Roger Waters, The Wall Live, November 18, 2010

Pink Floyd’s The Wall is thirty one years old this month, and I remember my mom getting me the LP for my fourteenth birthday in early December of 1979. Even then, I remember thinking the album was over the top–I wouldn’t have used the word “bombastic” back then, but it would have fit well. It introduced an over-wrought theatricality that Roger Waters would employ in everything he recorded afterward. It came as no surprise when he eventually took on traditional opera with Ca Ira, since The Wall uses a good deal of the conventions and pomp of that form.
For those that have been introduced to The Wall retrospectively, the movie by Alan Parker is the dominant narrative of the album. But the film is an unrelenting trudge of violence, sex and body-shaving Bob Geldof. Well-timed moments of calm on the album, such as Good Bye Blue Sky or Nobody Home were transformed into moments of misery and violence by Parker, leaving the viewer beaten and battered by the end of the film. For all of its aural stomping, the album was clearly driving for something other than that.
Waters famously hated the movie, and turned its proposed soundtrack, The Final Cut, into a confessional album without parallel, but also without sales. It’s hard to imagine that Waters didn’t plan it that way, since Not Now John, the album’s single featured the chorus “fuck all that”. The radio friendly version, toned down with “stuff all that”, just sounds too silly to consider, and disappeared from fm playlists very soon after arrival. A challenge and a reward, The Final Cut not a casual listen.
I once saw a Pink Floyd tour picture of a snare drum with “hit here” and an arrow pointing to the center of the skin written in magic marker. I’m sure it was a joke, but that sums up Waters’ concert philosophy. Indeed, during some of the Wall-covered moments of the second set last night, I might have believed that the band had left for a smoke while the album played.  The musicians are only part of the spectacle. From the homeless vet wandering the aisles with a shopping cart before the musicians took the stage to the slow march off the stage after Outside the Wall, the whole performance was about theatre much more than musicianship.

Waters has become more of a performance artist than a musician. And what last night’s performance made clear to me was that this is the format for which The Wall was intended. The pacing, the bombast, the dramatic flourishes and the note-perfect reproduction of the album make sense in the performance setting. At the time of The Wall’s release, Waters said Bring The Boys Back Home was the nub of the album, the heart. Listening to the record even now, once can’t help but wonder, “How can that be?” It’s just the lead in to the high point of Comfortably Numb. In concert though, it brought tears to my eyes. The overblown Naziism of the album’s In The Flesh turns out to be a pitch perfect set piece, even down to the stoner dude that stood next to me mimicking Waters’ crossed armed salute. And constructing a giant wall between the band and the audience always sounded like a conceit that must certainly be an off-putting experience for the audience. It turns out, however, to be the perfect prop for the projections that drive the show, serving not simply as a metaphor, but as the central tool in turning a concert into something else entirely.
Barrett-era Pink Floyd shows were known as cutting edge affairs at the time, experimenting with oil lenses, trippy lighting and various odd stage props. The Wall, which has always seemed like the ultimate severance from the garage days of Arnold Lane, turns out to be the culmination of them. Unlike the Stones or the Grateful Dead, the mature Pink Floyd was thought of as a studio band, an act whose intricate recordings were made with a perfectly tuned McIntosh amplifier in mind. What last night’s show made clear to me was that the album was made in service of the performance, that it was a means, not an end. Last night’s show, which I both looked forward to and dreaded as revisiting and rehashing the obsessions and fascinations of a teenage boy in Buffalo NY turned out to have been something completely different: a revelation.

 

Sounds like 1978, in the best of ways

This would have been on every mix tape I ever made if it actually came from the era that it sounds like. Kind of puts Harry Nilsson’s “You’re Breakin’ My Heart” to shame.

Tuli Kupferberg has died

From the NYTImes

Tuli Kupferberg, a poet and singer who went from being a noted Beat to becoming, in his words, “the world’s oldest rock star” when he helped found the Fugs, the bawdy and politically pugnacious rock group, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 86 and lived in Manhattan.
He had been in poor health since suffering two strokes last year, said Ed Sanders, his friend and fellow Fug.
The Fugs were, in the view of the longtime Village Voice critic Robert Christgau, “the Lower East Side’s first true underground band.” They were also perhaps the most puerile and yet the most literary rock group of the 1960s, with songs suitable for the locker room as well as the graduate seminar (“Ah, Sunflower, Weary of Time,” based on a poem by William Blake); all were played with a ramshackle glee that anticipated punk rock.
With songs like “Kill for Peace,” the Fugs also established themselves as aggressively antiwar, with a touch of absurdist theater. The band became “the U.S.O. of the left,” Mr. Kupferberg once said, and it played innumerable peace rallies, including the “exorcism” of the Pentagon in 1967 that Norman Mailer chronicled in his book “The Armies of the Night.” (The band took its name from a usage in Mailer’s “Naked and the Dead.”)

The Fugs had a track that was a musical adaptation of The Ten Commandments and the writing credit was “Kupferberg/God”.
That, in and of itself, was good enough for an entire career.

A quick one, while he’s away

The summer is my busiest time for work, so it’s been hard for me to keep up with album reviews. (I did listen to a great Don Dixon record during workout this morning, though.)

In the meantime, I came across this video, which comes pretty close to recreating a fever dream I had in 1986. And yes, my hands did feel just like two balloons at the time.

Alice Cooper Goes to Hell

As a way to rediscover my vinyl collection, I’m playing an old record each time I work out. The idea is to listen to stuff I haven’t heard in decades, and to get out of my listening rut. The rules are:

• I go alphabetically by artist, then chronologically within the artist. I skip anything I own digitally. (This keeps me away from stuff I listen to already)
• I skip stuff that is accepted canon.( I can’t think of anything else to say about the White Album)
• I reserve the right to skip the second third, fourth, etc. album from an artist I’ve already covered.

This morning, Alice Cooper Goes to Hell.
My brother used to blare this on 8-track in his 1972 Road Runner driving around Alden NY. I’m so used to it in that form that I still expect the fade out/fade in right in the middle of “Didn’t We Meet”, and I guess I kind of miss it.

An arch record wherein the famed Mr. Cooper, like Dante, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Phantom (more on him when we get to the p’s) go to hell and then finds a ray of hope at the end. I’m pretty sure Joss Whedon based his entire career on this album. Silly supernatural story-check. Clever writing-check. Good performances-check. A really surprising amount of heart–you betcha.
Alice Cooper was Ozzy before Ozzy was Ozzy, and the stories that I used to hear about him in the schoolyard made biting the head off a bat seem tame. Most of them were probably made up on the spot, but that only means he had become something of a boogie man to us.
And with good reason. When I googled this album this morning, this amazing video clip from 1976 came up:

He starts by assaulting his co-host, grabbing a random woman from the audience and getting tackled by the cops in a pretty convincing way. The dancers come out, and it becomes clear it’s an act. But even then, he still shocks–returning to flog a bondage-clad woman on the stage live. In the end, it came off as too staged, but he clearly had a punk heart before punk was punking. That whole thing was about being shocking.
The thing is, Alice Cooper always knew how to goof off his wild man image, and this album really has fun with it. In “Go To Hell”, the opener, he condemns himself “For making us doubt our parent’s authority, For being a brat, refusing to act your age…you even make your grandma sick”. Sure, a tough guy.
For all the green skin demon artwork, the album boast four acoustic ballads, and a dead on cover of the tin-pan alley classic I’m Always Chasing Rainbows complete with tweeting birds. Throw in the operatic I’m Going Home, the jazz danceresque I’m the Coolest and the goofy courtroom dialogue stage piece of Give the Kid a Break and there’s really no room left here for balls-to-the-wall satanism. Go To Hell and Wish You Were Here come off as goofy as well, but with more guitar. Guilty is really the only classic Alice Cooper style rocker, and it’s quite fun. The most risque thing on the whole record: “It seems the laws on my ass every time I stick it out the door.” Toby Keith wishes he wrote that, for God’s sake.
The hit was I Never Cry which I I enjoy hearing considerably more than the similarly themed Doctor My Eyes.
Bob Ezrin produced this and much of Alice Cooper’s other stuff. I first saw his name on Pink Floyd’s The Wall. That actually makes a lot of sense–they both have a “music in service of the narrative” quality that comes off as a bit corny and bombastic, but is pretty fun too.
I’m waiting for the broadway musical.

Rolling Stones–Exile on Main St. Reissue

This post violates all my rules, but I can’t resist.

I used to be a buyer at a used record store in Ithaca NY. Usually, folks would show up with an armful of crap records and you’d pass on the Tears for Fears vinyl, but take the Talking Heads ’77.
Occasionally, someone would show up with a couple of crates, and you could tell it was most of the collection. It was a bit of record store geek arcana that you could look at the cover of his (it was always a he) copy of Exile on Main St., and know what the rest of the collection looked like.
Exile came out in ’72. Sticky Fingers, ’71. The two seminal Stones albums of that decade. Sticky Fingers had a cover design by Andy Warhol, which famously had an actual zipper embedded in the cover. That YYK special scratched the hell out of the back cover of Exile, which was logically filed next to it in chronological sequence.
If the scratches were just impressions, but hadn’t actually torn the paper, then the rest of the records would be in pretty good shape. That meant the owner had bagged Sticky Fingers in order to keep it from hacking up his other records. If it was really torn to shreds, then the whole collection was useless.
If Exile didn’t have the scratches, then you were dealing with a poser, who either didn’t know how to file records, didn’t have Sticky Fingers, or had one of the later reissues without the zipper.
If the scratches ran from the center of the back to the left edge, then the rest of the collection tended toward more pop stuff. That was the result of pulling out Sticky Fingers, a near perfect album that was loaded with some of the best hooks of the Stones’ career. On the other hand, if the scratches ran to the right, that means they pulled out Exile more often, and they were into the weird, the murky and the obscure.
Exile on Main St. is a bellwether album. Its dense, occasionally off-key and can be downright unlistenable to the uninitiated. But once it gets its hooks into you, it is one of the most compelling albums in Rock and Roll. You either get it, or you don’t.
Yesterday, the Stones dropped a disc with eight new songs from that session, and alternate versions of Soul Survivor and Loving Cup. Hearing Keith croak through the lead of Survivor is worth the price of admission alone. Pass the Wine (Sophia Loren)” “I’m not Signifying” “Follow the River” and “Dancing in the Light” fit right in with sides 2 or 3 of the album, but are additive, not revelatory. They all have that same fever dream quality of Exile, and I can’t help but think they’ll embed themselves pretty deeply on further listens. Plundered My Soul, a song Mick put together recently using instrumental tracks from the Exile sessions, is the oddball. I’ve come to find his preening vocals so annoying in the last fifteen years or so, that my first reaction is to quickly dismiss this one. But he does a fair job trying to sound 30 years old and drunk, so perhaps it’ll grow on me. Like the Bootleg series from Dylan, this really makes one wonder what else is in the vault. Let it Loose, Mick, instead of releasing new compilations every other week. It’ll remind us of what we loved about the band in the first place, before it turned into a bad parody of rock and roll.

The Coolies dig..?

What goes into the pizza sauce at Fellini’s? Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme.
Clay Harper, known lately as a Pizza millionaire for slinging up slices for $2.05 at his Fellini’s Pizza joints around Atlanta had a frat rock band back in the day called the Coolies. This, their first album, is nine Simon & Garfunkel covers and Paul Anka’s “Having My Baby”. Talk about a One Trick Pony. (I know, that link really does ruin what would otherwise be a somewhat clever little play on words with Rhymin’ Simon’s career. The link seems like a long pause, waiting for someone to laugh at a throwaway quip.)
Harper sounds like Dan Stuart from Green on Red without the years of listening to Zuma in his basement. Despite trying to explore nearly every genre with the album, the band still sounds the same through every track. You get a sense of the value of the musical chops of Scott McCaughey in the similarly goofy Young Fresh Fellows.
In the end, I think there was a little too much respect for the S&G stuff to really lay into it. With a whole album dedicated to the joke, I kept waiting for some big payoff, but the closest thing was the Anka track. “Baby” actually produced a guffaw in the middle of my workout, a hard thing to do during planks.
Of note, Anne Richmond Boston did the artwork. Many know her Jeff Calder’s Swimming Pool Q’s, and her subsequent solo album. But the real standout is the keyboard player “I am a Rock”, John Cerreta. Years later, he would hit the pinnacle of musical honors, and provide the interludes for Issue 3 of Verb: An Audioquarterly. I guess everyone has to start somewhere.
I continue to scour garage sales looking for the much better regarded follow up, Doug, a rock opera focused on a skin head who kills a transvestite short order cook and gets rich by publishing the recipes he stole from his victim. Perhaps that’s where the recipe for Fellini’s sauce came from.

Chad & Jeremy/ I Don’t Want to Lose You Baby (1965)

As a way to rediscover my vinyl collection, I’m playing an old record each time I work out. The idea is to listen to stuff I haven’t heard in decades, and to get out of my listening rut. The rules are:

• I go alphabetically by artist, then chronologically within the artist. I skip anything I own digitally. (This keeps me away from stuff I listen to already)
• I skip stuff that is accepted canon.( I can’t think of anything else to say about the White Album)
• I reserve the right to skip the second third, fourth, etc. album from an artist I’ve already covered.

A forgotten front of the British Invasion, Chad and Jeremy are kind of like The Hollies without the edge. These guys were duking it out with the dreaded Glen Campbell to score hits on the easy listening charts in the mid sixties. I expected to hate this record. I remember buying it at a garage sale only because I had them confused with Peter & Gordon, and was bummed when I realized my mistake. Their harmonies were sweet, their song choices obvious, and their production meek. But, it turns out the record is hard to dislike. Like a bag of skittles left over after Halloween, you enjoy it while it goes down, but you aren’t going to go buy the 1 lb. bag.
I Don’t Want to Lose You Baby was there second LP for Columbia, and just like any folk album released between 1964 and 1971, it had an obligatory Dylan cover–in this case, Don’t Look Twice, It’s Alright. It’s funny that in a current discography, Chad calls Mr. Tambourine Man a Byrds cover. Surely he knows who gets the royalty check, but I guess that for some those guys still own that song.
Chad needed a copy editor for the liner notes–five paragraphs rife with run on sentences and verb tense switches. But what’s interesting about them is their nearly complete lack of sixties lingo. He name drops Phil Everly, which is as close to claiming hip credibility as he comes.
I do think Jeremy looks like a young Peter Case in the cover photo. No?
Sixties era non-Dylan folk, properly skewered by A Mighty Wind, really does have a kind of dated appeal. There is an innocence to it all, a naivete that is fun in its simplicity. Granted, this is what’s on the air in the America that Glenn Beck dreams of. The technical note on the bottom assures us that even though this is a mono record, “you can purchase this record with no fear of its becoming obsolete in the future.”
It is hard to imagine by what measure this record isn’t obsolete.

Jackson Browne (Saturate Before Using)

As a way to rediscover my vinyl collection, I’m playing an old record each time I work out. The idea is to listen to stuff I haven’t heard in decades, and to get out of my listening rut. The rules are:

• I go alphabetically by artist, then chronologically within the artist. I skip anything I own digitally. (This keeps me away from stuff I listen to already)
• I skip stuff that is accepted canon.( I can’t think of anything else to say about the White Album)
• I reserve the right to skip the second third, fourth, etc. album from an artist I’ve already covered.

In honor of LASIK week, and because I’m too busy to write any real comments, I’ve circled back to listen to Jackson Browne’s first album. This violates a couple rules. Sosumi.
Technically, this LP is eponymous, but because the artwork includes the phrase “Saturate Before Using” it is often referred to using that moniker.
The hit was Doctor My Eyes. I’m getting LASIK, so it seemed appropriate to circle back and take a listen. I think I should have dropped the needle on this one last year when I had an ear infection, and my hearing was clogged. Could anyone be more maudlin? Was I really earnest enough to buy all his stuff in college? Christ, I must have been unbearable.
With all proper love to Tonio K., I’ve gotta say, “Fountain of Sorrow my ass motherf#$ker, I hope you wind up in the ground.”
And for all you pedantic types out there, yes, I know “Fountain of Sorrow” is from Late for the Sky”, but I wish I didn’t.
I really wish Darryl H. had walloped him with the fireplace stoker.

Jim Carroll/Catholic Boy

As a way to rediscover my vinyl collection, I’m playing an old record each time I work out. The idea is to listen to stuff I haven’t heard in decades, and to get out of my listening rut. The rules are:

• I go alphabetically by artist, then chronologically within the artist. I skip anything I own digitally. (This keeps me away from stuff I listen to already)
• I skip stuff that is accepted canon.( I can’t think of anything else to say about the White Album)
• I reserve the right to skip the second third, fourth, etc. album from an artist I’ve already covered.

This morning, I headed back into Patti Smith territory with one of her proteges, Jim Carroll. Catholic Boy (1980) was his first album and the one that got all the attention.
To most folks, Jim Carroll is the guy who wrote that movie about himself that Leo DiCaprio starred in. Back in 1980, he was part of the NY Punk scene, having published some well-regarded poetry and his memoir, The Basketball Diaries. There’s a legend that this album was briefly released on the Rolling Stones label, but I’ve never seen it that way. The cover is by Annie Liebowitz. That lets you the company he was keeping at the time.
The backing band is standard post-punk fare, but it doesn’t get in the way of some great writing. Carroll’s singing is somewhat affected–he didn’t have what you would call a powerful voice, so he had to do something.
People Who Died, the semi-hit of this album is the hookiest, and despite its darkness, has occasionally been treated like a gimmick song. As of 9/11/2009, Carroll is ready to be added as another verse to the song. Here’s my attempt:

Jimmy was an old man who had done it all
He was a basketball star when he was sixteen
Prostituting himself for heroin in the village,
He’d grown respectable by sixty
and died working on a novel in his fine New York apartment.

OK, the rhyme scheme sucks, and there’s no rhythm, but I’m working on short notice.

Although there’s not a bad song on the album, the real gem is City Drops into the Night. An epic, film noir take on New York in the Taxi Driver era. I’m pretty sure I heard Jodie Foster in there somewhere, and I know saw I Tom Waits taking notes. Other stand outs are the title track, which hardly comes off as a ringing endorsement of that faith. I was surprised to see that there was a funeral mass for him at Our Lady of Pompei Church on Bleecker St. It’s too Late, Wicked Gravity, and Nothing is True also work well. I Want the Angel and Day and Night are the only forgettable tracks, but that’s not a bad ratio at all. Definitely worth another spin.

On another note, I have some workout advice. If you have a routine, keep at it. I’ve been sporadic of late, and this morning was misery. I’m trying to get back in the groove, but this isn’t any fun.