Sunday, April 22, 2012

Pazz, Jop etc, Part Quarto: Hearing Voices

By the late seventies I started to notice that the Village Voice, and Robert Christgau in particular, had no patience for mellow singer songwriters like James Taylor, or overly serious progressive rock bands like Genesis.  They were about rock and roll in all its ebullience and pock-marked beauty.  To my horror, I would see seemingly simplistic rock and roll records like the New York Dolls being rated over my oh so serious heroes like Jackson Browne.

Wow, was that like a bucket of cold water! They really seemed to enjoy bashing anything “tasteful” – in other words anything that I’d be tempted to put on to impress my parents that rock music was serious.

To be fair, Creem magazine had always shared this aesthetic, but when I was reading it back in 1973, I thought it was in thrall to the glam rock fad going on at the time. But it turned out to be part of a grander tradition that had also looked askance at the psychedelic era (which, let’s face it, didn’t age very well) with it’s long guitar solos and hazy pronouncements that said little more than “there’s a weird smell in the bathroom.”.

All of this upended my thinking. So there were difference schools of thought! Which led to the question: if the critics themselves didn’t agree, why listen to any of them?

Was one school of thought any more valid than another?  Well, yes, I thought. The one you found yourself agreeing with, right?  But not so fast. Didn’t that just make it another dead-end tribe? Yes, unless it challenged you and taught you things. Then it was something better. It helped you avoid the trap of listening to the same thing over and over again.

But it also meant meant that you shouldn’t expect to absolutely love everything the first time you heard it. I have a long history of not getting things the first time around. But sticking around has almost always paid off.

The Voice helped me look back at the 70s in a new light, and encouraged my hesitant forays into punk rock.

My first was Talking Heads More Songs About Buildings and Food, based on a rave from Robert Christgau. The first time I put it on, I heard maybe four good songs surrounded by a lot of weirdness. But those four were enough to keep me hanging in until I got the rest (“Found a Job” being the most audacious, and maybe now my favorite.) Within a week I loved it all, and it remains one of my all time favorites.

And there would be others that seemed even more forbidding, like the Sex Pistols. I listened anyway. Some things I never got (Pere Ubu), but so what? Half the fun was the exploration. The trick was to not get discouraged. Just learn something about the music, the reviewer and maybe myself.



And move on to the next record.

Sunday, April 15, 2012

Pazz Jop, Part Twa: Friendly Critics, Critical Friends

You can rely on your own tribe for only so long.

I could get the Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir solo albums because I was already a Deadhead, but maybe I should have stopped before getting to Mickey Hart - a great drummer, but maybe I didn’t need to have yet another version of “Playing in the Band”.

And known territory was by definite safe.  Too safe.

I forayed into singer-songwriter territory via Jackson Browne, scoring a win with Warren Zevon, and what seemed like a win at the time with Dan Fogelberg (it was good to get that off my chest). I barely missed the rest, thank god.

But this was just making me more knowledgeable about the types of music I already liked. I sensed there was more, and so began to check out some of the popular rock magazines of the day.

I’d like to say that I only got the coolest ones, but there were more than a few “16” magazines lying around from my Monkees days. (I didn’t know "16" was meant for girls, I swear!)

I had to be careful which magazines I brought home because some had dirty words in them. Plus they cost money.

First there was Circus, which was full of puff pieces on whoever was “in” at the time. You know, kind of like how Rolling Stone is now.  But they did have a decent review section.

Then there was Rolling Stone, Creem and Crawdaddy. They were less juvenile, which is what I wanted, even if I was still one myself.

I’d notice the ads for records. There would be quotes that sometimes caught my attention, like "Springsteen is a truly great songwriter", "Little Feat are the best band in America" or Elliot Murphy's Aquashow being compared to Blonde on Blonde.

And I'd read reviews, which, at the time, I took at face value. As dumb as it is to say now, I assumed that one review would be the same as another - that there was a universal standard being applying to the music, instead of the reviewer's subjective taste.

So I’d get some records that would annoy people, and take heat for “listening to critics” - unfairly, I think, since I never “decided to like something” because of a review I read.

Advice, whether it comes from a friend or a critic, may get you to buy a record, but it won’t get you to like it. So is reading a critic any worse than listening to a friend’s advice?  Admit it, it’s usually better.

Were those critics “reliable”? It depends what you expect to get. If you think reading someone’s opinion of a record is going to infallibly predict your own reaction to it, then no. But if you read one looking for evidence that the person listened to the record more than a couple of times, thought about it, and formed coherent thoughts about it, then yes, you can find someone “reliable”, assuming you understand that there’s ultimately no accounting for taste. But if you look for a way of thinking that rings true to you, then you’re on safer ground.

And if you aren’t into opera, but find yourself reading Opera Digest (Why? I don’t know.  You tell me. But hey man, hat's off to you.) don’t buy the record that is “the best opera record of the year”. Get the “ideal introduction to opera” instead.

If anything, I was more likely to fool myself into liking something because I liked that artist’s previous work. Like most young people, I was looking for heroes, and tried to convince myself that everything they did was “great”.

Another viewpoint is valuable to shake you out of such thinking. Maybe the best thing is to find a critic who will tell you that everything you thought before was wrong.

Next: Hearing Voices

Monday, April 9, 2012

Pazz, Jop, Spreadsheet, Etc: Part Duh - Get a Job!


When I turned sixteen, I finally broke down and got a job, like my Mom wanted.

She’d been pestering me for so long that it never occurred to me what I'd do with the money once I made it. If she'd have thought of the music angle I would have dropped out of kindergarten. 

At the time, my brother and I had, at most, 40 albums, so getting a new one every couple of weeks would be. Just. Awesome. (In the pre 21st century - and as such, undiluted - version of the word. And I'm a prime diluter - nowadays I'll call a halfway cold beer awesome.)

I could more or less buy whatever records I wanted so long as I didn’t go off the deep end. I didn’t want another comic purge.

But which ones did I want? It was getting harder to find out.

When you bought a single you knew exactly what you were getting. With an LP who really knew?  How to find out?

Should I have counted on friends to point me to certain bands? I guess so, if I ended up liking the music. And that if was getting bigger all the time because everyone was breaking up into their own different musical tribes (Led Zeppelin, Allman Brothers, 70s Soul, etc.) and it didn’t look like we’d all be reuniting any time soon.

Next: Frying, Fires, or Good-Bye Mom, Hello Robert Christgau

Sunday, April 1, 2012

Pazz and Jop Made Me Do It!, or The Spreadsheet: Part One

In between beers the other night, Nutboy and I were talking about how we go about deciding what records to buy. As I’ve said before, Nutboy is a jump-right-in kind of guy, so he gets what he feels like when he feels like it.

“What about you?” he asked.

I was doing some hemming and hawing when he helped me to the end of my thought.

“Oh, you do your research.” And left it at that.

He was being kind. Totally non-judgmental. But even without any sarcasm attached to it, the word was loaded with negative connotations. You could almost hear someone say “Research?”Really, Jaybee? It’s only pop music, for God’s sake!

Now those are fighting words, but since they were only taking place in my head, I kept my cool. Besides, Nutboy might not understand why I was suddenly punching myself in the face, even if Bob Dylan and Jane’s Addiction recommended it.

I quickly changed the subject (How about those Beatles, eh?) and we ended up having a fine old time. But afterwards, over a breakfast beer, I realized that I had to face this dark secret of mine and come clean.

It's something I've very vaguely alluded to a while back.  But now it’s time for me to confess - to explain how I buy records. This will be painful for me - possibly worse for you.

It's about the spreadsheet.


Radio, Radio:

Let's start back before the Stone Age, when I was a child.

From about 1965 to 1969, you could count on the local AM pop stations to play great music, so there was no effort involved in finding it. All you did was turn on the radio.

I don't remember hearing a bad song on the radio until at least 1970. “For the Love of Him” by Bobbi Martin, comes to mind. Hearing it now, it’s really not so bad, even if it has the distinction of being like the first rat signaling the start of the bubonic plague.

And soon there were more, and more. Bad records were crowding out good ones. If I wanted to hear good music, I’d have to actively seek it out. I started impatiently switching back and forth between those two pop stations, trying to find something I liked. I was doing it so much that I didn't even have to look at the dial anymore.

By now I was thirteen, and if I heard a song I really loved and had some spending money – two big ifs at the time - I could buy a single.

Finally, the Partridge Family and Osmond Brothers - clans that have wreaked more havoc than the Corleones - chased me from the AM dial altogether. I’d been checking out FM by then anyway, and was hearing more album oriented music, which was, almost by definition, more hit or miss. (Or maybe my tastes were becoming more rigid. Ask Bobbi Martin.)

And LPs cost more, so I’d really have to save up if I wanted one. It was getting harder to hear something I liked and harder to buy it when I did.


Cliffhanger alert:

Voice of the Narrator (Me): With good music and money in short supply what will our hero do? What will he do!?!

Voice of Jaybee’s Mom, circa 1973: Get a job, that’s what he’ll do, if I have any say in the matter!

Jaybee: Aw Ma, you ruined the cliffhanger ending!

Jaybee’s Mom: So it that what you’re doing while I’m here working my fingers to the bone? Hangin’ off cliffs? You have a fine head on you for that now, don’t you? And how much do they pay you for that anyhow? When I was your age….

Jaybee: CUT!!!!

Coming up: Jobs, Quotes, Critics, Friends and Hearing Voices
That is, if it’s okay with my mom.