AC/DC Scheduled to Perform 2015 Grammys and Headline Coachella

As I posted recently, I was less than thrilled when the 2015 Grammy nominations were announced. Outside of a few groups nominated in categories that won't air, I really didn't have anyone to root for or reason to watch. You might argue that there's never a reason to watch the Grammys. However, aside from a professional interest during the dozen years I worked at a record store, there's always been something that drew me in and gave me a reason to care. This year seemed to be the one where I was destined to tune out.

Last week, the Grammys began to announce the performers for the Feb. 8 awards show. Among the performers announced thus far: Madonna, Ariana Grande, Ed Sheeran, Eric Church, Sam Smith, Pharrell Williams, Usher, Miranda Lambert, Common and John Legend, and for the first time on the Grammy stage, AC/DC.

Well, there's my reason to watch. I will tune in just to watch AC/DC mop the floor with the sorry parade of pop tart ding-a-lings. It's always good to see any rock band at the Grammys, but having one of the best rock bands of all time play is going to be great. The group are not up for any awards, but were likely invited on the back of their recently released album, Rock or Bust.

Now granted, today's AC/DC is not the AC/DC of yore. Malcolm Young has left the group (at least temporarily) due to serious illness. Phil Rudd's involvement in the group is question after a police raid on his home. Brian Johnson's acid-razor  of a voice is not quite what it once was. All that said, it's still AC/DC. Malcolm and Angus' brother Stevie has joined on guitar and if Rudd can't make it, they should have no problem finding a drummer - maybe Chris Slade will come back.

Regardless of the line-up or their age, this is a band that is more than a match for the likes of Ed Sheeran or Sam Smith. I'd love to see one of those choirboys follow these legends. I'd be willing to wager, however, in true, lame Grammy fashion, the band will close out the show and be cut off 30 seconds into their performance due to the lateness of the broadcast.

I'm sure there will be a generation of younger viewers who will have no context for these old guys tearing up the stage. Hopefully a few eyes are opened, but I can't expect much. I'm much more hopeful for the news of the band headlining Coachella.

Coachella has recently been into booking older acts that cause a twitter storm of tweens wondering who some headliners (like the Stone Roses) are. Now perhaps I'm not giving the younger generation enough credit. AC/DC are one of those bands who seem to cross generational lines and are a fixture of popular culture. Something tells me though that there are a lot of trendy, rich kids who are going to have their minds blown in the desert this spring. I hope every denim-clad dirtball in Bakersfield, CA comes out to Coachella for AC/DC's set, just to make it interesting.

Now if life were truly just, the '74-'79, Bon Scott-era version of the group would be playing the Grammys and Coachella. But that would be too much rock, too much danger for today's whimpering music audience. Could you imagine Bon Scott in the same room as Taylor Swift? Oh, but to dream.

Here's a video of the group's new single, "Rock or Bust." It's a nice rocker and the band sound to be in good enough form to destroy the Grammys. I followed that with a selection of Bon-era gems. What I would give for the Grammy audience to have to deal with such a raw, feral, barrel-chested, satyr-beast like Bon.

Steely Dan? Who the Hell Am I?

One constant of my music taste has always been my extreme distaste for Steely Dan. In the past, I have described listening to their music as akin to drinking a tall glass of lukewarm vomit. Their aping of jazz tropes mixed with sleazy subject matter approached with a patronizing pseudo-intellectual tone concocted an overall stew of 70s session man "grooviness" that has always made me gag.

And yet, I've always respected Donald Fagen and Walter Becker from a distance. They are very good at what they do. They made the music they wanted to in an exacting, precise fashion. What I deemed as their awfulness was never a mistake. The fact that they made music that terrible on purpose made dislike them even more.

So it is with great personal confusion that I admit that I have recently reevaluated their music, and discovered with some shock and horror that I like Steely Dan. There have been weeks over the past nine months during which there have been periods where I have listened to little else. I am fine with being proven wrong, but such a dramatic shift in my own opinion has made me question the very fabric of my being. I like Steely Dan? Do I even know who I am anymore?

To be fair, this isn't something that happened overnight. I've grown an appreciation for them slowly over the past few years starting with their debut album. It had always been with some embarrassment that I would admit to myself how much I liked the verses of "Reelin' in the Years." I say the verses because this 70s FM nugget's cheesy guitar lead and chorus always gave me hives. However, the verse's piano riff and Fagen's sardonic (Steely Dan, in a single word) vocals are sublime. Song by song, their first album, Can't Buy A Thrill (1972), revealed itself to me to be distinct from the rest of their catalog. I could admit to liking one of their records. The fact that critics and album guides singled the album out from the rest of their work as being more rock 'n' roll made me more comfortable liking it. Here was a band that began with a promising anomaly, but quickly fell off the deep end of jazz rock pretension and smug hipster intellectualism.

Further investigation was halted by the first track on their second album, "Bodhisattva." This song ranks up there with "Sugar Magnolia" as one of my least favorite songs of all time. Bookending the rest of their career with the later sleazy, predatory "Hey Nineteen" from Gaucho (1982), I was able to dismiss everything else in between.

So what changed? Well, at first, I was exposed to their music little by little through external sources: the Minutemen's cover of "Doctor Wu," the hilarious albeit exaggerated characterization of them in the Yacht Rock series, and the VH1 Classic Albums documentary about Aja (1977). I was even secretly thrilled when Becker and Fagen won the Grammy Album of the Year in 2001 in a startling upset for their comeback, Two Against Nature. All these incidents opened my mind towards them, but it took something more personal to fully bring me around.

I came to embrace Steely Dan through periods of great stress. The first time was while I was editing my first issue of The Chord, the newsletter of the record store where I worked. I was under deadline working in my basement office hours after the store had closed, catching peripheral glimpses of mice scuttle by my door as I struggled to learn InDesign on the job. It was in this environment that the first album truly took hold. Something about the music helped me cope with the crushing fear of failure.

Steely Dan make music about pathetic losers, cowardly cheats, gangsters, perverts, junkies, and reprobates - desperate people who have nothing left to lose. Listening to the stories of the characters in their songs I am reminded by something Leonard Cohen once said about staying in hotels. Cohen said one always has the feeling in a hotel room of being on the lam, a safe moment in the escape, a refuge and sanctuary of a temporary kind, a place in the grass while the hounds pass by. This was the feeling I got listening to Can't Buy A Thrill in the late hours of the night (or early hours of morning) engaged in the exercise of amateur journalism.

This past spring saw me working late nights, taking work home during the week and on weekends. This time I fell in deeper than just the first album. When everything is bearing down on you there's something relaxing about the Dan's epic ambivalence. It's a shrug of the shoulders as your just about to go over the cliff.

Below is a playlist that prunes the catalog for my favorite touchstones. A lot of these are the hits, but you'll note that "Bodhisattva" is still conspicuously absent.

Lou Reed

I started writing a piece during the summer on Lou Reed's critique of the new Kanye West, but I never finished it. Basically, it was going to be a primer on Lou for Kanye fans who had no idea of who this cranky old guy was. When Lou passed away I was recording vocals for a new record. Needless to say, it was difficult to process that day. I wrote the following on Facebook, but I thought I might like to share it here as well.

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I’ve taken Lou Reed’s passing harder than I would have expected. Like many people, his music was hugely important to me. I was surprised how much coverage his death received and the range of people who paid tribute. I admit some surprise at seeing Miley Cyrus’ and Josh Groban’s tweets. Perhaps most celebrities simply realized that a giant had fallen and they felt compelled to comment. Maybe they were fans though. Who am I to judge?

A lot of people posted what their favorite song was or just that he influenced them. However, I didn’t hear a lot of specifics about why they loved his music. Here’s my story about how I found his music and what it meant to me.

I found Lou the summer after my senior year in high school. It might have been earlier except for a hair metal music clerk at my local Great American Music. I had read an article in Spin a couple of years earlier which stated that The Byrds were the most influential American rock group outside of the Velvet Underground. I thought it was strange that I had never heard of the most influential American group of all time. I was buying Led Zeppelin II at the aforementioned G.A.M. when I asked the Dana Strum clone behind the counter who the Velvets were, mentioning the Spin article. He reacted with disgust and told me the Velvet Underground were a terrible band. He played me the beginning of what I later recognized as “Heroin.” It sounded dark and different, but Mr. Strum turned it off before the vocals started, telling me that I was better off sticking with Zeppelin.

I didn’t make my way back until I had found Bowie and learned of the connection. The summer after high school I had to have reconstructive jaw surgery because my dentist was convinced I would develop huge polyps on the sides of my face since my teeth didn’t touch in the back, meaning the jaw muscles were never at rest. I learned later that the surgery wasn’t necessarily needed.

Since the post-surgery recovery would be two-weeks spent at home my mom said she would buy me a couple of tapes. I picked out Walk on the Wild Side: Best of Lou Reed (the one with the Rachel Polaroids on it) and The Best of the Velvet Underground: Words and Music of Lou Reed.

I brought the tapes and my Walkman with me to the hospital to listen to post-op. I remember waking up in the hospital room with my jaw wired shut and my face newly swollen to the size of a basketball. I was told I wouldn’t be able to feel the lower part of my face for at least a few weeks. There was a lot of involuntary drooling over my fat, cracked lip covered in dried blood. My brother and sister had a hard time looking at me without crying when they came to visit. I felt like a monster, like Joseph Merrick. To be seventeen is to be self-conscious, but this was something else entirely.

That first night in the hospital I listened to the Velvets cassette, finally hearing “Heroin” in full while I was hooked to the IV drip. I didn’t sleep much that night. I had to keep going to the bathroom from the constant infusion of fluids. There was something monstrous in this music which I related to, which gave me some comfort. Ever since Lou Reed’s music was a source of comfort for me when I felt scared, confused, overwhelmed, humiliated, or disappointed in myself.

Obviously, my life is far from tormented – I’m a pretty lucky guy, in fact. And likewise, Lou's music is not all grim. There’s a lot of joy in it. As the liner notes to that Velvets best-of stated, Lou’s mantra could have been condensed down to his reassurance that “It was alright.” Essentially, Lou's music found beauty in things that other people thought were weird or ugly, and that can be a reassuring thing when you're feeling low.

Everyone knows the Velvets are great, but Lou’s solo stuff often gets short shrift. For those who are unfamiliar, here’s a playlist. It’s not the most obscure, but it’s a start from my own personal bias.

RIP Storm Thorgerson

Storm Thorgerson was a graphic designer who was perhaps as well known in rock geek circles as he was amongst designers. At a time in which the visual creativity of music is shrinking, the news of his passing a month ago made me particularly sad.

As part of the design company Hipgnosis his visual style defined rock aesthetics from the late-60s until today. I won’t go into a long laundry list of the great artwork that he generated – if you want or need such a thing, go to Wikipedia.

Rock design has become incredibly stunted and self-referential. The literal real estate of rock visuals has been reduced down to the size of (at most) a 200 x 200 jpg. Album artwork means less and less to the current generation whose rock music no longer has the mystery of coded semiotics that it once had.
   

Take for instance, the cover of the recent album by Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Mosquito. The cover is not just superficially ugly (in rendering as well as subject), but lacking in any sense of purpose or meaning on its own. It is simply a literal visual take on the album title and given a moronic, Garbage Pail Kids interpretation. Now, I’m not particularly a fan of this group, but this is cover, to me, is a poor representation of the music contained. It looks cheap and fake. It repulses in all the wrong ways. The YYYs have had mostly poor album art (It’s Blitz being the exception). Unfortunately, this has become the norm for groups nowadays.

This wasn’t always the case. In fact, there was a time when really mediocre groups had phenomenal artwork for their very pedestrian records (Wishbone Ash, cough cough, Uriah Heep). Storm and his associates (including Aubrey Powell and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, of TG and Coil fame) produced great artwork no matter how good the band was. Often the art was worth more than the music.

I can remember a friend being excited about a poster he saw for a new album by a band he had never heard of, The Mans Villa. The poster featured the Thorgerson-designed album artwork for their new album, Frances the Mute. He was disappointed to learn that the band was, in fact, The Mars Volta, the typeface having obscured the truth of the band’s identity. I don’t know if he was more disappointed that such a great cover belonged to a band that didn’t interest him, or if the cover drew him in to reconsider a band that he had previously dismissed. Either way, it is a great cover, one that arguably has outlasted the music.

Hipgnosis’ photos and design were generally simple in terms of concept, but grand in the scope of their execution and imagination. They were unafraid to take the long way around to get striking images that today people would use computers to generate, traveling to exotic locations or going to great lengths of labor to stage one photo. For example, consider Thorgerson’s cover for Pink Floyd’s A Momentary Lapse of Reason. Those beds on the beach were real. Someone took the time to set all of them up and then tear them all down once the (more-than-likely) half-hour photo session was over. The result has a reality that computers can’t duplicate. The shear lunacy of the idea is what makes its production so amazing.

Thorgerson’s images gave the music a mystery and a dimension missing from most rock today. His album covers could be scary, sexual, humorous, cheeky, beautiful, elegant, trashy, earthy, otherworldly, spiritual, or stately – sometimes all at once. This was multidimensional artwork which could be taken any number of different ways. This sometimes made them controversial – targets of the easily-offended. The punning cover of UFO’s Force It could easily be accused of being sexist in a ridiculous Spinal Tap fashion, but when you learn that the man and the woman on the cover are none other than Throbbing Gristle’s Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti, it somehow takes the sails out of the accusation while simultaneously ratcheting up the perversity factor.

The background stories behind these covers and behind Thorgerson’s adventures creating them are as interesting as the stories behind the music themselves. The book, For the Love of Vinyl: The Album Art of Hipgnosis, is well worth reading for anyone wanting to know more about Storm Thorgerson or great album art in general. I’d like to hold out hope for a return to the same kind of strong visual aesthetic in rock that Thorgerson’s legacy leaves behind, but I feel that an era has passed and we will never see its like again.

Welcome to Rock and Roll Dynasty

Welcome to my new blog. Here's a little background on me.

I'm a self-confessed record geek who worked at record stores for over a dozen years before getting a straight job. Before I left the world of music retail I felt like having to stay on top of every new release was beginning to take its toll on my listening enjoyment. I felt myself developing conditioned, knee-jerk reactions to new music. I wasn't ever able to spend the time absorbing records like I used to or be able indulge in the kind of deep listening that some records require.

I've found a lot of criticism online to have some of the same issues. There is little space or time for context or deep consideration. Everything seems to have become a race to be the first to post a leaked track, spread a tour rumor, or review an as-yet-unreleased record and a give an off-hand, often off-base judgment before moving on to the next piece of product.

My posts and reviews will likely not be as up-to-date as other blogs, but what I lack in timeliness will hopefully be made up for with a greater sense of perspective that comes with time. I hope this blog brings back a sense of slow patience to music criticism. I may gush at times; I may be critical. I hope never to play to hype or fall back on snide snarkiness. If nothing else, I hope for you to understand your own tastes better by comparing them to mine.

So why Rock and Roll Dynasty? Because I believe no music is born in a vacuum. I'm primarily interested in Bloom's anxiety of influence as it applies to popular music. This is about lineage - about the analysis of the root systems of the family tree of rock. How's that for pretentious? Trust me, that's just the beginning.