Yes, it's a tenuous rock 'n' roll connection to current events, but don't you think that everyone, even J.D. Salinger, understands how terrifying it can be to be chased by a guy in a bear suit?
H/t to JB's fine The Hits Keep On Coming blog for pointing out that Tom Nawrocki, who formerly wrote the great One Poor Correspondent blog, is back blogging over at Debris Slide. In an odd, roundabout way, that inspired this entry. And welcome back, Tom!
I used to hear Grand Funk Railroad (later just Grand Funk) all the time on the radio. In the 70s, they were huge, filling arenas all around the country, having massive hits, working with producers like Todd Rundgren and Frank Zappa, and selling more than 25 million albums.
Their music is big, dumb rock 'n' roll: infectious, loud, and more than a little goofy.
In other words, it's hard to take them too seriously, but it's also hard not to love them.
And their song "Bad Time" is the first song I remember associating with a crush. We were maybe 8 or 9 and Linda had long brown hair, dark green eyes, and pigtails. She liked to play kickball and wore Keds sneakers every day (except for Wedenesdays, when she'd always wear brown leather shoes). One day she told me she liked me, then ran away. By the time I could tell her I liked her too, she'd already moved on to a guy named Larry who was the class Dodgeball star. This made me sad even though I wasn't quite sure why (and really didn't know what it meant to "like" someone anyway).
And then I heard this song on the radio. I'd heard it before, but I'd never really listened to it. And at the age of 8 or 9, I listened and nodded wisely (well, as wisely as you can nod at 8 or 9) and thought "yeah, this is exactly how I feel."
Anyone who loves vinyl will tell you how much better it sounds. It's warmer, deeper, and you feel like you can crawl inside the grooves of the record.
But people who love vinyl rarely tell you how precarious it is. You need to treat records right so they don't get warped. You need to clean them so you don't gather dust on the needle (and you need to make sure you have a good needle to begin with).
Still, sometimes, even though you care for records well, they still sound bad.
Now, thanks to YouTube, you can hear that for yourself. Among the many odd sub-genres on YouTube is a huge collection of people filming vinyl records playing. (I don't know why this is, certainly the craptastic camcorder microphone and sound negates any sound advantage the vinyl offers.) And that's where I found this video of Grand Funk:
The 45 is gold vinyl, which is pretty cool. But it sounds horrible. Watch the record spin around a few times and you'll notice the whole was cut off-center. So the record isn't quite centered and the tone arm is moving back and forth to compensate. Meanwhile, the platter is spinning at a constant 45 revolutions per minute, but since the record isn't centered, part of it spins a little too fast and the rest spins a little too slow.
This does no favors for Grand Funk Railroad, a band from Roger Moore's hometown of Flint, Michigan whose name was a pun on the "Grand Trunk Railroad" spur that ran through town (and in no way an indication of any actual funk going on in their music) or to the single best use of cowbell ever in rock 'n' roll (Will Ferrell, Conan, Beck, and the guy from ZZ Top notwithstanding).
Shortly after my "Bad Time" revelation, my family moved. I didn't go to school with Linda anymore and might have forgotten her altogether by now. Except that I did see her exactly once more.
I was on the street in New York City after college, visiting a friend who'd moved there. And suddenly, there was Linda, walking towards me, wearing a Grand Funk "We're an American Band" t-shirt. Although she'd certainly changed in the 15 years that had passed, I recognized her immediately. Unfortunately, she didn't remember me at all (she also didn't remember Larry, which made me feel better -- and childish for feeling better).
I nearly told her she was my first crush. I thought about telling her I always thought of her when I heard "Bad Time." I almost pointed out that "We're an American Band" is an ode to female groupies who screw around and how ironic it was for her to wear that shirt. But I did none of those things. Because she really had no idea who I was. And we were both in a hurry.
So we parted, each scurrying off to a different part of Manhattan, no longer joined tenuously by a song, each marching to the beat of our own cowbell.
Peter's Power Pop reminded me of the fabulous Mitch Friedman (a New York-based singer/songwriter who manages to corral both Andy Partridge and Dave Gregory from XTC to play on his records) and his very, very meta "This is A Song":
And finally, Then Play Long (home of long, fascinating essays about each #1 British album of the rock era in order) draws the curtain down on the 60s (and the Beatles) with a meditation on Abbey Road. Give it a read.
She had all their albums. She'd seen them live twice. Once I caught a glimpse of a tattoo she had that said "Maximum R&B."
But it was the 70s and the Who were in serious decline. They'd followed the brilliance of their late-60s mod singles with the genius (and pomposity) of Tommy, the incoherence of Lifehouse -- which still somehow birthed the amazing Who's Next -- and the insane power (and borderline incoherence) of Quadrophenia.
And then came the slide. Everyone was fighting with everyone else. Pete Townsend's hearing was shot. Roger Daltry thought he was a movie star. John Entwistle was spending money like it was going out of style. And Keith Moon was drinking. A lot.
The Who By Numbers was aptly named and contained the insufferably awful "Squeeze Box." Solo albums by various members started appearing and Keith Moon seemed more alcohol- and drug-fueled rampages with Ringo, Harry Nilsson, and others than in making music. He'd collapsed drunk onstage during a show. He'd gained a lot of weight. He had trouble breathing, could barely play his drum parts correctly, and was openly talking about who should replace him in the band if "anything happens."
Jane camped out in front of a local record store in the center of town so she could be the first one to buy Who Are You the day it was released. (She could have saved herself the trouble, slept in comfort in her own bed, and arrived at any time that morning -- by 1978 there was no sense of urgency or mad rush to buy a new Who album drenched in synths.) Jane talked about going to Los Angeles where her cousin lived (and knew all the places Keith liked to drink). She didn't think it was unreasonable that she and Keith would someday marry; after all, she was almost 18 and he was barely 31. (Link for Gmail subscribers.)
And then...
Keith Moon started taking a prescription drug to lessen the effects of alcohol withdrawal. The maximum dosage was 3 pills over the course of 24 hours. He was told to take one whenever he felt the urge to drink, so one night in September he took 32 pills. And died.
Jane came into school the next day wearing a black armband.
When the Who toured the next year with the drummer from the Small Faces, Jane didn't even bother to get tickets. "It's not really the Who," she said. When festival-seating crowds in Cincinnati stampeded and killed 11 fans, Jane took it as a sign that the band was cursed and shouldn't carry on without Keith.
I didn't know her that well, so I never talked to her about this. Until 20 years later, when I ran into her on a visit back to my hometown. We both found ourselves inside a Starbucks located at the exact spot where a great record store once stood.
She remembered the black armband, but told me she wasn't so much mourning for the band. "I'd started drinking at parties," she said. "And when I got drunk, Keith's drumming seemed mystical, like he was an out-of-control shaman sent from the other side. And I wanted to be out of control, to get beyond our suburban lives, to be like Keith. Until he died. And after that I didn't have a drop to drink for 5 years."
She admitted her cousin in Los Angeles had never seen Keith Moon. And her "tattoo"? Stenciled in semi-permanent marker that took three weeks to completely wash/scrape off. When I teased her about her boasts that she'd someday marry Keith Moon, she just smiled. Because she did get married -- to a drummer. A solid, dependable guy who worked in a bank and played in a cover band on weekends. "He may not be known all around the world," she said, "but he's healthy and alive and dependable."
We spent maybe a half-hour together. We talked about people we knew and the ways the town had changed. By the time we finished our drinks, we ran out of things to say and exchanged information with vague plans to keep in touch. We both got up to leave and heard the familiar opening of an old Who song on the sound system. But not one of their great songs. Not even one of their good songs.
Standing in that Starbucks, in the spot where I'd spent hours flipping through used records when I was younger, I winced at the intro to "Squeeze Box."
I looked over at Jane and we both said (at exactly the same time) "I always hated this song." Long Live Rock, indeed.
[Originally, this was just the embedded clip from Conan O'Brien with the obscenely expensive car disguised as a mouse while a Rolling Stones song played. But the embedding doesn't work anymore, so follow this link to get the story and the clip. Thanks.]
Why stretch a perfectly good 3-minute pop song out to 8 or 9 minutes with a bunch of extraneous beats and sound effects?
Don't get me wrong -- I lived through the 1980s, so I've heard my share of dance mixes, extended mixes, remixes, and DJ Scratch mixes.
For the most part, they leave me cold.
But every once in a while, you hear something that is so much better than the original that it's hard to listen to the original again.
I was done with U2 by the time "Desire" was on the radio. To me, it sounded too much like every other U2 song and not interesting enough that I'd want to here it again. But then a radio station started playing this:
And that was something I wanted to hear again and again. The sirens, the wailing female vocalist, the newscasters talking authoritatively about something you can't quite understand, the way the band phases in and out and Bono keeps getting pushed into the background -- for me all these things are what make the song. So I did what I'd done so many times before. I hunted the record down. I think it's the only record I'd ever bought specifically to get a remix of a song.
Another radio station I used to love (which sadly switched to ranchero music years ago) used to play a "mashup of the day" every afternoon.
And while I like both Green Day and Oasis, I absolutely love this:
By the way, in case you haven't heard, it's rained an insane amount in Southern California in the past three days. We've been socked with three storms in a row and a fourth is coming. (And maybe a fifth.)
So we've had periods of heavy rain that's overpowered the storm drains and flooded streets and buildings. We've had tornadoes. There've been rainbows and astonishing clouds pushed across the sky by fierce winds.
An amazing mixture, awesome and beautiful, tiptoeing up to the edge of being too much and then boldly striding right over that edge.
But don't worry -- this is Hollywood; we'll fix it in post.
I grew up thinking that stereo was just always inherently better than mono. And it makes sense if you think about it. If you could have two channels, why would you want to settle for one? It just makes sense that two is better than one and therefore stereo is twice as good as mono.
But I've come to the conclusion that this belief (which I never really questioned before) is ridiculous.
A few months ago when the Beatles remasters came out, I read a lot comparing the mono remasters to the stereo versions. Until about 1967 in the U.S. and 1968 in the U.K., most records sold were mono. The stereo versions were considered novelties. So while the bands would labor for days or weeks on getting exactly the right mono mix, it was often a junior engineer who would jimmy up a stereo mix in an hour or two. And a lot of those stereo mixes involved a lot of artificial separation (to emphasize that there were two separate channels) -- sometimes putting all the vocals on one side and all the instruments on the other. Needless to say, that's a crappy way to listen to music.
Then a funny thing happened to bands that had been around since the mid-60s: their early albums stopped being available in mono. So the public had to buy the stereo versions -- even though those were the versions whose mixes were tossed off with minimal involvement of the creative team that made the record.
This hit me like a ton of bricks when I recently heard a mono version of the Hollies' Greatest Hits. I own this record on vinyl (in stereo) and I love it. The harmonies are wonderful, the songs are great, and it just makes you smile from start to finish. And then I heard the mono mix of the same album.
It's like night and day.
In mono, the drums are sharp and visceral. The vocals are clearer and more natural. The guitars really chime. It's like being in a church that has perfect acoustics.
In stereo (and my vinyl copy had a sticker boasting of scientific stereo separation that was identical to hearing music live), everything feels smooshed together. The drums, guitars, and vocals get mashed together and the attempts to create spread and space just make the music sound muddy. It's like being in a clown car with 20 trombonists all playing in different keys at different tempos.
But even with the inferior sound, I still loved that album. Because the songs were great and even when they were poorly mixed they were still pretty great.
And it makes me wonder how many old records there are whose great mono mixes were discarded and the inferior stereo mixes (without any remixing or remastering to compensate) were put on CD and foisted on an unsuspecting public (or put on MP3 and compressed down to the point where the sound really suffered). All because we believe inherently that two channels has to be better than one.
But think about how ridiculous that is. Does that mean that anything recorded on 256 tracks is 64 times better than something recorded on only four tracks? So the latest Jonas Brothers album is 64 times better than Sgt. Pepper? Is the teenage girl with Pro Tools (or Garage Band) better than Carly Simon just because of technology?
Of course not.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter how many tracks you have or how many channels you master for. What matters is the quality of the songs and the quality of the performances.
And that's why inferior mixes of amazing songs still sound better than amazing mixes of inferior songs.
Still... I wish I would have had the mono version of that Hollies album for all these years.
J.D. Salinger died this week at the age of 91.
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