Chicago – Chicago (X)XXII: Stone of Sisyphus
Rhino Records (6/17/08; should have been 1993… will explain later)
Popus interruptus

This one’s so weird that VH1’s Behind the Music would think twice about broadcasting it.

Let me take you back to late 1982, if I may. Yr Humble Scrivener was in college. Most of you were still at the gamete stage, if that. Chicago (the group, not the city) was having dirt thrown over it. Their longtime label, Columbia, dropped them after a series of disappointing albums (and to be fair, the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth albums did well and truly suck). No other label wanted them. Disappointing sales track record over the past five or so years, and where did Chicago and its horns fit in a world full of synthesizers? It was only because their manager Irving Azoff had his own vanity imprint, Full Moon, that the group could record. Warner Brothers, who distributed Full Moon, wasn’t very happy about being stuck with this dinosaur act, but they were not about to piss off the guy who managed acts like the Eagles. So Warners sucked it up.

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Night Ranger – Hole in the Sun
VH1 Classics (7/1/08)
Pop/Rock From Back When Pop/Rock Was Good

First Greg Norman at the British Open, now a new release from Night Ranger… I Love The ’80s! Even if it’s supposedly 2008, I Love The ’80s!

Seriously, I Love The ’80s (and if you’re wondering why I keep repeating that phrase, look at who’s releasing this and marvel at my blatant suck-up capabilities). It was my time, after all. My late teen years, my Bright College Days, the old Time Of Highest Sexual Potency thing. It was a good time for me. It was a slightly more innocent time when it came to music as well. Anything went, as you could tell from the genres that had their origins in the ’80s—everything from electronica to house to techno to hip-hop. Hell, we’d listen to anything. Go Home Productions has made a career out of creating mash-ups of ’80s material; honestly, check out their mash of Yaz’s “Don’t Go” and U2’s “Vertigo” and marvel at its magnificence.

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Xanadu on Broadway – The Original Broadway Cast Recording
PS Classics (1/8/08)
Broadway
Available at Amazon.com

Oh, is this one going to require an explanation. Fortunately for you, I was there for all of it. And, yes, I remember it well. So grab a seat, a refreshing beverage made by PepsiCo, and some popcorn. This is going to take a while. I’d advise you hitting the restroom before I start.

Ready? Snacks all prepared and your bladders empty? Good. It all started a long, long time ago with an article in Rolling Stone. Rolling Stone was hip, edgy, and the arbiter of everything that was cool in music…

…will you please stop giggling? Yes, I know that what I said is inconceivable and ridiculous, but this was a long, long time ago, so long ago that CDs didn’t exist and Professor Eric hadn’t even hit puberty yet. As I said, a long, long, LONG time ago. So shush and let me tell the story.

As I said, it all started with an article in Rolling Stone. The article was called “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night”, and told the story of the mini-society that was creating itself inside of a disco in Brooklyn and its attendant sociology and values. It was a revelation to readers. Once you entered that disco, the rules of life changed. Losers became winners based on their ability to do the Hustle. The inside of a disco could be as foreign and disconcerting as the jungles of New Guinea. Great piece.

Eventually, someone thought it would be a terrific idea to make it into a movie. Hey, why not? Everything can be made into a movie, after all. There was only one snag: since it involved a disco, the movie would have to be a musical. The movie musical had been dead for nearly a decade. It was a tough sell. However, the film got sold for two reasons. First of all, the budget would be low, so if the movie tanked, no skin off anyone’s nose. Second, the star of the film would be the breakthrough performer on the hit TV series Welcome Back, Kotter, a young performer named John Travolta, who was perfect for the lead role.

The film would eventually become known as Saturday Night Fever. It was a huge hit. The soundtrack was an even bigger hit, front-loaded with appealing songs by the Bee Gees, one of the few established groups who successfully adapted to the needs of disco. It’s still the biggest-selling soundtrack album in history and one of the biggest-selling albums of any sort ever. It alone extended the lifespan of disco far past its sell-by date.

So, here was Hollywood with a very unexpected hit on their hands. Naturally, this being Hollywood, they had to figure out how to make more money off of this. Fortunately, someone had a great idea. ’50s nostalgia was huge at the time—the two biggest shows on TV were Happy Days and its spin-off Laverne and Shirley. On Broadway, one of the biggest new hits played directly off of this nostalgia craze. Grease was a musical that seemed to appeal to audiences of all ages. It was pulling in big box-office. But with the exception of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (at the time, still not a cult favorite), Hollywood hadn’t tried to adapt a Broadway musical since someone thought it’d be a good idea to have Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood sing in Paint Your Wagon. The movie industry was gun-shy about a movie adaptation of a Broadway hit. But, what if Travolta could be convinced to do the lead? He could sing—he’d already had a Top Ten single. And what if they paired him with an established rock star as his female lead? There was someone who seemed to be ideal for the role: Australian chanteuse Olivia Newton-John. She had the perfect image and the vocal chops.

Everyone got on board, and Grease became an enormous hit, with another enormous soundtrack album trailing in its wake. All was well and good. Except for one thing: this was Hollywood, the land of drawing general conclusions from specific circumstances. Lots of people came to different conclusions about the meaning of the successes of Saturday Night Fever and Grease. And the results were, shall we say, dire. Here’s a scorecard of some of those conclusions and the results:

Broadway musicals were now fair game again. Result: The Wiz, which ended Diana Ross’ acting career for good. Somehow, Michael Jackson escaped blame for this disaster. Imagine if he hadn’t, and how different the world would be.

You can do a movie musical as long as it had loads of disco music. Result: Thank God It’s Friday, an expensive dud, and Can’t Stop the Music, the ultimate in kitsch, which really can’t be described. It was one of the stakes in the heart of the Village People’s career, yet, somehow, Steve Guttenberg escaped blame. Imagine if he hadn’t, and smile.

The real reason for the success of Grease was Olivia Newton-John:. Result: Xanadu.

This is a film that a lot more people have heard of than seen. It’s regarded as one of the Legendary Film Disasters of the Eighties, right up there with Heaven’s Gate and Ishtar. You’ll understand why when I quickly summarize the plot. A Venice, California, street artist (Michael Beck) is sorely in need of inspiration. Answering his call, one of the Greek Muses (Newton-John) descends from Olympus to inspire him. Apparently, dressing like a late-’70s bimbo and strapping on a pair of roller skates is an integral part of this process. In the process of inspiration, Newton-John runs into a musician that she inspired during World War II (Gene Kelly). Together, the threesome, mutually inspired, come up with the ultimate expression of their combined inspiration: a combination of a ’40s nightclub and roller disco called Xanadu.

Look, there was cocaine involved. Lots of it. Anything that might seem inexplicable and insane from this era can be easily explained by the involvement of tootski. Thanks to Peruvian marching powder, someone, somewhere, thought this was a perfectly acceptable plot for a movie musical. Someone else was able to drag Gene Kelly out of retirement by promising him that this would be just like a ’40s MGM movie, but with a “modern” twist. And someone else decided to get Jeff Lynne involved. And that’s how I entered the picture.

It’s well-known that I’m the world’s biggest ELO fanboy. I’ve been so for a long time now. Lynne’s involvement got me into the theater to see this steaming pile of feces. Little did I know that I was collateral damage. Lynne’s ego is very well-known now, but not so back in 1980. He’d always wanted to do a movie soundtrack, and with ELO coming off of their two biggest albums to date, Out of the Blue and Discovery, he was a hot property. So, a division of labor was made in regard to the music. ELO would do half of the soundtrack, and John Farrar, Newton-John’s chief collaborator, would do the other half. The two would get together on the closing number.

Because of this, Xanadu has become the exemplar of a phenomenon of that era: movie bombs with big hit soundtrack albums, and this soundtrack was a great one. Disengaged from the film and played on radio, audiences responded to the music (one has to wonder what would have happened had MTV been around and videos based on the movie were made). ELO had a Top Ten hit with “All Over the World” and a Top Twenty hit with “I’m Alive”. Newton-John went to #1 with “Magic”. The title track duet went Top Five. The album went to #1. This is an element of the film that’s usually ignored by movie historians, and helped color one of the biggest misconceptions about the film.

Xanadu is said to be a career-killer, and such is its reputation that the statement is accepted at face value. It’s also completely wrong. Michael Beck’s career was killed, but that’s about it. Newton-John ended up having her biggest hit the year after Xanadu, the song that’s now regarded as her signature number, “Physical”. ELO’s next album was Time, which contains the song that’s earned Lynne more money than anything he’s ever done, “Hold On Tight”. The Tubes, who performed in the show-stopping (and movie-stopping) number “Dancin’”, had their two biggest albums and biggest single right after Xanadu. Cliff Richard, who duetted with Newton-John on “Suddenly”, had his biggest hit in the US in the wake of Xanadu, with “We Don’t Talk Anymore”. It didn’t even kill Newton-John’s movie career. That had to wait until 1983 and her big reunion with Travolta, Two of a Kind.

So, essentially, Xanadu passed into pop culture without a trace. And it would have stayed in the memory hole if not for circumstances beyond anyone’s control.

Somehow, for some reason, ’70s nostalgia became big. Anyone like me who lived it has wondered how this happened. I have no clue, and, frankly, I don’t wish to analyze it. However, its effects were far-reaching. One of the pillars of that movement is Mamma Mia. It’s drawn capacity audiences all over the world for two reasons: (1) the ABBA soundtrack, and (2) its pleasing plot, which isn’t afraid to delve into the ordure of pure kitsch. It’s a harmless, entertaining theater experience. However, Broadway is as copy-cattish as Hollywood. And sitting right there in the pop-culture trash bin is something as kitschy as Mamma Mia, something that’s as much of an artifact of its time that can be sold as post-modern nostalgia, with all the intendant winking and giggles that process involves. And it’s already pre-made as a musical with just enough of a plot to hang it together. So why not bring Xanadu to the stage and sell it as a corny good time? Heck, the audience won’t even mind the roller disco elements thanks to Starlight Express.

Oy, vey.

Here’s the problem that anyone familiar with the material will have: these songs are distinctive. They’re very closely connected with the artist that originally performed them, much more so than ABBA’s rather universal material. Jeff Lynne wrote his material for him to sing and ELO to perform. John Farrar wrote his material for Olivia Newton-John. Can the songs be disconnected from the artists for someone else to sing? There’s an acid test here that’s instructive. ELO recorded a version of “Xanadu” with Lynne singing lead and no Newton-John to be found. It was horrible. It’s a major test for the performers here to create that disconnect and then sell it. How well did they do?

In its original version, “I’m Alive” has a wonderful sense of grandeur to it. Even Lynne’s worst critics have to admit that he can turn a mere song into a mini-epic, and it’s used quite well in the film as a dance number involving the Muses. The soundtrack undercuts this grandeur by using the song as the set-up for the goofy plot. The vocals don’t really kick in until the last verse, by which time it’s too late. “I’m Alive” is one of my favorite ELO tracks, so maybe nothing could live up to the original in my mind. But this version doesn’t even really try. It’s obvious that the key selling point of the stage version is the kitsch. There’s a very fine line in post-modernism between selling kitsch to the audience and pushing it on them.

Olivia Newton-John has put out a lot of audience-pleasing MOR pap over the last three decades plus. But one vocal performance of hers that no one has ever critized has been her wonderful, sweet “Magic”. It’s always been her most respected song. In contrast, Kerry Butler’s performance here is far too brassy, even for a stage version. Sticking to the song instead of trying too hard to sell it to an audience is sometimes the best approach in situations like these. Her in-and-out Newton-John impersonation is the final factor that sinks the song.

In order to pad out the musical, some non-Xanadu tracks were taken from the Lynne and Farrar songbooks. The choice of this addition material is, in general, unfortunate, since the tracks chosen are very well-known, moreso than the Xanadu material itself. “Evil Woman” is certainly one of ELO’s best known songs. It works well in the context of being sung by the female antagonists of our story, and Jackie Hoffman and Mary Testa’s gospelesque vocal touches work decently. However, the “humorous” vamping does hideous violence to a song that’s on heavy rotation on every classic rock station in the world. It makes one realize what a genius performance Kristin Chenoweth gave in Wicked. She could have gone totally over-the-top as Glinda and no one would have blamed her. But she utilized vocal subtleties to flesh out the character and impart sympathy. Of course, Wicked wasn’t being played for yucks.

Butler’s indecision about her Newton-John impersonation helps to undercut “Suddenly”. Cheyenne Jackson does honor to Cliff Richard’s original, and he does blend quite well harmonically with Butler, but Butler’s vocals, with their occasional descent into chopped, almost staccato, patterns, make it difficult to do so. Give credit to Jackson for his efforts.

Butler, though, still has an opportunity to redeem herself. For the Gene Kelly role, Tony Roberts has been cast. Roberts has demonstrated time and again, both on Broadway and in Woody Allen films, that he has the ability to lift his castmates to a new level. He is a performer’s performer. If anyone can set Butler on the straight and narrow, it’s him. Roberts goes to town on “Whenever You’re Away from Me”, bringing his undeniable energy to the ’40s-style number that was supposed to make Gene Kelly feel comfortable in the original (unfortunately, Kelly’s age prevented him from bringing the song the same energy). Roberts’ mere presence tones Butler down and focuses her. Her scat singing even works. The style of the number also plays to Butler’s strengths. I don’t necessarily want to hear her sing Olivia Newton-John numbers, but I’d love to see what she could do in a revival of, say, Carousel.

“Dancin’” has always been a problematic number in Xanadu. As I said earlier, it was meant to be the show-stopping big production number, but it ended up stopping the movie dead. It was the demonstration of the vision of the dream of the two male leads, starting off with a ’40s big band and transitioning to an ’80s rock band (played by the Tubes in the movie) in what was supposed to be a gigantic ensemble. It lasted far too long in the movie. The producers saw the same problem I did. They’ve chopped the number down to two and a half minutes and increased the focus on the terrific merged ending. Too bad the Tubes aren’t here to do this version.

And that leads us to another moment of dread. If there’s an ELO song that shouldn’t be fooled with, it’s “Strange Magic”. It was done perfectly the first time, and it certainly doesn’t have a place here. Well, not in the way that it’s used, anyway. If it had been done as a ballad duet between the leads, it might have worked. However, Hoffman and Testa are given the first verse, and gospelesque just doesn’t work with this song, especially when played for laughs. But here Butler’s vocals work and mesh surprisingly well with the others. It’s both a relief and a regret that they kept this version short at two minutes even. If the goofy level had been turned down, it could have been a great number.

“All Over the World” has been moved up in the program; in the movie, it’s one of the final songs, used at the opening of the roller disco. Here it’s rather inappropriately used for the renovation-of-the-warehouse-into-a-roller-disco scene. The quality of the song still shines through, with one caveat: anyone who hears this will hope that we never see a Tony Roberts Sings the Jeff Lynne Songbook album. After Jackson’s rather soft vocals, hearing Roberts growl his way in is rather disconcerting.

That being said, there are certain styles of songs that Jeff Lynne shouldn’t sing, even if he wrote them. “Don’t Walk Away” is one of them. It’s always been a tough fit in the ELO catalogue. Jeff Lynne is much too white to do call-and-response. It’s been recast here as a duet between Jackson and Roberts. Jackson’s theatricality and ability to work within a gospel framework provide the song with a much more appropriate vocal and is an improvement over the original. As for Roberts’ vocal, see “All Over the World”.

After this, the soundtrack takes a short dip into the external Newton-John songbook with a minute-and-a-half rendition of “Fool”. It’s well-performed by the three lead ladies in the cast, but it’s too short to make any real difference.

That leads us to another tough fit in Lynne’s work, “The Fall”. It’s always seemed like a leftover to me, something he had lying around that he never got to use. It sounds like it would have fit in perfectly on side 1 of Out of the Blue, which is where I suspect that it was originally destined and didn’t make the cut; too bad, since it’s a better song than “It’s Over”. Again, Jackson gives it a wonderful vocal treatment. He has a superbly powerful high tenor, and I’d like to see what he could do with the song in full instead of a two-minute excerpt.

“Suspended in Time” is the least-distinctive song in the original Xanadu, a typically-bland Newton-John ballad. As such, it’s the song where Butler’s attempts at a Newton-John accent work the best. Of course, in the stage show, she’s also flying above the stage on Pegasus…

…look, when you have cocaine psychosis being played for kitsch, situations like those happen. Just go along for the ride and thank God that Xanadu wasn’t done five years earlier under the influence of Quaaludes. And speaking of Quaaludes…

If there was a vote for Ultimate Quaalude Song, I have this suspicion that “Have You Never Been Mellow” would be the hands-down winner. It’s certainly one of the most-ridiculed songs of the most-ridiculed time in music, the mid-1970s. Naturally, it has to be imported into the stage version of Xanadu. And, naturally, it’s been turned into the big ensemble number, addressed to Zeus, who, if Greek mythology was correct, was a lot of things, but “mellow” was not on the list. Regrettably for me, you can’t really find Quaaludes anymore. I mean, I’ve got some good prescription stuff, but this really needs methaqualone. There’s just no substitute.

And after that bit of trauma, we have the closing title number. “Xanadu” was actually a revelation at the time. Newton-John fit in shockingly well into Lynne’s ELO instrumental framework, and he contributed superb background vocals that enhanced Newton-John’s lead. Also, the song was a stretch for Newton-John. She rarely got to use her top range in Farrar’s compositions, and it was a surprise that she was able to put that much power into it. Butler doesn’t have the necessary power in the upper range to handle the bridges, and the final chorus here falls apart. She’s not able to take it up into the stratosphere like Newton-John on that final note, which provides most of the song’s excitement.

There’s a rule of thumb to be followed with musicals: the stronger a musical is, the less its soundtrack depends on actually seeing it. A strong soundtrack can be listened to independently and appreciated without reference to the production. That’s certainly the case with Xanadu’s nearest contemporary comparisons, Wicked, Mamma Mia, and Spamalot. This soundtrack, though, is a hard sell without actually seeing the production on stage. Kitsch is difficult to work in only one element. What doesn’t work on CD may work perfectly well on stage, with all the intended humor included. If you’ve seen the show and enjoyed it, then by all means get the soundtrack. If you haven’t, honestly, get the movie soundtrack. That way, you’ll get the best part of Xanadu without having to actually watch the movie.

Rating:

Ramones – It’s Alive 1974-1996
Rhino Records (10/2/07)
Unrated
262 minutes

This review is dedicated to the late Linda Stein. Without the efforts of her and her husband, the CBGBs scene might have remained in the Bowery. Let’s all hope that the cops catch whoever did this.

Why, yes, indeedy, I saw the Ramones live—it was in 1991 at a festival in Germany, and it was Joey, Johnny, Marky and C. J. They had the honor of closing the festival and did their usual magnificent job. Unfortunately, by this time, the live show had boiled down completely to formula. It was essentially a Greatest Hits package from a group that had no hits (at least in America). We in the audience knew the points to cheer, we knew the set would end with “Pinhead”, we’d cheer the dancing retard… formula may be comfortable, but it’s rarely exciting. The Ramones always did their damndest to make it exciting, though.

It wasn’t their fault that their shows devolved into this. They were frozen in amber long before this, after their audience didn’t take to the ambition of Road to Ruin and they ended up having their biggest hit single with their cover of “Baby, I Love You” from End of the Century (be sure to pick up Mick Brown’s recently-released book on Phil Spector; Brown’s relating of Spector’s obsession with Joey during the End of the Century sessions is scary, to say the least). Supposedly at Johnny’s instigation—and since he was handling the band’s business end by this point, we can assume this to be true—the Ramones decided to fix their image in stone: the leather jackets, Joey’s shades, the bowl haircuts, the slightly-watered-down version of their sound. They only diverted on rare occasions, like on the Dave Stewart-produced “Howling at the Moon” (still one of my favorite Ramones tracks). Since they didn’t change, their audience didn’t. It grew by attrition, with the old fans sticking around and new ones gained through incessant live touring and old fans educating new fans on the history of the group. Longevity of fandom was advertised by the group members’ names on their trademark T-shirt. And so it went for over two thousand live shows.

And so it went for their studio work as well. If you want to gauge a group’s influence by their first three albums, the Ramones rank up there with only The Beatles and The Clash. They’d done their best work prior to entering ossification, and the preservation had its positive aspects, presenting to the world a relatively pure example of a sound that literally changed the world of music (that concert in London on Bicentennial Day, July 4th, 1976, may have been the most influential single concert performance in history). There’s a reason why this group entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in its first year of eligibility, but it wasn’t soon enough for Joey, who was already dead from lymphoma by the time the induction took place.

Yes, the band has an interesting back story, especially in regard to the constant politically-oriented battles between Joey and Johnny. But those stories are presented on the group’s documentary End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones. Definitely get it; it’s terrific. But this double-DVD release by Rhino is here for a dual purpose: to remind fans who were there, like me, of what the group was capable of doing live; and to introduce to an audience that was too late to see them what made them so influential to groups like Green Day (two members of Green Day have named their children in tribute to the Ramones). And because of that second purpose, we have the weirdness of being presented with the Ramones in Dolby 5.1 Surround.

The disks are divided into two periods. The first covers 1974 to New Years’ Eve 1977 at the Rainbow in London—the famous It’s Alive concert, presented in nearly-full; unfortunately, three tracks from the set are missing, and the only available recordings are not of broadcast quality. The second disk covers 1978 to their last major concert in Buenos Aires in 1996. It’s a good division, as the show at the Rainbow has been celebrated as the quintessential Ramones concert.

The footage from a September 1974 concert at CBGBs is among the earliest Ramones footage available; LA punk artist Black Randy provided it to Rhino. It’s a very unusual show indeed. You can’t take your eyes off Joey as the group performs “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue”. For the uninitiated in New York Music, you may think he’s attempting and failing to do a Mick Jagger impersonation. No. What he’s trying and failing to do is impersonate David Johansen impersonating Mick Jagger, attempting to connect the Ramones to the city’s previous underground music scene, dominated by the New York Dolls and Wicked Lester, who’d become KISS. He’s attempting to give his audience some context into which to place these short, fast, weird songs. Within a year, he wouldn’t need to do that, as CBGBs filled up with the strange and unique, providing a home for artists as diverse as Richard Hell, Debbie Harry and David Byrne. Joey would develop his own persona and presence, which would be a key part of the Ramones’ live appeal for the next two decades.

After the early CBGBs footage, the set fast-forwards a year and a half to Max’s (and footage provided by photographer/scene-maker Bob Gruen). A lot had changed for the Ramones in that time. They’d been signed to Sire and recorded their legendary first album. “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” from this set has a great blooper moment: Dee Dee shouts “1-2-3-4″, then Johnny realizes that his guitar’s unplugged. He stops the band, casually plugs in again, and they start. By this time, Joey’s rid himself of the faux-Jaggerisms and established himself as a dynamic singer. Dee Dee’s maturity on bass is evident from the incendiary performance he gives of the song he wrote about him being a male hustler, “53rd and 3rd”. This band was now definitely going somewhere.

And where they went was England for some shows. The adulation of the fans there and the realization that someone, somewhere understood what they were trying to do wrought another change in the group. Another show at Max’s from October 1976, after they got back, shows a new confidence in the group that they hadn’t shown before. Johnny is more solid on guitar, Dee Dee more crazy on bass, Tommy perfectly controlled on drums, and Joey well on his way to developing his front-man personality.

The maturity process is underscored by a nice selection from various shows in June 1977. The highlight of these shows is eight numbers recorded at CBGBs (in color). The group plays to the audience, they’re totally comfortable (as they should be; they’re at CBGBs, after all). If you ever needed an explanation why audience would grasp on to the nearest solid object when the Ramones played in order not to be swept away by the sheer velocity, just grab a look at the performance of “Cretin Hop” from this concert. It’ll tell you everything you need to know. There’s even a nice direct comparison here between the September 1974 concert and here, as both sets have “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue” in them. The change in Joey is incredible, even given the three-year timespan. This group was ready to conquer the world. But the amber was already beginning to harden. That’s evident in this set’s first display of “Pinhead”, recorded at the Ivanhoe Theater here in Chicago during a June 1977 concert. The song doesn’t end the set yet, and there’s no dancing pinhead, but Joey already has the “Gabba Gabba Hey” sign. The performances of “Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World” from the June shows and their tour of Texas the next month are disturbingly identical. However, they were still human at this point. Johnny has another case of unplugged guitar during a July 1977 show in Houston, and the group simply stops, totally lost, until the problem’s corrected, then slam into “Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment” again.

The shows in Texas built up to their first appearance on TV, on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert. For those of you too young to remember, during the mid-to-late-1970s, there were only two places on television to see acts performing new music—Saturday Night Live and Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert. The legendary writer-producer had a good feel for what might appeal to an audience that might just be sick and tired of the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac, the constant loop of Zep that was being played on the “edgier” rock radio stations, and the thump-thump-thump of disco. Kirshner put it quite well in his introduction: “Many people are saying that punk rock could be a wave here in America. We’ll let you judge for yourselves.” Given the evidence on this DVD, a lot of people watching late-night television on August 9, 1977, did judge. Unfortunately, too many of them voted “Nay” and went back to their safe, secure Hotel Californias, where the only scary thing was no one having a supply of your favorite vintage. Honestly, it wasn’t the Ramones’ fault. They did their best, providing a high-energy set that fulfilled a lot of their early promise. Maybe it was just too high-energy after years of Zep’s faux-English-mysticism and an endless parade of cocaine cowboys and cowgirls with their acoustic guitars…

…actually, I think I should clarify where I’m coming from. I still love the Eagles to death. I spent a good portion of an evening a week ago listening to mid-’70s Joni Mitchell. I think Jackson Browne is one of the greatest post-Lennon-McCartney songwriters around. I don’t hate that music that I’m damning. But the potential was there for a high-energy alternative, and the Ramones were the best shot at getting it to the public. The failure to do so, thanks in no small part to the Sex Pistols’ disastrous US tour a few months later, is a regret that needs a catharsis once in a while. So if I rag on those guys, it’s out of love, on both sides of the divide.

One consequence of the TV appearance was that the Ramones discovered the power of television. They ended up shooting a few proto-music videos in New York in September 1977 in anticipation of their soon-to-be-released third album, Rocket to Russia. One of the few stage attributes that Joey hadn’t mastered at this point was lip-synching to a pre-recorded backing track. There are a few notable slip-ups in these very ’70s videos. However, there was no outlet in the US to play them, and wouldn’t be for nearly four more years.

In terms of Punk, the year 1977, that oft-prophesied year, was rung in by The Clash at the Roxy and led out by the Ramones at the Rainbow (the Roxy by this time having closed and the Vortex not of sufficient size for a Ramones concert in London). If you have It’s Alive (the album, released in 1979), you have this concert already. However, the video is nicely remastered and is worth another look.

Disk 1 also contains some nice extras, including some actual videos and a bunch of interviews with the group and their manager at the time, Danny Fields. There’s a wonderful slice-of-life montage shot during their first tour of Argentina, and a great interview with Joey and performance on Swedish television where the presenter is obviously clueless about who these guys are. It’s capped off by a slightly embarassing appearance on Sha Na Na. The musical parts of these appearances are contained on Disk 2.

Disk 2 kicks off with eleven tracks recorded for a TV show in Bremen, Germany, in September 1978. By this point, the Sex Pistols’ break-up had done its damage in regard to Punk’s image in America, and the Ramones were finding the climate overseas a little more to their liking. There, they could put on the mantle of stardom that America had denied them. In fact, foreign television provides a good portion of Disk 2’s footage. Arturo Vega’s US Seal backdrop was by now a familiar prop and was quickly slapped on the band’s T-shirts (in fact, try to find a Ramones T-shirt that DOESN’T have the “Hey Ho, Let’s Go” seal). Marky had replaced Tommy on drums by this point. Marky (and Richie, for that matter) was a more powerful drummer than Tommy was, although Tommy’s finesse and unerring sense of timing made up for that. But by this point, the Ramones needed that power.

However, they’d also developed an unerring sense as to what their audience wanted and when it was appropriate to pull out that power. Witness their two appearances on the BBC nine days apart collected here. On Top of the Pops, the group toned it down for the less-hardcore BBC1 audience. On The Old Dead Squirrel Test… sorry, The Old Grey Whistle Test, they let it rip for the more hardcore audience that watched that show. The differences in their performances of “Don’t Come Close” are almost as extreme as the Ramones and a Ramones tribute band.

Their next trip to England was after the release of End of the Century, their terrific album produced by Phil Spector, in 1980, and was done to promote that album and their appearance in Rock ‘n’ Roll High School. This collection only separates the two appearances two years apart with footage of a couple of concerts in California in 1978 and 1979. The difference between the two sets of appearances, other than the obvious answer of “two years”, is that the Ramones Stance was now fully established. Johnny and Dee Dee are virtually immobile, legs apart, flanking Joey, who’s also virtually a statue. The tableau would eventually become not only emblematic, but iconic, but witnessing it in close proximity to the Ramones of 1978, it’s a little bit shocking and disconcerting. It’s also a little disconcerting to hear “Do You Remember Rock ‘n’ Roll Radio?” without Spector’s flourishes, and it makes you realize that Spector’s additions here were a good thing. Maybe we need a fair judgment on this. Say, get Tommy into the studio with the masters and have him do an End of the Century… Naked. That need becomes a necessity by witnessing the Top of the Pops footage of “Baby, I Love You”, complete with string section. The Ramones, accompanied by a string section, on a lip-synch program, singing a Ronettes cover produced by the same guy who wrote and produced it the first time around. If anyone in CBGBs four years earlier had seen that as a vision of the future…

Appearances on Swedish television (see above) and Spanish television lead into nine tracks from the Ramones’ appearance at the US Festival in 1982. You know, that was supposed to be my generation’s Woodstock. To quote Mistah Lydon, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” My generation lost out on all the good music, all the good drugs and all the good festivals, and we were too late for the dot-com craziness. But enough of my generation getting boned. What is up during this performance in re Joey attempting to sound like Elvis Costello? And wearing lipstick and a fuscia shirt under his black leather? No fuscia, no fuscia, no fuscia for you, Joey. Honestly, we weren’t all like this back in the early ’80s, folks. I never owned a skinny tie or an ill-fitting suit, and only rarely wore make-up. That being said, the performance is as dynamic as the Ramones ever were in the last fifteen years of their lifespan. Joey had mastered the ability to communicate everything while doing virtually nothing, and Johnny and Dee Dee were at the tops of their game. They’d also learned how to demonstrate their complete unconcern with “inappropriate” songs. They never had any trouble playing “Blitzkrieg Bop” and “Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World” in Germany, for instance, and they pull that trick out in the other direction at the US Festival, playing “Beat on the Brat” in the middle of Peace And Love In The Land Of Fruits And Nuts, or playing “Chinese Rocks” to an audience of dancing tan-hardbodies of indeterminate gender and impeccable bodily habits. That’s one reason I love this group to pieces.

After the US Festival, it’s fast-forward to 1985 and yet another appearance on The Old Dead Squirrel Test, with Dee Dee handling vocals on “Wart Hog” and Richie on drums and backing vocals. Really strange to see a Ramones video that doesn’t focus on Joey. However, these two performances are worth it. Richie had made an immediate impact on the group, revitalizing them for Too Tough to Die, one of their greatest albums. However, they couldn’t capitalize on it, and sunk back into the old routine. Seven tracks from Argentina in 1987 are next on the list, and they’re Dee Dee’s real final hurrah with the group. That sad thought is made up with an incendiary performance of “Mama’s Boy” for consolation (the one on The Old Dead Squirrel Test was said to be better, but the BBC couldn’t find it). Eight tracks from a 1988 festival in Finland display a visibly-aged Dee Dee, descending into his personal quest for Chinese Rocks. However, Marky’s back on drums after sobering up, but that’s small consolation.

Seven numbers from a 1992 show in Milan provide us with our introduction to C. J. and provide us with visual record of their tradition closing number on “Pinhead”, with the sign and the dancing retard in full effect. The band still sounds great, but you can tell that it’s starting to end. Closure is provided with yet another Top of the Pops performance, this time of “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up”, the lead track from their final studio album, Adios Amigos. Almost ironic, or at the very least sardonic. It is comforting to know that Joey never was able to master lip-synching, though. But this collection had to end on a live show recording, and the three numbers from a 1996 concert in Argentina end off the collection on a high note. The DVD compilers purposely put “Blitzkrieg Bop” as the final track of the collection, and, yes, it’s appropriate. Then again, I’m a sucker for full circles.

Seeing the Ramones live was almost a rite of passage for my generation. Seeing this footage brings back some great memories for me. But for those younger than I, who’ve been denied this experience, this collection will have to do. Does it do the job? Absolutely. It strives for as much authenticity as possible, with Tommy acting as the collection’s musical director and production people who obviously love the Ramones and what they stood for. If you weren’t there, though, just do me a favor. Don’t play it in Dolby 5.1. Turn the bass on your equipment as loud as it can go. Turn up the volume. Get about twenty of your favorite friends who know how to slam-dance properly to watch it with you (and for true authenticity, don’t have them bathe for a week beforehand). Then, and only then, will you be prepared to dodge dancing pinheads. At the end, if everything’s gone right, there’s only one thing you’ll be able to say: “Hey, ho, let’s go.”

Rating:

Chicago – The Best of Chicago: 40th Anniversary Edition
Rhino Records (10/2/07)
Classic rock / Anniversary Cash-In

Okay, so the math is simple. Get the guy from Chicago who only listens to oldies and classic rock stations to review a Greatest Hits Anniversary Collection from the band named after his hometown, who he undoubtedly grew up listening to from the time he could tune a radio and who knows every single one of these songs backward, forward, and every which way and who feels that all of the street signs on Chicago Avenue should be replaced with a certain trademarked logo instead of the few in the North Loop that have already been. Gee, you think the fix is in?

Okay, so it’s the fortieth anniversary of Chicago’s formation. Thirty albums later, they’re still recording and still having hits (twenty-five of those thirty have been certified platinum). It’s hard to believe that the proposition of this band was dodgy back then. Back in 1967, the only place you really found horns was on soul records. After the saxophone gave up its leading role in rock music to the electric guitar, brass pretty much disappeared from rock records. However, the signs of change were already there. One year before Chicago was formed, the Beatles recorded “Got to Get You into My Life”. And if the Beatles were putting horns on their records, then it was a sign that it was perfectly fine for everyone else to do so. But basing a group around horns? Wasn’t that taking it too far?

Not in the minds of the original seven members of Chicago Transit Authority. Jim Pankow’s trombone, Walt Parazider’s sax and woodwinds, and Lee Loughnane’s trumpet would be placed front and center, anchored by the genius guitar of Terry Kath, the solid bass and vocals of Peter Cetera, the steady, cataclysmic drumming of Danny Seraphine, and the majestic keyboards of Robert Lamm. They developed their chops in live performance, then convinced Columbia Records to sign them. Between this group and Blood, Sweat and Tears, horns became fashionable again in rock music. It wasn’t a totally smooth ride, though.

First came the name change. The CTA threatened to sue, so the group dropped the “Transit Authority” after the first album, trimming down to simply Chicago for their eponymous second album. That double-album set (each of the group’s first three albums were double albums, and their fourth was their four-album Live At Carnegie Hall; in two years, Chicago released ten disks of material, a phenomenal output) put them in the middle of the progressive rock revolution that was starting to take hold. The difference between Chicago and other prog-rock groups was that Chicago had a knack for creating hit singles, a fact which was noted right away. Those first two albums include classics like “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is”, “Beginnings”, “25 or 6 to 4″, “Make Me Smile” and “Colour My World”, all of which are included on Disc 1 of this collection, unusually out of chronological order.

Also unusually, these aren’t the album versions. They’re the edited single versions, which are generally inferior. The exceptions to the inferiority rule are “Questions 67 and 68″, which works better in small doses, and “You’re Not Alone” on Disk 2, where the single mix is more powerful than the version on Chicago 19. The real loss is not including “Getaway” as part of “Hard To Say I’m Sorry”. It’s the best part of the song. And not including the full version of “Will You Still Love Me” is a sin. I swear that if I ever were to get married, that’d be the song to start the ceremony. Of course, Gloomchen’s already taken, so where am I going to find someone who can traumatize along with me when I hear Siouxsie and the Banshees being used as restaurant muzak (true story, folks; Gloomie might have saved my life that Sunday in Kansas)?

Getting back to our package, Chicago cut down to single albums with Chicago V, but each album was guaranteed to have at least one hit single, and Disk 1 collects them in a nice package. “Saturday in the Park”, which is truly one of their best, from Chicago V and “Feelin’ Stronger Every Day” and “Just You ‘n’ Me” from Chicago VI show the group in its hit-machine mode, seamlessly blending the radio-friendly with the more ambitious album works. Chicago VII marked the group’s first reinvention. Relocating to California and absorbing some of the influences of the West Coast produced a more introspective work. The horn work on “(I’ve Been) Searchin’ So Long” and “Call on Me” are transcendent, and the Beach Boys harmony on “Wishing You Were Here” provides the group with a depth that was worth exploring, not to mention proof positive about Terry Kath’s genius on guitar. Chicago VII isn’t the best introduction to the group, but it’s definitely indicative of its time and still a great listen after 33 years. It’s one of those albums that I pull out when I want to mellow out. Even the sped-up ending of “Call On Me” doesn’t kill the mood. The mood continued on Chicago VIII and its hit single, “Old Days”, a truly fun song. In the liner notes of the collection (worth the price of admission), Pankow admitted that Cetera hated “Old Days” because he didn’t want to sing the words “Howdy Doody”. I can understand that; Cetera does bear quite the resemblance to Howdy Doody. But he really doesn’t have a leg to stand on. He sang “The Glory Of Love”, for God’s sake.

The ninth album was a greatest hits collection, and it was only missing one thing: a Number One single. Somehow, virtually everything Chicago released as singles hit the Top Ten, but avoided the top spot. That problem (one that still vexes another recent review subject of mine, John Fogerty) was rectified when Chicago X was released in 1976. A lot of people still hold up Chicago X as their best album, and it’s tough to argue with that unless you’re willing to delve into the total pop of 17 and 18 (which I’m usually willing to do, as you’ll see later). Peter Cetera, who was still uncertain as a songwrter, came up with what may be the greatest ballad of the last three decades, “If You Leave Me Now”. His high tenor has never worked better. Kath’s acoustic work is outstanding. The strings meshed perfectly with the horn section, especially Loughnane’s flugelhorn. “If You Leave Me Now” and Dan Fogelberg’s “Longer” ended up giving the flugelhorn legitimacy in pop music. A very underestimated instrument, the flugelhorn.

“If You Leave Me Now” is the cutoff for Disk 1, thus making for an unusual division: first ten albums on Disk 1, last twenty on Disk 2. Realistically, though, Disk 2 is “the next ten albums with a couple tracks from Chicago XXX to show everyone not listening to lite-rock radio that they’re still recording”. However, this is an appropriate point for a cut-off. After the success of Chicago X and “If You Leave Me Now”, Chicago started to change their focus. They started the slow morph into the pop band that we know today, a process that took until Chicago 16 and was prolonged and difficult. It’s hard to fault them for doing it. Genesis was doing the same thing at the same time, and it took them the same amount of time to do it (from …And Then There Were Three… to Genesis, roughly speaking). But Genesis was luckier. They didn’t lose their old audience while putting out Duke and Abacab; instead, their audience expanded to include the pop audience along with the prog audience. Chicago ended up undergoing a full disconnect.

As the booklet says regarding Disk 2, “Maintaining a standard, and staying on the radio, came at a cost.” Chicago XI was a critical disappointment, although they ended up having a hit with “Baby, What a Big Surprise” (you want something to embarass Chicago by, it’s that song). In the wake of the critical bashings, true tragedy struck the group. Terry Kath died in an accident that’s still not explicable today. He’d become a coke freak by the release of Chicago XI and, according to reports, was getting ready to leave the group. He’d also become a gun freak. After a party, while high and drunk, he was cleaning one of his 9mm pistols and neglected to fully check that it was emptied. He put the gun to his head to show people that it was perfectly safe, that the gun was unloaded. It wasn’t. He was a week short of his 32nd birthday.

Kath’s death put the group into a creative tailspin. They even broke from tradition and didn’t call their twelfth album Chicago XII. Hot Streets, as it ended up being called, was also critically lambasted, even with Phil Ramone behind the console (he produced Hot Streets in between The Stranger and 52nd Street for Billy Joel, so you can imagine how hot he was at the time). They got a minor hit out of “No Tell Lover”, but it would be the last time for four years that they’d sniff the charts. At that time, the group went through personnel changes as well as a label change. Columbia dropped them, and Irving Azoff picked up their management contract and signed them to his vanity label distributed by Warner Brothers, Full Moon. Donnie Dacus wasn’t working out on guitar as Kath’s replacement, so they brought in Bill Champlin, who would become invaluable in the future as a guitarist, keyboardist, writer, arranger, and vocalist. Chris Pinnick was also brought in to add the heft on guitar that Kath had provided and Champlin couldn’t. But the group couldn’t pull itself out of its death spiral. Their old audience had left, and there seemed to be no one to replace them. Their new pop sound wasn’t fully developed. They needed help to complete the transformation.

Enter David Foster. Oh, how this man has been maligned for turning the mid-eighties into a MOR festival. Yes, the man has some sins on his platter, there’s no doubt about that. But we can’t really blame him for producing Celine Dion’s first English-language album, can we? I mean, who would have known what “Where Does My Heart Beat Now” would lead to? Certainly not I; I still like that song and think the production of it is high-quality. But if you wanted to get back some pop credibility, and Chicago desperately needed to at this point, Foster was the man. He took the helm for Chicago 16, and out popped another Cetera ballad, “Hard to Say I’m Sorry”, and, suddenly, Chicago had another Number One hit, this time seemingly from the dead. Of course, certain members of the band were rather upset at Foster’s dictatorial production methods, namely the entire horn section, who seemingly were cut out of the action. Parazaider admits in the liner notes that the three were seriously discussing leaving at this point. Pankow says that “it became the David Foster/Peter Cetera show”. It wouldn’t be for very much longer, though.

Since not even the horn section could argue with success, Foster was back for Chicago 17, Chicago’s contribution to that great string of pop music released between mid-1982 and mid-1984. I’ll ignore “Stay the Night”, since this collection did, and good for both of us. However, including “You’re The Inspiration” and not “Along Comes a Woman”… okay, I didn’t decide on the tracks for this collection, and “You’re the Inspiration” is more famous (both went Top Ten, though). But maybe my fond recollections of this album are based on two things: the “Along Comes a Woman” video, which had the guts to turn Casablanca into a rock video, and the fact that I broke up with a girlfriend to “Hard Habit to Break”. Being mean-spirited does not necessarily come from age, people; I was a royal bastard in my late teens and early twenties too. Great album, though, as was its even-better follow-up.

Ah, but there was another personnel change or two in the process of reaching adulthood in album terms. Chris Pinnick left after 17, thus focusing things more on Champlin’s guitar work. And Peter Cetera had finally had enough. Foster had inflated him to the point where he felt that he could go solo, and thus initiated an acid-tinged break-up that’s still bitter today. Okay, so Cetera had his solo hits, and there are some good ones among them, but Chicago had the last laugh.

They kept Foster around for one more album, and Chicago 18 is one of the hidden shining jewels of mid-eighties pop. Anyone who thought that Chicago was screwed after Cetera left had to revise their judgment on hearing “Niagara Falls”, the incredible opener of 18 that isn’t on this collection. Cetera’s voice was replaced by Champlin, and his bass was replaced by Jason Scheff, who’s still with the band today. Yes, this is the album that committed the sin of attempting to redo “25 or 6 to 4″, but that can be forgiven thanks to the first side’s trio of power ballads that are alone enough to legitimize that heavily-criticized genre. “Niagara Falls” isn’t on here because it wasn’t released as a single, but the other two are, “If She Would Have Been Faithful” and “Will You Still Love Me”, the latter in its butchered single version. Stick with the album version. You can even hear the edits if you know the original well enough. That’s rather disconcerting.

(By the way, can someone with a chart of “If She Would Have Been Faithful” please tell me what the hell the harmony chord the group sings at the end of the bridge is? As the lyric being sung at that point says, it defies all logical explanation.)

Chicago had one last blast of Eighties Pop left in them, and they brought in Ron Nevison to produce Chicago 19. Nevison had made his name resurrecting Heart from the dead a few years earlier, and had a good reputation as a pop producer. He also was good friends with Diane Warren, the hottest songwriter of the era, and the group was “talked into recording some Diane Warren songs,” in Pankow’s words. Warren’s songwriting did two things: they almost drove Pankow and Lamm out of the group, and they gave Chicago their third and last Number One, “Look Away”, the Number One song of 1989. Looking over the final Billboard charts for 1989, it really wasn’t a very good year for music. Please, don’t look; you’ll only end up crying too. The only solace for me is Chicago at Number One and the presence at Number Twelve of one of the greatest pure pop songs ever, Boy Meets Girl’s “Waiting for a Star to Fall”. Personally, I blame this on my leaving for Germany. If I’d been in the States, I’m sure things would have been different.

But enough of my guilt complex. 19 brings four songs to this collection, including the magnificent single version of “You’re Not Alone”, a surprise Top Ten single but definitely worthy. Personally, I would have made it five and threw in “We Can Last Forever”, yet another beautiful ballad from a group that by this time had mastered the form. As for the next decade and a half, that’s pretty much it for this collection other than two tracks from last year’s critically acclaimed Chicago XXX, a return to form for the group. And the two tracks pulled out of there for this collection, “Feel” and “Love Will Come Back”, are two of the best on that album, so there’s no room to complain.

So is this collection worth it? As a primer on Chicago, it’s perfectly well and good. It’s certainly not comprehensive, but the group already has a five-CD box set available, which contains tracks from the unreleased Chicago 22 (otherwise known as Stone of Sisyphus). If you’ve never listened to Chicago in depth, I’d definitely pick up this set. Then, when you find out that you really enjoy this music, buy the box set. Just don’t not listen to Chicago. As I said, I’m immersed in this music as a birthright, so I’m certainly not the most objective person in the world on this subject. But you’ll have to trust me on this. Just because you weren’t involved in it for the past forty years doesn’t mean that you don’t have time to catch up. It’s worth your time. Just open your ears and let the horns work their magic. That’s not much of a commitment, is it?

Rating:

John Fogerty – Revival
Concord/Fantasy (10/2/07)
Rock

A great many of the younger contingent are currently foaming at the mouth at the actions of the RIAA in court. That recent six-figure judgment stirred up the bile even more. However, you’re not seeing such dramatic reaction from the older set like me. There’s a simple reason for that: we’ve already seen weirdness from the music industry in regard to court cases in an even purer and more mind-boggling form. We lived through George Harrison being declared guilty of “unconscious plagiarism” for turning “He’s So Fine” into “My Sweet Lord”. And we lived through one of the weirdest court cases in the history of music, Fantasy Records v Fogerty.

Yes, it’s history lesson time. Just scroll down if you don’t like it.

So, it’s 1985. Professor Eric is still in college at that point, dealing with the ramifications of quantum mechanics. John Fogerty hadn’t released an album in nearly a decade thanks to David Geffen rejecting one of his works and Fogerty retrenching in response. Then, out of nowhere came Centerfield, one of the greatest comeback albums in history. For those pundits and consumers who were wondering where the righteous blasts of pure energy exhibited by Bruce Springsteen on his three previous albums had come from, Centerfield was the perfect reminder that, long as I (and everyone else who was around) remember, there was this group from California called Creedence Clearwater Revival, and “Born in the USA” was just a rewrite of “Fortunate Son” for the Reaganista Years and that The River was a motif long since drained by Fogerty in his stories of Americana. With one album, Fogerty restored his proper place as past influence and modern recording artist. People were now watching him again.

Unfortunately, one of those people was Saul Zaentz. As head of Fantasy Records (before he became a movie mogul), he signed an unknown CCR in the mid-’60s and watched as they became one of the biggest bands in America. But signing as an unknown group in those days had a very specific and traditional string attached to it—a contract that was one step from indentured servitude. Just after CCR’s messy break-up in the early ’70s, Fogerty had to get out of that contract with Fantasy, and to do so, he had to sign everything away. Fantasy owned the rights to his recordings, and there was nothing Fogerty could do about it. The negotiations for the divorce were as messy as CCR’s break-up. It turned Fogerty and Zaentz into enemies for life. And on Centerfield, the feud was revived.

If you look at your copy of Centerfield (and if you don’t have one, go out and get it), you’ll see that the final track is called “Vanz Kant Danz”. Not on the first pressings. Then, it was called “Zanz Kant Danz”. Saul Zaentz didn’t really like that, especially since the chorus began with the words, “Zanz Kant Danz, but he’ll steal your money”. Zaentz threatened to sue Fogerty for defamation, so Fogerty redid the vocal for subsequent pressings and renamed the song. But Zaentz wasn’t through.

The lead song from the album, and the lead single from it, was “The Old Man Down the Road”, now a standard of classic rock radio. Zaentz filed a case claiming that “The Old Man Down the Road” was stolen from a song owned by Fantasy Records called “Run Through The Jungle”. The latter song was written and performed by… John Fogerty.

John Fogerty was being sued for plagiarizing himself. Get that one through your heads.

It took until 1993 to settle the suits and countersuits, but Fogerty finally won. He didn’t get the rights to his songs back, but now he was free, with the imprimatur of the law, to write the way he always had and record those songs. He has always said that he was going to record an entire album of songs that sounded exactly like Creedence in its prime. Now, he’s finally done it.

Revival is a loaded title to give such an album. It’s a statement of fact here, with religious overtones that match the way classic rock lovers feel about Creedence. The reverence is deserved. Fogerty has synthesized his traditional swamp rock with a commercial force that he was a key inspiration for, modern country rock, producing a very appealing hybrid, a sound that you could easily see Creedence settling into had they survived their internal tumults.

“Don’t You Wish It Was True” is the lead track and lead single, and it sets up things nicely. This is a song that Kenny Chesney or Alan Jackson would kill to perform (and they likely will include it in their sets within the next few years). It’s also a song that you can hear Glenn Frey doing lead vocals on circa On the Border; it’d fit in perfectly with “Already Gone” or “James Dean”. The Eagles have never really admitted to CCR as an influence, but it wasn’t that obvious at the time. Now that it is, “Don’t You Wish It Was True” is the sound of a circle being closed, and all the better for it; the vein is continued in “Broken Down Cowboy”, which sounds like a lost demo for Desperado, something made all the possible by the fact that Fogerty was signed to Asylum after his escape from Fantasy. I’m not a fan of country music, but Fogerty shows that modern country has its merits, and why it’s become acceptable for rock fans to listen to it.

“Gunslinger” and “River Is Waiting” display a second thread of influence, one that I’ve already cited. They’re songs that most fans unclear on the history of rock will call “Springsteen rip-offs”. It’s more a convergence than a rip-off. Springsteen has never sounded more like Fogerty than he does on Magic, so there’s a modus vivendi at work here, the sight of two legends at the summit of Rock Parnassus coming to grips with each other and acknowledging that each has given and taken to the other, a potlach in rock’s best tradition. No, it’s no rip-off. It’s something much sweeter and more innocent, in a time where innocence is a true rarity and something to be prized.

Another quantity that’s a true rarity in music these days is irony. Real irony, not Alanis irony. Fogerty’s always been one of the best at writing material that expresses that tricky concept, and “Creedence Song” is the latest example of it. He takes on his own legacy and is able to both celebrate and dismiss it at the same time, displaying all the contradictions of the human god that he’s become. It’s a funny song to boot, which makes it all the better. It’s the direct heir to “Lodi”, answering the question of what happens after that struggling singer makes it big and enters music history and vocabulary.

Of course, Fogerty doesn’t ignore swamp rock. “Long Dark Night” is like a harder version of “Bad Moon Rising”, albeit without the apocalyptic implied imagery of that overplayed classic. It’s got everything that made Creedence so great, only missing a reference to Cody Junior for a full transport back to 1969. It points out the fact behind the humor in “Creedence Song”: you really can’t go wrong playing a little bit of that Creedence song. “Natural Thing” continues this trend; it sounds like a deep track from Cosmo’s Factory. Fogerty goes further back on the short but incredibly sweet “It Ain’t Right” and “I Can’t Take It No More”, showing the roots of swamp rock in both rockabilly and Little Richard. Reverend Penniman would have definitely been in favor of the rave-ups that Fogerty’s done here. In fact, I’d love to see what Little Richard could do today with “I Can’t Take It No More”. They’re perfect lead-ins to the blues rave-up of “Somebody Help Me”.

“Summer of Love”, by comparison, comes as a shock. It not only sounds like a Neil Young song, it sounds as if Young was doing the vocal. This is not a condemnation, by the way. There are tons of artists out there who’d kill to be compared positively to Neil Young. It does make me wonder, though, how much of a percolation there was between the Bay Area and Los Angeles during the time period “celebrated” in this song. Most rock histories have dismissed this, considering SF- and LA-distinct entities. But Fogerty and Young were always ones for cross-pollination.

“Longshot” closes the disk in style. It’s probably the song that will be playing on classic rock stations in twenty years. Its politics are subtle compared to, say, “Fortunate Son”, delving into the personal as well as the world-view. Dubbaya has admitted being a Fogerty fan, and this song shows Fogerty’s disgust with that. It’s a personal statement couched in a hard-driving love song, something he’s a master at.

Revival lives up to its name. It shows a legend in full control of his music and his image. He fuses the old and new with the skill of a true master, creating something that looks back on the past while still maintaining a foothold in the present. Between this album and Springsteen’s Magic, it’s a good time for members of the Hall of Fame. Let’s just hope that he doesn’t have to go to court about this one too.

Rating:

Pink Floyd – The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (40th Anniversary Edition)
EMI/Capitol (9/4/07)
Psychedelia / Classic rock / Anniversary Cash-In

Like James Agee and Walter Evans, I praise famous men. Actually, I tend to praise men who should be more famous than they are; people you may have heard of but haven’t heard much about. Therefore, let me now praise Norman Smith. And, for a change, I’m doing it while the person in question is still alive and could possibly read this.

Norman Smith is now 84 years old. He’s still a very talented musician who, as Hurricane Smith, had a few hits in the ’70s. But it’s what he did in the previous decade that matters to music, and not in his capacity as a person who could literally play any instrument put in front of him. After serving as a glider pilot in World War II, Norman became a staff engineer at EMI Studios, located on a thoroughfare that some of you may have heard of called Abbey Road. In 1962, he was the engineer assigned to a session by a group newly signed by an EMI subsidiary. EMI policy at the time was that if you engineered an act’s first session, you stayed with the act as long as it was signed to EMI. And, thus, Norman Smith was behind the console for the most spectacular run of hits ever recorded. The clean, appealing sound he crafted for the Beatles on those early records became a standard that engineers all over the world would try to reproduce. John Lennon’s nickname for him, “Normal”, was an act of affection by Lennon, who realized that Smith was the stable center of the hurricane of Beatlemania. For this task, he’d remain uncredited on the records. Most people today still don’t know who engineered the Beatles. Well, there’s your answer.

For some, working with the Beatles would have been enough. Not for Norman Smith. As an EMI employee, he was always on the look-out for new acts to sign to the label. As The Beatles’ engineer, he was tapped heavily into the music scene of London. In early 1966, he saw a new group playing at a club. Their sound, a combination of good old-fashioned rock combined with the influences beginning to creep in from the United States, especially San Francisco, appealed to him. He thought that he knew exactly how to get that sound on a record. He pushed for EMI to sign the group, and they did. There was only one little complication: Smith insisted that he had to produce them in order to get that sound on record. In the hierarchy of EMI, that meant that Smith had to be promoted. His bosses had no problem with the promotion, but it meant one thing: Smith couldn’t be the Beatles’ engineer anymore. He had to make a choice. He decided that this group was too good to let anyone else get a hold of them, and he gave up his seat next to George Martin. He thought this new act could be bigger than the Beatles. Foolishness? Well, in the annals of rock music, that group is one of the few to come close to that status, so Smith, as usual, was right.

Norman Smith’s decision actually had two effects. One of them was on music, and we’ll be discussing that in more detail. The other was on the Human Resources Department at EMI Studios. Smith’s decision left a void in the Beatles’ apparatus. George Martin filled it with nineteen-year-old Geoff Emerick, promoted to full engineer at a time when no one at EMI made that status before the age of forty. It would be Emerick that would become the Beatles’ audio alchemist from Revolver on, creating new sounds that no one had ever thought of making, especially at an antiquated studio like Abbey Road. When Emerick walked out during the fractious sessions for the White Album (and would return for Abbey Road after being begged by Paul McCartney to come back), it opened up a space for other young assistant engineers to get promoted to full engineer and eventually producer, most notably Chris Thomas, Ken Scott, and my beloved Alan Parsons, who’d go on to work with Norman’s group and become engineer on one of the most influential and popular albums ever made. But that was in 1973. Let’s go back six years from that and examine the ingredients in the test tube that became the rocket fuel for that trip to the shadier side of Luna.

So, Norman Smith got his way. He brought in his group, comprised of an elfin lead singer named Syd Barrett, along with Roger Waters, Richard Wright and Nick Mason, to Abbey Road. With the help of another of EMI’s phenomenal engineers, Pete Bown, he was able to translate the group’s slightly twisted vision into vinyl. He did such a great job that the unusually-named group, who took for a cognomen the first names of American blues players Pink Anderson and Floyd Council, became the centerpiece of Lysergic London. And forty years, two hundred million records, one legendary acid casualty, induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and numerous lawsuits between the group members later, we can look back at this record and celebrate its existence with a special two-disc package.

But, like The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and for that matter, anything Pink Floyd’s done over the years, this is not a normal package, despite the presence of Normal as producer. Both discs contain the same material—the album as it was released in 1967. No bonus tracks, no bonus remixes of “Arnold Layne” or any of the group’s early singles that you’d expect to find on a celebratory package. So why bother buying this? What the heck does it need two discs for? Because of two technological developments that came in after this album was recorded: stereo and CDs. One disc is a brand-new stereo remaster. The other disc is in mono, the way God and Norman Smith intended this album to be heard.

Ah, I can see your eyes rolling around in your heads, you know. Who the hell would listen to mono in a day and age when albums are released in 5.1 DTS and the man who popularized the phrase “Back to Mono” is sitting in a courtroom in California on trial for murder? Because of the way things were in 1967. Ah, you children. You need a little history lesson. Well, step up and let Professor Eric provide you with one. Unlike you, he was actually alive in 1967, although his musical tastes didn’t incorporate Pink Floyd at that point. Regrettably, I wasn’t the coolest three-year-old in the world.

In 1967, stereo equipment was still expensive and designed for audiophiles. Home stereo wouldn’t become popular for a few more years (and then would lead to the ridiculousness of quadrophonic and 8-track tapes, the less said about which the better). Most radio stations that would play music were located on the mono AM band. The experiments with music on the FM band in stereo being conducted by Tom Donahue in San Francisco still hadn’t borne fruit, and if you think I’m going to pull out a gay joke at this point, you don’t know how much I respect the late Mr. Donahue and what he did for radio before the whole medium became bastardized and turned into a joke. Therefore, most human beings heard their music through one speaker, and producers and engineers knew this. They’d end up creating two sets of master recordings, one in mono and one in stereo (EMI Studios wouldn’t switch to a stereo-mix-only policy until 1969). The mono mix was lavished over with incredible attention, since that’s what pretty much everyone was going to hear. The stereo mixes were an afterthought and were, to put it politely, shoddy. But when CDs came around in the early ’80s and the record companies realized what a goldmine they were sitting on with their back catalogues and the need for consumers to alter to the new and incompatible-with-everything-else format, they pulled out those horrid stereo mixes and used them to master CDs. Therefore, CD issues of material from the ’50s and ’60s sound pretty bad.

Now do you understand? For an album like The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the mono mix is perfect and stands out as a salutary lesson on the art of being a recording producer and engineer. The original stereo mix had to be scrapped in order to create something that would appeal to modern ears, with even the cheapest available audio equipment today being unimaginable forty years ago. The mono mix is the true indication of how the group, Smith and Bown intended the record to be heard. The stereo mix is a modern compromise. Therefore, this set is designed to appeal to the average consumer with its stereo remix and to the total snobs like me among us who are perfectly willing to go Back To Mono in order to hear the true sound.

And that’s what I did. I listened to the mono mix of this collection first. After forty years, “Astronomy Domine” still retains its astonishing quality. It’s one of those few tracks that not only open an album, but open a world of possibility. You want to know how great Smith and Bown were? Listen to that mono mix of “Astronomy Domine” and the illusion of space it creates. They did this without using stereo tricks and using the most primitive of enhancement equipment. But it’s still so deep that you can fall into it. It also provided a good test for the stereo remaster. I have to admit that it’s a good job done by James Guthrie and Joel Plante. The stereo version “swirls” more (if you know your psychedelia, you know what I’m talking about) and Nick Mason’s drums are pushed a little more forward, becoming more cavernous. Syd Barrett’s vocals have a little more echo on them, which is appropriate to the setting.

The care taken in the stereo remaster comes through on “Lucifer Sam”, especially on Barrett’s vocals. He’s never sounded more shamanistic. Listening to that vocal, you begin to understand Barrett’s reputation, one that fortunately was established while he was still alive, even if he wasn’t very cognizant of it. Unfortunately, the opposite is true of “Flaming”. Barrett’s vocals are clarified too much for the sake of authenticity, but the improvement in the sound of Richard Wright’s keyboards makes up for that lapse. The quality control breaks down a little on the instrumental “Pow R. Toc H.”. There seems to be a bit of a balance issue between Mason’s drums and Wright’s keyboards that swamp the keyboards a little too much.

But the acid test of the mix experiment, so to speak, is “Interstellar Overdrive”. This extended instrumental was what really made Pink Floyd’s early career. Nine and a half minutes plus of freak-out that made The Who look tame, not to mention the closest comparison you can make of Roger Waters to John Entwhistle on their common instrument. Its only negative is that it provided the prototype for the Album Sides Of Doom that the Floyd would come up with in the early ’70s. The stereo version is a little more shallow, with more attempt at separation of instruments. Yes, it’s a more modern approach to the song, but the fact is that the instruments are supposed to mesh, collide, blend and conflict with each other. That’s the charm of “Interstellar Overdrive”. Removing that charm, even only a bit, is devastating to this album, which established its reputation on its charm, peculiar though it may be.

Of course, there are weak spots on this recording. “Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk” leads you to one of two established conclusions: (1) that Roger Waters really improved as a songwriter over the years or (2) that Waters has always been a crappy songwriter. And not everything Barrett did was a masterpiece, despite the claims of some of the apologists out there who claim that the Floyd was ruined when the group brought in David Gilmour to enhance and eventually replace him as he fell further into acid casualtyville; “The Gnome” is so twee that Donovan would have considered it ridiculous. And “Chapter 24″’s philosophy makes George Harrison’s incessant Krishna-izing look mature and subtle. But this was the ’60s, and things like this are to be expected from artifacts of that era. Then again, I don’t hear any of that stuff on Pet Sounds, despite the beautiful harmonies inherent in both. After that, the surface gooniness of “Bike” is a refreshing antidote, and the stereo remaster really shines on that track, with Wright’s piano glissandos literally luminous.

Does The Piper at the Gates of Dawn deserve its reputation and deserve an anniversary package? As the beginning of Pink Floyd’s career and as a document of what the world missed out on when Syd went around the bend, it’s undeniable. But it’s a strange mixture of timeless and artifact-of-its-time. It’s a document of the future of music and a document of the kind and quality of drugs that were floating around London as all the hip kids switched from speed to LSD. As a piece of psychedelia, it’s certainly no Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but it’s definitely better than Their Satanic Majesty’s Request. But it’s a singular piece, the only recording on which Syd Barrett’s vision was dominant. You could tell the difference in the group on their very next recording, A Saucerful of Secrets. Despite having Smith and Bown around to do that one with them, there is a substantial difference. Compare the bass domination of “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” to anything on the Barrett-guitar-dominated The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and you can tell that the Floyd had a new master, one whose vision would dominate the group until the fractious sessions for the anti-war self-indulgence of The Final Cut. Waters’ guidance made the Floyd a legend. But was that a good thing? How would Barrett’s Floyd have evolved, even assuming that they’d become a five-piece with Gilmour? Would they have evolved in four years to something as beautiful and solid as “Fearless”? And what about Dark Side of the Moon? Would that have come about? Too many questions, and I don’t even want to delve on what would replace Wish You Were Here without the inspiration of Barrett’s non compos mentis status.

I think I totally lost the point of my argument in that last paragraph. However, that’s what listening to The Piper at the Gates of Dawn does to you. You get lost in it and lost in the possibilities it now represents. Yes, it does deserve a lot of its reputation. But as the sine qua non of the Floyd? No. There’s just too much in the catalog of such incredible excellence to counter that assumption. Yes, some romantics out there say that the real Floyd ended when Syd went bonkers, and it’s fashionable to hold that opinion. But the evolution of the group between their first album and Dark Side of the Moon is a clear path. Those people are indulging in sins of omission.

And God bless Norman Smith for putting them on that path. Very soon, he’ll be releasing a mass-market version of his memoirs that, like the CD booklet for this collection, includes rare photographs of the Floyd and reminiscences of his three albums of work with them. Pick it up, and give the old man his due. Anyone whose work includes both “Interstellar Overdrive” and “Ticket to Ride” deserves a lot more than that from us.

Rating:

Mono Mix:

Stereo Mix:

The Traveling Wilburys – The Traveling Wilburys Collection
Wilbury/Rhino (6/12/2007)
Rock
Available at Amazon.com

In the English language, there are a number of ten-letter obscenities. Lenny Bruce was hauled into court for using one of the more popular ones on one of his many obscenity busts. But it took the music industry to create a new one, at least in the minds of the more effete, snobbish would-be musicologists. As loath as I am to use obscenities…oh, who am I kidding? Anyone who’s ever read me knows that I have an elite education combined with the vocabulary of a longshoreman. I’m not afraid to use obscenities in any of my columns. So, I’m going to use this one now. You ready? Last warning, you can turn away your virgin eyes now. You’ve been warned. Here it goes…

Supergroup.

There, I’ve said it. And I’m not ashamed. If you’re offended, tough luck.

What I can’t figure out is why it’s considered an obscene word by music fans at all. The list of supergroup (meaning a group composed of members of other popular acts) accomplishments is a rather noteworthy one. Blind Faith’s only album. The Plastic Ono Band. The Flying Burrito Brothers. Asia’s first album (and, yes, I’m excited that the original line-up is getting together again). The most popular edition of Fleetwood Mac can be considered a supergroup. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Hell, I even liked the Power Station.

But if you need an argument in favor of supergroups, you have to turn to the greatest supergroup of all time. Five men, four of whom are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (and the fifth should be, but I’m the biggest ELO fanboy in the world, so take that for what you will)—their influence on rock is incalculable. And when they teamed up in the late ’80s, it was an exciting proposition that was more than fulfilled. George Harrison. Bob Dylan. Tom Petty. Roy Orbison. Jeff Lynne. The Traveling Wilburys.

The thing is, they’re more known than heard today. That’s because their work together hasn’t been that easy to find over the past decade or so. That problem’s now been solved courtesy of Rhino Records. They’ve collected both Wilburys CDs into a collection and added a DVD and a small booklet with notes by Mo Ostin (a fitting tribute to all concerned given Ostin’s status). If all you’ve heard is “Handle With Care” playing on your local rock station, there’s definitely more to the Wilbury Experience, and this collection has it all. For what was supposed to be a one-off B-side for a Harrison single, this turned into magic.

Both Wilburys CDs, Volume 1 and Volume 3 (Volume 2 was skipped as a tribute to Orbison), are here, along with a short DVD of Wilburys videos. The CDs have been remastered by Jeff Lynne. Now, given the preferences of some people, this might be a warning signal. Lynne’s prediliction for overproduction is quite well-known, after all, and there’s no George Harrison to rein him in as there was on the original sessions. Good news, folks: Lynne still has the proper Wilburys spirit. He expands the sound without destroying the original balance, something that’s apparent immediately on “Handle With Care”. The guitars provide a much firmer backing to Harrison’s vocal than on the original, and the vocal plays against the acoustic strumming to a greater extent as well. And when Orbison comes in on the bridge… well, that’s the moment that justifies the Wilburys right there. “I’m so tired of being lonely” is a six-word summary of Orbison’s entire career, and he puts every bit of ethereal beauty the line deserves from him into it. It’s been preserved perfectly in the remaster. Hearing Orbison sing those words is spine-tingling every time. It didn’t need the remaster, but it sure helped.

It’s pretty hard to screw up the first Wilburys album, even if you set out to do so. Volume 1 was the catalyst for creative peaks for all concerned. Harrison and Lynne had just collaborated on Harrison’s comeback Cloud Nine, an album that received raves (and gave Harrison a Number One single with “I Got My Mind Set On You”). The Wilburys would be the immediate inspiration for other masterpieces by the individual members (with frequent contributions from the other Wilburys): Orbison’s Mystery Girl, Dylan’s Oh Mercy, Lynne’s Armchair Theater, and especially Petty’s Full Moon Fever. Everyone’s in fine form here, and Lynne concentrates on bringing out their best in the remaster. On “Congratulations” and “Tweeter and the Monkey Man”, he’s smoothed out Dylan’s more egregious… well, Dylanisms. Yeah, Dylan’s ragged vocals are part of the charm, but there’s only so much you can take.

He’s also improved the remainder of that album. “Not Alone Any More” no longer sounds like a rehearsal for Mystery Girl—it’s become a true Orbison masterpiece. “Heading for the Light” reveals its origins as an unused ELO track (remember, I consider this a good thing), and Harrison’s lead vocal is less jarring. He’s also brought out the full contributions of the “Sixth Wilbury”, legendary session drummer Jim Keltner (well, technically, Keltner is a “Sidesbury”, but there’s some common blood there); the drums, along with Ray Cooper’s percussion, sound sparkling. The first album contains two bonus tracks (speaking of jarring, hearing something after “End Of The Line” after nearly two decades of hearing this album in the normal fashion is a little disconcerting), and you can really hear why they were cut in the first place. They don’t wreck the quality, but “Maxine” is quite negligible, although “Like a Ship” has its occasional moments.

The acid test for the remaster, though, was “End of the Line”. If Lynne screwed this up… well, he didn’t, so he has nothing to fear. He indulged in a little remixing along with the remastering, and it’s done the song good. The four lead vocals mesh into one another rather than rub against each other (this is clearly evident in Orbison’s vocal turn, which now merges beautifully). Petty no longer sounds like he’s coming out of nowhere. “End of the Line” has always been my favorite Wilburys track; now it’s so more than ever. Lynne proves that his efforts are a labor of love with this song. Specifically, it’s a labor of love for his friend Harrison, restating for George, in whatever afterlife he’s in, that Lynne would be nothing without him (remember, it was the Beatles’ experimentation that inspired Lynne to turn the Move into ELO).

Volume 3 is a trickier proposition than Volume 1. A great deal of their Wilburys-related inspiration had been subsumed into their solo albums (and when Petty got the Heartbreakers together with Lynne, they came out with another masterpiece, Into the Great Wide Open). They’d lost Orbison after they gave him that one final moment of glory (remember that “You Got It” was already a Top Ten hit the week Orbison died), so getting together again for another disk must have been a bit disconcerting, and the results showed. Volume 3 is nowhere on the level of Volume 1, but that’s damning with faint praise. Volume 1 is, after all, the best album released between Appetite for Destruction and Straight Outta Compton. Volume 3 couldn’t help itself if it wasn’t as good. Just the lack of Orbison alone…

Volume 3 takes a radically different approach to Volume 1. Volume 1 had its set of star turns. Volume 3 is a collective effort. On Volume 3, the Wilburys are more of a group with four lead singers, and they have no problem exchanging lead. “Inside Out” shows this approach to magnificient effect, playing to everyone’s strengths. Dylan and Petty take most of the lead vocals on the song, while Harrison and Lynne demonstrate their mastery of harmony. Harrison/Lynne harmony vocals is one of the great treats of any of the projects they worked on together; it really made Cloud Nine, just to cite one example. If there are solo turns on Volume 3, they belong to Dylan, as is proper. “If You Belonged to Me” works perfectly in this vein. “7 Deadly Sins”, though, is a miscalculation. It was a tune that was obviously earmarked for Orbison, who would have done a magnificent job with it. Petty’s solo turns tend to sound like Full Moon Fever outtakes given the Wilburys treatment. It’s not a bad thing, just unusual, something proven on “You Took My Breath Away” with its Petty/Lynne lead with Lynne taking the solo on the middle eights. Volume 3 is a disk that takes multiple plays to work itself into your affection.

The first album was suffused from start to finish with a sense of fun. A lot of that is lost on Volume 3; it seems like more of a project. There are those moments of fun, though. “Poor House” is goofy and weird in the best way, with Petty/Lynne harmony vocals on the lead and the unmistakable Harrison lead guitar creating a bizarre fusion of rockabilly and classic country. It’s Hank Williams on acid, and all the better for it. “New Blue Moon” is in a similar vein, only substituting Leiber/Stoller Drifters production for hardcore country. It’s the closest the Wilburys ever came to giving Harrison a Beatles-circa-1963 number to work with. Of course, the closing track, “Wilbury Twist”, is pure, outright fun, and the booklet gives you a full lesson on how to do the Wilbury Twist, a very helpful guide indeed.

The bonus tracks for Volume 3 are well-chosen. “Nobody’s Child” became the title track for the all-star effort to assist Romanian orphans after the true conditions they were living in were exposed in 1990. It’s not the best track from that album (I happen to own it; it was a good cause); that’s G&R’s “Civil War”. However, it’s nice to have it here. Their cover of Del Shannon’s classic “Runaway” deserved to be the A-side rather than the B-side of “She’s My Baby”. Lynne’s recreation of the immortal Musitron solo from the original is note-perfect. It’s meant to be faithful in the nicest way. After all, Shannon was going to replace Orbison in the Wilburys, and Lynne was working with Shannon on a comeback album when Shannon killed himself.

The DVD features a 25-minute documentary on the creation of the group and the recording of the first album. The documentary shows the happenstance nature of the writing and recording of the album, written on the spot and recorded in the kitchen of Dave Stewart’s house. The creation of each song is covered in detail, so it’s complete and informative. The five Wilburys videos are included in the DVD. The video for “End of the Line” is heartbreaking. It was filmed after Orbison’s death, and he’s represented by a photo and an empty chair with a guitar sitting on it. The videos are transferred very well on to DVD, and Lynne remastered the audio for the videos as well, so the songs come out perfectly clear.

Considering the personnel involved, it’s very unusual to ask the standard question of What Could Have Been when it comes to the Wilburys. But the questions are there nonetheless. What if Lynne had been able to stop Shannon from killing himself (or Shannon cut down on his Prozac use)? Would the group have continued in an on-and-off format? Harrison didn’t record very much in the decade prior to his death, and having more of George would have been a great thing. Petty went into a bit of a creative tailspin. Dylan is still Dylan, occasionally producing an unexpected masterpiece, but he really flourished inside of this format. Lynne preferred to spend his time in court attempting to get the ELO name back, and when he finally did, produced a dud of an album with Zoom. The Wilburys were a distraction for them, but it was a distraction that brought out the best. Now, thanks to this package, we get to live out that distraction again. If you weren’t there the first time, it’ll be a revelation of the most pleasant variety. If you were there, you get to live it out again, even if your memories of that time aren’t the best (hearing “Handle With Care” takes me back to my Army training in San Antonio, six months of hell). But grab this package, and you’ll want to do the Wilbury Twist until the sun goes down, and then you’ll find you can’t stop.

Rating:

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon
By Crystal Zevon
Ecco/HarperCollins (5/1/07)
ISBN 0-060763-45-9
480 pages
Available at Amazon.com

This review came about for a rather peculiar reason. I was essentially dared into it. Let me explain…

One Friday evening, I was headed home from the day job with barely enough time to shower, change and head to the night job when I stopped into Barnes and Noble. While perusing the stacks, my phone rings. It’s Flea. Just to clarify things, this is the Flea from Pulse Wrestling, not the bassist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers (I do have to remember what section I’m writing in, so that clarification is necessary). I’m not that well-connected, folks. So, our conversation eventually turns to the fact that I’m shopping in Barnes and Noble, and he’s asking me whether there’s anything good out literature-wise. Well, I’m in the biography section, and I notice I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon. I pick it up, quickly page through it, and tell Flea, “Well, there’s a new oral-history biography of Warren Zevon done by his ex-wife. Looks interesting.”

I didn’t really expect Flea’s reaction. “Oh, not f*ckin’ Warren Zevon. Goddamn, I hate him. Fuckin’ ‘Werewolves of London’…” It took me back a little. If anyone would be a Zevon fan, I thought, it’d be Flea. He likes iconoclastic artists like Zevon. Besides, Zevon was a drunk, Flea’s a drunk, and you can connect the dots. Then I thought about it for a second. I could see where Fleabag was coming from regarding “Werewolves of London”. It’s one of those truly great songs that you end up hating because it’s played at saturation level on rock radio; I’ve heard it three times this week alone on two different stations. It’s in good company though, sitting right next to “Freebird”, “Roundabout”, “Light My Fire”, “Comfortably Numb” and pretty much everything from the Led Zeppelin catalog (seriously, when a Zep song comes on the radio, I switch the station unless the song in question is “Kashmir” or “Immigrant Song”). So, I knew I needed to counter this a bit, and I decided to… well, draw blood, as the man said in that song. “Dude, ‘Lawyers, Guns and Money’.” “Well, I’ll give you that one,” was Flea’s response. At this point, I knew I needed to purchase this book, and I needed to review it.

This book came about in a way almost as unusual as this review. When Warren was diagnosed with the mesothelioma that would kill him at 56, he wanted his story told. The only person he trusted to do this was, of all people, his ex-wife Crystal. His rationale was very Zevon-like: Crystal had seen the absolute worst of him, and he knew that she wouldn’t sugar-coat him and turn him into some sort of plaster saint. She took on the obligation to do so, with full credit to her. Reliving those days must have been painful for her.

However, she decided on the perfect format to ensure that personal bias wouldn’t creep in on her part. She chose to do the book in the oral-history fashion that was given legitimacy in rock writing by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain in their magnificent history of New York Punk, Please Kill Me. Crystal used quotes from published interviews, personal interviews, magazine articles, and various and sundry reminiscences to assemble her ex-husband’s history in a highly readable, understandable format, never dwelling too much on any one segment of his life, even the end of it.

The format helps here, because a prose telling of Zevon’s life would bring one to the conclusion that even the oral-history version makes hard to avoid: he was, to put it nicely, a complete and utter asshole. An extremely talented asshole, but an asshole nonetheless. He was miserable to deal with, drunk or sober, and extremely demanding on everyone who entered his life. Yet, somehow, everyone ended up loving him, even the people he used, treating his personality as just something to deal with in order to get to the talent that burst from him.

Zevon was born in Chicago to a Jewish mid-level gangster and a Mormon waitress twenty years younger than him. The family eventually made it to California, and through those trips, Warren’s talent for music appeared at an early age. It was so evident that his youth was disregarded; when he met Stravinsky at the age of 13, the great composer treated him with fully adult respect and encouraged his talent. He got out of Fresno at an early age and wandered to San Francisco just before the hippie boom hit, forming a proto-psychedelic folk duo and calling himself stephen lyme (lower-case spelling courtesy of e e cummings). He had a full understanding of the importance of image at that age, making sure that “lyme” had an affection for anything colored green. He started to make friends on the West Coast rock scene, becoming close to Howard Kaylan of The Turtles, among others. Kaylan convinced The Turtles to put a Zevon composition on the flip-side of “Happy Together”, and Warren had his first success in the business.

But his career didn’t progress rapidly. He had a failed solo album come out in 1970, which was enough to get him the attention of the Everly Brothers, who hired him as keyboardist and musical director. Zevon ended up hiring Waddy Wachtel long before he became one of the leading guitarists-for-hire in rock for the Everlys, starting a fruitful creative relationship. While working for the Everlys, whether together or solo, he got to meet and make friends with Jackson Browne and Lindsey Buckingham (pre-Fleetwood Mac), and through them, the cream of the West Coast scene. It was Browne that would end up pressuring David Geffen for years to sign Zevon to Asylum Records. After all, Asylum artists like Linda Rondstadt were recording Zevon songs, so it was a natural. Geffen resisted, but finally gave in. His first solo release for Asylum wasn’t a real financial success, but critics fell over each other giving it praise. It would be his second Asylum album, Excitable Boy, that would prove to be the breakthrough.

Fortunately for Flea and people like him, the reminiscences regarding “Werewolves of London” are not too plentiful, only appropriate for a song that everyone agrees took fifteen minutes to write. Unfortunately, the format doesn’t apply itself well to reminiscences of any song in particular. One does wish for a little more detail, but Zevon was such a phenomenal lyricist that one can imagine that everything came so easy to him that he or anyone else didn’t really dwell on where the inspiration came from. As a lyricist, though, he was definitely ahead of his time, and Excitable Boy proves it. “Werewolves of London” is post-modern kitsch long before that concept became cool. “Laywers, Guns and Money”, in one line, perfectly anticipates the ’80s: “Bring lawyers, guns and money; the shit has hit the fan”. It took his friend Jackson Browne five more years to come up with something nearly as good and incisive with “Lawyers in Love”, and even then, people missed the point of that song. With Zevon, you always knew.

It was during this period, though, that Zevon’s worst tendencies were starting to come out. He had broken up with the mother of his son Jordan to marry Crystal, and they ended up having a daughter, Ariel. Zevon, though, plowed himself into two separate directions that took him away from his family: into his work, and into the bottle. SoCal Rock was front-loaded with Cocaine Cowboys at the time, and Zevon was regarded as the rowdiest of the breed, behavior that later commended him to Hunter Thompson as part of the musical contingent of Gonzo (Zevon’s gun fetish alone will give you chills reading about it). The alcohol abuse broke up his marriage, and then Zevon established his track record as a serial monogamist, getting together and then breaking up with women when they started to bore him. He became alienated from his children. The booze also took a toll on his musical career. Geffen ended up dropping him from Asylum, then signed him when he created Geffen Records, then ended up dropping him again. Zevon became more and more dependent on help from friends and fans, like the members of R.E.M., in order to sustain a career that was only kept going through a repetitive tour sequence that guaranteed him an audience. It took him until the mid-’80s to start drying up, and the process took repeated trips to rehab and a nearly-unhealthy dependence on Alcoholics Anonymous. He ended up stopping his AA meetings when he discovered his sponsor was addicted to heroin, but he stayed off the booze, a testament to his willpower.

But the talent didn’t dry up. His lyrics were always of high caliber, and he kept attracting famous fans who’d help him, like David Letterman, who relied on Zevon when Paul Shaffer needed a vacation. When he was diagnosed with the disease that would kill him, his fans came out in droves, and he did have a habit of making fans and friends in unusual ways. For instance, he developed symptoms of OCD. Instead of it being a drawback, it became a way to bond with a neighbor of his who also had OCD. The neighbor in question was a then-unknown Billy Bob Thornton, who stayed friends with Zevon until the end of his life. Reading this book, you get the impression that Warren Zevon was the luckiest man in showbiz. Every time he’d fall, and he’d keep falling and falling, someone would be there to pick him up, allowing his ability and talent to be shown to anyone who’d listen. That tendency was kept alive until the end. He’d fallen back into alcoholism when he received his death sentence, but the news that he’d try to get in one more album before the end brought his coterie out to help him, including Bruce Springsteen. The Wind might have been Zevon’s greatest statement, an album that told everyone, “You might not have listened when I was alive, but listen now, and you’re gonna miss me after this.”

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead is a fast-paced trip through the life of an enigmatic rock star, one who was truly upset that most of his peer group achieved greater success than he did but rarely showed it. As Crystal promised, there’s no sugar-coating here. Zevon is shown in his most despicable light. In fact, he may be portrayed as too despicable at times. That sense is aggravated a bit by a lack of explanation for any of his activities. Zevon went through life in a No Apologies mode, and his friends and the contributors to this book understand that and accept it, and don’t try to attempt to explain him.

That may be this book’s greatest failing. When you’re confronted with a protagonist such as this, some explanations would be welcome. There’s no real justification for anything he did that’s apparaent on the surface. Joe Strummer, for instance, ended up rejecting life because he felt that life had rejected him, a conclusion he developed at the age of nine that stayed with him for the remaining forty-one years of his life. Zevon came from a broken home with parents that didn’t really give him the attention he deserved, and ended up growing up in a soul-crushing place like Fresno, but that doesn’t explain everything. He was someone who used and abused people until they gave up on him, but he’d end up attracting those people back. He definitely had the knack of making friends and keeping them for extended periods of time. And he knew how to use those connections. It was his relationship with Lindsey Buckingham, combined with his reputation, that explains the fact that the rhythm section on “Werewolves of London” is Mick Fleetwood and John McVie. He was even able to use people after he was dead, like he did with Crystal and this book.

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, though, encapsulates the experience of what it was like to know Warren Zevon. It shows why people were attracted to him, some of them knowing going into the relationship that it would turn out to be a disaster. People were willing to put up with all of the nonsense because they knew that there was a talent in there that needed to be expressed, and they were willing to do anything to help it come out. No, he definitely isn’t displayed here as a plaster saint. But to those of us who follow in his behavioral footsteps, Warren Zevon is certainly a patron saint. If you can’t bring lawyers, guns, and money to this show, just give yourself a little sentimental hygeine and cry out an “aah-ooh” as you read this. It’s definitely worth your time. You can sleep when you’re dead.

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Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer
By Chris Salewicz
Faber & Faber (5/15/07)
ISBN 0-571211-78-X
640 pages
Available At Amazon.com

The question still rings out like a challenge and accusation across three decades: “Where were you in ‘77?” If you worked for one of the three major British weekly music papers, the answer to that is simple: you were in bed with The Clash. The championing of punk by the papers when it was still an underground movement the previous year refined itself after the Grundy Incident and national exposure down to the championing of the one group that was considered acceptable by everyone, including record companies. After all, no other punk group got a one-hundred-thousand-pound advance to sign to a major. It was safe to promote The Clash as the vanguard of New Music, and the reporters covering punk pitched in with an enthusiasm that can be seen given the time separation as downright embarrassing.

(As usual, one of those reporters, Caroline Coon, took it one step further and decided to turn metaphor into reality. The woman who came up with the Do It Yourself ethos decided to follow it, using Paul Simonon as a walking sex toy in an attempt to relive her radical youth. She’d even end up managing The Clash for a brief period.)

One of the worst offenders of the journalistic credo of separating yourself from what you cover was Chris Salewicz. His articles in the New Musical Express on The Clash were always the most enthusiastic. As such, he developed a deep and lasting friendship with the members of the group, one that still exists to this day. This is not to say that Salewicz was deficient as a journalist. He did his job, and he did it well given the particular necessities of the time. But I was taught that it wasn’t a journalist’s job to be a cheerleader. It’s something that’s informed my writing to this day, and, yes, I do get uncomfortable with some of the writers on this site who don’t follow that principle. Objectivity is a virtue, after all.

However, Salewicz has been able to use his deficiencies to his advantage, writing a number of books on subjects that he has been personally enthused about, and doing so in an engaging way. His latest work takes him back to The Clash, and an attempt to get a hold on one of the most enigmatic of punk performers, Joe Strummer. Salewicz apparently considers it a badge of honor that people have told him that he was the only journalist that Strummer “trusted”. Those admissions at the beginning of Redemption Song: The Ballad Of Joe Strummer left me a bit queasy. Biography-as-encomium is a genre that leaves me cold. I detest books that set up their subject as some sort of plaster saint. Salewicz doesn’t do that here, but it’s not for lack of trying.

The attempt starts on the cover. The subtitle of the book is “The Definitive Biography”. At that point, Salewicz paints himself into a corner. The definitive book on British punk has long been written—Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming. The definitive book on The Clash has also long been written—Marcus Grey’s Last Gang in Town. Of course, Savage’s story ends in 1991, and Grey’s in 1995. It’s no coincidence that the strongest portions of Redemption Song are those that focus on Strummer after Grey’s book ends, dealing with his time with the Mescaleros, as he tried to revive a career in the doldrums.

The story of the man that became Joe Strummer is a rather simple one. Born as the younger of two sons of a member of the Foreign Office, John Mellor’s early life was one of adventure and disconnection as he moved from place to place, wherever Ron Mellor was needed by the British government. In order to stop the constant moves, the Mellors placed their sons in a boarding school when John turned nine. The Mellor boys reacted badly to being placed in an alien environment in, what was to them, another foreign land (John was born in Turkey, while his father was born in India, and neither had really lived full-time in England). David, the elder, withdrew into himself, leading to his suicide at a young age. John became a rebel and bully, something he would remain for the remainder of his life.

Salewicz sets up no type of judgments on Strummer’s behavior, either as a child or as an adult. The story of Strummer’s youth is well-trod ground by now, and Salewicz provides nothing really new or noteworthy. We all know that Strummer essentially dropped out of society as his schooling ended, becoming a hippie, renaming himself “Woody” (and coming up with the connection to Woody Guthrie post-hoc, something that provided him with a connection to other Guthrie acolytes like Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen), entering the squatter’s movement in London, forming the 101ers and renaming himself Joe Strummer after his guitar-playing style… it’s a well-known story, and every angle was covered during the orgy of Clash press coverage thirty years ago. Grey’s book provides many more details than Salewicz provides. However, if you’ve never read Grey’s book, Redemption Song is a good primer on the forces that created Joe Strummer.

But the strength of Salewicz’s book, as said, comes in areas that Grey didn’t cover. During the last half-dozen years of his life, Strummer attempted to reconnect with his mother’s family in Scotland, and Salewicz uses them as sources in an attempt to display another side of Strummer, one that wasn’t publicly known. Unfortunately, it ends up being the same side we’ve already seen. All of his mother’s relatives loved Joe, as apparently did everyone else Salewicz talked to. No one hated Joe Strummer, not even the people he treated badly. Mick Jones and Topper Headon forgave him quickly for Strummer turfing them out of The Clash. The Clash substitutes he assembled for that last, disastrous Clash album give him a free pass. The members of the Latino Rockabilly War and the Mescaleros, whom Joe treated like hired hands or worse, all love, love, love him, and not even the four and a half years after his death have changed their minds. Even Gaby Salter, who spent fourteen years with Joe and bore him two daughters, then was dumped to the curb when he met Lucinda, won’t say a bad word about him. It’s only in between the lines that you can find stuff to dislike about Strummer.

In between the sweet portraits of the man are the moments and the subtext that redeems this book somewhat. You just have to find them. Yes, it’s wonderful to hear about Salewicz and Simonon going on a trek to find Joe’s ancestral home in the Hebridies. But it’s thrillingly disconcerting to piece together the portrait of the post-Clash Strummer, a man totally lost. Salewicz won’t say it straight out, but in the decade-and-a-half between the final dissolution of The Clash and the point where he started to receive critical acclaim for his work with the Mescaleros, Strummer was a disagreeable alcoholic who had a constant nimbus of pot haze surrounding him. Virtually every anecdote of Salewicz’s personal encounters with Strummer begins with them lighting up a joint. Strummer couldn’t work in the studio without setting up a “spliff bunker”, a contraption of cases where he could isolate himself, toke up, and write lyrics. Pot and booze is a combination that does not lead to a favorable mindset when it comes to dealing with other people. Or maybe those are just my experiences, and Strummer was completely different.

How lost was Strummer? His best efforts during his “wilderness years” were things he ended up doing with Mick Jones, the only man who could provide the music to set off Joe’s lyrics. But his relationship with The Clash became ambivalent. He’d hate to be reminded of the band, and he chafed at the CBS contract that Bernie Rhodes signed that essentially put his work with the group into a lifelong arrangement, but it was The Clash reissues that provided him with the money to live his lifestyle and attempt to find his own way. There’s a telling anecdote in here from Strummer’s final year of life. He sent a bunch of lyrics to Mick Jones, about a half-dozen songs’ worth, and Mick wrote the music. Mick thought that these would be for the Mescaleros’ next album. When they didn’t turn up on Global A-Go-Go, Mick asked Joe what was up. Joe told him, “No, these aren’t for the Mescaleros. They’re for The Clash’s next album.” It took the Mescaleros to get Strummer comfortable with the thought of The Clash. When Mick Jones walked out on stage to play with Strummer in 2002, at what would end up being Strummer’s final concert (a situation that Salewicz paints as a spur-of-the-moment decision by Jones), the ball was rolling. Despite Simonon’s protests, The Clash would reunite in 2003 when they were inducted in to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It was a certainty. It was stopped only by Strummer’s death.

I remember the excitement that I felt when I read about Jones joining Strummer on stage that night. To me, and a lot of people my age, the Clash may not have been The Only Band That Mattered, but they were damn close. I felt that the post-September 11th Era needed a group to blow away the miasma of bullshit and show the world exactly what was going on with the Bush/Blair Axis of Obfuscation. No one did it better than The Clash when they went up against the varsity team of Reagan and Thatcher; the JVs wouldn’t even be a challenge. Simonon could be talked into it, I felt; he could put down the paintbrushes and create sonic works of art again. Strummer’s death five weeks later from a congenital heart defect destroyed that image. For someone whose personal feelings about The Clash and its members permeate this book, Salewicz doesn’t relate his own feelings about that moment and what it could have meant. Of course, he knew exactly how intransigent Simonon was on the issue, and that tempered his own feelings. In general, Salewicz doesn’t service Clash fans very well in this book, and that was his intention. He wrote this book for Strummer, and parroted Strummer’s own prejudices and feelings. The writing was an act of exorcism, not intending to inform as much as confront the world with what his friend felt, something that Strummer never did in prose form. This book is substitution, with Salewicz putting himself into his buddy’s shoes and attempting to write what Strummer might have done if he’d confronted himself enough to write his autobiography.

Joe Strummer had a half-century of life, much of which was wasted potential. When he set out to work, he did so with a clarity of conviction. He spent his last decade confronting the decisions he’d made during those moments of clarity, attempting to reestablish bridges that he’d burnt. He did it with the 101ers that he’d abandoned to join The Clash. He did it with the audience in his tours with the Pogues, the Latino Rockabilly War, and the Mescaleros, not to mention his BBC World Service show. He did it with the former members of The Clash, and got close to bringing them back together, knowing that it was the best moment of their lives and they could have those moments again as they approached an age where they were satisfied with their lives and their demons were dismissed. He did it with his mother’s family that he’d ignored and dismissed for three decades. It’s those attempts that Salewicz emphasizes. But is it a fair portrait of the man? I think that Strummer himself would say that it isn’t. It’s the type of book that someone would love to have written about them after they die. But Strummer was always honest, and he’d be the first to say that this book should have contained more of his worse moments. He was always one to believe in fairness, after all.

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