The Concert for 12.12.12

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The “greatest rock lineup ever assembled” was, above all, a study in rock star aging. It also made you realize, if you ever forgot, what a great decade for rock the ‘70s were. Forty years later, when important people wanted to raise millions and millions of dollars for storm relief, where did they go but to stars of the ‘70s who sang songs from the ‘70s. They also sang some later songs, and there were some later acts, but none, with one exception, packed the same punch.

The biggest disappointment, if only because so much has been made of their current tour, was the Rolling Stones. Keith Richard seemed to exist in a haze, and Mick Jagger, who is almost a parody of himself, was wizened. It is amazing that he can move as well as he does, but Jumpin’ Jack Flash had no bite and overstayed its welcome. Their two-song set was the shortest of the night, and I wasn’t sorry to see them leave. Steve Buscemi’s following riff with the “Graybeards” – retired first responders from Long Island – was more enjoyable.

The Who, arguably as great as the Stones if not as long-lived, were represented by Pete Townshend, a true rock god, and Roger Daltry, who embarrassed by acting like he was 25. Their song selections, Pinball Wizard and Baba O’Riley, could not be faulted. Nor could Roger Waters’, presenting The Wall and Dark Side of the Moon in short form. Having Eddie Vedder alongside for Comfortably Numb was delightful. Waters himself has aged appropriately, unlike Daltry.

Eric Clapton, by contrast, appeared ageless, with glasses and preppie good looks. His songs were forgettable – at least, a day later I have forgotten them. Paul McCartney, on the other hand, was memorable specifically for singing such forgettable songs – Helter, Skelter, Live and Let Die, My Valentine and something from Wings. If ever I needed evidence that the Beatles were overrated, I could point to Sir Paul’s set.

American rockers may have been outnumbered, but they were clearly not outclassed. (In this comparison I am scoring a draw for the duet of Chris Martin and Michael Stipe. Both did what they do perfectly.) I am tempted to say Bruce Springsteen is in a class by himself, except he was given a run for his money by Billy Joel, who played the most numbers and is as identified with Long Island as Bruce is with New Jersey. Only the Good Die Young got us dancing, but Born to Run (with Jon Bon Jovi) made me cry. As much as the critics continue to admire the Boss’s new releases, nothing in the last 20 years has emotionally attached itself to me, including Wrecking Ball, a prominent part of his performance. Billy Joel didn’t dilute his tribute with “new” material; he stuck with the oldies we love.

For the sake of completeness, I should say that I skipped Alicia Keyes and Kanye West, both for lack of familiarity and lack of interest in their styles.  I think that only leaves Jon Bon Jovi. I find his stage presence a little grating, but his TK was the one exceptional post-‘70s song, a rousing anthem that was well worth Bruce’s reappearance on stage.

Song of the Year

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Announcing a new category: Song of the Year. The first winner, for 2011, is Dawes, A Little Bit of Everything. For 2007, if I’d started this sooner, it would be Plain White T’s, Hey There Delilah. Also retrospectively, for 2009, the honor goes to Michael Franti & Spearhead, Say Hey (I Love You). I’ll fill in other missing years as and if songs of sufficient merit come to mind.
I was introduced to Dawes when The Current began playing Time Spent in Los Angeles before it was available on iTunes. (I know because I tried to buy it.) The clean, somber, thoughtful sound seemed anchored in the best part of L.A. When I next heard A Little Bit of Everything I was blown away, and the more I listened, the more it hooked me. It starts with a simple piano playing the tune and you can almost hear the piano singing the words. When they do come, they paint a picture and tell a story that is specific and intelligent, rhyming ‘San Francisco traffic’ with ‘join a demographic.’ An Andover classmate committed suicide this way (I think it was the Bay Bridge, not the Golden Gate, whichever bridge is in the song). The despair in these lyrics is palpable, but not so extreme that you can’t relate.
The song, however, doesn’t linger – it moves into an old folks’ home, and the places where our mothers now live come immediately to mind, even if they don’t have a buffet line. The old man, too, is sad as he looks back on his life; but for him, “a little bit of everything” is how he copes. By this time, too, a drum has been added to the lone piano, building momentum. In the instrumental break, a guitar begins to wail. We have been sucked in; now we are committed.
Then comes the capper: a young couple planning a fall wedding starts out as one more bit of sadness. “Baby,” the groom-to-be says, “you don’t seem to be having any fun at all.” Bride-to-be, however, tells him off and issues an affirmation: “Love is so much easier than you realize/ If you can give yourself to someone, then you should.” Out of hopelessness, hope. We pare down again to the simple piano notes. And amid some elliptical but deep-sounding phrases we are given a little bit of philosophy at the end, telling us, “Hey – don’t overthink everything”: “It’s like trying to make out every word when they should simply hum along.”
Of course, the fact that Serin and Marc were planning their wedding – albeit for August, not September – when this song came along, made it that much more personal. Three verses, three stories I could relate to. And the song ends, leaving you wanting more. Rhythmically, when Dawes sings “little bit of everything” there are two empty beats where you expect the phrase to end.

Fiona Apple

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The single highlight of Monday night’s (July 16, 2012) Fiona Apple concert at the Orpheum came in the opening act, when Fiona’s lead guitarist, Blake Mills, performed ‘Sleepwalk,’ one of the great instrumentals in rock history. He gussied it up some with his wonderfully expressive guitar, but the song’s essence remained the same. The memories of slow-dancing in a basement rec room in 7th grade were only a part – well, maybe a big part – of the pleasure this performance gave me. Just as thrilling was the recognition that ’50s music sounds just as good 50 years later, and that a guitarist for one of the most challenging and lauded artists of 2012 can make it his own today. There was, however, one little time bump: rather than acknowledge 1959 as the original date for the Santo & Johnny hit, Blake recalled the song from the 1987 movie La Bamba.
As for Fiona Apple’s performance, she was a dynamo. I only knew one of her songs, “Criminal,” and it’s not a favorite, but you had to admire the ferocity with which she projected her music and, with her sprite-like body, controlled the stage. The musical highlight, coincidentally, was another oldie: she sang Conway Twitty’s “It’s Only Make Believe” for her encore, showing off every bit of her vocal range and power.

Too Old to Rock’n’Roll?

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Seeing Jackson Browne (acoustic) at the State Theater May 29 completes my recent trifecta of Aging Rocker Concerts that started with David Crosby and Graham Nash (both age 69) at the Arlington in Santa Barbara and included Bob Seger (66) and the Silver Bullet Band at the Xcel Center. I have previously commented on the staying power of rock’n’roll in Seger’s case, and that comments holds true for all these performers. None of their work sounded dated in the least, and their performances sounded fresh and true, even though they must have sung some songs thousands and thousands of times.
On the other hand, my enjoyment of each show was less than total, not because of the performers but, perhaps, because of my aging. I loved the music, but petty annoyances at each venue distracted me and kept me from being fully engaged. At the Crosby/Nash concert, two women sat next to me and proceeded to chat with each other during the numbers. When they weren’t talking, the women to my left was on her iPhone, reading and sending messages. When I asked her to please be quiet, she and her friend got huffy, and suggested I stay home and listen to a CD instead of coming to a rock concert, where apparently their behavior was to be expected.
At the Seger show, I had a ticket on the main floor, which meant I was close to the action, but also meant I had a terrible sightline to the stage. When the audience stood, as it did most of the show, the short woman in front of me had no view of the proceedings at all. For Jackson Browne (62), I could see perfectly well, but the man in the adjoining seat was a beefy 300-pounder, whose arm rested fully in my space, and whose time-keeping thigh reverberated through my leg. At intermission I changed seats so I could be next to his wife, a mere 200-pounder, but he changed seats and was next to me again. Moreover, he had this piercing voice that yelled out a request before each number.
Jackson Browne’s set itself was all I could ask for, with favorites from almost every album. The depth of his repertoire was typified when he came out for his encore: “I could do The Load-Out, For A Dancer, or Late for the Sky,” he offered, before settling on the first. Nevertheless, I will say that either his voice was horribly overamped, or it just isn’t sweet anymore. He has always been a greater songwriter than singer, but here it was slightly painful. I eventually discovered that if I covered my ears, the songs came through cleaner.
Of course, the rest of the audience was delirious throughout, which leaves me to wonder if the fault is not mine. Should I, rather, stay home and listen to the stereo.
As a postscript, I should probably add the Bruce Cockburn concert I attended two weeks at the Cedar Cultural Center in the West Bank area of the U. Arriving 15 minutes early, I picked up a general admission ticket for $20. The first problem was that Cockburn (age 65) had decided to start at 8, instead of 7:30, which gave me 45 minutes to wait around – not my strength. The “Cedar” is a small hall, so every seat is fine for looking and listening. The problem is they are not so good for sitting. They use folding chairs, and for a sold-out show, I was crammed among the people next to and in front of me. Maybe I’m spoiled by the luxury you get in most movie theaters these days. Or maybe I’m just getting old.

Bob Seger at Xcel

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     The message I took from the concert in St. Paul by 66-year-old Bob Seger is that rock’n’roll is here to stay. Although some songs he sang were 40 years old, this was not an oldies concert. The Silver Bullet Band played the songs as written, with no need for a musical update, and they sounded just as fresh, just as relevant as when they were new. When an orchestra plays a Beethoven symphony, you don’t like it because it’s an oldie-but-goodie.  It speaks to you today. The same is true for Seger’s music. I guess that’s why they call it ‘classic rock.’ I feel it will still have the same power to move people 40 years from now.
(This raises the question whether the hits of today will have the same staying power. Am I attached to Seger’s music because I was more impressionable when it first came out? It’s certainly true that there was a preponderance of 60-year-olds in the crowd. One answer is that music was more unified, and unifying, in the 1970s. There wasn’t the division on the airwaves among pop, AOR, soft rock, alternative, not to mention 50-some choices on Sirius. Songs like “Night Moves” and “We’ve Got Tonight” were anthemic in the way few releases can be today.)
As for the concert itself, it had sincerity and integrity. The bass player, acting like the music director, has been a Silver Bullet since 1969. The saxophonist, who looked like a refugee from the Sopranos, goes back to 1971, as does the lead guitarist, who hasn’t cut his hair since then and reminded me of Riff-Raff on steroids. With three backup vocalists and a four-man horn section, there were a total of 15 on stage. Seger himself was white-haired, heavyset and bespectacled, wore a black headband and a series of Harley-Davidson T-shirts, and looked a little goofy with his gap-toothed grin. His moves consisted of pumping his right arm, which you felt was quite age-appropriate. He didn’t burden us with new material, but his selections tended toward second-tier cuts off his best albums: the songs were recognizable but not the show-stoppers I was hoping for. Horizontal Bop and Katmandhu are not my favorite Seger.
In all, the energy was there, the crowd was enthusiastic and vocal, there was always someone to look at onstage, and the music made you stand and dance. It was straight-on rock’n’roll, Michigan-style, and we felt honored.

Introduction to Top 25

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            The first step in naming the Top 25 Songs of the Rock Era, which happens to coincide with my personal music-listening era, is determining the criteria for a “Top” song.

            Obviously, the criterion is not best-selling, or most-played, or even most-requested. If you rank songs by how many weeks they were #1 on the Billboard Top 40, not one of that top 100 would be on my list. Many, of course, weren’t even rock’n’roll: Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In; Mack the Knife; The Battle of New Orleans. Many were minor: Ebony and Ivory (McCartney and Wonder), Night Fever (BeeGees), Physical (Olivia Newton-John). Some were even obnoxious: My Sharona, The Ballad of the Green Berets.

            On the other hand, they can’t be too obscure. We all have personal favorites. But unless a song has some general notoriety it’s not fair to judge it against others that get played over and over, giving them the chance to wear out their welcome. And general acceptance is a useful confirmation of personal preference in this arena.

            Permit a digression, the first of many. Back at the end of my college days, which was also the end of the AM Top-40 era, I created a scoring formula for rating the all-time greatest hits (a compulsion for order that would eventually find me in law school). I gave points on a 1-5 basis for things like “originality” and whether it was an artist’s first hit. Using this formula, the other details of which I have mercifully forgotten, I judged the top song of the rock era to be a dead heat between the Temptations’ My Girl and the Buckinghams’ Kind of A Drag.

            This time, no formulas. But this time, almost 40 years later, there is also a lot more ground to cover. If comparing apples and oranges is hard, what about comparing songs from the doo-wop era with heavy metal? OK, doo-wop was better; but saying that already lands me in the area of personal preference, or at least dates me.

            The one test I can think of that applies to songs of all eras is, do I still want to listen to it? If I’m in my car and I reach my destination, will I keep the motor running until the song is over? One step up: would I consider it sacrilegious to turn the radio off while the song is playing? For sure, there are more than 25 songs that meet this test, but this is a good place to start. My heart might beat a little faster when I hear the first chords of Satisfaction, but do I have to stay with it until the end? Not really.

            Finally, a word about my age, and how that will influence the selections. Rock songs are associative. They connect us to certain times in our lives: a summer romance (if we’re lucky), a painful breakup, a trip, a friend, a particular year. For that reason alone, no two people will ever have the same Top 25 list.

            I was there when the rock era began. Not in the clubs of Cleveland, but at home, not only listening to Martin Block’s Make Believe Ballroom on WABC Radio, but writing down the top 25 each Saturday morning. I made a marginal note in 1954, when the CrewCuts’ Sh-Boom became the first rock’n’roll record to crack the Magic Circle. At the age of 8, I was already championing rock’n’roll as “my” music.

            I made lists through the ‘50s, happily staying home on New Year’s Eve to capture the run-down of the year’s top 100. Then in 1960 I was given a Wollensak tape recorder and began compiling my own archives. I never bought a record, in fact, until 1967, when album rock began to make singles obsolete, and I purchased the first albums of Buffalo Springfield, Percy Sledge and the BeeGees.

            The 1970s were the most fertile decade in rock history, but they consolidated the fragmentation that began with the advent of FM radio in the late ‘60s. There was no more Top 40 that anyone cared about; instead, niche formats split the market, and we all listened to different music.

            From 1980 on I have probably drifted further from the mainstream, if one can be identified. I have continued to listen to “new” music on the radio, but it’s often the new music of one station. I can’t comment on hip-hop, any more than I can comment on disco music from the ‘70s, heavy metal from the ‘80s, or Top 40 from any year after 1970.

            My selections, therefore, will undoubtedly skew to the ‘70s, when I was not yet a father and had disposable income and time; or to the ‘60s, my formative years from 14 to 22.

            With that introduction, let the fun begin.

1. My Girl, The Temptations

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            Perhaps the most effective, evocative three-note opening sequence in rock creates an aura of anticipation so utterly fulfilled when the guitar starts ascending and the voice comes in, “I’ve got sunshine…..on a cloudy day.” What a sunny, upbeat, mood-improving song! It’s hard, nay, impossible, not to smile any and every time I hear this classic from the Temptations. “hey-hey-hey!” It has even weathered a commercial use or three.

Beyond the song’s cheery brilliance is its place at the top of one of rock’s best sustained moments: the Motown era. This coincided, almost exactly, with my four college years, the peak of my dancing career. To this day, nothing gets the Marshalls out on the dance floor more surely than the Motown beat. And when I think of all the things I should have but didn’t learn in college, one of the foremost is the dance steps the Tempts used when singing this song.

 

Sidebar: Motown

            Shall I let My Girl stand for everything from the Motown corral? As good as Baby I Need Your Loving and I Can’t Help Myself (the “sugar pie honey bunch” song) are, the Four Tops put out a lot of plodding material. Smokey Robinson was the cleverest lyricist of the time, and The Tracks of My Tears holds up well. Aretha Franklin, Mary Wells, the Marvelettes, Marvin Gaye, all have one or two numbers that wouldn’t embarrass any list. But the only other Motown release that could fit on my Top 25 is Stop! In the Name of Love. The Supremes are the top female group of all time, and they had more hits in the ‘60s than anyone except Elvis and the Beatles. Like the Tempts, they performed a cool dance number, but what sets Stop! apart from the rest of the catalogue is the emotional wallop it packs. “I try so hard, hard to be patient, hoping you’d stop this infatuation.” Whew!

2. Brown-Eyed Girl, Van Morrison

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            “Hey, wherever we go,” you’re pretty much assured of hearing this classic. It’s totally infectious, whether you’re singing along on the car radio or bopping on the dance floor: “We used to sing – sha-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-di-la-di-da.” I’m generally not big on lyrics, but that’s one I can remember. The key words for me in this song, however, come late, and I never fail to wait expectantly. You have to remember that this came out in 1967, when references to sex were not so explicit. When Van the Man sang about “making love in the green grass, behind the stadium,” it unleashed my primal fantasies as I tried to picture the exact spot behind the football field where I could do it.

            I saw Morrison twice in concert in the ‘70s, once at the Fillmore East, the second time at Avery Fisher Hall. I remember walking back up Broadway from Lincoln Center, overhearing some fellow concertgoers opine that Van was the best singer in rock, and realizing that they were probably right. It doesn’t hurt my evaluation, or ranking of this song, that he followed it with one of the ten, maybe five, best albums of the Rock Era, Moondance.

 

Sidebar: Albums

            It’s worth addressing near the outset the question, why apotheosize 25 “songs,” when for much of the period it was the “album” (l/k/a “CD”) that was collected and was the unit upon which artists were judged. From 1955 until the Beatles’ breakthrough concept album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, in 1967, the album was basically a collection of singles, generally sold on the strength of the hit song or two. The ‘70s and, to a lesser extent the ‘80s, were the era of the album, exemplified by Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, in which one song melded into the next, a whole much, much greater than the sum of its single parts. Every art movement leads to a reaction, and by the early ‘80s the pop single, whether deriving from the New York Ramones or the British New Wave, was the hot trend. And since then, we’ve had a little of each, with the emergence of online downloading virtually erasing the relevance of music’s source.

            As for me, I have been introduced to almost all my music through the radio, which means that, even for albums I love, I have come to them through a favorite song. Even when the relationship I have with an artist leads me to buy an album, songs unheard, there was always one particular song that started the relationship. That will be the work I include in this list.

3. Stairway to Heaven, Led Zeppelin

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This is the song that defined how I define this list. It was in the mid-70s, driving back with the guys from touch football, and we reached my apartment on West End and 77th maybe two minutes into Stairway to Heaven. I can’t just leave in the middle of this song, I said; the other guys in the car concurred, and we sat there for the full eight minutes, till Robert Plant squeezed out the final, “…And she’s buying…a stairway…to..heaven.” It starts out like Greensleeves, a simple country ballad, then builds inexorably, adding guitars, reverb, drums into an all-out heavy metal frenzy, then back to quiet. The progression is like sex, isn’t it – and is that the point? For Americans, too, everything British sounds quaint and esoteric; so it sounds like art when we hear incomprehensible, if not indecipherable, lines like, “If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow,” and “It’s just a spring clean for the may queen.” I’m not a particular Zeppelin fan, and I have little interest in the metal bands that followed, but this song transcends genres, spans generations, grabs hold of you and won’t let go…and leaves you slightly exhausted but always a bit happier when it’s over.

4. Earth Angel, The Penguins

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            Ooo-oo-oo-oo, waa-aa-aa, ooo-oo-oo-oo is just one of the hundreds of memorable doo-wop sounds that instantly identify a favorite oldie to any music lover growing up in the ‘50s. There are probably 20 such songs I could live with on this list (see sidebar, below), but none surpasses Earth Angel for its combination of general popularity, sheer beauty and essential doo-wopness. According to the random books in my library, this was the first independent rhythm-and-blues record to enter the national pop charts (in 1955, and it was a hit again three or four years later) and is “considered to be the top R&B record of all time in terms of continuous popularity.” Says another, “It changed the course of history.” The top three oldies in every WINS countdown in New York varied in order from year to year, but they were always In the Still of the Night, Tonite, Tonite and Earth Angel. As for sheer beauty, Cleve Duncan’s high tenor lead is one of the purest sounds in rock history. I get goose bumps listening to his “oh-oh-oh”-ing as he comes in for the final verse. And the innocence that marked the ‘50s and was a hallmark of doo-wop merged from Duncan’s voice, the naïve lyrics – “my darling dear, I’ll love you all the time” – and the simple production – the song was recorded by four 19-year-olds in a garage in Los Angeles, with only a piano and drum behind them. Which is not to say there aren’t subtleties that reward a close listen: when the bridge comes around for the second time, we’re treated to a new voice and a syncopated delivery that makes the return of Duncan’s clear tone all the more thrilling.

 

Sidebar: Doo-Wop

            How to compare the Penguins with Led Zeppelin? Of course you can’t, it’s the proverbial apples and oranges. But both were favorites of the moment, and both have staying power. Doo-wop is my Italian quattrocento, a period of exquisite beauty that may not be as sophisticated as Dutch 17th century or Edo Japan but can still produce as big a thrill. In doo-wop there were slow songs and fast songs – usually back-to-back on the same 45 (e.g., Earth Angel b/wHey, Senorita) – and I can at least keep my comparisons somewhat clean by only judging Earth Angel against the slow-dance cohort. Cleve Duncan had an angelic voice, but so did Rudy West of the Five Keys (Out of Sight, Out of Mind) and Willie Winfield of the Harptones (The Glory of Love) and, to throw in a token white, Jimmy Beaumont of the Skyliners (Since I Don’t Have You). Other songs took fuller advantage of the group dimension of doo-wop: in Sincerely, the song that brought me to doo-wop, the opening bass line is unforgettable; in the Jesters’ version of The Wind, the whole ensemble trembles. Some songs pack more of an emotional wallop: Tears on My Pillow by Little Anthony & Imperials for one, Lee Andrews & Hearts’ Teardrops for another. Florence by the Paragons had an ethereal, other-worldly sound, while Shrine of St. Cecilia couldn’t have been more comforting. To an outsider, doo-wop may sound the same and even seem boring; but if, like a Renaissance scholar, you’ve studied it even a little, it’s a richly diverse world of magic.