Tom Watson

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.

Morning in the Promised Land

Walking from Grand Central to that big old shed of a Sheraton on Seventh Avenue for the Clinton Global Initiative takes me past St. Patrick's through Rockefeller Center (I always take the most scenic route around town, by old habit). This morning, that brought me smack up against a crowd of thousands squeezed between granite curtain walls as the roadies for the E Street Band scurried about a tiny stage tweaking the instruments. Roy Bittan, looking like a keyboard-humping Uncle Junior in a porkpie hat, got into place. There was violinist Suze Tyrell (I dig the strings on the new record), and Max Weinberg climbed onto the short riser. I decided immediately that Rupert Murdoch and Muhammad Yunus could wait.

Bruce  opened up with Promised Land, then swung through the new single Radio Nowhere. The third tune was Livin' in the Future from the new record, and he described it like this: "this song is called Livin' in the Future but it's really about what's happening now...about the things that are happening in this country that shouldn't be happening in this country." It's a rollicking up-tempo tune, and Springsteen delivered it sans guitar, gesturing like some white, wild-haired 50-something Beastie Boy - but the message of the song is deadly serious:

Woke up election day
Sky's gunpowder and shades of grey
Beneath the dirty sun
I whistle my time away
Then just about sun down
You come walkin' through town
Your boot heels clickin' like
The barrel of a pistol spinnin' round

Don't worry, darlin'
No baby, don't you fret
We're livin' in the future
And none of this has happened yet

The band skipped into My Hometown, and as I walked away the sound actually improved, and I turned west on 51st Street, singing along...those assembly jobs are going boys, and they ain't coming back.

Rock’s Greatest Covers...

Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine…When Van Morrison wrote the classic Gloria as the B-side to Them’s 1964 hit Baby Please Don’t Go, he couldn’t have suspected what a kid from New Jersey would do with his song a decade later. But I suspect he was thrilled. After all, Patti Smith’s cover of Gloria on her incredible 1975 debut album Horses stands as the greatest rock cover performance (studio release) of all time. At least, that’s my choice. You may cue up something else.....

Dylan on the Radio

The voice seems familiar, but the venue’s different. I’m driving down the highway, and there’s a guy on the radio talking about a record he’s about to play. I’m not sure what station’s on, but that voice…the emphasis on the last syllable of each sentence. The late-middle age growl. The cynical humor, a sardonic grin in every other word. It’s Bob Dylan, deejay. [Read the rest of this post over at newcritics.com].

The Fabulous Iggy Pop

From my post over at newcritics.com: Iggy Pop, aka James Osterberg from suburban Michigan, never put up the chart-toppers, never filled arenas, never toured in an armada of tractor trailers, elaborate staging, and handlers. Yet, four decades into his long and often strange career, Iggy Pop remains as influential as ever. Iggy turns 60 this year, the reunited Stooges have an album in the wings, and Iggy is the subject for the first full-blown, fully-researched biography of his long life. Paul Trynka, former editor of Mojo, has crafted a superb reader that captures the manic energy of “Iggy Pop,” and the restless, intellectual wanderings of Jim Osterberg. Iggy: Open Up and Bleed (due on April 17 from Broadway) explores the depths of madness and energy that have always keyed the Iggy Pop personal, melding the hypersexual wide-eyed rock-and-roll man-child with a fascinating cast of characters that tells the story of rock from the mid-60s to the latest playlists on iTunes. [More]

Meet the Newcritics

You may have noticed a slight slackening here the last few days, the appearance of distraction, of a mind engaged elsewhere. All true.

Friends, meet the newcritics. Newcritics.com is a fledgling effort that promises "web-based criticism in literature, music, television, film, technology, theater and art from a diverse group of bloggers."

That promise is my promise; I cobbled the site together over the past few weeks and invited a few bloggers to post. Last week, the first posts hit the clickstream.

Newcritics is an experiment for me - it came about after a gathering of political bloggers a couple of months back. What I expected to be a hard-core politicalfest actually became and meandering and fascinating discussion of culture, both high and low. I loved it, and thought about extending the conversation; newcritics is my answer to that problem.

I hope you read the posts there, subscribe to the feeds, link to them, and comment often. So far, there have been some terrific articles - here's a few:

Band of Brothers: The Game by Tony Alva, on role-playing games and soldiers
Steve Bowbrick's Crime for Kids, a review of Carl Hiaasen's latest
Talking on the WhyPhone by Brendan Tween, a reaction to Apple's media domination
Blue Girl's Promises Kept. Chapter One on Calvin Trillin's memoir of love
Sidewalks of New York, by Lance Mannion, which discusses film characters who are controlled by their appetites and emotions

Then there's what I hope will be the first of many "list" postings - argument-provoking Top 10 affairs that spur reaction. Jason Chervokas and I take a shot at the ten best American domestic sit-coms of all-time, those classic situations revolving around a home and a family. Sure, we've all got The Honeymooners, I Love Lucy, and All in the Family...but what's on your list? That's the point! Read Blondie's Children: the Best Domestic Sitcoms and let us know.

Consider what's up the first week, and my reaction is this: that's a magazine I'd read. Lots of voices, shared interests, conversation. We got one comment this week from Roxtar that really hit home, and made it feel (thus far) worthwhile:

A round-table, free-wheeling discussion of popular culture, on the other hand, can spin off in an infinite number of directions. It can take you from poetry to music to television, to literature, to film, to sociology and psychology, to marketing and persuasion, to technology and its role in the future…. I suspect your dinner last November touched on most, if not all, of those areas, and more besides.

Popular culture is not a trifle, or an idle diversion. It is like water to a fish; it surrounds us and, to a large degree, it defines us. But unlike our finny friends, we can actively participate in evaluating and determining the quality of our environment. Which I suppose is what you have in mind.

Exactly. I'm not giving up blogging here by any means. This will still be my personal space, and I'll probably cross-post most media/culture pieces. I'll only blog politics here. No politics on newcritics - it's a place for discussing what unites us, not what divides us. C'mon and set a spell.

Eminence Front

Elderly rock stars have this gift for introspection and analysis; they look back with a clarity not present during the drug binges, and there’s a received wisdom that comes with the long-term attainment of stardom - a been there, done that shrug. Two of ‘em - roughly half a rock generation apart - write a couple of fine personal journals. In recent posts, both David Byrne and Pete Townshend give homilies on performing and the current scene. Great reading, guilty pleasures.

Townshend writes an open letter to Independent art critic David Lister, who had written up an interview with the Who’s muse. Townshend’s theory has long been that Britain’s post-war rockers were really a reaction to the bleakness of the bombed-out cities, and that their brand of tough, loud music was almost literally an echo of Hitler’s bombs. But he’s finding a more gentle ribbon of protest in modern rock.

I think rock music is about to throw off some of its testosterone driven defiance. I may be wrong, but wherever I look today I see younger musicians demanding a new level of intimacy from their audience. ‘Unplugged’ rock is not exactly what is happening. It is more a return to the traditions of Bert Jansch, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Ewan McColl, Dave Van Ronk, Big Bill Broonzy, Joan Baez and even early Bob Dylan. This is not entirely about Protest, rather about music performed gently that expresses a single idea along the single pathway of the conscience of an individual musician daring to speak up about something they might uniquely believe. Even anger is delivered gently.To my mind this is a more fitting way to make music in today’s political climate than standing on a stage hiding behind a virtual armory of heavy metal weaponry. It is not Pacifism. It is not denial. It is a sharing of individual morality.

Of course, for Pete it always comes back to the big sound in the end - which is why his brief analysis of “the new softness” is so interesting. It has to do with the war.

I’m not certain where this new powerful gentleness has come from. Perhaps the invasion of Iraq, the horrible mess that we now face on top of the horrible mess we made when we created the country in the first place, is sifting down through the current generation of songwriters and producing a quieter voice. Faced with the atrocity of 9/11, my song Won’t Get Fooled Again had defiant value when played to the people who had to clear up the mess in New York. The song is futile in the context of the present day except as a nostalgic reference to the way we were. I sang in 1971 about protecting my family against Hippies and their absurd psychedelic ‘revolution’, not a threatening foreign ideology beyond my understanding in 2007.For my part, so I don’t appear to be a hypocrite when I next stand on stage with my guitar and pretend to be a B-52, I find it hard to let go of loud rock music as a natural expression of my inner psyche. This is a confused position to take in a world in which being more powerful than one’s enemy achieves very little.

The former Talking Head, meanwhile, is burning down the house getting ready for a series of shows in February at Carnegie Hall. All original material, which Byrne - ever the iconoclast - says is liberating.

It’s a thrill to be able to do a whole concert of new material. Most of my life in concerts and tours I have gingerly mixed in new stuff with songs that are more familiar to an audience, which is what most bands and singers do. Occasionally we get overly enthusiastic and we play a whole new record, or most of it, on tour — our enthusiasm for the new material sometimes overwhelms practical concerns for the desires of our audiences. It’s a balancing act — we don’t want to give them only what they already know (and to be honest they’d get bored with that after a while, as would all of us) but one can only introduce new and surprising elements a little at a time so it becomes a mixing act.

The work in question is Here Lies Love, with “Musical Contributions by Fatboy Slim,” a musical operetta that “presents Imelda Marcos meditating on events in her life, from her childhood spent in poverty and her rise to power to her ultimate departure from the palace.” Don’t cry for me, Baguio City.

(Cross-posted from newcritics.com)

I Feel Good

Some sudden celebrity deaths are shocking to me: Elvis, Bing Crosby, Joe Strummer all fit the category. The hold on life, even for the talented - those larger than life - is but a slim strand. The Godfather of Soul's passing from heart failure related to pneumonia stopped the Christmas frenzy just now - when I got the news through my feedroll (don't we always these days) from Jason's blog that James Brown was dead. MSNBC says Brown initially felt better and even talked about playing New Year's Eve in New York. He was only 73 and seemed younger, still did the moves when the lights went on. Chervokas has the first-hand memories (mine are recorded, alas) so I'll let him tell it:

Of course James Brown was a titanic musical figure, one of the giants of 20th century music, up there with Louis Armstrong and Igor Stravinsky. He invented funk. It wasn't a single handed invention--the crackerjack musicians of the James Brown Show had a lot to do with it--and of course funk had roots in funky blues, the rolling music of New Orleans, and centuries old Yoruban music of West Africa. But in 1965, with the release of "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag," Mr. Brown did something new--orchestrating a drum beat across the whole band the way Duke Ellington spread his Debussyan chords across the brass and reeds.

"Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" sounded radical in 1965, but it was still more or less a straight R&B record with rhythmic horn vamp. Over the next few years things got more intense, with the music stripped of chord changes entirely. The breakthrough came with "There was a Time." The song evolved from the out vamp of the group's live arrangement of a forgettable mid 1960s hit "Let Yourself Go." In performance the out vamp came to dominate the song, soon stretched out to seven minutes, with Brown improvising his autobiography over the furious pump of the music. Although my favorite version of "There Was a Time" can be found on the fake live 1970 classic album Sex Machine, you can hear the development of the song in the Let Yourself Go/There Was a Time performance from Live at the Apollo Vol. II. 

But the overpowering influence of funk on world music in the latter decades of the 20th century sometimes obscures the influence of Brown's early years as the greatest soul singer of all. Like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, Brown did things that other singers couldn't go, so his influence as a singer is not all that deeply heard today. But the first generation of hard rock singers stole everything from James Brown.

UPDATE: Ah what the hell, here's a TV video up top of Sex Machine cut in with Soul Power from (I'm guessing) around 1970-71.

Olden Times and Ancient Rhymes

BlueGirl and Neddie Jingo have a Christmas gift for their blogger friends, and it's quite beautiful indeed. They made music of the season, by long distance, and yet vibrantly personal - clear, nostalgic, and sad; modern technology linking a fine arrangement and a sweet, rich voice. They amaze.

And if you're at Neddie's, you might pass along condolences on the passing of his beloved father-in-law. This is a very difficult time for death; somehow, it doesn't seem to fit. We're supposed to be giving and spending and making resolutions. Yet, we're reminded that a day can be just like any other day when the time runs out on someone we love.

And since it's the season to give, I want everyone who reads this to help support one of the great blogging voices - none other than Shakespeare's Sister, whose beloved has had some trouble of the nation's highways, causing the bill collectors to nip. Shakes has such a clear, resolute voice; morever, she encourages our little community in so many ways. So let's pull a Mary Bailey, break into Martini's juke-a-box, and hit that tip jar, OK?

Betting on the Band

Ultrasound Studios comprises a couple of floors in the impressively named but relentlessly relaxed Recording & Rehearsal Arts Building over on West 30th Street, just shy of Eighth Avenue, around the corner from the Garden.

St. John the Baptist, with its grimy brownstone facade and Gothic tower, designed by Napoleon LeBrun and completed in 1872, anchors the block. The rest is a slapdash of fur wholesalers, music shops, and second story massage parlors. There are always a bunch of guys carrying guitar cases walking over from Seventh Avenue after work. Sometimes that's me and Steve, staving off hunger with a greasy slice on the corner and then humping the guitars over to Ultrasound.

Upstairs, we meet with Adam and square off in one of the warren of rehearsal studios. Each has a drumkit and a couple of banks of amplifiers, pretty good little sound-crunchers generally - the tech hooks up a couple of mics, and for two or three hours once a month, we work out the kinks on some power chords and blues hooks. Nothing crazy. Surfer tunes. A little punk. Classic rock. Some blues jams. The occasional original.

I'm on the guitar and vocals, alternating between rhythm and lead on my Telecaster, a prized possession and the guitar I couldn't afford way back when. Steve's on bass, but he also works the keyboards and is a classically trained musician with a killer ear. Adam handles drums, through his own kit is still back in Ohio and he loves the mid-tempo numbers where there's room to swing.

Truth is, the cost of renting a studio at Ultrasound is cheaper than any Manhattan therapist, and a damned sight more effective. Slide into Ziggy Stardust or The Kids Are Alright or Come Together, and you're gone - totally gone, transported from the grind, the mortgage, the payments, the ass-kissing drag of making your living, putting shoes on the baby's feet.

It ain't rebellion anymore. We're accepting slaves. We bend. We scrape. We walk the line. But it's more than a mere distraction, a little reverie. It's not escapist. Like travel to someplace new, it stays with you for days - those chords and downbeats get inside and move every last cell in the body. The effect is like newly-oxygenated blood, or a cold front blowing through the sweltering August streets with its clear, honey-scented air.

As Stevie Wonder told it, music is a world unto itself, it's a language we all understand. Getting a groove down, playing it through with the unspoken cues of veteran bandmates, the language of the music partner, man that's some sweet fresh air to breathe.

Last week, we stepped out, as is our habit, at the company's annual holiday party in a wonderful old Chelsea ballroom. Co-workers sang (some of them quite well), we nailed our songs change for change, cue for cue, solo for solo, and accepted the post-performance congratulations with the humility that we frankly believe our low level of musicianship deserves.

But across the crowded room, there were purposeful glances exchanged, a few nods. Yeah man, we rocked. We're a band.

And we did, better than before. So the plan is to keep playing. Perhaps we'll do a few local bars, a watering hole or two early in the week. You can grow addicted to playing in front of people. And we may do some recording (anyone know a good studio with an engineer who doesn't mind working with near amateurs, let me know), working on those originals. But even if we don't, that monthly anti-stress session is still on the docket.

Plug in, relax your mind, and float downstream.

Where the Love Light Gleams

Christmas in Italy, 1943

In December of 1943, American marines invaded New Britain in the Solomon Islands. In Europe after the previous month's Tehran conference of the Big Three, the Allies began planning for a late spring invasion of France the following year, as GI's continued their bloody fight up the Italian peninsula. And the greatest war-time American Christmas song raced up the radio charts.

Walter Kern's haunting melody and Kim Gannon's melodramatic and emotional lyrics gave Bing Crosby the material he needed to create an instant classic - I'll Be Home for Christmas remains my favorite holiday song.

The tune earned Crosby his fifth gold record and became the most requested song at Christmas U.S.O. shows in both Europe and the Pacific. That year, of course, millions of Americans were in uniform, fighting a global struggle against totalitarianism and the nation was mobilized behind them. I'll Be Home for Christmas, beamed around the world on armed forces radio, acknowledged the sadness of separation, the presence of death, and the dim but still extant hope of peace.

We tend to romanticize World War Two in the United States as a time when we pulled together as a society, united in the fight for good, for democracy, for freedom. In these terrible days with young Americans dying for a cause most of us at home believe is either lost or not worth the sacrifice in the first place, it's comforting to look back to a time of accepted sacrifice - when songs like this one spoke in simple terms. But the Second World War was long, brutal and imperfect - victory wasn't total; triumph not universal. Millions of innocents died, and Americans claimed a share of those deaths. it was a horrific period in recorded human history.

I'm not a pacifist for two reasons: for one, some wars have to be fought to preserve civilization for those who come after the soldiers stop killing and dying. Then too, humans will always fight. The global struggle of the 1930s and 40s was long in the making, and we still live in the shadow of its gravestones and war memorials.  And while I'm  a student of history, I'm not  nostalgic for "better wars." But I will admit nostalgia for better reasons for war - my living memory knows none. Because I came from an Irish Catholic family, Christmas music was der Bingle and everybody else. And after White Christmas, I'll Be Home for Christmas was number two in the canon. So it fits my December, in memory and in what I'd like Christmas to be.

There's a fine simplicity to the song, and it's nostalgic and emotional. Despite its mid-war authorship, it doesn't light any patriotic fireworks or wave a flag. I've sung this for my children since they were little.

I'll be home for Christmas,
You can count on me.
Please have snow and mistletoe
And presents under the tree.
Christmas Eve will find me,
Where the love light gleams.
I'll be home for Christmas,
If only in my dreams.
Christmas Eve will find me,
Where the love light gleams.
I'll be home for Christmas,
If only in my dreams.

This is my favorite December song - what's yours?

UPDATE: Ellen from Brooklyn wrote to correct my lyric transcription. She points out that the original Crosby side had "plan on me" rather than "count," and that the presents were "on" the tree, rather than under - both changes make the song that much more nostalgic to my ears. She also wishes me "Mele Kalikimaka{" which brings to mind my favorite Christmas movie - can you guess which one?

This Ain't No Mudd Club

We live somewhere now in post neo-classic proto pre-post punk rock land. Everything is derivative, but there's more of it, and sometimes it makes you tap your toes on the morning commute. Always there in the DNA is the strange and wonderful cluster of gene markers known roughly to scientists as "New York punk." Others call it the Johnny Thunders mutation. Whatever it is, it's a historic part of our musical evolution, a marker on a place where music changed - and it changed best here.

Clearly, one of places in the long dual ribbon of DNA bears the name CBGB. A dark pestilent hole that attracted talent: that's the elevator speech. CB's closes tomorrow, but it's all so anti-climatic. All the youngsters wearing the iconic black t-shirts under their Gap jackets is testimony to a lasting rock brand - one that Hilly Kristal and his advisor's apparently hope to keep alive in Las Vegas and along the byways of cyber-commerce.

My buddy Brendan has a must-read elegy to CBGB on his blog today - here's a taste:

It's true, CBGBs as an entity started to "think who it was" in its old age. The CBs Gallery, the record label, the angry-girl/guy-with-guitar-on-SubPop acts, the utterly ham-handed artsiness and pretense were late '90s East Village unbearable. But then CBs would surprise you with a really killer friday night lineup of old standbys or someone new who was actually worth listening to. Done as an homage to the faded letters on the awning. I won't miss CBGBs as it is today, but I will mourn the loss of the CBGBs that was a large part of my wild youth.

I spent a great deal of time in the clubs of New York City, drinking beer and generally causing trouble from the time I was about 13 years old and my brother took me to see Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers at the Mudd Club. Within 4 years I was doing gigs in second tier shitholes with a punk band I co-started called Social Insecurity.

Way, way back, Brendan and I played in the same neighborhood band - he went on to some great musical highlights; I play for my kids and in our corporate house band. Read his whole post for the history. Now we're Metro-North regulars, reading the paper on the commute, working for our kids and our families, plugging politicians, exchanging links and files like we once exchanged chord changes. We still have our stories of CB's, Max's, the Mudd Club, the Pep Lounge, Hurrah's, Danceteria, Trax, Tramps, Heat, the Ritz, the Bottom Line and other assorted dives and pit stops.

Now again, I dial up the playlist on the old, trusty iPod. There's Johnny and Walter Lure, Iggy and the Stooges, Richard Hell, Cheetah Chrome, the Ramones, Lou Reed, the Dolls, Patti Smith, the Senders, David Jo, various members of Television, Voodoo Shoes, the Damned, Stiv Bators, the Sex Pistols, Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, the Clash, and so on.

I tap my shoes on the train and see some ghosts out the window. A bridge and tunnel boy still. As Brendan says:

I read that Hilly planned to gut and preserve CBs (even the urinals, he said) and move the pieces to Vegas where it would rise from the ashes as a CBs-themed nightclub and presumably casino.

But like an old junkie, it's been so long, and the big dogs don't live forever.

UPDATE: James Wolcott says it perfectly, with the long lens:

It never occurred to any of us then that someday the CBGB's t-shirt would be a ubiquitous cultural signifier, Richard Hell's byline would grace the op-ed page of the NY Times, the Ramones' "Hey ho/let's go" would rev up car ads, Please Kill Me would be as much a classic of oral history as Edie or Studs Terkel's books, and Deborah Harry would achieve her dye-job dream of being a Warhol superstar in a post-Warhol world.

Comment of the Week

Sean smacks down my boomer sentiment and musical tastes in this week's comment (I haven't been as regular with these as I want to be, but them's the breaks). Here's the pull-quote:

As silly and ill-formed as the "review" is, it's a sentiment I share. The Who are not "artists," (they haven't been a real band in about 35 yrs) they're an oldies act with a proper schtick, still peddling Culturally Important Signifiers, like mini-operas, decades after they were worn out. Someone like Jon Pareles should know better, but guess what...he's a boomer himself, so The Who, like most of their ilk, get a free pass (and this is from someone who adores the Who Sell Out). Ditto, Springsteen the Stones, and anyone else you care to name.

What Haider's really stumbling on about is The Rolling Stone Effect: where stars in general, but boomers esp. are slobbered over by critics (witness Kurt Loder's 5-star review for Springsteen's The Rising, and Wenner's 5-star suck up for Jagger's Goddess In The Doorway)eager to keep those rock-is-eternal, the-sixties-are-still-with us myths alive. (Prediction: new Who album--4 stars.) But the Sixties are long gone, and no amount of false-boomer worship is gonna bring em back anytime soon.

He's right about the Rolling Stone rating system and the "giants of rock" hagiography it supports. But I humbly submit that I'm not part of that. Pete Townshend's not an oldies act, if you follow along. He is very much an artist (and as such, has released some god-awful stuff in the last three decades, but also some brilliant sides). The Stones? Springsteen? Yeah, they're masters at leveraging the past, selling to the incredibly power boomer demographic (I'm a last-minute boomer, by the way - just caught the wave). But they also come up with the hooks, and sometimes, they light it up along the way.

Finally, I'm not a Sixties guy - late 70s was the sweet spot for me, musically: the coming of age moment. It was a weird, wonderful time and the arena bands competed with the tiny clubs and destructive punk bands for my dollar. I was picky, too - the hippie shit left me cold. I hated The Dead, long drawn-out jams, drum solos. I loved power chords, short songs, stuff I could play myself. I've broadened since then (no weight jokes please) and could care less about the age of any musician; truth be told, I'm about halfway between Dylan and the Arctic Monkeys, generationally speaking.

And I agree with Sean and with Jason (who has said this before) that "Culturally Important Signifiers" in rock are pretty much dead; indeed, throughout pop music in general. It's just the music, in my ears, at my desk, on the train, or blasting through the speakers across from this old leather chair.

Note: If you care, you can see what I listen to on my office PC here - every track, artist, etc. I enjoy checking this out every now and then, but it doesn't count the iPod, the car, the home stereo.

People Try to Put Us Down

Sometime in the deep gray fog of the late 70s, I found myself in a great seat in the old Westchester Premiere Theater, a suburban shed where old-timey crooners in shaggy toupees shook their leisure-suited hips for the station wagon set. I was thinking: this ain't no Mudd Club, no CBGB. Until the bands came on. Jerry Lee Lewis. Carl Perkins. The Coasters. And the incredible Chuck Berry.

[The Who, originally uploaded by Tom Watson.]

It was an oldies tour, plain and simple. Hits were played. Local musicians were hired. And the word went out on local radio that the "sounds of the 50s" would "turn back the clock" so that moms and dads could feel young again, and remember - for two hours - those carefree days of jukebox romance, sock hops and chocolate malteds. But I remember that Berry, playing with what seemed like a high school pickup band, rocked the joint, blasting those two-note jumped up blues chords far, far into the rafters.

If my math holds, he was an archaic 52 at the time - or nearly a decade younger than Pete Townshend was last night, when he took the stage out at Jones Beach and smacked 6,000 fans of all ages in the gut with some expansive new music and traditionally vicious power chords. And well more than a decade older than ole Bob Dylan, whose album is number one on the pop charts.

The boomer rockers are defying the gravitational pull of age in rock and roll, changing the genre entirely; now it's fun for the whole family. The Stones are the biggest touring act. Springsteen moves big-time units doing folk covers.  Ray Davies cuts a masterwork. The New York Dolls get dirty again. Tom Petty's going' back down south. The Who's on tour and has a new album in the wings - we heard a seven-song mini rock opera from it last night, and it was definitely not "vintage" Townshend; it was new Townshend, using some of his trademark techniques to be sure - and telling the same basic story of growing up again - but the music stretched, his guitar playing has gone in new directions, his sense of rhythm has broadened. I loved the new stuff - and I bounced around to Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere until my back started to ache.

And of course, Dylan's number one. This bothers certain young critics. The Cornell Daily Sun's reviewer, Shuja Haider, has had it with fogey rock being praised by boomer reviewers (and presumably consumed by the generations that still pay for music).

Old folks, including every single commentator in the entertainment media, tripped over each other’s canes praising Dylan’s “comeback”—after thirty years. Over the next decade, Ol’ Man Dylan put out an amazingly prolific one album, the universally adored Love and Theft, wrote one bestselling autobiographical book, Chronicles, and was the subject of one of legendary director Martin Scorcese’s only documentaries, No Direction Home. Needless to say, there’s been plenty of hoopla over all of it from the baby-boomer crowd, to the point of getting nauseating. Maybe some of you have even heard it from your folks.

Haider excoriates the traditional hagiography surrounding the classic rock greats, and claims that old people really don't get the whole modern music scene. Dylan's new record, he snarls, looks backward to older forms while pretending to be modern - the work of an old man. But the kid is playing it too cute; indeed he's not just a clueless innocent; that's just a stance, a Dylanesque pose. He obviously knows the Dylan canon (he claims Blood on the Tracks is overrated) - and should therefore know that Dylan has always looked backward, that his sense of musical evolution - American musical evolution - has powered his greatness as a songwriter.

Old man Dylan "is grasping back at a time before even he was born," he writes. But in the same review, he claims hip-hop as today's ascendent form. At last today's college kids are "smart enough to notice that Bob Dylan is a pop musician, who has much more to do with the Spice Girls than with Yeats, and that’s what is good about him, and if he has literary inheritors, they don’t publish poems or even write songs, they rap."

Except that, er, they've been doing that since before Shuja Haider was born. Mainstream rap is almost 30 years old now, older actually than Chuck Berry's music was when I saw him play as a skinny, punk-obsessed teenager - and its antecedents are centuries old.

Last night, Pete Townshend extended the pre-punk My Generation into an exploratory jam that lasted many minutes past the two-minute classic. Floating discordant arpeggios off the two basic chords, he began to chant.

Hope I die before I get old...
Hope I die before I get old...
Hope I get old...
Hope I get old before...

It wasn't one of his comic throwaway lines about age (and there were a few in the cool Long Island night) -  it was a serious statement. Townshend has that creator's gleam this year - a year of dinosaurs emerging from the back catalog muck with new verve, and evolved ideas and perspective. I, for one, need those ideas. Hey kids, pay attention. Long live rock, I need it every night.

UPDATE: Tons of terrific stuff to add, particularly Jason's meaty follow-up to this post:

That boomer rock continues to dominate the marketplace for pop music is an accident of demographics about which I've written before. But the social and artistic shadow cast by boomer rock, and rock in general, since rock and roll is THE quintessential cultural expression of the boomer generation, is another matter entirely.

With the rise of rock and roll in the 1950 and 1960s pop music reached a cultural apotheosis. Suddenly pop music was something other than material for entertainment, it was in the center of a surging, violent cultural upheaval. The music one liked was a source of tribal identity the way religion and ethnicity once had been.

Definitely true, but no longer really; music is only a portion of it, and generally isn't even the main emblem in these media saturated times. So icons like Dylan and The Who go back to being artists, really - very famous and well-paid ones, but artists nonetheless. And the depth to which rock has suffused the culture makes that artistry viable; Jason again:

If the demographics of the baby boom have given boomer rock its commercial staying power, the cultural politics of boomer rock have given the music its cultural staying power.

I thought Jon Pareles in the Times pretty much saw the same show I did at Jones Beach, noting this:

Mr. Townshend has never been subdued onstage, but now he is more clearly than ever the band’s vital center. Mr. Daltrey’s voice is weathered, straining at high notes, and when he twirled a microphone on its cord, it looked hokey. But Mr. Townshend’s guitar — in power chords, wailing blues lines, probing modal phrases, architecturally placed riffs and savage little trills — is still a bulwark and a goad.

Very true, and the audience clearly fed Townshend, easing a hunger he still feels four decades in. This from an interview in The Republican in Massachusetts:

This new, large-scale adventure is not intended to suggest a last gasp. I simply wanted to make sure as many people as possible heard about our new music, and got to enjoy our old music, while Roger and I are still fit and strong. While we can, we will always perform together now in some shape or form. This is not an end, it really is a beginning for us. We two old buggers have one of the great banners of rock history to wave, and we are determined to wave it, partly in memory of our two buddies who flew the coop. Roger and I have each other, and that means more today than it did when we first crossed angry paths as kids in Acton in 1960, 46 years ago.

 

John Hall for Congress

Two years ago, as President Bush was running for a second term, a catchy folk rock hook would filter down from the rafters of the halls Karl Rove packed with glassy-eyed yes-people who bought and consumed the Administration's lies uncooked, fully raw and filled with brain-killing organisms. The hook was written by John Hall and performed by his early 70s rock band Orleans. As it turned out, buoyed by lies and personal attacks, Bush was sadly Still The One, but the campaign was forced to quit playing the song after Hall complained.

But John Hall wasn't just another songwriter peeved at having his work stolen by a political movement he abhored - nope, John's a politician too. Democrats, liberal variety, environmentally movitated. Yesterday, Hall won his primary in New York's 19th Congressional District and with it the right to face Bush lackey Sue Kelly, a Congresswoman for whom the utterance of the word "aye" is directed solely by the political whims of Mr. Rove.

Now, my one encounter with John Hall came in 1979 when he organized the fantastic No Nukes concerts in New York City, which included performances by Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, James Taylor, Carly Simon, The Doobie Brothers, Jesse Colin Young, Gil Scott-Heron, Tom Petty, and others. A grooving time was had by all, but the grassroots anti-nuke movement never really achieved that level of pop culture sophisitication since. Funny thing, though - Hall never stopped. From his Wikipedia bio:

He has been involved with Mid-Hudson Nuclear Opponents, who successfully fought the siting of a nuclear power plant on the Hudson River in Greene County. While living in Saugerties, John co-founded Saugerties Concerned Citizens, and helped write the town's first zoning law. When Ulster County announced plans for a 200 acre solid waste dump on the historic Winston Farm, John led the opposition. This effort culminated in his 1989 election to the Ulster County Legislature. In the late nineties, after three successive school budgets were rejected by the voters, John ran for, and was elected twice to, the Saugerties Board of Education. His fellow trustees elected him president, and budgets were passed each year of Hall's tenure.

So he thought globally and acted locally - a fine old 70s slogan he actually lived by (most of us didn't, though we wore it on t-shirts and the like).

Another strong point in his favor: Hall has the strong backing of two buddies of mine, Brendan and Lance, which counts for a lot. Brendan, who I've known for all of his four decades, had this to say on his terrific blog.

John Hall's victory speech was inspiring, and gave me hope that the disastrous neocon social experiment may soon truly be coming to an end.

This is a guy with brains, guts and a list of endorsers a mile long - most notably Rep. Maurice Hinchey, the outspoken Bush critic and true champion of the middle class. This is a first for Hinchey, having never endorsed a congressional candidate before Hall.

The future looks bright.

As Karl Rove and his ilk sharpen their knives to eviscerate a genuinely decent American, as the neo-con money train chugs toward the Sue Kelly campaign HQ, as Sue Kelly's campaign workers start planting signs and start probing for weaknesses, as the whole status quo turns a hoary eye toward Beacon and Hall's campaign HQ, the man himself stands ready and anxious to join the fight.
Sue Kelly, while she stood alongside Newt Gingrich, campaigned on promises of supporting term limits.

After 12 years of her brainless rubber-stamping of one Bush fiasco after another, it's time to put an end to her limitless terms.

Lance also met Hall, and wrote: "He's got the stuff, not just to beat Kelly, but to be an exemplary legislator."

Good enough for me. John Hall for Congress. Make a contribution if you can.

It's the Freakiest Show

Back in the early 70s, I'd sometimes sit in my parents' room and watch The Avengers on their old black and white TV. It was cheeky fantasy really, a strange alternative world of crime-fighting keyed by the visual cues of a bowler hat, an umbrella, small guns, and Dianna Rigg's tight leather pants. I'm not sure if the show actually ran in color on Channel 9, but I watched in shades of gray and all the world of that Great Britain seemed to live in those hues. The 60s had already swung by the time the series ran in America, and it seemed like a relic - a fun relic, to be sure, but ancient.

I was thinking about The Avengers when I tuned into the new BBC drama Life on Mars, whose premise is a lawman's strange return to the world of 1973 in grimy Manchester, whose monochrome backdrop is tinted a stready flavor of grimy red brick. From the whirlwind opening, when a chance traffic accident sends Deputy Inspector Sam Tyler into a netherworld - he "lives" as a police officer in 1973 but is occasionally drawn to his hospital room in 2005. I could go on about the premise, but I won't; it's complex and in some ways, the facts don't matter.

What matters are the superb performances, the groovy soundtrack, the wardrobe brillance (all cheap leather, chains, and wide polyester collars), the sets thick with cigarette smoke, and the wonderful enveloping sentimentalism for the 70s. The moral center is provided by DI Tyler's nemesis, an old-fashioned bruised-knuckle copper as played by Philip Glenister, whose rutted face is like a crinkled motorway roadmap. His corruption and real-world venality root the weekly episodes in the kind of fertile acting loam that produced Ian McShane's brilliant Al Swearengen.

The men smoke, booze, beat up suspects as they please, and grab ass; the women don't seem to mind. Oh, the nostalgia - keyed by the soundtrack, which opens with Bowie title track and has included (thus far) pitch-perfect choices like Live and Let Die, Jean Genie, and Lou Reed's I'm So Free. I'm totally hooked. Or as Bowie said:

Take a look at the lawman
Beating up
the wrong guy.
Oh man!
Wonder if he'll ever
know
He's in the best selling show.
Is there life
on Mars?

Reckless Crazy

So who needs a New York Dolls record from an emaciated David Johansen, a pudgy Syl Sylvain, and three or four able studio guys half their ages here in 2006 - a full generation removed even from the post-Dolls late-70s era that I (and a few regulars on this blog) enjoyed in punked-out and grimy New York?

Me, it turns out.

The title of the new Johansen epic (and it really is a Johansen record, be not doubtful) is ironic about the state of irony, like a double mirror in the barber shop showing the back of your head to infinity. No doubt Johansen got a chuckle from this official record company promo copy:

Now in 2006, the band returns with the follow-up to 1974's Too Much Too Soon that proves that the band hasn’t lost a step and that they are ready to show the world what they've been missing. The new studio album "One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This" captures the spirit of a band that had disappeared long before rock n roll became about big business, and presents the essence of fun, revelatory Rock N Roll in its purest form.

A follow-up to Too Much, Too Soon? Now that's a scream. Hasn't lost a step? Perhaps not, but it's lost four regular players to death, most importantly Johnny Thunders, who created a guitar sound imitated by thousands, and most tragically Arthur "Killer" Kane, the bassist who came back for the reunion only to die almost immediately of leukemia.

So a return to form for the Dolls - no. More like a return to a certain type of artistry for Johansen. This "Dolls" record is closer in many ways to Johansen's first two post-Dolls classics - David Johansen and In Style. Like those late-70s outings, this record perfectly blends what has always fascinated Johansen - and which reached somewhat tighter arragements in his soloc career - a blend of Motown, Chicago blues, surf music, and girl band vocals. Think Bernadette meets Pipeline meets John Lee Hooker, add a touch of slouchy glam, and you've pretty much got it.

This record has a bunch of good tracks, some hilarious and emotional writing along the lines of Frenchette and Funky But Chic, and plenty of delivery. My fave is the rolling mid-tempo piano blues number I Ain’t Got Nothin', all crammed with regret but delivered with a sly wink. Irony about irony. And there's nothin more ironic than a new Dolls record, here in post-everything New York. Get it and you won't be sorry.

Previous Dolls-related posts for your reading pleasure:

Considering David Jo
Johnny Thunders Best
Johnny's Still Dead

Tags: New+York+Dolls David+Johansen Johnny+Thunders Dolls Johansen Thunders 

Mellow Yellow

There is some elusive, compelling quality about Tom Petty and his Heartbreakers even after 30 years, even after the churning restlessness of Florida youth melds smoothly into the cool observations of an old California dude with a great collection of guitars and pals like Dylan and Harrison. Last night at the Garden, where I first saw Petty open for Springsteen at No Nukes in 1979 (organized, by the way, by John Hall who - God willing - will defeat the Bush toady Sue Kelly in New York's 19th District this fall), that cool, sweet music was drifting with the ganja smoke in the rafters, brushing up agains the jerseys of Brad Park and Rod Gilbert. Totally derivative, they said with derision about Tom Petty three decades ago - he copies the Beatles, the Byrds, the Yardbirds. He plays a 12-string Rickenbacker, for Crissakes. But Petty has endured, and his prolific career has produced a certain canon that commands airplay on the classic rock stations and in the iPod earbuds of rockers of a certain age: teens to 50s. Much of this respect is due to Larry Campbell, one of the great sidemen of American rock bands, a guy whose licks light up the simple G-C-D-Em progressions of so many Petty laments about girls, and cars, and wanting something more. Yeah, we had to endure Stevie Nicks on a few tunes (another of Petty's A-list rock pals). But the new songs had sparkle, and the old guy with the long, blonde-gray hair kept rolling out different guitars - and a whole bunch of songs that I dearly love to hear.

Tags: Tom Petty

Comment of the Week

Got this great comment (full post really and a nice story at that) from Chris in the UK, and it keeps the "British rock giants" theme going here, so it's comment of the week:

Congrats on your daughter and handing down the guitar habit. I look foward to doing the same in due course.

This is as much a comment on the "Pete Townsend is not only human but reads select blogs and posts comments", which came to mind yesterday. I was walking down the street pushing my 8 month old son on Notting Hill Gate, London ( where I now live, after growing up in Chicago and living in DC). I stop to look in a window, look up, and there's Jimmy Page standing next to me.

First, a quick background note, I'm 37, and a guitar geek since 11 years old. I was born just too late to participate in the 60s and 70s, but they still were a potent backdrop to my youth. My earliest musical bedrocks were the Beatles and the Stones, inheritances from my parents. But my first peer-influenced discovery was Led Zeppelin, and at 11 years old I was obsessed with their records. When John Bonham died, I was holding my first (cancelled) rock concert tickets courtesy of an uncle, a chaperone right out of "Dazed and Confused".

At the same age picked up a guitar and started pulling these records apart trying to figure out where all the weird sounds were coming from. My musical journey continued swiftly from british blues rockers into blues, old R+B, jazz, then punk, post-punk, country, I got into all sorts of open tunings, fingerstyle, slide, etc, and the art of underplaying in service to a good song, and I left the slightly embarrassing stadium heavy-rock far behind in pre-adolescence.

Jumping back ahead over two decades, so there's Jimmy Page next to me.. Instead of ignoring him NYC Celeb style, I proceed to gently initiate a conversation. He asks my name. I tell him that he's responsible for my having picked up a guitar for the first time. He asks if I still play. We talk about Chicago and its music. The cancelled tour. He asks after my son, wondering if I still play with an infant in tow. I tell him that I have a guitar in open D for him to plonk a chord on. A very genial few minutes of chat, then we move on.

It was jarring to be brought back to the state of mind of that age, the hero-worship stage of youth in which these towering figures, whether giant rock gods, or maybe, baseball stars, could no more be human than Odin or Thor.

Because, later came true adolescence, when under the DIY, punk and indie influence, rock gods, like all father figures, were very uncool, and heroes abandoned for a more human lot of influences, and books, and peers. You literally forget what one's 11-12-13 year old mind is like. But then something cracks a back window view into it.

I laughed afterwords and thought that if you had told my 12 year old rock-loving self, "oh, one day, you'll chat with Jimmy Page on a street corner", that would have been as weird to me as saying one day you'll walk on the moon.

But then I thought it was probably the same for these British kids, who felt the same way about Chess 45s, when they got to meet Willie Dixon and Howlin Wolf as adults. As kids they didn't imagine bluesmen walking down the street, or worried about the bills, or maybe buying some ribs and beer in Chicago. They too must have at some point spent so much time immersed in the sounds from a flat plate of vinyl that their imagination had no room for mere mortals behind them.

Anyway, keep up the good writing, and teaching your daughter.

Tags:

Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend

These Six Strings

V for Veronica, originally uploaded by Tom Watson.

Earlier this week, Jackson had a terrific post about all the guitars he's owned and played. I've had some great ones myself and will write about them - and about how important they were in my life - one of these days. But I wanted to write about the newest guitar in our household, a nice Ibanez acoustic-electric. It's Veronica's graduation gift for her eighth grade graduation - 30 years to the week I graduated from the very same school and received my first guitar, a Sears mail order special given to me by my grandmother. Veronica's middle name is Gertrude - after my grandmother - so it just seemed like the right way to go. Veronica (and this is a father's sacred right of bragadocchio) graduated with first honors, receiving the singular award for academic excellence in her class. The artist and I are very proud indeed. And now this old guitarist  is working through G and C chords with her - slowly, surely, and with the sense of time, in the metre of the old school, where tradition means something and music is the gift of a lifetime.

Comment of the Week

I'm borrowing a technique I've seen on a bunch of blogs, and elevating a comment to front page status - hopefully, each week. Now, which to choose.....hmmm.....let's see. Think I'll go with this one:

Tom, Thanks for being first to comment on my Blog. Hope you're a Who fan because you get a free CD. You can always sell it to help a pet charity. Your Blog is fascinating and I will come back. Pete Townshend

So, no fair - Tom K., Bruce, Tony Alva, Steve-o, Ralph, Fitz, Brendog, Slappy and the rest will have to wait. And a rather suspect choice of weeks to open this little featurette? Yes, rather. But what the hell: it's been a long, tough slog of a week in other non-blogging aspects and I need a little shot of The Punk Meets the Godfather. I want to revel in the glory for a few more moments. Fred convinced me, actually. Knee-deep in a major Townshend jag (as am I), he noted:

When your idols become your readers, well that's just super cool.

Yeah, it is. And that's why Pete is my initial Comment of the Week.

UPDATE: Getting lots of email from really smart people, terrific writers all, reduced to basically saying "cool, man." I feel the same way - and, incidentally, haven't heard that much usage of that phrase since about 1979. I also like PowerPop's take on it - rings true to me:

You know that great scene in Annie Hall, when Woody and Diane are behind the guy in the movie line who's spewing complete nonsense about Marshall MacLuhan, so Woody steps out of the screen and brings MacLuhan in to say he's wrong, wrong, wrong?

How many times in your life have you wished for that opportunity?

It's now yours.

Cool, man.

Tags: Pete Townshend

The Man Who Hears Music

No sooner had I thought to myself "it's too bad Pete Townshend now only posts to his regular, old rock star web site - no more two-way communications with a core group of bloggers" than the landscape changed. This morning, Pete's reopened his Boy Who Heard Music site on Blogspot, probably in reaction to the outpouring of intense discussion that erupted earlier this week over the origins of Won't Get Fooled Again.

Wait, a rock anthem released in 1971, fully 35 years ago. A lanky 60ish rock geezer clutching maniacally to a pitted Telecaster. Uh, cutting edge of the Fab New Media Explosion?

Yeah man.

Townshend gets it. After a lifetime at the very cushioned pinnacle of big media - and there is no more cushioned environment than that of the mega rock star (just read the riders) - Pete is making music and other in closer collaboration with those who consume it than ever before...or at least since his days at Ealing. Earlier this week, I posted on the National Review's insane list of 50 most conservative rock songs, giving my own semi-humorous choices, but more importantly, touching off a nice little debate among regular readers - which centered, not surprisingly, on the No. 1 on the Right Wing Hit Parade. Multiply this blog by about three dozen other blogs with similar conversation and the news of the ongoing debate reached old man Townshend's ears toot-sweet:

Won't Get Fooled Again has been listed in the UK Independent Newspaper as the number one song with - as I understand it - the political message most often misunderstood - in this case the message is said to be 'conservative', a word that may mean different things in the UK and USA.

Of course the song has no party-allied political message at all. It is not precisely a song that decries revolution - it suggests that we will indeed fight in the streets - but that revolution, like all action can have results we cannot predict. Don't expect to see what you expect to see. Expect nothing and you might gain everything.

The song was meant to let politicians and revolutionaries alike know that what lay in the centre of my life was not for sale, and could not be co-opted into any obvious cause.

Has the world changed? When, in the past, could a group of writers essentially ping a rock star and get a thoughtful response in a matter of hours? I'll tell you when - never. But tag a bunch of posts with Pete Townshend, get the feeds fired up, and word gets passed up the big media food chain pretty quickly - or rather, pretty directly. The point is: there is no food chain now - no Under-Secertaries of A&R and Communications to keep us away from them.

This is something that Old Blue Eyes - always an artist before a rock star, really - understands quite well. In this post, he talks about live webcasting of music (which he and Roger Daltrey plan to do when The Who go on tour this summer) and how it changes the who, what, and when factors of media production and consumption.

...if you wish to address a Live audience, in real time, intimately, and free of interference from petty government regulation, broadcast restrictions, or even internet controls – Live webcasting is the future for you. On In The Attic we can smoke, swear, attack hypocrites, even be hypocrites. We can have fun and be funny. The most important thing is that we can play Live music when the whim takes us. No one can argue that you are a true performer if you can appear Live and do your thing. No tricks. No ‘auto-tune’. No computer fiddling. No puffed up personality stunts effected by extreme video editing (of the style that made Keith Moon – for example – appear insanely funny every moment of his life when in fact he was often depressed, serious and incisive). The beauty of Live webcasting is that it does not preclude the inclusion of small films, or even pre-recorded music; the Live presentation element makes it all hang together.

The circle here? Imagine logging on each day to a report from Robert Fisk on the ground in Baghdad and being able to send him a Blog comment that let him know you were with him as he exploded with frustration over what was going on around him. Imagine being logged on, and knowing there was probably less that a two or three second time delay, and witnessing a truck being blown up, or a group of police-volunteers being attacked. Such news could be relayed on Robert Fisk’s terms, and not his editor’s. Imagine knowing that you were in a small elite of subscribers who were seeing what was happening first hand, and had a duty to help spread the word. Journalism as we know it will be unravelled by Live webcasting – sadly (perhaps) it seems Rupert Murdoch is the only person on the planet who can see this ahead of time and is buying up web companies like candy. He is – like me – rather old to be so prescient. But there it is – I predicted music downloading in 1985 at a lecture at the RCA and most people walked out.

Sometimes it pays to watch the icons - especially those who prefer life off the pedestal. Oh, and something else. You may recall that Townshend supported the invasion of Iraq, and Britain's involvement. Well, he's changed his position a bit - and painfully - with an openness and honesty that's missing in Whitehall and Washington:

At first, personally knowing one of his torture victims, I wanted Sadam Hussein removed at any price. I also wanted to send a message to the Islamic world (again, a place full of many of my friends) that the West was run by dangerous men with powerful weapons and our going into Iraq to ‘tidy up’ was a better option for sending that message than dropping nuclear warheads on Afghanistan or Pakistan which has such deep and tenuous links with Britain. It is too easy to sanction war when you don’t know what is actually happening to the soldiers and civilians in the conflict, and pretty much all British newspapers have kept everyone abreast of the true horrors. The Independent through Robert Fisk has been a leader in speaking of the reality of the conflict in Iraq, and the real ‘price’ of removing Sadam. I won’t go back on my initial support for the invasion, but I feel blooded and humbled, deeply, deeply ashamed at the way things have turned out.

UPDATE: Pete's serious about video - the very first Who rehearsals are already up in QT. Oh yeah, PT welcomes TW here. And comments here. New world? Yeah... [He also hit Blue Girl and Mannion].

Technorati tags: Pete Townshend | Who | The Who

The Morals That They Worship

When I first heard [via the prolific Lance and Blue Girl] that the National Review's John J. Miller had taken it upon himself to compile a list of top conservative ditties, I expected a discography of Wagner by way of Pat Boone, with the near-certain inclusion of Paper Roses by the versatile Anita Bryant. Alas, it was not to be. There, in the number one spot on the 50-song right-wing hit parade, was the classic rock anthem of classic rock anthems, Won't Get Fooled Again.

Oh yeah, they went there. Discredited and hypocritical movement. Disgraced administration. Flailing strategy. Aligned with The Who's classic rant against political revolution. And the rest of the list - Sympathy for the Devil (for its rampant anti-Leninism), Sweet Home Alabama (pro-red state values and George Wallace), I Fought the War (and the pro-law enforcement community won), Rock the Casbah (most requested anti-Islamofascist song by British Army radio), The Battle of Evermore ("The tyrant’s face is red.” Get it?), and ever onward. Play that funky music, white Buckley boy. Tongue sadly slapping loosely around the conservative lips and jaw, nowhere near the inside of writer's cheek, you realize Mr. Miller is actually serious. I guess irony really is dead in the post 9-11 world.

So, onto my own carefully-considered Top Ten list of conservative classics - skipping the many dozens of blatant attacks on the good right (your Dylan, your Neil Young, your Joni, your Bruce, your Steve Earle, your Pearl Jam - all too obvious) and focusing heavily on classics from a certain grouping on my iTunes playlist (certainly betraying my own rock vintage in the bargain).

• Anarchy in the UK - "I am an anti-christ, don't know what i want but I know how to get it." Nailed it.
• Gloria - Patti Smith - "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine." (Bush-Cheney branch of conservative politics).
• Pills - New York Dolls - Rush Limbaugh tribute.
• Dazed and Confused - Led Zeppelin - (otherwise known as Administration Breakdown).
• Search and Destroy - Iggy Pop - "I'm a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm, I'm a runaway son of the nuclear a-bomb." Tribute to Rumsfeld?
• Johnny Ryall - Beastie Boys - The GOP view of the downsized lower classes
• Big Tears - Elvis Costello - "Standing in the shadow, turning wives to widows..." Big tears mean nothing, fellas. Ask Rummy.
• Endless Night - Graham Parker - "If I could only find a switch that turns on the endless night."
• Death or Glory - The Clash - "Every cheap hood strikes a bargain with the world."
• Road to Nowhere - Talking Heads - The one we're on.

Alright, that wasn't particularly well-considered - I slapped it together in nine minutes. The aptly-named Jon Swift - the most genuine conservative now publishing a blog - did a much better job. But it was fun.  And just for your patience, a special bonus track has been appended to this conservative playlist - by far the most recent track in the list: 16 Military Wives by the Decemberists, who write this:

Sixteen military wives
Thirty-two softly focused brightly colored eyes
Staring at the natural tan
of thirty-two gently clenching wrinkled little hands
Seventeen company men
Out of which only twelve will make it back again
Sergeant sends a letter to five
Military wives, whose tears drip down through ten little eyes
Cheer them on to their rivals
Cause America can, and America can't say no
And America does, if America says it's so
It's so!

UPDATE: Pete Townshend laughs at the National Review ranking, and tells the story behind Won't Get Fooled Again. Fascinating read. Check it out, Tom K.

Technorati tags: Pete Townshend | Who | conservatism

Blogging Snow Job

With more snow in my front yard than any average Giuseppe in Turin - the meteorologists and my weather-loving father are going nuts - it's the perfect time to settle in, put another pot of coffee on, and noodle around with the Weblog. And so, time for a few notes and thoughts on the medium itself - yes, I know, a good percentage of you rolls your eyes and mutters "technology review ahead - nuts" but I don't care. As I've said before, this blog is an experiment in the form as well as an outlet for discussions on politics and media, and frankly, I've been neglecting the plumbing for quite some time.

So a couple of thoughts, some additions, and some subtractions.

First this: advertising does not work for the average blogger, even the above-average blogger. It only works for the big group blogs and a tiny handful of full-timers. Advertising as a means of support for bloggers is a complete, utter, and frankly, rather embarassing failure. If Fred Wilson can't earn more than charity change for his blog - well-read, updated thrice daily, and a leader in an important category - than few others can. If Steve Gilliard has to hang out a rusty tin can on his blog and beg for nickels, then blog advertising has failed. If Joe Gandelman's still on the ventriloquism circuit instead of sitting in a fine office, collecting fees for his incredible service to blog journalism, then advertising doesn't work.

Sure, it works for Google, but I suspect that is because we were all suckers in the early days of this and slapped AdSense up on our sites. Well, AdSense doesn't work for me and it's coming down. I'm also sure advertising sales has created a nice little business for Henry Copeland and his BlogAds empire - a nice idea, fairly well-executed. But you know, a bunch of liberal bloggers who also enjoyed books and media criticism banded together to form the the Liberal Prose network - but it hasn't worked for me. It doesn't seem to me like anyone is actively selling the ads. Yeah, I got a few ads from Rosie's site, a rock band pushing its downloads, and a few other causes. But the money was small, and it takes too much time and space. So it's coming down.

Frankly, it's disappointing in the purportedly "open" blogosphere to find such abject failure in advertising - to find gatekeepers, a star system, and closed networks. In short: old media. The advertising model is the same fellas, stop fooling yourself into thinking it's not. Advertising on blogs is old media, with a little tip jar begging thrown in. Since this blog exists only for the conversation it stirs and for the outlet I need to keep away from padded rooms, my "paid" advertising is coming down - at least for now.

Besides, I need the space for more experiments.

Ironically, one of them is advertising of a sort - but it's free, open, and based entirely on the individual publisher's tastes - and not on the ad reps from BlogAds or the formulas over at Google, which are a little too open, except in Communist China. It's called Word of Blog, and I got it from Fred (who treats his own blog like an experiment as well) a few months ago. I really like Word of Blog, because I control what sites and people I promote. Sometimes it's a political cause, sometimes it's a podcast, like Jason's great Down in the Flood. Sure, no money changes hands - but the interface is easy, and it feels good.

The next one also comes from Fred, and it's the"charts" produced by the wonderful music recommendation/online radio site Last.fm - which is so easy, and so good it just has to find its way into the mainstream media canon in iPodian proportions at some point. Last.fm lets you build radio stations for (fully-licensed) online listening, and keeps charts of what you've been playing on its servers, and on iTunes. I've wanted to have my own personal charts on this blog since I started it, and was frustrated by the manual Typepad lists etc. This does it. Automatically. Hope it starts some conversations. [Blog charts would be a terrific service for NetFlix and Tivo to offer as well, come to think of it].

Finally, thanks to Bruno Giussani, I discovered coComments literally the second it went public and I really like it so far. The service gives you a browser plug-in that lets you save your comments on other sites to coComments' server first, then to the blog's site itself. That's slightly cumbersome and may be automated at some point, but it you're really into the conversation - as I am - it's invaluable. Because when you give up your comments to the coComments site, you gain a tracking mechanism - this allows you to publish your comments elsewhere on your own blog, and to create RSS feeds for your comment stream. [Note to coComments team: right now, the service is slow and moderately selective - it takes a while for comments to make the RSS stream - and therefore, alert me to follow-up]. Could this "change everything?" Will we actually need blogs anymore if the "conversation" takes on its own life in feeds? Dunno. But I'm gonna try it out for a while - I urge you to click on the box from time to time and jump into the conversations I'm involved in on other blogs.

Very cool. Just like the weather.

UPDATE: I realize that this post may have cast aspersions upon the members and organizers of the Liberal Prose Network. Let me clear that up: they're s