Center City 1

Center City 1 was written and recorded by me at my apartment at 23rd and Arch in Center City Philadelphia in 2010. Center City 1, also, was written in late 2010 out of the pronounced sense that the euphoria of Aughts Philadelphia and Neo-Romanticism, the dream-like trance it engendered, had dissipated into the mist of the Great Recession. Thus, the playpen that Center City had been for me and my cronies was not there any more, and had become a place of privations and deficits. The characters in the song have something in common with Springsteen characters— youth, desperation, willingness to stand up against authority— but they are more involved in the arts and in “hipster-ism” in general, including deals and dealing. As of 2015, are there any real hipsters left in America, like Sara? When the dream ended in Philadelphia as of around 2009— and it did end, very specifically, for many of us, in the summer of 2009— we all had to crawl our way towards whatever new life we could establish for ourselves. It is no surprise that the sound of this “crawl” in the Recession’s crawlspace is a plaintive one— here, just me and a guitar.

Jane and Trish

"Jane and Trish" by Adam Fieled was written and recorded at his apartment at 23rd and Arch in Center City Philadelphia in 2010. Painting by Abby Heller-Burnham.

Worn Yesterday

I wrote Worn Yesterday towards the end of my senior year at CHS. It was March, and I had The Godheads going with Ben Daniels and Pete Leonard, but I knew as I wrote it that this song wasn’t cut out for that band, which was more along the lines of Nirvana and Green Day. It’s a dramatic ballad, unique enough that I can’t think of any easy analogues. I wrote it, didn’t know what to call it, and was driving around Manayunk one night and saw the boutique on Main Street called Worn Yesterday, and voila, there it was. I played it for a few CHS people like Adam Garrett, and it was a staple of my repertoire when I arrived in State College later that year. Yet, when I started seriously recording in the late 90s, I never felt I could do it justice, and (to be honest) I still haven’t done it justice. It needs, I’ve always felt, a string section, something ornate and baroque to elevate its sound. This particular recording of Worn Yesterday was done at my 23^rd and Arch apartment in 2010, using Audacity. As to who the target of the song’s lyrics is, there’s no easy Carrie or Jen here. I seem to have tapped into a situation beyond the confines of my own life. Who knows?

Covers

Big Star and Visual Elitism

Big Star are unusual, in the history of pop and rock music, for a sense of the visual, expressed in portraits of the band, both distinctive and elite. The best portraits of Big Star in Memphis in the early Seventies can compete as possibly the most refined, artistically elevated portraits of a rock band of all time. The mood of the portraits is foreboding, dusky, ghostly, even macabre. Yet there's a strange sense of wonder to the portraits, of something evanescent captured, difficult to define.

It can't be an accident that Alex Chilton's mother ran an art gallery out of the Chilton house, where Alex lived too, during the Big Star era. Alex Chilton's good art karma dictated that when Big Star were photographed, it was by seriously motivated photographers with serious intentions, who were unwilling to settle for visual cliches. The eerie glamour and singularity of the shots build around Big Star a mystique, visible only to those sensitive to visual art, but potent nonetheless.  

Face the Strange: What was Classic Rock Radio?

In terms of structures that coalesce on different levels, rock music has many things in common with other cultural contexts. Rock has produced movements, conglomerations, and different corpuses of work that have manifested at different times. Many of the structural movements around rock music, especially regarding dissemination, have been dictated by mercenary concerns. Rock is, of course, a commercial art-form. One of the more curious developments involving rock music, where dissemination and commercial presentation are concerned, was the rise of “classic rock radio,” that took root and thrived from about 1985-1995. The dissemination of “classic rock” on classic rock radio stations involved the creation and maintenance of a discrete corpus of music— what radio stations deigned “classic.” What’s fascinating about this corpus is how arbitrary it appeared to be— and the demographics that dictated this arbitrary appearance. The first assumption that radio stations made is that, thirty years on, listeners in target groups would have no interest in what were already characterized as “oldies”— first generation rockers like Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, etc. So, the classic rock corpus wasn’t a lofty bid for comprehensiveness— radio stations were aiming for an audience for whom rock began with the Beatles. The rock music master narrative (which hasn’t, over the long term, proved to be particularly reliable) has always asserted three central sixties titans— the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan. The Beatles and Stones were both so consolidated into the classic rock corpus as to have some predominance; but one quirk of the corpus is that Dylan was almost completely excluded from it. Occasional airplay would be given to “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Positively Fourth Street,” but there was always a better chance of hearing Lynyrd Skynyrd or Foreigner.

Was Dylan that much of a commercial underling as to merit non-inclusion? In this niche, he was. Yet Dylan has been the subject (and this was already established) of dozens of books, serious articles, profiles, and movies. It would be unlikely that a “Don’t Look Back” style documentary would be made about Foreigner. Dylan has always been a media darling; classic rock radio unearthed the dirty little secret that a large mass of the general public does, in fact, prefer Foreigner to Dylan. Yet other occurrences around the classic rock corpus confounded the possibility that all decisions were made in favor of crass commerciality. Dylan was on one side of Foreigner; on the other side would’ve been Kiss, who had by then outsold almost everyone in the classic rock canon. Dylan got bits of intermittent airplay; Kiss got even less. The natural conclusion to be drawn is that the creators of the classic rock corpus found Kiss’s songs not worthy of inclusion. But what the AOR bands (like Foreigner) had over Kiss remains unclear. The Kiss exclusion, considering their sales numbers (and that other hard rock bands like Led Zeppelin received heavy airplay) was baffling. Black Sabbath’s exclusion, considering their low sales profile, made some sense; they may even have been considered too heavy. But the truly droll aspect of the classic rock corpus often manifested in playlists that seem to have been generated on other planets. Try to make sense of a run of songs like this:

Heart, “Magic Man”

David Bowie, “Changes”

Supertramp, “The Logical Song”

Pink Floyd, “Us and Them”

Billy Joel, “The Entertainer”

John Cougar Mellencamp, “Pink Houses”

Led Zeppelin, “D’yer Maker”

It’s not just that the songs are cross-generic— each song is at such a tangent to those before and after that an argument can be made that heterogeneity defined the classic rock corpus. However, the wild extremes represented involved not only genres but values. “Changes” and “Us and Them” are both serious songs that address serious themes; the Mellencamp song seems about half-serious; the rest are kitsch. Thus, the experience of listening to classic rock radio was extreme; you could easily be delivered into the sublime or the ridiculous. The only internal logic seemingly operative was to keep the integrity of the corpus intact. Specific contexts on these stations opened for “adjuncts” to the corpus to appear. The most obvious was late-night— that if you tuned in at 2 am, you might hear Fairport Convention or the Velvets. Another feature accompanied new releases of adjunct artists like Lou Reed, Elvis Costello, and XTC— it was a sign of respect to air the first single a handful of times. But, over the decade that classic rock radio stations were prominent on FM in the States, surprisingly few adjuncts managed to consolidate a place in the corpus, which did manage to retain a good amount of integrity. The happiest experience for these stations was when a corpus stalwart hit a new commercial peak— this happened with Yes and George Harrison in the late 80s. New, successful singles could be incorporated without loss into the corpus. Unsuccessful new singles by high-ranking artists (like the Stones singles from Steel Wheels) would be incorporated for a while as a sign of respect, then discarded.

Things could be amped up owing to the Zeitgeist, as well— the late 80s wound up being a boom-time for Led Zeppelin, whose high stock went up even higher in the corpus. Led Zeppelin were one of the few bands to have entire albums consolidated into the corpus; at any time, you might hear anything from II or IV. Boston’s first album was almost completely consolidated; Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors; the Eagles’ Hotel California. Greatest hits compilations aside, the Beatles and the Stones (for some reason) could boast of no such thing. Zeppelin had an edge as the reigning British band, bar none; but you’d never hear much from III, Physical Graffiti, or (especially) Presence. Another surprising exclusion was post Diver Down Van Halen; the 1984 singles (their biggest hits) were scarcely visible. You could hear the Kinks do “Low Budget” but not “Waterloo Sunset”; and you were more likely to hear early Animals than any Kinks. It could be asserted that the demise of classic rock radio killed off the Animals as anything but “oldies.” Possibly it killed off Eagles’ album tracks too.

All these events are complex and nuanced, if inexplicable. The classic rock corpus was comforting, but my friends and I were made restless by it. By the late 80s, and having missed the Smiths the first go-round, I was deep enough into rock to despair of hearing anything new, produced in my lifetime, as strong as the Beatles, Stones, and the rest. What happened next (the Alternative Revolution) answered that despair in an authoritative enough manner that the classic rock corpus, as a gestalt, was made almost instantly obsolescent. But it remains interesting, for its quirks, and for the way it created an illusion of permanence; however, there is nothing natural or permanent about the classic rock canon, and what it left out was as revealing, ultimately, as what was included. It wasn’t “just the crap” or “just the good stuff”; it was some of both, pieced together in such a way that cohesion was never possible. The target market was clearly late Boomers; but early Boomers were still too young to be an oldies crowd, and suburban kids like myself were getting a kind of education too. Was it an education that Nirvana and the rest later erased? For me, not much. If you’ve heard “Feels like the First Time” a thousand times, you’ll never get it out from under your skin.

Dynamics of Desperation: Tim Buckley's "Sweet Surrender"

Since his untimely death in 1975, Tim Buckley’s status as a cult hero has become established. Through a seemingly never-ending series of re-issues, unearthed live performances, and radio broadcasts, Buckley’s work has been kept in wide circulation. Inevitably, what jumps out first to new listeners is Buckley’s voice, with its’ bell-like clarity and several octave range. By the time “Sweet Surrender” was released, on the 1972 album Greetings from L.A., Buckley’s career had wound in several directions— from folk to avant-jazz. Greetings introduced the heretofore pristine Buckley into the sleaze n’ cheese world of L.A. funk. Buckley’s reaction to this context was an engagement with the expression of bleak desperation— the sense of being a werewolf on the prowl. It was a desperate time for him (commercial fortunes having dwindled) and avowed desperation briefly became his métier. “Sweet Surrender” is the most blatant expression of desperation on Greetings— what makes it unique is that it is the detailed account of an actual (in the sense of being lyrically actualized) relationship. The turbid nature of the sleaze n’ cheese orchestration gives the song a strange, guttural allure, somewhat akin to the attraction we feel for horror movies. It’s not outrageous to think that sleaze n’ cheese could have major high art consonance— Brecht/ Weill (particularly the Threepenny Opera) had a penchant for such things too. What it can engender in the listener is a sense of morbid fascination. Yet the lyrics of “Sweet Surrender” chafe against this— having been written from a deep, dark place, they initiate a battle with the sleaze n’ cheese production. The war is a gruesome one, and neither side wins. But, in terms of pulling out all the stops to engender a reaction from the listener, “Sweet Surrender” is nonpareil in the rock canon.

The sound of guitar which opens the song is stomach-turning; two minor chords, processed by an effects box so that they sound like mud being churned. When the strings kick in for the second verse, the sense of sickliness deepens. It is these choppy strings, with the dive-bomb runs they do, which imparts the better part of the song’s sleaze n’ cheese effect. The song meanders in search of a structure, and never particularly finds one— Buckley exhorts, talks, yelps, and straightforwardly sings, which adds to the air of a misshapen construct. When Buckley does just emote, as on the final bridge, the result is exquisite— it gives the song its’ beauty quotient. The lurch the strings do at the song’s conclusion goes rather beyond “A Day in the Life”— instead of organized cacophony, this is the bottom level of sleaze— when it becomes deadly. None of this would be worth writing about if the result weren’t compelling— the aural equivalent of a train-wreck. Yet the song’s real arsenal is right there in the words. Buckley establishes the situation instantly— “Now you want to know the reason/ why I cheated on you?/ I had to be a hunter again/ this little man/ had to try to make love feel new again.” Buckley drops us in medias res into what could be seen as a soap opera, but is given quirks— a protagonist who has “to be a hunter,” worn out by the grind of a stable relationship. The unconventional detail of the protagonist feeling “little” (macho protocol often dictating that rock protagonists blow themselves up) adds to an impression of unusual candor, which is immediately rebuked by the cheesy strings.

The chorus, lyrically, is an exercise in the grotesque— “this flim-flam lover boy/ found him a flamingo/ and his flamingo/ showed him how to tango/ and when they tango’d/ it’d send their hearts a-flutter…” One irony of this situation is what Buckley’s motivation was in writing this. The songs from Greetings were, he felt, his last chance at commercial viability. But Buckley either misperceived what commercial was in 1972 or his perversity got the better of him. Still, the rest of the lyrics take pains to commit themselves to bare-nerved honesty. The second verse establishes a key detail— the woman in the scenario is cheating too— “now you’re gonna go out/ and get yourself a reputation/ but I’m gonna have to show you/ where to start.” Love devolved into absolute warfare is not as common in rock as might be supposed— “Under My Thumb” is close to this, maybe “Down by the River.” What’s unique about Buckley’s approach is that the threats and recriminations he issues are saturated not only with hatred of his lover and their situation but with self-hatred and an impulse towards self-abasement. The protagonist levels everything, including himself. All that’s left, at the end, is to “surrender to love,” yet there’s no indication of surrender on either side. When mixed into the stomach-turning music, the net result is either, depending on who’s listening, an absolute gross-out or a high water-mark of desperate candor. It’s not surprising that when the protagonist turns the vicious purgative again on himself, he goes to the heart of his own emotional inadequacy— “I’m just too cold, honey/ just too hard to care.” The problem is that the texture of the music belies this— it sounds like warm, boiling mud. He idealizes a version of love that could “heal the mess we made,” without mentioning the desire to stop cheating. So, he resigns himself to the fact that the situation “keeps going round and round/ you hurt me/ then I hurt you again.”

The central irony of the song’s lyrics is this— the protagonist evinces the desire to surrender to love, yet his language suggests that he is, in fact, surrendering to hatred and self-abasement. This is a failed protagonist par excellence, in a way that the protagonist of “Under My Thumb,” who is happy to celebrate rather than abase himself, is not. He is also more honest than Jagger’s protagonist by halves, and in many ways more compelling. In a sense, we may say that the kitschy musical elements are put in place to abase us, so that we join the circle of abasement. Why would we want to do this? Again, a tie could be made to Brecht— specifically, Brechtian alienation. This is the presentation of a protagonist (or character) who repels us, rather than inviting us to identify with him or her. This brings with it its’ own set of complications— if this figure really does want to “surrender to love,” he is not completely a villain. Many of the threads left hanging by the song are musical— as the strings screech into oblivion, the song just sputters out. The whole statement is equivocal, as was Buckley’s attitude towards his own commodity status. Greetings’ failure to sell certainly had something not only to do with Buckley’s perversity but with the uncompromising ethos with which he expressed his contradictions. Buckley’s body of work, as a whole, exudes an aura of something inchoate. There is something about “Sweet Surrender” itself that is inchoate— its’ strange proportions, what is honest versus what is exaggerated. All the same, Buckley seems more interesting, in 2011, than his singer-songwriter contemporaries; they of sentiments and comforting platitudes. Buckley’s sense of fragments beats their sense of wholes. “Sweet Surrender,” ultimately, seems like an experiment; the fusion of disparate and often incompatible elements. It courts and repels simultaneously. Buckley’s gutsiness is specifically American gutsiness— there is some naivete in it. He doesn’t always know where he’s going— he finds out when he gets there. The sacrifice, had he chose a predetermined, commercial path, would have been substantial, and a loss for us.