gold card guy who gets pissed becasue the machine has slowed down after he's waited in line a whole 3 minutes to get his new Manhiem Steamroller CD and he had to be somewhere ten minutes ago? Not hardly. But I met a lot of people in those days who became my friends. A lot of them are still my friends. Of course there's the shared work connection - ironic becasue I only worked at Sound Warehouse for two years, though a lot of the people I knew were still there and I continued meeting people there when I shopped there or hung out with those folks who were still there. But we also shared a connection because of and through the music.

Amazon may try and suggest things but that's just some algorithm, some cold mathematical process. "The last 25 people who bought this also looked at..." and it pops up all those things. But it's not the same. It is SO not the same. It doesn't carry the weight of your friend coming over and handing you a CD of the Alabama Shakes or the Raconteurs or Japandroids and saying "You HAVE to hear this!"

[How many of you have a hand in this?]
 

 

I recently wrote about my first experiences with Led Zeppelin here on this blog and on my Facebook page. On Facebook, it prompted a comment from my long time friend and fellow Burleson High Skool 1985 graduate Marty. Marty's 17 year old son is a drummer - okay, he's really a pretty good one, but don't tell him I said that. [see here or you can see this one he made after I told him he needs to stop the double bass modern rock BS and play some rock and roll]

Marty mentioned that Spencer was interested in vinyl records, but he didn't understand how it worked. My reply, in part:

"As for vinyl [and everything else], he is coming up at a different time, the Age of Instant and Immediate Everything. If he wants to hear the new Jose and the Beaners album, he doesn't have to drive 25 minutes from B.F.E. Burleson up to the Sound Warehouse on Camp Bowie or Berry Street, plunk down that hard earned Perkins Electric paycheck money and shlep 25 minutes back to B.F.E. just so he can put that platter on the player. He goes to Amazon, clicks on it and ten minutes later is destroying his eardrums with it. Same with videos. Remember going down to the Burleson movie theater to rent a clunky old VHS tape? Remember when he was grounded from his cell and you had to explain that you could actually dial and call people's cell phones from the land line?!?"

There's something to anticipation that the current generation is missing. I mean they're missing a lot of things like FM radio that had a playlist of more than 200 songs. And real live DJs. But in the example I just gave, there's the anticipation - the drive to the record store, the charge walking in and finding what you're looking for [or something you weren't looking for - like buying an album because the cover looks interesting. Look at those Little Feat covers! Or Kiss' Hotter Than Hell. Sebastian Bach tells a story about finding Kill 'Em All in the imports and looking at the back cover and going "Those are the ugliest dudes I have ever seen - this has got to be something!"] and then driving home all charged up to play this new thing - and believe me there were frustrations wwhen you'd walk in ready to plop on your bed with the new platter and headphones and Mom would catch you and go "Not 'til the grass is cut, Sonny Jim..." Then you're out there pushing the mower at a jog and doing a crappy job because you're in a hurry to get to your new album. And I think that that anticipation made us pay closer attention to what we were hearing. Maybe that was just me.

The other thing is not having that physical thing to tie you to the music. I'd lay on my bed and stare at album covers, reading liner notes and lyric sheets and all that while listening. I remember being sad when things got to CD size - which is worse not that my eyes are getting worse, bifocals and all. Not having that, I think, makes the music seem disposable - one click and it's deleted from your hard drive and from your memory. And what if something happens to your hard drive? At least I can reload what I have on CD and re-record and convert my vinyl. It would be a pain in the butt and I don't want to, but I could...if I had to.


One other thing Nate and I agreed on that is so great about music is that not only is there new stuff always coming out, but there's a deep, deep past to discover. Like this band called Titanic Love Affair that Jay Bennet was in during the 90s. [check this out - you'll be blown away] Nate lost it a while back - one of those things that gets split, 'nuff said - and he's looking for it again. Or going through Half Price and finding Public Image Ltd.'s Album. "I loved 9 and I dug Happy? okay, I guess I'll check this out..." and being blown away by it. Or "Ive always heard about Southside Johnny. I guess you can't lose for $3.99." Or over the last couple of years, I have been on a soul and funk kick and I have found so much great stuff [Johnny 'Guitar' Watson, the Meters, the Intruders, the Sylistics, the Dramatics, Bobby Womack, the Isley Brothers' Showdown, Issac Hayes' Black Moses, Funkadelic's Let's Take It To the Stage, Parliament's Up For the Down Stroke... just to name a few]. But I know even with all the CDs, albums and digital downloads I have - and I have a LOT - I still am just scratching the surface.

I have found that the thing I love about Music is that it's as deep as the oceans, you can follow it back up the rivers, streams and creeks to the sources and find all kinds of incredible things along the way and it never dries up - every time someone puts out a new album or writes a new song, it's another drop of rain keeping the whole thing rolling.

The Mothership [OR How David Herring Changed My Life]

It's a dreary Saturday morning in Fort Worth Texas circa June 1984. A young man drives his first car down the freeway. He may be going to the mall or to meet some friends or to his summer job. The car is a sun bleached green Plymouth Duster - not the muscular cool version but a straight 6 250. The interior has a funky musty smell that the rain does little to improve. There's a bulky after market AM/FM/cassette deck bolted under the dashboard in one of the most haphazard car stereo installations in the history of car stereos. The speaker wires run up the center hump, under the front and back seats and into the trunk. Sometimes the sound resembles music coming out of a string and tin can set. This was, as a relative was once described a certain '54 Ford that his brother [my father] had 'borrowed' [and had yet to return] while he and his future wife were enjoying a movie, "a car you could leave running with a full tank of gas that no one would steal." But it is a running car and at seventeen, a car equals freedom.

Before I turned north, I had stopped a friend's house and picked up a pair of tapes the other teen had been recording for me. In the 20 minutes or so since then, my life had been changed. It was suddenly all clearer - the wide world out there was waiting to be discovered and conquered and now I had the soundtrack to that mission.

Before I backed out of David Herring's driveway, I popped in the first tape. It was a BASF Performance I cassette with a red label. I backed out onto Gardens and turned north while the tape leader played, turned right onto Wilshire headed east towards I-35... and out of the speakers came two crashing chords - DAN! DAN! There's a hi hat in the back ground counting off when the chords slash out again DANT DANT. The hi hat picks doubles up to eight notes and the chords punch me in the chest again DANT DANT. The cowbell kicks in over the hi hat tik tik tik tik tik tik BAM BAM tik tik tik tika tik tik BAM BAM - then there is a rolling thunder of a drum fill and a voice joins the fray:

IN THE DAYS OF MY YOUTH I WAS TOLD WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A MAN....

This is my first ride on the mothership, my formal introduction to the mighty Led Zeppelin.

I say formal introduction because if you listened to FM radio anytime after 1970 - and I did, every chance I had - you knew a smattering of Led Zeppelin. Stairway, of course, Whole Lotta Love, Kashmir, Rock And Roll, Black Dog [even if you didn't know what it was called, you knew "a big legged woman ain't got no soul"], All My Love, Fool In the Rain and probably a handful of others. Enough to say you knew who Led Zeppelin WAS, even if you weren't intimate with their whole catalog. Enough to join the debate whether Stairway To Heaven or Free Bird was the greatest rock and roll song of all time.

But in just the first four songs - side one of that first Led Zeppelin album - I knew this was something far different from what I had been listening to. This was heavier than the Beatles ever tried to get. It certainly was not E.L.O. or Queen. This made Kiss sound like they recorded their albums with tin cans and baling wire and left their balls outside the studio door.  David had made me some Who tapes earlier in the school year as they were on what turned out to be the first of many 'Last Who Tour's - this was a lot stronger than that. Not that the Who didn't have their moments, too: I Can't Explain, I Can See For Miles, My Generation [if you must], Won't Get Fooled Again - but Zeppelin would never write something like I'm A Boy, Sister Disco, Athena [yeah remember that piece of shit from It's Hard? Didn't think so.] or Love Reign O'er Me. Not better, not worse, but the Who were scared little thirteen year old boys where Zeppelin was seventeen and strutting, strong and cocksure.They were, as Alice Cooper said, eighteen - and they liked it.

This was the era when Van Halen ruled the high school parking lots, back when Diamond Dave was the be all, end all of front men. That's the closest thing I could approximate this to, but it surely wasn't that. This band wasn't about partying on the patio when your parents were out of town, taking your whiskey home or everybody wanting some or getting "some leg tonight for sure" - this was darker. As quoted in that unauthorized book, this was all about power, mystery and the hammer of the gods.

And to end the argument right here, it is NOT heavy metal.

Yes, the metal guys took things from Zeppelin's box - mostly the 'guitar player with mystery' and the howling lead singer bit. Touches of near East and Middle Eastern influences. A lot of the imagery from The Song Remains the Same movie. And the sound. But there's a huge gap between what became heavy metal and Zeppelin, and one need look no further than the second song of their catalog - the cover of Babe I'm Gonna Leave You. Two songs in and they're showing a versatility that is missing from a lot of heavy metal. Zep could, and often did slow down and play things that would never fly in heavy metal - Gallows Pole, anyone? Banjo? Concertina? Pedal steel guitars? John Paul Jones' organ playing on Your Time Is Gonna Come, Page's mysterious Eastern flavored Black Mountainside? Going To California?

I mean, I get it - in Zeppelin and Black Sabbath you have the foundation of what would become heavy metal. Add the simplicity of the Stooges and the bombast of Blue Cheer and some sci-fi / fantasy art and J.R.R. Tolkien and you're in the neighborhood. But I can see why  the Zeppelin boys decline to be lumped in to that pigeonhole. Post Hell Bent For Leather Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Metallica, Megadeth - heavy metal. Poison, Bon Jovi, Motley Crue, Def Leppard and the like, for the record, not heavy metal either. Hair metal? OK. Saved the record industry or destroyed it: discussion for another day. 

The metal guys couldn't / wouldn't do In the Light, In My Time Of Dying, Hot Dog, Royal Orleans or Boogie With Stu. Couldn't touch the funkiness of Trampled Under Foot if you spotted a pile of James Brown records. Most of them don't come from Rock & Roll - and there is a distinction there. As Keith Richards said,"they forgot the roll and only kept the rock. The roll's the whole damn thing, dude, the rock is nothing, deal with it the roll is king. Unfortunately most cats don't get behind the roll." Zeppelin knew how to roll, how to swing it a little bit. They came from rock and roll - Elvis, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Little Richard - just the same as Lennon and McCartney. They went back to the roots - Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, Robert Johnson - just like Jagger and Richards. That's why they can pull off Since I've Been Loving You or In My Time of Dying or When the Levee Breaks and those metal guys can't. I think Michael Leone and I have had the discussion that John Bonham would have been the last of the great English drummers who had come up through jazz. Yes, Bonzo idolized Keith Moon, but his training was from a jazz background.

Unfortunately [or fortunately when one looks at the Who's history], Zep was dead as a doornail by the time I discovered them. Yeah, there were Plant's solo albums, but they had more in common with the Cars than Zeppelin. There was Page's so-so soundtrack to Death Wish 2 and the Firm - Paul Rodgers and Jimmy Page together? Good on paper, not in reality. The abomination that was the Live Aid reunion - we waited all day for THAT?!? At least Queen, U2 and Madonna kicked ass that day.

But I can see why Plant doesn't want to do it. He doesn't want to be that guy anymore. And it's not Led Zeppelin. I'm sure Jason Bonham is adequate, but he isn't his dad. He doesn't have the same references. No one can say what the 80's would have held for Zeppelin. They could still be doing it like the Stones are. They could have broken up, reformed and broken up like the Who have. Maybe they fade from view and become just another summer concert staple like Steve Miller and Santana. Maybe they would have cleaned up and pulled an Aerosmith and become some unrecognizable semblance of themselves, Or like Kiss all face lifted and trying to act 29 when you're pushing 65. But Robert Plant is a realist. He doesn't need any more money, he doesn't need his ego fed ala Mick Jagger. Like Neil Young, he can follow his muse and he's not going to fit into whatever box you're trying to stuff him into. He's earned that right. And he's earned the right not to go out and sing Stairway To Heaven every night.


But the idea of a Zeppelin reunion excites people the same way the idea of a Beatles reunion used to, until that tragic December. People hope that such a thing would happen and they would magically be sixteen and innocent again. But it doesn't work that way. You can never BE sixteen again, dropping the needle on that virgin vinyl that you just bought with your birthday money, listening to those first chiming notes of Stairway in your room. Listening to it five times in a row, absorbing each note, each chord, finding little nuances in the drumming, the bass and keyboards, building and building and building and then there's the chiming guitars like church bells across a cold moonlit night and then suddenly Page is ripping into that famous famous solo and then you're winding down the road with shadows taller than your soul and a lady we all know and then the tune comes to you at last and all is one and one is all and we are all rocks not to rooooooooooooooooooooooollllll....  and then the band winds down to that last chord and then there's just Robert Plant reminding you that there's a lady and she's buy-yi-ing a stairway...... to heaven......



And then there is silence - reverential silence until the record player clicks and the tone arm lists and returns to its cradle and you are sitting there in the silence contemplating the universe and your place in it and trying to decidce if Zeppelin are gods or mere mortal men and if you want to play it five more times in a row or just sit and think about life a for a bit.

[Of course, this does not happen in the CD / digital age. After a few seconds, the funky opening to Misty Mountain Hop kicks in and you're off into what used to be side two. No interaction, no motion necessary on your part, no flipping the record over and dropping the needle again or deciding just to play side one over again. Maybe that's part of the appeal and magic of vinyl, too - the end of the record when there is silence and you have to decide whether to play it again, flip it over, put something else on or just enjoy the quiet for a while...]


And really, so what if Robert Plant doesn't want to do it anymore? We still have the original - what's there on the format of your choice is there forever. :listening to it can still evoke those memories of earlier and / or happier times. It can still open your mind to places you have yet to go and ideas you have yet to experience. It still has the power to challenge, excite, energize and move us. Isn't that part of what we love about music in the first place?

Think about this the day you have to be up earlier than usual and you're still groggy from being up editing and typing late into the night. Start the hot water in the shower, then drop the needle on Rock And Roll from Led Zeppelin IV [or Zoso or whatever you call the album with Stairway, because it really has no title]. By the time the water hits the back of your neck, Bonzo should be bashing his brains out on the hi-hat and the snare and suddenly BOOM! the guitars and bass explode into that insistent unforgettable riff - da da na na NA NA na na naah - over and over and over. Then Plant gives us our rallying cry: "It's been a long time since I've rock and rolled / It's been a long time since I did the stroll...." And suddenly your energy comes up like you've had a shot of espresso pumped right into your arm, minus the sludge at the bottom of the cup, ya dig. You're feeling alive and you're  ready to deal with crummy bosses, angry customers, mad dogs and the French - whatever the day has lined up for you, it's going to be cool. Don;t worry, just rock and roll a little but right now. "Yeah hey! YEAH HEY! Yeah hey! Yeah HEYYYYYY!!!" And there's Ian Stewart pounding out boogie on the piano in there somewhere...

BEEN A LONG TIME BEEN A LONG TIME BEEN A LONG LONELY LONELY LONELY LONELY LONELY TIME....

Then it screeches to a halt for one thin dime of a second and  then an explosion and the world's most famous drum fill rattles through the house, shaking through the floorboards to the foundation and threatening to burst out all of your windows and it winds up to that final crashing chord and a playful little trill by Page before it splashes to a close.

If at that moment. if every nerve, every fiber, every atom in your body isn't charged up like you just bit into the main line coming off of Hoover Dam, I feel sorry for you because you are missing something magical.

The Unexpected And Amazingly Not Unwelcome Return Of Soundgarden

  In this awards season [yea! NOT!] the nominee and winner of the "Sneered At, Eye Rolling and Tongue Clicking Inducing, 'Why-Do-They-Want-To-Do-That' Invoking Attempt At A Reunion / Comeback" goes to.... Soundgarden. Soundgarden is unable or unwilling to show up in my computer room / music den, so I will award 20 pounds of kitty litter to my snarky cat Mojo instead. Use it in good health my fuzzy friend!

  While I thought ending Soundgarden on the odd but still under rated Down On the Upside left something unfinished. DOtU is no Superuknown, which was no Badmotorfinger, which was no Louder Than Love... you get the idea. Soundgarden always seemed like an always moving target. Some people don't dig that. Some people like the rawness of Ultramega OK or Louder, a lot of people bought Badmotorfinger and Superunknown. And I think a lot of people were puzzled by Down And stayed away from it.

  So now they pop up a decade and a half (+ / -) later with a new album. I admit, I really, really really thought "Why?" And having learned the lessons about impulse buying a new album by a favorite band [I am looking squarely at you with daggers in my eyes Aerosmith Get A Grip] I skipped this when it arrived. [Of course never listening to radio - modern or otherwise - where would I be exposed to it anyway?] I skipped it in my recommended list on Amazon right up to the point it was $ 3.99. Half the price of a used CD? OK. Download accomplished. But it still took me a week and a half / two weeks to remember to burn a CD for the work trek. Yeah, I checked the samples of the songs before I bought the thing, but still expectations are a bitch. I'm just hoping that I am not massively underwhelmed [Hello, Robbie Robertson, most boring album of 2011!].

   I was not disappointed. In fact, I was surprised bordering on amazed. King Animal picks up right where the band left off. Yes, everyone is saying that. Lester Bangs is probably screaming it from his grave. What ever happened in the 'lost years' [Cornell's solo albums, Audioslave, Matt Cameron joining Pearl Jam, Kim Thayil and Ben Sheppard disappearing into the ether] must have recharged the magic for these guys. And that's the thing - I think Soundgarden is a band that is the sum of its parts. Those four people get in a room and it sounds like this. Little heavier, little lighter at times, more swirly here, more straight ahead riffing here... but all the pieces fit.

  First song, Been Away Too Long  - guitars, band locks in on a new riff, then Cornell arrives - the voice is raspy and tinny like he has been gargling with ground glass and had pea gravel mixed in with his Grape Nuts. Have all the years of going for those high notes on Jesus Christ Pose, New Damage, Never the Machine Forever and Superunknown - has is come to this? 25 years of shredding his vocal chords, and I think 'Too bad, he's had it. Couldn't they have got some studio trick to fix it?' But then how rock and roll would that be? Zero. This is brave - "Hey I'm here older, greyer and wiser and I'm I'm giving it all I've got!" But the music swirling around him is locked in - like heat seeking missile locked in. Thayil, Sheppard and Cameron are riding that riff for all it's worth and more. They even kick the riff up a notch on the next track, Non-State Actor. Cornell's voice still fits into this, even if he's still a little hoarse. How Soundgarden is the swirling feedback from 2:42 to 3:04, sliding into a deceptively simple and amazingly tasteful guitar solo?

  The third song, By Crooked Steps is where we hit the pay dirt. Cornell's voice is back in familiar range and Thayil adds amazing flourishing riffs and licks over a super insistent throbbing pulsing riff that wouldn't have been out of place on Superunknown. If you're listening closely, you will  here some fantastically tasty work on bass by Ben Sheppard. in fact, I have a great new appreciation for Sheppard and I think I will have to check more of his work using my ancient but honorable Radio Shack Nova 40 headphones. A Thousand Days Before begins with some noodling on sitars and droning, then the riff kicks in, just a slow steady riding rhythm, the Arabic cousin to Searching With My Good Eye Closed.  Bones of Birds hits that sweet spot, the slow burn akin to Switch Opens or Head Down.

  I'm not going to go track by track over this thing. I will only say this if you were / are a Soundgarden fan - I mean a fan who really appreciated the music, not a poser who bought Superunknown just for Black Hole Sun and hated the rest of it - then this is a record you want to hear. I'm nto saying it'll make you feel 21 [or 25 or 29] again, but it's like getting a phone call from an old friend who you haven't talked to in AGES.

Tommy, Can You Hear Me?

This is probably going to sound silly [no pun intended], but I concerned about how we are listening to out music these days.

No, I don not mean the usual digital versus analog or CD versus vinyl debates. I admit it - I have gone to the dark side on that one, if only for convenience. Amazon is the devil and I am caught in its evil clutches. A lot of it is convenience, like not having to buy a whole Jethro Tull album to get the 7 songs of theirs I like. And those one hit wonders. The only time I put on an album these days is to play it for conversion to a digital file. But I am still buying vinyl - there is no late 80s / early 90s Pere Ubu on Amazon, people!

No, my concern now is about the little things we are actually sticking in our ears when we listen on those MP3 / iPod wonders. I mean first of all, haven't we been warned for time eternal NOT to stick the tip of the Q-tip into your ear canal? [Yes most of us do it, but you're still not supposed to.] But we gladly stick these little grape sized things into our ears. And there are some you have to squeeze in because they don't stay in any other way [I'm looking at you Sennheiser!] In the interest of full disclosure, yes, I do have a pretty bad tinnitus - from listening to music on real old head phones [and you children of the 70s know what I mean - the old headphones that covered your ears and half your face] at volumes that could be heard clearly in the next room. Yes, all this records that said "Play this record loud" or " best enjoyed at maximum volume"... and just about any other record for that matter. Same thing with the portable tape player [we could never afford a "real" Walkman, so we got the Wal Mart knock off]. And in the vehicle when I was/am riding by myself.

Don't get me wrong - the invention of the portable personal music device has been a godsend. Being able to plug in Aerosmith's Toys In the Attic or X's More Fun In the New World on a two day car trip probably saved some nice family argument time back in the 80s - though it always sucked when the batteries wore down. But I fear the ear bud generation is missing something - I mean besides music made by real people on real instruments.

My argument goes something like this - I was sitting at work listening to the latest offering from Wilco [which I bought in a digital format from Amazon, not on a CD] and it felt like I was missing something. Or missing a lot, really. I couldn't get the music to sound full enough - either it sounded like the highs were clipped off or like it was all compressed in the mid range. Remember when the early CDs came out and the sound sucked because the record companies said "you can't hear anything outside the range of 20 - 20,000 Hz, so we will not worry about sounds outside that range and we will compress the shit out of everything and get these things out before this CD fad ends!" Well that's what the Wilco sounded like. Yes, I know Jeff Tweedy likes to do weird shit, but I don't think he would do that for a whole album. A song maybe but not a whole album. Except that he might... But he didn't - I played it on my real headphones [Radio Shack Nova 40s circa 1986] and on my real stereo [Pioneer SX-737, mid 70s vintage pushing 2 Bose 301s and 2 Sony SS-B3000 speakers] to be sure.

In the ear buds, the bass was muted and the highs seemed exaggerated. Listening in the headphones gave a pretty full range but any excessive volume irritated my tinnitus. Listening in the room I seemed to be missing some of the highs - they do seem to get lost when I have a fan going but the Bose really disappoint with their high frequencies, hence the Sony to boot mid-range and highs. I wonder if this all has to do with sound reproduction and the amount of distance it takes for the sound to reach my ears. Moving a few millimeters in my ear canal versus the headphone where the sound is focused down the whole ear versus room ambiance and speaker performance. Throw in all the music I listen to in my car [confined space ambiance].

Its a silly thing to be curious about but I wonder if how you experience music affects how it affects you. I mean our parents generation went from mono to stereo, our generation went from speakers to headphones to ear phones and now our children [okay, your children] are getting their music straight from their ears. Do they appreciate a full range of sound? When you have them in the car do they listen to the radio / CD you are or put those things in their ears and tune you out? I mean I can jokingly say that it obviously affects them, look at the overproduced computer generated perfect pitch crap they listen to - the same way your parents put down Van Halen / Motley Crue / Black Sabbath / Black Flag / Dead Kennedys / Beastie Boys.

What's my point? Maybe I don't really have one. Maybe I just wanted to plant an idea in your head, something to think about next time you're grooving on your iPod or driving down the road listening to KXT or your Stones comp for the car...