Coastal California in January is a setting for unpredictable bursts of melancholy and joy. Scandinavians or Minnesotans would barely recognize “winter” here, but we have impossibly thin skins for ours. We have too many sunlit summer teaser days to steel ourselves for the bleakness, and when the big storms hit the Bay Area, you might as well be walking through an Ingmar Bergman movie or a Leonard Cohen album. This makes January the perfect time to listen to Neko Case’s weather-obsessed 2009 album, Middle Cyclone.

Calling a musician a “force of nature” is a tiresome cliche, because who isn’t? We humans are a bunch of animals, and the “artificial” music of Kraftwerk and Gorillaz comes from nature just as much as Delta blues. (I’ll exclude Coldplay and Sting, since they appear to be pure cylon.) But I digress. What matters about Neko Case isn’t that she’s “natural,” but that she has such a fluid force. Galvanizing calm and rage, she can take a phrase lesser lights would turn into mushy prattle (“I’m a man-eater” or “never turn your back on Mother Earth”) and make you believe her life and your life depend on it. She doesn’t just sing about stormy weather, she is the weather.

On “This Tornado Loves You,” perhaps Neko’s best song yet, she is the speed of sound, stalking lost love like a funnel cloud ready to strike. She is the force of love and danger spinning out of control. She’s the perfect soundtrack for a continent hanging on to hope while flirting with impending doom. She’s even the cool hood ornament on a 1967 Mercury Cougar. For those of us who emerged from the Zeroes with our attention spans twittered into submission, it’s a revelation to hear in Neko’s “Tornado” a rock musician with an ace geologist’s sense of timing:

I have waited with a glacier’s patience
Smashed every transformer with every trailer
’til nothing was standing
65 miles wide
Still you are nowhere
Nowhere in sight

I’ve played Middle Cyclone repeatedly while reading Dead Pool, James Lawrence Powell’s gripping account of how decades spent denying the forces of nature have left the western landscape vulnerable to climate change, potentially turning places like Phoenix into dusty, uninhabitable ghost towns. The rivers whisper and scream with the violence of lost love, but still we are nowhere in sight.

In the first clip below, Neko Case performs “This Tornado Loves You.” In the second, she chats with a Canadian talk show host about mesocyclones and animal instinct, Goethe and Harry Nilsson, Loretta Lynn and PMS. At the end, she hallucinates about George W. Bush visiting a taco wagon dressed in a grimy tank top.

Neko Case, “This Tornado Loves You”

Neko Case Interview

Despite a lifelong obsession with politics and music, I only really learned about Victor Jara because of Professor Joe Strummer. “Please remember Victor Jara, in the Santiago stadium,” the late, lamented Clash bard quietly intoned in “Washington Bullets,” and I had to find out what he meant. Jara, the Chilean singer-songwriter and pioneer of the nueva cancion movement, was tortured and murdered with many others following Pinochet’s CIA-supported 1973 military coup on September 11, 1973.

Earlier this month, 36 years after his death, thousands convened in Santiago to give Jara a proper funeral, following a new autopsy that confirmed his torture and murder. Attendees included Jara’s widow, Joan Turner, and Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, whose own father was among the junta’s victims. It’s belated poetic justice that Pinochet died in infamy as one of the world’s most disgraced public figures, while the boxing stadium where Jara lost his life is now known as Victor Jara Stadium. The next time you’re looking for a profile in courage, consider the poem fragment Victor Jara penned in the boxing stadium moments before his execution, and after his hands had been broken:

To see myself among so much
and so many moments of infinity
in which silence and screams
are the end of my song.
What I see, I have never seen
What I have felt and what I feel
Will give birth to the moment…

Because Victor Jara’s recordings aren’t widely heard in this country, his role in progressive iconography has long eclipsed his earlier fame as a singer-songwriter. But as his discography and a handful of video clips confirm, he had a wonderful voice. A couple of his better-known songs are in the clips below. After the click-through are just a few of the songs he’s inspired, featuring Calexico, Los Fabulosos Cadillacs, Claudia Acuna, Inti-illimani (and, please remember, the Clash).

Victor Jara, “El Derecho de Vivir en Paz”

Victor Jara, “Te Recuerdo Amanda”

(more…)

For a long time after I first saw spoken-word artist Sarah Palin recite for a national audience, part of me doubted her existence. I have nothing against regional dialect poetry, and hers hasn’t suffered from lack of attention. Last fall, the Utne Reader described her work as beat poetry, comparing her Katie Couric interview line-by-line with works by Ginsberg and Kerouac. In Salon, Camille Paglia, the Sarah Palin of essayists, described her Alaskan counterpart’s style as “closer to street rapping than to the smug bourgeois cadences of the affluent professional class.”

Still, I remained skeptical. Palin’s ice-fogged persona—equal parts Northern Exposure and Manchurian Candidate—seemed too calculated to be credible to all but the most serious Ted Nugent fans. It didn’t help that the author of her signature convention speech is a vegetarian animal rights activist, or that the names of her six children (Snipp, Snapp, Snurr, Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka) sounded too familiar. I kept waiting for the J.T. Leroy/ James Frey-type moment that would blast her story in a million little pieces, revealing “Sarah Palin” to be the creation of a bored Berkeley creative writing student, or Tina Fey’s older sister.

But Palin is indeed real, and the past month has shown that I clearly misunderestimated her artistic skill. A governor is a lot like a performance artist, but with actual responsibilities. With her recent resignation, Palin has brilliantly freed herself from the chores of governance. Much like the title character in the children’s story Duck for President, she will find that quitting frees up time to work on her memoirs and give speeches only other ducks can understand. Her farewell rant in Alaska, which many found inscrutable, ranks as a surrealist tour de force, sledding over the icy tundra of grammar and diction like an American Idiotarod of freestyle improvisation.

Even better, late last month on Conan O’Brien’s show, “master thespian” and Canadian mind-control expert William Shatner performed cover versions of Palin’s farewell speech and Twitter posts. Palin joined a select few over several decades–notably, the Beatles, Dylan and Pulp–deemed worthy of Shatner covers (remarkably, Shatner is six years older than John McCain). For those like me put off by Palin’s chirpy delivery of her own material, Shatner’s covers were a revelation. Following up on his moving and poignant 2004 masterpiece Has Been, Shatner used his martini-dry delivery to make Palin’s words boldly go where no prose has gone before, peeking at the “big wild good life teeming along the road that is north to the future.” Or, as one of Palin’s tweets makes perfectly clear:

Left Unalakleet warmth for rain in Juneau tonite. No drought threat down here, ever…but consistent rain reminds us: “No rain? No rainbow!”

William Shatner, performing Sarah Palin’s Tweets

I doubt that even Shatner knows the first thing about splitting the Cheechakos from the Sourdoughs. But his spinning salad of Palin’s prose added a new layer of intrigue. I briefly recalled Ken Nordine’s worldly and other-worldy word-jazz. Even more, I thought of the surrealist beat poet Ted “The Hipster” Joans. As poets, Joans and Palin are a little like Captain Ahab chasing his nemesis: Joans’ Moby Dick was Dave Brubeck; for Palin, it’s Barack Obama. Joans’ credo was “jazz is my religion, and surrealism is my point of view”; for Palin, religion is her jazz and surrealism is her language. Joans spoke of poems as “hand grenades” meant to “explode on the enemy and the unhip”; Palin uses poems as hand grenades to explode on the unrighteous. Joans said “you have nothing to fear from the poet but the truth”; we have nothing to fear from Sarah Palin but her lies.

Ted Joans, “Jazz is My Religion”

Most of all, listening to Shatner’s take on Palin made me think of his encounter with another feisty, dangerous brunette a generation earlier in the 1967 Star Trek episode The City on the Edge of Forever. I’m no Trekkie, but if Shatner had a moment as a master thespian, this is it. Due to a deliciously preposterous alteration of history which forces the crew to go forward into the past, Shatner’s character, Captain James T. Kirk, is transported into the United States in the 1930s, where he has to choose between saving humanity from Hitler and hooking up with Joan Collins. In the sixties, this was apparently considered something of a close call. Love and hormones almost get the best of Kirk, but in the end justice triumphs.

As aired, City on the Edge of Forever enraged Harlan Ellison, author of the original script for the episode. The TV episode suggests Collins’ character, a Depression Era do-gooder named Edith Keeler, was supposed to be killed in traffic accident. But unless corrected, the accidental change in history would spare her life, allowing her to spearhead a pacifist movement delaying U.S. entry into World War II. That delay would then have permitted the Nazis to develop the atomic bomb first and conquer the world. When the episode aired at the height of the Vietnam War, the antiwar Ellison disliked having an unsubtle bird flipped at the peace movement against his wishes.

Listening to Shatner’s performances last month made me think of a more contemporary moment at the edge of forever. All kidding aside, Sarah Palin could conceivably become President. I’d bet against it, but I remember how far-fetched it once seemed that we would have Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jesse Ventura as governors. At a time when climate change is already occurring and Alaskan glaciers are melting with surprising speed, having a President who once said she was “not one who would attribute” global warming as “being man-made” could recklessly alter history—not our past, but our future. Describing Edith Keeler’s commitment to peace, Spock in City on the Edge tells Kirk, “She was right. But at the wrong time.” By contrast, Sarah Palin is wrong, and at the wrong time.

Star Trek, “The City on the Edge of Forever”

William Shatner, “Common People”

I only remembered it was Bastille Day an hour before it was over this Tuesday, but I knew just what I wanted to hear. Jacques Dutronc is a revered figure in his country’s rock history that remains a total obscurity to many stateside. That’s a shame, because if there’s one person who can demonstrate that “French rock” isn’t an oxymoron, it’s Jacques Dutronc. Dutronc’s music calls to mind the scene in the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night in which a reporter asked Ringo Starr if he was a mod or a rocker, and he responded, “I’m a mocker.”

Jacques Dutronc made being a mocker into an art form. The dapper Dutronc drew energy from sixties-era youth rebellion at the same time he skewered its narcissistic excesses in songs like the brilliant breakthrough single “Et Moi, Et Moi, Et Moi,” said to be an answer song to the Franco-Dylanisms of Antoine’s “Les Élucubrations d’Antoine.” Set to an insanely catchy thumping backbeat, Dutronc rattles off increasingly surreal population statistics (700 million Chinese, 50 million imperfect people, 500 billion little martians), while always placing himself in the forefront (“et moi”).

Whether he’s tackling prickly everyday problems (“Les Cactus”), flipping the bird to hypocritical swingers (the bachelor sendup “Les Playboys”), or lampooning armchair hippies (the sitar-tinged “Hippie Hippie Hourrah”), Dutronc is also smart enough to capture what’s compelling and cool about his subjects. As with his closest British counterpart, the Kinks’ Ray Davies, Dutronc’s ironic swagger would have fallen flat if his music weren’t equally forceful, and diverse enough to capture an occasional tender subject, like his affection for Paris in the morning (“Il est cinq heures, Paris s’eveille”). Too suave to really play garage rock, he still understood enough about its simple power to deliver on songs like “La fille du père Noël,” a Gallic spin on Bo Diddley’s “I’m a Man” that can hold its own with the Yardbirds’ cover of the Diddley ditty.

Two other central figures in Jacques Dutronc’s world deserve special mention. First, Dutronc’s longtime muse, collaborator, and wife of almost three decades is Francoise Hardy, the classiest and arguably the most talented of the French ye-ye pop singers (their son is the jazz guitarist Thomas Dutronc). Still gorgeous well into her sixties, Hardy became an accomplished singer-songwriter who has remained open-minded enough to collaborate with everyone from Blur and Air to Iggy Pop.

Second, most of the credit for Jacques Dutronc’s droll commentary is owed to his songwriting partner Jacques Lanzmann, a twentieth-century Renaissance man whose odd career found him, at various times, as a welder, truck driver, copper miner, painter, founder of a men’s magazine, travel show host, and author of 40 novels. Lanzmann, whose brother Claude directed the Holocaust epic Shoah, also escaped a Nazi death squad as a teenager, reputedly because he was determined “not to die a virgin.” Now that’s French resistance!

Jacques Dutronc, ““Et Moi, Et Moi, Et Moi”

Jacques Dutronc, “Les Cactus”

Jacques Dutronc, “La Fille Du Père Noël”

Baby, baby, I can’t let go
I got the Seeds on the stereo….

The Zeros, “Wild Weekend”

Last Thursday, the world lost a musical pioneer known for his childlike wonder. He sealed his reputation making joyful noise, yet also seemed doomed to tiptoe through fields of anguish and despair. The singer precisely captured his moment in time. But in his increasingly strange last decades, he seemed to come from another planet, so absorbed in his restless search for solace that his oddness overshadowed his moments of unalloyed pop brilliance.

I speak, of course, of Sky Saxon, singer and bassist for the psychedelic garage band innovators the Seeds. Los Angeles-based writer and radio host Ken Levine aptly described Saxon’s music as “a mix of hard rock, blues, peyote, and not sleeping for several weeks.” Overshadowed in his time by hitmakers like the Kingsmen and the Troggs, and later by the likes of Love and the Doors, he continued the trend even in death, passing away within hours of a better-known guy who fancied himself as the King of Pop. Saxon and the Seeds were inconsistent and erratic, and their most fertile period was short-lived. But at their best, they produced relentless mini-anthems filled with love and danger. “Pushin’ Too Hard,” my favorite of these, is as compelling as anything in the Jacksons’ catalogues, and meant more to me personally.

Sky Saxon was also known as Richard Marsh, a Mormon kid from Utah and former doo-wop bandleader who discovered he could make his voice sound like Mick Jagger swallowing gasoline. When he moved to California and formed the Seeds in the mid-Sixties, his new moniker fit nicely with a new band taking flight, first with the roar of proto-punk garage rock and later with the birdlike flight patterns of flower power. The Seeds discovered trippy keyboards before the Doors, and were unleashing raw power before the Stooges. They were their best at their simplest, exemplifying Woody Guthrie’s dictum that if you use more than two chords, you’re showing off. It’s fitting that Saxon’s final days were spent in Austin, stomping grounds for fellow psych-garage head cases both old (Roky Erickson) and new (the Black Angels).

If the Seeds were a movie, they would have been a grainy, no-budget independent film that lingers in the memory longer than last year’s big-budget Oscar winner. They were a little scary, but they played with heart. Saxon wound up ingesting too many of the Sixties’ finest pharmaceuticals and joining a spiritual cult, but he remained a charismatic and inspirational figure to musicians. The Seeds remained his signature group, and they were as seminal as the name implies. Muddy Waters loved the Seeds so much that he described them as “America’s own Rolling Stones,” and wrote the liner notes to one of Saxon’s lesser side projects, an attempt at garage/ blues fusion. Joey Ramone claimed that listening to the Seeds’ “Pushin’ Too Hard” inspired him to sing, and the Ramones later covered a second Seeds standard, “Can’t Seem to Make You Mine.” I’m pretty sure the Ramones also took haircut tips from the Seeds.

The most heartfelt tribute I’ve seen to Saxon’s legacy came from Los Angeles native Nels Cline, whose genre-bending guitar work has found him collaborating with everyone from Charlie Haden to Mike Watt to Willie Nelson, fronting his own improvised music group, and playing lead for the fiery nineties roots-punk combo the Geraldine Fibbers on the way to his current lead duties with Wilco. In an obituary last week, Cline described Saxon as his first rock idol, not simply for the Seeds’ music, but for the charisma he exuded while appearing on TV programs with names like “Boss City” and “The Groovy Show.” Cline wrote that he “would stare in disbelief as he—clad in shiny satin Nehru shirts bedazzled with some gaudy brooch—would gyrate around lasciviously, holding the microphone in every cool way imaginable. He seemed from another planet.” Years later, Cline ran into an aging hippie at Trader Joe’s with an unmistakable style, and you can guess who it was. Saxon and Cline went on to play an improvised set, using the name Flower God Men and their Assistants. The flower god man has taken his final flight, but the thrill ride continues.

The Seeds, “Pushin’ Too Hard”

The Seeds, “Mr. Farmer”

If a deep, slow groove with big implications for globalization are your bag, all 10.5 minutes of “900 Million People Daily All Makin’ Love” should be required listening:

Can you just imagine digging up the King,
Begging him to sing
About the heavenly mansions Jesus mentioned….
He went walking on the water with his pills.

Warren Zevon, “Jesus Mentioned”

When Elvis left the building a generation ago at what seemed then the very advanced age of 42, I loved a few of his songs, but mainly considered him a bloated, Eskimo Pie-addicted man-cartoon that some kids’ parents liked. Only later did I discover what the fuss was about: the Memphis truck driver getting “real, real gone” in the magical Sun Sessions; the swaggering sex machine; the out-of-control mystery train that not even a dozen corny movies and a thousand prescriptions could completely derail. No wonder even Nixon cited Elvis as the explanation for the Bermuda triangle (“Elvis needs boats”).

This week, at the young, tender age of 50, another larger-than-life man-cartoon made an inglorious exit. Like Presley, Michael Jackson walked on water, first with his brilliance and later with his pills. And as with Elvis, I dismissed most of what he did long before he left. But MJ was an arresting presence even for those who, like me, did my best to ignore him. Elvis even seems an inadequate comparison for his stratospheric global reach. A closer comparison might be Howard Hughes, another man-child of erratic brilliance, whose master aviator’s soaring heights later gave way to reclusive paranoia and heartbreaking tailspin.

For now I will set aside the aspects of Michael Jackson’s life better left to the justice system and to his maker. As an admiring non-fan, I’ll count down five of his huge accomplishments:

1. He Liberated Eastern Europe from Communism.

Who do you think accomplished this, Reagan and Gorbachev? Please. The invasion of Afghanistan was bad enough, but the Kremlin’s most self-destructive act was its 1985 decision not to censor a vinyl version of Thriller. Long before MJ built a 35-foot statue of himself in Prague, his invisible gloved hand shook like a thousand Adam Smiths, securing our opportunity to visit McDonald’s in Vilnius.

Michael Jackson, HIStory Teaser

2. He Made Globalization Irreversible.

Don’t blame him for the shortcomings of NAFTA, GATT and world-beat fusion music. The new century would still be inconceivable without globalization, and MJ was its mascot. If there’s any doubt, listen to Caetano Veloso’s version of “Billie Jean.”

Caetano Veloso, “Billie Jean”

3. He Stopped Quincy Jones from Making Bad Solo Records.

Quincy Jones has a great ear for talent other than his own. Long ago, Q made five-martini bachelor pad classics like “Soul Bossa Nova,” which featured the amazing Rahsaan Roland Kirk. But by the late seventies, he’d spent far too much time making lame film soundtracks. Soon after Q started mentoring MJ, he woke up and started sailing the high seas of Eighties soul-funk cheese, producing bizarre period classics such as 1981’s The Dude, which even features a zany cover of a song by Ian Dury and the Blockheads sideman Chaz Jankel. The Dude abides.

Quincy Jones, “Soul Bossa Nova”

Soul Bossa Nova (Tema da Nike) – Quincy Jones

4. His Voice Was Better than Your Favorite Singer’s Voice.

Maybe that’s stretching it. Still, once you get beyond the tabloid crassness, Jackson had a voice so divinely inspired that comparisons are almost unfair. Production values and taste are things that can be questioned, and I’ve criticized those in most of his work. But his abilities were already astonishing by the time the J5 featured his preteen lead on “I Want You Back.”

Jackson Five, “I Want You Back”

5. He was Jackie Robinson in Aviator Glasses.

It’s hard to describe how segregated most of the pop mainstream was at the end of the seventies, with much of white America (including me) still in “Disco Sucks” mode and rap still emerging from the underground. Off the Wall and Thriller shattered that rigidity. If the path that followed has had some cracks in the pavement—like having to endure Fred Durst limply pretending to be funky—MJ still helped prepare the country and the planet for their multiracial future.

Indian version of “Thriller”

Funny videos

I’m a walking bag of contradictions. In my mind’s eye, I am free of bigotry, but as soon as someone I don’t know walks in the room, I immediately start sizing up the music they listen to, based upon their appearance and wardrobe alone. Typically, the set of associations goes something like this:

Ann Taylor pantsuit: Natalie Merchant
Polo shirt, khakis, possible African choker: Vampire Weekend
Tie-dye T-shirt, jeans, over 35: Dead, Phish
Tie dye T-shirt, under 35: Fleet Foxes
Business suit, two ties: Wazmo Nariz (to get that one, it helps if you were in Chicago around 1980)

Too often, my stereotypical associations turn out to be, well, right on the money. That’s what made it gratifying to learn last month that I was dead wrong about the musical inclinations of America’s left-leaning sweetheart, MSNBC pundit Rachel Maddow. I would have suspected her to favor the gentle and droll—some Belle and Sebastian here, some Jens Lekman there. Judging from the glasses she sometimes wears in interviews, perhaps some Buddy Holly or Elvis Costello would enter the mix.

But metal? That would bring back memories of the epic Terry Gross/ Gene Simmons smackdown from a few years ago. I would have judged mild-mannered Maddow more likely to be a pastor of muppets than a master of puppets (and yes, she has drawn a muppet analogy to the decline of the American auto industry). Yet before an interview with Metallica’s Lars Ulrich, the Rhodes scholar blushingly described herself as a “fangirl.” Maddow displayed the “Enter Sandman” ring tone on her Blackberry and described how the Master of Puppets album changed her life when she was fifteen. And the fan-love went both ways; in a recent Time feature, Ulrich put the Rachel Maddow Show on the short list of his favorite things, right up there with tightrope artist Philippe Petit and Mark Rothko, who loved black even more than the average Metallica fan.

I’m by no stretch a metalhead; to me, Howlin’ Wolf makes James Hetfield sound like a girlyman. But I appreciated Maddow’s explanation of how Master of Puppets’ cathartic rush became the soundtrack to everything she wasn’t expected or supposed to do as a teenager. And Ulrich did his part to mess with my stereotype of the heavy metal drummer, which essentially comes from the Spinal Tap theory that they’re interchangeable and likely to spontaneously explode (“Most of them died in their sleep while playing,” explained Tap’s David St. Hubbins.) On the show, Ulrich, the diminutive Dane and Michael Keaton lookalike, chatted up the virtues of social democracy and San Francisco tolerance. When Rachel asked Lars his reaction to Metallica’s music being used to harass prisoners during the Iraq War, he shrugged it off: “I could name 30 Norwegian death metal bands who make Metallica sound like Simon and Garfunkel.”

Rachel Maddow interviews Metallica’s Lars Ulrich

Wilco, “Heavy Metal Drummer”

The noble quest of Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter to be the keystone in the Senate’s archway may have ruined his chance to sing with Senator Orrin Hatch and the Osmonds. Switching parties was a drastic step, but I personally blame the EPA for years of inaction. For two decades, scientists have warned that the habitat which once allowed Moderatus Republicanus to spawn and thrive was in startling decline. A generation ago, mild-mannered moderates roaming the Americas could count on the opportunity, given the right connections, to support charities with Nelson Rockefeller, shop for V-neck sweaters with Eliot Richardson, build log cabins at the Log Cabin Club, and listen to Edward Brooke sing Marvin Gaye songs for Barbara Walters.

But those days are long gone. Although Moderatus Republicanus is occasionally still seen in the Maine wilderness and the Austrian parts of California, the species may already be doomed to suffer the same fate as the passenger pigeon and the Whig Party. Experts begged for action after Pat Buchanan’s 1992 convention speech, which the late Molly Ivins described as better in the original German, but little was done to reverse the tide, and we all know what missions were accomplished in the last eight years.

The extinction event for this troubled species quite likely came earlier this week. I speak not of Specter’s defection, but a television interview in which the delightfully perky Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann found it “interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president, Jimmy Carter.” Ever the nuanced orator, she clarified that “I’m not blaming this on President Obama, I just think it’s an interesting coincidence.” Another “interesting coincidence” she may have overlooked is that the swine flu epidemic occurred when Gerald Ford was president, as Chevy Chase would have gladly told her. Ouch.

Meanwhile, Senator Specter’s struggle for survival will require serious musical inspiration, and serious intestinal fortitude, as he shares metamucil with Joe Lieberman and finds his seat at the cafeteria table with Ben Campbell, Mary Landrieu, Blanche Lincoln, and Evan Bayh. The survival of a species is always precarious. But only time will test zoologist Jim Hightower’s prediction that in the future, nothing will remain in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.

Stealers Wheel, “Stuck in the Middle with You”

M.I.A., “Bird Flu”

M.I.A. -
bird flu – M.I.A

Pretenders, “Middle of the Road”

When I started writing about music in the Eighties, a prominent beard on a musician was often viewed as a sure sign that the performer was an out-of-touch hippie fossil, or barring that, a member of ZZ Top. That started to change during the goatee epidemic of the Nineties, which I was convinced would make facial hair disreputable for decades to come once the grunge bubble burst. But history has proven me wrong, because the late Zeroes have seen an outgrowth of musician facial hair worth of a post-Civil War presidential campaign, along with a revival of the hierarchy of beards. In what follows below, I’ll survey some of the notable beards of the moment, ranked from zero to ten on the Sanders-Hudson index. For the uninitiated, that index celebrates the beardly perfection of saxophone visionary Pharoah Sanders and Band keyboardist Garth Hudson, whose historic contributions have done for beards what Christopher Walken has done for the cowbell.

Facial outgrowth isn’t always a sign of greatness, or vice-versa. Patchy-faced Bob Dylan and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy have sometimes dabbled in facial hair, but these are not beardly men; you might as well put a spoiler on a Volvo station wagon. Nobody knows that better than Tweedy himself, the author of “Bob Dylan’s 49th Beard” (“things got pretty weird, and I grew Bob Dylan’s beard”). And beardrevue.com gave a major thumbs down to Stuck Between Stations favorite Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet), ranking him three points below the composite band score assigned to current beard icons the Fleet Foxes. Explaining the Captain’s lowly 5.9 ranking, the site noted: “His lip ferret was merely average. And his poet’s beard was never much more than the obligatory mark of a mad musical genius.”

At the outset, I have disqualified Devendra Banhart, because that would be too easy, like naming Jesus on a list of famous sandal-wearers. This list is for beard-growers, and I have it on good authority that Devendra was born bearded to traveling circus performers from Caracas. Here are my rankings in this year’s Battle of the Beards:

• Kyp Malone, TV on the Radio (Sanders-Hudson Rating: 7.5)

The guitarist-singer from Brooklyn’s innovative art rockers-turned-mutant funkateers had this year’s beard competition all sewn up. But, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, Kyp has now trimmed his beard.

TV on the Radio, “Dancing Choose”

• Jim James, My Morning Jacket (Sanders-Hudson Rating: 7.0)

James’ Kentucky combo may well rank as the most hirsute band of the past decade. But he’s docked two notches here, because his Prince falsetto on this year’s Evil Urges is less convincing than that of Spoon’s Britt Daniel, and worse, he has reportedly switched to a mustache.

My Morning Jacket, “Wordless Chorus”

More beards after the click-through (more…)

For months, I’ve wondered what music I’d want to listen to once the long election march toward the post-Bush era was finally over. The always-reliable Carrie Brownstein had some great pre-election suggestions in her Monitor Mix blog —the Chambers Brothers’ “Time Has Come Today,” Al Green’s version of Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready”—but like me, she found that on election night the only real answer was to make your own music. From NYC’s Union Square, she reported “magically becoming tolerant” of “the Bacchanalia I usually associate with drum circles, Hemp Fests and Renaissance Fairs.” Fresh off the plane from two days of voter protection work in Nevada, I had a similar moment, banging on an assortment of random percussion instruments with my three year-old son Matthew like a giddy hippie who’d staggered through one too many Dead tours asking for a miracle.

By the next morning, though, I knew exactly what I wanted to hear. On his unlikely path to the Presidency, Barack Obama kept his cool very much like vintage late fifties/ early sixties Miles Davis. Like Obama, the Miles who recorded Kind of Blue was hardly a radical; his subtle power was less iconoclastic than Ornette Coleman’s similarly timed Shape of Jazz to Come and less dramatic than the Giant Steps of his sideman John Coltrane. Yet Miles too was a forward thinker who nailed his moment in history. Sensing that hard bop’s routine of riffing had become a bridge to nowhere, he dispensed with straight chord progressions in favor of modes and shaped sounds that still seem almost as fresh as they did nearly half a century ago. After enduring a parade of hotheads, blowhards, dimwits, and trigger-happy supermodels, I’ll spend today celebrating the simple virtues of the “cool”—not in the snarky sense of “hipper than thou,” but as a credo standing for resilient grace and poise in the face of chaos.

As an occasional hothead, I can’t help wondering whether the cool President-Elect Obama who channels mid-period Miles also has a little Bitches’ Brew bubbling under the surface. Before I could even complete this thought, I discovered that someone has already done a mash-up of Obama’s speeches and electric Miles, notably “Feio” from the Bitches’ Brew sessions. There’s a new deal in town, and I can’t wait to listen.

Miles Davis, “So What” (featuring John Coltrane)

Can you think of a band that could save your life? I didn’t ask which band could be your life, the subject of the Minutemen’s classic “History Lesson, Part II” and Michael Azerrad’s survey of the American rock underground circa 1981-1991. The question posed here is more literal. A Reuters article this week reported that the Bee Gees’ falsetto-fortified 1977 disco hit ‘Stayin’ Alive,” which clocks in at 103 beats per minute (bpm), almost perfectly matches the 100 per minute rate that the American Heart Association recommends for chest compressions during cardiopulmonary resuscitation. A recent study at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria found that listening to “Stayin’ Alive” helped 15 doctors and medical students perform chest compressions on dummies at the appropriate speed. By contrast, Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On,” despite its title, plods along at a potentially lethal 50 bpm.

No disrespect for the Bee Gees, who started out as a rather classy British Invasion band, but I suspect the disco-loving doctors stacked the deck on this one. Quick review of an online bpm directory reveals that the medical authorities strangely bypassed plenty of songs registering exactly 100 bpm, including such life-affirming ditties as “Straight Cadillac Pimpin‘” by 8-Ball and MJG and “No Shelter” by Rage Against the Machine. But I’m probably just getting defensive because I had to give a guy CPR once, and the song I recall hearing in my head was “Blitzkrieg Bop” by the Ramones, which races along at a frightful 175.8 bpm. Miraculously, he survived. For years, I’ve harbored the delusion that the Ramones helped save his life, when the life they helped save was mine.

One song I’d identify as a “lifesaver” without resorting to mathematical determinism is “(Reach Out) I’ll Be There” by the Four Tops, whose lead crooner Levi Stubbs passed away yesterday. It’s as thorny as a hook-laden love song can get, with “confusion” rhymed with “illusion” and an outstretched hand offering solace in a “world crumbling down.” Almost as good is the 1986 British hit that Stubbs inspired, “Levi Stubbs’ Tears,” which probably ranks as Billy Bragg’s finest moment. The song is a bittersweet character study of an enduring woman that says more about living with dignity in hard times than a dozen of Bragg’s wordier political anthems. “When the world falls apart, some things stay in place/ Levi Stubbs’ tears run down his face.” When the nameless woman in the song quietly places the Four Tops tape back in its case, her world remains bleak, but she’s managed to survive to face another day, a little wearier and a little wiser. Call me corny, but at a time when the world sure seems like it’s falling apart, keeping the heart moving a little may be the most subversive impulse available. And it’s not just based on math.

Ramones, “Blitzkrieg Bop”

Four Tops, “(Reach Out) I’ll Be There”

Billy Bragg, “Levi Stubbs’ Tears”

Do you remember the first time you heard a song that gave you the chills? For me, that moment happened the same month Richard Nixon resigned. Too young to fully grasp current events, I still knew that a disturbing otherness was intruding into daily routines, something unsettling enough to make grownups forget their keys at the supermarket or lose their train of thought in mid-sentence. People seemed strange, and I didn’t know why. During these culminating moments of Watergate, a Billie Holiday anthology from the library gave me my first taste of “Strange Fruit.” For reasons I couldn’t explain, the way she sang her way through her numbness captured the unsettling strangeness around me. I had no idea that the song was about lynching; for years, I still thought it was about fruit. Decades later, when I saw photographer Amy Kubes’ “Little Worries” collection, which features images of a bandaged pear and a cantaloupe wearing underpants, I couldn’t stop hearing “Strange Fruit” in my head.

For the past few weeks, “Strange Fruit” has followed me everywhere. Partly that’s because recent events made me recall a picture of two studious-looking little boys who reminded me a bit of myself—little Robert, dressed in a Brooklyn Dodgers t-shirt, looking over the shoulder of his big brother Michael, with his face buried in a newspaper. But these boys were the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and the newspaper in Michael’s hand bore details of their parents’ impending execution. Robert and Michael became the adoptive sons of Abel Meeropol, a Bronx-based schoolteacher, union activist, and occasional poet/ songwriter who wrote under the pseudonym Lewis Allan. After seeing Lawrence Beitler’s gruesome image of a lynching in Marion, Indiana, Meeropol wrote a haunting poem that he later turned into “Strange Fruit.” One wonders whether he saw the Rosenbergs’ execution, which Jean-Paul Sartre once termed a “legal lynching,” as strange fruit of a different sort.

The iconic picture of Robert and Michael reading the newspaper reappeared in the news this month along with new evidence confirming Julius Rosenberg’s involvement as a Soviet spy, while adding to doubts that Ethel was guilty of more than being a loyal wife. That news prompted the Meeropol brothers, who spent decades attempting to prove both parents’ innocence, to confront the strange reality that things were not quite what they seemed. Ironically, the revelations about the Rosenbergs coincided with the near-collapse of the banking system and plans for the most sweeping state takeover of private enterprise in American history—not because of a Russian invasion, but because under-regulated and over-leveraged financiers ran out of ways to creatively repackage crushing debt. Time will tell whether the reaction to this crisis will, 78 years after the lynching that inspired “Strange Fruit,” lead to the election of our first African-American president. I’m trying to be hopeful, but much of the time, I’m singing my way through my numbness and feeling a little strange.

Billie Holiday, “Strange Fruit”

Last Thursday in Denver, at the rousing convention finale held on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the most gifted orator of his generation finished the most important speech of his life before a crowd of more than 80,000 and an international audience of millions. And what music did Barack Obama choose to accompany his exit? “Only in America” by Brooks and Dunn, a song recycled from the Republican convention four years ago. If there’s one act that deserves to be put in the slammer with the Oak Ridge Boys, it is Brooks and Dunn.

This can’t be the musical change America needs. I love my country too, but “Only in America” reminds me of the speech a generation ago in which the elder mayor Daley of Chicago pontificated that “together we will rise to ever higher and higher platitudes.” The song choice was especially puzzling because Obama, with the possible exception of Ralph Nader’s 2008 running mate Matt Gonzalez, has the most interesting musical taste of any candidate for the Oval Office in recent memory. Stevie Wonder was in the house, and stadium-worthy Obama fans ranging from Wilco and Kanye to Springsteen and U2 couldn’t have been more than a phone call away. If they were all unavailable, couldn’t Obama simply have put his iPod on shuffle?

I suppose you could view the commandeering of “Only in America” as a defiant gesture aiming straight for the hearts and ears of red state line-dancers and wearers of enormous hats. But I still think the song is too weak to work, especially now that John McCain has thrown down the gauntlet by selecting Alaskan yodeler Jewel Kilcher as his running mate (or was it Lisa Loeb?). Can we attempt to lay out a campaign playlist suitable for a year of change? As Bob the Builder would say, “yes we can.”

Lee Dorsey, “Yes We Can”

The Pointer Sisters added an extra “can” to the title for their hit version of the Allen Toussaint-penned New Orleans funk classic, but I prefer Lee Dorsey’s earthier 1970 version. As storm waters head toward the Crescent City yet again, it’s a good time to emphasize the need to back up the song’s optimism with real resources and hard work.

Merle Haggard, “If We Make it Through December”

Where some see struggles between red and blue to control the United States map, I simply see a struggle for the soul of Merle Haggard. Most famous for decades-old hippie-tweaking fare, Haggard is also an underdog troubadour whose ear for the poetry of the working man sometimes rivals Guthrie and Springsteen. I was surprised to discover buried alongside the ABBA ditties on John McCain’s all-time Top Ten was Hag’s bleak seventies weeper “December.” The laid-off father in the song has a bank account in the red and a serious case of the blues.

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Bo Diddley’s tombstone head finally joined his graveyard mind last week, and if there’s one thing Bo knew, it was how to distill the sound of danger. Warren Zevon was understating the case when he called him a gunslinger; as the featured clip below from the Ed Sullivan show attests, one-chord cavalry was more like it. The year was 1955. Bo, who claimed he had promised to perform a Tennessee Ernie Ford number, launched into “Bo Diddley” instead, galloping through his mutant variation on the son clave and hambone rhythms like a field general with a war to win and no time to waste. It’s a germinal beat that makes you want candy on a magic bus in 1969 while teetering between faith and desire that will not fade away. It makes you want to smash a rectangular guitar in a state of panic, wondering whether she’s the one, or asking how soon is now. Bo was human and needed to be loved, but he also wanted to be feared. It’s equally fitting that Bo entered his golden years opening for the Clash, and that back in the day, the Rolling Stones opened for him.

But none of the Bo Diddley retrospectives I’ve read have uncovered the secret of something Bo definitely did not know diddley about: foreign policy. I can attest that the author of the worst topical song in all music history was…Bo Diddley. (The close second runner-up: “I Hate the Capitalist System” by Barbara Dane). The year was 1986. While the United States’ past and future headliners in the Axis of Evil, Iran and Iraq, were busy fighting each other, Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi enjoyed fifteen-plus minutes of fame as the most hated man in America. During his celebrity run, nothing seemed to vanquish the madman of the moment; not the Reagan Administration bombing raid that took out a hundred civilians, and not even the New York Post article that ran a picture of what Qaddafi would look like if he dressed in drag.

There was clearly only one gunslinger whose rattlesnake hide was tough enough to take on the President-for-life who inexplicably remained a colonel: Bo Diddley. And so it was that during Summer 1986, when I watched Bo Diddley open for the Blasters in Washington D.C., Bo announced that the next song would be a little ditty called “Hey, Qaddafi!” I’m roughly paraphrasing, but the lyrics went something like:

Ooh Qaddafi, we’re gonna put a flag in your ear
Ooh Qaddafi, we’re gonna put a flag in your ass.

It never got any better than that. It seemed to go on forever. It was a slow-motion train wreck that made me feel crassly voyeuristic because I couldn’t bring myself to turn away. It reminded me that virtually all my favorite performers have at least one song that flat-out makes me cringe. If you’ve experienced one of your favorites having a “Hey Qaddafi” moment, we’d like to hear about it.

Bo Diddley, “Bo Diddley”

Barack Obama can’t even do an interview anymore without having to address one of his least-favorite subjects: the suspicion that beneath his calm demeanor and business-suited exterior, he is a fanatical Pink Floyd fan. The long-simmering suspicions boiled over last week at California’s Coachella Music Festival. Former Floyd leader Roger Waters arranged an unauthorized airdrop of Obama leaflets that missed its target, creating an unwelcome source of precipitation for golfing retirees. Then, during a performance of “Sheep,” from Pink Floyd’s Orwellian-themed Animals, Waters’ inflatable pig prop flew away, festooned with left-wing slogans (“Don’t be led to the slaughter”; “Impeach Bush”) and OBAMA written on the underside. The rabble-rousing Obama pig sailed over the Coachella Valley and crashed, winding up in a condition that its finder described as resembling “pulled pork.”

Hillary Clinton noted that “there is no clear evidence that Barack Obama is an America-hating Pink Floyd fanatic. As far as I know.” “But let me tell you,” she continued, “during my administration, we’ll have no time for laser light shows, ponderous guitar solos, vague anti-capitalist lyrics, and 23-minute songs about albatrosses. From day one, we’ll be rolling up our sleeves for the working people of America, pausing only for some Carly Simon, James Taylor and maybe a few aromatherapy candles.” Blushing as she adjusted her gun holster, she quickly added, “excuse me, I meant Toby Keith, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and a few rounds of target practice.”

While Obama’s suspected Pink Floyd past has dogged him for months, many supporters hoped he had put the subject to rest two months ago with a rousing speech in Philadelphia that some historians hailed as one of the most important speeches ever on the role of psychedelic rock in Anglo-American life. Obama’s speech criticized Waters’ occasional “Us and Them” mentality, as well as his apparent belief that “we don’t need no education” because it might lead to some sort of “thought control.” Yet Obama refused to entirely disavow Waters, saying nothing to quell the rumors that Pink Floyd songs were played at Obama’s wedding, or that at least one of his children was conceived while “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” played on his stereo. “I could no more ‘disown’ Roger Waters,” he said in Philadelphia, “than I could disown my stoner aunt in Hawaii who liked to have a little herb with her Bob Marley albums.”

Roger Waters’ “Obama pig” takes flight

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