Riding the Waves

Despite being there less then a year, I did have some fun in Manhattan. In the spring of ’99, I found myself with a new group of running buddies— NYU film majors, all set to graduate— and I was initiated into their way of life. It was luxuriant, and partly pot-based— they had their weed delivered to their respective doors, like a pizza. My main hinge to this crowd was Todd Smolar, who I had met in Washington Square Park. It was through Todd that I met Paul Levin and began recording at Buttons Sound at 45^th and 5^th. Todd lived on Leonard Street in Tribeca then, right next to the Knitting Factory. Todd, while an NYU undergrad, had been the singer for a series of bands. That spring, we wrote a bunch of material together. Weirdly, and from out of our stoned haze, what we churned out had the slick, commercialized feel of Sugar Ray and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Another song I wrote at Todd’s Leonard Street flat was Riding the Waves, from a small fragment Todd had. The first version of the song, recorded at Buttons Sound right then (and with my State College chum Jason Liebman also laying down guitar tracks), featured an extended intro resembling David Bowie’s Quicksand, from Hunky Dory. That original version is now lost, though it may still be in the Buttons Sound files. When I commuted from Philly to Manhattan to re-record the song in late ’99, which is what we have here, I made it more terse and more visceral, less abstracted. That session was just Paul Levin and I. I included this version on the first, 2000 version of Darkyr Sooner, and on the later versions as well.

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.