Posts

Posted on

In Which I Grumble About Pop Culture

When, exactly, did the celebrity-obsessed tabloid press switch over to first-name-basis reportage? Celebrities used to have full names, not that long ago in fact. Sure, there was the occasional Cher or Oprah, but they were the exceptions to prove the rule. Or perhaps they were the pioneers that got the tabloids asking “why take up space on the page with useless last names?” So, now we have Brad and Angelina, but also perfectly generic names like Jen and John and Jon and Kate like we’re not only supposed to know who the hell these people are, but we’re buddies. Someone named Nicole shares the cover of US Weekly with Britney as the “Worst Beach Bod.” I recognize neither her face nor her pot belly. Perhaps if there was a last name associated with the unflattering picture, I could place her.

What’s worse is that this cancer is spreading into politics. I guess if you can’t distinguish yourself through policy differences, you can coast on celebrity. So it was when I was in New Hampshire for the primaries that a surprising number of campaign themes emphasized a candidates’ first name – even to the point of dropping any reference to the last. It’s one thing for Hillary to do so, because, really, there could be no other. Same goes for Rudy, I suppose. But Fred? As in bumper stickers that read simply, “Fred ’08.” I thought that perhaps a wayward street team for a new solo record by the B52’s Fred Schneider had gotten mixed up with all the politicking, but, no, it was a legitimate contender for the Presidency of the United States that decided to market himself as just Fred. (Presidential Also-Rans for $500: “Who is Fred Thompson?”)

I suppose that all this first name nonsense is designed to make stars more accessible, more “just like us.” I wonder what effect being encouraged to call a celebrity by his or her first name has on the kinds of people already prone to stalker-ish behavior. I’ll tell you the effect it has on the sort of person who doesn’t watch teevee is to feel more alienated from pop culture. I used to be able to more or less follow who are the popular actors, but they emphasize last names on movie posters, so it’s a real disconnect unless you are already sucked in to the whole TMZ world of 24-hour celebrity gossip.

This informality gets to be too much. There’s only so much you can break formality down before you have to build it back up again so that some new generation can have the fun of tearing it down all over again. Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? Joe?

Someone has to take a stand. Don’t be “Janet, Miss Jackson if you’re nasty.” Be Ms. Janet Jackson to everyone except your family and closest friends.

Posted on

Play The Legend

Can rock music ever go back to the days of “headphone records,” gatefold albums, mysterious liner notes and fans creating their own image of the band in their minds? Music video did much to kill the radio star, by presenting a carefully screened image for mass consumption…but Ed Sullivan started it all rolling downhill and Marty Scorsese might have reached the nadir with what might otherwise be considered the absolute zenith of rock-n-roll cinema, “The Last Waltz.” His sumptuous concert doc made high art out of simple musical performance, and enshrined the legacy (well, a particular version of it, anyway) of an erstwhile relatively-anonymous, workman-like group of musical superstars, the Band.

That simple, partly-modest, partly-conceited monicker underscores the extent that, without a pre-chosen image foisted upon the listener, this band could be whatever you choose. They first rocketed by prominence in 1968, playing on a plain white slab of modified petroleum product – a bootleg called “The Great White Wonder” – that purported to document some of what the mysterious Bob Dylan had been up to in Woodstock since his motorcycle accident. Before that they had been an anonymous touring band on the Canadian rockabilly circuit, before before being booed around the world supporting Dylan’s wee electric experiment. After that, they were on the cover of “Time” magazine (albeit, in a sketchy line drawing that still left much to the imagination) and on the top of the pops (and Ed Sullivan, too!).

The Band were a true ensemble. Three singers, four multi-instrumentalists, one wicked guitar player. Five members total. Two of the singers played the drums (one alternated between the skins and his piano, the other, a mandolin). Listening to the records, without visual aid, it’s easy to imagine all the permutations and guess who’s singing and who’s playing what. Scorsese’s version of the Band presents guitarist Robbie Robertson as the clear leader of the band, an articulate intellectual and philosopher of rock music and the star of many a close-up. Camera pans make out raspy-throated drummer/singer/mandolin-player Levon Helm to be the main singer, while boyish bassist Rick Danko takes a few cameo turns on vocals. Weird, mysterious Garth Hudson gets a bit wonky on his synthesizers, while additional drummer/pianist Richard Manuel seems like a sideman. The camera loves Robbie, and he tells all the best stories (even if they’re not his), while Levon Helm seems the most “homespun” (the Arkansawyer is the only actual American in the “Americana” band).

Helm’s autobiography, “This Wheel’s On Fire” (co-written with Stephen Davis), is a welcome corrective to Scorsese’s “print the legend” version of the Band. First, of course, is the fact that Helm had been the technical leader of the band (at least, as far as the musician’s union was concerned) during their Canadian rockabilly days, and the one who brought them their independence from founder Ronnie Hawkins. Not to mention that he was the one, after Dylan had recruited him and Robertson to fill out his first post-Newport electric rock band (in Forest Hills, hell yeah!), convinced Dylan to hire the entire Band (then known as Levon and the Hawks).

More important corrections to the legend apply to bandmates. Garth Hudson, as hinted at in “The Last Waltz” by the anecdote that the other members had to pay him additional money as a musical tutor (in their pre-salad days), was the true musical director of the band (especially the expanded “Last Waltz” band with its strings and horns). And poor Richard Manuel, who goes mostly overlooked by Scorsese’s cameras, is the Band’s main voice and true heart and soul. The troubled Manuel, who suffered from substance abuse and ultimately took his own life while on the road with the Band, actually sang lead on the lion’s share of the Band’s songs. The way that Scorsese placed the cameras – and given the listener’s ability to create one’s one mental image when listening to the other records – one (and I mean me) could be forgiven for thinking that most of those songs were being sung by Helm or Danko in a higher register than usual.

Although Helm is clearly very critical of Robertson’s role in the demise and subsequent legend of “The Last Waltz,” the author attempts to remain somewhat magnanimous and notes Robertson’s many contributions, both musical and of leadership. However, any criticism must be tempered slightly by the potential of “sour grapes” and the fact that Helm had ceded his own leadership of the Band by abandoning them while on Dylan’s legendary/disastrous 1966 tour of England when the booing of the folk purists became too much for him. By the time he returned to Woodstock, midway through the Basement Tapes period, band dynamics had obviously changed.

Still, Helm avoids actual bitterness until the afterword written for “Wheel’s” 2000 reprint edition, when mourning the death of Rick Danko years of age. Helm attributes Danko’s death at the relatively young age of 56 to a life of “hard work” and bitterly notes that Danko died with his money (royalties from “The Last Waltz” and other recordings) in Robbie Robertson’s pocket.

Posted on

“Do you feel like a story…?”

If you can find the full, ten-minute clip on your favorite internet video-sharing service, David Letterman’s blackmail confession was brilliant, riveting and hysterical. It was almost a throwback to his nervy, early days on “Late Night.” If only the blackmailer had been revealed to be Andy Kaufman.

Posted on

We Memoir Econo

Michael Azerrad’s excellent collection of 13 micro-biogrophies of beloved 80’s indie bands is a love letter to the era when pop culture began to fragment into mini-mass media of fanzines, underground rock clubs and vanity record labels. Cribbed from a Minutemen lyrics, Azerrad’s book, “Our Band Could Be Your Life” fleshes out the notion of gaining inspiration, principles and encouragement by the songs from some obscure band that your parents and most of your classmates never heard of.

Teh internets have exacerbated this tendency towards fragmentation. It is regrettable, to some extent, that there can never be another Beatles to saunter across (the equivalent of) Ed Sullivan’s stage and capture the hearts and imaginations of an entire nation in two and a half minutes. But it is perhaps better to have the Replacements, whose music feels more personal due to their underdog cult status, and whose “Let it Be” far outshines the sorry first record to share that name (made famous by its teevee and film pedigree).

Focused on the SST record label, Azerrad’s book has a clear narrative guiding it, despite its scattered vignette structure. It starts with Southern California’s Black Flag, who spearheaded not just America’s hardcore punk scene, but a network of record labels and concert venues (VFW halls, people’s basements and the occasional Actual Night Club), and follows the story as labelmates The Minutemen and Husker Du push against hardcore’s rigid boundaries, while east coast contemporaries Minor Threat aided in rigidly defining hardcore’s boundaries before leaving the scene behind.

Ian McKaye’s musical progress away from hardcore’s stifling “loud fast rules” while strictly adhering to a non-conformist independence from Corporate America, mass media and liquor provides “Your Band” with its most compelling narrative, as well as its most trenchant observation, courtesy of McKaye’s Fugazi bandmate Guy Picciotto:

“PEOPLE ARE LIVING IN THINGS THAT HAVE HAPPENED, YOUR PARENTS HAVE TAKEN ALL THE DRUGS THEY CAN TAKE, YOU’VE HAD THE 70’S, YOU HAD HEAVY METAL – GET WITH IT, IT’S OVER WITH, WAKE UP. KIDS ARE LIVING RE-RUNS, THE SAME CRAP OVER AND OVER AND THEIR MINDS GET CLOSED TIGHTER AND TIGHTER, IT’S SUCH A WASTE.”

I missed hardcore, so 80’s indie was all about the Replacements for me (and REM, but they’re not indie enough for Azerrad). Other acts feted by Azerrad (such as Big Black and the Butthole Surfers) were familiar to me by reputation, but no one had made such a compelling case to purchase “Hairway to Steven” or “Songs About Fucking” until this book. Perhaps these bands, too, could be my life.

Proudly powered by WordPress