Tomorrow The World
Wednesday, August 13th, 2008
We installed hard wood flooring in my home office recently and that meant moving all my CDs and vinyl out into a storage shed for a couple of months. No small task. Moving it all back in required me to once again alphabetize the CDs as I put them onto the shelves because no matter how careful you are packing they are going to get a little out of order when transfer them from shelves to boxes and back to shelves again. As I was unpacking a box one day recently something about this CD caught my attention when I came across it and I pulled it out and stuck it on my “listen to next” shelf. Now that in and of itself is no guarantee I’ll get to something any faster really. There are a couple of CDs that have been on my “listen to next” shelf for years. Something else always manages to get in the player before they do. It seems I still buy CDs faster than I can listen to them. So some things end up sitting on the shelf for awhile before I get around to listening them. Some things sit there for a very long time indeed.
I know next to nothing about The Shazam. I wonder, is the name a small tribute to the sixties British group The Move? I’m not real sure where this CD even came from. It was released in 2003 on the Not Lame label out of Colorado, the foremost powerpop label in the world. Maybe that’s why I have it. I have a lot of respect for Not Lame and will give most anything they put out a listen. But I don’t have any memory of buying this particular CD. Maybe someone sent it to me. Maybe it was in a goody bag at a SXSW convention. I just don’t know. The band, it turns out, is from Nashville, so there may be some connection there. Anyway, against all odds, I threw this CD into the player one day and sat back in amazement. This has got to be the best powerpop album I’ve heard in a long, long time. I’ve always been a follower of the genre, from The Who to Badfinger to The Dwight Twilley Band to The Cars to The Cretones and on and on and on. The sound (and the feel and spirit) on this album is “big.” It’s not Phil Spector “wall of sound” big, more like a loud, raucous, delicious, gorgeous powerpop big, due in no small part, I’m sure, to the brilliant production by Brad Jones, a well known Nashville rock producer. We’re talking loud crunchy guitars throwing off powerchords left and right, snappy drums keeping everything moving at a non-stop, no frills pace, great melodic hooks everywhere you look and crisp vocals and harmonies holding everything together.
Many of the songs have that “classic” feel, like you’re heard them before, even though you know you haven’t. That’s due in small part to some ingenious “steals” peppered throughout the songs (the “London Calling” riff hidden away in “You Know Who” or the “Brown Sugar” riff that kicks off ”Rockin’ And Rollin’ (With My) Rock ‘N’ Roll Rock ‘N’ Roller” the first song on the album). But it really has a lot more to do with the terrific songwriting skills of Hans Rotenberry (who also handles guitar). This is one guy who knows his way around a punchy melody and a memorable hook. There’s enough “ear candy” here to keep even the most rabid powerpop fan happy. At this point it’s hard for me to pick out many real favorites because all of the songs just knock me out and I haven’t lived with the album enough to see what stands up best over time. But I will say that “Squeeze The Day,” “The Not Quite Right Kid,” “Goodbye American Man” and the sole ballad “I’m Not Lost Anymore” are real standouts. And then there’s ”Rockin’ And Rollin’ (With My) Rock ‘N’ Roll Rock ‘N’ Roller” which is probably my favorite right now. The song itself is all fluff, but man, what fluff. It’s the kind of song that sounds like it was thrown together in ten minutes (and maybe it was) but it’s also the kind of timeless classic that turns out to be exactly what it sounds like on the first listen, pure pop magic.
A little research on allmusic.com shows this is the fourth release from The Shazam. There’s not a lot of info about the band there so I checked out their myspace page. Not a lot of information there as well, but I did find something about a possible new album titled Meteor they are said to be working on. I’ll probably end up buying their other three albums on Amazon.com sometime soon, because if they’re anywhere near as good as this I want to hear them. It’s so great to come across an album like this in my collection every now and then: a real gem I didn’t even know I had. Makes me wonder what else is hidden away in those shelves I just haven’t had time to get to yet. If only there was more time in the day maybe I could get caught up. Nah, probably not.
Other Listens on August 13th:
Monterey International Pop Festival by Various Artists
I listened to a lot of music even back in high school. It was mostly 8-track tapes for me in those days. I had a home player, and when I was finally old enough to drive I had a player in my car. When I’d get in trouble at home the favorite punishment of my Mom and Dad was to take away my 8-track player. They’d lock it in the trunk of the car so I had no chance at getting to it. I guess it was clear how much I loved my music, even back then. I also had a little portable player that I could carry around (a boom box if you will, way before boom boxes became popular). I remember taking it to school a few times and getting in a lot of trouble. But even though I tried to keep up with popular music, there was, of course, just way too much to really do so. Especially when my finances were pretty limited. A lot of bands slipped through the cracks. With some I might have been able to get one album, but it didn’t go much further than that. And with many more I only knew of them from the radio and was maybe familiar with a hit or two here and there. As I get older, and as more and more albums have been remastered and reissued on CD, I’ve been making a concerted effort to go back and fill in the missing pieces for a lot of these bands: The Jefferson Airplane, The Guess Who, Sly & The Family Stone, The Steve Miller Band, The Grateful Dead, Santana and Led Zeppelin are some good examples. I remember I had an 8-track at one time of Thirds by James Gang. All I remember of the album was the hit “Walk Away.” I was familiar with at least one other of their hits, “Funk 49.” But that was about all I knew of James Gang for the next thirty plus years. I’d never bought any of their albums on CD. Until recently.
I can trace my love of music directly back to a transistor radio I had when I was 10 years old. I actually had two radios: a small, portable transistor radio and a bedside clock radio. I had lots of paper routes when I was growing up (I once had three different ones at the same time) and I would almost always take my radio along with me as I was cycling through the neighborhood delivering papers. If it was summer I might sometimes be listening to a baseball game, but most of the time I was tuned in to WING-AM or WONE-AM, both out of Dayton, Ohio. I lived in the very small town of Bellbrook, Ohio (about 15 miles or so outside of Dayton) from the age of 9 to 13. In my bedroom, reading or studying I would almost always have the clock radio turned on. I found it so cool that I could set it to come on automatically and wake me up for school. I was always curious to find out what song would be playing when the radio suddenly started to gush out hit songs each morning. But where I really became hooked was bedtime. My mom wouldn’t let me listen to the clock radio when I went to bed, so I’d sneak my transistor radio under my pillow. I found the perfect volume setting where I could hear it if I pressed my ear down hard enough, but no one else would know it was on. There was many a night I would fall asleep with one sixties pop nugget after another playing just inches away from my ear. I went through a lot of batteries this way as the radio would often play through most of the night. I’d eventually wake up and turn it off, but sometimes that was many hours later. As I got older I eventually got a record player and began to buy 45 singles and 12″ albums. But I still listened to the radio a lot as well. In those days I only had a handful of singles and albums and I was always listening to the radio looking for new songs. It was all about the song in those days. I gradually became more and more aware of the artists, but at the beginning it was the song, just the song.
The 1966 tour through Australia, Europe and especially the UK is more historically significant and more musically consequential. There’s no denying the power and the majesty of those performances. The acoustic performances are positively ethereal. Dylan sounds truly stoned out of his mind yet perfectly in the moment. His harmonica playing on those tracks is unlike anything else I’ve ever heard. He wanders off into unbelievable solos and riffs that wind over, under and around themselves like twisted angelic musical prayers. And, of course, the electric sets are truly groundbreaking. The ferociousness of the band, the power that each and everyone of them brings to each song is truly unique in recorded music. This was a band, with Dylan at the helm, doing battle with their audience each and every night. It brought out something in them that’s never been touched since. I once had a talk with an artist I was working with as an A&R man. He is a truly rare, extraordinary and unique songwriter with not an ounce of business sense in his body. A show he and his band did at 12th & Porter, here in Nashville, in late 1999 remains one of the finest, most powerful and moving performances I’ve ever seen live. Hands down better than most of the concerts I’ve seen by the rich and famous rock stars. Most likely you’ve never heard of him. I haven’t kept in touch with him since I left the music business. Last I heard he was living on the side of a mountain outside Knoxville, Tennessee. We were talking about music, about audiences, about connecting with listeners, about following your true muse wherever that took you and most of all about the difficulty of doing that when no one else seemed to be able to come with you. He too is a big Dylan fan. Think of the irony, and in the end the true triumph of Dylan’s 1966 tour I said. Here he was being booed, not just casually, but deeply and forcefully, by every audience, every night. I don’t care how famous, how self-assured, how strong, how deeply set in your beliefs you are, that must do an incredible trip on your head. And here we are forty years later and this music is commonly, widely even universally, considered some of the most important live music ever recorded. Talk about full circle. It’s Vincent Van Gogh 100 years later with a guitar. Though, thankfully, Dylan didn’t have to die before his genius was recognized. 
There’s a great version of Jerry Jeff Walker’s classic song, “Mr. Bojangles,” on his 1969 Atco album, Five Years Gone. I didn’t discover Walker until a few years later when he released his self-titled album on Decca (still my favorite album of his and still unavailable on CD). It’s referred to in the liner notes as “the famous drunken recording made early in the morning on WBAI with David Bromberg.” It’s just Walker and Bromberg playing acoustic guitars live at a radio station. It was recorded in November 1967, during a period when Bromberg would regularly back up Walker. David Bromberg is what you might call the textbook example of a “musician’s musician.” He’s played with a ton of people over the years. There’s a great tape circulating of Emmylou Harris playing live on a radio broadcast in 1969 (this was six years before her “debut” album Pieces Of The Sky) with Bromberg backing her. He’s played on sessions with everyone from Bob Dylan to John Prine to Willie Nelson to The Eagles playing everything from fiddle to guitar to mandolin to dobro to bass.
I worked a four different record labels in the nineties. They were all independent labels. I never worked at a major label. Still, I think I have a pretty good idea of how the record business works and what’s involved. That’s why I just don’t understand the reluctance on the part of most major labels to make so much of their back catalog available digitally. Back in the “old” days when CDs ruled it made more sense. At each of the labels I worked at we would license material from major labels. Albums they just didn’t want to bother reissuing on CD. I used to talk to the folks that worked at these labels a lot. They would say their bottom line was 20,000 CDs. If they didn’t think a reissue could sell at least 20,000 copies they weren’t interested. It wasn’t worth their time and energy. Now, 20,000 is a LOT of CDs to sale, especially on a reissue. So, it was no wonder that a lot of albums languished in the vaults. Their reasons were pretty simple to understand. To make a reissue financially viable they had to pay for remastering, new artwork, pressing up CDs, distributing those CDs, warehousing the CDs, etc. Now an indie label could do the same thing much cheaper. We didn’t have to sell near that many CDs to break even or to make money. But that’s all changed now. To make an out of print album available as a digital only release, on iTunes, or wherever, the costs are dirt cheap. All you have to do is make a decent transfer of the master tape to digital files. Sure, you can remaster it if you want, but that’s not always necessary. For a few hundred dollars someone can transfer the tape and presto, you’ve got the digital files. No artwork costs. No distribution costs. No pressing costs. No warehousing costs. So, it boggles my mind why the labels don’t seem to be making more of an effort to make more albums available. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, I could make a list of at least 100 albums in a flash that I would buy as digital downloads if only they were available. With all the trouble the labels are having making money these days it’s just incredible that they are not diving into their catalogs and making all this great music available. Each album might not sell 20,000 copies or anywhere near that, but really, how many would they have to sell to break even? I don’t understand it. They’re just letting money sit there on the shelves of their vaults.
For some reason I’ve never been able to completely understand, America seems to require that most of our “artists” stick to one medium. As far as I can tell Elvis was the last musical artist to also have a real career in another field (film). And really, even he wasn’t taken seriously as an actor. Recent American history is full of case after case of artists trying to cross over from one medium to another and, often times, failing miserably. Now, to be fair, sometimes they are just plain bad at the new “field” they are trying to work in (Madonna as an actress?). But I think there’s more to it than that. It seems our first impulse is to automatically scoff at the very idea of an actor fronting a rock band. Or a musician writing a novel. Or a singer wanting to act. Sometimes it works but I think those cases are the exceptions. Jimmy Buffett and Kinky Friedman have both written many successful novels. Kris Kristofferson has done pretty well bouncing back and forth between films and music. But then you have Keanu Reaves and Russell Crowe both fronting rock bands (and neither getting much respect). I have a terrific country album that Sissy Spacek made in 1983 (Rodney Crowell produced it). I don’t think many people even knew it existed at the time. Mick Jagger and David Bowie both tried acting back in the 70s. I just find it interesting that it seems the initial reaction from our culture is to try and pigeonhole artists into one field. The very fact that they excel in one area of creativity seems to indicate that they may also be able to flourish in other areas given the chance. Now, sometimes if an actor “sneaks” a performance into a film it’s more easily accepted. Gary Busey played lead guitar and sang all the vocals in the 1978 film The Buddy Holly Story and did a fantastic job (the music even won an Oscar). Sissy Spacek did all the vocals in the 1980 Loretta Lynn biopic Coal Miner’s Daughter (for which she won a Best Actress Oscar). The soundtracks to each film featured their vocals, not the vocals of the stars they were portraying. But the thought of either of them doing an album outside of a movie didn’t generate much interest.
1975 to 1985 was the golden era of the Texas singer-songwriter. This is when artists like Billy Joe Shaver, Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Eric Taylor, Steven Fromholz, Walter Hyatt, Jerry Jeff Walker, Willis Alan Ramsey, Michael Murphey, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely, Ray Wylie Hubbard and Butch Hancock were at their peak. A second generation followed spearheaded by Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams, Lyle Lovett and Robert Earl Keen. We’re now well into a third generation and I just want to say, for the record, it ain’t the same. Every time I turn around there seems to be another songwriter from Texas trying to make themselves heard. With a few rare exceptions (Todd Snider, Bruce Robison) these new guys are a bunch of loud, obnoxious, frat boy, Saturday night dancehall blowhards. I’ve given plenty of them a listen and I swear if I hear one more album with ten songs about Texas on it I’m going to start pretending I never lived there. Texas has long been known for its independent streak and its possessive, protective, downright territorial attitude that anything and anyone not from Texas is not worth a damn, but come on, you can take this shit too far. I knew we had crossed a line when I put on an album by a Texas artist that was recorded live in Dallas. The first thing he shouts to the crowd is “Are there any Texans in the house!” and of course he gets back riotous screaming and applause. Give me a fucking break. You’re playing to a local crowd in Dallas. The room is probably full of nothing but Texans. This kind of shit really gets on my nerves. Now, I lived in Texas for twenty years so I feel qualified to speak to this. The artists I noted at the beginning of this entry wrote dozens of superb, often breathtaking songs about Texas, but they rarely, if every, resorted to this kind of patronizing garbage. 
I love bootlegs. I have hundreds of them. Many, many hundreds. Most of them are Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. But I’ve got them from dozens of artists including Neil Young, Jackson Browne, Elliott Murphy, Buffalo Springfield, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Sheryl Crow and many, many others. Most are live concerts, but many are also studio outtakes and other rarities. The first bootleg I ever bought was a two disc vinyl copy of Bob Dylan’s Great White Wonder on the Trade Mark Of Quality label. Released in 1969 this is famous for being the first “real” bootleg of the rock music era. It’s still one of the most famous bootlegs of all time. Original pressings of this are extremely rare and valuable. It’s estimated that the material on these two albums was repressed over 50 times in separately, identifiable versions. Hell, you could make a collection just out of versions of this bootleg. The album contained material from the “Minnesota Hotel Tape” in 1961, Basement Tape songs (not released at the time), outtakes from Another Side Of Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin’, Highway 61 Revisited and more. Wow. I bought a few other vinyl bootlegs in the early 70s, but was generally disappointed in the quality, especially of the live shows, so I didn’t really pursue them much. It was Springsteen’s 1978 Darkness On The Edge of Town tour that really turned things around. A handful of his shows from this tour were broadcast on FM radio, in their entirety, and when the bootlegers got ahold of these the floodgates opened wide. I had been lucky enough to see two of the 78 shows (still my all time favorite tour by any artist). Sometime in 1979 I picked up a copy of Pièce de Résistance, a recording of the September 19, 1978 show at The Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey. Unbelievable. Fantastic show. Great quality sound. Who could ask for more? I was hooked. Remember there was no live Springsteen commercially available at the time.
Garland Jeffreys is one of those artists who just seems to keep slipping through the cracks. He first released an album titled Garland Jeffreys And Grinder’s Switch on Vanguard in 1970. Then a jump to Atlantic for a self-titled CD in 1973 (recently reissued, thankfully, by Collectors Choice). It contained a few good songs, but was a little spotty overall. He then released a string of critically acclaimed albums on A&M in the late 1970s. Ghost Writer (1977, with the “almost” hit “Wild In The Streets”), One Eyed Jack (1978) and American Boy & Girl (1979) were all very well received by everyone, it seems, except the record buying public. American Boy & Girl was especially strong and the first time I fell in love with one of his albums. Songs like “Livin’ For Me,” “Ship Of Fools” and “Shoot Out The Moonlight” kept this LP in steady rotation on my record player. He actually had a hit, or so the story goes, in Spain with the track “Matador.” But in the US, nothing. Another jump, this time to Epic. Hey, something must have been working somewhere because he at least seemed to be able to keep getting signed to a new label. Someone must have believed in him and seen the potential.
First let me say that of the four artists in CSNY Neil Young is probably my favorite. I “collect” Neil Young. I’ve got all the albums. I’ve got a ton of bootlegs. But I sincerely believe he ruined Crosby, Stills & Nash. I think it was a mistake to add him to the group after the first album. He didn’t bring anything to the group as a “band.” It was always like Crosby, Stills & Nash AND Young. The three of them with Neil Young tacked on. They would have been better off without him. I think Déja Vu is a fine album, but it’s nowhere near as good as this album or the first Crosby, Stills & Nash album. Neil’s just not a “team” player. The great thing about CSN was/is the way they blend together so seamlessly. If you stop and think about each song it’s very clear which one is a Stills song, a Nash song or a Crosby song. But, if you just put the music on and listen to it, get lost in it, it’s all just Crosby, Stills and Nash. Hard to explain really, but if you know what I mean that makes sense to you.
