Off The Map

I started a four part series about the Montreal music scene of my teen years. The first post is about Deja Voodoo. You can read it at: 


http://theairandtheearth.tumblr.com/

A Beard Of Stars

                                 

I wrote this for a friend's music site. The site was to be a blog but turned into a tumblr. I guess this was too long for a tumblr. A shorter version may end up there someday. In the meantime, to avoid feeling like I wasted my time, here is the full post.

In high school, my friends and I shared music. The worst thing you could do was buy a record that someone else already owned. Each new record was meant to be passed around, taped and thus added to the collective.

One day I found myself no longer friends, in fact enemies, with these people and also living in another city in what could equally be describe as an emergence form a cocoon as an exile to a cold, harsh wilderness. The first music I bought after this upheaval was T.Rextasy by T.Rex. T.Rex wasn't like any of the music I had been listening to before. It rocked, but with a serene confidence and a coolness that I had never encountered. It was great, it was odd, and it was mine and mine alone.

After the hits compilation T.Rextasy, I quickly followed it up with Slider. My cassette copy of Slider was borrowed, brought to a party, and lost by a roommate. With the 12 dollars he gave me to replace it in hand, I headed to a used record store where I found a vinyl copy of Slider and to my delight had enough left over for the record next to it as well. That bonus record I picked up that day was A Beard of Stars by Tyrannosaurus Rex, a duo who were one album away from shortening the name and filling out the sound with a full band.

I remember sitting in the basement and watching the needle make it's way through one T.Rextasy hit after another and I immediately knew this was meant for me. It was everything I loved about music and even several things I hadn't known I loved about music until the first notes of Raw Ramp reached out and became my new best friends; best friends I felt I had already known forever. However, A Beard of Stars was different.

The sound is not as warm and lush. No steady, reliable groove. While T.Rex moves along somewhere between a strut and a saunter, here it skitters, skips, flutters and floats. The cockiness is not there in Bolan's voice. He is not playing the cosmic rock star of Get It On. His voice is higher, jittery. His pronunciation so odd that he seems to be singing half English words and half words he made up himself or merely a series of guttural vowel sounds, tongue clucks and whimpers.  The lack of drums was a bit off putting at the time, as well. The best way to be sure you are in the process of being rocked is to have a big fat beat up in your face.

Side A and side B both open with instrumentals. On the album's first track, Prelude, small bell is struck and on the ninth strike a lead electric guitar rings in with a slow, convincing melody. Up until this point, Marc Bolan had been insistent on staying strictly acoustic, so it is surprising that this album opens with, basically, a guitar solo. What's more surprising is how he had a unique voice on the guitar from the first note to the end of his career. If there are any boys/girls out there who want to know what a lead electric guitar should sound like, listen to the two instrumentals here (the other being A Beard of Stars).

Prelude fades into the warm and deep acoustic guitar of one of the album's best songs, A Day Laye. Wha-wha-ed leads, bass, a couple of acoustic guitars, bongos, and backing vocals come together but never crowd this perfectly balanced pop song. Now I won't go track by track here, don't worry, because I could write an essay on each one (and who wants to read that shit?). Let me bunch them together into a few groups.

Woodland Bop, First Heart Mighty Dawn Dart, Pavilions Of Sun, and Dragon's Ear have a decided Rock 'n Roll bent to them with a mix of chugga chugga rhythms, hand claps and climactic choruses. Eddie Cochran via Middle Earth. Definitely a hint of the Tolkien tinged, string-of-words-that-just-sound-cool-together lyrics, boogie rhythms, and blazing leads that would define the T.Rex sound. 

By the Light of The Magical Moon, Great Horse, Lofty Skies, and Dove are dreamy, lilting tunes that move along like a flower petal that's fallen on the surface of a pond. All four are truly beautiful songs and sadly they are in a vein that would not be explored as deeply in the more rock focussed T.Rex. Everything from the lyrics to the melody to the instrumentation are so light, delicate and moving. A smile on your face and tears rolling down your cheeks.

Two goofball songs break the flow of the album a little bit. Organ Blues has long, sustained organ notes and a simple repetitive bongo beat that make it seem longer than it actually is. The melody is good  and the fairy tale lyrics about beasties and people living in the sea are charming enough to save it from being a skipper. Wind Cheetah, I have begrudgingly come to like. Again organ is prominent and the guitar line following the vocal melody creates a plodding feel. the guitar leads sound great but overall, it's a bit of a miss. You know what they say; true beauty only exist in contrast to ugliness, so there's that.

The last song is the monstrous five and a half minute long Elemental Child. The acoustic guitar is gone and one of the (still to this day) rawest electric guitars takes the spotlight. The song is pretty much a twelve bar blues song but if anyone could ever make that seem fresh and unexpected, it was Bolan. The song breaks down into some serious chugging in the second half and it's just a guy in a room seeing how much noise he can get out of an amp and a guitar. Again it's amazing to think that when he finally decided to go electric he came out of the gates already one of most original and awesome guitarists in the world. Way to go!

Also, I feel I have to mention how this song features some of the worst, most tentative bass player ever committed to vinyl. It could be that was what they were going for or it was an afterthought. Or maybe no thought at all. I'd like to know what the decision making was behind keeping that odd, muffled, plucked take. It is a part of an amazing whole which cannot be broken apart so I wouldn't change it but what  a strange choice.

Of course, the circumstances under which you first hear an album have a huge effect on how you perceive it at the time, and often forever. Some things I heard at the wrong time but later realized their value. Others lost their appeal once the moment had past. But twenty five years later, A Beard of Stars still has a hold on me. As I listen I can picture myself on a hillside overlooking a dale, glenn, brook, shire or what have you, Bolan's odd quivering voice mixing in with the rustling of leaves above us. But I can also picture two young musicians and a producer, in a room, enthusiastically trying to make something great. It's this rich evocativeness contrasted with the unmistakable, stripped down sound of guys enjoying pounding out music together that makes this one of the albums I have come back to the most in my life. 

That, and the feeling I still have that it is mine and only mine.

Trevor: What Went Wrong #3

Turnover (part two)

I was watching an interview with an artist (Thomas Nozkowski) recently and he said something that stuck with me. He said that artists always think what they are working on currently is their best work yet. But that's not always the case. What comes next will not necessarily be better than what came before.

However, this mind set is essential for an artist to keep moving. Although you may keep going back to the same themes, you try to approach from another angle, focus on a different aspect, in hopes of not only making a good work but also discovering a path to lead you on to something unexpected and exciting. It's the only way. Making things leads to making other things.

The same does not apply to being in a band. Being in a band requires two separate things. One is the creative process of writing music, lyrics and arranging them with the band. The other thing is to then repeat the same songs again and again with the aim of playing them as well as you possibly can.

I never got that second thing. I approached it as a visual artist always moving on to the next thing. I wrote songs at a breakneck pace and I always thought that the last song I wrote was the best or at least the most interesting. I think Trevor were active for maybe five years, and during that time we must have performed 60 to 70 songs on stage. there must be another 40 I wrote and recorded that were not introduced to the band or were done in the practice room but not live. Every time we performed there was at least one, but often more, new song that we were playing live for the first time. Exciting for us but maybe not the best for the paying audience.

It's one of my biggest regrets. I wish we had settled on a 15 song set list and just practiced and performed it to perfection. We should have played a constant live schedule and featured the same basic set each time. As it was, if someone ever did see us live more than once they may not have seen a single song twice. Just like in any commercial enterprise that depends on favorable reaction from customers who may drop in at any time, consistency is the key. If you have an off night, physically or emotionally, at least you can offer a competent well rehearsed set.

Unfortunately I was far more enthralled with the creative process and far less dedicated to perfecting what we already had. In the end, making stuff up is way more fun than practicing.

Trevor: What Went Wrong #2

Turnover (part one)

More reasons why my band never went anywhere.

The one constant from our first recording (a four track made in my parents' basement in Arvida that included a song called "I Stand" that stayed in our set list for a while) was that I wrote the songs, played guitar, sang, and my brother Mike played drums. Beyond the natural connections we had being brothers and having more or less the same musical history and taste, we were a good fit because we were always at the same level of competence with our respective instruments. We started just being able to get through a song and ended up being pretty good players in our own way.

For the most part, I gave up the drum arrangement to Mike, unless I had a very specific idea in mind: a break here, ride the floor tom here, a certain feel. Our first bass player, Chantal,  wrote her own bass lines. Her ability was limited much like ours was so mostly she followed what I played and wasn't writing elaborate bass melodies. She actually wrote the only song we ever did that wasn't written be me. It was based on a bass riff that was pretty much "Brand New Love" by Sebadoh but on bass. Nonetheless it was and is a great riff. Unfortunately the song we made from it didn't do it justice. Chantal was friends with the coolest of the cool in the Mtl. scene. She seemed to be playing with us out of a lack of a better offers. It was like she was always looking past us, over our shoulder waiting for someone more interesting to come in the room. I knew her time with Trevor was limited. I don't think she ever invited her cool friends out to see us play, even.

On the positive side, she'd sometimes forget how much cooler than us she was and she could be a really nice person. I think she was going through a lot of stuff at the time that we never discussed so I shouldn't be too hard on her. She introduced me to a lot of great music (Sebadoh, Superchunk, The Muffs, and much more) that really changed my song writing. Also she was down for practicing as often as possible. I was a jobless bum at the time, Mike was going to school (?) maybe, and she was on a similar schedule to me. We rehearsed four or more times a week at a space on Bleury that was occupied by some of the guys who went on to start Hotel2Tango and God Speed...  It was cold and the electricity wasn't grounded. That winter was one of the coldest I have ever lived through in Montreal and the place was frigid. Also the mic shocked my lips every time I sang too close so that I had blisters on my mouth for weeks. But we managed to play a show in less than three months after forming and we didn't embarrass ourselves. Actually I think we were remarkably tight which made up for many other shortcomings. I don't remember how many shows she played with us but we didn't record any songs with her on bass.

Our next bass player, Dave,  was a far, far better musician than we were so I let him have free reign and usually he came up with something cool that I couldn't have come up with in a million years. This was the peak of the band. Some of the songs were maybe not the best I've written but we practiced a lot and played like a well oiled machine, honing our set list (which changed too much, more on that later).

Our first set list was mostly the same as the one we were playing with Chantal but we were a better band at that point. We played a bunch of shows at Station 10, the bottom of the barrel of the handful of live venues in Mtl. at the time. Mostly we played to friends of the other bands who could not have hated us more. We cleared the bar more than once as I remember. We recorded a bit because Dave actually had a 12 track in his apartment. He later went on to have his own studio for a while. He was also playing in, what was becoming, a very successful ska band. He eventually moved on to be with them full time. Couldn't blame him.

Next, my friend Flo came on board after we had taken a hiatus of over a year. She's a pretty strong willed lady so I let her play what she wanted to and was almost always happy with the results. She never played live with us but we did record an 8 song cassette that I think featured some of our best songs. Flo, always had a few hundred other things going on so it was not surprising when she moved in favor of one of them.

The last line up included two girls I had met at art school and necessitated that I write every one's part ,except Mike's. So I came up with bass lines, and keyboard melodies. Pretty crazy! We played live only a few times but we were pretty good. We recorded a four song CD and by this point I had enough control that I guess I can also claim most of the blame for any short comings we had. It was a fun challenge to write all the parts but in the end I think it showed off my limitations as a musician. It would've been nice to have someone else's input at times. One girl enjoyed our time together but couldn't make it a priority. She also had bad stage fright and didn't enjoy playing live. The other I dated for a short time. It didn't end well. That was that. Classic.

All these changes were not conducive to gathering any kind of momentum. With each personnel change the band's sound also underwent a fundamental change. Sometimes the change was necessary to fit the playing of the new member and sometimes was due to my own restlessness. Unfortunately not one bass player was ever the take charge organizer type the we so desperately needed.

Hot Dog / Cold Dog

Hot Dog 
R&B

Most of my dear readers are not big R&B/ Hip Hop fans, this I know. So with that in mind, if you were to get only one R&B/Hip Hop album this year, I would suggest Miguel's Kaleidoscope Dream.

A lot of thought and care went into the song writing on this album. It's relatively short with most songs coming in under four minutes. The lyrics are smart and deal with everyday emotional concerns in plain unassuming language. There's no braggy millionaire playboy B.S. The production is excellent, surprising, fresh but always in service to the song and not just ear-catching novelty. What more do you want. Heavy rotation at Spindles Manor.

I know much has been said and typed about the R&B/ Hip hop - Rock innovation gap but let me just add a few words to the lament. I'm not going to say that no great Rock albums have been made in the last 15 years or so, or that nothing new, unexpected or innovative has been added to the Rock vocabulary, but I will say that one big difference is that when R&B artists push the edges out a bit and expand on what has come before, always looking for a new approach or method they also try to write hit songs. Not only has Miguel made something the critics can stroke to but the first single also went to number one.

In the late 70's/early 80's (78 to 83: The Golden Age) the so called "new wave" bands wanted to remake, remodel, and reform what Rock was and could do. They pushed the boundaries sonically, lyrically and even presented themselves in a whole new way. They had massive artistic ambition but even more importantly, they wanted to write hits. They wanted to follow their artistic path but that path had to lead to the top of the pop charts. Being a cult band is great but changing what everyone considers mainstream is an even more admirable accomplishment. They were being subversive but at the same time seduced everyone into loving them. How cool is that?

Since then, Rock (of any substance) has slowly ceded the charts to Hip Hop or R&B. When Rock did reach the mainstream (Cobain, Vedder, et al. whined endlessly how they never wanted anyone beyond cool kids in the know to like their music. Boo hoo!).

So here we are in 2012 and if you want to hear thrilling pop hits with some weight: Miguel!

Cold Dog 
Rockin' Pneumonia

It's been about two years since my asthma's gotten severe enough that I need a barrage of daily medicines to keep it under control. I think I'm finally recognizing the patterns, triggers and consequences of it and can maybe start trying to head things off or at least minimize the damage.

Apart from being allergic to every living creature, both animal and vegetable, dust seems to be my fiercest enemy. A more concerted effort to cut down on the amount of house dust is being made. As someone who has never been overly cleanly I need to constantly remind myself to vacuum. Actually, I don't even really have to vacuum as we have a robot slave that takes care of that for us but the dumb thing still can't get around well, so I at least have to clear the floors of detritus before setting him loose. It'd be nice to get that done once a week.

However, a big problem that I haven't found a solution to is chalk dust. Dust that rains down on me as I write on the blackboard, that coats everything I touch, that's on my skin, in my eyes and nose, which dries everything out but my lungs, which get busy making liters of phlegm.

Here's the pattern that's developed. I've mentioned the sand that blows off the desert in China and hangs over south-western Japan like mustard gas every spring and fall. That is the worst. So that gets the allergies going. After a few weeks I get a cold. It goes away and comes back as bronchitis. I get really sick but try to stick it out and eventually miss a couple of days of work. A few months later; repeat.

Late August/ early September, the cloud settled in. It was worse than usual and I was on heavy medication with plenty of side effects so that I could drag myself to work and then home and that's all. After a month or more the demon sand blew out of town and I inevitably caught a cold. I started coughing up the the most vile phlegm buy the bucket-load. I figured it was bronchitis and I could ride it out. Three days later I broke down and went to the doctor. He said bronchitis. Antibiotics and whatnot. I get worse and go back. I get I.V. antibiotics. My wife checks out my blood test results and says I have pneumonia. Three days later the doctor catches up and says it pneumonia. He basically orders me to take a day off work.

That's right. I have no vacations to take so I worked through the whole thing, potentially infecting hundreds of people. That's the way it works in a country with no sick days.

Until about a week ago, I was still very weak and pretty much came home after work and collapsed. I have to realize that this is the new norm and managing it has to be my approach. Winter is coming and that is a break from the allergies, at least the outdoor ones. It would be great to work somewhere where I wasn't exposed to hundreds of sniffing, coughing germ bags everyday. I'm a perfect example of someone who needs to do solitary work, preferably from inside a hermetically sealed plastic bubble.

Trevor : What Went Wrong #1

Like millions and millions of other middle class white kids who grew up in the eighties, I was in a band. We recorded a few times, committing about 15 or so songs to tape and I have boxes full of cassettes I recorded alone on a four track. I am pretty proud of some songs we did and at least not embarrassed by any of the songs I wrote. We never managed to rise above being extremely marginal in the Montreal music scene of the early nineties. I've been looking into digitizing some old cassettes of music I/ we made before they are lost to the sands of time and it got me thinking about my foray into music making. I thought that being well over ten years removed from it all it might be interesting to write a sort of post-mortem on what I'll call (with great reservation and frantic air-quoting) my music career. 

Our band was called Trevor, which is neither a great name nor a terrible name. Much like, let's say Pavement, it falls well into that blurry zone between brilliant and stupid. If Pavement sucked it would be a pretty stupid band name. They ended up being a very good band so no one really gives the name a seconds thought. It just is. The other day I was talking to my wife about Nirvana, and being younger and Japanese, she wasn't really aware of them. She asked" Is that from Buddhism?" I said yes. She said " That's a stupid name for a band." And she's right.

So in no real order here are some key things that made it so we had absolutely no success, rather than the very minute success we deserved.

The Voice

I am not a very good singer. There are quite a few bands fronted by guys who could be described as "not good singers" but the difference is that they found what was good about their voice and just F***ed the rest. I often sang the wrong notes and could be a bit hard to listen to for the more delicate audience members but I feel confident saying that I had an "interesting" voice. By that I mean a voice with a good tone that conveyed emotion in an engaging and idiosyncratic way. When I had the confidence to let my voice out in the way I thought I should, it was sometimes, at the very least, not dull. Arguably, people may have left in disgust but never out of boredom. I have met many people who have been blessed with good singing voices and the ability to hit the right notes who were not gifted with an idea of how to deliver those notes in an engaging way. They never rose above competent or pleasant. I was not blessed with this ability and even on the best night out rarely did I sing "well", I never rose to the level of competence nor pleasantness. I did have an idea of how to deliver a song, however. I think my shortcomings as a singer (honestly some shows I was just tone deaf and must have been torture to listen too) turned off a lot of spectators.

The biggest problems about my voice arose when we recorded. Whoever was in charge of the the session would always point out which notes went wrong and get me to redo them, punch me in, and ultimately lose the whole feel of the performance. My confidence was easily shaken and the final result would be my usual barely on key singing but with the added downside of a very nervous and tentative performance. The best vocal recordings I ever did were either done in one take straight through or at most cut in half and done in two consecutive takes. I remember my friend Dan sat in on a session once and, after our bass player who was engineering the recording had made me stop and redo a few times, said "That's how he sings! Let him do it. It's what's good about the song." Confidence back, I tore through in one take and it came out quite well.

I'm not sure why I was the singer. My older brother, Mike, and I started the band. He played drums and I played guitar. I wrote the songs which included lyrics and melody. No one else was around and I obviously knew how the songs were supposed to go so… That makes sense but how I remained the singer is another question. I'm pretty sure I always thought that a stand alone singer (who doesn't play an instrument) was not cool, and what kind of person does that anyway? But getting another guitarist/ singer would mean that someone else would surely be writing songs which would cut into my songs and that person would slowly take over the creative direction of the band. Performing my own songs was why I wanted to be in a band (I still don't particularly enjoy playing guitar. It's a means to an end.) so I wasn't interested in sharing. That's probably why we stayed a three piece for most of our existence, even a second guitarist was too much of a threat to grab the reigns. 

I was in a band a few years earlier where I played bass (poorly). It was my first real band and my first major undertaking after moving to the big city. I had formed it (along with Mike) with the idea that I would write the songs. I found a guitarist who didn't have any song writing ambitions. Then we found a singer. The singer brought in a guitarist who started bringing in his songs (which were fucking awful). My brother left the band, a new drummer came in. Next thing I know, it's not my band anymore. I missed a recording session (don't remember why, most likely alcohol related) and got booted from the band. I never forgot. I switched to guitar because bass players can't be band leaders and I swore that would never happen again.

3000 Years Ago

Who are these guys? I don't know and don't want to know. I like the mystery surrounding some bands. My brother and I were introduced to Anthony Meynell and Squire by my brother's friend Pierre (of WC for Functionary fame). We knew nothing about these guys except the date they recorded and that they were obviously British. Over twenty years later, I still know nothing. I like not knowing. Maybe my brother and I willed them into being. Maybe they were a collective dream like the one we had about a cartoon staring Rick Springfield called Do You Believe in Magic? I could easily find out everything I want to know and more from The Internet. Both probably have multiple fan sites. But I don't want to. A little mystery is a good thing. Especially when living in an era where any mystery can be dispelled with a few keystrokes.

Growing up in an isolated northern kingdom with no access to decent music magazines, radio, record stores, or even knowledgeable music fans, mysteries tended to remain mysteries. Bands I liked seemed to have dropped from the sky and being unable to find any trace of them outside my or a few of my friends' basements, I often felt they may have been figments of our imaginations, created just for us. Finding a stray mention in an otherwise Metal focussed magazine , or the occasional video slipped into Music Plus' "Rage" (no not "Rage". What was it called before that?) would be so thrilling! They exist! I'm not crazy!

No evidence of Squire was ever found… until now. I downloaded it from itunes. Who would've thought to look?

So how is it? After a couple of listens, it is definitely falling into the "better than I remember" category. Before I listened I could only hazily remember a couple of songs that had stood out at the time, but ten seconds into each song my memory was fully restored and I was singing along to tunes I hadn't heard in twenty years!

They were part of the late seventies/ early eighties mod revival (despite there insistence to the contrary : "Me and my friends we get pretty violent/ when you say we're just a mod revival yeah!"). In the eighties revival that was big in the decade that just past, the focus was mainly on a handful of post punk bands and mining their deep vein of arty, moody pop, so it's easy to forget what else was going on in the eighties' underground. For instance, the huge number of sixties influenced bands. Every city and town had it's own mop-topped band churning out Nuggets covers/ rip offs. They were everywhere. I guess Squire can be included in this group. However, they don't go in for the rough and sloppy sounds of the Nuggets influenced garage bands. They play for the same team as the Jam. A heavy mod influence coupled with a crisp, clear, uncluttered sound that highlights great hooks and a tight band. 

I was reminded of Raphael Saadiq again and again while listening to Squire. It may sound strange but they both do the same thing. They operate in a past genre without aping it, sounding nostalgic, or being a lesser version of the respective styles they've chosen to play. Squire do absolutely nothing that hadn't already been done one generation earlier by their heroes but damn they do it well! Great song writing, performed well, and recorded perfectly will always be worth listening to. The more I listen to music the more I feel the pop music timeline collapsing on itself.  Is this from '66, '81, or '09? Who cares? Not interested.

Me and my ears are glad we dug this one up. 

TNT

It was a blindingly sunny day in mid-winter and I was headed over to some girl's house. For those of you who didn't grow up or have never even been north of the 49th parallel let me try to explain a sunny day in the middle of winter. There are actually quite a few of them. The sky is bluer than in summer when often a white haze covers like a thin wash but it is a deeper blue like you can almost see outer space through it. The sun reflects off the snow covered road, off the snowbanks, off the roof tops like a room full of mirrors. It gives your eyes nowhere to rest. The sunny days are often the coldest as clouds act as an insulating blanket trapping what little heat there is and giving us all a little relief. It's dry and crisp and the spectacular sunshine almost makes you forget the cold

So anyway, I'm 13, turning 14 and two or three of my friends and I were invited over to some girl's house that was about a ten minute walk from my house. I don't remember being particularly interested in any of the girls but I've always had a bad mix of wanting every girl to like me the most and being interested in any girl who actually does. So despite having no specific intentions, I was dressing to impress. I had had girlfriends since elementary school but around this time it seemed to be changing, girls learned the word "immature" and fell in love with the sound, and guys I hung out with started to shape their style of dress and the music they listened to with an eye to what the ladies liked. This still hadn't occurred to me, or if it had I somehow thought my unique coolness would impress them more than if I just parroted the other boys' style.

I put on my tight black jeans, probably a three quarter sleeve concert shirt, maybe a jean vest (though I hope not), parted my longish hair down the middle, all the while blasting TNT by AC/DC out of my one speaker Sears cassette player. I was so pumped. I knew all the words. I had known this song for a few years already but for some reason it had made a big resurgence and was on heavy rotation in my bedroom around this time. I headed out most likely hatless and possibly gloveless as well. The only thing stronger than the forces of nature is a teenager's desire to be cool. I walked along singing the song over and over just under my breath. " See me ride out of the sunset on your colour TV screen. Out for all that I can get, if you know what I mean. Women to the left of me, and women to the right. Ain't got no gun. Ain't got no knife but don't you start no fight."

With the sunshine and the song in my head I was about to explode by the time I got to the house. I went in and my friends were there. They were wearing pastel polo shirts and (perhaps) light blue faded jeans. Their hair was gelled and spiked in what was at the time a Corey Hart inspired hair style ( the important part was to have your bangs combed down onto your forehead while the rest stood straight up). We sat around listening to Honeymoon Suite, Platinum Blonde and what was everyone's favorite song that day, Komerade Kiev or maybe Eurasian Eyes by the above mentioned Corey Hart. I didn't know what to think. I felt betrayed by my friends. They couldn't actually like what was going on here. Why are they putting on this act. I had no chance of the girls liking me most so I quickly found a hundred reasons to hate them. I guess I could have thought "Well, I'm just different, I guess. To each his own." But that was not me. No sir!

" What the fuck is going on here? What's wrong with these idiots? How can I demonstrate to them what a wrong turn they've taken and that the path they are on leads to Dicktown? Your clothes make you look like a child trying to win his mother's approval by making his bed and this music is joyless. I'm 13! I'm alive! I want music that makes me feel bigger and better than I am, makes me feel like I want to hug/ punch someone or anyone! How can I right this ship? I know! You have to hear TNT!"

Hang On Sloopy

Yet another series gets underway on The Mighty Dawn Dart. Although until I post a second article lets not get too attached to this "series". My mind has turned to jelly in the stifling Nagasaki summer humidity and then congealed under the, at first refreshing but eventually liver failure inducing, air conditioning so the fast pace posting I was hoping for has not materialized. Welcome to the jungle baby! Welcome to the jungle, indeed!

I'd like to share with you some songs. These are not the greatest of all time. They actually are not part of any "Ten Best" nor do they represent any genre or era in Pop music. These are songs that I was exposed to as a child, perhaps I even loved them as a child, and they just stuck with me. Others grew into the level of appreciation I have for them now. These are songs that I have listened to on a pretty regular basis, at times more, at times less, for my entire life. Well, to be honest, I've drawn the line, for now, at ten years old. So, some of these songs I've had on semi-heavy rotation for the last 27 years, some for more. It would be interesting if you could somehow figure out how many times , in all forms form vinyl, cassette, cd, etc., you've heard certain songs over your lifetime. I wonder if the results would surprise some of us. Anyway, get to work on that itunes. Earn that "Genius" moniker.

I don't know when I first became aware of "Hang On Sloopy". I'm guessing I was under five and it was part of a bunch of songs that I loved as a kid such as Flying Purple People Eater, Shimmy Shimmy Koko Bop, and Pepperment Twist. Songs either squarely in the novelty category or flirting with it. Our summer family trips out to Moncton, NB, in the rolling fortress that was the 1976(?) Chrysler New Yorker were soundtracked by a single 8 track cartridge of great fifties/sixties songs like Devil in a Blue Dress, Runaway and Let's Dance. Sloopy may have been on that one too. It also, very likely, was on at least one cassette mix that my parents' friend, Fred, made and that I got hours of of pleasure from. I know Louie Louie was on there but it was the sax-heavy version by Paul Revere and the Raiders. It wasn't until years later that I heard the definitive Kingsmen version. Of the Louie Louie/Wild Thing songs (one of three major song groups from the time, the two others being the Little Latin Lupe Lu and Gloria groups) I for some reason identified most with Hang On Sloopy.

Uncharacteristically, I did a bit of research on the song and the performers of the version I think of when I think of the song, The McCoys. First off, I knew somehow, that the song was produced by a group of songwriter/producers who also played as The Strangeloves. The Strangeloves' big hit  was I Want Candy and they laid down the music for Hang On Sloopy hoping to release it as their next single. However, in a rush to beat The Dave Clark Five to the presses (they planned to release a version as well) they recruited a young band from Dayton, Ohio. The band was lead by a teenager by the name of Rick Derringer (!) The youngsters came in and laid down the vocal track as well as the guitar solo (still to this day I can't decide on which side of awful it falls). It's a cool story. The music definitely has The Strangeloves drum heavy arrangement style, also evident on another single by them Night Time. Rick Derringer obviously was blessed with some natural talent as he pulls off a fabulous vocal performance and he would go on to have a lengthy, if not C level, career.

What do I love about this song? The title is odd and it remains a mystery, at least to me, why the heroine of the story is named Sloopy. The role reversal on the lover from the wrong side of the tracks is quite unique as well. I've always loved the lyric " Sloopy let your hair down girl. Let it hang down on me." Again a little odd but so sweet and a bit sexy at the same time. The song kicks of at full blast with the rush of the chorus and quiets down for the whisper soft verse. The song reaches it's peak with some "shake it shake it"s and one of my all time favorite screams. The punches at the end tie it up in a nice little bow and if you're not smiling your not human.

A lot of people have talked about the mid sixties as a golden era and what I like about that time was a focus on hits. It seemed like it didn't matter how it got done. If you had to patch it together with studio musicians or some local garage band, you just wanted to get the next thing out there and outdo last week's sensation.If you created something to make the kids get up and move, great. If you created something beautiful and lasting, bonus. It's an urgency and energy that has long since left Rock/Pop music. In the age of earnest bands turning out 80 minute long albums every couple of years the rush of newness is more like an inescapable 10 000 mile wide lava flow. I think we can maybe still look to hip hop for that one up manship, and the search for the next beat, the next sound that knocks people back.

Oh well enjoy the song and don't be shy to let me know what you think of it.

Styx vs. Journey vs. REO Speedwagon vs. The World

In the first three or four years of the nineteen eighties the top forty was full of rock music by bands such as Styx, Foreigner, Toto, Journey, Survivor, Asia, and REO Speedwagon. Not to mention The Go Gos, The Pretenders, John Cougar, Steve Miller Band, Rick Springfield, Survivor, Joan Jett, and Loverboy. Now don't get ahead of yourself, I'm not going to argue that this was some kind of golden age but I do think it was Top 40 Rock's last stand. Especially one handful of groups that that are often lumped together (Journeyrstyxreospeedwagon) deserve to be given some thought (or don't but you can't stop me!)

These oft derided bands shared some things in common like : virtuoso playing, bold powerful singers, ambitious song writing and arranging, slick and extravagant production. Or as it's often remembered wanker guitarists, cheesey vocals, and overblown and over produced songs. Below I will argue that the former is more accurate and, making every effort not to sound like an old grouch, I will try to place them in context vis a vis the current less than stellar state of commercial rock.

I've recently come across articles and radio shows featuring self satisfied hipsters deriding, mocking, dismissing, and giggling at the eighties. Especially in the media, and not only music media, things get lazily repeated and recycled and repeated until they become a created truth that goes unquestioned.(e.g.Sgt. Pepper's is the greatest album ever) That the eighties were terrible music-wise and fashion-wise is one of these. Sure, once in a while someone will write something to say" See there was some non-crap..." I found this top 100 list on Pitchfork that should have been titled "A Hipsters Guide to the Obvious"

This isn't a defense of the eighties, though. There's a bigger problem here and that is the inability to remove music from the cultural context in which it was created and listen to it as a song, pure and simple. I'm sure there were a lot of reasons to dislike REO Speedwagon at the time they were charting. I'm sure they were seen as the uncool flip side of the new wave of bands emerging out of the punk explosion. No doubt, Toto didn't compare favourably with The Clash. Journey weren't exactly out to question the very notions of a rock song but and the same time they didn't earn the "authenticity" tag that Bruce Springsteen did. But they didn't want to or need to. They wanted to make something shiny, big, and awesome. They wanted to make something everyone would love. You can't have the extreme without the mainstream so they fulfilled a function and took their responsibility seriously. They weren't young punk kids either. They were seasoned musicians that had been kicking around the music biz, with varying degrees of success, throughout the seventies. Moreover, who cares! Twenty five years later it surely doesn't matter who was cooler, who wore what, who said what. Is "Too Much Time (On my Hands)" a great song? Yes, it is.

I don't mean great in a "guilty pleasure" way either. "Guilty pleasure" has to be the most inane,weakest, most intellectually cowardly concept ever! Don't get me started! (too late). How could anyone possibly be ashamed of something they like. Are you that insecure? Are you that afraid to stand by your opinions? Are you just too intellectually flaccid to be able to justify your tastes? Why do I like something? Because it's good and I don't like things that are not good. If everything I like is good then why would I feel embarrassed to like it? I have thought about why I like what I like ( and don't like what I don't like) and I can explain why if pressed to do so. (You know hard it can be to pry an opinion out of me).If you can't then what have you been using your brain for all this time? If you feel "guilty" for liking a Phil Collins song your an ass. 

In this time where we often know a musicians "story" before we've even heard their music, where critics biographize and psycho-analyze because it's easier than actually writing about music, combing through lyrics to find a tenuous connection to some bio blurb from a press release, it is often difficult to separate an artist from their art. Now, I have been guilty of this a million times, hating some band because of something completely extraneous to the music they've produced. I hate something they said, what they wear, what the represent, how they are promoted, (and the hardest to overcome) I hate their fans. But I've grown up and I realize that I love music and not musicians. Do I want to know what Lilly Allen has to say about life, love and politics? No, not really. But she made a good album and I'm interested in that.

A while back, I found myself at a bar for some reason, with a bunch of British guys. I guess it was around the time that The Arctic Monkeys first album came out. I mentioned that I thought the Hard-Fi album was actually better. They looked at me like I'd just shit on the table and offered them some. I mentioned this to another British friend later and he said that the perception of Hard-Fi was that they were posers and wanna-be's and who knows what else.I guess the singer had said or done something that rubbed people the wrong way. Being completely unaware of the media buzz on either band I had come to an honest judgement based solely on my ears and brain. They may really prefer The Arctic Monkey's, that's perfectly fine, but they seemed to have rejected and embraced the two bands based on something other than the music entirely.

Getting back to Styx, REO Speedwagon and Journey, and why I decided to write about them, they encompass everything top 40 Rock should be and is no longer. Their songs were big, with REO Speedwagon leaning towards the soft side, Styx leaning towards the pomp and conceptual pretensions, while Journey went straight down the middle. REO Speedwagon played with the sweet love song with a rock edge and wrote some great melodies with a great combination of familiarity and complexity. They sometimes suffered from some overdone, fussy production that brushed over everything with a wash of tinny digital reverb but on their best songs like " Take It On the Run" and "Can't Fight this Feeling" they sound slick and confident. Styx go for the knock out every time out and when it comes together it's fantastic, like on "Babe" or " Too Much Time (on my hands)", but can be embarrassing like on the excessive "Suite Madame Blue". Thanks to their unadulterated and unashamed ambition, even the failures are endearing and command a certain respect. The ability and willingness too reach too far and risk looking pompous and foolish has been lost in modern Rock, it seems. Would any top 40 Rock band ever release a song like Mr.Roboto today? If they could make an amusing video that hinted they were probably just kidding about the whole thing then maybe, yes. Styx were not kidding.Finally, Journey, of the three, have stood the test of time the best. Solid songwriting, in any era, lyrics with a narrative sense and broad appeal, all topped off by the breath-taking, thrilling, all-time quality voice of Steve Perry. "Anyway You Want It" is a fist pumping, scissor kicking, lip sync into the mirror anthem. " Don't Stop Believing" is an anthem that out Springsteens Springsteen in it's small town, blue collar appeal while at the same time soaring wit a huge chorus and immediately unforgettable melody. The low key "Faithfully" is Perry at his vocal peak.

Listening to these bands now it's hard to imagine music with this combination of songwriting ambition, musical chops, supreme confidence and complete unselfconciousness  ever being made again. None of this is too say that this is the best music ever, far from it. They kept a foot in the elaborate overwrought prog-rock of the seventies while working in the synth sounds and beats of the more innovative early eighties bands. This may have been a cynical compromise to make their mark on the charts but 25 or more years removed it sounds like the next step for Rock and unfortunately the last step. Music blew apart in the late eighties where "alternative" bands started to go double platinum. U2, former outsiders, became the biggest band in the world. Eddie Vedder's overblown Rock hiding behind fake humility and anti rock star posing made it impossible for another Steve Perry to ever emerge. Give these bands a listen and think about what a unique time in Rock they represent. And I dare you not to have fun.