Donald Brown's Open Salon Blog

15 Albums: 1

Fri, 1 Oct 2010 16:10:00 -0400

Originating in answer to one of those Facebook memes that go the rounds, I'm going to write commentaries on "15 albums that left a major impression," in chronological order of my getting to know them.

These 15 are not only fully absorbed, they are touchstones, lodestar albums I steer my creaky ship by. They all burned their respective tracks into my brain before I turned thirty, which I think is the only way to really count for "major impression" status.

1. Highway 61 Revisited--Bob Dylan (released August 1965, first heard spring 1970).

At that point, all the Dylan I knew was on the first Greatest Hits album. The only song the two albums have in common is "Like a Rolling Stone," which had briefly become an object of fascination as I tried to get all the words just by listening to it over and over again. When my older brother brought this album into the house, he called me in, mainly to play "Desolation Row," a song he'd heard on late night FM radio and had been talking about since. First he played "Tombstone Blues," "Highway 61 Revisited," "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues." I wasn't even 11 yet, and I was getting tired. Dylan's music, by the early '70s, had been superseded, in aural presence and hooks and power chords, for anyone who had been listening, as we mostly did, to hard rock or pop-rock. This wasn't pop or rock, really. It was some weird hybrid derived from folk and it sounded (as indeed it was) designed for mono playback rather than stereo. Which is to say, it seemed pretty dated already. And yet.

Now it's forty years after my first listening and they've just released the mono version on CD. I've bought this album on vinyl and on CD and on SACD, and I never tire of it. That datedness has come to be an immense part of its charm, partly because of the aura derived from the mid-60s as a time when mono music was still made. And that era boasts an aura, these days, in part because of the albums Dylan released then. Indeed, but for some notable exceptions, the AM radio music of the era isn't what matters, except as nostalgia. This album threw a wrench into what pop and rock'n'roll could be in the name of a hipster subculture I knew very little about when I was 10, but there it was, filling the room. And something changed. Because Dylan, on the cover, was so cleary not a rock star. And he wasn't a folksinger any more either. Whatever he was, he seemed to know it would be unprecedented for a lot of people.

Between '72 and '75, when Blood on the Tracks was released, I got to know most of the Dylan back catalogue and this album only increased its fascination. It so clearly was a definitive statement -- the rock songs on its predecesssor, Bringing It All Back Home, were mostly throwaways, and its dense and drugged-out successor, Blonde on Blonde, though it showed progress in making an entire album boast a dominant sound, lacked the sheer verbal brilliance of this album, haunting, comic, surreal, sneering. "Desolation Row" never fails to put me in a trance and somewhere in there -- among the indelible images, the clever phrases, the articulate guitar fills -- is that feeling I learned to call "poetry" though maybe that's a word too literary in connotation. Maybe it's better just to call it "the dream." Every song on this album takes me away and from every one of them I could quote a line or two that does it for me. Sums up some state of mind or an attitude or a way of articulating one's status in a memorable, take no prisoners phrase. And for sheer delivery, this is still the Dylan album, the singing, as the liner notes say, "exercises in tonal breath control," that bend and rasp and enunciate as though, in the weird scenes Bob finds himself in, only diction can get you through.

Yes, I received your letter yesterday
About the time the doorknob broke
When you asked me how I was doing
Was that some kind of joke?
--Bob Dylan, "Desolation Row"

WHATCHA READIN?, 6

Fri, 1 Oct 2010 13:10:38 -0400

10. The Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus, Rainer Maria Rilke (German; 1923; trans. A. Poulin, Jr., 1977)

It was May of 1978 and I’d never heard of Rilke but for references to him in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow where he is the favorite reading of a German military man, Lt. Weissmann, aka Captain Blicero -- bisexual, sadistic, highly romantic, Wagnerian even. I was in New York for the day and browsing a book store. Seeing the name, I picked it up and started skimming. It was one of those ‘something clicked’ moments, an ‘interpellation.’ Suddenly, I just had to read this because this was for me.

What I saw, it seems to me now, was a glimpse of the full flower of romanticism, but not in the form with which I was previously familiar. I’d carried around in high school The Mentor Book of Major British Poets, including everyone you’d ever need from Wm. Blake to Dylan Thomas, and not long after my Rilke encounter, I would pick up Willis Barnstone’s Modern European Poetry, comprised of translations from major poets writing in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and Greek. A bit later, it would be The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, edited by Richard Ellmann, stretching from Whitman to James Tate. Yes, friends, I read it cover to cover in 1980-81.

But Rilke, even against the backdrop of all those various poets, is a unique read. And the point at which I found him was fateful. There I was, eighteen and never been kissed, and here was a poetry of desire as metaphysical longing. Of ecstasy as transcendence. This was the ‘sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll’ era, and I’d had plenty of the latter, my share of the former, but none of the initial term. Rock made sex banal -- the music’s predominant modes were either horniness or bitching and moaning about the fact that it didn’t work out (generally called the blues). Sure, Dylan was different, and I spent a lot of time with his work, even picking up his Writings and Drawings in 1973, but there was still lacking the imperative to romance. One could think: oh, if only I could meet a girl like the ones in Dylan songs, then we’d see . . .

What did Rilke have to do with any of that? It was the timing, pure and simple. It was time to find a girlfriend (being out of school meant being ‘mature’ or something), but Rilke gave that quest an existential coloring: the pursuit of a romantic Other, in other words, could be a personally defining moment, a moment of Being!

I’d been filling notebooks with verse since I was twelve. There had eventually come a hiatus around seventeen. ‘Youth here has end’ and all that. So certainly I already knew about romantic longing, but never was it focused on the here-and-now of my own life. I was not a teenager writing about being a teenager as a day-to-day reality, or writing fantasy exploits or sci-fi escapades. I was putting into words an internal logic -- a ‘romance with the self’ was no doubt how I understood it. And if that sounds a bit masturbatory, well, sure. But that outlet is true of almost anyone; what’s not so often true is the lyrical outpouring of solitary adolescence. Of course I was enamoured of Hesse and German romanticism, and of course Rilke would arrive as the crown upon that throne.

I fell in love with this book, one of those ‘and that has made all the difference’ choices. Being in love with it colored rather drastically what falling in love with a person would be like when it happened. It happened that summer, 1978; I had two females in mind as I read Rilke at the beach that year. I ended up falling in love with both of them, at first kind of simultaneously, then in succession. But that’s another story.

Why is a sequence of elegies the poem of my late-teen romance? Doesn’t that tell you something right there? I could’ve believed that Rilke was under thirty when he wrote these, when I first read them; when I realized they date from his late thirties to late forties, completed only a few years before his death, I could see them as a great summation from one who could shuffle off this mortal coil only after giving us immortal songs of praise and grief, of what it means to be in love with this world and with what Keats calls ‘beauty that must die.’

More than a decade later, in graduate school, talking over Rilke with the German scholar Stanley Corngold, who thanked me for doing the whole Rilkean ‘when a happy thing falls’ number in class (he didn’t feel up to it anymore, he said), Poulin’s translation came up and Stanley belittled it as ‘too Californian new-agey.’ I saw at once that he was right, but that in itself was part of the fatefulness. I was, in ‘78, about as Californian as I would ever be. The previous September I’d heard the Dead play live for the first time -- at Englishtown Raceway in NJ -- and a few months before acquiring Poulin’s Rilke was present at a memorable Jerry Garcia Band show at the Tower in Philly where the vibes were -- to quote Shelley Duvall in Annie Hall (1977) -- transplendent. So, yeah, a happy thing falls, the dead are grateful, times are high, and romance is a way of life -- just ask the angels.

DISCS OF THE DECADE

Sun, 23 May 2010 12:05:16 -0400

The years of the past decade are not notable to me as being distinct entities, much less so than decades from earlier in my own history. In fact, during the decade itself, I could be heard to say I’ll start paying attention again when we get to the ‘teens. And there’s more than a little truth in that. I’m ready to start paying attention now, I swear.

So here goes an attempt to stretch my brain by actually trying to ascribe something memorable to the output of the individual ‘00 years, in my listening. It’s quite easy for me to ignore whatever is high on the charts, and simply pick up new stuff from oldsters, or new stuff from whoever among the young(er than me) catches my attention. The decade ends with me listening to more classical music than ever before, so ... who knows, in another decade I might not be rocking at all.

Ok, enough preamble: let the listing begin!

2000:
Steve Earle’s Transcendental Blues arrived as a follow-up to the excellent El Corazón of 1997, but with more variety to the production, more muscle. It was, in hindsight, Earle’s peak album and blends a contemporary rock sound with country (which was a genre I was indulging more than ever in the closing years of the ‘90s, what with Johnny Cash’s renaissance, and with me finally listening to Townes Van Zandt, The Flying Burrito Bros., Gram Parsons in the early years of this decade). Speaking of Johnny, his Solitary Man from this year may be his all-around strongest album, or, in any case, it showed that the Rick Rubin-produced sessions were still going strong.

But the album that came to dominate all others from that year, eventually, was Modest Mouse’s The Moon and Antarctica, which I didn’t really get to know till 2001. It had the power of a, for me, new discovery (being the first entire album I heard by this oddly abrasive band), and features extended songs, short visceral punches, and a host of memorable lines and deliveries. 'Tiny Cities Made of Ashes' was a song for the time, much as a song like Talking Heads’ 'Life During Wartime' was in its day.

My song of the year: 'I’m the Man Who Murdered Love' by XTC: a catchy, mordant, irresistibly tongue-in-cheek account of how to overcome romantic longings.

2001:
Bob Dylan’s Love & Theft was released on 9/11/2001, a day everyone old enough to have memory on that day will always remember. Even though I didn’t buy it on that day, I did wander by a record store to contemplate its existence in the long daze that the day became. And that’s the album that will always be the album for the year, not only because getting to know it happened in the wake of the World Trade Center attack, but because, with two other Dylan albums of new material released this decade, it holds up the best. I’m ready to say it’s one of the top ten albums of his career and might even accept it in the top five. It brought back home a Dylan who could rock and softshoe and croon and caterwaul, and everything else he’d always done, including throwing out memorable lines and others that played with cliché and borrowings -- including a knock-knock joke -- in a refreshingly loose, at times almost zany, way. Not as prettily produced as Time Out of Mind (1997), nor ever as menacing or menaced, the album presents a Dylan for the new decade, a bit of old weird Americana with a vengeance. It actually reminded me of Self-Portrait at times in its ‘take it or leave it’ insouciance.

A big album of this year for me, in hindsight (didn’t get to know it till 2003) was Jay Farrar’s Sebastopol; even more than Earle’s album, this is country-tinged rock able to disassemble both genres in the name of something else, feeling almost at times experimental, and at other times quite ‘classic’ the way an album by The Band feels. Nick Cave’s album No More Shall We Part is a strong, lyrical, melancholy, and at times hilarious, edgy and uneasy follow-up to The Boatman’s Call (1997), which I regarded as a career peak, though others saw it as Nick calming down. No More, in its audacity, is more like classic Nick, but with greater musical maturity than he’d shown up to this point.

My song of the year: 'Mississippi' by Bob Dylan: a survivor’s wistfulness pervades the song, neither too dark nor too light -- rueful but unrepentant.

2002:
There was some good stuff this year: two albums by Tom Waits, though neither was as good as his previous album; a bit of a return to form for Elvis Costello, the best David Bowie album in a long time; the last George Harrison album, which is one of his best; a strong, but lesser, follow-up to their 2000 album by The Mekons, and, though I didn’t hear it till 2006, the best album I’ve heard by The Decemberists, Castaways and Cutouts; but the real contenders, for me, at the time were: 3) the debut album by a brash punk band, The Libertines, Up the Bracket, by turns melodic and almost thrashy; 2) Johnny Cash’s The Man Comes Around (his final album of his lifetime), featuring his version of 'Hurt,' powerfully uncompromising and naked, and some other standouts, like the title track and a somber reading of Sting’s 'I Hung My Head'; but the album I hear as the soundtrack for the year is 1) Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. It was the first album I heard by them, which means I started, I’d say, with their career peak, at least so far. It’s a pop album with a bad conscience, so while it can give you that happy-go-lucky air of good vibes that pop is supposed to deliver, it also works its hooks through layered deconstructions at times that make them have to fight to the surface, full of foreboding, and Jeff Tweedy’s voice can put you on edge the way the Neil Young of After the Gold Rush could.

My song of the year: 'The Good Old Days' by The Libertines: it’s a little dissatisfying, only because the huge adrenalin spike between 'things we said we’d do tomorrow' and 'the arcadian dream has fallen through' only occurs once, but the trailing off of the song makes that meaningful. These are the good old days, but they’re only as good as you believe them to be.

2003:
Things start to fray this year . . . or maybe it’s just one of those years -- every decade has them -- where not that much comes out to give the year a definite trajectory. Richard Thompson’s The Old Kit Bag sustains his position as a frontrunner of those remaining artists who began careers in the ‘60s and consolidated themselves (rather than burning out) in the ‘70s, and managed to survive the ‘80s without too much loss of taste, and on through a reassertion in the ‘90s as mature rockers; it, like Mock Tudor in 1999, is one of his most adept albums; Neil Young, also in that group, but more restless and uneven, delivered Greendale, a musical drama that is as inimitable as anything in his career, but the breakout album for me was by Chan Marshall, a young woman born in the ‘70s and hitting her stride with a stripped-down, hypnotic, haunting album, Cat Power’s You Are Free, which keeps up what seems to be my ear’s inner tendency in these days: strong hooks that are undermined rather than pushed in the usual pop-song manner; Marshall’s voice can be hard to take in its baleful unprettiness, but it registers a truth that no pop diva paraded on the radio has any inkling of.

My song of the year: 'Meet Me Down the Alley' by Paul Westerberg: speaking of truth, this song is so quaveringly plaintive, you’d probably have to shut it off if you aren’t in the mood to meet its gutsy vulnerability, but . . . it’s the song, by a guy more or less my age, that said what needed to be said, to whoever’s listening.

2004:
Another difficult year. It’s almost tempting to say it’s all over: longtime favorites R.E.M. release the worst album of their career, not bad so much as boring; albums by The Cure and Elvis Costello, both of whom had done some good work earlier in the decade, are mostly annoying, though featuring a few good tracks; Leonard Cohen puts out his slightest album ever, and Tom Waits puts out an album only intermittently interesting; but there are some new acts to catch: Franz Ferdinand’s eponymous debut is as hot and cool as rock is supposed to be, updating ‘80s club sounds; The Veils’ debut album, The Runaway Found, surfaced in the U.K. late in ‘03 and finally makes it stateside, giving us Finn Andrews, one of the most gripping, visceral vocalists of his generation; but this is Nick Cave’s year all the way. His double album disc: Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus crushes all that blocks its path; the arrangements, including great back-up singers and horns, kick ass and Nick is at his weirdly verbal best, riffing on basic premises that stem from a poetic approach to life threatening to go horribly wrong or, despite everything, able to affirm the value of personal vision.

My song of the year: 'There She Goes, My Beautiful World' by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: with its litany of artists and writers on the edge, evoked comically but feelingly; with its cri de coeur for some kind of inspiration; with its abasement that is utterly exhilerating; and with its relentless rhythm that seems to bowl over every possible hesitation or resistance, this is a crowning song in the Nick Cave canon of rave-ups. 'Send that stuff on down to me.'

To be continued.

WHATCHA READIN?, 5

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 20:10:56 -0400

9. Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon (American, 1973)

An English teacher in my high school, who later became a friend and was known for being something of ‘a freak,’ hearing I’d read a bunch of Vonnegut and had recently made it halfway through Ulysses, told me about a crazy book, published a few years before and deemed ‘unreadable’ by the Pulitzer committee, that featured a character who goes down a toilet bowl. He offered it as perhaps the most challenging work of recent fiction.

Not much later, I accepted the challenge. The trip down the toilet didn’t put me off, but I do remember one morning in homeroom reading the infamous Brigadier Pudding shit-eating masochism scene and feeling a bit peculiar in my first few classes that day. I kinda let my reading of the book drift a bit after that, which was spring of 1977. The next time I remember reading the book at length was at the beach in June of 1978. That return was in part inspired by picking up a copy of Rilke’s Duino Elegies in May of ‘78 (see 'Whatcha Readin? 6'). But even then I didn’t get through GR.

It wasn’t until September 1980 that I finally got through the final third of the book: the end of 'In the Zone' and 'The Counterforce,' and it was then, living in Philadelphia, that I got to know other readers of the book. And every time I crossed paths with someone who had “been there,” who could recall some improbable, baffling, hilarious, inspired, mind-expanding scene in Gravity’s Rainbow, there was a starry-eyed high, a contagious elation. Yes, it’s true, it’s really there because someone else has read it too!

Given my feelings about literature as a field of study (as expressed via Rimbaud in 'Whatcha Readin? 4'), I must’ve needed to find a living literary hero I could believe in. And Pynchon, in his weirdly insular refusal to be a public person, to be, basically, unseen and unheard of since sending a comedian to accept the National Book award for him in 1974, was the ideal figure. In addition to Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, a book I was in love with in those closing months of high school was Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971). The deregulation of the senses, capiche? Pynchon’s novel, like nothing else I’d ever seen, felt like the wild imaginings of someone completely outside or beyond the rational norms, the parameters of conventional thought -- whether of history or of narrative or of literature or of myth. The book was paranoid and psychotic, but absurdly so, pushed to the point of clairvoyant vision, or to where that vision must break down before the unprincipled rationales by which the world is run and governed.

Pynchon wasn’t a person. I couldn’t care less about what the guy who perpetrated this did with his days and nights or how he had gotten this incredible thing produced and published. Pynchon was prose, or, even more, 'Pynchon' was the name given to what was going on in my mind while reading this prose. Then I read his previous two novels and saw something else: it’s not 'Pynchon,' because that author has written two other books that, no matter their merits, don’t do what GR does. So, it was the narrator of GR, that unique and unrepeatable performance itself, that was the mainline. And the only place to find that was in GR.

Thus began a love affair that lasted for another four years, or until Slow Learner’s Intro (1984) introduced a guy named Thomas Pynchon who was a writer and who had the proprietary rights to GR (even though he said nothing about that book in the SL intro). And this Pynchon was going to go on with his career, write blurbs and reviews and produce more novels. Fine. But that guy isn’t the narrator of GR. To be a fan of GR was like, oh pick your own example, being a fan of Blonde on Blonde and having someone put one of Dylan’s ‘80s albums on... or of 'You Never Give Me Your Money' and someone puts on 'Silly Love Songs.' Or Kind of Blue, Miles with Coltrane, and now you’re hearing Miles with Chick Corea. There’s a wide difference, not just a difference in the perpetrator of these things, but in the times themselves, in what was possible or imaginable.

It’s here, perhaps, that the point of this exercise of '15 Books That Stayed With You' becomes clearest to me. Because Pynchon is the first person on this list who still has an ongoing career, and so he becomes the best example for how definitive it is, that moment in which a book finds you -- in your own life (I’m insisting on pre-30) -- and in its life. GR found me in the first decade after its publication when it simply made every other work of fiction published in that period feel like an also-ran, written by someone who had largely missed the point of what the decade previous to its publication -- from the assassination of JFK to the impeachment of Nixon essentially -- was 'like.'

Pynchon got it, and he translated that feel into a vast cinematic retrospect on the era --World War II -- he was a child in, and which we all, post-WWII brats, grew up teething on. In other words, it was as timely and as necessary, to my conception of things, as any work of fiction could be. It’s been hard for me to imagine ever since how any mere novel could beat it’s time.

Like a Jolly Elf

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 20:10:52 -0400

Yes, it's true, Bob Dylan has a Christmas album; read my review here