James and the Giant Bag of CDs

I’m Gonna Say About...1973?:

“You have to get Rock and Roll by Foghat,” said childhood friend Tony. “You’ll love it!”

For some reason, I wasn’t convinced. Tony was sixteen at the time, which would make me about fifteen. A music snob (snot?) even then, I passed. I didn’t say that to him, of course. I nodded, smiled and said something along the lines of Oh yes, I’ll have to do that.

And I don’t have the slightest inclination to check it out. Sorry, Tony! It’s not you, it’s me. Well, actually it is you because you recommended a record I believed then - and believe still - will be awful. (So I guess it is me, after all.)


1983:

“Human Sexual Response is pretty good. You should check it out.”

Friend Mike was in town for a visit, and since my idea of a good time is going to the record store, we ended up at J&R Music World.

I was looking for Human Switchboard’s first record and were in the H section when he showed me the HSR album.

Mike was speaking in his usual laid back - almost indifferent - tone, which undercut any enthusiasm he seemed to have for the record (mine, too). I somehow wormed my way out of it.


1990:

“You have to check out Be Bop Deluxe,” the moving guy said. (I only remember the year because we were moving into our house.)

No, I don’t. When I see phrases like “art rock” and “progressive rock” I fear I’m going to get a lot of technique and not enough joy. That worked when I was fifteen, but I doubt it still will.

I did come close, though.  And I still might, but it’s been nearly thirty years.


Your Music Sucks:

These are just a few of the many incidents over the years of my not taking the musical advice of others. I'm afraid I have profoundly different tastes than the suggester.

Tony was convinced Foghat was undeniably great. This is a variant of the "We've got both types of music here, Country AND Western" syndrome.

Moving man was a BBD enthusiast, and definitely older than Tony, but older folks do form their own  “enthusiasms”, don't they? Like Ted Kaczinsky. And if you partake in someone else's enthusiasm, you’re almost obligated to sign up for the cult.

Mike was just being laid back Mike. When Mike gets enthusiastic I sit up in listen, but it wasn’t that day.

So in these and most other cases, I managed what the young people call a “soft pass”.

However, a hard pass may not have been a bad idea. One opportunity for growth that not enough people experience is to have someone tell them that the music they like is terrible. It’s happened to me many times and has taken many forms.

My parents hating the Beatles.

My Led Zeppelin fans telling me how much the Grateful Dead sucked.

Robert Christgau sh*tting on Jackson Browne and the Allman Brothers.

Before Born to Run came out, more than one person told me they hated “that Jew” Bruce Springsteen. (Clearly, the critique quality varied greatly.)

I’m not saying they were wrong and I was right. I’m saying we were both right. (Well, not the anti-Semites. They were wrong on every possible level.)

So I’m not big on people’s suggestions.

And it’s only gotten worse as I get older because I’m painfully aware that I DONT HAVE ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD - on a given day (no hanging around with friends in the middle of the day like a normal fifteen-year-old) or in my lifespan (I'm sixty-two for god sake.)


James:

So along comes Son Michael’s friend James, who I’ve connected with on a couple of levels, music being just one. He burned a CD for Mike once, and because of the time frame it covered (1969-1980) I liked it at least as much as Michael, who was, to his credit, pretty enthusiastic about it.

It gets better.

For Christmas, James gets me and Mrs. Jaybe four vinyl albums! I haven’t bought vinyl in nearly thirty years.

And now he’s lent me a big bag o’ CDs. Good ones, too. There’s got to be thirty or forty in there.

So somehow I’ve got to give these CDs their due. But how am I gonna do that with my World History Project, Decade Project and 2019 piling up in front of me?


But Let Me Digress:

So before I dive into the bag, I should report on a few records I have gotten a chance to listen to.

The year got off in two unexpected directions, one being hip hop, a genre I suspect I’ll never love, but I at least I got reassurance that I can really like it


Pusha T: Daytona (2018)

There’s no getting around it. This is a rap record. And a real good one. The key, for me, is that there has to be music to go with the rapping. Or the music has to be in the rapping. This one is the former.

But the rapping is good, too. The subject matter isn’t family friendly - he’s not going to win any humanitarian awards - but he seems genuine.

A-

“Hard Piano”





Noname: Room 25 (2018)

Here’s another one, this time with a female point of view.  The music is more (warning, annoying musical description word ahead) sinuous and subtle.

Jazzy, smooth and easy on the ear, which brings you back to it again and again. But once you start to really hear the words you have to confront the pain

A-

“Self”


And it's suddenly possible to love hip hop!

Then there are a couple of more female artists - one disappointing (slightly) and one definitely not.



Mitski: Be the Cowboy (2018)

Mrs. Jaybee liked this one right off the bat. And I thought it was an improvement, too, over her last record, which I liked but didn’t love.

But that stentorian voice that, at first, pulls you in also keeps you from really loving it.

B+

But, I've got to admit this video really pulls me in!

“Geyser”



Janelle Monae - Dirty Computer (2018)

I’ve had my eye on this young woman for a while (okay, that sounded really bad, but you know what I mean, right? In case the police come?)

The first spin is all surface and enjoyable enough, but now after at least a dozen listens I hear an artist with some vision, and talent to burn.

Good songwriting. Kind of Prince-y.  But I like her voice more. And a little sci-fi for good measure.

And while I still prefer Kacey Musgraves, this one gives her a run for the money.

A-

“Crazy Classic Life”


So at some point, I'll report on the actual contents of James' Bag of CDs.

Just one last question. What do normal people do with their time?

Sex, Drugs, Rock, Roll, etc.

Hi. My name’s Joe Friday-on-My-Mind. I’m with the ACLU, Rock Music Division. We defend the indefensible. Here’s my story:

R&R

If your upbringing was anything like mine, your parents hated rock and roll music. Some lucky kids had parents who could at least stomach the Beatles. Not us. I’ll never forget my dad’s pronouncement, made sometime in 1964 I think, that There would never be a Beatles record in this house! Man, that sounded pretty final at the time, and even though we eventually wore him down, it took until 1966, and a double birthday combo (my brother’s and mine were three weeks apart) to get our first album ever – “Revolver”. And even that was Plan B, after the single (“Yellow Submarine”/”Eleanor Rigby”) they bought us kept skipping on our old Victrola. The pennies weighing down the tone arm didn’t work. They did eventually wear a groove into “She Said She Said” that was so deep that I was an adult before I heard the song all the way through uninterrupted.

After some time, the Monkees were permitted, too, but we knew there were limits. No one with facial or female-length hair need apply. We probably could have gotten away with the odd subtle drug reference here or there. After all, my dad missed what Country Joe was spelling out on “Woodstock”. But then my mom figured out what John Prine’s “Illegal Smile” was about.

And in my own cowardly and roundabout way, I struck a blow for justice when I accidentally (?) dropped a stack of Irish LPs on the floor. Back then the vinyl was thick and brittle. All I remember now is being up to my ankles in jagged black shards, feeling like I’d just slain Goliath (or Dorothy after she unknowingly dropped a house on the witch, but I’m a little uncomfortable with that analogy).

A lot of us spent our childhoods being told that what we loved was crap and that our heroes were bums. How did you deal with that? Did you ignore the criticisms or try to prove them wrong? If you did the former, weren’t you implicitly accepting the criticism? (Not really, but I thought so at the time. Unlike most other kids, I never learned to totally ignore adults.) And if you accepted it, then didn’t that mean that you yourself would eventually choose to stop listening to it, judging it to be juvenile? And even though I was confusing a simple change of taste with a conscious decision to reject something on philosophical grounds, I still think that the early seventies represented my generation’s first reaction against rock and roll. Many of us, in an effort to feel more mature, began listening to more “serious” music.

I did it too, by getting into “progressive” music, singer-songwriters and other such genres. I was looking for Artists who were making music that was more defensible. After all, I had adults I needed to be to arguing with. Other kids played stickball.

And what defenses did I use, you ask?

First, there was the Virtuosity, or, “Ginger Baker is the best drummer in the world” defense. At around the age of twelve, musicianship became very important to me. Simply judging music by the amount of enjoyment it provided was too subjective for me. And it left me open to the criticism that my taste was immature. But if someone was a great musician, it meant that they had an inherent quality that could be measured, which validated the music. Alas, this is where music “appreciation” begins. Remember how much fun it was to listen to ten minute drum solos?

Then there was the Sounds Like Classical Music defense. You had to buy Emerson, Lake and Palmer records for this one. Some high school music teachers even pretended to buy into it. But it usually entailed listening to long “suite”s on side two. Rock operas could fall into this category, too, unless, like “Tommy”, they used actual rock and roll music. Imagine.

And finally, there was the Sounds Like Music Older People Would Like defense. I would play “Celluloid Heroes” by the Kinks for my mom, hoping that she would one day say “What a beautiful song. Well, rock music is actually very good! How’s about putting on some Hot f-ing Tuna?” Instead, she mistook the drum beat for a scratch on the record. Much later, to her credit, she very unexpectedly said that she liked “Ripple” by the Grateful Dead. And dad noted that David Lindley could play a mean violin, wild hair and all. Thanks, Mom and Dad.

Even on its own, independent of adult disapproval, rock music felt the need to get serious. I suppose we could blame Sgt. Pepper for this, but this hasn’t been an entirely bad thing. Let’s face it, for a lot of people, rock and roll music was just an excuse to act like an asshole. For every Woodstock, there’s at least one Altamont. So those of us who were not assholes – both listeners and musicians - were given a false choice between Significance or utter Stupidity. Choosing the former meant you were - and had - no fun; the latter meant that you were an ignorant clod. Foghat to the right of me, Genesis to the left of me - what’s a fellow to do? I wouldn’t resolve this dilemma satisfactorily until years later when I could absorb some punk rock.

And as I got older, I began to get the cosmic joke a little more. I could see how rock and roll would always be in danger of looking stupid when it took itself too seriously. Some of us get more serious over time, but those of us who are too serious to begin with sometimes learn to just lighten up. You can be unserious and smart at the same time.

It took time to appreciate rock and roll music that could be both, even when it was right in front of me. You can have your cake and eat it too, it said, by immersing yourself in the joy of the sound, having a good time with the theoretical stupidity (“Louie, Louie”), and totally rejecting the actual stupidity (see my posting “Most Awful Bands”). This is not easy for a teen-ager who takes himself way too seriously. I can barely manage it now.

But after a while, you realize that a good TV show is better than a bad book. And in the same way, good rock and roll is better than bad opera. Sometimes good rock and roll is an opera.

Sex (Not Really) and Drugs:

But I mustn’t ignore the second front of this particular war, which was a debate over lifestyle, by which I mean sex and drugs. Well drugs anyway. Sex (defined more or less as the seeing anyone else’s underwear, in any context whatsoever) wasn’t discussed. So let’s just check that one off right away.

A self evident axiom at the time was that Everybody who played rock music took drugs. My parents certainly thought so. “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” had a great line about it: “In a recent experiment, scientists gave LSD to lab rats. There were few side affects, but the rats now have an album in the Top 40.” Even I laughed at that one.

Drug addicts (i.e., anyone who ever tried an illegal drug in their lives) were bad people, and bad people couldn’t do things like make great music. So I had to defend my favorite artists from this charge. I told my parents that they were being unfair, and that they shouldn’t assume this about anyone, blah, blah, blah…. I really believed this; hence my need at the time to find “clean cut” groups (i.e. those adhering to my dad’s facial hair dictum, which I’d apparently internalized by this time. Sgt. Pepper, again, caused a crisis, with the Beatles now sporting mustaches.) I can now admit that I was being a bit naive, but only because my mom probably won’t read this.

One of the low points of this period was the day my mom marched into our bedroom one morning to announce, with relish, that one of our heroes – Mickey Dolenz of the clean cut Monkees – had been arrested for drug possession. (Pot? LSD? Heroin? What difference did it make? It was drugs!) I felt so betrayed that I went through my copy of “Sixteen” (wait, that can’t be right. I was only ten!) magazine and decided to spit on his picture. Since these magazines had LOTS of pictures, there were a bunch to choose from. I decided that I would spit on the 30^th one I found, which I got to about a third of the way through.

I made my way down to the kitchen, and heard on the news that it was Mick JAGGER who got arrested, not Mickey Dolenz! Of course he took drugs, mom! He was in the Rolling Stones! He practically had to. One perfectly good magazine ruined. I would find out later that Mick Jagger was a relative tea-totler, compared to everyone else around him. So I was wrong every which way from Sunday on this one.

Have Mouth, Will Defend:

Both personal experience and a perusal of Blender magazine force me to confront the fact that musicians may, in fact, be the most miserable excuses for human beings on the planet. (Oh wait, that’s Bill O’Reilly.) And when they interact with other humans, it’s the latter who usually get the worst of it. These friends and family members must endure them and thus pay a steep price for our joy. I hope there’s a special place in heaven for them because I will continue to require this joy until the day I die.

I think my problem was that I was trying to defend what can’t be defended. Once you try to fit music, or worse yet, the musicians themselves, into a set of philosophical preconditions, you’re going to run into trouble. The minute that irresistible hook comes around, you’ll be singing along with those lyrics about drowning puppies in a well. (What, you don’t remember that one?) Okay, may not. After all, we all draw our own personal line in the sand for when something is officially “offensive” to us, but it’s usually because the riff (or the punch line) isn’t good enough. I would call it my Guns n Roses line. And we all have a duty to encourage the good and discourage the bad. We should deny sex (yeah, this situation is always coming up) to those who profess an admiration for Hitler or John Tesh, both as punishment, and to clean up the gene pool.

But otherwise, if I may paraphrase some very unsound advice, if it sounds good, maybe you should just sit back and enjoy. And yes, I’ll admit that we’ll all draw the line at drowning puppies, but I wonder what I’ll be willing to sing along to before I get to that point? Hopefully not “Deutschland über Alles”.