Hawking Comedy

On Saturday morning in Chinatown in NYC, you can get pirated DVDs of last night’s new releases from the movie theaters. Women literally wave them in your face as you walk by. On a more discrete note, women whisper to tourists, “You want handbags?” Undoubtedly, they are counterfeit jobs made in sweatshops. The women whisper probably because they don’t want cops shutting them down. I passed one storefront that had been closed down for selling counterfeit merchandise. It’s a spit in the ocean.

But the strangest hawking I see on the streets is for comedy shows. It used to be in New York, guys would be pedaling strip joint admissions. Now in Times Square and the West Village, you hear the shouts of “seen on HBO, Comedy Central, Letterman!” The hawkers tend to be boy and girl next door types, quite unlike the ones that used to scream out “fresh and creamy” in the seedy days of old.

Why do comedy clubs have to resort to hawking their wares on the street to sell tickets? I went to a lot of jazz clubs. No one was hawking outside. Same with theater. Even the strip joints – now called Gentlemen’s Clubs (What kind of “gentleman” pays 100 bucks to drink watered down scotch and have some skanky girl with a drug habit grind naked against his privates anyhow?) – near Ninth Avenue tend be oh so discrete.

I think the answer is that we don’t value comedy very much. Comic authors of novels for instance rarely get their due. Comic music acts are usually ignored. Movie comedies rarely win Oscars. We love to laugh, sure. But when it comes to entertainment, comedy is viewed as lowbrow.

I don’t quite get it. For me, great comedy is the highest form of entertainment and art. Great comedy makes you laugh and think at the same time. From Midsummer Night’s Dream to Rabelais to Christopher Buckley, it’s the stuff that sticks in my head and resonates. Woody Allen used to make wonderful and funny movies. Now he makes forgettable after forgettable film about gentiles behaving badly. Critics predictably love many of these “serious” films. For me, they are snoozefests. Give me the prison breakout scene in Take the Money and Run where the carved out-of-soap gun turns to suds during a rainstorm – for my money one of the funniest scenes ever in movies – anytime.

We shouldn’t have to hawk comedy. People should be lining up outside the door for the precious treat of laughter.

Cole Porter’s Piano

A little while back someone asked me if I had to pick only one CD what would it be. I didn't hesitate. Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter was my answer. That answer has been true for about a decade (before that it was Billie Holiday from the 1930s). The reasons are simple. No one ever wrote a better lyric than Cole Porter. No pop singer has ever sung as flawlessly as Ella Fitzgerald. It is truly a marriage made in heaven.

Yesterday I walked six blocks out of my way to see Cole Porter's piano, the one he used to write many of his songs while living at the Algonquin Hotel. I would have loved to play it, but alas, they would have kicked me out if I had tried to do that. Instead I rubbed my hand against the tan Steinway for good luck, kind of like rubbing Buddha's belly. I could use the juju.

I grew up in the rock era, the golden age of rock and roll. I still listen to the newer stuff, but hardly ever anything I listened to as a kid. Rock has its merits. But on the whole it isn't as literate or intelligent – in the golden age or now – as the songs of people like Gershwin, Mercer, Arlen and Porter. It tends to be self-indulgent and pretentious, two things that Cole Porter definitely isn't.

When I listen to Ella sing Cole Porter, I often try to imagine the studio where the recordings were made. The band has charts. There is no overdubbing. They play straight to tape and before recording tape was invented cut the song directly on a disc (where the term "cut" still used today to denote a recorded song comes from). Maybe they do this two or three times, pick the best version and then they're done. I can't conceive of any band today having the talent to do this and sound as good.

I'm a superstitious guy and if in the next week or so I uncork a great song, I'm going to attribute it all to rubbing my hand against Cole Porter's piano.

I don't know where songs come from. A songwriter gets an idea in his or her head, and then it just happens. Who knows why or how? When I write a good song, I can feel the buzz while I'm doing it. It's better than any drug that's for certain. The elation can lasts for days after. I will likely never write a song as good as Easy To Love, but I know what Cole Porter felt when he wrote it. I wouldn't trade that feeling for anything.

In Praise of Being a Square

Yesterday, I went to see a new movie, Ratatouille. Yes, I know it’s a kids movie. But I didn’t go with any kids. I went because I wanted to see it. And I loved the thing. It was funny, smart and charming. As a matter of fact, it’s probably a little too smart for kids under about nine. Regardless, going to see a G-Rated movie isn’t a hip thing to do. To admit enjoying it is uber-unhip. If that means, I’m not hip, that’s fine with me because I’ve never been hip and I’ve never been cool. I never wanted to be.

In high school, I did a lot of drugs. For some, that was hip. For me, it was self-medication. I needed to numb myself. I wasn’t following any trends. I was just in a tremendous amount of emotional pain. I don’t recommend self-medication by the way. Two of my friends from that era died as a result of it.

Hip to me means following the latest trends in fashion and pop culture. With regard to fashion, hip clothes are way too expensive. Yesterday, I saw a belt for sale for 400 bucks. I’m not paying that kind of money to hold up my pants. Call me cheap. I don’t care. I pay attention to my appearance, sure. I wear a lot of basic black. If that ever goes out of fashion, it will likely take me about four or five years to adjust, the time it takes for my clothes to wear out.

I listen to a lot of contemporary music. But that’s almost entirely for business purposes. To be frank, I could care less about the latest teen heartthrob who barely knows how to play an instrument and can’t sing, but looks great in the latest fashions. As for indie rock, I find almost all of it to be pretentious, unintelligent and irritatingly depressing. For example, take Wilco, a band that quite a few males my age who try to be hip adore. Please no, anything but that. I’d much rather listen to some old record that no one under the age of 80 cares about.

I went to the Museum of Modern Art yesterday. That’s probably not a hip thing to do. It’s more of a “young parents still pretending to be hip” thing to do when you’re towing your children around. I saw a lot of that there yesterday. But I don’t even want to pretend to be hip. If I had my choice I’d rather be at the Metropolitan Museum looking at Greek sculpture and pottery.

Hip to me also means a level of narcissism that goes with being unable to commit to fully loving someone else. I happen to be all for commitment. If I were running for president, I’d run on a commitment platform. I love my sweetie. I will love her until my dying day. If that means I’m not hip, I’m happy to be as square as Mr. Rogers.

Being hip is overrated. Square is where it’s at, dude. Square might one day become the new hip. If it happens, I’ll be on the ground floor of the latest trend. I'm not holding my breath.

Standing Out in a Crowd

A couple of nights ago, I went with my family to see the play Avenue Q. I’d heard sniping from someone who writes musicals and has had one on Broadway about how Avenue Q wasn’t very good. But you never know whether that sniping is simply jealousy. After I saw the musical I understood what he was saying. But I still thought it was a clever, fun show.

Avenue Q is really a jukebox musical, a bunch of fun tunes with no single theme and a book that tries to glue them together. It borrows heavily from the Muppets and in fact is essentially a Muppet show for adults. The melodies are pedestrian, many of the rhymes in the songs are weak, but the tunes are often funny and witty as all get out. They even have a song with the same title as a song I wrote, Schadenfreude. And the performances are top notch.

Great performances are almost a given on Broadway. The talent pool is deep. As I walked to the theater to get our tickets, I passed by marquees for Angela Lansbury, Vanessa Redgrave, and Frank Langella vehicles. Unlike Avenue Q, the plays these big stars are in are completely forgettable. It’s a given that the pool of talent always outstrips the number of decent plays on Broadway. It’s true in movies and TV too. There are so many wonderful performers and so little for them to do.

What’s interesting to me is that below those great performers are other great talents who never get a chance to shine. For every Vanessa Redgrave, there are likely a couple hundred equally talented others who could play her parts to rave reviews. There’s only room for a precious few at the top and the difference between the “stars” and “nobodies” is often non-existent.

If your dream is to become a Broadway star or a music icon maybe the hardest situation to handle is watching someone you know make it when you didn’t. I’ve talked to two people who have been in that situation. One was a woman from Fresno who went to high school with Audra McDonald. When every lead part came up in her high school, she’d lose out. I could see the pain in her face when she told me this.*

I saw the same pain when I talked to someone who went to high school with Norah Jones. The person is probably equally as talented and just as pretty. But there’s only room at the top for one velvet-voiced balladeer in her twenties from Dallas. It’s just bad luck.

*I happen to be in love with Audra McDonald as a performer. Right now, she’s performing in a forgettable play. I’m tempted to buy a ticket just to watch her.

Bud Selig, Barry Bonds, Hank Aaron, Milwaukee, and Me

I grew up in Milwaukee and for a time, went to school with Bud Selig’s kids. They weren’t the sharpest pencils in the box and neither is Bud. Back then, Bud Selig was running his dad’s car dealership and Hank Aaron, five foot ten with a lithe build and incredibly quick wrists, was hitting home runs at a steady pace of 30-40 a year in a band box of a ballpark, Milwaukee County Stadium.

Milwaukee more or less embraced Hank. Except for one thing. He was black. The town admired him. But they didn’t love him.

Hank was one of my heroes. I have two photos in my office from that era. One is from the last day the Braves played in Milwaukee and the other from a 60s All Star game where the three starting National League All Star outfielders – Aaron, Mays and Clemente – are palling around. For my money, those three comprised the best All Star outfield of all time and Willie Mays is the second best player to ever play the game.

The best? His godson Barry Bonds. I’ve never seen anyone better. Barry Bonds in his prime had no peer. Except for one thing. He was using steroids. Without them, he was a Hall of Fame caliber player a notch below his godfather. With them, he was unbelievably good.

While Barry Bonds took steroids, Bud Selig was Commissioner of Major League Baseball. He still is. And as certain as is the fact that Barry Bonds’ achievements are partly the result of steroids is the fact that Bud Selig knew that Barry Bonds and many other players were taken steroids. He didn’t care. Home runs sell tickets. He was happy to sell tickets.*

Barry Bonds is currently in Milwaukee and may well match or best Hank Aaron’s home run record this weekend. Bud Selig is playing a cat and mouse game concerning his attendance at Barry Bond’s games. He doesn’t want to appear to be endorsing Barry Bond’s achievements because they are steroids influenced. These actions seem rather odd. He already sanctioned Barry Bonds use of steroids by looking the other way in the 1990s.** Why does he have cold feet now?

As I already mentioned, Bud Selig, like his kids, isn’t the sharpest pencil in the box. But he does get paid fourteen million dollars to be commissioner. He got the job not because he’s good at it. Rather the job is his because the owners of MLB’s teams don’t want anyone telling them what to do. He gets his money for being a rug.

While Bud Selig is too much of a coward and lightweight to ever admit publicly that he knowingly allowed players to use steroids in the 1990s** (and now knowingly allows players to use human growth hormones), Bud Selig should be man enough to eat his crow. He should sit in his damn seat as if glued for every damn game until Barry Bonds sets his record. He sanctioned the use of steroids through his silence. He might as well sanction the home run record the steroids era created.

*A few days after I wrote this piece, Bud Selig held a press conference and denied he or MLB knew of steroids use by ballplayers. This is a categorical lie. Tony LaRussa, manager of the Oakland As during the steroids era, has stated publicly that he knew. The Yankees also knew that Giambi was taking steroids otherwise they would have never agreed to the language in his contract.

**Correction. Barry Bonds' stellar steroid enhanced season took place in 2001. So the years of extensive steroid use went on into the 2000s.

Filtering

When I was a professor, a typical class size would be about 25. And in that class, there would be anywhere between 3 and 8 kids who were just plain wonderful students. They were smart. They cared about learning. They were interesting people to talk to after class as well.

Then there were the 17 to 22 others that weren’t so great. At the low end they were rather dumb and openly anti-intellectual. Typically, the worst were legacies or children of the super-wealthy who bought their way into school. Some had downright ugly personalities.

A big part of my job was to filter. I had to focus my attention on those three to eight great kids. They were there to learn. I was there to teach. Why should I care about the dimwits in the class who bought their way in? They could only bring me and the level of the class down. I worked hard to pretend they weren’t even there.

On good days I succeeded. On bad days I didn’t. Filtering is not one of my strengths.

I’m in NYC right now. It’s a noisy, messy place. At a subway stop, an absolutely adorable baby in a stroller started to wail as a subway train roared on by. His father covered his ears. That was the baby’s filter. Sometimes I wish I had someone to cover my ears and eyes.

There are some absolutely beautiful and wonderful things in NYC. I’m glad I’m here. On good hours, I can filter all of the junk out of my observations. On bad hours, all of the ugliness of the city comes to the fore. For me, filtering is a key aspect of my living well. I suspect that that’s true for just about everyone.

A Game of Numbers

Last night, I went into a hole in the wall kind of bar in the West Village and watched a 67 year old man, Lew Tabackin, play his heart out. There were maybe 30 people there, each paying the price of a movie and popcorn to listen and get a free drink. The bass player, Boris Kozlov, was out of sight too.

Lew Tabackin has been doing this for decades. He has a sweet tone. His improvisational skills are as good as just about any in the business. He’s never had much of an audience. Even when he had a big band that drew rave reviews, the crowds just weren’t there. Some people with great talent just don’t stick with the public. I don’t understand why. They just don’t.

But watching someone play that well with that kind of intensity just made me grin from ear to ear. In a place that small, there is no need for amplification. It was like having a jazz trio play in my living room.

There is very little audience for jazz. As the joke goes, what’s the difference between a blues and jazz player? A bluesman plays three notes before 1000 people. A jazzman plays 1000 notes before three people. You can go nuts trying to understand why the public buys crappy simple music by people with very little talent. They just do.

In a game of small numbers, wonderfully talented people don’t even get a chance to show their talent before the audience they deserve. It’s a shame. But you can still find it in hole in the wall clubs. As Lew Tabackin said last night, “We’re not doing this for the bread. We’re doing this because we get to play what we like.” Hooray for that sentiment. I can only hope that when I’m 67, I have half the energy and intensity that he showed last night.

Before Elvis

John Lennon once said, “Before Elvis, there was nothing.” Dean Martin once said, “It’s Frank’s world. We only live in it.” The truth lies somewhere between the two.

There was something before Elvis, a whole lot of something. It was music that wasn’t strictly youth oriented. A real live adult, even a parent, could put a piece of popular vinyl on the record player and listen for enjoyment. It might be Frank Sinatra. It might be Rosemary Clooney. The songs were about love lost and gained. The language could be dreamy and childish, but it was often literate.

Before that era there were crooners I don’t even know about and exquisite musicians, some funny, some not like Duke Ellington and Fats Waller. They played as Duke Ellington once noted, “the good kind” of music. There were people like Ira and George Gershwin, Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, and Cole Porter who put John Lennon’s songwriting skills to shame.

There was a lot more than “nothing” before Elvis. There was great musicianship and great songwriting.

What there wasn’t was a lot of was music about sex so directly (although there was plenty of innuendo). What there wasn’t was music that was groove based designed for shaking your booty. What there wasn’t was the simple, emotionally captivating music from the rural dirt poor Mississippi delta that Elvis and others translated and softened to make it palatable for white kids. It was called rock and roll.

John Lennon was right in a sense. Before Elvis, pop music was for all generations. After Elvis it was almost strictly for kids. The language was very simple and childlike. The beats were simple. The melodies were very simple. It was all very loud. As a kid, I loved the stuff.

What’s interesting to me is that John Lennon’s partner in musical crime, Paul McCartney, clearly does not share John Lennon’s sentiment. He borrows freely from the pre-Elvis era at least in terms of melodies. Many of the most memorable Beatles tunes aren’t rock and roll at all, but McCartney written stuff that comes out of the bandstand ballad era, like Yesterday. McCartney is essentially a crooner who was made hip by the presence of Lennon. Now that’s what you call synergy.

“Before Elvis, there was nothing,” has a very biblical tone to it. And it’s catchy. But like most catchy sound bites, it’s pure b.s.

I’ll Never Sing Like Sinatra

I was on a plane yesterday listening to the "I" songs on my iPod. I found out two things. One: Ryan Adams' song In My Time of Need is almost a carbon copy of Townes Van Zandt's If I Needed You. Ryan Adams has never been my cup of tea anyway. He's for twentysomethings who have never heard the stuff he blatantly rips off from the 70s. He's also an a**hole of a person. But he does sing well. OK, I'm grouchy. Tally it up to jet lag.

But another funny happened in the "I" section of my iPod a new tune of mine that I just recorded last week – It's the Rainy Days – came on. The song is a lounge kind of number and I'm doing my best to sound like a cabaret kind of guy.

That song was followed by "It's the Same Old Dream" sung by Frank Sinatra. And it isn't even close. There's me trying to sound like a crooner. And then there is the real deal. The smooth tone. The impeccable phrasing. Comparing me to Frank Sinatra is like comparing Leroy Neiman to Matisse. I'm a hack of a singer. But the new song is damn good. And if only Sinatra were alive today to sing the thing. Now that would bring tears of joy to my eyes. Really.

Adventures in Cause and Effect, Part III

Today, Live Earth is taking place across the world. It’s a mix of two of my favorite subjects, music and science. I’m watching Corrine Bailey Rae in London on the web as I type this. She’s just OK in my book. The songs are below average and her vocal range is limited, but she has a warm tone and is easy on the eyes. Real singers like Aretha Franklin wouldn’t stand a chance in today’s entertainment climate where looks are 90 percent of the game.

But I’ve posted enough about music for a while. And I started posting on “cause and effect” a while back and promised more. I got sidetracked. But today is a good day to talk about cause and effect vis a vis climate change.

We are currently running a huge and lousy scientific experiment. We are pumping CO2 into the atmosphere through burning of fossil fuels. And we are observing whether that change will cause global temperatures and climate to change appreciably. It’s a lousy experiment in many ways. There is no decent baseline and by that I mean that our data on climate and temperature before we started pumping CO2 in the atmosphere is sketchy at best. How can we know if there is appreciable change in climate due to CO2 if we don’t know what happened in the past?

Then there are complicating factors. We are pumping all kinds of other stuff into the atmosphere that effect our energy balance. Most importantly, there is natural variability of unknown magnitude and included in that variability is the fact that the Earth is going through a natural warming cycle right now.

At face value, our experiment is just plain lousy science. To run this experiment in a valid way, we’d need two identical Earth-like planets. We’d observe the climate on both of them for a couple hundred years at least to establish a baseline. Then on one of them we’d start pumping CO2 into the atmosphere and on the other we’d keep things “natural.” We’d observe the differences for a hundred years or so. Then we’d have a good experiment to test whether CO2 can influence climate in a measurable way.

Obviously, we can’t do this. So instead we just pump away and watch. We don’t quite even know what to look at. Every drought, every flood, and every hurricane becomes a suspect in identifying an “effect” from a “cause.” We run models to see what to “look for,” but those models are very poor in making valid predictions of climate change. It’s messy, bad science.

I can criticize the science all I want. But the fact is that we didn’t run this “experiment” on purpose to examine how the Earth responds to CO2. It’s an inadvertent aspect of our global carbon-based economy. And the implications of this “lousy experiment” are very significant. We may well change our climate in ways that will be costly to the planet. So all the subsequent science, as messy and bad though it may be, is necessary.

That said, playing the cause and effect game with regard to climate change and CO2 is a dicey business. What we have is a simple and scientifically sound theory that indicates that increases in CO2 should cause the earth’s atmosphere and oceans to warm. We have observations that CO2 is increasing substantially and the planet is indeed warming. We have at face value a “cause” and a “effect.” I’ll talk about that cause and effect more next time.

And Another Thing

On this little thread of how pop music has changed I forgot a couple of things both big and small. One funny thing is that British singers no longer feel compelled to sing like they are 50 year-old black Americans. Some still do - Amy Winehouse and the cheesy Aretha Franklin imitator Joss Stone for instance – but British rock bands have vocalists that sound, well they sound like they are from Britain. I don't know when exactly this change took place, but beginning with the Beatles British bands tried to pretend vocally that they were from America. I think it was because of the Southern black roots of rock. It was always strange to hear these guys being interviewed after they sang a song, because then you'd hear their real accents. That era has thankfully (for the most past) ended.

With regard to female vocalists, Billie Holiday imitators have recently come to the fore and acts frequently employ heavy Southern accents even if they are from Massachusetts. Madelyn Peyroux has managed to make a good living channeling Ms. Holiday with the addition of 70s era songs and 50s style Ella musical arrangements. Nora Jones is heavily influenced by Ms. Holiday as well and sings with an accent that suggests she was raised somewhere in Georgia (she comes from suburban Dallas).

Finally, lyrics have evolved not only in their heavy use of irony and detachment, but their language has become much more sophisticated. It used to be that all acts pretended they had no education whatsoever. It goes back to the rural Southern roots of rock. You essentially pretended that instead of having a degree from places like the London School of Economics (like Mick Jagger), you left school at eight to pick cotton in the fields. Grammar was lousy (I can't get no satisfaction yada, yada, yada) and words tended to be very short. If you took an SAT and had only read rock lyrics over the course of your life, you'd never score above 400 in the English part of the test.

But that's no longer the case. Education is starting to leak through big time. It isn't just the band The Decemberists that is doing this. All kinds of bands and acts are using five-dollar words in their lyrics and rhyme couplets. People aren't so embarrassed to show their intelligence and education anymore. I think the reason for this is two-fold. One is that more musicians have college degrees. The other is that it took time for rock to step back from its Southern blue roots and use language that reflected the backgrounds of the acts.

It is curious that as much of rock has become more sophisticated and reflects white suburban culture more and more, it has lost much of its audience. Sales and interest have shifted to rap and r&b. Just like when I was a kid, white suburban kids want to pretend that they are black at least when it comes to the music they listen to. They like simple words and big beats. As a result, the standard dream white suburban males kids – to become a "rock god" - becomes less and less possible. When you sell at most a couple hundred thousand records and play before audiences of 2000, you're not a god anymore. You're just an entertainer.

The diminishment of rock as a popular form of entertainment I think is a good thing. Arena rock was always cheesy and bad. With smaller crowds, comes the possibility of decent music. Of course, there will always be a dreadful band like Nickleback around to show that it's possible to be a cheesy rock band and still draw crowds. It's just that in this age of diminished appetite for rock music, there is only room for a couple of lowest-common denominator seeking bands like that. The rest just might have to produce quality music to survive.

Then and Now, Part III

When I listen to rock/pop music today, I find that because it’s so easy for someone to do interesting things with production, that the song often doesn’t matter that much melodically. For example, the singer Feist has a new album that seems to be breaking out right now that fits the contemporary formula to a T.

It’s essentially an album of melodic minimalism, nursery school-like melodies. Corrine Bailey Ray has done the same thing on her recent breakout album. In both cases, a very pretty girl with a warm voice sings songs over a very limited vocal range.

But whereas Corrine Bailey Ray’s lyrics are very old style and direct, Feist’s lyrics are very much in the mainstream of contemporary lyric writing. They are ironic, opaque and ethereal. It used to be when you loved someone you said it. When you were angry you screamed it. But in contemporary rock/pop you don’t tend to be so head on in displaying your emotions. There is a detachment and ironic distancing to much of contemporary lyric writing.

I think the heavy use of irony and detachment in lyrics reflects a cultural shift in attitudes in the post-boomer generations. They simply have a much more ironic and guarded view of the world than boomers did in their 20s and the music shows it.

Because the songs tend to be melodically very ho-hum it’s imperative that something else make up for it. And in addition to an emphasis on production there is also a new emphasis on voice. In addition to having to be beautiful to be successful in today’s music environment, it’s almost required that the music acts of today have very warm voices. It’s almost as if we’ve gone back to the crooner era.

To some extent, voice tone was important in the music I grew up with. Otis Redding and Van Morrison never said much lyrically, but their voices were so expressive that it didn’t matter. It’s just that today, there are many more examples of voice over content, the most popular among them being Nora Jones. She doesn’t say much, her melodies are perfunctory, but her voice has such resonance that people just might pay to hear her sing the phone book on one note.

The list of contemporary artists who rely on the expressiveness of their voice alone is long. To some extent, the absence of good songwriting to go along with their voices is the result of having them write their own songs. Whoever said that singers are also good songwriters? This requirement that singers sing primarily songs they write themselves was also a problem in the golden age of rock. Lots of great and beautiful singers have no business writing songs.

So when I listen to rock/pop music today, I find the plus of interesting production balanced by the minus of not very interesting melodies; and my reaction to an ironic lyrical style that reflects the culture of young people today is neutral. And like the old days, requiring singers write their own material creates lots of misses in pop music.

Bob Dylan knows how to write a lyric and happens to perform as well. Paul McCartney knows how to write a melody and has a sweet voice. There are precious few performers who come close to matching up to those two. Almost all performers would benefit from letting someone else write the songs. It was true in the “golden age of rock.” It’s still true today.

Then and Now, Part 2

I stopped listening to pop music in the 1980s. Commercial FM radio, which emerged as a low cost quirky place for interesting music in the 1960s, was being taken over by major companies and turned into junk. Major record companies, in their quest for more market share, largely abandoned decent music. So I stopped listening.

Occasionally, I would hear a band – Nirvana being a chief case in point – that would make me wonder whether there was still something going on of interest in rock/pop. But then I'd turn on the radio again and find out that no, the radio was still almost filled with junk and major record companies were mostly putting out junk.

What I didn't know was college radio and independent record companies were taking up the slack. There was distinctive music out there; I just wasn't aware of it. And even if I had become aware, the lyrics were nothing that would speak to me at the time, a young married man with a kid and a mortgage.

I stuck to classical music and jazz for twenty years. I still mostly listen to just that. I still have a lot of pop on vinyl from the 1960s and 1970s, but in retrospect almost all of it is stuff best suited for 14 years olds and I rarely listen to it. A few years ago, I started to listen to pop music again after a twenty-year absence. With the emergence of the internet as a conduit for music, it's a lot easier to find intelligent music in the pop world. It probably was there in the 80s and 90s, but who knew how to access it?

Given that I took a twenty-year absence from pop music, I feel a little lurch every time I hear a contemporary pop record. Right from the start, the sound is bright, way too bright for my ears. I need to turn down the treble to listen. Some of that brightness comes from digital recording, but I think a lot of that is added in post-production to catch the attention of the listener.

Digital recording is way, way different than recording from the golden age of rock. It used to be that you went into a studio with a band and you just played. That's how I still do it when I record. Rhythms vary over the course of a song; pitch isn't exact. It is in essence a very human and imprecise experience.

But almost all music of today isn't recorded like this. It's done in layers now. Drums and bass are played to a click track, often separately. Then layer by layer all of the other instruments are added. Vocals are tuned in post-production note by note. Even bluegrass bands do this tuning nowadays.

The negative aspect of recording this way is that it sounds way too clinical and heartless to my ears. It's the player piano approach to music. Everything is exact, clean and flawless. This approach leaves me cold. I believe it's one of the reasons that college students still listen to the music I listened to as a kid; the current stuff just has no heart in comparison.

The positive aspect of recording this way is that you can make interesting arrangements that you'd never think of creating when you played as a band. A producer can have a painterly approach to dressing up a song. They can add a splash of strange rhythm here and there. They can add and subtract at will. And that's what they tend to do. Modern records are very much producer driven now. They don't sound like a band is playing live anymore. Rather, they sound like a collection of sounds put together by the producer. In the hands of a good producer, the collection of sounds can result in music that's new and fresh.

OK, I'll finish this up next time.

Scooter Libby 1 Hollywood Socialite 0

It’s a crazy world we live in. A Hollywood socialite is found guilty of DUI. She asks for a pardon from Arnold. He says no. She gets locked up for a few weeks. On the other coast (the East Coast is the Least Coast), the right hand man of the Vice President of the United States is found guilty of lying to a Federal Grand Jury. He asks for a pardon from W. The right hand man serves no time.

Now tell me which is the more serious offense? And which Republican leader is competent and sane?

I won’t even mention the Hollywood socialite’s name. But the one not serving time is Scooter (What kind of big-name government official goes by a nickname best suited for an eight year old anyhow? Even if he was innocent, he should be serving twenty years or worse on account of his infantile nickname.) Libby.

Let’s go through the facts. A State Department official had the nerve to question White House touted “data” about Iraqi uranium acquisition on TV and in print. He was right to question the “data” because the “data” were junk. But in the Bush’s White House facts don’t mean a thing. Loyalty trumps fact every time.

Bush and Cheney childishly decided to get even. They played hardball by ruining the CIA career of the wife of that State Department official. The only problem is they got caught. They had Cheney’s chief of staff lie to a grand jury about their stupidity. He got caught for perjury. Bush commuted the perjurer’s sentence.

Is Bush corrupt and a liar? You bet. Is he more of a child or more corrupt or more of a liar than Clinton, Bush Senior or Reagan? No. He came into office promising to restore “dignity and honor” to the White House. Fat chance.

While W. is no more slimy than his predecessors, he is quite different than all of them in that he lacks basic competence and brains. He also has no respect for the role of government except as a source of military might. And another way he is quite different is that instead of putting his VP in some remote corner of power, he’s put him front and center.

Given that Bush is as dumb as a stump, giving the VP some real say in running the show is at face value a good idea. The only problem is that Cheney is unhinged. People who knew him at Yale and now say he was always this way to some degree, slightly unhinged. It’s just that he’s gotten worse. The closest “political figure” Cheney resembles is Doctor Strangelove. So in summary we have a dummy for president who has given a guy who is one shade shy of being in a straightjacket and padded cell a lot of power.

Pardoning and commuting criminal sentences of those with influence has long been a pastime of presidents. Ever since I was a kid, the presidential office has been a sewer rife with corruption. I’m sure it has always been. I’m not upset that Libby has been granted a big favor by Bush. That’s how things work in Washington.

Yes, I’m as cynical as all get out when it comes to Washington politics. But there is a caveat: I truly believe in representative democracy for this country despite its many flaws. Somehow despite all of the egos and slime it sort of works. It’s a miracle that it does, but it does work. I don’t quite understand it. People are uninformed and don’t vote. Politicians are born liars whose natural home is a pig trough. Yet somehow the country stays in one piece. Except for now.

I don’t expect presidents to be honest. I don’t expect them to have integrity. As far as I can tell, big-time politics requires people to be slimy. My view is that it’s quite possible to have clean government and politics at the city level or lower. But once you create legislative bodies where people have to move from their homes to govern, it’s all over.

The last more or less honest president we had was Jimmy Carter and he was a disaster because he didn’t understand the game. As someone once said, “Politics is the art of the possible.” Apparently the art of the possible requires slime. Or as Einstein once said, “Politics makes the clean dirty and the dirty dangerous.”

That said, I do expect basic competence. I’ve given up on that possibility for Bush. I’m already looking ahead to 2008.

Let our next president be a liar. Let him or her be corrupt like the 40 odd other people who have served before. But please oh please come next election let’s find someone with some brains and real management skills. And if that person says that they are going to bring “honor and dignity” back to the White House or “clean up Washington” please, please just have someone slap him or her across the face. And when that person selects a VP let’s please check the sanity of the person selected.

We can do a whole lot better than what we have now. I bet we can in fact do no worse. Folks, Republican or Democrat, we have no place to go but up.

OK, back to music next time.

Then and Now
Orrin Keepnews, producer of all of those great Bill Evans and Thelonious Monk albums in the 1950s, said that the golden age of jazz ended with multi-track recording. "Once they started saying 'we'll fix it in the mix' it was over." There's some truth to that statement. Less than great musicianship could be hidden. But jazz has gone on since then and is still very much alive. It just isn't part of mainstream culture.

Orrin Keepnews is 83 or so. I'm a little younger than that. He was part of the golden age of jazz. I grew up in what was the golden age of rock. And similar to him I'd have to say that once they starting using the computer for recording, rock was over. Bands that could barely play could be made to sound decent with Protools. Then auto-tuning came along and people who couldn't sing a lick could be made to sound passable (except for the annoying hack saw sound that is characteristic of auto-tuning to this day). But like jazz, rock isn't dead. It just isn't as popular as it once was. R&B and rap have replaced it.

Rock has changed dramatically over the years. It's a very mature music form now and rarely does anything exciting come out of it anymore, but it still has its moments. For me, the last great rock band was Nirvana. I doubt that another one will come along. But then again, I thought that rock had given up any chance of producing great music in the 80s. I was wrong then. I'm undoubtedly wrong now.

Like jazz, the roots of rock are the blues of the Southern black America. When I was listening to rock avidly, you could still hear those roots. And I can remember at twelve, going to Muddy Waters, Fred McDowell and Howlin' Wolf concerts and thinking "Why am I listening to rock – which is just bleach blonde blues - when I can hear the real thing?" Whenever I heard the Rolling Stones or Eric Clapton on the radio, I would roll my eyes; they were to my ears pale imitations. I still think that's the case.

But over the years, hearing those black Southern roots in rock became harder and harder. White suburban America and England made rock into their own music. The lyrics started to reflect white suburban anxieties and dreams. The chords started to change as did the rhythms. By the 90s, rock had been transformed into something that essentially completely reflected white teen-age middle-class culture. It's not surprising that once it made that transformation, people started to lose interest and look for other kinds of music.

When I hear rock music today, I listen as an observer now rather than a fan because the lyrics are for teens and twentysomethings. They can't possibly speak to me. I must say that the rock of today is a hell of a lot better than rock in the 1980s, which was a decade of music that was just plain awful.

OK, I have to get on with work. I'll finish this up tomorrow.