Bears On Trikes

I am a bear. I like to eat honey and ride my tricycle for applause. It's not as easy as it looks, squeezing my big bear paws into the stirrups.

[bearsontrikes]

‘Prisoner’ and Ryan Adams’ 4-Year Breakup Cycle

The new album ‘Prisoner’ has been labeled Ryan Adams’ “breakup record” following a high-profile divorce to singer/actress Mandy Moore. If true, this could be a defining moment for a songwriter who’s perpetually in a state of disrepair. Ryan Adams is the definitive break-up artist, the saddest sack on the songwriting block and a recording artist who’d already released albums with titles like ‘Heartbreaker’ and ‘Love Is Hell’ (not to mention scores of harrowing breakup songs with ominous titles like Why Do They Leave, Harder Now That It’s Over, How Do You Keep Love Alive, The Sun Also Sets, I Taught Myself How To Grow Old, and the absolute king of romantic futility, I Love You But I Don’t Know What to Say). Lookup the word “wheelhouse” in the dictionary and you may find the cover of this new album. The documentation of such an experience most directly and positively… is his milieu. 

First the good news, while ‘Prisoner’ isn’t a career-defining artistic statement, it does find Ryan Adams at the top of his game. The new album features some of the sharpest songwriting of his career, also his most consistent and essential collection of songs since that revered freshman release ‘Heartbreaker’. The lyrics are concise, evocative and malleable, offering up hard-fought wisdom and deep-seated honesty. But it turns out that ‘Prisoner’ is not actually his “break-up album”, as that would be his self-titled 2014 LP ‘Ryan Adams’. While he only filed for divorce in Jan 2015, he lists the date of separation in that public document as Aug. 4, 2014 -- which was roughly a month before the eponymous album came out… and who knows how much earlier he’d come to grips with the dissolution. ‘Ryan Adams’, or ‘ST’ (“Self-Titled” as it’s become known) was most certainly written within that emotional climate and now having ‘Prisoner’ to bookend the years, can we see how specific and autobiographical that self-titled affair was. Also, in between ‘ST’ and 60 of the songs he wrote for what would become ‘Prisoner’, he released another 25 newly recorded songs across 8 7” singles… plus a full album of originally orchestrated covers from Taylor Swift’s own breakup album ‘1989’. Which means (with astounding intimacy and clarity) Ryan Adams has now spent a 3 or 4-year song-cycle charting the 7 stages of his post-breakup grief.

Wavering between anger and a surreal sense of disconnect (maybe disbelief), ‘ST’ is the album where he’s first reading the tea leaves and coming to terms with a doleful, most dire reality. The breakup described on ‘ST’ is cold and distant, almost journalistic in its candor as a sneaking suspicion comes into focus. That album charts this inflection point with about 5 songs that take the metaphor of fire, once a stand-in for passion, and now depict it as something more like a destructive force that consumes all available oxygen with force and totality. In “Am I Safe” he sings “Every day my heart sinks like a stone, Carries me away into the undertow | At the bottom there’s no air, There’s no sound or light.” Within the chorus refrain he fully commits what was once unthinkable and unconscious knowledge: “I just don’t love you anymore, I just want to sit here and watch it burn”, a sentiment equally intoned through the chorus of ‘Trouble’: “I know everything here is gonna burn”. “Wrecking Ball” is equally adept expressing this now foregone conclusion that there’s “Not much left in the tank, Somehow this thing still drives | Like it forgot what it needed but somehow still survives”. What becomes ‘Prisoner’ is writ large on the wall throughout ‘ST’. In the song “Feels Like Fire” he melodically sings “You will always be the hardest thing I ever will let go” and later in “Tired of Giving Up”, “I’m tired of giving up, and I’m tired of fighting, I don’t understand at all, And I’m tired trying to hide it.” Even the song titles on ‘ST’ push their individual epiphanies to the forefront as he comes to terms: from “Trouble” to “Am I Safe”, “Stay With Me” to “Tired of Giving Up”… the album even ends with a song titled “Let go”. So ‘ST’ is the sick love album, the set of songs that still regards the presence of two people within a room, and by time we get to ‘Prisoner’, there’s nobody else in the room. There’s no “we”, just a lone “I” licking his wounds and taking stock of the fallout. Which isn’t to say it’s as big a downer as ‘ST’. The new album is lucid and contemplative, occasionally fearful, often fragile, but positively positioned, like an affirmation. No bleary-eyed midnight calling, on ‘Prisoner’ he has perspective and focus on the new day rising.

Throughout the recent press junket, Ryan Adams has been assuring his interviewers that ‘Prisoner’ is something that’s sure to be misunderstood. Let’s not be coy, yes the album is about divorce, his divorce specifically. And yes the tone is mournful. But he’s cautioned, "it has nothing to do at all with the plot people assume the record is about…" Unpacking that a bit further: “This record is me trying to give myself a break but romantically say that attachment to permanence is an illusion” The record came out of his will to remain open-hearted, enough to risk a new heartbreak.  By time we get to ‘Prisoner’, he’s come through the other side and has channeled his pain for catharsis. And because this is such familiar ground for him, the individual songs fit well within his catalog.

“To Be Without You” is one of those classic Ryan Adams songs that flows so well and effortlessly it seems like it’s always existed, just waiting up there in style heaven for Ryan to pluck it from the ether and pull it down (BTW, thank you ‘Wonder Boys’). It’s a rhythmic ballad that unfolds with style and grace. “Everything was new and colorful, It’s gotten darker, Every day’s a lesson things were brighter before… I feel empty, I feel tired, I feel worn… And nothing really matters anymore” After beating himself up for so long, scraping the bottom for answers that just won’t come, he comes through with an unsatisfying but most definitive truth: “Nothing left to say or really even wonder, We are like a book and every page is torn”

“Shiver and Shake” is the album’s most raw of ballads, inhabiting the time where the divorce becomes final: “I’ve been waiting here like a dog at the door, You used to throw me scraps, you don’t do it anymore, I miss your loving touch, miss your embrace, But if I wait here any longer I’m gonna fade away” That said, it’s “Broken Anyway” that best embodies the meaning of ‘Prisoner’. Adams described the song itself saying it lives within those last couple of seconds before a proverbial car crash, the type of crash that ensures the car can never be driven again. So this is couple’s last chance to have any discussion, but instead of hitting the brakes they lean into the crash. Because they realize the car is already totaled, and this fatalistic acceptance of the crash, he’s said, is how people free themselves when something’s dysfunctional. Elegant and concise, “The problem is what we wanna say, What we wanna say would just blow us both away… Everything we were is going down an endless drain” The chorus becomes an elegy of sorts, expressing his struggle to find affirmation or comfort: “It was broken anyway. It was broken, it was fake… and we don’t know what it meant”

Finally, we get the album closer “We Disappear”, the most revealing song on the album. “Was I alone, am I still, Nobody gets in, nobody ever will… You deserve a future and you know I’ll never change“, this is the lyric he sings as sacrament. Adams has described the song as Ryan explaining to himself what he was doing, and the flaws he had in expectation… he’s explaining himself to this guy, a 70 or 80 year-old man raking leaves in the front yard where the leaves are parts of his personality he hadn’t come to terms with. So while pondering a brighter future, he concedes that he’s the greatest threat to that future, and he’s speaking to his ex but he’s also addressing himself. And with that he ends one cycle (both ‘Prisoner’s song cycle and a relationship cycle) with eager anticipation for the next. For all the thematic and stylistic connections this album has to Bruce Springsteen, this might be where ‘Prisoner’ connects to The Boss best as its spiritual forbearer, who in the song “Atlantic City” coined an ever-living optimism with the couplet “Everything dies, baby that’s a fact… But maybe everything that dies -- someday comes back”.

On a recent WTF podcast with Marc Maron, Ryan was describing the days where he wrote his original masterpiece, ‘Heartbreaker’. He describes how he went broke in NYC and with his tail between his legs, had to move back to North Carolina. There, he recounts days just drinking and communing with music. He paints the picture: “You’re by yourself in the house and your liberal tears go down your face, you’re like “wow this song is killing me and raising me up from the dead at the same time!”” He cites Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me" as exhibit A, but with ‘Prisoner’ Ryan Adams has released another batch of songs that’ll do just that. It’s a slow-burner of an album, and it will both kill you and raise you up from the dead at the same time.

[bearsontrikes]

‘One More Time With Feeling’: Prophecy Within the Work and Life of Nick Cave

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdl5sox2G6g)

‘One More Time With Feeling’ Documentary

In July 2015, the goth-noir Australian rocker Nick Cave experienced the unspeakable when he lost one of his twin sons at the age of 15. His son Arthur fell off a cliff in the sleepy seaside town of Brighton, England, and he died from head injuries. Cave had already written the batch of songs that would appear on his next album ‘Skeleton Tree’, but was midway through the recording when the incident occurred. After taking 6 months off to grieve, he asked his friend and filmmaker Andrew Dominik (“The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford”, “Killing Them Softly”) to film the remaining recording sessions and original interviews to create a documentary about the album and its circumstances. More pragmatic than an artistic instinct to explore grief and adversity within the creative process, he specifically commissioned ‘One More Time with Feeling’ to help him weather the record’s eventual press junket (where he’d inevitably be bombarded with loads of painful, intrusive, and maddeningly inane questions about deeply personal matters). Dominik’s resulting work premiered at the Venice Film Festival, and then played in a few hundred theaters around the world the night before the record’s release. ‘One More Time With Feeling’ is a far better film than was necessary, with exceptional form and function. What began as a promotional film is elevated into something that manages to articulate the inexplicable with great depth, compassion and insight.

Part I: Artifice

‘One More Time With Feeling’ is a 3D film photographed in high-contrast black and white. I’ve never seen 3D technology used to simply present talking heads and bodies at rest, but it really elevates the studio recording scenes that run throughout. 3D footage is shot with a depth-of-field so shallow that we see Bad Seeds band-mate Warren Ellis’ conducting hand fall out of focus just as quickly as it comes in. The camera presents life as a scattershot of stimuli vying for attention and consideration, in a context where there can be no clarity or transcendence.  The camera is disciplined enough to hold one object in focus, leaving everything else gauzy, hazy, significantly out of reach, and here Dominik creates the illusion of intimacy… making things palpable albeit extremely fleeting. And then there’s the stark black and white photography, which most effectively amplifies the weight and gravity of the content. Rich chiaroscuro lighting gives objects great depth, a nuance that conveys even the slouching weight of the fabric he wears as inky black shadows pool within the dimpled sleeves of his sport coat. With sizable floodlights studding the studio’s perimeter, the camera illuminates Cave’s grace and emotion during flares. When depicted in silhouette, it swallows him in darkness and grief.

Dominik creates no boundaries between the studio subjects and his documentary crew, and in doing so makes no efforts to cloak the artificiality that would otherwise inhibit intimacy. The film even opens with a botched take. Audio continues to roll while the cameras set-up anew, capturing Nick Cave’s close friend and collaborator Warren Ellis’ off-camera reticence to even talk about such personal affairs. Not long after, the director asks Cave to take off his shirt just so he can put it back on again within a better take. This is not a naturalistic approach to documentary filmmaking, and the director deliberately foregoes the typical fly-on-the-wall approach. In fact somewhere past the mid-point, Cave’s wife and son visit the studio and Cave calls out the irony of a cameraman watching the 3D camera, which watches he and his family as they close the circle by watching that cameraman. By assembling the film from 2 groups of cameras, one set on the musicians and the other tracking the musicians from behind crew #1, the contrivances of filmmaking become part of the film’s fabric. The camera dolly and the circular track that encircles Cave at his grand piano become as much a part of the action as the old-timey microphones and studio equipment the musicians employ to capture aural authenticity. This creates an interesting contrast between intimacy and audience, inspiration and intent.

The filmmaker also stitches together a few impossible shots to suggest continuity and context, both internal and external states. In one case, the camera spins around the piano and pulls away, deftly pushing through a crack in the wall, plunging down the center of a circular stairwell, exiting and emerging into the blinding daylight. In another shot, possibly the filmmaker’s most literal narrative provision, the camera moves in tight on Danish soprano Else Torp’s face as she sings the song “Distant Sky”, pushing further and further through the skin and veins of her face and out the back of her head to once again thread a tiny crack in the wall. We’re back outside, pulling away from the studio and into the night. Through the aid of savvy computer editing, the town of Brighton quickly gives way to East Sussex, to England, to the UK and the Western Hemisphere, as the Earth turns. By co-opting this piece of satellite imagery, he reconciles the internal with a macro view of our place in the cosmos. Both shots suggest life beyond the grief, a context beyond Cave’s own private trauma.

Part II: Substance

Throughout the interview footage, Nick Cave considers his place in the cosmos and sees it differently. Time has become abstract for him, either all happening at once or stretching like an elastic band. He articulates best while working in metaphor: “You have this trauma and so you create a fence around the area. Everything around it is ok and you move forwards but that fence is always there and the way I was saying ‘Time is elastic’, we can go away from the event… but at some point the elastic snaps back and we always come back to it.” He points out that we have what the universe does not: consciousness, and due to that gift and curse, “the present is of a magnitude greater than the trillions of stars that came before” For that reason, there is no Earth time, there is no humility within the cosmos because “the past, the present and the future are happening now.”

Small devices aside, like those that help reconcile the verbal with the visual, Andrew Dominik tries to avoid editorializing and its within Nick Cave’s narration where the documentary broadens its appeal to those unfamiliar with his music and persona and becomes something truly profound. Nick Cave repeatedly attempts to describe the trauma but warns there are no words that can neatly summarize his grief, because extreme loss is no place for sentiment. “You can try to put words to it”, he says, “or offer some trite platitude that wraps everything up neatly, to say something like ‘he lives in my heart’ — but he doesn’t. Not really, because he doesn’t live anymore.” And here he’s not just speaking on the futility of articulation -- rather he’s speaking to its utter uselessness because he can no longer event predict how he’ll respond to stimuli, events or personal interactions. “It’s too big to comprehend,” Cave says towards the end of the film, “you search to get your head around it, to create a narrative for it.” But he also recognizes that such a narrative would provide no answers and no comfort. He, his wife and Arthur’s twin brother Earl grieve together, as a family, but in parallel they also grieve alone as individuals. And he no longer understands himself as an individual. The “event” instantly made him into another person, literally someone else inside his skin. “It’s affected me in ways I don’t understand,” says Cave, still raw with grief. He recounts sobbing on the street in the arms of a friend, only to then realize that he’s leaning into the arms of a complete stranger, or he recounts how a baker asks how he is, and he gets tripped up without a clue how to answer. “It’s frightening. I don’t know what I’m fucking doing now… what am I doing sitting in a camera talking about this kinda thing? I wouldn’t have done that before.”  

Creativity fits centrally within the film, as Nick Cave concedes that a writer wants things to happen in life so you have something to write about, but suggests that trauma is very damaging to the creative process. “Imagination needs room to breathe, and when a trauma happens, there’s just no room to breathe.” He recognizes the prophetic nature of his lyrics and cites his wife Susie’s (potentially revisionist) sense of superstition around that. When she later presents the camera with a painting Arthur made when he was 5 of the Rottingdean Windmill (which happens to be located mere meters from the cliff where he fell to his death), she laments how they chose to frame the painting, way back when, in black. Their tragedy seems to define not only the present and future, but permeate the past, and it’s clearly changed her, as fundamentally as it did him. There’s an indelible moment right here as Cave’s eyes respectfully and tenderly shift to and from her, with both understanding and trepidation. He leans back in his chair to give her space, but it feels like he’s leaning forward, as if her next words could come as complete surprise. Because he assumes that she’s changed just as much as he, and maybe 6 months later they no longer know how to understand one another beyond the shared grief that’s come to define them.

Dominik applies a few devices to resolve the film in ways that feel narratively “authentic” while still serving the weight and gravity of the story. From that satellite image of the world still spinning to a montage of still portraits of each now-familiar face from the film, ‘One More Time With Feeling’ is ultimately not about the recording of an album but a family separated, and that family’s comprised of his wife and son, the band, anyone affected. Earlier we heard Cave concede a critical point that this isn’t just something that’s happened to he and his wife, because it happened to Arthur (who he reminded us, doesn’t really live in his heart because he doesn’t live at all). The film ends fittingly, with a lingering image of the cliff where Arthur fell to his death. During those end credits we hear Arthur’s own voice, for the first time, right beside his twin Earl as the now-divided brothers sing Marianne Faithfull’s “Deep Water” a few years back. It’s an impossibly fitting song that confirms as more than superstition, that there is indeed prophecy, and maybe a little bit of providence, in Nick Cave’s work and life.

‘Deep Water’ by Marianne Faithfull

I'm walking through deep water

It's all that I can do

I'm walking through deep water

Trying to get to you

Your face is hidden from me

But your love is not

I will not reach for other things

Till I know what I have got

I'm walking through deep water

Trying to get to you

I'm walking through deep water

I have no time to lose

I'm walking through deep water

There's nothing left to choose

This little heart of mine

Got loaded up with chains

The world just swirls around me

The water makes its claim

I'm walking through deep water

Trying to get to you

Who will calm my fears?

Who will drive my tears away?

Who will calm my fears?

Who will drive my tears away?

I'm walking through deep water

Nearer to the sea

I'm asking the deep water

Don't take my love from me

I'll dance with little ladies

With a hundred just like me

They hold their breath and hesitate

And dance beneath the sea

[bearsontrikes]

David Bowie: A Man Out Of Time

On January 10 2016, a mere 2 days after releasing the musical rebirth ‘Blackstar’, it was announced that David Bowie had passed away. ‘Blackstar’ signaled new directions for Bowie, and was allegedly modeled after Kendrick Lamar’s shape-shifting hip-hop opus ‘To Pimp A Butterfly’. At the same time, it contained no discernible traces of hip-hop (and scant connections to rock and roll, for that matter). It was another curveball from an artist who repeatedly gave his fans reason to expect the unexpected. And for better or for worse, he always delivered on that promise. After releasing 27 studio albums, there may be musicians who left behind such a broad and esteemed catalog, but nobody covered as much ground, as fearlessly and as aggressively, as David Bowie. Especially through his 1970s heyday, he released a string of 13 albums in a row where each was bold and varied, critically revered and commercially successful. That David Bowie began and remained at the absolute vanguard of popular music for that decade is an irrefutable truth.

 Today we look back on the 70s as the decade where bloated, arena rock gave way to economical, simplistic, often nihilistic punk rock, laced with amphetamine and squalor (“no future”, as the Sex Pistols sang). But while that decade has come to be seen as a denouement of sorts to the more groundbreaking and essential 1960s revolution, David Bowie’s output during that time created a template that laid the groundwork to influence music, art, fashion for generations to come. Through the 70s and after, he took new and emerging genres and imbued them with fresh sonic textures and production techniques that delivered material that could be daring and challenging, yet simultaneously popular and accessible. Bowie often interlaced standard rock and pop structures with the avant-garde. His songs could be peppered with baroque jazz, cabaret, icy synth washes or angular guitars, but amidst the offbeat turns and occasional outright chaos, he’d always reach out and offer the listener a lifeline, something accessible and comforting for balance. For example, amidst the futuristic electronic swell of ‘Low’, vocal melodies weren’t necessarily centered within the music and you didn’t always know which one of those countermelodies to follow, as they’d push and pull like shifting tectonic plates beneath the familiar terrain. He could always push the tension in his voice until he’d find something worthy of a hook or sample, or drop a melodic line amidst the chaos (e.g. the absolutely bonkers “Scream Like A Baby” from ‘Scary Monsters’) to create that sense of familiarity on further listens. David Bowie’s songs were completely unpredictable like that. They were oddities when taken as singles, but in each album’s context they seemed somehow connected and native. And his instinct for sequencing albums was uncanny.

 The first time I heard “Blackstar”, I could barely reconcile the monochromatic Gregorian melodies layered atop a chaotic yet completely relaxed free jazz saxophone. But this was nothing new to his music; we’ve seen him create suites before from completely disparate segments through delicate bridges or chordal progressions, sometimes it seemed through nothing more than the forward insistence of momentum itself. Just look to the album namesake from 1976’s “Station to Station”, a song that starts slow with a buzzing labor, opens into a plodding rhythm and a doting melody which finally clears into a huge arena-ready chorus. We don’t know how we got there, but that chorus delivers blue-sky energy, and it’s a great place to be. A worthy pay-off to the first 5 minutes. Most rock songwriters get credit for their pop song-craft but are completely neglected when it comes to composition. The highly influential late-century American composer Philip Glass has praised Bowie's gift for creating "fairly complex pieces of music, masquerading as simple pieces", and fashioned his own seminal early 90s symphonies after the Berlin Trilogy (1992’s Symphony No. 1 “Low” and 1994’s Symphony No. 4 “Heroes”).

 Bowie continually excavated fringe cultures not just with the borderland musical genres he brought to each new album, but in terms of his visual ethic and the personas he adopted. He brought a complete vision for how each album cycle would be packaged and received, and at the end of each album cycle, he burned the bridge to get back home. Only in retrospect do some albums appear to suggest a new direction to come, as the baroque, stylistically detached ‘Aladdin Sane’ bridged the glam and future shock of ‘Ziggy Stardust’ into the dystopic Orwellian concept album of ‘Diamond Dogs’, or as ‘Station To Station’ bridged the “plastic soul” of ‘Young Americans’ with the icy, abstract electronic soundscapes of ‘Low’. After the Berlin Trilogy had moved him as far as possible from traditional pop structures, he came back to that familiar mix of avant-pop with ‘Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)’ -- before moving swiftly into straight arena pop with the global smash ‘Let’s Dance’. David Bowie delivered close to an album a year for his first 14 years, and no matter how they were received, he moved fast and he always moved forwards. “Golden Years” from ‘Station To Station’ presaged the disco scene, while George Clinton credits the scratch-funk of “Fame” from ‘Young Americans’ for having inspired his Parliament sound (on “Give Up The Funk”). Early 80s post-punk bands like Gary Numan and Bauhaus would owe a sizable debt with their dark angular riffs-come-static noise to that slow-building dirge that opens “Station to Station”, the still edgy pre-industrial/alt-nation workup that runs throughout ‘Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)’, or even small, slight, otherwise overlooked flourishes that run throughout, like the chugging and feedback-laced coda from “The Sweetest Thing (Reprise)” off 1974’s ‘Diamond Dogs’ -- which could’ve anchored an entire alternative rock record in 1993.

 And regarding those ever-changing personas he was so well known for, he never got too precious or vested because that might overshadow his loftier ambitions. Case in point, he flatly announced at the end of his ‘Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’ tour, while first reaching an early career high-point, that this would be the last show they’d ever play. Like the crowd, the band was completely caught off-guard as they launched into the final song of the night, an aptly chosen “Rock and Roll Suicide”. This became his template, as each phase ended abruptly, typically more unceremoniously than Ziggy. In a sense, the completion of every project cycle was tantamount to a rock and roll suicide. He once said, “The only way to remain a vibrant part of what is happening, is to keep working anew all the time. For me, it always will be change” He’d later claim that his musical wanderlust was simply based on a lack of focus, an inability to keep himself compelled for too long a period. But it’s a bit flip to tell the press that he kept moving forwards simply because he got bored… there was clearly an artistic ethos at play, a musical wanderlust, but one that was never precious, as he crafted each role, each album, each tour. When he’d proclaim, “I’m a collector, and I’ve always just seemed to collect personalities and ideas”, he seemed to simplify his work without trivializing the character platforms that carried it. Bowie said that he created the albums not to carry these characters, but rather he created the characters so that he could write those albums. Brian Eno recounted that process of experimentation and embodiment in the studio: “What it was for him was finding out who the person was singing it, so trying out different voices and different inflections of voice and standing in a particular way. So it was like a method actor. Once he knew who this person was, who was doing the singing, everything else fell into place.”

 And while the “Thin White Duke” of ‘Station To Station’ will go down as the final immersive character from his early shape-shifting days, it wasn’t until the ‘Serious Moonlight’ tour supporting his greatest commercial success, ‘Let’s Dance’, that he made a conscious decision to move way from what had become a common tactic for carrying his music. He conceded: “We’re out of characters, just into suits… and the suits will change from tour to tour”. So it was finally in 1983 that he truly moved past the manipulation of image, and strived to present himself as “Just a performer. To take away some of the confusion about my identity.” Of course he continued to play with image through his career, if not altogether embodying discrete characters anymore. In Rolling Stone magazine, about a month before he died, the journalist Andy Greene was interviewing keyboardist Jason Lindner on the recording of ‘Blackstar’, and they began to chat about the fact that David Bowie hasn’t toured since 2003’s ‘Reality’. Here Greene took over the interview, impressing on Lindner how the current David Bowie fit into his lineage of characters and personas: “I think after the heart surgery he wanted to recover in private and be with his family. During that absence, he started to have a mystique about him again. It wasn't like all those interviews he did in the 1990s and early 2000s did much to advance his career, and now suddenly, he was this mysterious figure for the first time since the 1970s. I think he's realized it served him well and just stuck with it. Also, it's like his newest persona. He's like this rock-star ghost.” 

Which is a pretty brilliant insight to make sense of modern David Bowie, in context of how we understood him… Of course it assumes that Bowie was still concerned with matters of image, instead of recognizing the very real possibility that his absence from the public circuit wasn’t some post-modern mind-fuck on image and celebrity, but rather the complete lack of regard for something he no longer cared about. Either way, it’s the greatest irony viewed in terms of where he started his career, that going underground was the only way one of the biggest rock stars in the world, who’s music hadn’t not touched a single corner of the globe, could subvert, if not take back control of his image. And this interpretation will never lose its credence now that the man has passed, because the truth is that there has never been a celebrity so adept at the construction of, or application of his or her own mythology. While Guns N Roses got to it first, their album title “Use your illusion” would’ve been the perfect mantra for David Bowie to mount a new tour, at any point in his career.

 Whether the personas were a simple extension of the music, or reflected the art itself, David Bowie understood the power of image and used those images to reinvent culture for the marginalized throughout his career. He said “There was this other world, an alternative reality, one that I really want to embrace… I wanted anything but the place I came from” and as an artist he always created his own reality, possibly his own moral universe. He made it cool to be an outsider because he was self-possessed and always presented himself with complete conviction. Watching all those videos and performances on YouTube, seeing his presence, his physicality, the way he completely fills each frame no matter how close or far the camera tracked him… he had a magnetic personality and presence akin most to Elvis, at the birth of Rock n Roll.

 David Bowie was a musical polyglot that borrowed nascent ideas from emerging scenes, and some of this synthesis wouldn’t be paid off for years to come. His music often read like it was pulled completely and fully formed out of the ether, and consequently he came off as being canny, sophisticated and savvy, yet often transgressive. Due to that, and the completely singular vision he brought to each song-cycle and album release, David Bowie will go down as the ultimate and perennial outsider… the alien Rock and Roll messiah who fell to Earth and made it safe for the misfits, possibly even cool to be a misfit. But to frame him as a counter-culture figure would be to miss the point. He was an iconoclast, by design. Culture itself was his canvas, far beyond just the music, and that’s what elevated his peak work well beyond that decade which heralded the space alien’s arrival.

[bearsontrikes]

A Treatise on ‘Beggar’s Banquet’ via the Incomparable Benmont Tench

I’ve long fantasized about a series on Netflix or YouTube where musicians interview other musicians. Nothing too high concept, just a couple of talking heads in the know, rapping about music. And maybe the host would spend each episode with a different band or artist, poring over great material like it was the Dead Sea Scrolls, exploring great albums with academic zeal. And only as they’d strip away the legend and cultural detritus which cloud our ears and how we see the music, they’d come to reveal something both overly familiar yet shiny and new. Yes they’d point to all the hallmarks of great songwriting, composition and production, but they’d also describe the music as they first heard it, and vicariously transport us to a pure visceral response of something wildly new and exciting.

The 33 1/3 book series is great, conceptually, as they devote a pocket-sized book to a different album (Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out is the most recent title, and 115th in the series). I’ve read plenty of titles within the series, but to fill 140 pages describing an album, and work without the aid of multimedia, the authors end up spending most of their time describing either their autobiographical relationship to the album, or the circumstances that lead to it’s being canonized. These pages can be great, interesting, engaging, but they’re rarely revelatory, because those circumstances tend to be very... circumstantial. These types of books offer anecdotal information that provides much context with little resonance. “Did you know” and “have you ever wondered” become very pedantic when you’re reading Griel Marcus’ 304-page treatise on Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. Despite being one of the greatest rock and roll historians, most of those 304 pages are long on content but short on wonder. Scanning through the 33 1/3 series, ‘Exile on Main Street’ was one of the better titles, partly because it was about ‘Exile on Main Street’, and partly because it was written by fellow musician Bill Janovitz, he lead guitarist and singer of late 1980’s Boston band Buffalo Tom. That he himself probably first learned to play guitar by the dashboard light of that very album brings a passion that comes through in the writing. But what also made that title successful was the way he devoted half the book to the album’s circumstances, and committed the other half to the songs. Structured as a walking tour of ‘Exile’ with a chapter devoted to each song, he references and then sub-references down to the individual timestamps, as he reveals buried guitar riffs, rhythmic drum fills, codas, accents and overlays.

But it takes a rare voice to not only elevate a recording with insight and understanding, but a most articulate one to find the words that bring those songs to life. I recently discovered the ‘My Favorite Album with Jeremy Dylan’ podcast series, which is always good, occasionally great, and have to say that episode #123: Benmont Tench for 'Beggar’s Banquet' is a high-water mark for rock and roll critique and appreciation. Over the course of 67 minutes, the piano player from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers explains, elucidates and testifies why ‘Beggar’s Banquet’ is the sound of The Rolling Stones finding their voice, synthesizing the blueprint of rock and roll and seizing their destiny to become the world’s greatest rock and roll band. It’s both inside baseball and unabashed fanboy love at its finest.

His fervor for the album is a wonder as he shows the same regard for a deep-cut like “Factory Girl” as he would a seminal 60’s staple like “Waterloo Sunset”. And working through ‘Beggar’s Banquet’, he delves into the lyrical content of “Jigsaw Puzzle” as he does “Salt of the Earth”, postulating that “Jigsaw” is just as ragged and apocalyptic as “Street Fighting Man”. On that matter, he asserts that “if you’re going to be a rock critic and you want to write your treatise, don’t base it on “Jigsaw Puzzle”, but certainly don’t skip over “Jigsaw Puzzle” and just go to “Street Fighting Man…” Benmont’s got insight to burn as an unabashed Stones fan and as one of the most respected musicians working today (look for some quick call-outs about the times that oh, by the way, he recorded with the Stones, as well as Mick Jagger solo). But he’s also all heart and admiration as he waxes philosophical about the sheer liberation of rock and roll.

But for all the talk about the deep cuts that make ‘Beggar’s Banquet’ a cohesive yet most varied album, ‘Beggar’s Banquet’ happens to feature one of the richest, most evocative crown jewels of rock and roll history, and Benmont rises to the challenge of describing the fever dream that is “Sympathy for the Devil”:

And you open a rock and roll record with “Please allow me to introduce myself”, it is the perfect way to start a record. You want to open a record like that... The track is a lesson in how to develop a song. The song is a lesson in how to write a song… 

He walks through the song as it unfolds, starting with what seems a deceptively simple description of the narrator:

The lyric’s a little heavy-handed (“every cop is a criminal, every sinner a saint”), but consider the character that’s singing the song. So what exactly is going on here?

Soon his commentary builds and matches the music we hear unfolding:

It’s all about the music. The bass propels it, the piano just hits chords in the beginning, the percussion bubbles along… gets a little more intense as the track goes along, and the piano played by Nicky Hopkins starts to get a little bit more intense. The bass becomes this lovely… like the iron works you see in N.O. or something. But like the percussion, it just bubbles and drives. The piano starts to pick up the intensity of the bass and every now and then you get the crash of a cymbal…

It builds an intensity until the piano is as filigreed as the bass, and as filigreed as the percussion, and then you get this out of nowhere electric guitar, just jabbing and stabbing at you, and poking and prodding at you…and the whole time you’re hearing something that’s coming from the ether, from a great distance. This is not a land you’re familiar with, not something you’ve heard before…

For the generations of listeners who grew up with ‘Sympathy’ already a classic rock radio staple, he neutralizes all that we take for granted:

You’re listening to music from Mars. Just like the first time you heard Hendrix, just like the first time you heard ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’, just like the first time you heard ‘That’s Alright Mama’ or ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. Just like the first time you hear Louis Armstrong, cause Louis Armstrong was from Mars.

…This is the *shit* 

He then takes a step back and puts it all in context:

So. You get this record, and the first thing you have is the devil asking for sympathy, or somebody saying “look at the world and have some sympathy for the devil.”

Hot damn, that’s some fine stuff.

The greatest part of being born with the Rolling Stones’ legacy fully formed is ironically the hardest: how do you not take it for granted. There was a 5-year stretch, long before many of us were born when they released ‘Beggar’s Banquet’, then ‘Let It Bleed’, then ‘Sticky Fingers’ and then ‘Exile on Main Street’… 4 of the greatest albums in rock and roll history, one after the other. But we didn’t have to play ‘Sticky Fingers’ non-stop for an entire year, wondering what’ll come next, because by time we got to ‘Sticky Fingers’, Exile was right behind it. That’s even more the case today as those studio albums are bundled with another 22 titles, available at the touch of a finger (hello, Spotify!) 

But there was a day, back in December 1968 when ‘Beggar’s Banquet’ was unleashed to an unsuspecting public that received something wildly fresh and original. The music was heady, weighty, sometimes extremely racy (“Stray Cat Blues”) despite being largely distilled from what that had come before (and by definition, everything we see in the rearview mirror is safe). Yet somehow this album comprised largely of American folk, rhythm and blues, country and gospel had managed to project a bold new future. It’s hard to contextualize an album in that way. But that’s the magic of this podcast as Benmont strips away the familiarity of a classic, well-worn and now potentially soft around the edges classic, and presents ‘Sympathy’ to a jaded, post-Boomer listener the way it was heard back in 1968. And by helping fans hear this epic, earth-shaking, most revered song through virgin ears, as if anew, he shares a gift that looks back to pay it forward. In this 67-minute podcast, Benmont Tench strips down a time-honored classic to reveal that inexplicable spark which gives timeless music its soul.

[bearsontrikes]

Grateful Dead – There Were Days Between

The Grateful Dead’s lyricist Robert Hunter has said that his 1993 collaboration with Jerry Garcia ‘Days Between’ was not just one of the last songs they ever wrote together, but also a breakthrough that teased new possibilities for their songwriting partnership. Robert Hunter typically handed Jerry complete lyrics, leaving it to meter to differentiate verse and chorus, and Jerry would compose the melody, sometimes blocking off a couplet for the occasional bridge. But ‘Days Between’ brought a new process where the two collaborators sat side-by-side, writing and composing together in time and space. Hunter fed Jerry the first verse (with very “irregular” lines), and Jerry worked out a melody. And while he worked on the melody, Hunter moved on to the next verse. While one moved forwards, the other stepped back, and they discovered the song together as they watched it unfurl.

‘Days Between’ is something I discovered not through bootlegs, but on the collection ‘So Many Roads: 1965-1995’. The closest thing to a studio recording, this version was recorded at Club Front rehearsal from 2/18/93 (it was then performed 41x live) and has quickly become one of my favorite Dead tracks. The song is gorgeous, both musically and lyrically. It’s also one of the more atmospheric songs the Dead ever recorded, and lyrically full of portent and aged wisdom. If Jerry lived long enough to record his ‘Time Out of Mind’ (Bob Dylan’s vulnerable, dark night of the soul masterpiece), this song surely would’ve been a part. ‘Days Between’ is the shadow of a candle erratically flickering against the wall, a pearl of light on an ever-diminished wick. It’s been said that the sun sets slowly, and then it sets fast. But like the sun’s daily arc, the flame in ‘Days Between’ doesn’t burn clean and even. Rather it consumes the wick with increasing urgency as the passing sands run dry. Comprised of 4 verses, each verse in the song contains 14 lines that begin with a common motif that becomes an incantation of sorts:

“There were days, and there were days, and there were days between”

The lyrics start with universal sentiment before flipping to a more autobiographical sensibility. Its been suggested by the fans that each verse invokes a different season, offering a round sense of symmetry, but in reality the song only name-calls Spring and Summer. Virtually every other lyric lives in the time after, as days grow ever shorter and plod along with dogged, heavy footsteps. It’s a story told in the past tense, and while it calls upon the fleeting purity and promise of high times, that’s only for a counterpoint to more assiduously chronicle the slow decline and irrevocable decay of life:

Summer flies and August dies

The world grows dark and mean

Comes the shimmer of the moon

On black infested trees

The second verse begins with that patterned incantation of days and days and days between, quickly moving into the suggestion of mirage, “When phantom ships with phantom sails | Set to sea on phantom tides”. Once again intoning that pattern of 3 before driving into a phantasmagorical collusion where dreams comingle with waking life:

A hopeful candle lingers

In the land of lullabies

Where headless horsemen vanish

With wild and lonely cries… lonely cries

Lyrically, the first two verses most closely approximate the feeling of the music. With its circular organ figure and rising chord progression, the music reveals itself from a fog like that aforementioned phantom ghost ship. There, the ship appears from the ephemeral mist of imagination, swimming with remembrance and loss. In Phil Lesh’s autobiography, “Searching for the Sound”, he describes ‘Days Between’ as “Achingly nostalgic, ‘Days Between’ evokes the past. The music climbs laboriously out of shadows, growing and peaking with each verse, only to fall back each time in hopeless resignation.” The music definitely has a pulsing undercurrent that’s driving toward something of worth, but like the lyrics, there’s a certain resignation that Phil speaks of, a defeated sense of futility. The music’s circular build creates the suggestion of motion, provides some semblance of progress, but each verse inevitably winds up back where it began. So the music is given to rise, but ultimately doomed to fall, and can be best exemplified through metaphor of the tides that chase the moon in a rhythmic, repetitive cycle. As the water rolls up on the shore, its lapping motion washes clean its footsteps, erasing its history and ensuring its own dissipation. This is the song’s perspective.

Existential regret begins to creep into the third verse, which describes a restless compulsion to spend our days searching, wandering, pursuing the “promise of the glow”. That would be the prospect of riches or glory that consume our days and ultimately break the pact of kinship and connection (personified through home, or childhood).

And there were days I know

When all we ever wanted

Was to learn and love and grow

Once we grew into our shoes

We told them where to go

Walked halfway around the world

On the promise of the glow

The price of ambition is manifested by a “golden bowl, polished”, also the “Hearts of Summer, still tender and green”, each one “left on shelves collecting dust, not knowing what they mean” The final couplet in the song sizes the ultimate cost of a life’s worth of compromise, “hoping love would not forsake | the days that lie between… lie between”

After that suggestion of trophies sitting high on the shelf, serving no purpose, providing no comfort, ultimately bereft of meaning and value, that last line issues a crushing defeat to a life lived, winding down, now relegated to the past. After all, those “days between” will bleed into one another, and in doing so they amount to the content of a life. What the narrator sees in the twilight of his life is the simplicity of joy, the gift of love, all that’s tragically left behind.

I’ve seldom heard a song so imbued with that specific sense of protracted mortality. It reminds me of a quote from the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, that time “persists merely as a consequence of the events taking place in it.” If ‘Days Between’ has a philosophy on time, I’d say that’s it, because my reading on the lyric is that death is not invoked as something that will happen, but rather something that’s been happening all along, from the first day to the last. As Bob Dylan offered on ‘Time Out Of Mind’, “It's not dark yet… but it's getting there.”

In terms of pure emotional resonance, ‘Days Between’ also reminds me of the penultimate scene from the first season of ‘Mad Men’, also one of my favorite scenes from the whole series. In that season finale, while hovering over a small conference room table, Don pitches Kodak and explains the exact sentiment that Robert Hunter writes about. Don speaks of the power of nostalgia, explaining that in Greek, “nostalgia” means “the pain from an old wound… It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.” But while he pitches his concept of the Carousel slide machine, “a time machine that goes backwards and forwards and takes us to a place where we ache to go again”, we see an assortment of family photos. It’s a beautiful, idyllic American family, but in cherry-picking his favorite moments, Don shows us the father and husband he could only aspire to be. In that sense, Don’s exactly what Robert Hunter describes in ‘Days Between’, a character who’d forsaken his love for the lure of riches, one more man who walked halfway around the world on the “promise of the glow”. Like the narrator, all Don ever wanted was “to learn and love and grow”, or as he puts it, home is the one place where he knew he was loved. Ironically by this scene at the end of season 1, Don had already seen the folly of his ways yet he would continue to repeat those mistakes through 6 more seasons. Which makes me remember that when this song was written and performed, Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter were just past 50. At 50 we’re not old men by any stretch… but we’re old enough to understand our nature.

When Robert Hunter spoke to Jerry Garcia for one of the last times, back in 1995, Jerry noted ‘Days Between’ and said, "Your words never stuck in my throat." Which struck Hunter because Jerry wasn’t one to offer appreciation or hand out compliments. As the last major song to be introduced to the Dead canon, it’s perhaps the perfect song for that honor. It embodies everything Jerry had seen, and most likely captured the inevitability he felt as his days wound down. His voice, world-worn and weathered, beautifully conveys the heartache in the lyric.

Grateful Dead - Days Between (Club Front rehearsal 2/18/93)

https://youtu.be/TQNX_u8T9uU

https://open.spotify.com/track/2GGv0QzS7F5AUvet9LATEF

[bearsontrikes]

Into the Woods with the Grateful Dead

Two things struck me about the Grateful Dead in my earliest experiences with them. First, I was scared of the fans because their band t-shirts were emblazoned with skeletons and skulls (I couldn’t distinguish the Grateful Dead from Iron Maiden). From appearances I figured their fans must have been gnarly, disenfranchised bad-asses, each one spoiling for a fight, and so I was careful not to stare. Second, when I finally heard their music, I was shocked to find they sounded like Emmet Otter’s Jug Band Christmas… if Emmet Otter’s Jug Band were a bunch of craggy old men from Appalachia, wheezing their homespun bluegrass harmonies through corn-cob pipes, black lung and emphysema. In these earliest memories I thought they sounded like something you’d hear at the Orange County Fair, not the Meadowlands. By now there are a few things funny about this:

1) Jerry Garcia actually was part of a genuine jug band (Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions), prior to the Warlocks and then Grateful Dead

2) Many of their fans at the time were complete burnouts and conscientious objectors… which is to say the furthest thing from the bad-asses I took them to be

3) The band has just celebrated their 50th anniversary and by this point in time, they actually look like craggy old men from Appalachia

In the years since, I’ve come to love the Dead. I genuinely love so many of their songs and have endless appreciation for their unmistakable sound. The Grateful Dead sounded like what CBGBs claimed, but unlike any of the bands made famous by that seminal punk club, the Dead actually played country (C), bluegrass (B G) and blues (Bs). By adding a heavy dose of folk, early garage and psychedelic rock, and jazz-tinged guitar exploration, they built the blueprint for jam-band rock, and what on the softer side of their catalogue can only be described as pure “Americana”. They’re a band without peer or substitute, a band that’s come to embody summer for me more than any other, a band I can go to when I want to get up or get down. Yet I have to admit, I still don’t completely understand them.

So much of the Dead’s legacy is through the live music. During these marathon shows they play two sets, the second of which includes about 30 minutes of what they call “Drums/Space”. I’ve never been a fan of long, protracted drum solos (I’m not convinced that anyone is), and the “Space” part of these endless intermissions is formless, tuneless, meandering guitar noodling. There are moments during these interludes where I genuinely can’t tell if the band’s jamming or tuning their guitars. But drums/space aside, I have problems with the other 3 hours too. There’s something elusive in their long, open jams as they go places I just can’t follow. I’ve always been surprised they have such a large fan base because I feel like I’m fairly progressive in my ability to receive music (more than most) and I don’t get it. But for me, a Grateful Dead bootleg is like American football... The game lasts for 4 grueling hours but the ball's only in-play for a scant 12 minutes. So how could they have what seem like millions of fans?

In the Spotify Landmark Edition for ‘American Beauty’, Bob Weir refers to the Deadheads as kindred spirits, as people who crave a little adventure in their lives, and therefore in their music. He suggests they go on to be jazz buffs because “the whole idea is you state a theme and take it for a little walk in the woods. And the woods can be scary, the woods can be sublime, but there is adventure to be found out there.” Mickey Hart has offered a similar take of his own, using more loaded imagery: "The Grateful Dead weren't in the music business, they were in the transportation business." And biographer Blair Jackson wrote of the Dead, “they got people high… whether those people were on drugs or not”. It’s hard not to hear this sentiment without thinking of the inextricable ties long held between the band, the music and the drugs, for when its suggested that the Dead is less a collective of musicians and more a medium that helped to facilitate other plains of consciousness, Mr. Jackson’s qualifier inevitably becomes caricature.

For a kid raised on heavy metal and peak-era alternative rock, it was ‘Deadicated’, the 1991 tribute album that drew me in. I’d recorded bootlegs off my camp counselors and relished drawing all sorts of logos and band iconography on the cassette sleeves, but bootlegs were simply the wrong way in for me. On the studio-recorded tribute album, Jane’s Addiction (“Ripple”) was the draw, but artists like Elvis Costello (“Ship of Fools”), Midnight Oil (“Wharf Rat”), Suzanne Vega (“China Doll”, “Cassidy”) and Lyle Lovett (“Friend of the Devil”) that really pulled me in. Despite the sleeper success of “Touch of Grey” and that album, the Dead’s sound was a very unfashionable style of music for a 16 year-old when Lollapalooza was first getting started. But having a chance to hear the songs without all the baggage that comes with the Grateful Dead’s brand, their voices or the reedy instrumentals made it so much easier to discover their songs. More than just covers, these versions were performed within different styles and signatures really hooked me, and sure enough I could now go back to ‘Reckoning’ and find all my familiar favorites. ‘Reckoning’ has always been the bedrock of my connection to the band. A live acoustic collection that peels back the experimental spirit of their live conquests, and recorded during a stretch of shows in the fall of 1980, between Radio City Music Hall and the Warfield Theatre, ‘Reckoning’ offered me a way in. I’m not one of the family friends that Bob Weir describes; I still can’t find a way into jazz and I can’t connect to the Dead when their jams run free. But when I do show up for the Dead, which I do with greater frequency the older I get, I’m there for the songs first and foremost. The live shows aren’t necessarily about the songs. When they toured, the songs become more a basic framework on which to hang the whole horizon: all terrain, full weather, four seasons in one day. And when I listen to those live recordings, their un-tethered jams inevitably fall into the background as my mind follows the narrow roads of its most undisciplined whims. 

My favorite Dead recordings fall into the ‘Grateful Dead Records’ era, that period in the early-to-mid 70s that produced the seminal triptych ‘Wake of the Flood’, ‘From the Mars Hotel’ and ‘Blues for Allah’. Coming on the heels of ‘Workingman’s Dead’ and ‘American Beauty’, with their pastoral folk and Bakersfield country, these later records show an increasingly eclectic streak of jazz and fusion influences, but also a more streamlined sense of songwriting and composition. I’m not a jazzbo, I’m not interested in what’s to be found in the woods and I’m not held rapt by the choicest moments of their live archives. For me its simply about the songs, and this stretch from 73-75 brought some of their most poignant, beautiful ballads, like “Stella Blue”, “China Doll”, “Ship of Fools”, also some of their most spirited concert staples like “Franklin’s Tower” and “Scarlett Begonias”. And throughout the entire cannon of rock and roll, the Jerry Garcia / Robert Hunter partnership is tops, epitomized just a few years prior by the simple, elegant Taoist beauty of “Ripple” and that indelible haiku at its center: 

Ripple in still water

When there is no pebble tossed

Nor wind to blow

‘Ripple’ is a great tuneful song, but also a paragon of classic rock wisdom where through his best fireside manner Jerry sings of a road between the dawn and dark of night, a road each man walks alone, a road which was created just for that man. The lyrics are kind, generous and understanding, beginning with the warmest of celebrations “If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine… Would you hear my voice… Would you hold it near as it were your own?”  and closing with an empathetic embrace of complete acceptance “If I knew the way, I would take you home”.

For a special treat check out “Unbroken Chain (Studio Acoustic Demo)” from the ‘Grateful Dead from the Mars Hotel’ re-release in 2006, where Jerry calls out the chord changes while recording the demo: “E minor7th… C major 7th… G minor 7th… F… E minor… more or less.” I don’t know whom he was talking through the track, since it was a solo acoustic demo, but it gives the recording a spontaneous, throwaway kind of vibe, as if to suggest “I’m just making this shit up as I go along”. Which apparently is how they sometimes did record. Flash forwards to the ‘Blues For Allah’ sessions, where Jerry later said:

We kind of [said]: ‘Let’s make a record where we get together every day and we don’t bring anything in… we’d go into the studio and jam for a while, and then if something nice turned up we’d say ‘Well let’s preserve this little hunk and work with it, see if we can’t do something with it.’ And that’s how we did most of the album.

Point being, for all the spontaneity the Dead brought to their live shows, there was still a tremendous spirit of invention in the studio, which shouldn’t be marginalized by their legend of jam. Jerry also said about ‘Blues for Allah’

“…it’s musically the most adventurous album we’ve done in a pretty long time. Our development has been to synthesize various forms … Now we’re working on creating styles rather than being eclectic of synthesizing other styles.”

So with that I think it’s time to call bullshit on the Deadheads that rally around the live archives as the “true” Grateful Dead experience, or one offering fidelity of a higher order to the band’s ethos and essence. For all the elation over specific live shows, from the May, 1977 Cornell sets (or Hartford 20 days later) to the hyper-trippy jams of the ‘Built To Last’ tour, the aggressive, color saturated sets of ’68, the raw, gritty electric sets during spring of 1970 or the crazy long jams during Fall of ’73, there were many seasons of Live Dead. But I’ve never heard a Deadhead point to a specific show where the band unearthed something new, that would shape their sound for the months to come. Yet if you look to the albums, they plot the band’s path. Every album they recorded between the years of 1968 and 1975 does exactly that, and the musical styles captured on official live albums like “Live Dead”, “History of the Grateful Dead, Volume One (Bear's Choice)”, “Skull and Roses”, “Europe ’72”… each studio album was a harbinger of “live” things to come.

The music can be challenging and trying and they grew from within the anti-establishment culture. So in efforts to explain their mainstream popularity, all I can come up with is that by representing one of the first cult acts in music history, which grew from the fringe and became the establishment, the Dead proved early on that there’s inclusion to be found for some in the exclusion of others. There was pretention and there was fashion, both of which I think inflated the legend and made the following far more visible as a scene. For many who had no sense of identification, or place within a scene, this is a band that offered the full package. They offered a visual identity, a philosophical ethos and a complete sense of belonging at home or on the road. The Grateful Dead made the world a little bit smaller, where fans could identify friends from a sea of strangers, with a means of recognition just short of a handshake. Jerry Garcia tried to explain it once in his own words. Not the scene or the eventual hero-worship, the big business or the inevitable nostalgia… just the spark of what made them compelling:

You need music, I don’t know why… It's probably one of those Joseph Campbell questions, why we need ritual. We need magic and bliss, and power and myth, and celebration and religion in our lives and music is a good way to encapsulate a lot of it.

Obviously he nailed it. Grateful Dead is that rare band that brought the power and the bliss, but also provided a rare shot of myth and magic. The ritual and religion is what the fans supplied, and that’s where the scene became transcendent.

People gravitate towards scenes for all sorts of reasons, and people have a need to be a part of a scene for all sorts of reasons. There’s identity and purpose to be found, and maybe that’s the celebration and religion that Jerry spoke of. I’ve never found religion in the Dead’s music, maybe because I didn’t need it. Instead I’ve found dozens of incredible songs that suit me when I’m alone, staring at the summer sun as it sits high over the gentle, lapping waves of NYC’s Hudson River. They shimmer like a thousand diamonds and the songs carry me through the evening as the sun plunges deep behind the Hoboken skyline. In my mind’s eye I can picture the Lackawanna train terminals up the river and to the south, that old, dilapidated Colgate Clock in Jersey City. And that’s where it occurs to me that through the Grateful Dead’s music I’ve found ritual… and I start to wonder if maybe, just maybe, religion’s not too far behind.

[bearsontrikes]

Sally Brown and the Ballad of Old Drum

I was walking my dog along the Hudson River and a dog walker asked if that’s a Foxhound. I said “yeah it is, how’d you know” and he went into a whole spiel that the Foxhound is the original “Man’s Best Friend”. Apparently in the late 1800’s there was a lawyer named George Graham Vest (who later became a senator in Missouri), and Mr. Vest represented the plaintiff in a case called Burden v. Hornsby. Apparently Charles Burden had his hunting dog shot dead by a local sheep farmer named Leonidas Hornsby, when Leonidas caught the dog running on his property (Leonidas was incidentally Charles Burden’s brother-in-law). The dog was a Foxhound named “Drum”, or “Old Drum” as Charles Burden referred to him. The lawyer sought the maximum penalty at the time of $50 and during his closing argument he abandoned the entire testimony that came before. Instead he offered a eulogy to Old Drum and the crux of the speech was that in a world when even your best friend (or brother-in-law) can turn on you, the faithful, noble dog remains with you through thick and thin. George Graham Vest won the case as well as its appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court, the case gained notoriety and found a special place in Missouri’s heart. Today a statue of Old Drum stands in front of the Warrensburg, Missouri courthouse where the case was heard, and a bust of the dog resides in the Missouri Supreme Court building in Jefferson City, Missouri where the appeal was won (there’s also an historical marker in George Graham Vest’s home state of Kentucky). 

My Foxhound probably isn’t as cool as Old Drum was, though I am surprised she hasn’t befallen the same fate (on the other hand, where can you find a sheep farmer today?) Sally Brown is an American Foxhound mix that I adopted back in 2004. At the time she went by the name “Martha”, which I suspected was only the most recent in a long line of identities borrowed, adopted or stolen. In my keen, hyper-realistic imagination, she'd been on the lam for most of her life and I could only hope she was running from a mix of minor infractions and misdemeanors (e.g. petty theft, loitering, disorderly conduct, public intoxication, etc.). That would actually make sense, since the first time I saw her she was behind bars. But I also hoped I could rehabilitate her post-jailbreak, I thought a loving environment would rid her of her wicked ways and that this particular man's best friend might quickly become my best friend.  

NOPE.

I came to learn that adopting a dog is like finding a roommate on Craigslist. They move in before you get to know them, they're always around yet pretend to ignore your very existence, they're always scheming to eat your food and sometimes when they pass out on the couch, they pee themselves in their sleep. Looking at the dull, listless look she’s flashed in every photo I’ve ever taken, I have to question her motives. Sally’s got the shifty eyes of a convict, and if someone threw down a hamburger between you and Sally, watch out because you might get shanked (she has a love for scrimshaw and once I picked her up from day-care to find she’d whittled a shiv out of rawhide).

When your adopted dog shows signs of leash aggressiveness, when she snaps at another dog, barks at an old lady on the street or snatches an ice cream cone straight out of a small child’s hand (then looks them right in the eye as she eats the ice cream), you begin to wonder if this is the dog you adopted, or is it the dog you created. Granted it sets a bad precedent to ply her with treats whenever the doorbell rings and she starts to bark furiously, because maybe she needs to hear the doorbell and learn not to be territorial. And maybe I shouldn’t wake her from a deep slumber and shake her up every time I want some attention and/or personal validation (at 4am). And that one time I caught her smoking a cigarette, I probably shouldn’t have locked her in the closet to finish the pack. That’s all questionable dog-rearing, I can see that now. But Sally Brown is one harsh mistress and while it's possible that she's merely reflecting my own worst character traits, I'd still maintain that this is the dog I adopted and not the dog I created.  

If we ever found ourselves down by the courthouses in Warrensburg, Missouri, she’d probably pee all over Old Drum. The same way she pees on every other gravestone, headstone and Civil War monument. Because she likes to pee, as much as she likes to drink. But I tell you she’s a lousy drunk, and every time she barfs in the rosebushes, I think about what Leonidas Hornsby would say:

Some dogs just got no respect.

[bearsontrikes]

Bruce Springsteen’s Ministry of Rock n’ Roll

Bruce Springsteen has articulated his on-stage work ethic as a transaction of sorts, that if the audience can still raise their hands at the end of a show he hasn’t done his job. He’s famous for playing marathon three and a half hour shows, and back in 2012, at the tender age of 62, he kept Helsinki, Finland on the balls of their feet for four hours and six minutes. Time slips away in the best possible sense, as he takes song requests from the banner waving faithful and frequently closes with old R&B covers that unfurl over 40 minute-long encores. I’ve seen Springsteen close down The City That Never Sleeps many times, on one occasion actually emptying Madison Square Garden as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25th anniversary show eclipsed the last few trains out of Penn Station.

But more important than the marathon performances is the purpose they channel: he mythologizes rock and roll with the ardent zeal of a disciple, and at any moment, he is possibly the greatest disciple in the room, to the power, the glory, the ministry of Rock and Roll (as Bruce would say). A Bruce Springsteen concert is sacrament for rock and roll fans, in the way the Church defines their rites as “…signs of grace, instituted by Christ and entrusted to the Church, by which divine life is dispensed”. I’ve never been to church, but I’ve received benediction from Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band and it brought me higher. Like a Reconstructionist preacher, he has a keen eye for theatricality but an unerring sense of purpose. While speaking the tongue of the cloth, he’ll rhapsodize about spiritual rebirth and sermonize about the transformative power of rock and roll. It’s a metaphor he plays out literal, as he blends and ultimately conflates religion with rock and roll. Per the audience interlude during “Tenth Avenue Freezeout”, from the ‘Live From New York’ album:

I want to find that river of life! I want to find that river of love! I want to find that river of faith! And that river of hope! Tonight I want to go to that river of transformation where you can go and you can be changed… I want to go to that river or resurrection where everybody gets a second chance

At a Bruce Springsteen concert, the tongue is rock and roll but the performance is gospel. During these shows I’ve felt what Bruce has felt, and I’ve believed what he’s believed. Whether delivering a treatise on our promises unfulfilled or a critique of a manifest destiny turned sour, his songs and sermons are contrite, mournful and deeply sympathetic, but uncontestedly hopeful that justice and joy, security and salvation awaits all who endure their daily struggles. When he talks about the character of our country, and the injustices faced by the most maligned and neglected, he makes me feel like my situation is worse than it really is, but that my prospects are somehow better than they probably are (because we’re one people, and that brings unlimited possibility for change). Offering this religion as a counterpoint to the worst kind of worldly despair, he carries a raw, unwavering and resolute sense of conviction that if we look deep inside ourselves, and we can summon all our courage and fortitude, genuine character will emerge. And that’s what creates perseverance and accomplishment in this life.

For me, the joy of communing with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, and the epiphany found in that experience is that there is a togetherness to be found in numbers, and a crowd can add up to more than the sum of its parts, or the air in our lungs. Bruce Springsteen believes in community. He writes about it, he talks about it; he sings about it, and through his very act of performance, he creates it. The pact he makes with the crowd is that if you check yourself at the door and succumb to the spirit, you’ll get swept up in the grandeur of his rock and roll sacrament. Like a Pentecostal revival tent, or a mega-church, where worshippers eagerly reach their hands to the sky, palms open and fingertips forwards as if deliverance were something tangible, you can make a choice to give yourself over to the music. Which is something I had to learn at a Springsteen show, along with any other jaded faces in the crowd. I’ve learned that its very liberating to discover there’s nothing mundane about a rock and roll show. There’s nothing corny or obsequious about raising your hands in the air and succumbing to a hymn-like chant or the rhythms of a call-response breakdown as the song regains its footing after a blazing set of solos. 

Springsteen shows provide a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose, and an object for your attention and affection that vibrates at a much higher frequency than any others. These shows have taken me from a nihilistic funk to spiritual euphoria in as long as it takes to dim the lights. For anyone looking for something to believe in, something to hold onto, and something to be a part of… Springsteen and E Street is no less powerful or dominant a cult as the Grateful Dead. But where The Dead invite the audience to follow them into the woods, Bruce Springsteen takes the audience by the hand and pulls them out of the woods. The journey isn’t to discover something that wasn’t there before, but to find focus and bring clarity to that which has always been there. It’s a reminder of the sizable gap that exists between the head and the heart, and the path in between. 

Ultimately the pact Springsteen has with his fans is that if you can check your head at the door, you’ll feel the most freeing, visceral, enduring joy around. And that’s the ministry of rock and roll.

[bearsontrikes]

Stephen King Can’t Stop

A couple of years ago I bought a copy of Stephen King’s ‘The Stand’. There were two different editions on the shelf at Strand Books, one an old used hardcover from the 80s, and the other a pristine, glossy new re-release, complete and uncut with a slick, shiny unbroken spine. That newer version of the book weighed in at 1,153 pages, some 400 pages longer than the original published in 1978. 

In the introduction Stephen King describes the history, how Doubleday had to cut the length for practical reasons, being that they back then used a glue binding instead of a cloth binding, and at a certain thickness the glue just fell apart. Rather than issue the book in two volumes, the editor took the liberty of cutting the book by 400 pages. To assemble the modern restored version, Stephen King retyped the whole thing from the first page to the last. He describes the process of sitting down with the original manuscript on one side, and the pages of the published novel, torn out of the binding, on the other side. He started at the beginning and meshed the two together. Along the way he updated certain dates and wrote new material as well (because he can’t help himself).

I couldn’t really spot those additional pages since the whole book is pretty fat. It’s ultimately a super anticlimactic story that culminates with a pyromaniac blowing up the nuke long before it reaches the city, for no particular ideological reason other than he likes to see shit blow up. But that disappointment doesn’t undermine the thousand or so pages that came before. And that’s a reminder then Stephen King is such a great storyteller, he can spend 400 pages describing how he ties his shoes and you’ll hang on his every word. This is after all a man who confessed in his memoir that he was so drunk at the time he wrote ‘The Dark Half’ that he doesn’t even remember writing it.

Reading ‘The Stand’, and pondering those updated and restored pages reminded me of an exchange from Michael Chabon’s ‘Wonder Boys’ where Vernon Hardapple asks Grady Tripp what his book was about.  Vernon says “But you’ve got to know what it was about, right? If you didn’t know what it was about, why were you writing?” and a broken and beaten Grady sighs and exclaims “I couldn’t stop.”

That said, Stephen King is one badass writer. Here are some choice quotes that illustrate his peerless talent to lay the thickest, most visceral narrative with concision befitting a tweet:

o   “We’ll have to assume the worst,” Starkey said, and a queer grin came over his face. It lifted his upper lip and made it wrinkle like the snout of a dog protecting a farmyard”

o   “Starkey put out his hand and Creighton took it in both of his own.  Starkey’s hand was old and cold, like the shed skin of a snake in which some small prairie animal had died, leaving its own fragile skeleton within the husk of the reptile.”

o   “In one of the lab carrels a young man clad in jockey shorts lay sprawled over his desk.  He was comatose, bleeding from the nose and mouth.  His breath rattled in and out with a sound like October wind in dead cornhusks.”

o   “He remembered meeting her in the park, and how he had thought her conversation seemed like a careless spray of diamonds on the green felt of a billiard table.  Since yesterday afternoon it had seemed more like the glitter of zircons, near-perfect pastes that were, after all, only pastes.”

o   “His fingers wrung the right sounds out of the guitar: hard, flashy, a bit tawdry, like a display of junk jewelry, probably stolen, sold out of a paper bag on a street corner.”

o   “She picked up the tow-sack, opened it, and peered down.  One of the hens still had her head under her wing, fast asleep.  The other two had squashed against each other, not moving much.  It was dark in the sack and the hens thought it was nighttime.  The only thing dumber than a broody hen was a New York Democrat.”

[bearsontrikes]

Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band — that’s the legend

From Bruce Springsteen’s 2014 speech inducting The E Street Band to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame:

“A few days before my own induction, I stood in my darkened kitchen along with Steve Van Zandt. Steve was just returning to the band after a 15-year hiatus and he was petitioning me to push the Hall of Fame to induct all of us together. I listened, and the Hall of Fame had its rules, and I was proud of my independence. …Steve was quiet, but persistent. And at the end of our conversation, he just said, "Yeah, I understand. But Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band — that’s the legend."

Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band is The Legend, in caps. Their shows are consistently transformative, each one worthy of the “Live From Budokan” treatment. They perform with an urgency you haven’t witnessed since you were twelve, impressionable and open, hearing for the first time that band which you’d wear on your sleeve for years to come… that band which came to define your youth…  that band that gave you a much needed sense of self at a time when you otherwise had none. I’ve been a part of their rock and roll history many times, but on 11/8/09 I saw a truly historical show when Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band performed ‘The River’ live in its entirety for the first and last time at Madison Square Garden. I was also lucky enough to get a wristband and stand in the pit, watching the show maybe 8 bodies from the stage. It was a bravura, 3 hour long, 32 song performance, and whenever I see that show listed as a fan favorite beside all other unreleased bootlegs, it reminds me I was a part of something great.

There are many fabled bootlegs that capture the spark and spirit that make a Springsteen show truly great, some of the most highly regarded include Bryn Mawr 2/5/75, The Roxy 7/7/78, The Agora 8/9/78, Uniondale 12/31/80, Brendan Byrne 8/20/84… But there was something unique happening during the 1999 reunion tour that’s captured on the ‘Live In New York City’ album (also known as the HBO broadcast). The E Street band hadn’t played together for 11 years, and Little Steven Van Zandt hadn’t played with the band in 15 years, so to update the outfit and modernize their stage-show they gave some old songs bold new orchestrations. The album drew middling reviews from most trades and critics, less for the actual performances than what made the cut and what didn’t. But once you get past a basic inventory of all the great tracks that didn’t make the cut, you’re left with a set of performances that in many cases eclipse the original.

The band’s ability to breathe new life, with urgency and immediacy, into a revered fan favorite is never more stark than with “Atlantic City”, initially a skeletal 4-track home recording released within the ‘Nebraska’ album. Nebraska’s a great album with Flannery O’Connor-type stories about hard people shaped by harsh environments, summed up by the Charles Starkweather-inspired title track’s postscript (“Well sir I guess there's just a meanness in this world”). “Atlantic City” is one of the great songs off that album, and the closest thing to a single that ‘Nebraska’ had. While a seemingly quiet, cautionary tale of the desperation that comes to people who can’t make ends meet (“Well I got a job and tried to put my money away. But I got debts that no honest man can pay”), the story is deceptively large and the song deserves some size and scope.  The song begins with reference to a real-life event in 1981 (“Well they blew up the Chicken Man in Philly last night”) that sparked a bloody mob war across Atlantic City, and while there are mundane accents that will get swallowed up in the distant bleachers of a basketball arena ("Put on your stockings, baby, 'cause the night is getting cold"), there was a larger sense of scope to be found in those songs. The E Street Band’s orchestrations mine that in powerful new ways, and the version they revealed during the 1999 reunion tour shows how much The E Street Band brings to the music, and how they can bring an epic scope to even the smallest and most intimate of recordings.

Experienced live on the ‘Live in New York City’ recording, “Atlantic City” begins with a solitary, hollow kick drum and snare, some light feedback and trailing chords which create an ominous landing for its downtrodden lyrics about desperation, pressure and ruin. But like so many Springsteen tracks, the E Street Band’s live rendition turns a very specific story into something more universal, possibly an ode to redemption. Their performance puts the hook “Everything dies baby that's a fact | But maybe everything that dies… someday comes back” at the heart of the song, and when they follow the titular lyric with a triumphant mandolin-lead sweep, those orchestrations reach for something bigger.  After what would be the natural three and a half minute conclusion of the studio recording, Bruce counts the band back in for a muscular, grand finish that rides the back of a drum roll and delivers a rousing, surging resurrection: come on and meet me… come on and meet me... This rouses the crowd and draws us into the power, the glory, the ministry of Rock ‘n’ Roll (as Bruce describes it).

During the 1984-85 Born in the USA Tour, Springsteen was introducing “The River” with a preamble of sorts, a long and extremely personal story about a fraught and challenged relationship with his father, and the pivotal moment during his Vietnam draft experience that brought them understanding. Like the song itself, the introduction is understated in delivery but carries a sentiment and emotion that simply destroys. The version on ‘Live In New York City’ doesn’t connect to that story, and even minimizes that searing funereal harmonica riff of the studio version (where its used as a motif of sorts, to punctuate the absolutely soul-crushing defeat that life brings to the narrator and his lover Mary). Instead, the updated rendition features an entirely new piece of music, beginning with a saxophone solo that plays like a reverie. This gives the song a dreamy, haunted vibe while a gentle piano figure comes in and paves the way for the lyric. 

When the familiar harmonica line finally does come in, it’s a fleeting moment in the song, a punctuated moment right before the lyrics turn bitter (the character takes a job, gets sucked up by the recession, and copes with a spiritual void left in the wake of his broken dreams). Life flips from one of promise and possibility, to one of burden and responsibility and the harmonica signifies that moment of spiritual death. On studio recording the harmonica riff carries over the wind, but in this version, it’s more strident, meaner and angrier. In this performance it sounds like a bullhorn, flat and dead as if conveyed through the desolation of a vacuum. Nothing remains: no hope, no comfort, no promise of a better day as the protagonist ponders:

Now those memories come back to haunt me 

they haunt me like a curse 

Is a dream a lie if it don't come true 

Or is it something worse 

The song ultimately finds its acceptance, possibly resignation, and returns to that dreamy, curious wave it began with, as Nils’ voice lilts over the coda. This rendition seems to make the finality of their circumstances ever more existential. Here it doesn’t just carry live accents, but rather becomes a complete update of the studio version.

“The River” leads seamlessly into “Youngstown” which seems a spiritual counterpoint of sorts. It’s a similar story told on a larger scale, where the character’s downfall isn’t to innocence but rather the greed of local industry and war as an economic imperative. Where “The River” spends its words describing a character’s inner heartbreak, “Youngstown” depicts a northeastern Ohio town in servitude to industry, the iron ore mines and blast furnaces that drive the local economy and a bereft town pock-marked by the weapons that support war after war. The song is bleak, and like “The River” its characters are burdened by their lot in life. In the Springsteen canon small industrial towns provide a life that can’t be escaped, this one without loyalty, honor, and eventually purpose:

These mills they built the tanks and bombs

That won this country's wars

We sent our sons to Korea and Vietnam

Now we're wondering what they were dyin' for

On the original ‘Ghost of Tom Joad’ studio recording, “Youngstown” is a gentle folk ballad with metronomic percussion that lives in the shadows of Springsteen’s flat affect but weighty, unsettled delivery (“My sweet Janie I’m sinking down… Here darlin' in Youngstown”). Re-imagined live with the E Street Band, the song’s riddled with righteous indignation at the Heaton brothers, who devoured generations of townsfolk for profit, and closed the mills once their string of prosperity comes to an end. The song’s constructed like the very blast furnace it describes within the lyrics, and Nils Lofgren’s guitar work builds with steely resolve. He bends notes and skips octaves, following chromatic scales that lead the riffs ever higher as Roy Bittan underscores the movement with a roiling pipe organ. Ultimately Nils breaks through the hopelessness and nihilism of the lyrics with an unforgiving, furiously cathartic solo that hit new heights and reflects the destructive power and entropy unleashed by the mill’s munitions.

Then the guitar pickup bends and a temporal drum fill segues seamlessly into the beginning of “Murder Incorporated”, a hard-driving guitar workout that makes these three songs my favorite trifecta on any live album, by any artist. With its burly power chords, the song’s all anger and action, violence and retribution. “Murder Incorporated” belongs to a sub-genre of the Springsteen canon, stories like “Atlantic City” or “Meeting Across The River” where crime doesn’t come from greed or ill-will, but of circumstance and desperation. The song’s a mere footnote from the ‘Born in the USA’ sessions, re-recorded and tacked onto Columbia’s ‘Greatest Hits’ package, but as a post-script to “The River” and “Youngstown”, it reveals great depth, suggesting the inevitability of those prior stories, perhaps the consequence that comes from these character’s economic and spiritual decay.

No matter where you step you feel you're never out of danger

So the comfort that you keep's a gold-plated-snub-nose-thirty-two

Taking his own turn at the solo, Bruce clamps down on the neck of the guitar and chokes furious notes with gnarled, almost arthritic fingers. There the song moves into complete social disrepair. The final verse seems eerily prescient today, with the many instances of unarmed people of color killed by police (#blacklivesmatter):

Everywhere you look life ain't got no soul 

That apartment you live in feels like it's just a place to hide 

When you're walkin' down the street you won't meet no one eye to eye 

The cops reported you as just another homicide 

It’s a profound, exhausting, cathartic, and deeply exciting stretch on the ‘Live in New York City’ album, these 3 songs spanning nearly 24 minutes. But we know that every Springsteen concert is a study in love, faith and spiritual commitment, and so we get the album closer “If I Should Fall Behind”, an unassuming but brilliant ballad from his marginalized and forgotten 1992 solo album ‘Lucky Town.’ Performed with the E Street Band, “If I Should Fall Behind” is nothing less than an epiphany, showcasing a tight, unified band with 5 different voices that could each carry the show (if leading a lesser band). Each one steps to the microphone, and each one sings with sensitivity unseen. Here Bruce, Stevie, Nils, Clarence and Patti take turns with alternating verses, each voice calling back the song’s gorgeous refrain:

I’ll wait for you

And should I fall behind

Wait for me

Bruce starts with the first verse, his voice gentle and buoyant, belying none of the gruff, vein-pulsing-in-the-forehead grit showcased in ‘Murder Incorporated’. Stevie then comes in with a surprisingly delicate croon, scratchy and weathered but balanced, with a slight vibrato. Nils lends his soft and mellow choir-boy voice to the most devasting lyric of the song (“Now everyone dreams of a love lasting and true | But you and I know what this world can do”) before Patti’s lilting voice comes in to harmonize with Nils, and then with Clarence on the next verse. For the finale, each member croons the couplet alone, taking the spotlight one last time, and before all harmonizing together one last time.

Through this live recording, across each performance, the E Street Band breathes new life into Springsteen’s greatest songs, and vastly elevates the lesser ones. Its always eye-opening to see what a great band can do with great material, how they reinterpret and reinvigorate an old, traveled blueprint, but its most epiphanous to see how they can imbue small songs with great heft and depth, to fit a grand venue, without losing the song’s intimacy and gravity. When I listen to ‘Live in New York City’ I find myself impressed and amazed, startled and astounded… astonished, dumbfounded, positively stupefied, because who would expect this much from an HBO broadcast. Who would expect a live album that captures a frenzied arena rock tour to really be about the songs. And who would expect songs that are almost made to get lost in the rafters, could find such strong, confident footing in a vast arena 18,000 strong. But then I remind myself that this is the heart-stopping, pants-dropping, hard-rocking, booty-shaking, love-making, earth-quaking, Viagra-taking, justifying, death-defying, legendary E Street Band. And it seems about right.

[bearsontrikes]

Johnny Cash, Ryan Adams and the MTV Unplugged Effect

Songwriters have been rearranging and reinterpreting songs for as long as they’ve been writing songs.  The Blues was a genre built around reinterpretation and renewal, as the genre’s become a travelogue of sorts that’s helped musicians explore and understand their times.  Folk music is based on a similar ethos of reviving and reinvigorating a canon of songs that have withstood the test of time.  With a shorter lifespan, rock music has certainly experienced its growing pains, but as an amalgamation of prior generations and genres, it’s always keen to reinvent itself.  After rock and roll became fat with production, orchestration, indulgent solos and arena-ready histrionics, artists began to strip songs down to their essence with acoustic recordings.  Going acoustic is obviously not the only way to re-envision a song, and its not necessarily going to be the most dramatic, but its the simplest example for how an artist might excavate a well-known song to explore its essence and put a new interpretation on what they hear. 

 MTV Unplugged captured a moment in popular music, but there’s a distinction that runs through the series, between artists performing their songs with acoustic instruments… and artists redefining their songs with acoustic performances.  Eric Clapton is seen as the progenitor of the unplugged era (and maybe “dad-rock” itself) with his acoustic recording of ‘Layla’.  But the Unplugged version didn’t redefine the song, or provide any new insight to what it was about.  It was simply a new composition of an old familiar song.  The performance was more a musical choice than an artistic one.  On the other end of the spectrum, Johnny Cash recording Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Hurt’.  There he channeled something familiar, yet new and striking.  The Nine Inch Nails original is a slow-building cauldron of self-loathing and despair, slowly building towards its self-immolating industrial synth coda.  In his version, Cash stripped the song down to its brittle, hollowed bones, and through his own urgent mortality, imbued the song with a sense of resignation that maybe amplified the fragility of even the original recording.  Part of the producer and matchmaker Rick Rubin’s genius was pairing Cash with Trent Reznor’s writing at a point in time where John’s physical deterioration trumped even the song’s unflinching bleakness.  The circumstances and context were undeniable (and form the basis for the uncomfortably effective music video that followed), but sentiment aside, John managed to record a more successful take on the original.  His version was completely faithful to the original, but he sharpened the song’s core, he amplified the raw nerve that ran throughout.  It was a song reborn and Trent Reznor conceded that the moment he heard John’s take, it became John’s song in his mind. 

 There are parts of music that can’t be fully appreciated unless you’re a musician, I presume, and what make covers so much fun is that those new takes and interpretations implicitly showcase or editorialize all the decisions the artists, producers, sound mixers made in the original recording.  The best songwriters have a knack for spotting and honing the emotional core of a song, seeing things that lie submerged in the subtext of the lyrics, or hearing how it could have been recorded in the studio, in the hands of a different artist or a different producer.  They hear things the rest of us don’t, and see things the original artist might never have known or intended. 

 Ryan Adams has a tremendous eye for recognizing the heart of a song, getting under its skin and providing something new and inspired.  He’s a master of reinvention and has a gift to purify or clarify songs in a way that brings greater resonance.  Take his NPR version of Iron Maiden’s “Wasted Years”, the original song was a heavy metal power ballad without the weepy strings and hallmark machinations of the typical 80s power ballad.  It was a power ballad built on a blistering guitar riff, based on a simple chromatic scale not dissimilar to the lead riff in Guns N Roses’ ‘Sweet Child of Mine’.  The song itself is a meditation of life, choices and identity:

From the coast of gold, across the seven seas,

I'm traveling on, far and wide,

But now it seems, I'm just a stranger to myself,

And all the things I sometimes do, it isn't me but someone else.

In the chorus the narrator finds his center, with an affirmation not to “waste your time always searching for those wasted years”… because “you’re living in the golden years” A momentary pause gives way to affirmation and the narrator moves forward without regret because he’s followed his purpose in life.  He’s ultimately able to reconcile his choices and sacrifice.  When Ryan Adams performs the song with his fragile lilting voice, he portrays a narrator at odds with himself, a man in crisis.  His resolve is overtaken by doubt and the coupling of verse and chorus becomes the call-response volley of a man who’s wanderlust has taken a heavier toll.  There are repercussions and the performance ultimately never gets too far from the opening panic that “now it seems, I’m just a stranger to myself” His incisive, emotive vocal performance lend the lyrics weight and by forgoing a great, driving metal riff for an introspective meditation on the narrator’s inner state, Adams mines the emotional core of the song.  He converts a fleeting doubt into an existential declaration.

 Of course its with his cover of the Oasis smash hit ‘Wonderwall’ that Ryan Adams made his bones as a best-in-class cover artist.  The original recording layered a metronomic guitar strum with the studied sweep of cello and a closing piano couplet, each sturdy enough to hang a winding melody that segues seamlessly into a Sunday morning chorus.  An unabashed fan of The Beatles and indomitable melodicist, Noel Gallager wrote a deceptively simple pop song that captured the grandeur of Paul McCartney’s best.  But as a singer, the other Gallager brother Liam’s always seemed completely incapable of nuance.  He sings like he’s tone deaf, he’s brash and his delivery lacks delicacy.  Meaning, he’s a rock and roll star.  But when he waxes lyrical through introspective lines about the roads we have to walk and the many things he’d like to say to (her), you’re left wondering why he doesn’t just say them.  Liam puts everything on the surface, it all stands upright in the topsoil.  When Ryan Adams covered ‘Wonderwall’ on his 2004 album fittingly titled “Love Is Hell”, he turned the song into a shimmering, shuddering icicle.  The acoustic strumming of the original gives way to introspective, haunted arpeggios in this reimagining.  The song is sung in a fog like a funeral reverie, the winding roads that lead the song’s subject are fortified in a snowbank with a top-skim of fine white powder dancing in the cold winter wind.  The song’s cryptic namesake is his embodiment of gratitude and the song becomes a breaking dawn, post-coital confession from someone who rarely gets it right.  He sings the lyrics as if the morning tide brought an ocean of regret back for a second chance.  And when he sings the chiming chorus refrain “because maybe, you’re gonna be the one that saves me”, he sounds like someone who genuinely needed to be saved. 

 Cover songs are fun, but reinterpretations can be an epiphany.  Artists can breathe new life into a familiar song, revealing depths unseen.  The melodies and couplets have been ever-present through years, even decades of our lives, and then you hear them anew and realize you never knew them to begin with.  Not like this.  These are the performances that bring us closer to the hallowed ground place pop songs occupy in our shared consciousness, and this is the unique ability for art to live on, well beyond sentiment or nostalgia.  Because once it’s released into the wild, it’s available for the world over to own in their hearts.

 Ryan Adams – Wasted Years

https://soundcloud.com/twentyfourbit/ryan-adams-wasted-years-iron

 Johnny Cash - Hurt

https://soundcloud.com/ahmet-konan/johnny-cash-hurt

[bearsontrikes]

On The Road With Neal Casal

Many photographers get extended,candid, and spontaneous access to their subjects, but some photos pull you inand some keep you at a distance.  It depends a great deal on the subject, both their openness as well as the baggage they bring with them.  Subject photography can be a bit austere -- lots of these photos document something of significance yet convey no purpose.  There’s a photographer named Neal Casal who had unlimited access to Ryan Adams and The Cardinals between 2006–2009.  He also happened to be the lead guitarist of Ryan Adams and The Cardinals, and so Neal shot endless rolls of film with a keen eye and an unparalleled sense of empathy.  He eventually put out a book called A View Of Other Windows that documented The Cardinals in the studio and on tour.  These photos had purpose for me. 

 In this book there's a great balance of imagery and commentary where the band members’ voices and insights complement the photos so well, and together they create something that is both joyful and winsome, yet lonesome and disconsolate.  The book presents shifting narratives in recording and touring, not just the discovery and creativity that’s captured through brotherhood, but also the remoteness that exists between creative partners.  But while there's the form and function of the book, there's also the intent and inspiration behind its images.  While the former pulled me in, as a fan of the music, the latter drew me as a fan of the photography. 

 I can still see those doleful and disconsolate images of planes, trains and automobiles, and I can feel the distance between places, faces and spaces.  I particularly think of the photos in Ludwigshafen, 2006: Ryan sitting in a chair at the mouth of a low-rent ballroom, then nobody sitting in a chair, just an empty chair and a desolate ballroom.  The gap in time seems immeasurable.  Motifs of windows and mirrors throughout, empty rooms, thin ribbons of cigarette smoke dissipating into the ether... reflections of time and space.  But when I re-imagine these photos of the band in those quiet cramped quarters, in hotel rooms and backstage before a show, I can see Ryan Adams and The Cardinals as I've always imagined them, and as I've known them through the music.  I see the band fully occupying these spaces and infecting them with a warmth and generosity of spirit that feels familiar and provides comfort. 

 In an interview with The Daily Beast, Neal said about the book:

Photography is a means to making life on the road and in the studio more interesting, and a way of telling stories that no one would know otherwise. The camera is the instrument I pick up when a room is too quiet for music. A perfect way to continue singing the song after a show has ended.

 I'm not a musician, have never lived on the road and there's never been anything transient about my life.  I also don't know what its like to hold a crowd in the thrall of those brief moments of active that justify the long stretches of inactive, but I've shared many choice moments from the other side of the stage and that too is my emotional investment in Neal’s work.  I was fortunate to see The Cardinals about a dozen times during this period and have since pored over scores of bootlegs from those tours.  As a fan of the music I’ve experienced these moments through these two ears, but these two ears have benefitted greatly, and will be forever grateful, to Neal’s incomparable and eye as a photographer and generous spirit as a musician. 

[bearsontrikes]

Bob Dylan’s Mercurial Roadshow

Once the sun’s set and the city streets have grown cold, long after I’ve burrowed deep under the covers and enshrouded myself within the shadows of online anonymity, I can maybe, just barely, muster the courage to admit the following: I saw Bob Dylan play the Beacon Theatre in 2005 and couldn’t place his final encore.  At least, not until he moved into the second chorus.  This in itself doesn’t seem so outrageous, as nobody can understand what the hell he’s been saying for a couple of decades now, but for the fact his final encore was ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ -- which not only features one of the most famous couplets to kick off a song in the history of rock and roll, but also repeatedly showcases one of the most distinctive and confrontational refrains ever in the chorus.  Rolling Stone ranked the song as the #1 greatest song ever, and rock historian Greil Marcus spent an entire book extolling the song’s significance.  Yet at this particular show, Bob Dylan performed it, and I couldn’t recognize it until a couple of minutes in.  For the first few minutes I gamely played along, as if I did, but once the realization hit, I felt like a big fat phony… a fake… a tourist amongst tourists (which is saying a lot if you’ve been to a Bob Dylan concert over the last decade).  I had to remind myself that Bob Dylan live is a very different animal from the Bob Dylan I listen to at home.  The reason why is one of the most misunderstood, yet respectable things I know about Bob Dylan today.                 

A lot of people over the years have said that Bob Dylan has contempt for his fans as much as he does the press.  Popular logic draws from the following: 1) He doesn’t speak to the crowd. 2) He’s spent entire tours hiding behind an electric organ -- at the back of the stage. 3) He plays set-lists that heavily feature newer material and otherwise favor deep cuts. 4) When he does play the classics, he renders them so unrecognizable that he practically nullifies their cultural importance or whatever personal significance the audience brings to bear.  But complaint #4 is kind of the point.  In terms of his aim or purpose onstage, he’s clearly stated “songs don't come alive in a recording studio. You try your best, but there's always something missing. What's missing is a live audience.”  So aside from a simple affirmation that music requires an audience, Dylan’s also saying that what helps his art endure, is something that exists not in the original work but rather in the space between (the artist and the listener).  Which is pretty modest coming from a man who’s consistently a lock for any list that presents the most influential people of the 20th century.  After reading his surprisingly accessible autobiography, Chronicles, I got the sense that Bob Dylan’s actually the most modest performer ever.  Below are some great quotes from chapter 4 (‘Oh Mercy’):

It’s nice to be known as a legend, and people will pay to see one, but for most people, once is enough.  You have to deliver the goods, not waste your time and everybody else’s.  I hadn’t actually disappeared from the scene, but the road had narrowed, almost shut down and was supposed to be wide open. 

It had become monotonous. My performances were an act, and the rituals were boring me. I’d see the people in the crowd and they’d look like cutouts from a shooting gallery, there was no connection to them – just subjects at random… My own songs had become strangers to me, I didn’t have the skill to touch their raw nerves, couldn’t penetrate the surfaces. It wasn’t my moment of history anymore. There was a hollow singing in my heart and I couldn’t wait to retire and fold the tent.

I had no feelings for any of those songs and didn’t know how I could sing them with any intent. A lot of them might have been only sung once anyway, the time that they’d been recorded. There were so many that I couldn’t tell which was which – I might even get the words to some mixed up with others.  I needed sets of lyrics to understand what they were talking about, and when I saw the lyrics, especially to the older, more obscure songs, I couldn’t see how I could get this stuff off emotionally. 

A few pages deeper in that chapter, Dylan describes a spiritual and musical awakening, that came in the form of a pair of epiphanies: one while watching an anonymous jazz trio perform in a small club, and one on stage, in Locarno, Switzerland, 1987, when for a brief moment he completely lost his voice.  In these closely quartered experiences he discovered a new means of performing that helped him avoid “the repetition that makes even esteemed artists feel like frauds.”  He describes the mathematics of his performances as such:

Something out of the ordinary had occurred and I became aware of a certain set of dynamic principles by which my performances could be transformed.  By combining certain elements of technique which ignite each other I could shift the levels of perception, time-frame structures and systems of rhythm which would give my songs a brighter countenance, call them up from the grave – stretch out the stiffness in their bodies and straighten them out. 

In a Sept. 7, 2006 Rolling Stone cover story, he explained to Jonathan Lethem more specifically what’s happening onstage, which seems to infuriate so much of the audience:

We do keep the structures intact to some degree. But the dynamics of the song itself might change from one given night to another because the mathematical process we use allows that. As far as I know, no one else out there plays like this. Today, yesterday and probably tomorrow. I don't think you'll hear what I do ever again. It took a while to find this thing. But then again, I believe that things are handed to you when you're ready to make use of them. You wouldn't recognize them unless you'd come through certain experiences. I'm a strong believer that each man has a destiny."

I've heard it said, you've probably heard it said, that all the arrangements change night after night. Well, that's a bunch of bullshit, they don't know what they're talkin' about. The arrangements don't change night after night. The rhythmic structures are different, that's all. You can't change the arrangement night after night – it's impossible."

I find this to be the most interesting thing about Bob Dylan today.  While the quotes in ‘Chronicles’ clearly explain that he’s challenging his audience out of respect, in addition to his need to maintain relevance, it’s the explanation in Rolling Stone that describes exactly how he does this.  There’s a difference between rhythm, meter, and the arrangement of the song itself.  What we miss in these songs, as performed live, is the rhythmic structures that he’s changed, we miss what we’d otherwise call melody (vocal or instrumental).  Melodies are what we latch onto in pop music, but that’s where the logic breaks down: Bob Dylan’s never been a pop artist.  The Beatles were pop, and so their melodies are infectiously indelible.  But Dylan’s music is steeped in folk and R&B, neither of which aspires to be especially hummable, and throughout his career he’s incorporated strong elements of Country Blues and Bluegrass, Gospel, Rockabilly, British Beat, etc.  Sometimes music reviewers go even further, citing long-lost dialects like Appalacian Folk and Western Swing, which he's definitely mined of late.  In this regard Bob Dylan’s become the preeminent archivist of musical Americana, incorporating the regional accents that existed long before cheap travel, urban migration and mass media homogenized the country (this also explains why his last few albums sound like they could be played on a Victrola). 

It’s been said that Bob Dylan writes songs that are meant to be covered by other artists.  Bands like The Byrds rode his coattails into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, while Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton found some of their biggest and most enduring hits within Dylan’s catalogue.  There’ve been plenty of compilations strictly devoted to Bob Dylan covers, from the 2007 soundtrack to ‘I’m Not There’, Todd Haynes’ series of ruminations on Dylan’s many incarnations, to last year’s ‘Chimes Of Freedom’, a massive compilation released to raise money for Amnesty International, which featured 75 artists covering and interpreting his music.  On stage, Bob Dylan is essentially doing to his own songs what other artists have been doing for 45 years: covering them.  Reinterpreting them.  Giving them new context, so as to keep their meaning fresh and relevant.  The point is that it’s always fun to hear your favorite songs with fresh ears, and any time another artist interprets those songs, you’re drawn closer to the music.  For whatever reason, Dylan fans clamor over the covers but don’t want to give Bob himself that same leniency to present a new vision of old text.  That’s ironic, and a bit unfortunate.  I’m a pretty sentimental guy, and spend plenty of time and money on nostalgia.  But the music of Bob Dylan is not where you go to find that nostalgia.  Some day he’ll be gone, and all we’ll have is a deep catalogue of (35 studio albums and 458 songs and counting).  There’ll be plenty of studio work to pore over, but what we’ll regret the most is that we didn’t appreciate the live performances.  And we’ll come back to what he said in that Rolling Stone interview:

“No one else out there plays like this. Today, yesterday and probably tomorrow. I don't think you'll hear what I do ever again” 

Bob Dylan: Respect.

[bearsontrikes]

How The Converse Weapon '86 Revealed Pinterest As A Shopping Vehicle

I love Converse’s brand resurrection over this last decade.  Not just the way they embraced the Rock and Roll community’s affection for their 80 year-old Chuck Taylor All-Stars, but how they then extended that heritage by creating an imprint label with Rock and Roll fashion icon John Varvatos.  The collaboration’s become a cornerstone of both brands’ retail experience, and the redesigned line of Chuck Taylors have been ubiquitous in chains and boutiques over the last few years.  Back in September they launched at NYC’s flagship Bowery store (the old CBGBs) a modernized, street-casual redesign of the famous Weapon ’86 (if you were a fan of Magic or Bird’s back in the 80’s, you probably had a pair back in the day).  The new line had been streamlined with a slimmer outsole, a sleeker ankle rise, and distressed leather uppers that come in colors like “Faded Rose/Black” (deep crimson) and “Nightshade/Gold” (dark navy).  They were a great remix of the original, looked both modern and classic at the same time.  The only problem was, by time the Christmas shopping season hit, they’d already discontinued the line. 

My size (12) happens to be one of their most in-demand, which made it twice as difficult to track down a pair.  The brick and mortars had long sold out so I shifted my search online.  There I found some scattered inventory across various online retailers, but quickly saw the remaining size 12s sell out in the colors I didn’t want, while I held out for the colors I did want (Nightshade/Gold).  I stalked each brands’ website and checked for new inventory constantly, and spent a week searching Google and Bing Shopping as well as leading Comparative Shopping Engines (CSEs) like Bizrate and Nextag.  On Google.com I clicked 10 pages deep to uncover additional online retailers that might not come back within the CSEs.  Ultimately I did find sites that carried the line, but found less inventory and fewer available sizes each next day.  By the end of the week I’d begun to consider whether I could feasibly trade down a size, perpetually curling my toes or possibly binding them into a daintier size (which even the Chinese stopped doing in 1912).  Just when failure seemed a certainty, I found exactly what I was looking for at Thom Brown, a small mom and pop shoe store out of Boston.  They had it in the right color, in the right size, and they happened to have it cheaper than everyone else (bonus!)  But I didn’t discover them on Google, and the CSEs don’t seem to know that Thom Brown exists.  They’re not set-up within eBay Marketplaces and they’re not part of Amazon’s Market Place.  I ultimately discovered this vendor on Pinterest.

I found that so interesting, that Big Search failed me yet Thom Brown's modest grassroots tactics provided for this discovery and ultimately, my wish fulfillment.  The bigger the Web gets, the more content Google will have to index, and by virtue of that, the more they're bound to fail us as consumers.  The search algorithms still favor the larger websites, based on their link authority, which has become an enemy of genuine discovery...

Quick anecdote: In college I worked at an independent record store (back when there still existed a thing called "independent record stores").  My employer was eventually put out of business by a brand within the Sam Goody chain, which set-up shop 3 doors down.  This conversation about mega-chains killing off mom-and-pops is nothing new, and now the big box retailers like Wal-Mart and Amazon are even killing off the biggest national chains.  I guess that's the way it goes, only the fittest survive and in this day and age, biggest = fittest.  Except that's not necessarily what's in the consumers best interests.  In an age where price pressure creates vertical consolidation, the only way to fit in is to stand apart, and small mom-and-pops can do that just by being nimble, by spending time on new, emerging platforms like Pinterest. 

Pinterest hasn't quite crystallized a commercial model, but they do host millions upon millions of passionate, highly engaged consumers -- searching, surfing, desiring something new for their collections.  Pinterest was able to do something that the biggest Internet companies in the world couldn't, which was bridge the gap between the virtual world and the real world, and connect me with a small retailer I've never heard of, in a city I haven't been to in 4 years, to buy a product I obsessively desired but couldn't find.  That's something to think about. 

[bearsontrikes]

Jonathan Franzen's Lost In The Woods

I just started reading Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections.  The following is a paragraph I encountered extremely early on in the book (e.g. page 11) that killed off any hope of quickly establishing some momentum.  It also happens to be one single, excruciatingly long, run-on sentence nearly 2,000 characters long.  I don't know a whole lot about post-modern literary crit (though I'm abbreviating "criticism" to "crit" to make me sound both more post-modern and literary), but when I encounter this type of writing it makes me want to give up reading for the rest of my days.  The thought of encountering a sentence like this again is just too much to bear.  Though in all fairness, there are some writers that make Franzen look like Hemingway.  David Foster Wallace used to write long-winded asides and overwrought analogies that put this one to shame, just in the footnotes of his own sprawling novels.

He began a sentence: "I am---" but when he was taken by surprise, every sentence became an adventure in the woods; as soon as he could no longer see the light of the clearing from which he'd entered, he would realize that the crumbs he'd dropped for bearings had been eaten by birds, silent deft darting things which he couldn't quite see in the darkness but which were so numerous and swarming in their hunger that it seemed as if they were the darkness, as if the darkness weren't uniform, weren't an absence of light but a teeming and corpuscular thing, and indeed when as a studious teenager he'd encountered the word "crepuscular" in McKay's Treasury of English Verse, the corpuscles of biology had bled into his understanding of the word, so that for his entire adult life he'd seen in twilight a corpuscularity, as of the graininess of the high-speed film necessary for photography under conditions of low ambient light, as of a kind of sinister decay; and hence the panic of a man betrayed deep in the woods whose darkness was the darkness of starlings blotting out the sunset or black ants storming a dead opossum, a darkness that didn't just exist, but actively consumed the bearings that he'd sensibly established for himself, lest he be lost; but in the instant of realizing he was lost, time became marvelously slow and he discovered hitherto unguessed eternities in the space between one word and the next, or rather he became trapped in that space between words and could only stand and watch as time sped on without him, the thoughtless boyish part of him crashing on out of sight blindly through the woods while he, trapped, the grownup Al, watched in oddly impersonal suspense to see if the panic-stricken little boy might, despite no longer knowing where he was or at what point he'd entered the woods of this sentence, still manage to blunder into the clearing where Enid was waiting for him, unaware of any woods --- "packing my suitcase," he heard himself say.

Reciprocating the mental fog the character finds himself in, I no longer know where I am or at what point I'd entered the woods (of this sentence)...

[bearsontrikes]

"We will accept all breeds of dogs... Except"

It's getting harder to find an apartment in New York City. The following was an email response from a broker representing a building in Brooklyn, describing the kinds of dogs not allowed.  At some point it becomes easier to ask for a list of the dogs that are allowed. 

We will accept all breeds of dogs except the following or any combination of mixed breed that contain any of the following:  Afghan Hound, Akita, Australian Cattle Dog, Basenji, Basset Hound, Beddington Terrier, Bernese Mountain Dog, Bloodhound, Boxer, Bulldog, Chow, Dalmatian, Doberman, German Shepherd, Great Dane, Keeshond, Mastiff, Pointer, Pitt Bull Terriers*, Rottweiler, Saluki, Saint Bernard, Siberian Husky, and Weimaraner. We reserve the right to add additional breeds or families to this list of prohibited breeds at any time.  We allow a maximum of two (2) pets per apartment.  All cats must be spayed or neutered. *Including all Pitt Bull breeds- American Putt Bull Terriers, American or Irish Staffordshire Terriers, Bull Terriers, Pitt Bulls, American Bull Dogs and Presa Canario. As far as the weight limit is concerned we do not have one.  Let me know if you have any other questions or need any additional information.

Sometimes authority seems kind of random, no?

[bearsontrikes]

Dear Nora Ephron: You Were A Lone Reed

Dear Nora Ephron: You were a lone reed, standing tall, waving boldly in the corrupt sands of commerce.

Nora Ephron died of complications from Leukemia on June 26th.  It was a sad day.  For my generation she was nothing less than the architect of the modern romantic comedy.  She also wrote novels, essays and films as diverse as ‘Silkwood’, ’Michael’ and the hugely underrated ‘My Blue Heaven’… but her best films certainly fell into the chick-flick category.  ‘When Harry Met Sally’, ‘Sleepless In Seattle’ and ‘You’ve Got Mail’ were the golden triumvirate of her canon and they created the standard by which all other rom-coms would be judged.  Romantic comedies are like horror, in the sense that they’re easy to do poorly, but extremely difficult to do well.  She elevated the genre to something much greater.  

Nobody was as charming as Nora Ephron.  Her films were smart and clever and compulsively watchable.  Her characters were ingratiating beyond compare and she told stories that played out as pure wish fulfillment.  But her films didn’t simply deliver the formula, she filled in the space between plot and character arcs with great moments of life: small moments drawn from gestures, quips, serendipitous encounters. For me the most analogous modern filmmaker would be Cameron Crowe.  While Nora Ephron’s films seemed to start top-down as romantic comedies, and his bottom-up as observational comedic dramas, they both wound up in exactly the same place: as meticulous, fully-formed character pieces crafted with the lightest touch.  I’m sure its no coincidence that both writers began as journalists…  Their films have a spontaneous feel coupled with an exceptional eye for detail, and end up being much fuller than they seem.  Their charms only grow with each successive viewing.

I used to sit around in college and write broad, self-involved essays on how Nora Ephron killed love for an entire generation (more so than the divorce rates of the time), because she created this completely unrealistic standard that life couldn't possibly live up to.  The essays were crap, but I had a highly romanticized view of the world and was trying to form my worldview from these second-hand pop-culture influences.  I think I was just trying to write my way into the same kind of winning, observant characterization she herself wrote so well.  After all, she’d soon have Meg Ryan’s character intone a similar sentiment in ‘You’ve Got Mail’:

“I lead a small life - well, valuable, but small - and sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven't been brave? So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?”

I’ve watched “the golden triumvirate” more times than I can count, because they provide wonderfully vicarious living through characters I’d want to meet and experiences I’d want to own.  Whether I watch her films uncut on DVD or with commercial interruption on basic cable, at 2 in the afternoon or right before I go to bed, they never fail to provide the deepest comfort.  Because after you strip away what a phenomenal writer and director she was, you’re left with the simple fact that nobody had heart like Nora Ephron.  

Below’s a couple of my favorite quotes from ‘You’ve Got Mail’, which is for my money, her most charming script.

Kathleeen Kelly: My store is closing this week. I own a store, did I ever tell you that? It's a lovely store, and in a week it'll be something really depressing, like a Baby Gap.

Joe Fox: Matthew is my father's son, Annabelle is my grandfather's daughter. We are... an American family.

Kathleen Kelly: Once I read a story about a butterfly in the subway, and today, I saw one! It got on at 42nd and off at 59th, where, I assume, it was going to Bloomingdales to buy a hat that will turn out to be a mistake, as almost all hats are.

Joe Fox: The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. Short, tall, light, dark, caf, decaf, low-fat, non-fat, etc. So people who don't know what the hell they're doing or who on earth they are can, for only $2.95, get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self: Tall. Decaf. Cappuccino.

Frank Navasky: A HOTDOG is singing. You need quiet while a HOTDOG is singing??

Kathleen Kelly: 'Joe. Just call me Joe.' As if you were one of those stupid 22-year-old girls with no last name. 'Hi, I'm Kimberley.' 'Hi, I'm Janice.' Don't they know you're supposed to have a last name? It's like they're an entire generation of cocktail waitresses.

Joe Fox: I love Patricia. Patricia's amazing. Patricia makes coffee nervous.

Nelson Fox: Perfect. Keep those West-Side liberal nuts, psudo-intellectuals...

Joe Fox: Readers, Dad. They're called readers.

Nelson Fox: Don't do that, son. Don't romanticize them.

Joe Fox: Don't cry, Shopgirl. Don't cry.