Old Fogey of the Year, part 2 - Ian Hunter

Ian Hunter, who will be 78 years old next summer, was older than his audience from the start. I don't think this was very well known at the time, but Hunter was already 33 when "All the Young Dudes" finally made him and Mott the Hoople famous. Only Pete Townshend has been as fascinated by the relationship between a band and its fans as Hunter. But Townshend and the Who - in the early days anyway - saw themselves as representative of their audience, still part of them somehow. The Who just happened to be the ones on the stage. Hunter always seemed aware of a certain detachment - he never shared that same sense of identity and it actually made him more grateful and more appreciative of the fact that he had an audience at all. No one but Ian Hunter could have written "Saturday Gigs."

'73 was a jamboree
We were the dudes and the dudes were we
Did you see the suits and the platform boots
Oh dear, oh God, oh my

After Mott's breakup, Hunter's solo career, in partnership with Mick Ronson, got off to
a rousing start but soon began to falter. All sorts of business entanglements made it difficult to maintain his partnership with Ronson. And just like Mott, Hunter had trouble getting a hit, which in turn led to problems with his record companies. Along the way Ronson, at age 46, died of cancer in 1993. Hunter himself turned 60 in 1999 - it had been twenty years since he'd made a record worth listening to more than once. There was nothing to suggest that his richest period of music in forty years was ahead of him. But it was.

There are several reasons why Hunter has aged much better than his contemporaries. His perspective was never the same as the kids in the audience. He knew that from the start, and always wrote more about the world he saw than about himself. He hasn't had to remake himself and his purpose as a writer. The new album includes a lovely and affectionate remembrance of his old chum David Bowie - it also has songs about sailors pressed into naval service, Ovid's god of dreams and sleep, and the Fielding Brothers of 18th century London. As a singer - well, Hunter never really had much of a singing voice to start with. There was never much to lose. Hunter wasn't really a singer at all - he just had this kind of distinctive noise that he made with his throat. He can still make that noise, and so he still sounds like Ian Hunter. Finally, Hunter's always needed a really good guitar player to serve as his musical partner. Mick Ralphs and Mick Ronson set that bar pretty high, but with the James Maslin in the Rant Band he's found another.

Rolling Stones - Blue and Lonesome

As everyone knows, this an album of blues covers, bashed out in three days with minimal overdubs. It's a deeply weird achievement, and quite interesting for that reason alone. This is where the Stones throw in the towel, and revert to their original ambition.

I hope we're not too messanic
Or a trifle too Satanic
We just love to play the blues

The Stones have always been linked with the Beatles, but we need to remember that back in the day the Stones couldn't compete with the Beatles, neither on stage nor on record. It was never even a contest. The Beatles had far more experience as a live band, and they had far more experience playing with each other. The Beatles blew the Stones right out of the water. The Beatles also had the geat good fortune to have George Martin working with them on their recordings. Martin was an experienced pro, a man who knew his way around a studio, but also a man with a musical background himself, an open mind, and a truly remarkable willingness to trust the judgement of his artists. The Stones had a wannabee hustler named Andrew Loog Oldham, who had never been in a recording studio in his life and whose approach to recording the Stones basically amounted to cranking up the volume on anything he happened to like. And of course Lennon and McCartney had written literally hundreds of songs together over five years before it even occurred to the Stones to try writing one themselves. And the only reason it occurred to Mick and Keith at all was because they had actually watched John and Paul write a song right in front of them. That song ("I Wanna Be Your Man") turned into the Stones' very first hit. (It still took Oldham locking Mick and Keith in a room and telling them not to come out until they had written a song to make it finally happen.)

The Beatles were always a far more ambitious band. They were Northerners - which made them country bumpkins in the England of 1962 - but in their own minds they came out of the Liverpool sticks to take over the world. They wanted to be "bigger than Elvis." The Stones had no such dreams. They just wanted to play some Chicago blues properly. But in 1964, though they did their best, a bunch of callow kids from London simply weren't up to that job. So the Stones went off in some other directions and it worked out very well for them - they had a five year run (1968-72) when they made some of the greatest rock records ever made. Since that high-water mark, they have fought desperately for more than 40 years to maintain their hold on contemporary relevance. That battle was lost a long time ago (although they sure kept trying!) - along the way they did develop into a far greater live act than they ever were in their glory years.

Bur now, in their old age, they've returned to the mission they set out on in the first place. What's different is that now they're actually up to the job. Jagger in particular sounds liberated. No longer trying to find a way to be modern, he delivers his least affected vocal performances in at least 40 years (he's practically channeling Howlin' Wolf on "Commit a Crime.") He also plays more wild blues harp on this album than you'll hear from him on any ten records. The guitars are noisy, a little sloppy, and straight to the point. Charlie is still Charlie. The whole production is drenched in 1950s Chess studios reverb.

It may have taken them half a century, but the Stones have actually become what they always set out to be. You do have to wonder if anyone outside the band cares at this point, but there's something strangely admirable about the whole thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEuV82GqQnE

Old Fogey of the Year, part 1 - Alejandro Escovedo

I've never actually defined what qualifies an artist as an Old Fogey - I'm gravitating towards  "a living artist old enough to collect a government pension." Which eliminates Radiohead and the Tragically Hip, for example, whose careers on record go back as far or farther than Alejandro Escovedo's. But Escovedo, who will be 66 next month, was already in his 40s before beginning his solo career. The many bands he was in before that - the Nuns, Rank and File, the True Believers - were and remain extremely obscure to anyone outside the bar circuits they worked. And the few recordings they made all sank without a trace and to this day are quite difficult to track down.

Alejandro shook things up recently. He got married, for the fourth time. He and his new wife were almost killed by a hurricane while on honeymoon, and both came down with PTSD as a result. After being based out of Austin Texas for more than 30 years, he moved to Dallas. And after making a series of fine records in collaboration with Chuck Prophet and Tony Visconti, going back to 2008's Real Animal, he found himself some new recording partners. He teamed up with Scott McCaughey and R.E.M.'s Peter Buck to write this one, which he recorded in Portland with McCaughey, Buck, and some of the local luminaries, most notably Kurt Bloch and Jerry Moen.

It's turned out to be a helluva good idea - Escovedo's written one of the best batches of songs in his long career, and he has never, never rocked this hard. It's all loud noisy guitars, and it reminds us that Escovedo was one of the original California punk rockers some forty years ago, before Rank and File and True Believers. It's all good, but I especially love "Johnny Volume"

I'm going down to Max's
Fender Twin on ten
Back to Jackson Heights
start all over again

and then Kurt Bloch just rips it up. Everyone should make a point of seeing the whole show on Austin City Limits in a few weeks.

Hail and Farewell, part 3: Cohen

While David Bowie did almost all the work for which he's best remembered by the age of 33, Leonard Cohen didn't even begin his recording career until he turned 33. He was already famous, in Canada anyway, before he ever made a record. I first became acquainted with him through the "Selected Poems" which I'd read obsessively before I ever heard him sing. And while Cohen wrote many, many great songs in the first 20 years of his musical career- from "Suzanne" to "Hallelujah", from "Bird on the Wire" to "If It Be Your Will" - he didn't even begin to figure out how to make effective records until he was well into his 50s. And after making "I'm Your Man" and "The Future" Cohen retreated from the world into a monastery. By far the most productive and rewarding portion of his musical career came after he turned 75, forced back into activity by a larcenous financial manager. Which is certainly a unique career arc.

Cohen's early music is based on his own guitar playing, the half dozen chords he'd mastered along with a flamenco approach to finger picking. In his old age, he discovered his voice had dropped about an octave and the only way he could still play those songs was by tuning his guitar down several steps. But he'd turned much of the musical work over to his collaborators anyway. He'd also learned to let the voices of his female collaborators - Julie Christensen, Perla Battala, Sharon Robinson, Hattie and Charlie Webb - do the heavy lifting of carrying his melodies (and it's always overlooked, but Leonard Cohen came up with beautiful melodies) while the poet half-sang, half-intoned lyrics that he'd famously spent years polishing. Sometimes decades.

This last record was preceded by news of his failing health, and that he was "ready to die." He appeared at a press event the day of its release, noticeably short of breath, but in his usual good humour. He said he had a tendency to be overly dramatic and that he intended to live forever. He was gone three weeks later. You Want it Darker was recorded at his laptop in his living room, the essentially immobile artist singing from a medical chair and exchanging emails of the backing tracks with his collaborators. Cohen had been asked about the place religion had in his life and work. He said he had no spiritual strategies he could recommend, only that he'd grown up with a certain vocabulary and was comfortable using it. And so in the title track, we hear him singing fom the Torah, "Hineni, Hineni (Here I am) - I'm ready my Lord." There's an overwhelming sense of a man putting his affairs in order. It runs a brief 37 minutes and has little time for the usual jokes, and little time for many of the old obsessions - "I don't need a lover / That wretched beast is tame."  I love all of it, of course, especially "Steer Your Way" and the impossibly gorgeous "Treaty," which gives us one last magnificent melody.

I wish there was a treaty we could sign
It's over now, the water and the wine
We were broken then, but now we're borderline
I wish there was a treaty
I wish there was a treaty
Between your love and mine 

Hail and Farewell, part 2: Bowie

Many fell along the way, but the two that meant the most to me by far were David Bowie at the beginning of the year and Leonard Cohen towards the end. The arcs of their careers had little in common, save both releasing a final album just a few weeks before shuffling off this mortal coil.

Bowie was still a teenager when he made his first record, and he'd produced almost all of the work for which he's best remembered by the time he turned 33 in 1980, the year of "Scary Monsters."  He was one of the definitive artists of the 1970s - innovative, restless, batshit crazy, at the centre of everything that was new in the music. The world had seen nothing like him. But all of the flash aside, the whole thing wasn't that complicated. Bowie wrote great songs, and Mick Ronson was the heart and soul and brains of a wonderful band. Their run together was brief - 1970 to 1973 - and Bowie continued to do remarkable work afterwards - the Berlin trilogy with Eno, the magnificent "Station to Station." He didn't really fade away after that - he continued to make interesting records all the while, even if he didn't attract the same attention as in his heyday. But he had a heart attack on stage in 2004, and simply disappeared for almost ten years afterwards until unexpectedly resurfacing with two albums in the final three years of his life.

"Blackstar" sounds nothing like anything Bowie had ever done before. Musically, it's dominated by Donny McCaslin's jazz band. That's not entirely to my taste. The lead instrument is McCaslin's sax honking away non-stop, and Mark Guilliana's extremely busy drumming is definitely not my cup of tea. And still - it somehow sounds like no one except David Bowie. And the title track is just one of those all-time great Bowie tracks - everyone has a few, and yours probably differ from mine - but this is another one of them, mighty and awesome, completely original and unlike anything you've ever heard from him. Somehow still himself, to the very end.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-JqH1M4Ya8

Hail and Farewell, part 1

It sure seemed like 2016 was a great year for the Grim Reaper - I'm not actually sure if this was really true or if it was just a reflection of the fact that my generation has far more days behind us than ahead of us. But still...  Even Abe Vigoda couldn't survive 2016, We lost iconic sports legends  (Gordie Howe, Muhammad Ali, Arnold Palmer) and entertainment  figures (Garry Shandling, Alan Rickman.)  2016 was the year that accomplished what even the CIA couldn't do, by dispatching Fidel Castro.

But it sure seemed like musicians were especially singled out.  It was enough to make a humble guitar player look both ways, twice, when crossing the road. Dale Griffin from Mott the Hoople, Glenn Frey from the Eagles. Keith Emerson and Greg Lake. Bernie Worrell and Henry McCulloch. Lonnie Mack and Leon Russell. Maurice White and Natalie Cole. Alan Vega and Paul Kantner. The legendary Scotty Moore. The great Guy Clark. The peerless George Martin.

Everyone's mileage will vary, but some will loom larger than others. Prince burst into massive stardom roughly the same time as Michael Jackson, in 1983-84. I always preferred Prince, of course. He could do bad-ass rock'n'roll whenever he felt like it, he didn't have a whiff of the Motown assembly line to him, and he never stopped being a working musician. Jackson lived for another 27 years after Thriller, and in that time he released three new records. Three! Prince released at least 30, and who knows what still sits unreleased in his legendary archives. The only reason people like me, who didn't know them personally, ever cared about these guys was the music they made. Prince never forgot that, and never stopped being a musician. I always admired that about him.

And Merle. I wonder sometimes what the Hag thought of that whole "outlaw country" movement that started up in the early 1970s, with Willie and Waylon and their chums. Merle Haggard didn't play San Quentin.  He lived there for two years, having been a thief and a robber since the age of 13. He was paroled when he was 23, started writing songs, and the rest is history, as they say. If you don't love Merle Haggard, you don't like country music. He's part of the foundation, him and Hank and Possum.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOWlP5Vfyfc

Archiving

In which we gather together everything I said on Facebook over the years that still interests me, mainly so I have more convenient access to it.


                                                            2016


The Year in Old Fogeys
While some Old Fogeys released some very fine work in 2016 - alas, there were exceptions, and these came from some of my all-time favourites. Bob Dylan dropped Fallen Angels, his second take on the Great American songbook. The songs were all beautifully played by Dylan's ace band, and the Old Master sang them beautifully, which is pretty surprising at this stage of the game. But I don't care for the songs all that much. I've simply never been that big a fan of the "Great American Songbook." A similar problem applies to Van Morrison's Keep Me Singing - the old guy is in fine voice, the players are on the money, but the songs - generally written by Van himself - just don't make it. Van wrote some great songs in his day, but those days are long gone for the most part.

But at least Dylan and Morrison are still trying. I don't know what to make of Neil Young. We're told he bashed out Peace Trail in four days, and one can only wonder - how did this take four whole days? It sounds as if it was written and recorded in an afternoon. The songs are all half-baked and unfinished, the rhythm section is just shuffling along in Young's wake. Young has never much cared for the craft of record making, and has always made a virtue of being raw and spontaneous. But this is barely listenable.

Young also seems to be fashioning himself as a modern Woody Guthrie. To me, that means cranking out tuneless diatribes on the issues of the day. Guthrie was also a dire influence on Bruce Springsteen, who was in his mid-30s when he discovered him. Guthrie doesn't appear to have affected Young's work at all until these last few years. The most famous Woody Guthrie disciple of them all is Bob Dylan, but there's a crucial difference - Dylan's Guthrie phase was a youthful infatuation, and as an artistic phase it was all well behind him by the time he turned 23 (although Dylan has paid respectful tribute to Guthrie all his life.) Sure, Guthrie wrote some great songs. The man wrote ten songs a day for more than twenty years. The Law of Large Numbers says some of them would be pretty good.


Disappointment of the Year
Kanye West The Life of Pablo
I've grown fond of likening Kanye to the post-Beatles John Lennon - an arrogant, but absolutely fearless loudmouth willing to speak his version of the truth whatever the consequence. All this rests upon a truly strange psyche rent with enormous insecurities, and some strange mommy issues. It sometimes results in epic displays of being an enormous asshole in public - that's the price you pay sometimes. Life of Pablo is where West loses the plot. His previous albums have all had a kind of thematic or stylistic coherence, and there's a glimmer of one somewhere in here - something about celebrity in the modern world - but it's all half baked and unfinished. The asshole has overcome the artist. See, first you can lose touch with where you came from, and then you can lose touch with the impulse that made you an artist in the first place. That's what's happened here. He's still Kanye Freaking West and the record does have a couple of great, great tracks. But so does Mind Games. This is the sound of a great artist floundering.


Ian Hunter
Ian Hunter - yes, him - has a new album. And it's fabulous. And it's equally fabulous that a man who turned 77 three months ago is making great rock music. And rather than celebrating his old glories, he's saying

You can never go back
You can never go back
Those days are gone
You got to move on
You can't live in the past

A few reasons why Hunter has aged so well. He always wrote more about the world he saw than about himself, and over the years he's actually gotten better at it. And he never really had much of a singing voice to lose to time. He only ever had this kind of vocal Sound that he made, and he can still get that when he needs it. And he can still spot a really good guitar player, which is good because he's always needed one.

This track is an affectionate farewell to his old chum David Bowie, aka Mr Jones, the Prettiest Star.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqA5aDBk2Zc


Jimi Hendrix
It always irritates me when people speculate that if Jimi Hendrix hadn't died so young, 46 years ago today, he'd probably have gone on to play jazz or something similar. As if he'd leave that silly rock'n'roll behind once he'd grown up. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of exactly who this musician was. He worshiped Bob Dylan, and thought Sgt Pepper was a masterpiece. He wrote tight commercial pop songs, with hooks and everything. He was someone who learned his trade playing in funk bands - which you can hear all over his playing. Even this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bowrdK8abn8


Sally Was a Cop
Alejandro Escovedo is just a great, great songwriter, and of course he's a pretty fine performer as well. But somehow I think even Alejandro himself didn't quite see all the possibilties in this one. That ominous descending chord pattern, the spooky backing vocals, they're all there in his version. But I think the song calls for just a little more Drama and Terror.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L00kjoQXxjw&t=8s


Tears of a Clown
Smokey Robinson wrote a lot of great songs, but there's a real problem with covering any of them. The problem is that those songs have already been sung. By Smokey Robinson. So unless your name is John Lennon, you should probably just pack up and go home. My way around this vexing dilemma is to rearrange the song so drastically that Smokey himself might not recognize it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0_HDMvFma8&t=2s


Walk Away Renee
Surprised and gratified at the reception this has received on SoundCloud. It's a wonderful song, of course, a glorious piece of wimp-rock from my misspent youth. But I've never liked any of the recordings of it. So even though it's a poor fit for my voice, such as it is, I just had to take a whack at it.

https://soundcloud.com/daniel-mcilroy-2/walk-away-renee?in=daniel-mcilroy-2/sets/old-inventions


The Tragically Hip
The first thing that really knocked me out about the Tragically Hip wasn't the singer at all. It was the guitars. I loved the way Paul Langlois and Robbie Baker played together. Keith Richards' autobiography is mostly 600 pages of tedium, but it always comes to life when he's talking about music. Richards describes what he calls guitars "weaving" - two electric guitars playing together in such a way that there's no distinction between the lead and the rhythm. It's two guitars actually working together, and it's remarkable how seldom one hears it. And while Baker does take most of the solos, the Hip always had that and I always loved it.

But the best players, the best band - it all goes for nothing, absolutely nothing, if they don't have anything worth playing. At first, I couldn't figure out whether Gord Downie was a pretentious loon or a humble genius. Turns out you can be all of that. All of that, and so much more. Gord is sui generis, one of a kind, and his vision and ambition - and that of his bandmates - made a Kingston bar band into something as large and mysterious as a landscape.


The Beatles, On Their Way
On this day in 1960, the Beatles - John, Paul, George, Pete, and Stuart - rode the ferry from Harwich to the Hook of Holland. They then drove across the Netherlands to Hamburg, for their first gigs on the Reeperbahn. (They'd get sent home early a few weeks later- George was just 17 and underage.) On their way there, they stopped at the Arnhem War Memorial - you all remember A Bridge Too Far - and someone took a picture. Maybe it was Lennon, he's not in the photograph.

And yes, their name liveth forevermore.

The Euphemism Treadmill
The Euphemism Treadmill (as explained by Dr Stephen Pinker) states that words or phrases intended as a neutral replacement for something with unwanted/negative connotations will themselves acquire the connotations of their referents. And that treadmill will catch up to everything, in time. No matter what word you call the little people - it's going to mean little people.

I'm not old enough to remember when "idiot" and "imbecile" were neutral, descriptive terms. But they were, once upon a time. But by the time of my youth, they had been replaced by the nice, user-friendly term "retarded" - and there's a word I probably wouldn't want to use in polite company either. The same thing is happening to "special" and "challenged." The referent always wins. The Euphemism Treadmill rules, and we have to run like hell to keep up...


Ali
This might be the most famous, most iconic picture of Ali at work. And what's interesting is how very uncharacteristic it is. Ali was as expressive a man in the ring as any fighter who ever lived, but the fury in his face here is so unlike him. Why was he so angry? Why was he screaming at his fallen foe to "get up and fight?" Because he knew - and if anyone besides Liston would know, Ali would know - that Liston had taken a dive, in a fight for the heavyweight championship of the world. And Ali was outraged by it.

It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)
This confused the hell out of his audience at the time (always a Bob specialty - he'd confuse them even more about a year later.) Where was the protest, the topicality, the railing against the injustices of the world? (It was still there, just... different.) This was like Rimbaud set to music, or something.
And so it was. But Rimbaud was never this good. This is an unbelievable song, in the sense that it's hard to believe the thing actually exists.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYajHZ4QUVM


Susan Sarandon And Third Party Voters
Against stupidity, the gods themselves struggle in vain. Back in 2000, Susan Sarandon served on Ralph Nader's National Steering Committee. It seems obvious to me that everyone who helped George Bush defeat Al Gore in 2000 bears some responsibility for the consequences, and in this case those consequences involve hundreds of thousands of dead people. A lot of people were responsible, and there's more than enough blood for everyone's hands.

What can you say? Perhaps she's incapable of learning anything from experience. Perhaps she needs a little more blood on her hands. Perhaps she's just an idiot, a pampered and privileged fool. After all, none of the consequences of a Trump victory - to reproductive rights, to the environment, to immigrants, to people who simply want the right to vote - are likely to inconvenience her all that much.


George Martin (1926-2016)
George Martin had an admirable sense of proportion. He knew his place in music history, he was rightfully proud of it - he discovered the freaking Beatles, after all - but he never once fell prey to the illusion that he was the real genius behind the curtain. He was a brilliant producer precisely insofar as he was the Beatles' producer. But that was quite enough, thank you very much. His innovative work with them in the studio has long been recognized and appreciated, and recapping it here would be impossible. A few highlights: suggesting that they begin "Can't Buy Me Love" with the chorus; the close micing of the strings on "Eleanor Rigby" (the session players thought he was crazy); the amazing cut-and-paste work that resulted in "Strawberry Fields Forever"; devising a Western string arrangement to accompany the Eastern music of "Within You, Without You."

I'd like to bring up a point no one ever mentions - did anyone before George Martin ever once make intelligent use of stereo? The Beatles worked in mono. It was the 1960s. Phil Spector and Brian Wilson, the other brilliant producers of the era, both worked exclusively in mono. Both regarded mono as superior. The Beatles began involving themselves in the whole mixing and post-production process fairly early on, but once the final mono product had been achieved, they were out the door. Martin did the stereo mixes on his own. At first he'd bang out a stereo mix of an album in a few hours, but by the time of "Revolver" and "Pepper" he was fully taking advantage of the new soundscape possibilities. Listen again to the placement of the instruments, and the way the voices wander across the stereo spectrum on "A Day in the Life." That was all Martin.


2015 Album of the Year
Kendrick Lamar To Pimp a Butterfly
Here's the thing. I will never really get hip-hop. First of all, my musical tastes and prejudices were formed a long time ago, and they kind of revolve around guitars. (That's rhythm guitar, of course. You know, that thing I play myself.) Honestly, I distrust any piece of music where I can't hear the rhythm guitar. And hip-hop is built around beats, and doesn't have much use for guitars. Secondly, and more importantly, the culture is not mine. I'm a middle-aged white guy from Canada. The urban black experience in the modern American city is alien to me. And so is the rural black experience in the Mississipi Delta 80 years ago. I'll never really get Muddy Waters, either.
But goddam. I do know greatness when I hear it.

Honourable Mention
Sleater-Kinney No Cities to Love
A long time ago, the wizards of Decca Records rejected The Beatles, saying that "groups with guitars are on their way out." And sometimes I look around sadly, and think those guys might finally be right. Except that 2015 was a great year for girl groups getting the band back together, plugging in the guitars, cranking up the amps, and kicking ass.

Honourable Mention
Jason Isbell Something More Than Free
Isbell's first three albums were all pretty good, as was his work with the Drive-By-Truckers. But then he got sober, got married, and made a friggin' masterpiece. 2013's Southeastern was obviously great, a huge leap forward - and for that reason it grabbed you immediately in ways that this year's record doesn't. But Isbell didn't need to take another giant step, and the subtle pleasures of this one are quite enough. And I love this performance - he went on Letterman with his wife, near the end of David's run - and rather than do one of his own songs and plug his own new album, he played a song by the late great Warren Zevon, a guy who was always one of Dave's own favourites,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX4nrkd0b0I

New Artist of the Year
Courtney Barnett Sometimes I Sit and Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit
The Grammys have a long tradition of totally missing the boat on this one - Starland Vocal Band! Milli Vanilli! Hootie & the Blowfish! - so it would be downright weird if they got it right. They didn't. There's a good chance that Meghan Trainor and "All About That Bass" was last year's version of "The Macarena" or "Who Let The Dogs Out?" I will confess to being somewhat fascinated by James Bay. That voice works for me, he reminds me a little of Terry Reid. Reid of course couldn't write a good song to save his life, and he's had a life-long knack for making bad career decisions, whereas young Mr Bay can write a pop tune and seems to know exactly what he's doing. Still, this was a no-brainer. Courtney Barnett is the Real Deal.

Country Album of the Year
Ashley Monroe The Blade
I like Chris Stapleton's record quite a bit - almost as much as the Grammy people. But Ashley's album is even better. Some of it's as good as Grievous Angel and higher praise than that I do not have. Miranda Lambert was already a big star when the Pistol Annies got together - Monroe and Angaleena Presley were anonymous singer-songwriters by comparison. But Presley and Monroe have proven to be just as talented as Miranda. And now they're all stars.

Old Fogey of the Year
Richard Thompson Still
This was a bad year for old fogeys. Into the File and Forget bin go recordings by Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Mark Knopfler, Van Morrison, Don Henley... pretty depressing, actually. Luckily, the world's Greatest Living Guitar player came though for me. Thompson's been making records for almost 50 years, and at this point his craft is so dependable that everything turns on the quality of this particular batch of songs, and this is his best since 2007's Sweet Warrior. Even the novelty tune at the end, in which RT replicates the guitar styles of Django Reinhardt, Les Paul, James Burton, Chuck Berry, and Hank Marvin manages to be fun. Gotta admit, though - there's something really weird about a 67 year old grandfather singing about how he can't get into his girl's pants.


Glenn Frey and the Eagles
All right, let's talk about the Eagles. I suspect that every piece about Glenn Frey's passing will use the phrase "country-rock" at some point, so let's stomp on that notion right away. There was almost nothing that was "country" about the Eagles. They were California singer-songwriters, in the Crosby-Stills-Nash line. With the difference - an important one - that they were an actual band, with a rhythm section and everything.

I've long been struck by the parallels between the Eagles and Led Zeppelin, an observation which generally gets me in deep trouble with fans of both outfits. But it's just too obvious to ignore. Both bands were formed by music industry pros, guys who had been around the block a time or two. These weren't kids who got together in a garage somewhere. Both bands built quite obviously on an existing musical template, and both bands improved on it drastically. (Led Zeppelin was way better than Cream, and the Eagles were way better than Crosby, Stills, & Nash.) Both bands were wildly, insanely popular.

And both bands seemed to practically embody all the excesses and self-indulgences of the early 1970s. This might be one reason history hasn't been all that kind to Eagles, and it's a little unfair. The Eagles weren't the first bunch of guys who were mainly interested in getting rich, getting famous, and getting laid. It's just that in their case, the desire seemed so... transparent. Maybe because you could generally hear what they were singing about. It wasn't obscured by layers of screaming guitars, buried in the mix, or disguised by Jaggeresque diction.

Zeppelin's worn much better, of course. Zeppelin's music was all about the sound rather than the songs, and the sound still kicks ass. The Eagles music was always about the songs, and on most of their albums the songs really aren't about much of anything save the gratification of all those desires. The exceptions are Desperado (which is very good when it's actually about Old West outlaws, but downright embarrassing when it tries to identify the band with said outlaws) and Hotel California which really had something to say about something interesting.


It's All Too Much
I like to think I try harder than most fellas my age to keep abreast of what's going on with contemporary music. But as I've often noted, the sheer quantity of what's being produced these days is just overwhelming. (Two main reasons for this - the female half of the species is now just as active as the dudes, and the old music industry system is pretty much broken.) Anyway, this here is the Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop poll. In it, more than 500 readers voted for the ten best albums of 2015. More than 1200 different albums received votes. And of that group, I've listened to exactly 115 of them often enough to have begun forming an opinion on them. Granted, there are whole musical continents I'm happy to ignore completely (Jazz! Metal!) or give a fairly minimal amount of attention (Hip-hop! Bro-country! Electronica!) But still, I gotta be missing a whole lot of stuff I'd probably really like.

It's all too much!

                                                           2015


Frank Sinatra
It's the Sinatra centennial today, of course. He was a strange, strange guy, equal parts thoroughly repulsive and extremely admirable. The man is long gone, the music remains, but even it represents a strange kind of accomplishment. Sinatra finished off his own kind of music. He more or less perfected something in the 1950s. Those records are so great, so original - it was simply impossible for anyone to do this type of thing better. Once that had been accomplished, there was little point in anyone carrying on in the same vein. It was the end of an era, and time for Elvis.


Taylor Swift vs Apple
Some things never change, and most musicians are powerless to stand up against the terms dictated by the huge corporations who attempt to control access to recorded music. It's entirely up to the big stars to act on behalf of everyone. Which isn't something most of them have bothered to do.
So let's hear it for Taylor Swift. “We don’t ask you for free iPhones,” she added. “Please don’t ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation.”

You GO, girl!


2014 Album of the Year
St Vincent - St Vincent
Everybody already knew that Annie Clark was the guitar hero of the milennium. You know it, I know it, and I'm pretty sure Annie knows it, too. She can do anything she wants on the instrument, and (even better!) she chooses to play the instrument in a way no one has ever played it before. I think this is when the rest of her game catches up with her guitar skills - this is the first time the singing and the song-writing and the record-making has the same confidence and mastery. Pretty sure she can do anything.

Honourable Mention
Hold Steady - Teeth Dreams
This is a different band without the keyboard player. They rock harder, and they sound more distinctive, more like themselves than anyone else. Craig Finn is a wonderfully odd-looking frontman for a rock'n'roll band, and he writes more like a short story writer than anything else. His tales of losers and low lifes are vaguely reminiscent of a slightly upscale (but just slightly!) Tom Waits. Or if Elmore Leonard was writing for a really good Mid-Western rock band....

Honourable Mention
Sharon Van Etten - Are We There
This is Van Etten's fourth album - the first three all had their moments, all showed the steady development of an outsized talent. But this here is the payoff. Van Etten has always had a special sense of how a multitude of voices make her songs dig in. For the first time, the musical settings provide an appropriate match. It's a large modern wall of sound, drum loops and circling keyboards. As always (and as one of the tunes says) she sings about fear and love, and it's an extraordinary batch of songs.

Honourable Mention
Lana Del Rey - Ultraviolence
This is surely the Weird Musical Coupling of the year: Lana Del Rey, with her slowly unfolding film noir tales of desire and regret - and Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys. It works amazingly well - her reverb-drenched synth pop is cut with just enough of Auerbach's gritty guitar playing and cut-to-the-chase aesthetic to produce something more powerful and memorable than any of her previous work. Or his, come to think of it. And why wouldn't it? He might be the better musician, but she's the better songwriter. And I think you have to love a girl who says things like ""You know, I have slept with a lot of guys in the industry, but none of them helped me get my record deals. Which is annoying."

Honourable Mention
Drive-By Truckers - English Oceans
The Truckers have always played old fashioned Southern hard rock, but without the guitar self-indulgence that always ends up irritating me well before the latest twenty minute jam meanders to some sort of conclusion. I always appreciated that, and I'd always liked some songs, but I never thought they'd made a really outstanding album until now. I suppose the tenth time - (tenth?) - is the charm. It's just a whole lot of good songs played with energy and purpose. It seems obvious (to me anyway) that the reason this one is so good is because for the first time the singing and writing is split equally; this time Patterson Hood gets more help than just a song or two from one of his bandmates. It makes his own material (like this tune) stands up better somehow. The trick wouldn't work if Mike Cooley hadn't written some great songs himself. But he did.

Old Fogey of the Year
Robert Plant - Lullaby and the Ceaseless Roar
Plant has spent much of the past decade exploring traditional American music in his work with Alison Krauss and Patty Griffin. But for the most part, this music makes far more use of traditional British and Irish music. It's his singing that's the real revelation here - it's all nuance and subtlety, timing and phrasing, and makes me think of no one more than, guess who, Alison Krauss. Honourable mention: U2, Leonard Cohen, Rosanne Cash, Tom Petty, Bryan Ferry.


                                                                  2014

The Year in Music...
So I'm looking at Rolling Stone magazine, and come across their Best Albums of 2014. And the top two spots are occupied by U2 and Bruce Springsteen, and Tom Petty is lurking nearby in the top ten. I was delighted, saying to myself: "I guess it's still 1984, after all, and wasn't that the strangest dream EVER? Hey - what happened to my hair?"

Oh well. Tom Petty isn't capable of making a bad record - his band is too good and his own craftsmanship is too solid. But he simply hasn't written any great tunes this time around, so this is not a great Petty album.

And while even minor Springsteen is generally interesting - and High Hopes is very minor indeed - the point of remaking old songs with Tom Morello just escapes me. Morello is an utterly amazing guitar technician who since the demise of Rage Against the Machine has had no idea what to do with his amazing technique. Springsteen has no idea either. So we end up with another Morello audition tape, as he demonstrates yet again his technical mastery. We hope someday someone thinks of some musical use for it. But until that happens it's just a parlour trick.

I actually like the U2 quite a bit, but be forewarned. I've always been totally out of step with those guys, and somewhat mystified by their enormous reputation and popularity. I think they've made one masterpiece - Achtung Baby - and the rest of their catalogue is okay but nothing to actually get excited about. At any rate, none of these albums are among the ten best recordings of the past year. None of them are even the best record by an Old Fogey.


Bob Dylan at the Sony Centre
Still on the road, heading for another joint. What struck me about the performance is how alive his recent music sounds. And how much his famous old classics seem like museum pieces, songs from another lifetime. Which is what they are, of course - he wrote "Tangled Up in Blue" 40 years ago, "She Belongs to Me" 50 years ago, and "Blowin' in the Wind" even before that. Those songs were like relics, odd curiosities - he was a different man with a different voice when those songs were new to him. They seemed totally out of time and place. Whereas the material from the last few albums- which is what most of the show consisted of - was full of life and energy. (Not too mention they're also much better suited to the craggy wreck that is all that now remains of a voice that's been ravaged by too much booze, too many cigarettes, and a quarter-century of relentless touring.) The highlights - and there were many - came exclusively among the recent tunes: "Forgetful Heart" "Early Roman Kings" "Duquesne Whistle" and a tremendous closing of "Long and Wasted Years."


The Scottish Referendum
The referendum question is "Should Scotland be an independent country?" Voters can answer only Yes or No. No beating around the bush. No weasel words about negotiating sovereignty-association.

This is how men who aren't afraid to wear skirts do it.


The 123 Worst Musicians of All Time
https://noisey.vice.com/en_uk/article/the-123-worst-musicians-of-all-time
I hate this shit. It's damn hard to be a musician. It takes a great deal of time and effort to learn to play an instrument. There's no money in it for the vast majority of people who make that commitment. There's all kinds of music I don't enjoy and don't want to listen to, but I regard every musician, every last one of them, as worthy of respect.

So all I have to say to whoever took the time to compile this list is "Go fuck yourself."


Holly Williams
Holly Williams was born to it - her father, Hank Williams Jr, actually made some decent records back in the day (before devolving into the Ted Nugent of contemporary country.) And her grandfather, the original Hank Williams, was one of the seminal figures in 20th century American music, a true giant. This song is about her other grandfather, though. A life story in common time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUH8VszQun8


In Search of the Lost Chord
So I'm trying to play Warren Zevon's gorgeous "Desperadoes on the Eaves" on the piano. It's fairly straightforward, except that right in the middle of the second verse ("I predict this motel") comes this random joker of a chord: D dim6. I've assumed that D with a diminished 6th would be a D chord with a B flat tossed in (D, F#, A, Bb) - but the ensuing discord is somewhat disturbing.


Smokey Robinson
It's a persistent myth, but Bob Dylan didn't really say Smokey Robinson was America's greatest living poet. But that was only because no one asked him. Time waits for no one, and the years have actually added a little bit of grit to what was once the unbelievably pure and clear high end of Smokey's voice. The man is 74 years old, after all. And naturally, he makes it work for him, and still sounds impossibly great. And why wouldn't he. He's Smokey Fucking Robinson.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7e5FT5Crjw


St. Patrick's Day
Because who wouldn't be excited about centuries of oppression, a predisposition towards alcoholism, religious fanaticism, lousy weather, and terrible food. On the bright side, the Irish did invent and perfect Modern Terrorism.

You're welcome.


Sarah Jarosz
Not only did I survive the 1990s - I can now listen to musicians born in the 90s! Sarah Jarosz is obviously a very talented player and writer, but one of the things that fascinates me about this video is the instrument she's playing. It's an octave mandolin - which is more or less your standard mandolin but tuned an octave lower (which is why it's so much bigger than a regular mandolin.) I didn't even know there was such a thing, but I don't follow contemporary bluegrass all that closely...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X09s37tJ09s


The Everly Brothers
The Everly Brothers will never sing together again, and the world is a much poorer place. They practically invented it, harmonies so close as to be a single voice, and everyone from Lennon and McCartney to Gram and Emmy walk in their shadow. The Everlys own model was the Louvin Brothers, of course - Don and Phil just did it better. They were the original brothers who couldn't get along with each other, but even after not seeing each other for years they could still do this...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbbS7pi5MFU


                                                             2013

2013 Album of the Year
Vampire Weekend - Modern Vampires of the City
I'm not the first person to invoke Sgt Pepper when discussing this record - the songs are that good, the arrangements and performances are that well conceived and executed. Granted, as distinctive and engaging a singer as Ezra Koenig may be, he's nowhere nearly as great a singer as Lennon or McCartney - but who is, anyway? And he does write better lyrics. I really didn't see this coming - the band's first two records were interesting enough but a little... precious? This has the authority of absolute mastery.

Honourable Mention
Kanye West - Yeezus
It's Kanye's world, we just live in it. There's no one out else there with his inventiveness. Or his determination to never repeat himself. Or his balls. On the one hand, he has the confidence to do anything and on the other hand he still seems to think he has Everything to Prove. One of West's great strengths had always been a kind of omnivorous musicality - he's interested in all kinds of music and all aspects of it. And he's always been willing to use that to his advantage. It's given his work a range and depth no one else in his field can approach. So this time out, he works against those strengths and strips everything down to make music so raw it's positively abrasive. No one like him.

Honourable Mention
The National - Trouble Will Find Me
How great was 2013? The National are probably my favourite active band in the world right now. They're coming off three straight masterpieces, and this summer they made it four in a row. Who was the last band to do that? The Clash? And it's not even my Album of the Year? Yup, one helluva year. Incidentally, I don't find them particularly dark or depressing. It's exactly like Leonard Cohen - if you sing in a baritone and don't vary the timbre too much, and don't interject occasional moans and squeals - people will just assume you're dark and depressing. Like Cohen, these guys are very human, very warm, and very, very funny.

Honourable Mention
Jason Isbell - Southeastern
Best singer-songwriter record of the year, which is slightly surprising because the vast majority of outstanding work by singer-songwriters these last few years is coming from women. But on his third album since leaving the Truckers, Isbell has sobered up and put it all together.


The Year in Music, 2013
I am both a musician and an old fogey. And I will always be loyal to the music that formed my tastes - music made by other old fogeys. Still, three things strike me about this year in music. First, the sheer quantity of outstanding music that appeared in 2013 was absolutely breathaking. I'm certain that there's never been another year in my lifetime when so much great music came out. Second, most of this music was created by artists whose recording careers began in the current millennium. Not that 2013 was a bad year for us old farts - it's just that the best stuff was coming from younger artists. And finally, none of this would have been possible twenty or more years ago, back when the recorded music industry was still in the grip of a handful of enormous corporations, which tightly controlled exactly how much and what kind of product was going to appear on the market.
Good times!


Rock Stars
"...everyone still uses the term "rock star" incessantly, even though rock stars no longer exist. The idea of the rock star is a constant in our mental culture, but not as an element of our hard reality. Calling someone a "rock star" is like calling someone a "door-to-door salesman" — we all know what it means and we all know what it signifies, but no one occupies its literal designation. Instead, we say things like, "Game designers are the new rock stars" or "Bike messengers are the new rock stars." However, there are no rock stars becoming the new rock stars. That's over. The term is just an abstraction that connotes a specific type of public perception."
- Chuck Klosterman


Richard Thompson, "Hard on Me"
World's greatest living guitar player visits Toronto. Destroys everything in his path.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXyP4U1hl34


Nelson Mandela
Nelson Mandela did not choose the path he ended up taking. Confronted with an evil system that denied his very status as a human being, his response - the natural response - was resistance, activism, rebellion. But even these expressions were denied him, until all that was left was suffering, and its endurance. And so he suffered and endured...

I am fond of saying that those to whom evil is done do evil in return. Evil, absolute and pure, was done to Nelson Mandela for the span of a lifetime. But when he was finally free to choose a path, he chose reconciliation. There are rare individuals - Gandhi, King, Mandela - who do not do evil in return to the evil done to them. They break the mold. They are the ones who begin the work of putting an end to the vicious circles that oppress us all.


Gram and the Burritos
There's very little Gram preserved on video, of course. This piece of miming-along-with-the-record was evidently done for television sometime in the spring of 1969 (because drummer Mike Clarke and bassist and co-writer Chris Etheridge are both in the band.) For reasons known only to themselves, but probably involving illicit substances, Clarke and Etheridge have decided to swap instruments for this film session. The song is of course one of the great, classic Parsons vocal performances. No matter how much he hams it up here, you can still hear the hearts breaking. That was what he did.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rrqBsG1yXs


In the Hood
My neighbourhood bank was robbed yesterday. I came by, saw the yellow crime scene tape, four police cars, a cop outside the door. I asked him if there'd been a robbery. He said "Yup." And I said "Well, that's where they keep the money."

But I don't think they got any of MY money.


Brave New World
There is so much outstanding music being made these days that it's positively bewildering. When I was a pup it was possible to be aware of, and to listen regularly, to everything that was even halfway decent. Now - forget about it. I am constantly becoming aware of outstanding artists who've been around for years, and I've somehow never heard of them. A bit embarrassing, but loads of fun.


Tupac
Tupac would have been 42 today, which is almost hard to fathom. Now he's forever young, lost and angry, torn between the world he came from, the world he imagined, and the world he inhabited. The one that killed him. It's his ambivalence about it all that keeps him so interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Mng4Mcsk5s


Jimmy Page
Page is celebrated first of all as one of the original guitar heroes, and quite rightfully so; he's also recognized as a great producer, a brilliant sculptor of sound, and one of the unique creative forces in rock music. All very true. Is that all? There has never been a shortage of guitar heroes and there have been other great producers and creative people in the music.

But even more than all of these things, Page was a great bandleader, one of the greatest ever. He built a band - and it was his band, make no mistake - that was the perfect means to realize his vision. Which is why the death of John Bonham, a personal tragedy for his friends and family, was an artistic tragedy for Jimmy Page. Bonham's passing deprived a great musician of his ideal vehicle, the perfect outlet for his work. All this is equally true of Pete Townshend, a musician of comparable greatness, who has likewise accomplished almost nothing of note in the thirty years since the demise of his band. How could you follow Led Zeppelin? No one could, any more than you could follow The Who.


Elvis Presley
Presley's talent was so vast that actually applying it seemed almost... excessive. After all - what did he have to prove? And what material could possibly be worthy?

And besides - if this talent was actually applied, in all its force and power...well, the results would be utterly shattering, and quite likely lead to a total rupture of the space-time continuum. Which is exactly what happened when Presley was 20 years old, a kid with something to prove, and he did apply that talent.

So consider what he does here. The song is... well, it's awful. It's as lame a piece of cheese as could possibly be imagined. Elvis certainly doesn't apply himself to this. He merely breathes upon it, and creates this miracle. Out of crap he found by the side of the road.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHwnnKt2xLM


                                                               2012


Marvin Miller, RIP
"When people tell me that fans are against the players now, I say, 'Who cares?' “They have never given a damn about the players. As is their right. But they didn't care when the players were getting paid peanuts. They didn't care when the players were pieces of property the owners could throw around. Nor was there any fan movement whatsoever when baseball, for I don't know how long, wouldn't hire non-white players, no matter their ability. Where was the fan anger then?"


Led Zeppelin at the O2
If you're gonna get the band back together one last time... this is how you do it. What have the 30 years gone taken away? Well, Plant paces himself a little. But it's mostly typical 70s excess and self-indulgence that has gone by the wayside - "Dazed and Confused" lasts only 12 minutes here! This leaves a band far more focused and disciplined than was often the case in their heyday... and when you take the excess and self-indulgence away from this band, what remains is absolutely ferocious. And the interplay between Jason Bonham - who does just a sensational job - and his father's old bandmates is very sweet. He's so proud to be there, and they're so proud of him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ca3jyxOkqZY


Glenn Gould
The most remarkable musician this country has ever produced, Glenn Gould died 30 years ago this week. He'd just turned 50 - he should still be with us. So his career concluded where it had begun, with a radically different recording of the very piece that made him an instant sensation a quarter of a century earlier: Bach's Goldberg Variations. Has any musician ever seen so clearly into the heart of a composer as Glenn Gould saw into Bach? (And around the 7:30 mark of this, you might wonder if any composer has ever demanded so much from a musician.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEkXet4WX_c



Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah"
The melody is so seductive, the rising and falling drama of the verses is so powerful, the lyrics are so strange and so beautiful... it would be impossible for any singer with any self-regard not to be seduced by it. Which is why even such astonishing performances of this tune as those by Jeff Buckley and k.d. lang can't help but become, to some degree, about the singer rather than the song. But for obvious reasons old Leonard is immune to all of those temptations. So, more than any other version, this one is all about the song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrLk4vdY28Q


McCartney
Macca's career has been frustratingly inconsistent (and often maddeningly trivial). But the only response I or any other musician could possibly have to his staggering melodic gifts is awe. Jaw-dropping, gob-smacked AWE.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od5JgUOZYEc