Jetway

I’m eighteen minutes and forty six seconds into the film Hard Candy. So far, in a word, CREEPY. But somehow in the midst of watching a conversation between Patrick Wilson and Ellen Page the word “Jetway” popped into my head.

This is the perfect title for my first album. Done. A keeper. Finally, after years of thinking about phrases, strings of nouns and verbs to describe it, I’ve got it all in one single word. It’s about time.

It fits. I mean, I can tell you what it means to me, but they say it doesn’t matter what it means to the author, only to the reader, or in this case the listener. You’ll have to decide for yourself. But then, you always do.

More updates on the album once I put a band together and start rehearsing it. At this point, it’s words on a page and melodies in my mind.

Thanks for reading. Have a great rest of your day.

 

Oh mercy, mercy me…things ain’t what they used to be

I downloaded the new free iTunes song tonight. It’s called If U Leave and it’s by a singer named Musiq Soulchild. It also features Mary J. Blige. So, yeah, I haven’t really been listening to R & B since…well, since I was a kid really. I grew up listening to Motown on the radio and random LP’s – things like The Fifth Dimension and The Supremes Greatest Hits. Yes, I listened to vinyl as a kid, I’ve just dated myself. I have always loved Rhythm and Blues and Soul, ever since first hearing artists like Otis Redding, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin and Martha and The Vandellas at the age of six or seven. So hearing all of that incredible music left this indelible mark on my brain.

That was R&B to me – the classics. I never sought it out, it was kind of always there in the background, the soundtrack of my life. And I drifted through my phases of music. In junior high it was stuff like Heart, The Police, Pink Floyd. In high school I really got into Bob Marley and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and even Pearl Jam during the whole grunge explosion. In college I got way out there – art school will do that for you – and listened to Einsturzende Neubauten (New Exploding Buildings), more electronic stuff and really odd obscure things that I could find dirt cheap in the used racks at Amoeba Records in Berkeley. By the time I turned 21 I had heard and digested everything from A-ha to Frank Zappa. I hadn’t forgotten about R & B. It was still there, still being flipped to life when I dropped my quarters into the jukebox at my local diner. Still in the background of the city where I lived – but all of the current stuff stayed there because to me it was totally lacking in that quality that made it so amazing back when I was a kid.

I’d heard more of the vintage stuff along the way – working in record shops was a real treat – and I got to listen to early American blues, hits from the Chess Records vault and lots of the Stax collection. The more I heard of the classic Rhythm and Blues the more I was convinced that any of the singers coming up after about 1980 were just being fed into some kind of vast sonic grist mill. Like all major label music most of it was subject to the kind of pre-fabrication usually reserved for houses. It wasn’t that there weren’t good singers, people who had perfect pitch and adequate projection and sustain, it was just that the voices were accompanied by weak, really half-assed backing bands. No Funk Brothers here. No seasoned session players who could work a fretboard the way a great surfer can work a wave. Instead there were a couple of generations of producers and seemingly lazy musicians cranking out syncopated mediocrity. A grand parade of lifeless packaging to borrow from Peter Gabriel.

And hearing If U Leave just confirms my long-nagging suspicion – R&B is officially dead. Maybe it’s me, maybe I just don’t get it. Maybe I’m too old-school, too set in my ways, maybe I’m just too picky.

In college, I once sat through a two-hour class once where really all we did was watch a documentary about John Cage – the composer touted as being a god amongst the avant garde. Really, aside from the fact that John Cage was playful and clearly reaching for something, even with my willingness to try new things, I couldn’t get to like it. It was atonal, it was seemingly without tempo, or even a point. It wasn’t going anywhere, it simply came at you, like the cacophony of rush hour in Times Square that you get the moment you leave a car or bus. Sadly, Times Square has better resonance and melody than John Cage’s music.

And that’s how Rhythm and Blues is, lots of noise, well-produced, but totally without substance or weight. How can you listen to Otis Redding and not relate to what he is singing about? How can you hear Chain of Fools and not want to get on the floor and dance? I listened to If U Leave and thought – the voices are fine, good vocal technique, somewhat engaging, but the music is totally uninspired. Without the instruments to reinforce the vocals, you’d be better off with an a capella composition and in this case you’d wind up with an odd, struggling sort of duet that never really arrives anywhere. There doesn’t seem to be any emotional honesty left in R&B. I’m not saying the singers don’t have emotions, but the delivery is always the same – throw in some wavering phrases and dynamics and that crying out ending to each line in the chorus, make sure they are projecting well and sustaining the notes just so and you’ve got it – damn near every R&B song of the last thirty years.

Don’t get me wrong, Mary J. Blige and Musiq Soulchild are very good singers. So why the hell are they wasting their time lending their voices to tired phrasings and lazy accompaniments? The record labels it seems have given the listeners what they feel like producing and not necessarily what the listener wants to hear and it’s like the people buying the CD’s and digital downloads have just been programmed to think it’s good. There’s that psychological effect whereby you play something enough and eventually people will hum and sing along, it doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be repeated enough times. That isn’t to say there aren’t some outstanding singers out there – people like Jill Scott, Erykah Badu and Ben Harper spring to mind. But by and large from that sea of music, the Jill Scotts and Ben Harpers are like rogue waves and mostly what washes to shore is the becalmed and uneventful ripples of water that’s lacking in salt.

I remember a few years back – I think it was 2003, when I was living up in the Bay Area, I went to visit an associate of mine named “Bill”. Bill was a music producer responsible for some great R&B albums and he’d been in the business since the early seventies. After we finished our meeting I told him I wanted to play something for him because I thought he might like it. So I put on Room For Squares, the John Mayer album. We listened to a couple of songs and here’s the conversation that followed:

Bill: Who is this?
Me: This guy named John Mayer.
Bill: Tyler, I haven’t heard stuff like this in a long time. This is good R&B.
Me: It’s pretty amazing. I first heard him on the radio in Connecticut.
Bill: This guy can play and sing. This reminds me of old Stax songs.

I knew just what Bill meant. Even though you could easily place John Mayer in the pop section, all of his songs have the one quality that made the R&B of the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s so timeless:

They have soul.

 

It’s Official

So, I wasn’t sure how well I was doing at songwriting, but I recently sent a song (well, lyrics at least) to my friend D who’s a very talented poet. She responded by writing “Wow! I love the song.” Apparently, I’m on to something with this songwriting thing as D is very quick with criticism if something doesn’t work. So thanks again D. She also commented that the song was bluesy. I hadn’t thought of it as a blues tune before, but it could definitely work well as one. Based on D’s positive review and insight I am now officially working on my first album. It will be chock full of the music I love best – rock and roll, the blues, jazz and folk. I’m pretty stoked. Stay tuned for updates.

 

mixing pop and politics…

I was making one of those snazzy digital jukeboxes on playlist.com and that got me adding Billy Bragg songs and that made me realize that I’ve never written a blog about my love of Billy Bragg’s music. He’s my all-time favorite singer/songwriter.

I’ve been listening to his albums since I was about 13. That was when my parents and sister B and I went out to stay with my grandparents at their house on Long Island and I first heard Billy’s songs. My sister’s boyfriend P listened to lots of eclectic music and I slept up in the loft with him. I was on this old, dusty worn out mattress on the floor and he was sleeping in one of the twin beds that were shoved up against the wall. I couldn’t sleep and I looked up and noticed he had headphones on and was listening to something on a Sony Discman (for any youngsters who might be reading this there was actually a time before the iPod existed and your elders had to make due with such primitive technologies as cassette tapes, compact discs and vinyl records). I asked him what it was and he told me and offered the headphones to me. The player was cued up to the song A New Englandand I listened to it and I was hooked. It was raw, its was powerful. It was spare, just a voice and a guitar and above all else it was charged with brutal, honest emotion.

Like Elvis Costello, about whom Billy once said “He’s like Jackson Browne with attitude!”, and some other intelligent Brits, he has deftly combined songs about love with songs about the state of the world, both the English one and the one at large. He does it with ease, he does it with grace and he does it with an unmistakable style. He’s got wit, he’s got musicianship and he’s (at least in my humble opinion) one of the best songwriters around. He started off in a punk band called Riff Raff, but in that wave of bands that wanted to be the next Sex Pistols, Riff Raff was ill-fated and destined to go their separate ways. Lucky for me. His first two albums and EP have that straight ahead, simple, in-your-face punk feel to them, and are almost exclusively just him singing and playing guitar. Later on, he put together a full band and his sound mellowed and became more melodic and richer.

It’s also always inspiring to listen to Billy because he doesn’t just sing about changing the world he actually does his part to change it through projects like the Telco Living Wage Campaign. Not to mention the fact that 25 years on his music is still relevant. That’s the watermark of great music – it’s timeless. The song link below is a free download, so if for whatever reason you don’t want to download a song for free, but are curious about Billy Bragg, then go here instead:

Billy Bragg Official Site

Foundations/A New England Medley by Kate Nash and Billy Bragg

 

Need a ride to the show man?

I love music and I came across an envelope full of old concert ticket stubs, so I decided to post a list of all the shows I’ve seen (give or take a couple of Chump shows). Feel free to comment and tell me about some of your favorite shows.

1. Greenwich Village Folk Festival (first concert I ever went to): held at some auditorium on the NYU campus and featuring Suzanne Vega. My sister ‘T’ and her best friend ‘L’ took me to this show. Even at the tender age of 11 I was a dirty hippie.

2. Dave Matthews Band/Santana/The Roots: we were late getting to Giants Stadium so I missed Santana and The Roots, but DMB played a great show. The violinist played a solo that must have lasted 5 minutes and the drummer deftly beat his way around a huge kit.

3. Pink Floyd (1994 on the Division Bell Tour): FANFUCKINGTASTIC. My friend ‘R’, her ex-boyfriend and I got lost in the Bronx on the way to Yankee Stadium, got there minutes before they started playing and it seems as though that was Pink Floyd’s final tour. I’m still hoping they put out another album. So, David, Nick and Richard, if you’re reading this get on it.

4. Johnny Marr & The Healers: Bowery Ballroom, 2003, good set of atmospheric, sort of psychedelic rock from the former Smiths guitarist.

5. Billy Bragg and The Blokes: Mermaid Avenue Tour, Town Hall, 1999, Billy is my all-time favorite singer/songwriter and even though he had a cold and apologized for it, he performed his little heart out. Great show. Freedy Johnston opened for him and that was the first time I ever heard him perform.

6. Billy Bragg and The Blokes: Irving Plaza, 2002, Another great show, but then I’m awfully biased.

7. Social Distortion: right before Thanksgiving 2001 also at Irving Plaza. Not a huge Social D fan but they were fun to see live. Thanks to my friend Joel for taking me to that.

8. Bif Naked: Mercury Lounge, August, 1999, good music and a fun night in NYC.

9. G. Love & Special Sauce: back to Irving Plaza, July 1999, the second time I saw them, this time for the Philadelphonic tour. Good funky, bluesy music, oh and the concert was free because a marketing rep from Sony hooked me up with the tix.

10. The Who: an ampitheater in Camden, NJ, July 2000 with my buddy Joel. We pre-gamed with Grey Goose screwdrivers. Spot on greatest hits set. READY, STEADY, GO!

11. John Pizzarelli and Diana Krall: John Harms Center for the Arts, Englewood, NJ, March 2000, with my dad, who introduced me to jazz. Wonderful sets from both and at the end of Diana’s Elton John walked out on stage, totally unannounced, and they did a duet of Border Song

12. Morrissey: The Paramount Theater at MSG, September 1992 for the Your Arsenal Tour. Didn’t know most of the songs as I wasn’t a Moz fan yet, but thanks to my friend ‘J’ for taking me to that as it was a wonderful show.

13. Morrissey: Roseland Ballroom, February 2000. Awesome. He performed Smiths songs for the first time in years and by that point I was a huge Moz fan. ‘J’ and her ex took me to that one and it turned out my friend Joel had bought a ticket for that same date.

14. Elvis Costello w/The Imposters: NJPAC on my birthday in 2002. Hands down the best birthday present I’ve ever received. Thanks mom! Took my friend ‘J’ to make up for not taking her to the Johnny Marr show. The entire show was flawless.

15. H.O.R.D.E. Festival (Humans On Recreational Drugs Everywhere): August 1995. I’ve never taken an illegal drug in my life, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Blues Traveler, Ziggy Marley & The Melody Makers (the closest I’ll ever come to seeing Bob:(), The Black Crowes, G. Love & Special Sauce and Joan (nobody will walk to the stage to listen to me) Osborne. Sorry Joan, you were at the wrong booking I suppose. This show kicked ass all over the place. It was long before the Black Crowes broke up and Blues Traveler were tremendous.

16. Amos Lee: Some bar on Sunset in LA. thanks to my friend Noel for inviting me to go. Amos performed quite well and I shook Colin Hay’s hand and thanked him for his music.

17. Floetry: Bimbo’s 365 Club in San Francisco. A groovy blend of R&B, soul and hip-hop, without the bullshit gangsta rap. And they’ve got a really snappy name too.

18. Tito Puente & The Latin Jazz All-Stars: John Harms Center. Tito was like 80 at this point and still hitting the timbales like a 20 year old. Another great show with dad. Que Ritmo!

19. Dave Valentin & Hilton Ruiz: Iridium, a jazz club in NYC that looks like Dr. Seuss and Salvador Dali were the interior designers. Lovely flute and piano. Both my dad and I had a great time. Makes me realize I’ve never been to a concert with my mom.

20. Dave Brubeck Quartet (sadly not the original line-up): Central Park with my buddy Joel. Unbelievable. Dave was also about 80 at the time and he hasn’t lost any of his playing ability or musical genius. He was funny as well. He started off by saying “I’m not going to play the one song you all want to hear (obviously talking about Take Five). I’m sorry, I just don’t play that one anymore.”

21. Spacehog: Great American Music Hall for the Resident Alien tour. Ferocious. These guys could rock. Sadly, they suffered from the sophomore jinx and later disbanded.

22. Ben Folds Five: The Warfield in San Francisco for the Whatever and Ever Amen Tour. Great set. Ben was a madman on the piano and they ended with a medley that began with The Scorpions’ Rock You Like A Hurricane

23. The Who: San Jose Arena, circa 1997. They performed all of Quadrophenia. It was so perfect the term musical orgasm comes to mind.

24. Melissa Ferrick: The Bitter End in NYC. Good set. Not a fan of Melissa Ferrick, but a classic venue and a good night out with friends.

25. The Indigo Girls: Bucknell University Football Field. Throwing Muses opened up and I actually booed them. The Indigo Girls were great.

26. The Indigo Girls: PNC Bank Center, Holmdel, NJ. Another great set.

27. Jason Falkner: Maxwell’s in Hoboken, NJ. Good set, although I wasn’t really a Jason Falkner fan and the band was way too loud for the awful acoustics of the room.

28. Freedy Johnston: also at Maxwell’s. Wonderful. He and his guitarist covered Night And Day which works really well on slide guitar and the old Glenn Campbell tune Wichita Lineman.

29. Freedy Johnston and Josh Ritter: at Makor, the cultural center my dad used to run. Josh was great, as was Freedy who played Rocket Man on the piano. And I quote “I just started learning the piano, so if you were wondering why I didn’t use the pedals it’s because I don’t know what they do. That song was really hard to learn, I had to look up the chorus on the internet.”

30. The Ladykillers: The Rendezvous, a dive bar in Saugus, CA. Punkrockalicious. That’s a real word!

31. The Cosmic American Derelicts: Mexicali Blues, Teaneck, NJ. A little bit Bluegrass, a little bit rock, a whole lotta drinkin’ and a’ pickin’.

32. Forbidden Fruit: Geronimo’s, Teaneck, NJ. Irie. Ska, Funk, Reggae and one of my oldest friends Roland “Ro-Dog” Ramos on lead vocals and rhythm guitar.

33. Chump: saw them at some half rock club, half strip club in New Jersey. Not my cup of tea but my friend ‘R’ had a great time.

34. Guns N’ Roses Cover Band: forget their name but the lead singer had the Axl Rose snake dance down pat. Another show I went to with ‘R’. Pure 80’s nonsense.

35. NJPAC Festival: this was to commemorate the opening of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, NJ. Richie Havens, The Violent Femmes, John Hammond and Great Big Sea performed. We went for The Violent Femmes and Great Big Sea who both did a bang-up job. Why can’t I get just one kiss…

36. Great Big Sea: The Pontiac Grill on South Street in Philadelphia. Just about the best Modern Celtic band around. The PA system crapped out and they kept right on going. They even covered the REM song It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

37. The Outlaws?: Can’t remember the name of the band and that’s probably a good thing because they claimed to play jazz but it was atonal crap. Really the only bad show I’ve been to. This monstrosity occurred at Yoshi’s in Oakland, CA. Sorry dad, apparently they don’t make them like Dave Brubeck or Stan Getz anymore.

38. Al Green: The Gallo Winery in Mountainview, CA. You’ve never seen more white women pawing a black guy. Greatest hits tour, free admission, he sang like a champ considering it was out of doors and it was FREEZING.

39. The Stereoblasters: some bar in Oakland, CA. Great show. The crowd was diggin’ it. They loved Cap’n Davey and the gang.

40. The Stereoblasters: some C&W bar in Santa Rosa, CA. Rock solid. Great garage rock/blues tunes. Even better than the Oakland show, in part because I got to sit down.

41. Norah Jones and David Broza: Norah Jones sounded great, as did David Broza who is apparently the Bruce Springsteen of Israel. This was a memorial concert for someone who died, so the occasion was sad, but the music was uplifting. Thanks to my dad for bringing me along, since at that point I had a bit of a crush on Norah Jones.

42. Rattrap Bumpkin: The Continental in NYC. Tough to describe their sound but I guess I’d call it punk. Good set. I particularly liked the drumming.

43. Smashing Pumpkins and Garbage: My brother-in-law ‘A’ took me to this concert at the Cow Palace in San Francisco – December 1996. Rad. Garbage was promoting their eponymous debut and Smashing Pumpkins were promoting Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness, complete with projections of the Tonight, Tonight video behind them, you know the one that has the footage from the 1902 film Trip to the Moon by George Meiles.

44. The Stereoblasters: The Cave in LA. Good set, but it was a tiny club with bad acoustics.

45. Chris Ahlman: The Bear’s Lair, UC Berkeley. A good set, and hey even if it weren’t I’d say it was because I produced his first album. Chris always delivers though. A consummate singer/songwriter.

46. Crosby, Stills & Nash: Concord Pavillion, Concord, CA. Fantastic. Nothing short of transcendent. David Crosby had just recovered from many years of drug abuse and started off the evening by quoting Mark Twain -”The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” It could have been 1969 and for all the hippies in the crowd you might have thought it was.

47. The Coasters: Not sure if it counts, but The Coasters performed at my grandmother’s retirement party. But hey, seeing them perform Yakety Yak live must count for something.

48. The Willknots: Bottom Of The Hill, San Francisco. Not bad. Pop/punk in the vein of Green Day.

49. The Allman Brothers Band: not sure which year it was I saw them, roundabout 1998, but I went with my friend’s brother to the Beacon Theater in NYC and they put on a very good show. Naturally, it was long after Duane’s death and they were pushing a recent album, but musically they were tight and we had a good time.

50. Squeeze – I saw them back in ‘93 with The Smithereens at the WNEW 102.7 FM Christmas Show at the Beacon Theater in NYC. I’ve been a Squeeze fan since Babylon And On, their big 80’s album with the song Hourglass on it. You know, the one with the wacky chorus that goes “Take it to the bridge, throw it overboard, see if it can swim back up to the shore, no one’s in the house, everyone is out, all the lights are on and the blinds are down.” I didn’t really know any of The Smithereens songs, but they played a lively set. Squeeze rocked the house and for Tempted much to everyone’s delight, Paul Carrack walked out onto stage and sang his parts of the song. Ah, good old English pop.

51. Grant Lee Phillips – Got taken to see him at Bimbo’s 365 in San Francisco. Had only heard a couple of his songs before going, but he was awesome. A great performer and a really cool, mellow guy. We chatted with him after he got done playing. If you like clever, heartfelt singer-songwriters check out his album Mobilize.

 

I’d love to turn you on…

…to Suede, perhaps the most underrated British band of the last 20 years. I was first turned on to Suede in 1998 when I was working at a record store. My boss and I were talking about the bands we really loved and he said his current favorite was Suede. He told me they reminded him of Bowie (Bowie himself when asked about the similarity commented that he liked them a lot because they sounded like him) and that I should check them out.

I promptly found their albums in the rack and when I saw Dog Man Star I was intrigued by the title. I unwrapped it and put it on. This strange, powerful, atmospheric rock and roll shot out of the speakers. I was entranced. It was like nothing I’d ever heard. The lyrics were poetic but I had no idea what the singer was talking about, but it didn’t matter. The guitar, piano and drums seemed to be overlapped in this way that emphasized the dark things to come. In fact, it was their second album and the lyrics reflect the fact that at the time, Brett Anderson, the lead singer, was addicted to crack and heroin. Ah, the glamorous life of a pop star.

My favorite track on the album was and still is The Wild Ones. It starts with a bright, stark guitar melody, followed by an ethereal keyboard note and then Brett Anderson’s voice comes in bell clear and covered in emotion. The song is an entreaty to get a girl to stay – in bed, in the apartment, in his life. That was it, by track four I was a fan.

The most amazing thing about the band, aside from their skill as musicians and talent for songwriting is their total lack of popularity in the United States. They were lauded as being the band that saved pop music and became a household name in 1993 when they won the coveted Mercury Prize. Their name was mentioned in the same breath as Oasis, Blur and Pulp and they sold out clubs all over Europe, even touring as far away as Japan. Among collectors the Japanese pressings of their CD’s are considered to be commodities, as they featured extra songs not available on the UK or Australia pressings, plus the novelty of getting the liner notes in Japanese. I used to own one of these and it was worth every penny I spent.

They toured the U.S. three times, but the last time they came here was in 1997, a year before I even discovered them. Each trip through the states was brief, with only 14 shows here in ‘95. Clearly Sony, which distributed them had decided that Americans couldn’t really get behind a band that didn’t sound like The Beatles (Oasis) or The Beatles and The Kinks (Blur). In Sony’s opinion, I can only surmise, if you sounded like Bowie or had Morrissey’s dark sensibility and knack for roundabout lyrics, you were relegated to a handful of dates for the first half of your run as a band. Suede broke in 2003 but not after putting out 5 brilliant studio albums and garnering praise from fans and critics alike. All of their albums were in the Top 40 Charts in the UK, but never made it to the old Billboard. Here’s a nifty .jpg for ya. Enjoy.

 

i’m too hungry to think of a title

Got a present in the mail today. A card came in the mailbox and there was postage due. Very mysterious. I’d never received any parcels postage due before. So I drove down the street handed the clerk a quarter and when he passed me the envelope I saw the return address. It was a compact disc from my friend LG. Thanks LG! I’m listening to it right now and it’s pretty good. Very indie and very mellow. Nothing like friends who send mail. Especially when it’s new music. If you like the softer side of indie music, check out The Moldy Peaches. Cheers.