David Bowie

I’m old enough to have lived through plenty of famous rock star deaths. Elvis Presley, John Lennon, George Harrison, Johnny Cash, Kurt Cobain. I was alive but not that cognizant of the famous 1960s/70s losses, Jones, Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison. I became aware of the magnitude of those losses a little later on.

However none of those artists, however starred and talented, approached David Bowie as a central figure in my own musical consciousness.

Bowie was with me from almost the absolute start of my musical awareness. Aladdin Sane was one of the first LPs I ever bought, followed by Ziggy Stardust and within short order, Hunky Dory, The Man Who Sold The World, Space Oddity, even that strange collection of mid-60s mutant musical songs, The World of David Bowie. From the very beginning, Bowie’s strangeness, his appearance, his concerns resonated with me. Even as I explored the music of the 1960s, Dylan, The Beatles, Bowie became and remained the lyrical touchstone and the lyrical expounder of the fears and hopes that occupied my teenage self. His growth and change mirrored my own, his music was the perfect companion to the movie of my life as it stumbled through uncertainty and anxiety into the depression that capped the end of my teenage years.

It was not, of course, the sole soundtrack. I embraced punk and new wave and much else besides, but Bowie hovered above them all, as an influence and as a guide. Like no one else, Bowie infiltrated my subconscious and remained there. Even as I aged and lost direct interest in his music after the commercial success of Let’s Dance, choosing to dip occasionally into later forays, Tin Machine, the 90s albums and the turn of century recapitulations. Like many, I was ready for and embraced the reinvigoration of The Next Day and now Blackstar.

There will be no more and I feel the loss keenly. Not overwhelming grief, that, naturally enough, is reserved for those closest to me, but a sense of emptiness. No one has emerged to replace him. There is no substitute. No one else has articulated the tumult that overtook me in the early part of my life as effectively. No one ever will – Bowie’s time was wedded to my own. His death is a marker of time passed and time that cannot be replaced, only remembered. A part of myself has been taken from me and filed away like journal pages in a dusty folder. I’m not sure how large a part that is – it’s too soon to see. But things have changed. It’s as it has to be but I don’t like it. I never will.

Come Together

The Beatles’ back catalog has finally been made available for internet streaming, and as of the past couple of days or so the most popular streamed song on Spotify is ‘Come Together’.

This surprised me a little. Only a little, since ‘Abbey Road’ has long been a favorite among listeners and critics too, but it is not the song from that album that I would have picked first as most potentially popular. ‘Here Comes The Sun’, ‘Something’, ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’, maybe even ‘Because’ are more melodic, more pop. ‘Come Together’ is a rock and roll song, a deeply slowed down rewrite of Chuck Berry’s ‘You Can’t Catch Me’ (similar enough, indeed, that a legal judgement went against John Lennon).

However it doesn’t really sound like rock and roll. The prominent bass line, the jazzy electric piano (is a coincidence that The Doors heavily featured a not dissimilar sound in ‘Riders On The Storm’ a year or so later?), the stinging not quite blues, not quite jazz guitar, and Lennon’s last gasp of inspired surreal lyrics conjure up a very different animal underneath the familiar exterior.

It’s one of the few Beatles’ songs that continues to send shivers down me, even after all this time and the many times I’ve heard it. Ironically, considering its title, it strikes me as an ultimate breakup song, a plea for harmony that gets blown away down a darkened city alleyway as everything familiar breaks apart. The band, of course, were de facto finished at this point, only stitching ‘Abbey Road’ together as a glorious swan song (an effect dissipated, as many have noted, by the later release of the less-good and recorded-earlier frayed quilt of ‘Let It Be’). As a whole, ‘Abbey Road’ sounds less convincing than it used to. Its clear advantage in fidelity over any other Beatles recording sounds less like an audiophile dream and more like a harbinger for a cluster of over-polished records that followed later in the 1970s. As albums, ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, ‘Rubber Soul’, ‘Revolver’, ‘The Beatles’, yes maybe even ‘Sgt Pepper’, have an edge to my ears.

But ‘Come Together’ remains masterful and deeply affecting. It might be my favorite Beatles song too. Or if not that, at least perhaps the ultimate kiss-off to the promise of the 1960s and an early embrace of the confusion of the 1970s. A few other songs share this quality. The afore-discussed ‘Riders On The Storm’. The Beach Boys’ “Surf’s Up” (recorded in 1967, yes, but only emerging on the turn-of-decade album of the same name, altered and stamped with Carl Wilson’s uniquely melancholy voice). Not much more though.

Funny that a song – indeed a repertoire – recorded so long ago should still continue to resonate with so many people. Funny, but pleasing too.

 

After dreaming I was listening to “Riders On The Storm”

I woke up this morning with my mind full of that cascading electric piano phrase that punctuates the Doors’ “Riders On The Storm”.

It reminded me – again – of that poignant song that, like The Beatles’ “Abbey Road” and The Beach Boys’ “Surf’s Up” LPs, acts as a musical full-stop for the wild inventiveness and assertiveness of the 1960s and the beginning of a transition into less certain times.

I was young at that time – 1971. Barely into my teens, and still a year away from seriously beginning to embrace rock music as the soundtrack of my life, so I came to these records retroactively when I was little older. When they had already begun to acquire a sense of historical destiny. It seems to strange to look at back from these days of glacial rock and pop musical development where it becomes difficult to place the decade behind a contemporary sound, let alone the year, but in the early 1970s rock and pop was moving so fast in terms of changes to style and sound that you could mark out epochs in months.

At the time, of course, I thought that this helter-skelter pace of change and development would continue indefinitely. It was only in the late 1980s, as the first slowdowns began to take effect and I became familiar with the history of jazz, that I realised that this was not going to be. Jazz had gone through similar rapid transitions from the 1920s into the 1970s, but the broadly creative stylistic movements were behind it, even as certain artists continued to produce vital work. Now it was the time of Wynton Marsalis, talented for sure, but deliberately retrograde in terms of style. Jazz passed from a vital forward looking music into a consolidating, backhoeing, form. Mining the past and developing new syntheses, still interesting but now lacking that sense of historical onrush.

Rock and pop are at the same point today. Of the mainstream forms, only hip hop and dance represented some form of evolutionary development over the past few decades, but even they have begun to consolidate into their own histories.

Does any of this really matter? Vital artists continue to work within all these traditions, these days carving out small niches that more dependent on the artist themselves rather than being allied to any movement. Broad movements instead have splintered into ever more specialized sub-movements, with the multitude of confusing and often overlapping genres represented by only a handful of artists each. Such labeling has already become essentially redundant. You are better off settling in at the level of the artist him or herself alone.

This is fine, I suppose. But what has been lost is the sense of music as a social movement, an umbrella encompassing a generation. Opened wide and clear for all to see.

I miss that.

Power

I have barely posted on ‘Music’ over the past few years.

Partly this is because I have stopped buying music. My attentions have turned to the more creative, from a personal point of view, art of photography.

This means I have stopped becoming a music consumer.

I never thought I would reach this stage. Looking out, in my basement from my computer den, I see rows and rows of CDs and LPs, all lovingly accumulated over the years since I was 15.

Most have been converted to MP3s or FLACs, played now over my computer network in my bedroom, usually just before I go to sleep.

Or at work over the tinny speakers attached to my computer.

Or in the car over the not quite so tinny car speakers. Occasionally, between recorded radio plays.

Has music really become so peripheral to my life?

Perhaps it has. Yet it still holds strength. Last weekend, driving back from Holliday, MO, after an afternoon photographing sunflowers, I played the third album I ever bought, the first Roxy Music album, over and over again. Music bought when I was fifteen. I loved it. Those old songs, heard so many times since, still move me. They cast me back into the absolute beginnings of my life yet hold true to the life I life today. How can this be? How can something I loved while still living with my parents, while still a virgin, while still terrified of the unknown future ahead of me, still be meaningful today?

I don’t know. Perhaps this, more than anything, is a testament to the power of music.

The Big Express

Bit of an oddity, this, a new post here, but two circumstances led me to it. First, I was unable (for unknown reasons) to log onto the Ape House forum pages to make some comments. Second, through a convoluted chain of circumstances beginning with the introduction of an ’embed’ function into Cowbird, my almost exclusive internet outlet these days (apart from the inevitable Twitter and Facebook), I revisited my two Blogger blogs. Untouched they’ve been for years as My Opera and then Cowbird supplanted them.

But now I revisit and find a vastly increased level of functionality and ease-of-use.

So let’s go again.

“The Big Express” is an XTC album dating from the early 1980s. A period of mind-wobbling productivity for the band, pushing out reams of exquisitely crafted pop songs that sent critics into ecstasies and the general public into a swoon of indifference.

During a brief period in the mid 1980s, I scooped up almost all the current and older XTC albums (perversely skipping Go2) and feel immediately in love with two songs from “The Big Express”. The opener, a choppy mid-period Beatles-style guitar driven rumination on lack of awareness that managed to bridge the (admittedly narrow) gap between The Beatles and The Jam. And a little way into the running order, “This World Over”, a gloomy meditation on a post-nuclear world with twinges of Police sonics, but a typically entrancing melody.

The rest of the record I failed to take on board.

For years.

Until this weekend, when, undoubtedly stimulated by the multiple listens I have recently given Bowie’s excellent new “The Next Day”, a record itself stuffed with beautifully crafted songs, I listened again to “The Big Express”.

What a great record it is. Full of invention and energy, subversively constructed songs that defy clichés and an overall feel of a band at the height of its powers. Where, to be truthful, XTC was for most of its now sadly truncated career.

The revisit affirmed my love of “Wake Up” and “This World Over”, but other songs, “I Bought Myself A Liarbird”, “I Remember The Sun” in particular, are all reshuffling that great mental list of tunes, noteworthy or not.

That’s what I wanted to say on the Ape House forum, but this will do just as well.

(Originally posted April 11, 2013 on Music (Blogger))

What’s The Story?

Walking to the sound of my favorite tune
Tomorrow never knows what it doesn’t know too soon

I was cycling through Forest Park this morning on my way work, my mind wandering as it usually does at that time. This time I was thinking about music, and specifically the Oasis of ‘What’s the story (Morning Glory)?”. Part of this relates to my weekend experience of reminding myself how far and how low this band fell after the release of “Morning Glory”.

But there was more at work here than that. It’s about one full year since I finished my college course on the music of The Beatles, and I was thinking of that band as well. Oasis and The Beatles are tightly connected – the lyric quoted above directly refers to The Beatles’ song “Tomorrow Never Knows”, and this is just one of myriad Oasis borrowings and references.

Oasis manage to transcend this obvious fixation by never actually sounding like The Beatles. The guitar roar and Liam Gallagher’s whine place the band far closer to, say, the Sex Pistols sonically. For their first two albums, the band certainly squeezed out enough inspiration from this clash (no pun intended) to produce some truly catchy and unforgettable rock. But then it all fell apart, and the interesting thing about this is how slight the musical change was.

Post-“Morning Glory”, Oasis is not that different in sound and style from pre-, but what once sounded fresh and exciting becomes dull, uninspired and sometimes even turgid. It’s difficult to analyse exactly why. Certainly, songs became over-extended or relied one time too many on familiar sounding riffs and melodies. But something intangible was lost – best described as inspiration in both composition and performance – once the original band fragmented, even as the sound remained largely the same. Playing “Morning Glory” and “Be Here Now” back to back is perhaps the most effective demonstration I can think of recordings that rise to art and fall to over-confident mediocrity.

The Beatles, although not as consistently great as their reputation suggests, nonetheless never experienced such a tipping point. During the lifetime of that band, a lifetime well exceeded by Oasis, The Beatles produced about twice as much music and remained vital to the end.

I think this is a clue as why I have been so let-down by Oasis. The sound of this band is just about as close to the perfect sound that I have ever heard; their early songs as close to perfection as I could hope for. But this amounts to about two albums worth plus a collection of worthy singles. They should have broken up there and then and kept my fond memories and impressions intact.

The Beatles managed to do just that – break up before their decline (and the solo work demonstrates just how far they could have fallen).

I guess it really is all about timing.

Remastered

The energy that record companies devote to ensuring their consumers buy the same music over and over again never fails to astonish me. I suppose it all began in the 1970s when independent companies such as Mobile Fidelity began offering ‘half-speed remasters’ of popular best-selling rock albums, particularly those that attracted audiophiles in the first place.

Then along came the CD with its supposedly miraculously large dynamic range and scratch-free reproduction. Again, those same best-sellers were pushed onto that format, complete with a price premium to match those ‘half-speed remasters’, and what did we find? A very variable result, with some recordings well-mastered even from the earliest days (I have excellent CD versions of Wire’s Pink Flag, and Sonny Rollins’ Saxophone Colossus dating from those early days), but many sounding somewhat lifeless compared to LPs. a few sounding downright bad.

So began the CD remaster. Some in the 1980s, a lot more in the 1990s and 2000s. In some cases, they really do sound a lot better than their precursors. In others, marginally so. Some sound merely as if they have been remixed to boost the bass, some sound genuinely opened up with more detail coming through. But it is all a matter of degree. And, in a movement of sweet irony, much of this music is recompressed, reduced in sonic quality and recycled as mp3, WMA or iTunes. Portability easily trumps fidelity in most people’s estimation.

Now we are moving into DVD audio and SACD, allowing 5:1 and more remixes for home theaters and supposedly even greater fidelity. In strict signal terms, yes, the greater bandwidth of these new formats allows for even greater fidelity to the original source. But for most of us, it doesn’t matter at all.

For me the best thing about CDs was the removal of all those scratches and hisses. I was never such as audiophile that I really cared that much about the sonic imperfections of the earlier CDs. Certainly I can hear the improvements in the remasters. Sure they are nice, but they don’t really alter whatever artistic value I get from the music. Two speakers, mostly just headphones, are all I am ever going to want for music reproduction so the multichannel enhancements are essentially meaningless. In truth, I’m not even sure the jump from mono to stereo was really that significant. I prefer to spend my cash on seeking out some fresh and new music rather than buying yet another copy of Dark Side Of The Moon.