Albums from 1973

I was born seven days before Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” was released in America. Since then, I’ve noticed that “Houses of the Holy”, Can’s “Future Days”, The Stooges “Raw Power”, and Funkadelic’s “Cosmic Slop” were all released in 1973. That’s five stone-cold stunners.

I wonder what else there is?

Roxy Music, “For Your Pleasure”. I was 30 days old.

Stevie Wonder, “Innervisions”.

Bowie, “Aladdin Sane”. Jaaaaang.

The Who, “Quadrophenia”. It means something to Eddie Vedder. The movie’s alright (like the kids).

“Band on the Run”. I mean, it’s a thing.

“(Pronounced ‘l?h-’nérd ‘skin-’nérd)”. It’s got “Free Bird” (and “Simple Man” and “Tuesday’s Gone”. Pretty heavy).

“Shotgun Willie”

“The Harder They Come”

“Let’s Get it On”

“Greetings from Asbury Park” aaaand “The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle”.

Queen’s debut (!)

“Piano Man”

“Buckingham Nicks”

“Goats Head Soup”

“New York Dolls” (!)

Friggin’ “Tubular Bells”

Aerosmith’s debut! The debuts that came out that year were pretty insane.

“Tres Hombres”!

“Space Ritual”

The Blue and Red compilations from the Beatles.

“The Smoker You Drink The Player You Get”

“Killing Me Softly”

“Faust IV”

That’s a good year. It’s not 1967 or 1987 but, you could entertain yourself on a desert island of just that stuff. I’m not even counting things from people like Paul Simon, Elton John or “Larks Tongue in Aspic” that I don’t have any great connection with. There’s still “Ooh La La” that I marginally like.

Swans is tonight.

edit: Swans was tonight!

Hoo-boy. Glad I did my research on Reddit and heeded the ear plug warnings. I’ve probably heard louder (MBV, Sleep, Sonic Youth) but these folks were right up there. The ear plugs didn’t seem to muffle anything, especially when the amplitude vibrated throughout my frame. But the folks really made their volume work. I don’t think I was ever put off by it and I know I was certainly turned right on by some of the effects they were achieving. It was so cinematic and in a way that I hadn’t been expecting. Ethereal but challenging. Hard and haunting.

It didn’t make me sad or depressed which I thought might occur based off of the fact that some of the lyrics I had heard leading up to the show kind of bummed me out. Although I hardly moved more than 3-4 times throughout the show, it was still cathartic. It wasn’t ever (in the ballpark of) pretentious; not like the cliche No Wave/ New York Avant Garde band cliche I conjure up when No Wave pops into my head.

They are definitely one of those bands like the Birthday Party that I have mostly steered clear of because of their withering reputation and my preconceptions about them. I may have to give the Birthday Party a first-look since Swans transcended my prejudices so satisfyingly.

Michael Gira seems like an older musician that is grateful to receive the praise that he has acquired over the long, long years of slogging away in the name of scratching an itch. Norman Westberg was opening the show when I got there. He was great as well-loud and electronic, almost like William Basinski with a guitar. The rest of this line-up of Swans all did a hell of a job making a beautiful racket. Some people actually care about the work that they do. That’s who Swans are. Glad I went.

Cajon Practice Playlist

1.) I Am Stretched On Your Grave/ Sinead O’ Connor.

2.) Give It Up or Turn It Loose/ James Brown.

3.) Fool’s Gold/ Stone Roses.

4.) Zombie/ Fela

5.) Government Chicken Boy/ Fela

6.) Super Bon Bon/ Soul Coughing

7.) Cosmic Slop/ Funkadelic

8.) Bra/ Cymande

9.) Pump Up The Volume/ M/A/R/R/S

10.) Monk Chant/ The Monks

11.) Buffalo Stance (12” Mix)/ Neneh Cherry

Ah shit, Sinead O'Connor has died. Aged 56.

I hate only writing on here when people die but this one set me back. She’s only 6 years older than me and, even though I’m almost certain it was a suicide, the news hits like an echo from my own future, my own mortality. What’s weird is I was watching a video of her this morning from out of nowhere and several hours before I heard the news. She was just that weird, bald chick in the World Party video. And then she was that utterly unsettling bald woman, serpent, statue in her first solo video. “Troy” reached out of the screen from ‘120 Minutes’ one long, hot Sunday night and creeped me right out of my hot sweat. I couldn’t understand it, but it put the barb into me. “The Lion and the Cobra” is a stone-cold classic debut album, not like anyone else but somehow composed of all of the truly good things like mystery and power that made U2 so intriguing before Bono started waving flags. “Jackie” has the sweep of an ocean. “Mandinka” makes me want to buy a Telecaster. “Jerusalem” roars and filter sweeps its way to glory. It starts a great funk vein that “I Want Your Hands On Me” picks up and delivers the electro goods in full with. I can go without skipping one track. I had a great autograph on the album at one time. I didn’t get to meet her but the crew took it back and returned it to me signed. Her second album was the one that made her name and it’s good. Things kind of went haywire after that. Lot of trouble. Then, her son killed himself last year. It was pretty much over with after that. Today’s just the period at the end of the sentence. I have no answers.

A little late but, Andy Rourke has died.

The Smiths will never reunite with the full, original line-up now. They will never enter the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a four-piece. The legend will never be tainted. The original essence will neither dwindle or decrease. Considering my opinion of reunions and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, those conditions are acceptable. But in no way do I wash my hands of Andy Rourke. His playing was the soundtrack of the flowering of my youth. His presence as an outstanding member of one of the two bands that occupied the lion’s share of my formative imagination is stamped across my teenage years and that is not an insignificant thing. Standing in the shadows of two towers of virtue and still managing to shine out is not an insignificant thing. He did his thing and he was good at it. That’s good enough for me. I hope it was enough for him.

Tom Verlaine has died.

The old world continues to molt away into the ether and something new that I am entirely unsure of is left behind in its place. No one will remember him within 50 years. No one on this year’s Grammys will be remembered much beyond that. I won’t even make it that far. Their names may be recorded in some database in the mausoleum of time but they are all only slightly less mutable than I am. America is not that old and it already feels like it is falling apart at sea. The Egyptians, the Romans, the Atlanteans all lasted millenia (that’s right, all of them and all of the others, too) before being swallowed by the desert or the sea until nothing was left but strange architecture, middens, and half-statues. We have been preceded in time by civilizations as advanced as us (though likely in different ways) or perhaps some that were beyond us. And now they are just slight hills in the desert for tourists to stumble over or they are no more than legends and wild-eyed speculations for potheads to toss back and forth like a football as the sun sets and the imagination gets looser. When was the last time anybody talked about Elvis before Lisa Marie died recently? The time between the Beatles getting mentions in the media is getting longer and longer. I can’t remember the last time I heard Frank Sinatra referenced. Jeff Beck died last week; turn a page. I feel like we won’t hear from him much again, Hall of Fame or not. That thing’s not going to last forever either. One easily accomplished electromagnetic pulse and all of recorded music is lost until someone gets the electrical grid back up and that’s only going to bring back vinyl. All digital music could easily cease for good, like it never happened. Almost like Atlantis.

A Pointless List of Women In Rock Music

My favorite women in music:

As I sit in silence on New Year’s Day reading headlines and year-end/ year-beginning lists, my mind wanders to the past and, lo, a wild hare presents itself up my ass. For no good reason that I can imagine, I decided to review some of the female musicians that mean the most to me. Why? I don’t know; random nostalgia, melancholy for the glorious past, anything not to be doing some work that I know needs to be getting done. Any of it. All of it.

I’m a white guy born during the ascendency of rock and roll and I lived the first 20-30 years of my life witness to the pinnacle of the genre. I’ve seen it unfolding live at its best and I’ve watched its inevitable corruption and pixelation from the Overton Window of pop culture, taking its place in the modern world as a music genre akin to jazz, the other music that was once huge and now it just is. There will never be another jazz star and, it is quite possible that there will never be another rock and roll star. I suppose that some day there will never be another hip-hop star and so on and so forth. But rock and roll is written in the sinews and scrawled across the bones that I carry around in this ever-loosening bag of skin all day. I know it the way I know my freckles.

But as a white rock and roll fan, I’m aware of how much of my music collection is made of white guys. I always have been aware of this, as each Led Zeppelin album took its place on my shelf, as each Clash lyric was memorized and hollered, as I read each new biography or critical analysis of the Beatles, the Doors, or the Smiths. I knew that it was not good to only like those that looked just like me. I wanted more than that and I’ve always maintained an open mind for music from others, the folks that don’t look like me. I like seeing women get in the ring and rip it up. I’m just as thrilled by bad-asses like Mo Tucker, P.J. Harvey, and Delia Derbyshire as I am by the greats like Lemmy, Johnny Marr, or John Lydon. So, these are the women in my record collection that mean the most to me:

Patti Smith: I did a lot of corny things in high school and I was mostly a square with a rather Catholic outlook on life. But I will always give myself a little bit of credit for having covered “Dancing Barefoot” at a battle of the bands that was held my junior year. Patti Smith’s Just Kids is the book that made me feel the way I wanted people to feel when they read my writing. She is in the pantheon. She was/ is such a rock icon that she had the guts to walk away from the spotlight to take care of Sonic Smith and her children. And she is such an American legend that when she came back, it was as like she’d never left. She is as natural as the water. She will be here like the wind.

P.J. Harvey: P.J. Harvey was one of my very first discoveries that was truly mine after I left high school. After freshman year of college, I lived with a roommate that worked at Hasting’s Records and Tapes who brought home handfuls of promo CDs every week. One collection included Dry, the first release by P.J. Harvey. I didn’t know anyone else who listened to her and I feel like my opinion is pure. And it has endured. After that first album, the 90s and 00s were solidly on her side. As a guitar player that you’d think was a dude, P.J. Harvey’s music could sit adjacent with Grunge, and Brit-pop, while not being part of those movements at all. Her songwriting is impeccable—very English, very spooky. She can duet with Thom Yorke and hammer with Josh Homme.

Trish Keenan (Broadcast): I discovered Trish Keenan and Broadcast when the Facebook algorithm threw her obituary into my news feed. Something about the haunting face and ripped up photograph was alluring enough to get me to click on the link that took me to a YouTube clip of “American Boy”, a galloping anthem sung by a ghost that squelched and squawked its way across my transom and took up residence in my brain as I spent the lonely winter of 2010 walking the snow-blasted streets of downtown Dallas after I’d lost my job in the Great Recession. “I Found the F”, “The Black Cat”, and “Long Was the Year” became the soundtrack to that mind-blown era of not knowing what to do. I regret that she had to die in order for me to find her but, that is what happened.

Kate and Cindy (B-52s): “52 Girls” is the original inspiration for this list. The B-52s are another one of those bands that are so bad-ass simply because they were so weird and original and so incapable of being anything other than what they were that they earn miles of credibility and light years of respect.

Delia Derbyshire (BBC Radiophonic Workshop/ Dr. Who/ White Noise): An original. The classic definition of ahead of her time. Barely an ounce of respect in her lifetime. Still doesn’t get all she deserves. A maker of great noises.

Alice Coltrane: I can honestly say that Alice inspires me more than John but that’s kind of a shitty way to go about introducing her. She stands tall with her husband and the fact that they both measure up to the other is not insignificant. I guess I say it because she took a lot of shit for being the wife of the genius and her music took a lot of backseat to his. Her spirituality is brave and her devotion to her soul, her man, and her family is awe-inspiring. Her music from the ashram is full of blanks and air that my mind is drawn in to fill those spaces with my own melodies and intertwine them with the music of my own soul. She is as natural as old wood. She is as cosmic as the night.

The Breeders: Kim Deal will never be not cool. It is beyond her. She is one of US. And apparently, so is her sister, Kelly. One of the best live shows I have ever seen was the Breeders at Trees for the “Last Splash” tour. They played every good song they had and everyone had a blast, even me. Plus, they’ve got Steve Albini in their CV.

Neneh Cherry: “Buffalo Stance” still rules my world to this very day. It is a song that defined a seminal era of my adolescence and it will always rule a large portion of my heart. Throw “Slow Train to Dawn” on top of that and I’m done. She makes the list without question.

Nico: A big, old gal. So classical and still so original to herself. She shared stage and life with Lou Reed and Jim Morrison and John Cooper Clarke and was not minimized by their presence. Way out there with no discernible desire to get in touch with the mainstream. Her main instrument was a harmonium so you know she was entirely ensconced in her own trip.

Sinead O’Connor: She creeped me right out with that glitter-painted, bald head in the video for “Troy” when they world-premiered it on “120 Minutes”. I couldn’t wait for the song to end so they could get back to playing something lighter but that wouldn’t last long. Her first album is a stone-cold classic that doesn’t get near the attention it deserves, especially after it was over-shadowed by “Nothing Compares to U”, a song that I don’t like that is nevertheless part of an otherwise great follow-up album. She’s guested with some of my favorites (Edge, Jah Wobble, and The The). She’s gotten a little out there at times over the years but I still hope she gets the credit she deserves.

Chrissie Hynde (The Pretenders): I’ve written about Chrissie Hynde’s influence in my interpretation before but I reiterate myself here. She’s got a storybook rock and roll existence that echoes Patti Smith’s. She was a true believer as a suburban youth and she believed in rock and roll so much and so hard that she turned herself into a rock journalist with a knack for Zelig-like appearances in the great scenes of the early and mid-70s from the same Ohio milieu that birthed DEVO. She was at the Kent State riots, she married Ray Davies, and she sang on “Pride (in the Name of Love)”. And of course, she wrote those songs and led the Pretenders through the kind of nightmares that swallow lesser human beings whole.

Raincoats: I will always give Kurt Cobain credit for being an artist that was very proactive in his promotion of the other artists that inspired him. I learned about the Meat Puppets and the Vaselines because of him. One of his great achievements of throwing his weight around for the good of humanity was in getting the three Raincoats albums re-released on CD with, I believe, liner notes by John Lydon on his own affinity for the band. Like others on this list, it is spooky, dream music. The music exists in its own time and on its own plane with its own rules. And in that place, everything works, in all of its lo-fi, warbling glory.

Siouxsie: I was 14 years old in 1987 when I purchased a cassette copy of my first Siouxsie and the Banshees album, Through the Looking Glass, a collection of cover songs by artists I had never heard (of) before, except for Dylan, the Doors, and The Jungle Book track. This album introduced me to Television, Roxy Music, Iggy Pop, Sparks, Billie Holiday, Kraftwerk, and John Cale. I look at those names and my mind is utterly blown. So much bedrock packed into one patch of earth. So much foundational material presented, sometimes in versions that I personally prefer to the original. That same year I caught the end of the video for “Spellbound” and, as crushingly corny as it sounds, was captivated by the snippet of the thundering drums and those weird lyrics about throwing your grandparents down the stairs. A sensation that disappeared with the rise of the Internet and YouTube is the pain and anticipation of having to wait for a radio station or MTV to play that one track that you heard one time, fell in love with, and lived and breathed only in order to hear the track again and again and again. I stayed up so late on so many Sunday nights just waiting for MTV or Night Flight (on Saturday nights) to play “Spellbound” and it was sooo delicious whenever it would finally pop up. The birth of alternative radio kind of killed this waiting game and like I said, the Internet nailed the coffin shut and packed the dirt on top of it. In the following year or so, I would begin to complete my collection of Siouxsie classics like JuJu and the crucial singles collection, Once Upon a Time.

Siouxsie is one of those girls like Chrissie Hynde that was around all of the punk pioneers (again in Zelig-like fashion) so much that she became one of their equals almost through osmosis and sheer tenacity. I mean, she spoke to Bill Grundy more than Paul Cook or Glen Matlock. She inspired the whole controversial remark from Steve Jones that seemed like such a scandal at the time. She probably sold a billion cans of Aqua Net between 1978 and 1992. And most importantly, she never embarrassed herself. She never got shitty. Where so many people so they don’t, Siouxsie actually didn’t ever compromise. She and the Banshees made their music and it was good. She was always Siouxsie and that means something tough, cool.

Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth): She’s written one of my favorite autobiographies that I read during the COVID-era. Girl in a Band tells that story, the story of a girl with a rock and roll heart and a love of art growing up in the 70s, moving to New York, and starting a band, just like Patti Smith or Chrissie Hynde. Only Kim Gordon wasn’t the focus of her band, Sonic Youth. No, somehow Kim Gordon was the sexy singer/ bass player that never distracted from what was going on with all of those guitars, all of that feedback, all of that hot noise. She was a woman in an almost universally male genre. She was not loud, needy for attention. She was/ is the archetype for that most beautiful of jewels—the cool chick. She knows the artists that make the music you like and they look up to her. Without being loud or obnoxious, she has become one of the most influential underground musicians in the past 40 years, not only for her work with Sonic Youth but also for her efforts promoting new talent like Beck or Nirvana. And I guarantee that she has greased more wheels behind the scenes than I or anyone will ever know.

I saw her from the front row when Sonic Youth played Club Clearview. I felt like the press from the audience would sever my legs at the barriers and I felt like that for two sweaty hours. It’s the most punk rock thing I ever survived. And a great show.

Latitia (Stereolab): The label chanteuse is not wasted on her.

Stevie Nicks: I don’t enjoy cokeheads and I hate the whole gauzy, California aesthetic of the 70s that is personified by the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac. I have many problems with Fleetwood Mac’s entire history. But the Stevie Nicks tracks on Rumors are flawless. The whole album is immune to my hatred but especially her stuff. Throw “Edge of Seventeen”, “Stand Back”, and “Stop Dragging My Heart Around” on top and her reputation is airtight in my estimation. There’s some goofiness with the whole witchcraft thing and her godmother to the whole Lilith Fair contingent is a little eye-rolly but I’m fully prepared to overlook my reticence inspired by those bits of her biography in order to enjoy the music.

Mo Tucker (Velvet Underground): She is the pulse of the Velvet Underground. Her face is on Mount Rushmore in some alternate reality. A tough chick from the city. A cool chick that played the drums. A mom. John and Lou made all of the noise. She made it move.

Madonna: She’s become an embarrassment in the recent past but “Into the Groove” is a near-perfect pop song that was definitive in my pre-adolescent musical awakening and lasted through the 90s at least. The Immaculate Collection is worth your time.

Keith Levene has died.

A day after watching him in the PiL documentary and I see his face in the New York Post. You know the news is bad if you’re a post-punk legend and the Post is giving you the time of day. He was in the Clash. He is that sound from “Public Image” that sends a spike up my backside everytime I hear it.

This is the second time this week that I have watched a documentary about a band and then someone from that band turns up dead. Nik Turner from Hawkwind passed away the day after I spent an afternoon watching different versions of “Silver Machine” (including one by the Sex Pistols which led me to PiL documentary). I hope nothing bad happens to anyone from Spacemen 3 or the Brian Jonestown Massacre as they have also been on my mind/ viewing schedule this week.

The 4th of July

I remember the moment when ambient music first got a hook into me. I was a 12-year-old loner prone to contemplative walks through the latchkey afternoons of my pre-adolescence. I had received my birthday present for that year from Aunt Pammy-Whammy, my non-biological, “fun aunt” who proudly smoked a joint in photos from my first concert ever (Crystal Gayle at the Cotton Bowl). Pam was one of those “signpost connections” that every kid needs growing up to point them in cool directions. She had been attendant at the aforementioned epochal live show, she would give me my first copy of Andrew ‘Dice’ Clay’s “The Day the Laughter Died”, an album that I have never not had a copy of on me throughout the ages of the Walkman, the Discman, and the I-phone. But before all of those intervening years of comedy gold would pass, she gave me a potentially more important birthday present—a cassette by my first ever favorite band. A cassette with songs that will forever transport me back to imaginary lands that were terrained within my neocortex through endless solitary walks with a Walkman, after school, forever in sunsets or gloom.

The valley is deep but when I go there, I can still hear that one track with all of the freshness that I felt when I took it in for the first hundred or so times during that first year. It is a desert song. It is a whistle in the drywood. There is the lizard pulse thrum. There are the guitar notes like wind chimes made from stray bits of junk tchotchkes. There is a whispering like the wind that isn’t human. The hard-on of a lead singer is not involved. It doesn’t go anywhere, though it does transport me somewhere with faithful regularity. This was my initial contact with Brian Eno and it came about through his work with the biggest rock band on the planet for the next twenty years of my life.

I didn’t know any of those details at the time but I would quickly begin learning more about that one track on that one album that that one band made right before they swallowed the world. The promotional campaign for the album rolled out on MTV and I watched the half-hour special on the recording of the album whenever it aired. MTV survived on reruns of anything even remotely resembling what we call ‘content’ today so my fascination for my first band was endlessly nurtured. And one of my favorite scenes from the making of this album has the lead singer out of the picture. Guitar hero #1 is holding that beautiful black Stratocaster with the maple neck and the black pickguard that sent a shiver through my every wet dream of being in a band. Guitar hero #1 is losing his hair. And so is the wispy gentleman next to him, the one with his hands all over the volume pots on the beautiful black guitar. Somehow the two of them are playing THE SONG…together…on this one guitar.

My young head swirled in possibilities. Then (!) the half-bald blonde guy picks up a silver box in one hand and puts it to the strings. The terrain of the desert in my imagination was instantly defined in latitude and longitude by the sound of the E-Bow on the Edge’s strat. The caterwauling moan created by the infinite delay machine is like the smell of my mother’s cooking. I know everything that it signifies. Invisible coyotes clip through the windblown scrub in my brain. There is smoke in the sky, though I do not know from where it came. It is the 4th of July.

New words - Tabard, Eucatastrophe, redoubt

Tabard is a short cape or coat bearing a coat of arms worn over a knight’s armor or by a herald.

Eucatastrophe is a word coined by Tolkien himself. It describes an unlooked for change in fortune or a surprise victory from the jaw’s of defeat. See: Helm’s Deep/ the Charge of the Rohirrim, the flight of the Eagles, the Pellenor Fields, etc.

Redoubt is a small, defensive fortification.

New word--Diegetic

Artistic elements experienced as part of the world in which they occur. In a movie it is sound heard by the characters.

My introduction to this word came about in a moment of synchronicity. Part of the “sound design” for the audiobook of “The Grifter’s Bible” includes a plethora of in-world sound references and I had just recorded one of these instances (“…the sound of a horsehair bow being drawn across high-tension lines.” when I was reading something on The Quietus that used the term diegetic. I can’t remember what though.