instant music
The combination of Blue Oyster Cult, Jimi Hendrix, and Lynyrd Skynyrd have lately had me mulling what would seem to be a timeless tension in the creative arts: planning it vs. winging it. Lynyrd Skynyrd was (in case you're young and smart and understandably nonplussed by the ongoing appeal of "Tuesday's Gone" and "Free Bird") a sort of minor musical Love Canal of its time, an environmental hazard of American life in the 1970s. I myself wasn't hogwild for them, but we teenagers back then had to inhale, especially in North Carolina. Driving around high with my buddy David I sure got a snootful of Lynyrd Skynyrd on the car cassette player. He adored them, and the Eagles too; I gamely tolerated both.
Well, the hazardous waste-disposal site that is my skull has never been scraped entirely clean of that goddamned "Tuesday's Gone," and last summer it was nagging me enough that I thought I'd buy some Skynyrd music to see how it sounded thirty-some years later. There's some pretty good stuff going on. The singer's good, super-natural and amiably rednecky (capable of getting a little cross but not burning one); the rhythm section is spirited and practiced -- short of the "imaginative and omnicompetent" stamp of musical excellence, but if you let guys like Kenny Aaronoff fix the standard then you're leaching joy from your life for no good reason. I find Pronounced Leh-nerd Skin-nerd easy enough on the ears, but a little tough on the face, into which the "production" style of the times relentlessly gets. I mean the finicky aural separation, and I mean the snappy arrangement stunts piled on so as to make the songs mesmerize a passing stoner like a motorcycle tricked out with wheel stripes and taillights airbrushed with rose-wielding skeletons in formalwear. I mean the controlled overdrive of the guitars -- no, I mean the controlled everything of the everything. I had mistakenly remembe red the group's sound on record as being somewhat carefree; turns out it's anything but. But as I say, I wasn't listening that intently to their music back way back when.
Evidently not just me but everyone is beset by this nostalgia for things they weren't crazy about in their original iteration. Concurrently, Baby Boomers have decreed that pop culture is the only culture, and whatever happens to strike the Billboard Top 200 is a rune to ponder and automatic historical-archive fodder. And so the commercial youth music of two generations ago drones on. My 12-year-old, God bless him, and help me, is listening to Blue Oyster Cult non-stop -- by choice. And my guitarist Grant is listening with scholastic attention to Jimi Hendrix, on assignment. He's joining the popular Chicago cover band Tributosaurus for their set of Hendrix covers this week, and the expectation of the band and its fans alike is that every noise circumstantially encoded on the officially released tracks -- each accidentally touched string and off-mike cough -- will be regurgitated with stunning fidelity. What a curious and paradoxical outcome: unbridled impulse meets hero-worship, shakes hands with supply and demand, is crushed!
Here, after that windy warm-up, comes the theoretical crux of my mulling. Hendrix was one of those special people who play beautifully without forethought. How much if any of this ability can be ascribed to the men of Blue Oyster Cult, whose first record appeared less than two years after Hendrix's death, is impossible to tell on the archived evidence, because in that brief interval the cultural presumptions of the record business had decisively tipped. The dead guitarist was providentially situated at the tail-end of a long wave of improvisation on commercial records. (Really, all records before MTV, big-label or independent, were commercial records -- made for profit and promoted mostly through radio play.) The value of off-the-cuff performance had plummeted by the early 1970s, when "Cities on Flame" and "Things Goin' On," with their scripted soloing and laboriously premeditated arrangements, were released.
At least they sound scripted to me, but if I'm misperceiving these two (and post-digitally, perceptions are permanently suspect) I think I'm still solid on the thesis. "Why would people stop playing whatever they felt like on records all of a sudden?" my son asked skeptically. I think the answer lies in a fateful crescendo of economics, technology, and attitudes. Consider the rise of the modern producer, and how the scope and prestige of his job evolved from, say, 1955 (Sam Phillips, Orrin Keepnews) to 1970 (Al Kooper, Arif Mardin). This evolution somewhat mirrors the change in the nature of the U.S. presidency between Coolidge and Obama -- low-metabolism servant of the state to full-blooded godhead. Or the change in parenting, from "go off somewhere and play for the afternoon" to micromanaging a dizzying ballet of music lessons and homework and social growth and non-dangerous sports. Producers have always been the grownups at the point of commercial music creation, but since the 1970s their duties have exploded: helping the drummer play more metronomically, psychologically massaging unstable divas, firing deadweight band members, judging and assembling innumerable individual and group performances into a deceptively seamless piece, superintending the sculpting of chaotic soundwaves into grand architectures of happily harmonious tones and impressive interlocking parts, outworking all others toward the ultimate goal -- the safe and ontime delivery of a product of undeniable commercial promise. The caliph-like modern producer's ancient company-man counterpart was not so glamorous or knowing. He didn't tell Nat King Cole what notes to play, or suggest to Mother Maybelle Carter that she vary her thumbpick pattern. Nor did he say to Dinah Shore, "All right, I think we've got enough to work with" and proceed to "comp" a master track from multiple performances. He didn't because first technology and then practicality disallowed it. Using musical performances as raw material for the assembly of a consumer item remained surprisingly unthinkable even after it was conceivable.
If Jimi was the end of the wave, Louis Armstrong was the earthquake that set it in motion. His revolutionary playing revitalized (see paragraph below) the idea of spontaneous composition and legitimized it for record buyers; in his wake came a splendid thirty-five years of electronically frozen music that was, when not improvised, richly studded with unplanned moments and moves. I'm sure most of the hallowed figures of this freakishly inventive period wouldn't have hesitated a moment to trade their many privations for the ability to click a mouse and erase an embarrassing squeak, or hear what a fellow instrumentalist halfway across the globe was up to -- but their privations are our riches. To me it's amazing that, after 30 and even 40 years of post-Armstrong industrial growth and expanding information, you can still hear so many records that sound so clearly unbusinesslike. Wasn't anybody thinking, "The logic of sneakers and automobiles applies here -- we need an ever-finer-tooled and unerringly consistent product -- need to satisfy not stymie demonstrated consumer expectations"? In the 1960s this logic was sinking in, but slowly. Chet Atkins came on his urbane, coolly assembled brand of recorded country music; Phil Spector and Berry Gordy and others minted and maintained their brands; George Martin judiciously tamed the Beatles. By the time the Boomers hit their recreational-spending prime, the reign of big budgets, all-knowing producers, and one-sound-at-a-time pastiche methodology was officially upon us; the Armstrong spirit was in eclipse.
I have a hunch the rise of printed sheet music had an artistic effect similar to the maturing markets and recording technologies of the mid-20th-century, that of devaluing improvisation, and enshrining as an ideal the scripted, standardized musical performance. It's hazy what musicians were up to before the 15th century (do any readers have good information?), but common sense suggests they were doing what hillbillies and other non-mainstreamers were doing through the turn of the 20th: playing in unofficial settings, making individualized works from commonly shared templates, dignifying the experience of their listeners by recasting it in vibrating, shapely song...and just brazenly making shit up. I guess you can see where my prejudice lies: I think that past a certain point a script is a straitjacket. That point for me is a ways before the moment when the guy who has smoked the most funny cigarettes gets a stray notion and a gleam in his eye and steps forward to play.
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11 comments
Friedrich Seeberger -expert in prehistoric music and what not.
Here's him playing a replica of 30,000 year old flute.
I don't know what the key is, but it's certainly pretty.
http://www.donsmaps.com/flutesound.html
"I think that past a certain point a script is a straitjacket."
Here's a slight cop-out to your assertion: It all depends on the song and who's singing it. For me, a good song stays good, and meaningful, and moving -- often despite the performance. There are some really awful "set it and forget it" George Jones productions that were just as assembled (albeit in real time) as a full-blown Pro-Tools pastiche. But it's still George Jones, and 8 times out of 10 it's still a great song and performance overall.
I'd point to your own catalog as some proof. "Leave it to a Loser" is a great homage, production-wise, to scripted '70s Nashville, but that song is still all you and all f-ing good. In a case like that, the script becomes a strength of the tune, but the song itself makes room for that to be the case.
But I think you're talking about interplay, live playing, the conversation musicians have with one another, and I agree that the script can often hinder that and prevent better overall performances, especially on record and in the way records are now produced. The irony there is that recordings have never been less expensive and easier to produce professionally now than ever...why not take the time to get it right or at least to play with it a little more?
(BTW, thanks again for the "Blue Oyster Culture on the Skids" reference in Madison the other night. It's still causing me to pop off a chuckle now and again.)
Interesting thoughts, Robbie. My main problem with improvisational music is that point where the 'wank threshold' is breached, and it becomes a self-indulgent show-off thing (Hendrix was certainly no stranger to this).
And I love the artistry of creating a 'song' fully intact in such a way that live rendition would be doomed to fail (as with the late Beatles recordings, Brian Wilson, etc).
As to those Skynyrd recordings, I've always considered them tightly-structured, yet live-in-the-studio exciting recordings, like early Led Zeppelin, or the 'Bollocks' Pistols album. Cleverly controlled anarchy, perhaps. Could they do it live? Skynyrd, I think, probably could (and from the little I've heard of their live shows from that time, could also pull off some nice improv interplay 'a la' Stills-Young, for many extended minutes).
I think you're almost certainly correct about the advance of printed music, and then recorded music as perhaps sounding the death-knell of improvisation in terms of mass audience expectation, but I don't think mass audience expectation is of terribly large concern to either of us. Music, before media insemination went global, was pretty limited, primitive and probably not listened to much.
Plus ca change!
Nice piece, the solo interlude went off on a strange tangent there in the middle, but thankfully you pulled it all back together by the last paragraph.
I can still hear David Grisman relate how one time Stephane Grapelli walked over to him during a song that allowed each band member to solo and ask, "What song are we playing?"
I don't think I know enough to even debate...
but could we add "Blue Skies" by the Allman Brothers to this.
Or maybe I should just shut my mouth.
Miles Davis: "Man, why you play so long?"
John Coltrane: "It took that long to get it all in."
P.S. Say hey to my brother Berwyn Bob.
When I was a young man trying to "master" my instrument, listening to and playing along with Skynyrd, The Eagles, Doobie Brothers, etc. was an important part of my musical growth. I was fortunate to have wide ranging tastes that included 10cc, Rush, Beatles, Pink Floyd, Steely Dan and oddball country flavored groups like The Ozark Mountain Daredevils, The Flying Burrito Brothers, and Poco. Sometimes I was drawn in by the production(yes I too inhaled, small town Saskatchewan Canada is similar to Robbie's roots), but ultimately what rose to the top for me was the song. As I progressed to playing in bands it was the norm to learn every song we covered note for note and as we played them live they sometimes evolved into somthing more, or at least different. The production became less important and the delivery and the expression of our own feelings for the song became everything. I eventually came to understand that most of the songs I loved could be stripped down and played simply on an acoustic guitar and it didn't dimish their power and in some cases increased it. Where I live now (Calgary, Alberta Canada)we have a decent radio station that becomes a great radio station each evening with a show called Night Moves by Alison Brock. The most common thing I shout out when listening to it is "How did she get into my record/CD collection?" She will play lots of Springsteen(mostly the acoustic stuff), Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, Lyle Lovett, and lots of local artists etc. What is frustrating and puzzling for this old timer(47) is that she will play all these great classic songs BUT NEW COVER VERSIONS OF THEM! Solsbury Hill, Mrs. Robinson, Big Yellow Taxi, It Ain't Me Babe and on and on it goes. Some of them are great but most of them are note for note recreations of the original. Of course what really annoys me is I want to hear the original but then I catch myself and think of all the young people tuning in to the station. They are thinking "Wow what a great song!", not "Boy I wonder what Peter Gabriel's version sounds like?" Maybe Robbie should cut and relese "Tuesday's Gone". Then when it's a hit I can complain not only about how great the original was but I can say "You should hear his original stuff, he's way better than that!"
p.s. I can't believe you aren't an Eagles fan, at least the early stuff before the cocaine took over.
(you should have seen what he wanted to leave in this article)
Live and on record, noodling, when it reaches, as LRH put it "the wank threshold" is painful for most mass (and this individual) audience(s). For me, Chris Thile exemplifies this - brilliant musican, but when he goes off on one (The Punch Brothers album...) it's music which limits its audience because the audience is the artist satisfying himself (there's the onanism again) and it's often embarrasing to watch people do that in public, to continue the metaphor. Now, when Mr Thile works within a structure and makes it creak at the seams (How to grow a woman from the ground) - that's when his genius shows; to me anyway.
On a similar, but literary note, we had the author Nigel Hinton in school to give a talk about his writing. I said that I'd used a passage from his novel "Buddy" to exemplify the use of descriptive verbs - he laughed, because he said that he didn't consciously write in that way - it just spilled out onto the page...but getting students to adopt that technique is the first step towards them breaking away and trying something different. Don't you have to have rules first before they're broken? Doesn't part of the excitement come from knowing that you're messing with stuff? (Or in my case, not being able to play (Cajun box) "properly" so you do you own thing and go with it where you can to the best of your ability....)
"You know, a lot of times I wish I’d never invented it (multitrack recording). It took the life out of music. Everything today is spotless and squeaky clean. There’s not one little mistake in music; they go back and fix it."
- Les Paul
But isn't "the wank threshold" something that was determined by previous to current day wanking?