Battle of the Beards

Diatribes, Slow Jams

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 Continue reading Battle of the Beards →

A Welsh Onion Flute for Trying Times

Quick Shots

Zealously pining for the status symbol of the decade, the iPhone Ocarina? With a little practice, you know you’d become more studly than Ian Anderson, more virtuosic than Zamfir himself. And you wouldn’t be satisfied with breathy renditions of “Row Row Row Your Boat” or “Lemon Tree,” either – you’d go straight for the classics, like Stairway to Heaven:

(or was that Hairway to Steven?) But the sad truth is that your luxury spending coffers have been vacuumed dry after years of gambling in credit default swaps, and an iPhone probably isn’t in your future. Bad investor! No ocarina! But wait… even in these lean times, hope remains. You don’t need an iPhone to play the ocarina! Just grab a healthy stalk of organic broccoli, carve out a few holes, tune it up and let ‘er rip.

“Ah!” you say, “It’s true I took out a badly structured sub-prime mortgage, and yes, it’s true that my collateralized debt obligations have sucker-punched my liquidity risk… but it’s not true that I want to play the ocarina.” Fair enough. Sounds like the cucumber trumpet might be more up your alley:

Pinched capital flow? Try the radish slide whistle. Negative equity? The Welsh onion flute might be the instrument for you.

Underwritten securitization? Go blow an ostrich egg. Submarined by the shadow banking system? Try your hand at the cabbage slide flute.

Despite a dearth of regulatory responses or substantial loss mitigation guidance, you can have your ocarina and eat it too. iPhone be damned.

Music That Cooks: Our Thanksgiving Playlists

Playlists

For this year’s Thanksgiving, I posed this question to our Stuck Between Stations co-conspirators: “What music are you thankful for, and what would you suggest eating with it?” The results are posted below, including my edible playlist and helpings of pot luck from Zoe Krylova, Scot Hacker, Christian Crumlish, Benoit Baald, and Dan Haig. Need more Thanksgiving cheer? Check the heartwarming stories of Johnny Thunders struggling with a frozen turkey and the Rickrolling of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Zoe Krylova’s picks

PJ Harvey: rare steak and a baked potato
Patti Smith: hot chicken curry
Devendra Banhart: venison stew and a chimay
Vetiver: salad of mixed greens and wildflowers, elderberry wine
Bjork: dim sum
Joni Mitchell: assorted crackers and exotic cheeses
Neil Young: ribs
Classical Indian music: samosas and chai
Sun Ra: dark chocolate and smoothies
Reggae: jerk chicken & fresh lemonade

P.J. Harvey, “When Under Ether”

Sun Ra, “Pink Elephants”

Scot Hacker’s Picks

Elizabeth Cotten: For doing Fahey before there was Fahey, for being a chick doing the real gospel blues, for doing sweet folk without getting all Joan Baez on our asses, for making me float. Listen here. Note: The video above doesn’t do Cotten justice – definitely check out the Smithsonian collection of her works for the full effect. Recommended eating: Goat curry with IPA.

Music of Indonesia, Vol. 20: Indonesian Guitars: For reminding that none of us have heard the end of what the guitar is or does, or how it sounds. There’s always more pineapple to suck the juice out of, one more finger to lick. For reminding that the delta between Daniel Johnston, Japanese koto, and Bill Harkelroad converges on the Indian Ocean. Listen here. Recommended eating: Chicken satay and limeade.

Elizabeth Cotten, “Freight Train”

Continue reading Music That Cooks: Our Thanksgiving Playlists →

Guns n’ Sodas and the Great Leap Backward

Quick Shots

What would you say to the crazy guy in the park muttering about alien spaceship landings on the day the mothership finally beams down to bring him home? The makers of Dr. Pepper must be wondering the same thing. Earlier this year, Dr. Pepper notoriously promised that if professional head case Axl Rose finally released Guns n’ Roses’ perpetually unavailable Chinese Democracy album to the public after 17 years –and thereby deprived the music world of one of its best synonyms for incompleteness–it would give a free Dr. Pepper away to every American (except for departed guitarists Buckethead and Slash). That day has finally arrived. Any time today, and today only, you can visit the Dr. Pepper website and claim your free soda.

As I’ve never really been a fan of the band, I could ignore the media hype over Chinese Democracy if it weren’t for a few things:
• It’s messing with my sense of integrity. Back in the day, I considered the head cases in the Replacements to be the anti-Guns n’ Roses, delivering mostly heart and soul where Axl and his gang delivered mostly hype and bluster. But hell must be freezing over, because Tommy Stinson of the Replacements is now Guns n’ Roses’ bassist.
• It’s reminding me that Axl Rose is an idiot savant, not just an idiot. It wasn’t just a lucky fluke that “Welcome to the Jungle” and “Sweet Child o’ Mine” have become air guitar/ karaoke classics. As late finishers go, he’s certainly no Brian Wilson, but file the band under guilty semi-pleasure–and skip the icky power ballads.
• Since Axl Rose has been known to pen lyrics that make him come off like Ann Coulter with better hair, it’s interesting that the “new” album features a sample of Martin Luther King.
• Despite Axl’s best efforts, I still think he’s only the second-best rock degenerate to use China as a metaphor (see Johnny Thunders, below).

Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, “Chinese Rocks”

Guns n’ Roses, “Chinese Democracy”

Kind of Blue

Diatribes

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)

Back TUVA Future

Quick Shots

If it’s not already perfectly obvious what Tuvan throat singing, Yul Brynner, and theoretical physics have to do with one another, feast your peepers (and your ear-holes) on this (via Boing-Boing):

Filmmaker Ralph Leighton says, “This was the highlight of my recent trip to Vladivostok, Russia, where the film GENGHIS BLUES won the Governor’s Prize at the Pacific Meridian Film Festival. It features Tuvan throat-singer ONDAR and the voice of [Nobel laureate and physicist] Richard Feynman. I hope you enjoy it.” Back TUVA Future: Ondar in Vladivostok. If you’re wondering what the hell Tuva has to do with Feynman, check this out. (Thanks, George Dyson!)

This Band Could Save Your Life

Diatribes, Heavy Rotation

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”

Strange Fruit

Diatribes, Rants and Raves

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”

Zoe Keating, Tetrishead

Heavy Rotation

Zoe Roof Hatch If WNYC’s RadioLab isn’t a staple of your podcast diet by now, it should be. No one else has embraced the medium’s unique characteristics as well. Each week brings astounding new discoveries, wrapped in a blanket of sonic textures that perfectly illustrate – never distract from – the subject of the episode. It was through a recent episode of RadioLab called Quantum Cello that I came across the stunning music of avant-cellist Zoe Keating.

Don’t let the “avant” part turn you off — this music is accessible, fascinating, utterly beautiful, and works as well in the foreground as it does in the background (i.e. you can as easily close your eyes for deep listening as you can use it as a backdrop for hours-long coding sessions). There’s nothing wanky about it.


Zoe Keating: Tetrishead

Back-story: Keating was a classically trained cellist, on a fast track to the symphony. But despite her prodigious skill, debilitating stage fright kept her from advancing. In auditions, she’d forget entire compositions, drop the bow, and fall to pieces. But when playing solo, or playing her own work, she took flight. So “I bailed on the thing I loved the most.” Zoe ended up at Sarah Lawrence, creating film soundtracks for her art-major friends, who happened to have lots of effects pedals and sequencers laying around. It was there that Keating began to create her own sound, somewhere between Pablo Casals and the Kronos Quartet. Working on her own terms, not having to execute someone else’s compositions note-for-note, Keating’s stage fright virtually vanished. For her, experimenting with music was therapy. And her therapy is delicious to hear.

Her work with sequencers enables her to play live as though an ensemble unto herself, with one or two lines of classical cello and one or two lines of … something hard to put your finger on. Something warm and wiggly and textural, a romp through wonderous green clouds.

Mammatus-1
Keating’s cello sounds like these Mammatus clouds look

Despite the pedals and laptops that surround her in performance, Keating’s work never sounds electronic – it sounds like cello music, pure and simple. It’s not Bach, and she’s no Paolo Beschi, but I find Keating’s music every bit as warm and engrossing as that of the masters.

Her music is available on iTunes and Amazon MP3.

Change of the Century: A Campaign Playlist

Diatribes, Playlists

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.

Continue reading Change of the Century: A Campaign Playlist →