Tom Watson

The Language We All Understand

I like being home, and one reason is the music. Our house is relatively small and it's rarely quiet. Even now, I'm trying to watch some of the Sotomayer coverage after being on the road all day, and it's hard to hear. Part of it is my own diminished hearing, of course. But part of it's the musical instruments that are nearly always being plucked, strummed or pummeled around here.

By last count, the house has seven guitars under its roof (only three of 'em mine) and in the last month, we added a full drum kit. The youngest (11) is looking for the right distortion setting on his amp so he can work on his tunes, while my oldest (17) is changing the strings on her acoustic. The 14-year-old may well head downstairs shortly to thump away on his drums on the basement. A Dylan playlist is running endlessly on the Mac in the kitchen, and has been for this last 90 minutes or more (we're all off to see Mr. Zimmerman tomorrow night at a minor league stadium in Connecticut). Yesterday, it was Macca (we're set for the McCartney show at Citi Field on Friday night). The classics are appreciated by the Watsonian millennials dwelling within this mock tudor, I can tell you.

I enjoy the overlap of the music, which is often joined by the faint buzz of someone's iPod ear buds set to "inflict damage."  We're music-obsessed around here, but not in the most organized, formal way. It's just something that accompanies everyday life. And when it's quiet, it seems really quiet to my ear (dulled as they are from too much rock and roll). Too much so. As I said, I like being home - because I like the noise.

I Will Work the Land

Over on his Trickster! blog, Jason Chervokas has a terrific review of Levon Helm's new record, Electric Dirt. As Jason says, "Music-making is a guild craft, its secrets passed along by direct transmission, and Helm is one of the last living links in a chain that runs from Helena juke joints to the Woodstock festival to Madison Square Garden." Here's a great video on the making of Electric Dirt (which I've been listening to today):

Something to Remember Me By

For short time in the very late 70s and very early 80s, a flashy rockabilly outfit called The Senders ruled as the nearly the de facto house band upstairs at Max's Kansas City. Village Voice critic Robert Christgau famously called the band "the most interesting exponents of the good old Rock'n'Roll approach to New York new wave." The Senders never really hit the big time, but they released their "Seven Song Super Single" on the short-lived Max's label in 1980. The lineup featured Phil Marcade on lead vocals and harp, "Wild Bill" Thompson on lead guitar, Steve Shevlin on bass, and Marc Bourset on drums. Not sure whatever happened to those guys, but they never put on a bad show that I saw. Here's one from 1980 at Max's - pretty sure I was at this one.

Splendid Isolation

One of the great Warren Zevon numbers - this one's from an old Letterman show. Dig Dave holding up an LP.

Middle of the Road

I've always thought that like the late Bob Murphy, Chrissie Hynde's voice was a vocal harbinger of summer. Catch her running through those early Pretenders hits from 'round about '79 or '80 and it pretty much called for a cold beer on the back porch or the front stoop. Later this summer, the artist and I are planning to see Hynde and the current Pretenders lineup in Central Park - but I thight it would be great to kick off summer 'round here (and perhaps chase away the lingering monsoon) with this live gem, an early 80s rendition of Middle of the Road (which Chrissie Hynde most definitely is not).

Billie Jean Is Not My Lover

For all the glamor and scandal and just plain weirdness surrounding Michael Jackson and his strange surgical Neverland life, the man's musical output in the post Jackson 5 years was spotty - a sea of weeds surrounding one massive, startling oak, the 1982 megahit Thriller. That album remains the greatest seller in pop music history and perhaps deserves the honor; by far the best song on the record is the funky R&B hit, Billie Jean.

In a way, it's a shame Billie Jean became the tune Jackson did the moonwalk to - because in the end, though a brilliant entertainer, Jackson was no Fred Astaire or even Gene Kelly as a hoofer and Billie Jean will always be remembered in a moonwalk context. Yet it was the best of his solo tunes, which tended to suffer from massive over-production and the worst of music video overselling. Billie Jean had that infectious core groove - ably plumbed by Quincy Jones, though at first the producer hated the track - that tapped an addictive funk bass line and Jackson's strange but effective vocals, not to mention jazzman Tom Scott's sax.

But the tune was so emblematic of the madness around the budding icon, even in the early 80s; Jackson wrote the tune about a woman who claimed he fathered her children - a woman who is also a siren, luring the pop star into another world.  Billie Jean may be the one, "but the kid is not my son."

Jackson's was a strange, sad life and the times had so clearly passed him by, even as he became the human Transformer under the knives of surgeons looking for a buck. Yet the Jackson 5 canon will stand up over time; Michael was always best with Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, and Marlon and their "bubblegum soul" hits produced by The Corporation still sound great.

Their last big hit as the 5 was Dancing Machine, a pre-disco era number with a killer hook - watcha get down, watcha get down - that still brought the funk before the repetitive thump-thump-thump killed off much of the dance music genre. By that time, the feathered winged hair of the mid-70s female disco queen was in full blow-dried flight, thanks to a comely lass from Corpus Christi, Texas - a natural beauty who really didn't need any of the new hair products to shine.

And Farrah Fawcett, who Nancy Nall eulogized as a woman of the same generation, recalling one of the Farrah posters that sold like mad during the run of Charlie's Angels: "She looks great, of course, the essence of the American blonde beauty but warm, not Grace Kelly cool, fresh and clean and scrubbed. Don’t hate her because she’s beautiful. She was just one of the lucky ones."

Hollywood deals some strange hands in death, but this week may be its version of the inside straight, a virtual Carson show lineup from the late 70s or early 80s - chortling pitchman Ed McMahon, the vivacious and naturally appealing blonde Farrah Fawcett, and the the strange and self-tortured Michael Jackson. We knew you so well, but we hardly knew ye at all.

Why? Cause They Sez So...

Improbably, the New York Dolls have released their second studio album in three years, capping a tragicomic comeback with a blaze of dirty licks, lyrics that wink at modern life, and more hooks than a fisherman's tackle box. The new record, Cause I Sez So. was produced in Brazil by one Todd Rundgren, who produced his last Dolls record 36 years ago, and the new lineup just falls into much of the old sound, a blend of girl group backing vocals, blues and R&B chords, and the mocking high-pitched guitar sound pioneered by their original sideman, the great Johnny Thunders, who expired in a New Orleans flophouse back in '93.

I've played the record through a few times, and it's a great burst of devil-may-care rock and roll from the slimy, garbage-encrusted downtown streets of the 70s - but it destroys the borders of ironic wit to call it a "return to form." Though I must say, there's some semblance of perfect in the release of a remade The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 as David Johansen, Syl Sylvain, and the newer Dolls grind out a reggae-infused remake of Trash, their '73 ode to much-admired fallen virtue. "Ah, how do you call your loverboy?"

Well, like this, I'd say:

Last month, my friend Jim Wolcott took in a Dolls showcase in the skeleton remains of CBGB and observed that the title track (performed above on Jools Holland's show): "has a rousing chorus that makes the song sound like a favorite anthem even as you’re hearing it for the first time: pretty neat trick." He's right about that - and also about this:

Had anybody wagered in the mid-70s, when leather and safety pins spelled finis for glitter rock, that the New York Dolls in any configuration would forge onward into the new millennium, outliving the Ramones and the Clash and the Talking Heads, they could have retired on their winnings.

But who'd begrudge 'em? Johansen has been a fixture on the downtown New York music scene for four decades, even if the scene has decamped for Brooklyn, the Hudson Valley, parts of the Jersey waterfront, and Connecticut's sound shore. Or as Johansen remarks in the shrugging lounge lizard track This is Ridiculous from the new record:

This is getting too funky
A man of my stature can't live like this
When I talk about some money
All I ever to is reminisce
This is too austere
Just want to disappear and come back when the joint starts to swing
How did it come to this?
This is ridiculous.

Clearly, an anthem for our times.

Waltzing's for Dreamers

Just after 10 last night when the band finished breaking down, rolling up all the chords, packing away the guitars and pedals and lyric sheets, and humping it all down to the parking lot in the weekly coda of wrapping up another session. Cool night, with a breeze coming in from the west ahead of some rain.

We finished with a raunchy version of Hard Times, Stephen Foster's 19th century lament on economic diminishing, forever in vogue on a cyclical basis and currently making a big-time comeback in the covers file of musical units ranging from the E Street Band to our modest five-piece, which gathers in a studio upstairs from a suburban auto body shop to knock through a growing lineup of original rock numbers.

The band is a conceit, really. It's an escape from deadlines and the economy and responsibility, yes. But there's also a sense that we are, despite our retreating hairlines, putting together something of artistic value in the oeuvre of our youth. The material - if we do say so ourselves - is pretty decent, filled with hooks and power chords and stories about women and loss, war and angry protest. We work on the lead-ins and fills, and really toil on the shape of each song; we have a waltz and a blues number, several sprightly power pop tunes, a piano ballad and the Irish bar band cover that Brendan leads of Ed McCurdy's anti-war folk standard Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream.

"At 40-something, recommuning with the muse," goes the line in Jason's song about an old band from the early 80s, barely remembered on the post-millennial charts, "singing Folsom Prison, and James Alley Blues." In other words, finding their way back home to the very tribal roots that made them pick up guitars or drumsticks in the first place. Every member of our as-yet unnamed band is 25 or 30 years down the road from senior year in high school, when somebody was always rehearsing a Stones cover in some other kid's basement. Yet we've worked these last months on more than a dozen originals and two or three re-imagined standards with the enthusiasm of much younger players.

We're not quite Clint Eastwood's Hank Williams character from his underrated 1982 film Honky Tonk Man, fighting off failing lungs to sing one last song in Nashville, but that far-off horizon is very much part of the motivation. Last night we joked about covering the lame-ass "Viva Viagra" number from those omnipresent boner drug ads and the irony wasn't in the obvious humor over the pharmaceutical assistance of stubborn organs, but in the fact that we're playing live rock and roll with no intention of trying to impress the fairer sex. Sure, it might be a surprisingly welcome development, but this is about the songs - and the equipment we're obsessed with comes from the Musician's Friend catalogue or the back aisles of eBay. In truth, we're all packing better circuitry these days, with name-brand Fenders and Keeley-modded distortion pedals. Some of us (and I won't name names) are total tone freaks and gear heads, while others favor a more Gleasonesque notion of ploughing through the music in rough fashion, over-rehearsing be damned.

Nonetheless, the work is paying off - so when Mark drops a brisk drumroll intro, nine times out of ten the rest of us fall into he right place. And we're in touch with our own roots; some of us have toured the world in search of that muse, some have played clubs and backyard barbecues and holiday parties. Yet it does become a unit, even one that looks back an awful lot. On Back Again, the mournful Coldplay-like number that Steve wrote, the wistful narrator remembers his original love:  "When we were kids you looked at me - and promised things that never could be."

There's this folky waltz I wrote called 1919 about my grandfather returning home to New York from the First World War. It's about soldiers and the gauzy ancient notion of a war to end all wars. But it's also got a romance in the margins. Sort of like the band.

Last night as we packed the gear into the car outside the auto body shop, Jason lit a smoke and we both looked over at the strip mall across the street. There in the second story window, behind a neon sign advertising dance lessons, a couple moved in silent motion as the cars and trucks rumbled by on the two-lane blacktop.

They weren't youngsters these two, but they were younger than us by at least a decade and half. She was thin, with her light brown hair up in a bouncing ponytail. Her left hand rested on his right shoulder. He was wide and taller, but no giant. Curly dark hair and a light beard. White teeth that shone across Route 9A like one of those old-fashioned streetlights.

The unheard music stopped. The woman smiled widely, slapped his shoulder, and planted a light kiss on his lips. His head titled back with delight.

"They're getting married," said I. "Practicing for their first dance."

"Maybe. But it's beautiful," said Jason. "Just beautiful."

"Like a song."

"Yeah, Waltzing's for Dreamers," said Jason.

Which is an evocative, folky waltz written by Richard Thompson back in the 80s - a song that starts like this:

Oh play me a blues song and fade down the light
I'm sad as a proud man can be sad tonight
Just let me dream on, oh just let me sway
While the sweet violins and the saxophones play

And play on, we will. With no expectations, but lots of reverb and enthusiasm. So let the sweet violins and the saxophones play.

UPDATE: Like the Dolls, but with less glam and hair.

I Feel a Change Comin' On

At this stage, the Bob Dylan test is simple: listen to a new record a few times and before you make your judgment, pretend it's the work of a largely unknown old circuit rider named Robby Zimmerman playing bars and beer halls with his traveling blues band in the upper midwest.

Then decide.

By the high cultural standards generally ascribed to America's generational poet, Dylan's unexpected new album Together Through Life is light and occasionally pleasing, an interesting fourth record in a blues-based "comeback" that begin with his Grammy-winning Time Out of Mind in 1997. To Dylanologists and obsessive critics, it'll never make the canon.

But to anyone scuffling through the the hard rain of springtime, 2009, the new Dylan record is a low and pleasing rumble of traditional blues and front parlor numbers, latched to the back-end of a cross country semi hauling one hell of a groove across the American wasteland. If this were the work of an unknown veteran, in other words, the critics would be patting themselves on the back for their tremendous taste and ability to spot a new talent.

About that groove: the guitar work of Heartbreaker Mike Campbell and the accordion of Los Lobos' David Hidalgo weave a border cafe filigree of melody and rhythm, while Dylan's touring band - bassist Tony Garnier, drummer George Recile, and Donnie Herron on banjo, steel guitar and mando - lay down a rich bed of sound that's part vintage Chess sides and part nouveau Texas swing.

Dylan's voice has never been scruffier, a lonely warble grooved with years aural scars. But in other ways, his singing hasn't been this good in a decade. It's crisply enunciated. And the singer sells the songs completely, even though most of the lines turn downward these days at the end, the antithesis of the characteristic upward snarl of "how does it feel?"

This 67-year-old Dylan knows how it feels and the songs - mostly co-written with lyricist Robert Hunter - tell small and personal stories. Dark tales with dark humor and lost dreams: Dylan knows it's late in his game (and perhaps ours as well). "I feel a change comin' on and the fourth part of the day's already gone," he sings over happy upbeat blues on the record's best song. Then he adds: "I'm listening to Billy Joe Shaver and I'm reading James Joyce/Some people they tell me I’ve got the blood of the land in my voice.”

That he does. Most critics thought Dylan had finished his late-career blue trilogy (which also included Love and Theft from 2001 and Modern Times in 2006), but as Dylan sings in Jolene on the new disk: "I keep my hands in my pocket, I'm moving along, people think they know, but they're all wrong."

[Cross-posted from newcritics.com]

Our Carnival Life Forever

Sandy, the fireworks are hailin' over Little Eden tonight
Forcin' a light into all those stoned-out faces left stranded on this Fourth of July
Down in town the circuit's full with switchblade lovers so fast so shiny so sharp
And the wizards play down on Pinball Way on the boardwalk way past dark
And the boys from the casino dance with their shirts open like Latin lovers along the shore
Chasin' all them silly New York girls

Sandy the aurora is risin' behind us
The pier lights our carnival life forever
Love me tonight for I may never see you again
Hey Sandy girl

In memory of Danny Federici, a true musician's player who died yesterday at 58. His swirling organ riffs and rolling accordion gave the E Street sound two crucial aspects - deep emotional impact and a connection to the American past. A south Jersey player from the early days, it was Federici who first invited Bruce Springsteen to join his band, beginning a collaboration that spanned four decades. And he was a part of my youth as well, never to be replaced.