I woke up slightly disoriented but also greatly relieved. And tired. More tired than I had been when I had laid down.

   In that twilight I had been thinking of a lady. Longing from a distance and crushing on people is easy. You have only the lust and desire to be “with” them but nothing real world like job stress, aging parents and children, money woes and/or body breakdowns intrudes on the fantasy.

   The second half [or second or third dream, who cal tell?] involved one of those people I lusted and desired. But the fact was that drama surrounded her like the dust cloud around Pigpen or the raincloud over “Bad Luck” Schleprock on the old Pebbles and Bam-Bam cartoons. In the dream we had wed one day, then overnight she had disappeared and now everyone was looking for her and her friend who had run off with her kids in the middle of the night. I was smoking [I don’t other than an occasional drag]and unsuccessfully trying to dial a rotary phone to call into work and wondering how to explain this to them. SHE showed up but explained her friend’s decision to take off and why they couldn’t show pictures of the kids without one of the parent’s consent… then we had to leave our little apartment but I had to leave my bass guitar behind… ?

   How had I gotten here in my dream? I had earlier been dreaming of an ex with whom I shared a dossier of information I had gathered about her and then dumped a print out – as in one of those old style computer printout sheets with the white and green lines, holes on the side, perforation, etc. about how our lives together were going to be for the next ten years. And reviewing a tape of a jam we had [not really] at a party at one of my friend’s apartments with me on rolled up newspaper for drums, banging them on the floor. I wondered how the downstairs neighbor could stand that but remembered that he had been upstairs partying with us.

   The other funny thing about dreams is how people who never crossed paths in real life can mingle together in your dream. I’m 99.9% sure that the ex in this part of the dream had never met Henry in real life, yet here we were in Jim’s tiny, raucous, rocking apartment. The work I had been trying to call was my place of employ from 1991 to 1997 but in my thoughts in my dream it was the original divided building, not the later expanded workshop.

   I got out of bed top take a squirt and get a sip of water. Shadow must have sensed my unease because as I exited the powder room, he came up and rubbed against my legs as if trying to say “it’s okay dude.” I tried laying down again and he jumped up and lay down by my feet to sit with my but my mind was too tilt-a-whirl to go back to sleep.  I got up, loaded the dishwasher [might as well ‘accomplish’ something!] and turned it on and jotted down some notes. It’s 06:00 – “What’s the ‘O’ stand for? ‘Oh my God it’s early!’” – and still as dark as it was when I left work and when I went to bed after watching YET ANOTHER JFK theory show.

   Look, I am not a conspiracy nut but l realized the date on the way home and had just been thing that it’s been more than half a century – long after most the participants and witnesses are dead – that we don’t really know who blew Kennedy’s wig or why.

   This time, the Secret Service accidentally popped him with an AR-15 from the chase car and covered it up. First, by threatening the Medical Examiner andrushing the body out of Texas – where the law was any homicide required an autopsy before releasing the body. Then they stole… er, secured all the notes, photos, x-rays from the hilariously overcrowded [FBI, Secret Service and reps from the three other branches of the service!] Keystone Cops level contaminated Bethesda attempt at autopsy. Then threatening anyone and everyone involved with a “breech of national security” charge and jail time if the talked. And of course old Arlen Spector gets skewed for not calling any of the Secret Service or Bethesda pathologists who could say “This wound was too small for the 6.5mm bullet. The third and fatal shot was from back left from a low caliber, frangible [meant to fragment for maximum damage] bullet” – i.e. the .223 AR-15 the Secret Service had in that chase car. [There are photos of an agent holding it as they raced off to Parkland.]  It seems people in cars following the Prez  - like the mayor and his old lady and some Congressmen  -and on the ground in Dealey smelled gunpowder – which according to the show, would have blown UP Elm Street from in front of them.  One witness drawled “you don’t smell gunpowder unless it’s blown in your face,” suggesting the waft would not have been from Oswald’s perch above everyone.

   Sometimes it’s exhausting being in my head.

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.

Ric

It was My Best Friend’s Girl.

That’s the one that caught my ear. Sometime in the late 70s we visited my grandmother who lived in the projects in Ambridge and one of the neighbors took us down the hill to run to the bank and the grocery and in her car she had a cassette of that immortal first Cars album. While I waited in the car, My Best Friend’s Girl came on. That first riff is a hook, the hand claps are a hook, the backing vocals are a hook and that little galloping riff Elliot Easton throws in after the chorus [stolen from the Beatles I Will] is a stolen hook! It's hooky as hell and fuck it is so fun! One has to be one of the lowest living catfish NOT to be hooked by it.

I suppose that only weirdos like me “Schreive” from Diner remember moments that change their lives [and B-sides] by music. Or when music changes your life.

Over the next 8-10 years I would fall in love with the band and [most] of their output. I’d search B-sides for non-Lp tracks, buy the extended dance mix of one song. I’d replace vinyl with CDs and CDs with remastered CDs only to be confounded by a second remaster with the bonus tracks I hadn’t gotten in my box set. Fortunately Amazon cured some of those missing tracks. But hearing My Best Friend’s Girl that day or hearing Let’s Go blasting out of radios on the bus next to Journey and the Knack...[ and by the way, let's hear that snigger up your sleeve getting thing past the censors LP cut of Good Girls Don't here and there.] 6 albums over 10 years. Far less than the Clash put out in their 5 best years and not counting The New Cars or 2011’s so-so Ben Orr-less Move Like This. [Why the band wouldn’t bring in a bassist / 2nd vocalist like ex-Utopia Kasim Sulton... ah but that’s another rant.] Let me just say IMNHO, a Cars without Ben Orr was a sin. Ben’s vocals were natural and warm against Ric Ocasek’s sometimes cold, distant and robotic tone.

Ric Ocasek was the man behind the machine. As the song writer [although keyboardist Greg Hawkes occasionally got a co-writing credit] he apparently led with an iron first in a velvet glove. Those huge sunglasses of the early years were meant to hide behind. But the songs!!! On those 6 Cars albums I can count the total stink bombs on one hand. There are three or four “Best /Greatest” compilations and I don’t need to go over the songs because they are STILL staples of FM radio. AOR style “Classic Rock” and certainly any “Hits of Yesteryear” station. And that’s is it should be. The Cars were one of those bands that EVERYBODY could agree on.

My favorite, though it is not their best, is Panorama. It was the first one I owned and I played it to death. Not as pop or polished as The Cars or Candy-O and frequently missed by those “hits” because Touch And Go wasn’t a great big smash. But I have never cared what anyone else thought. Yeah I know all of the other Cars records are damn catchy, although for a long time I resented “Mutt” Lange’s treatments on Heartbeat City. I relented after listening on the box set. But it is still probably my least favorite as a whole though there are great songs like Drive, Magic and You Might Think. 

Ric’s first two solo records Beatitude and This Side Of Paradise were much darker than the songs that appeared on the Cars records. Beatitude remains another of those unsung records that got me through my teenage years. They frequently made my mix tape love letters to a girl who really never liked me as much as I wanted.

In the first or second week of summer break in 1984, I dragged myself up to the Sears at Seminary South mall about 7:30, 8:00 to get in line for Cars tickets. In that old lime green ‘73 Duster with the cassette deck bolted under the dash. About a dozen of use hung around, then rushed upstairs to Ticketmaster when they opened. I got lower balcony, dead center, maybe 15 rows up. Dad drove / went with me and we got bonked on the head by two girls dancing and shouting “Wang Chung is EXCELLENT!” [This was the Dance Hall Days Wang Chung, a couple of years before Everybody Have Fun or even To Live And Die In L.A. Still I bought Points On the Curve that summer because of that show and it too remains one of those teenage favorite albums.] The concert was fairly straight forward, no lasers, fire or smoke bombs.

I guess I gave up on Ric - really kind of moved on musically in the gap between the Cars [somewhat disappointing, though history shows it's held up very well after the first two songs] Door To Door [1987, same day as Aerosmith’s Permanent Vacation] and Ric’s 1991 Fireball Zone. It’s a shame because listening to it now it’s a fine record, as good as any of his solo records. But by then “We” had moved into louder, lipsticked and hair sprayed bands, then louder, angrier, flannel dressed bands, then... I don’t know. Ric’s pop rock was passe to radio. Not that we listened to Top 40 radio anymore. Ric hadn’t changed, we had and he got lost to a lot of us. But he was still active. Ric went behind the desk, producing Weezer, the Bad Brains, Suicide, Romeo Void, D Generation, a couple of No Doubt songs (don’t ask me if they were hits, I don’t get No Doubt), Bad Religion, Nada Surf and others. Not so much in the last decade, Ric certainly earned the right to drop out and live the life of a retired rock star. He apparently approved the Cars last remasters sometime in the last couple of years.

An now one of the great songwriters of our generation is gone. Ric’s legacy is no doubt cemented in rock and roll history. The Cars first album and Shake It Up are pure masterpieces, the right mix of technology, synthesizers and guitars in rock and roll without losing the human element.

Thanks, Ric. Really. Thanks a lot. There will always be a spot in my heart for your music.

Band Of Bothers

So I am watching Band Of Brothers – yes, not exactly cheery, feel good Saturday morning fare episodes 9 & 10. Episode 9 is titled “Why We Fight.” This is where the unit crosses into Germany and discovers one of the concentration / slave labor camps. My grandfather was in the ETO [102^nd Div, 405^th Infantry – see more here http://www.lonesentry.com/102thrugermany/index.html]. I had never specifically asked about such things but according to the pamphlet, outside of Gardelagen  in April ’45 “…Monday morning were found the charred and smoking bodies of over 300 slave laborers, prisoners of the Nazis who had been deliberately burned to death by their captors. Freshly dug common graves in nearby fields mutely emphasized the haste with which all evidence of this atrocity was being concealed. Another day and no trace would have remained. Investigation disclosed that 1016 political and military prisoners had perished [t]here.”

Grandpap never talked to me about combat – other than one apparently fresh from the states Lieutenant who walked down the middle of a road despite all warning from combat vets and got himself killed. If I had asked, he may have tried to describe such a thing but maybe not. Maybe he would simply have explained that there was no way to describe or explain it. Did those sights, smells, memories haunt his dreams until he passed? I don’t know. 

I never asked if he “understood” or “questioned” what he was fighting for. I doubt I understood at the time though I had – we both had - seen BoB. He once told someone that Grandma would “never have understood what [he] saw and went through over there.” But on the other hand he would never have understood what she would have been going through with him over there and two young daughters to take care of. Did SHE understand or question why her husband was sent halfway around the world to fight? I don’t know. 

With age comes the insight to ask such things but alas the time of my grandparents has passed. What I do know is that my grandfather returned to the softly rolling hills of Beaver County and lived the rest of his days in peace. Amen.