As it appeared in this month's Playback St. Louis :
Ray Charles: Genius Loves Company (Concord)
Imagine how frightening it’d be to record a duet with a singer known as “The Genius.” The latest and last Ray Charles CD finds him in the company of such high-caliber vocalists across the musical spectrum as James Taylor, Bonnie Raitt, and Gladys Knight. It’s fun to play “How do they measure up?” as you listen—who can provide worthy counterpoint to that iconic growl? But let’s be fair and say the deck was stacked against success. A duet with Charles when his voice is rough with age, hardened with discipline, shadowed with mortality, luminous with soul? Why not make today’s presidential candidates debate a resurrected Abe Lincoln?
That said, Elton John tries too hard and Natalie Cole is outclassed, but Norah Jones doesn’t break a sweat. Her youthful grace matched with Charles’ maturity on “Here We Go Again” conjures images of a granddaughter dancing with Grandpa at a family wedding.
When Brother Ray is paired with peers, there’s no nailbiting, no feeling it could go right or very, very wrong. Come on—who wouldn’t want to hear Charles and B.B. King testify with their “Sinner’s Prayer”? Lucille takes the first verse, her guitarist takes the next, then comes the single greatest moment on the disc: Charles breaks in with a “Know what, B.B.?” and B.B. defers with a “Yeah?” Two hard-lived old guys sitting around being old guys together, and it’s recorded—what an unimaginable privilege for the listener.
The arrangements rely too often on sickly-sweet strings or other overcooked elements, and some of the song choices could have been better. But the best duets come leaping out of their settings into a place far beyond criticism. There is a near-unimaginable poignancy in hearing Johnny Mathis—Johnny Mathis!—still gifting us with that silk. He and Charles may not be able to hold the last note of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” for a whole count, but it just doesn’t matter.
This article is an act of public service.
Those who may benefit most: bands who want to get better at performing live. And all bands want this, right? You’re not in this business to sound worse every night.
But where can you turn for advice? Let’s not make this about writing great songs and playing them with all you’ve got. Let’s assume you’ve got that. Let’s just talk about making your songs heard. Who’s going to know the most about doing this?
It could be the guy standing at that monster desk with all the knobs and dials and tiny lights. Some sound engineers in this town have been working concerts more than 20 years. They know more about the difference between music and noise than just about anyone.
Wouldn’t you like to hear it from them? If there’s some easily fixable thing you’re doing wrong, you’d probably appreciate it if the sound engineer sidled up to you and told you about it—just as you’d appreciate a friend taking you aside to say your zipper’s at half-mast.
But in talking to some engineers—among them Animal from Mississippi Nights, Jerry Boschert from the Rocket Bar, and John John from Cicero’s—I found out they’re not too keen on giving bands unsolicited advice. (More on why later.) You’ll just have to read it here for now.
read the rest at Playback St. Louis online by clicking "Columnists" and then "Good Sounds." Or, if you're in the Midwest, look for Playback at your better stores. And if they don't carry it, yell at them.
Something I wrote for @U2 almost exactly three years ago.
I've said before that U2 was rock 'n' roll incarnate, but I didn't have a full understanding of what that phrase could mean until I saw them in Boston on June 5th.
What they have managed to do, what makes them different from every other band today, is to tap the anarchic energy glimpsed in every great live performer -- the Stones, Springsteen, the Who -- proving these were all fed by the same source. They present an alternate history of the last 40 years where rock 'n' roll is the only thing that makes sense.
Bono in particular seems to be channeling something -- and indeed, at that Boston show, when he sang "I'm a MAAAAAAAN" in "Kite," my overwhelming impression was that the note he hit was actually beyond his ability. He could only sing that line at a U2 concert, with the music behind him and the audience pouring their enthusiasm into him. I could feel this same concert-fuelled extension of ability in myself during the snippet of "40" at the end of "Bad." It was too high for me to do at full voice; nevertheless, there I was singing it.
Channeling rock 'n' roll -- that's what all the snippets of other people's songs might be pointing toward. Bono sang "In My Life" as if it belonged to him, as if it was his heritage as Rock Singer. And for U2 the music is freed from the shackles of genre definition -- they threw in bits of Bob Marley and Frank Sinatra songs and they made equal sense with Van Morrison's "Gloria." "The same spirit runs through all of these," U2 seemed to be saying. "Or it does, now that we sing them."
What sort of spirit is it? U2 have been bandying about the term "ecstatic" to describe the sort of music they strive to make. In fact it's hard to use any other word for the frenzy that takes over with "Elevation" or "Where the Streets Have No Name." But there is an aspect of rock 'n' roll which is terrifying too, and they tap into that with equal skill. "Even when music is angry or agitated," Bono says in the tour program, "if it's ringing true then it's a force of love. If somebody is coughing up their real experiences in order to make sense of them, then that's an amazing thing." For many of us in the audience, the most frightening moment of the opening night Boston show was at the end of "Until the End of the World." Edge, whose reputation paints him as the calm, collected, "Zen" member of the band, threw his guitar down and kicked it, yelled something at Larry, and wore a grim expression as they begun the next song. Many of us, as I said, were disturbed by this development -- "Edge isn't angry! Edge can't get angry!" But others of us were genuinely excited -- "Cool! Don't see that too often!"
The strangest part was that we in the audience were oblivious to whatever mistake or accident upset Edge so. But what made his outburst exciting to see was that it betrayed the extent he cared about getting this performance perfect. The rock 'n' roll spirit may not always be ecstatic, but it is passionate, and passion is not always joyful.
There is a seduction to the darker side of passion. When the liquid tones at the beginning of "The Fly" were cut by the slashing rhythm of the main riff, I had this sudden sense of being wicked -- and really enjoyed the feeling. It was a mischievous, trickster, MacPhisto sort of wickedness, and it was all in the music -- Bono hadn't begun singing. Looking back I think of psychology class and the concept of the "shadow self," the part one usually tries to keep hidden. I also thought of Bono's oft-stated belief that what God wants for us is wholeness, to lay claim to all aspects of one's self, embarrassing or frightening as they may be.
Rock 'n' roll in concert, especially a U2 concert, has mad energy to get lost in, to dive into and swim away from, times when you know those up on stage are seized in the grip of the wave as much as, or more than, you are. Bono in the program again: "The out of body experience is really about realizing...that the music is working you, not the other way around." At the end of "Bullet the Blue Sky" Bono was doing a different rap than what I'd heard him do before. The song has meant many things over the years past its inspiration in the fighting in El Salvador -- during Zoo TV, for example, "burning crosses" became swastikas, a comment on the rise of fascism in Europe. During this tour, footage of Charlton Heston defending handgun accessibility in America is shown before the song. In Boston, Bono chanted "676,000 in twenty years" -- gun-related deaths in the U.S. -- as he swung a portable spotlight. It marked every area of the crowd, the shadows of waving fans putting them in bold relief. Then he aimed it at his temple, his finger, as it were, on the trigger. "Mark Chapman. Mark Chapman," he chanted. They were the last words of the song, the name of the man who shot John Lennon. "Mark Chapman."
Here is where the idea of U2 as rock 'n' roll incarnate is most important. The person who "just doesn't get" U2 could watch this and ask, "Does Bono think he's John Lennon?" But if the music is a continuum, then the spirit that flowed through the Beatles not only flows through U2 but U2 dares speak in its name. Mark Chapman didn't just kill a person named John Lennon nor a very talented musician and songwriter: he silenced a true voice. The fact is that "a gun in the hands of a bad man" could kill not just some guy named Bono but close a door now flung wide to the rock 'n' roll spirit. Realizing this at the Boston show, I felt my legs give out. Some others didn't hear what Bono had been saying and slow-danced with significant others during the next song. I stood there and felt the words hit me as if for the first time: "You got me with nothing to win and nothing left to lose. And you give yourself away...I can't live with or without you."
This article is a product of the media. Media: Latin for "middle," something standing between -- in this case, I'm standing in between you and Bill Carter. I read his new memoir Fools Rush In, watched his documentary Miss Sarajevo, then conducted a phone interview with him, and now I am sharing what I learned with you. If I do my job well, everyone benefits -- you find out interesting things without having to do too much research, and Bill Carter gets to do something besides field questions all day.
We take the media for granted sometimes. We think it is the only way to interact with the world. When a war goes on, for example, we expect the BBC, CNN and Time magazine will all send reporters to get the story from the front. We tend to forget that what they give us is mediated: they decide what pictures to show, what questions to ask, what portions of answers to report to us.
All this is necessary if you want to understand why what happened for thirteen nights in 1993 was unprecedented. Each night, one or two or three citizens in besieged Sarajevo spoke to an audience of 50,000, 60,000, or 100,000 people. They spoke for a few minutes about whatever they wanted to talk about. What they said was live and unedited. They did not speak to a reporter who then explained to a news anchor what it all meant -- they spoke to a rock crowd. The audiences were there for U2's Zooropa tour. The guy whose idea it was to link Sarajevo to these concerts, and who found Sarajevans willing to go in front of the cameras every night, was Bill Carter.
Full story at @U2.
Join me, won’t you, in singing this place. It doesn’t exist—not yet. Yes, the concrete of St. Louis is here, and it’s on the road maps, but in other ways there is barely a trace of this city.
Close your eyes and you can picture New York, even if you’ve never seen it. You can do the same with New Orleans or San Francisco. You know their street names through novels, rock lyrics, movies. Now ask yourself: how many outside our city can close their eyes and picture St. Louis?
That is what we can sing (or write, or paint, or sculpt) into existence—an art of the city, an art native to the city, an art expressing the soul of this place. We’ll get it wrong if we try to make our songs/stories/movies look like the art born elsewhere. We should be ourselves while there is still a chance, before homogeneity engulfs us all.
What is unique to a city reveals its soul. Be inspired by our native textures—the muddy river, the terracotta of our buildings. Investigate our native face—the amalgam of North and South, our French roots, our Bosnian and Vietnamese influx. Be honest in your creations about what in our civil society works and what doesn’t. Dare to love it enough to criticize it; dare to keep running back to it even if it dismisses you.
Most importantly, don’t wait for an infrastructure to form that will “support the artistic community.” The infrastructure arrives after the artists claim the territory. Think of Dublin, where plaques are hung at every location mentioned by James Joyce in Ulysses. The plaques are hung afterward; the book was written first. And now, tourists flock to Dublin, lured by the desire to see the city firsthand after a novel formed an image of it in their minds. Your grand ambition, and mine, could make such a thing happen here.
One easy way to begin: be specific when you write poems or songs or do whatever you do to create. Which is more evocative in a lyric: “the main drag” or “Grand Boulevard?” You may have a cult audience now or someday, so give them something to puzzle over. Give your true believers reason to make annotated versions of your work.
Never be content with a fan base here. Make something that upsets or confuses them, if you must. Be the prophet without honor in your home if it will give you a voice outside. But even in your travels away, find a way back. Get your record deal, publishing contract, or whatever out of town if you must, but keep a home in St. Louis. Our soil is clay; everything growing has to fight for its life here, but the fight makes it tougher, stronger. Staying here (or coming back) will strengthen you in ways a transplanting never will.
Originally published in Playback.
Christopher O'Riley cheerfully admits he has a Radiohead obsession. Some people have it worse; he mentions he knows "maybe a dozen" fans of the band who just go around the world attending their concerts. "Obviously, they've got their priorities right!" he laughs--but maybe he's not kidding.
Maybe he'd join them if he could, but he can't, because he's giving concerts of his own. Of Radiohead songs.
O'Riley, a classical pianist, will present his "Radiohead Transcriptions" at the Sheldon Concert Hall Thursday, September 25. This concert comes on the heels of the release of True Love Waits, his album of solo piano pieces with the entertainingly formal credit: "All Tracks Written By Thomas Yorke, Jonathan Greenwood, Colin Greenwood, Philip Selway, Edward O?Brien."
Read the rest here.
I once read an article claiming Yeats was the U2 of his time. Without having it in front of me, I can't provide an exact quote, but the sense was "His popularity makes him annoyingly inescapable, but he merits the hype because he really is brilliant."
So U2 and Yeats both have an overwhelming market share, but that's not all. It would almost be easier to list disconnections between them than connections. They own acres of common ground.
Read the rest here.
Well, something I wrote was cited in a book, anyhow.
The book is Spiritual Journeys: How Faith Has Influenced Twelve
Music Icons (Relevant Media). The chapter on Bono was written by Steve Beard, of Thunderstruck fame. He cites this article on Eugene Peterson in the course of it.
I'm really rather excited about this.
Hank Bordowitz has thought long and hard about this question: "If U2 were a book, which book would they be?"
Blame Creedence Clearwater Revival. Bordowitz, the man behind The U2 Reader: A Quarter Century of Commentary, Criticism and Reviews, also gave the world Bad Moon Rising: The Unauthorized History of Creedence Clearwater Revival. As he was working on the latter, a fellow music journalist told him such a book could become "the rock and roll version of Bleak House."
So if John Fogerty and Co.'s dealings conjure comparisons to a Dickens novel (one about a lawsuit that drags on until everyone associated with it is dead), what work of literature does U2 call to mind, Hank?
"The Fountainhead. It has to do with success by sheer force of will."
Read the rest here.
We interrupt this Krohnian alphabet lesson for breaking news: The story of how the Nashville Christian music industry got fired up about fighting AIDS in Africa can now be found here. And an interview with Jars of Clay singer Dan Haseltine on this subject is here. Go. Read. Enjoy.
excerpt from an article about littlesteven.com:
Go and read, absolutely read, all the essays on all the albums. Little Steven wrote them specifically for the site. He reports on an epiphany he had, just before he started his solo career, when a "German wise-ass" accused him of putting missiles in his country. At first he tried to distance himself from his country's foreign policies, but then, he says, "I reluctantly came to the conclusion that I was an American citizen and maybe some responsibilities went with that. So okay I'm putting missiles in this guy's country and I start reading books to see what else I've been doing since World War II." But Little Steven wasn't content with reading damning essays about US foreign policy. Before he wrote his songs, he went out and met those who were affected. His essays--compelling reading, every one--talk about crossing from West to East Germany ("It was the first time I ever missed advertising on billboards. There was no color."), negotiating for his life with South African revolutionaries ("The topic of conversation for the first hour was whether or not they should let me live."), and meeting Nicaraguan President Ortega's wife ("After you spend a little time in politics you learn where the power is and try to get to it as quickly as possible. In politics, as in life, the wife is usually a good place to start.")
full article at Tribal Soul Kitchen.
As a fan, I don't want good albums from U2. I want great ones.
I think they want to make great albums, too -- masterpieces, works that can stand with the best the great bands of the past had to offer. But I also think this may become tougher the longer U2 stick it out.
I don't say this because I believe the standard assumption -- that a great rock band has a limited shelf life, that it can only be at its creative peak for a short time and then, if it does not implode, it must fade into irrelevance. Just because most bands don't last doesn't mean they can't last. Even so, I don't discount the negative impact the "live fast, die young" mentality has had on rock culture. "Old" bands like U2 have to fight harder as they go. That's why the marketing for All That You Can't Leave Behind was so aggressive. They showed up for promotional TV appearances -- on Total Request Live, on Farmclub -- that some would have considered beneath their dignity. They had to do them because "dignity" is an old-person word, and for a rock band, anything with the slightest scent of old-person about it is fatal.
Read the rest at @U2.
Here's a theory: the most committed fans of a band-not the casual CD shoppers, but the true believers-get drawn into fandom because something about the band's character resonates with their own. They have something besides musical taste in common. You could expect U2 fans to share values or traits associated with U2-a hunger for social justice, say, or a need to communicate on a large scale.
Case in point: U2 are ambitious. They are possibly the most ambitious band out there (given how so few others are vocal about their quest to be Best Band in the World). So, too, U2 fan Heather Beekink is ambitious. She spearheaded a campaign to get thousands, if not millions, of fellow fans around the world to take to the streets. They would all do so on the same day and force government leaders to do more for Africa's multiple crises by the sheer power of raised voices.
Ambition doesn't always reward you with what you had in mind. It does, however, tend to get better results than apathy.
The story of the Dream Out Loud Protest/Rally, which really did happen November 12th [2002] at noon (even if not quite as it was envisioned), can serve as a primer for others out there with a gleam in their eye. If you're thinking big, pay attention to the hard-learned lessons of this experience.
Full article in @U2's archive here.
Many people watched The Diary of Bono and Chris Tucker: Aiding Africa on MTV in 2002. They watched Bono, Tucker and then-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill tour a newly built well in Uganda, and learned more wells could be built for only a thousand dollars at a time. Each could save hundreds of lives; many Africans are dying of diseases spread by unclean water. They heard Bono say, "I just wanted to show what a little amount of money can do to a lot of lives."
Many of the people who watched that show felt the way U2 fan Joanna Sanchez felt afterward: "Maybe there is something I can do." Sanchez spread the word among online fans that she wanted to start a fund to build wells in Africa. "It was like wildfire. In a matter of six weeks fifty people had joined" a mailing list on Yahoo Groups discussing the project, according to Julie Cook. Cook was among those who watched Diary and felt the tug to do something. She surfs sites for info on U2 and chats with fellow fans, but the band's example makes her feel she should also be giving something back. "When I'm looking up U2 stuff on the web sites I'm thinking, 'Why am I spending my time on this?' I'm totally addicted but I feel guilty! We really, really do want to help."
Cook talked to @U2 recently about the African Well Fund, the project started by U2 fans who shared a desire to aid Africa in a concrete way. Only a few months old, the fund has already passed a significant milestone. A thousand dollars has been collected, enough to build their first well. Cook said they were aiming high: "I think there's a potential to reach a hundred thousand dollars. I want people to think the sky's the limit. How many people can we potentially give life to?"
Full article here.