Mostly Yes

Anyone who has followed Yes for a long time — the band’s existence has spanned over four decades — has known about the changing lineups, members quitting and rejoining, feuds over naming rights, and vacillation between pop sellouts and attempts to recreate the magic of early-70s albums like Fragile and Close to the Edge.

For those and other reasons, I hadn’t paid much attention to the band for a while.  Yes was one of the least successful of the original A-list of prog-rock bands in making it past the 1970s.  Genesis’s wholehearted embrace of pop made them superstars; King Crimson stayed fresh and creative; ELP floundered and then just gave up.  Yes kept going… and going… and going.

One of the consequences of Yes’s insistent longevity has been the occasional appearance of bands with “Mostly Yes” personnel.  The first of these was in the early 80s, when vocalist Jon Anderson and keyboard player Rick Wakeman had left the band.  Their replacements were, respectively, Trevor Horn and Geoffrey Downes of the synthi-new-wave band Buggles (“Video Killed the Radio Star”). The sole studio album from this lineup, Drama, is now considered underrated: its cohesive band sound and energy level were Yes’s best since The Yes Album in 1971.

Recently I found two live albums from other “Mostly Yes” lineups that had some surprising elements.  One is An Evening of Yes Music Plus, a 1993 live album from the group that called itself Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe (ABWH) after rejecting alternative names like “The Affirmative” and “No.”  The lineup of Anderson, Bill Bruford on drums, Wakeman, and Steve Howe on guitar was responsible for the classic albums named above… along with bassist Chris Squire.  Squire held the legal rights to the Yes name and had his own version of the band based in LA.

As it turns out, An Evening of Yes Music Plus is quite possibly the best of the 12-count-em-12 live albums Yes released under its own moniker.  The difference can be summed up in two words: Bill Bruford.  Anderson and Howe were mostly content to re-create the tracks’ studio versions, while Rick Wakeman’s most interesting contribution was his cheeky solo piano intro to “Long Distance Runaround.”

Bruford played like it was 1989 (when the performance was recorded) instead of the early 70s.  His drumming style changed continuously from Yes’s beginnings in 1969 to forty years later when he retired from recording and performing.  It wasn’t just the Simmons electronic drums that he picked up in the 80s; his entire style evolved, and he gained new creative energy from stints in King Crimson as well as several avant-garde and jazz settings.  He brought all that to renditions of classic Yes material and thus made the songs fresh and vital.  These are also his only recorded live performances of songs from Close to the Edge, as he left Yes for Crimson just after recording that album.

Subsequently I heard Yes’s most recent live album, In the Present: Live from Lyon, a small-label release taken from a 2010 performance.  It was all oldies; no token would-be hit from some new album that fans didn’t care much about anyway.  Intriguingly, it included two tracks from Drama.

Steve Howe had been known to play songs live that he didn’t record in the studio, such as the mega-hit “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” which featured guitarist Trevor Rabin with Squire’s “LA” edition of the band.  But Anderson had always refused to sing anything from Drama live. Now, there he was, singing the Pink Floyd-ish “Machine Messiah” and the rocking “Tempus Fugit.”  He sounded fine.  Otherwise, these are desultory readings of classic tracks, including “Yours Is No Disgrace” from The Yes Album at a particularly draggy tempo.  The reading of “South Side of the Sky” from Fragile is not bad.

Then I Googled this album and found out the secret: it wasn’t Anderson singing after all.  The vocalist was Benoit David, the Canadian singer whom Yes had hired in 2009 from a Yes cover band to fill in during Anderson’s illness — an updated prog-rock version of the Judas Priest/Tim Owens story that led to the 2001 movie Rock Star.  I was really fooled.

Even after learning this, I still found it hard to believe that Anderson wasn’t singing.  As a mimic, Benoit David is better than Owens’s Rob Halford, Brian Howe’s Paul Rodgers (Bad Company), David Coverdale’s Robert Plant, and even JohnnyVan Zant’s Ronnie Van Zant in Lynyrd Skynyrd.

David stayed with the band for its ensuing studio album, Fly from Here, dividing his time between Yes and Mystery, his own prog band in Montreal.  On Fly from Here, he didn’t really sound like Anderson.  In fact, he sounded more like Trevor Horn.

A Manifesto for Music Exploration

I did two things related to music within the past few weeks: first, when Spotify launched in the United States, I immediately signed up for the Premium paid service.  I also read the book Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music, by Rob Young of The Wire magazine, a thorough and idiosyncratic look at British folk music.

Electric Eden covers a style of music I don’t know much about.  I know a handful of Fairport Convention albums, and I have a passing familiarity with the Strawbs, Pentangle, and Steeleye Span, but that’s about it.  The book made me want to explore this genre of, as Young calls it, “visionary” or “secret garden” music.

Not discover, but explore.

So I dove into Spotify and started exploring artists such as the Watersons and John Martyn, and the solo work of Sandy Denny and Maddy Prior.  This process worked to an extent, but it was neither efficient nor particularly satisfying.  To start with the obvious: the year given with each album was often that of some CD reissue, not the original, leaving me with little idea of the artist’s chronology.  And the list of “related artists” that these services show you say nothing about how they’re related.  This is particularly tricky with genre-blurring artists like Martyn and Fairport.

One of the biggest buzzwords in today’s digital music scene is “music discovery.”  Music discovery simply means listening to something you haven’t heard before; or at least its meaning has been reduced to that lowest common denominator.  The principal tool for music discovery in most of today’s digital music apps is the playlist.  For our purposes, there are three kinds of playlists: fixed, variable, and shared.

Fixed playlists are things like “stations” on Live365.com or the “top tracks” lists on artist pages in Rhapsody and other apps.  They’re just artist or genre anthologies, or they’re tantamount to Billboard charts with click-to-play links.  You know what’s in them, or at least you do once you’ve listened to them.

With variable playlists, you don’t know what you’re going to hear next.  Broadcast and satellite radio are variable-playlist media.  Variable playlists are generated by humans (as on radio) or automatically (as on services like Rhapsody), and sometimes you can customize them to your tastes, as with Pandora and similar apps.

The latest trend is shared playlists, where users can create them and publish them to the rest of the service’s user community.

Service developers like these types of playlists in increasing order by how I’ve listed them here, because they have increasing amounts of that quality so dear to startups and their venture investors: scalability.  That is, you can create more of them without much (or any) additional cost.  To use another silicon valley buzzword that’s currently teetering on the brink of cliche-dom: shared playlists crowdsource music discovery.

But how much do playlists help with music exploration?  Not so much.

The ultimate shared-playlist capability nowadays is Spotify’s.  Spotify’s application interface not only lets people create and publish playlists within the app, it lets them publish Spotify playlists anywhere at all.  There are now several different websites, like sharemyplaylists.com, that aren’t affiliated with Spotify but provide Spotify playlists.  At this writing, sharemyplaylists.com boasts over 50,000 of them.  At least some of them appear to be supplied by record labels.

This may be “scalable,” but it scales into a mess.  Abandon hope all ye who enter sites like sharemyplaylists.com.

What I’d like is someone sitting over my shoulder and telling me “if you like this song, try X.”  Or some way of helping me navigate from one artist or song to another based on specific characteristics.  The Music Genome Project (MGP) has this capability but, I’d have to say, keeps it from reaching its full potential by locking it up in the enormously popular Pandora music service (yes, I’m a paying member).

MGP creates lots of information — or in techie parlance, metadata — about relationships among songs.  Tim Westergren, the founder of MGP, describes it briefly here; in addition to the items in his description, MGP stores metadata about band members, so that Band X is recommended if you like Band Y because they had the same drummer, and so on.  Trained musicologists create the metadata in MGP the hard (i.e., non-scalable) way: by hand.  That’s why there are “only” about 800,000 songs in Pandora’s library, compared with over ten times that many in iTunes, Rhapsody, or Spotify — or other “custom radio” services like Last.fm and Slacker.  The latter boast of larger collections than Pandora, but there’s a reason why Pandora’s subscribership beats the others: it’s the quality of the metadata.

If MGP were to “open” its metadata scheme and let users (and app developers) navigate it according to relationship types, it would become more of a music exploration tool.  I like that song; let me see what other bands the guitarist played in.  Or: I like that song, let me see other downtempo ambient electronic music in major keys released during the same time period.  Or: I like that piece of chamber music, let me see what other woodwind quintets were written during the Baroque period.

Another type of tool that would lend itself well to music exploration is the “family tree,” as epitomized in Pete Frame’s series of books such as Pete Frame’s Complete Rock Family Trees.  Imagine a tool that turned Pete Frame’s family trees into clickable graphics that helped you explore a band like the Velvet Underground or a genre like Grunge.

Or, how about a tool that takes the text of a book like  Electric Eden, or the one I’m reading now, Paul Stump’s The Music’s All That Matters: A History of Progressive Rock (or, for that matter, blog posts and so on), analyzes the text, and creates not only a bunch of playlists for use in your favorite music app but also deduces relationships among the songs, albums, and artists.

There are lots of things that music services can do to make it easier to explore, not just discover, music.   It should be the obvious next thing to do in digital music services… if someone can find ways to make it scalable.

Remembering Queen, Sans Freddie

I just finished Mark Blake’s new book Is This the Real Life?: The Untold Story of Queen. One of the first rock concerts I ever saw was Queen at the Philadelphia Spectrum in 1976.  I was a big fan then, but like many Americans, I lost interest in Queen when they “went disco” with hits like “Another One Bites the Dust” in 1980.

Yet outside of the States, Queen got bigger and bigger.  When lead singer Freddie Mercury succumbed to AIDS in 1991, they had been in existence for 20 years and had become one of the biggest-selling acts in rock history (second only to the Beatles in the UK).

Queen is perhaps best known these days for two career-boosting events: the band’s show-stealing set at the Live Aid concert in 1985, and the use of their first mega-hit, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” in the movie “Wayne’s World” in 1992.  But as I traveled down Memory Lane with Queen while reading the book, I found a document that turns out to be more meaningful than either of those, let alone any of the myriad boxed sets and greatest-hits collections that have appeared since Freddie passed away.

The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert that the remaining band members staged the year after his death is one of the most significant live events in rock history, most closely paralleling The Band’s 1976 Last Waltz at Winterland.  The Freddie Tribute, which benefited his AIDS charity, took place in the UK’s Wembley Stadium and was seen by a billion people on television worldwide.  The three-hour affair featured a jaw-dropping list of artists who influenced or were influenced by Queen, playing Queen covers themselves or being backed by the remaining Queen members.

The concert was recorded and originally released on the long-gone Laser Disc format, then on VHS tape with lesser sound quality.  Eventually it was released as a DVD but with the first half of the concert missing, prompting howls of protest from reviewers and fans.   I really wanted to see the whole thing, so — having gotten rid of my VHS player years ago and never having owned a Laser Disc player — I turned to the dark side: YouTube.

It turns out that many of the important clips from the Mercury Tribute Concert are legally there, in decent quality, on YouTube’s Queen Channel.  But for the rest of it, you have to find the unauthorized camcorded clips that many fans have put up there… and that the remaining members of Queen have obviously let stay up there to help preserve Freddie’s legacy.  The quality of the user-contributed clips is as dubious as the provenance, but it’s all there, chopped up into less-than-ten-minute segments.

The main thing that struck me in watching these clips was the band members’ astuteness in picking other musicians to step in for Freddie’s vocals or cover the band’s tunes.  It all goes to show that regardless of Queen’s signature sound and internal cohesion as a band (20 years with no personnel changes and very few guest musicians), Queen has truly become part of the bedrock of modern music, by channeling its influences and by being a big influence on a younger generation of rockers.

The great choices vastly outnumber the ones that didn’t work.  James Hetfield of Metallica roars through the proto-thrash-metal “Stone Cold Crazy” from Sheer Heart Attack.  Annie Lennox of Eurythmics provides the right mix of elegance and decadence in duet with David Bowie on “Under Pressure.”  Both totally natural fits.

Led Zeppelin was a huge influence on Queen. The medley with Robert Plant  is pure genius: Plant sings Queen’s “Kashmir”-ish “Innuendo,” dropping in a couple of verses of the song that inspired it; then guitarist Brian May plays Jimmy Page on Zeppelin’s “Thank You”; then Plant and Queen segue into the rockabilly-tinged “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” recalling Plant’s own rockabilly foray with the Honeydrippers.

Another moment of inspiration is Elton John singing and playing the piano-based opening sequence of “Bohemian Rhapsody.”  As is the case when Queen performed the song live, the middle section with the zillion vocal harmonies is played from the recording.  But then Axl Rose comes out to snarl through the hard-rocking last section… and the unlikely pair of Axl and Elton sing together on the finale.

A reading of Mott the Hoople’s “All the Young Dudes,” with Mott’s Ian Hunter on vocals, is also poignant: it recalls Queen’s first US tour when they opened for Mott; it also features Bowie (the song’s author) on sax as well as Bowie/Mott guitar legend Mick Ronson on what turned out to be his final live performance before dying of cancer the following year.

The Queen covers by other bands hold up well, too.  Def Leppard gives the sleek rocker “Now I’m Here” a celebratory treatment, with Brian May stepping in to play the song’s chug-chug riff.  A Queen medley by Extreme shows Queen’s influence on the Aqua-Net-and-lipstick glam-metal scene of the late 80s.

The only vocal substitutions that don’t work are the Who’s Roger Daltrey on “I Want It All” and Axl Rose on “We Will Rock You.”  The finale, “We Are the Champions” (what else?), is sung by one of Freddie’s great influences: Liza Minnelli, who gives it the full Broadway treatment.  Some critics didn’t get this one, but as the cliche has it, Freddie would have wanted it that way.

The real heroes of the concert,of course, are the remaining band members, who played on most of the tunes.  But with Roger Taylor stuck behind his drum kit and bassist John Deacon standing silently at the back in his usual fashion, Queen’s ambassador to the world that night was guitarist Brian May — with his longtime trademarks: his handmade red guitar and massive billows of hair.  May cements his reputation as one of the all time great rock guitarists while dueling with the likes of Slash (Guns ‘n’ Roses) and Tony Iommi (Black Sabbath), and graciously ceding the spotlight to, and sharing emotional hugs with, the night’s many stars.   Queen may have been a chameleon of a band while it went through its varied musical phases and styles, but Brian May lives on as its rock ‘n’ roll heart.

Magma: Rézürrêkhtiön

Heard of concept albums?  Magma was a concept band.  Even though Magma threaded itself among the warp and weft of ultra-progressive rock in the early 1970s – King Crimson, Soft Machine, Gong, Henry Cow, and Frank Zappa – it labored in cultish obscurity, even among progressive rock fans.  This was the band to which you gravitated if you dug “21^st Century Schizoid Man” but thought it was too pop.

A group of French musicians formed the band that became Magma after John Coltrane’s death in 1967, having been inspired by the jazz legend to do something more fulfilling than their current gigs backing pop singers like Johnny Hallyday.  The leader was Christian Vander, a drummer of Polish Gypsy extraction who had studied with Chet Baker in Paris and was obsessed with Coltrane.  He started a commune, and the eight members developed their concept and music for several months before committing it to vinyl.

The band supposedly existed to tell the sci-fi story of the Utopian planet Kobaia, to which a group of intrepid Earthmen flee in the not-too-distant future as life on Earth becomes untenable.  The first set of albums tell the story – in Kobaian, a language that Vander invented, which sounds like a cross between German, Polish, and Klingon – and featured a surfeit of gratuitous diacritical marks long before heavy metal acts like Mötley Crüe.

The length of Magma’s “classic period” is a matter of honest debate among fans, but most say that the glory period started with the band’s second album, 1001^o Centigrades from 1971 and ended with 1976′s Udu Wudu.  Others narrow it to the three albums: Mekanik Destruktiw Kommandoh (1973), Kohntarkosz (1974), and Magma Live (1975), the latter being allowed in for its high proportion of original material and excellent sound quality.

Side one of  1001^o Centigrades established the band’s signature style, known as Zeuhl (pronounced either “Tsoil” or as a German would pronounce “Zöhl”) for the Kobaian word for “celestial music.”  It consisted of Carl Orff-style medievalist chanting put together with a jazzy rhythm section and influences from the likes of Stockhausen, Bartok, and eastern European folk music.  There were guitarists in the band, but they didn’t get solos.  The overall feel is heavily arranged doomy storm-trooper death march; instrumental solos are kept to a minimum.  The music is utterly unusual, nothing like progressive rock a la Yes, Genesis, or Pink Floyd, and most definitely an acquired taste.

Magma ran out of steam and fell out of favor, like most progressive rock, by the end of the 1970s.  Vander half-heartedly tried the pop sellout route (1984′s Merci) and then gave up.

Fast forward to the 2000s, after two things happened: the Magma “disapora” and other musicians picked up where Christian Vander left off and formed their own Zeuhl-influenced bands (Weidorje, Univers Zero, Ruins, Shub-Niggurath, and various others).  Then a few edgy alt-rock bands of the 1990s started to cover some of Magma’s shorter cuts, showing selective historical mining in the same way that other alt-rockers “found” Alex Chilton or Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd.

It was time to bring Magma back.  Vander did so, with his wife Stella on vocals, some young musicians from a band called Don’t Die that played Magma covers, and two children of the great bassist Bernard Paganotti from the glory period.  Magma achieved its resurrection without selling out (Genesis), phoning it in (Floyd), or releasing cardboard rehashes of their glory days (Yes).

Of the classic prog bands, only King Crimson produced recent music that retained the vitality and creativity of its 70s peak.  Yet while Crimson did it by redefining its sound for the current era, Magma resurrected the style for which it had become known and made it fresh through modern-day sound quality.  Magma’s music was so different from other bands’ that it never sounded “dated” and therefore wasn’t in need of  redefinition.

The first Magma comeback album was K.A. (Kohntarkosz Anteria), from 2004.  The material for this album was written before Kohntarkhosz in the mid-70s but was never recorded in its entirety at that time.  Lyrically it was supposed to be a prequel to Kohntarkosz.

K.A. comes across as an ecstatic space oratorio, complete with chants of “Allelujah!” The leaden feel of the original Zeuhl period is given a welcome facelift in the form of lighter, jazzier arrangements and far better sound quality.  Vander’s inspired drumming returns to his jazz roots. The third and final movement is especially intense and impressive.  The album only suffers from weak guitar and keyboard soloing, though new bassist Philippe Busssonet stands with the best Magma bassists over the years — Paganotti, Jannick Top, and Francis Moze — which is saying something.

Ëmëhntëhtt-Rê (2009) was released as a CD and as a DVD showing the sesssions and the music being developed. Much of the material here had appeared on Magma Live, Udu Wudu, and elsewhere, but Vander changed the arrangements and knitted the parts together into a suite.  Vander’s drumming and singing show the subtlety and maturity gained over thirty-plus years since the music was originally recorded.  If you can get past the language barrier (hint: don’t even bother listening to the words, just treat them as sounds), then Ëmëhntëhtt-Rê serves as a high-quality anthology of the band’s best material, and therefore an ideal entry point for newcomers into this absolutely unique and fascinating musical vision.

Frank Zappa’s Blunted Legacy

Yesterday I went to Zappa.com, the website of all things Frank Zappa, to look at what — if anything — is being done to make his music available to the digital generation.  Zappa.com and the rest of Zappa’s business interests are overseen by the Zappa Family Trust, headed by Frank’s widow Gail Sloatman Zappa.

I consider Frank Zappa to be one of the most underappreciated American musical geniuses of the twentieth century, a bandleader and composer who should be up there with the likes of Ellington, Davis, Mingus, Carter, and Copland.  But the best word to describe what the Zappa Family Trust is doing to preserve and spread his music for posterity is a Yiddish one: it’s a shanda.  For you German speakers out there, this is equivalent to Schande.  Roughly speaking, it’s a shame and an embarrassment.

Back when Rykodisc controlled Zappa’s recorded catalog, it was possible to buy Zappa’s music legally as DRM-free downloads on sites like eMusic.com.  Then when Warner Music Group acquired Rykodisc, they took all of the label’s music off those sites.  At the time, downloads were sold with DRM on sites like iTunes, but WMG did not make Zappa titles available there.  Nor did the company license Zappa’s music to subscription sites like Rhapsody and Napster.

Now, iTunes and other major music download sites are DRM-free. but Zappa’s catalog is nowhere to be found… legally.  On Zappa.com, all that’s available for digital download is a handful of newly-released concert recordings.  (There’s also a “Zappa radio” MP3 playlist for those with WinAmp or other web radio player apps, which plays all Zappa music at the mediocre bitrate of 64kbps.)

This is a travesty.  It prevents young people from discovering Zappa’s music and forces existing fans to choose between buying and ripping CDs (a lengthy, bothersome process) and obtaining the music from illegal sources.

Frank Zappa himself understood very well the necessity of competing with illegal sources.   He released a series called Beat the Boots, in which he sold known bootlegs — dubious sound quality and cover art included — so that he at least could profit from them instead of bootleggers doing so.  (The series is still available.)  Evidently, the Family Trust doesn’t share the paterfamilias‘s hard-won wisdom.

Furthermore, various Zappa “tribute bands” exist, many of which feature some of the large number of musicians who passed through Zappa’s band – a badge of honor indeed, given the technical complexity of his music as well as his reputation for fierce discipline as a bandleader.  But their ability to use Zappa’s name in their names or promotional materials is limited.  The best known of these bands is Project/Object.  Various contemporary classical outfits also perform his music alongside that of other contemporary classical icons.

These limitations may have something to do with the fact that the Zappa Family Trust has its own “official” Zappa tribute band, Zappa Plays Zappa, featuring Frank’s son Dweezil playing guitars from Frank’s collection as well as occasional guest appearances from former Zappa sidemen.   But worthy tribute acts such as the Ed Palermo Big Band (New York) and Le Bocal (France) must labor in the shadows and rely on word of mouth to get people to their performances.  This is not the case for the legions of Beatles, Stones, or Led Zeppelin tribute acts.

Finally, Zappa.com itself has the look and feel of a cheap amateur job.  Its site copy relies on cheap verbal Zappa clichés in a way that recalls Mad Magazine, and its e-commerce engine doesn’t work very well.  It’s a web 1.0 isolationist “strategy” in a web 2.0 era where Zappa should be everywhere online.

Despite the fact that some of Zappa’s music is not exactly fit for radio airplay or children under 18, the Family Trust should be doing much, much more to spread his legacy and introduce the “born digital” generation to his genius.  They could even (gasp) make more money in the process.

By the way, the digital download I purchased on Zappa.com (with some difficulty; the site’s PayPal interface doesn’t work) was a 1976 live set from Australia called FZ/OZ, featuring the band from the Zoot Allures album plus vocalist/reed player Napoleon Murphy Brock from Zappa’s previous band.  Though overly long on the cheap porn songs from Zappa’s mid-70s period, it does contain some sterling FZ guitar solos and great drumming from a very young Terry Bozzio.

De Alleman Broers

As I was walking to work one day with my favorite Pandora station playing in my earbuds, I heard a tune by the 1970s Dutch band Focus that I hadn’t heard in many years: “Answers? Questions! Questions? Answers!”, from the 1972 album Focus 3. Guitarist Jan Akkerman riffed and traded solos with keyboard player Thijs van Leer in a fourteen-minute jam.  It was wonderful.

Then it hit me: this was Holland’s answer to the Allman Brothers.  That’s silly, you might say; the Allman Brothers were (are) southern rock or jam-rock, and Focus was Euro-progressive rock.  But think about it: take the Allmans, swap out the (American) country influences for (European) classical, and you’ve got Focus.

Both bands were based around hard-hitting lead guitarists and singing organists who were all top-notch players.  (Van Leer wasn’t as much of a singer as Gregg Allman, but he did double on flute.)

Compare their best-known tunes.  Pretty, single-length instrumentals: the Allmans’ “Jessica,” Focus’s “Sylvia” (from Focus 3).  Mind-expanding album-side-long extravaganzas: “Whipping Post,” “Eruption” (from Moving Waves) — both featuring signature solos from the bands’ lead guitarists.  Modal jazz-blues jams: “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed”; “Answers? Questions!”.   Homages to their local roots: “Southbound”; “Elspeth of Nottingham” (from Focus 3).  Big hits: “Ramblin’ Man”; “Hocus Pocus” (from Moving Waves).

Moving Waves and the double-LP Focus 3 are the best of the bunch, particularly the former.  They are respectively the band’s second and third albums.  After that came a high-energy live set, At the Rainbow, followed by studio albums of decreasing quality after Akkerman lost interest and ultimately left the band.

The jam-band movement of this past decade offered some glimpses into the connection between prog-rock and jam bands; witness the music of bands like Phish and Umphrey’s McGee.  Anyone who listened to the Grateful Dead’s “The Other One” knows this.  Focus proves it.

Dub Side of the Moon

Like many, many people — including, supposedly, one out of every five households in the UK — I have a copy of Pink Floyd’s masterpiece Dark Side of the Moon. And like the vast majority of those people, I don’t listen to it much anymore.

Instead, I listen to an album called Dub Side of the Moon, by a NYC pickup group called the Easy Star All Stars. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this 2003 album: that’s right, this is a dub-reggae version of the Pink Floyd classic. It is also a masterpiece in its own right. It has been on the Billbaord (reggae) charts for 100 weeks, an echo (pun intended) of the original’s unequalled 724-week chart reign.

Dub Side of the Moon is not, not, not a cheap tribute album. It is not a group of well-known artists getting together to pay tribute to one of their influences (e.g., Two Rooms – Celebrating the Songs of Elton John & Bernie Taupin or Common Thread – The Songs of the Eagles), although it does feature well-known reggage and blues musicians like vocalist Ranking Joe, the harmony group Meditations, and guitarist Corey Harris. Nor is it the work of a smarmy parody act (Dread Zeppelin), nor is it a paint-by-numbers emulation (Beatlemania).

Dub Side of the Moon is, finally, the delivery of a pregnant idea. Dub music has a fair bit in common with progressive rock, and fans of the latter often share an affinity for the former. The spaciness, shifting textures, rhythmic juxtapositions, and emphasis on instrumentals over vocals are common to both. I remember listening to the productions of the UK-based dub wizard The Mad Professor in the early 1980s and thinking about how similar it sounded to British art-rock. I may have even segued from the Mad Professor into Floyd on my radio show back then.

On this album, the original material is treated with respect as it is transmogrified into dub language. Michael Goldwasser, the producer, was judicious in the elements he decided to change rather than emulate. For example, marijuana becomes part of the metaphor of paranoia that pervades the original album; hence the cash-register noises in “Money” are now the sounds of bong hits and coughing. David Gilmour’s soaring guitar solo in “Time” becomes a Ranking Joe toasting rap: “Time is the master, time can be a disaster.”

The sound quality of the album is amazing; it’s tailor made for iPods and earbuds, just as the original benefited from big clunky ear-surrounding headphones plugged into your stereo. It is also, allegedly, tailor made for listening while The Wizard of Oz plays on your VCR, just like the original.

I find myself listening to Dub Side of the Moon over and over again. I even saw the Easy Star All Stars perform it in its entirely at a downtown club a couple of years ago; the album has become so popular that the core group tours it internationally. Easy Star Records has followed with a Radiohead tribute called, of course, Radiodread.

Now, I have a request to the Easy Star All Stars: how about a dub version of a certain classic Yes album? One tune in particular cries out for the dub treatment. You could call it “And I and I.”

Postscript: the Easy Star All Stars released Dubber Side of the Moon, an album of remixes featuring such legendary dub producers as Scientist, Adrian Sherwood, and The Mad Professor, in October 2010.  It displaced Dub Side of the Moon after a Billboard reggae chart run of about 200 weeks.  I just listened to the new one.  Lots of wacky, spacy effects… but not as good as the “original.”

College Radio, 25 Years On

This past week, I went to the CMJ conference at NYU in NYC. Originally a gathering of college radio people, the CMJ Music Marathon is now a huge agglomeration of performances by new bands hoping to get noticed by record labels, radio music directors, promoters, and so on. Oh, yeah, and a conference with some panels. One of which, “2007: The Year in Tech”, had me as a panelist.

I spent the vast bulk of my college years at the radio station, WPRB in Princeton, NJ. Now I run the alumni board that oversees the station, but I’m not involved on a day-to-day basis. Two weeks ago, WPRB had its first ever on-air fund drive; I went down to help out, take phone calls, and even do my first radio show in over 12 years. That, combined with soaking up the atmosphere of CMJ, gave me a glimpse into the college radio scene nowadays.

CMJ — it originally stood for College Music Journal, now it’s just… CMJ — first appeared during my undergrad years of 1979-1983. For the first time ever, it gave college radio DJs an easy way of finding out what their peers at other college stations were playing. It was a great source of information. Around the same time, and not coincidentally, punk and new wave were emerging — and college stations were virtually the only ones that played that music. CMJ collected college radio playlists and produced charts, which record labels began to notice.

This had a major effect on the rock music industry. In fact, it was probably the biggest source of internal change until 1992, when automated SoundScan retail reports superseded retail managers’ payola-fueled “take our word for it” sales reports — resulting in the “sudden” vault of Grunge (Nirvana) past Urban Contemporary (Lionel Richie) to the top of the charts. With CMJ charts, record labels quickly understood why bands like the Police, Clash, U2, Talking Heads, and REM were selling healthily, and they took action: they signed bands, and the major record companies acquired punk and new wave labels like Stiff and Sire.

Over time, CMJ began to carve up the college radio sound into charts representing narrow — and basically trendoid — micro-segments like “American Stars & Bars.” These were very effective both in sending signals to college DJs about what’s hip and giving A&R people at record labels blueprints for their next signings.

CMJ was the serpent in the college radio Garden of Eden. The good news was that record labels finally began to take college stations seriously enough to provide them with decent record service (plus concert tickets and other bennies). The bad news was that college DJs began to look to their semi-weekly issues of CMJ to find out what they should play; as a result, music played on college radio began to homogenize, and much of the creativity got sucked out of the medium.

Nowadays, many college stations actually pride themselves on playing the CMJ Top 20. XM Satellite Radio even has a station called XMU, which plays it too — though with no blown segues and no announcers saying “ummm” and “uhhh.” Much of the music of the CMJ Top 20 sounds similar to what we played on college radio in the early-mid 80s. First it was called punk, then it was new wave, then it was alternative rock, then more simply alt-rock, and now it’s indie rock.

But it’s largely the same sounds. During a lunch break in the CMJ conference track, a band called La Laque played. They sang in French and had a female lead singer, but otherwise they might as well have been called Les Nouvelles Tetes Parlantes. The guitarist not only looked and jerked around stage like David Byrne, he even played the same vintage Fender Mustang guitar that Byrne played during the Talking Heads’ early days.

All in all, college radio today strikes me as much the same as it was 25 years ago. There are little differences. Some DJs plug their iPods into the studio mixing board instead of bringing a crate of albums in; this increases the chances of musical serendipity but decreases sound quality. The ubiquity of email, IM, and cell phones makes it easier to fit station management duties in with a class schedule, but it reduces station hanging-out time that leads to stronger commitment.

College radio perseveres because it has come to be identified closely with a type of music whose fans know is available there. Just as there was a rite of passage during my high-school days when you moved from Elton John to ELP and from Top 40 to progressive FM radio, today’s rite of passage from Avril Lavigne to Animal Collective often involves a college radio station (as well as various MySpace pages).

Of course, college radio doesn’t just play indie rock. It also perseveres because it offers two things that commercial radio does not. One is what Peter Gabriel has called a curatorial function: as the Internet makes music more ubiquitous and easier to get for free, the value is shifting to those who can help you discover music you don’t know but would like, or who can juxtapose different music in new and exciting ways.

In the 1960s and 70s, FM radio used to be a tastemaker. Now commercial radio is more of a taste reflector. One indie label guy I met at CMJ told me that his most successful artist, a folk-pop singer-songwriter, got her big break doing background music for TV, including the theme song for a prime time network series (I forget which one). Only now is commercial radio starting, slowly, to play her music. This is completely backwards from the way it used to be. College radio is virtually the only tastemaker left on broadcast radio.

The second is the human element. In commercial radio, with its automated music formats and generic, disembodied jocks, the human element has passed to talk radio — which partially explains its staggering rise from the fringes to the top during the last 10-15 years. College DJs are refreshingly, unabashedly, unapologetically human.

Many college radio people today talk about whether or how the Internet threatens the medium. The human element in radio is inherently non-scalable, and it’s what’s missing from net radio a la Live365.com. Many of the most successful college stations simulcast online. WPRB does this and got a significant number of pledges during its recent fund drive from Internet-only listeners.

Tastemaking is also not all that scalable online. The sheer volume of music-geek blogs, and the fact that most of them don’t last long before they are abandoned or discredited (as losers or as record-label shills), makes them a rather unreliable source. Recommendation engines like Pandora can be great but have significant limitations. College radio continues to emerge as a (user-)friendly, often reliable, and self-editing source of tastemaking information.

Back at the CMJ conference, someone from a new Internet-only college station asked a question to panelists: how can we get an FM license? My question to him was: why would you want to? He couldn’t give me an answer other than duh, it’s obvious. His lack of eloquence spoke volumes about the contiuning viability of college radio, even in the Internet age.

Deep Purple and Jethro Tull: Their "Other" Albums

Quick: name two early-70s albums by British hard rock bands with proggish tendencies that get played to death on classic rock radio. That’s right: Jethro Tull’s Aqualung (1971) and Deep Purple’s Machine Head (1972). Now: name any other album that either of those bands recorded.

Can’t do it? Not surprising. That’s the power that tightly formatted commercial radio has achieved over the past 20 years or so. No doubt that those albums were those bands’ best, but the overfamiliarity of tracks like “Smoke on the Water,” “Highway Star,” and “Space Truckin’” (Purple), and “Aqualung,” “Cross-Eyed Mary,” and “Locomotive Breath” (Tull) dull their value almost as if they were the advertising jingles that surround them.

Those two bands had other great albums. For Jethro Tull, my vote goes to Stand Up (1969), the band’s second LP. Aqualung, Tull’s fourth, was the first album that singer/flutist Ian Anderson dominated; the previous three were really band albums. The difference is readily apparent in the mix: Anderson’s vocals are less assertive and much less pretentious, and his flute is more of an ensemble instrument than a source of solos; Martin Barre’s guitar is more of a source of creativity in general, not just hooky lead lines.

Stand Up is a wonderfully eclectic yet unassuming collection of tunes. “New Day Yesterday,” the opener, features a heavy guitar riff pasted on top of an odd meter. “Nothing Is Easy” is swinging and jazzy, as is the album’s best-known track, “Bouree,” a reworking of Bach’s Bouree in E Minor. Other tunes like “Back to the Family” and “Fat Man” add light touches without being precious in the manner of Aqualung’s “Mother Goose.” Incidentally, Stand Up was Tull’s only UK No. 1 album.

Deep Purple started out with a different lineup than the one that recorded Machine Head, which is known as Deep Purple Mark II. But Mark II’s pre-Machine Head albums, Fireball and Deep Purple In Rock, were nothing special. Machine Head magically pulled all of the band’s raw materials together into a coherent style and milked it for almost all it was worth.

I say “almost” because the true excellence of this now-all-but-fogotten band (not even listed in the latest edition of the Rolling Stone Record Guide!) was onstage. Made In Japan was released in a hurry to the Japanese market in 1972 to capitalize on the breakaway success of Machine Head. Its popularity led the band’s label, EMI, to release it in the US and Europe as well.

Made In Japan is one of the greatest live rock albums of all time. Deep Purple plays for the crowd in Osaka as if its life depended on it. The album is guitarist Ritchie Blackmore’s crowning career achievement, and Jon Lord’s performance on organ — Jimmy Smith bluesy one moment, Mike Ratledge noisy the next — shows at least as much risk-taking experimentalism within the blues-rock format as Keith Emerson showed with The Nice and ELP. Roger Glover and Ian Paice pound away like crazy. Ian Gillain’s astounding shrieks show that he was most definitely not just a creature of studio artifice, and at times (such as during “Strange Kind of Woman”), he sounds like he is actually having fun.

Made In Japan‘s greatness derives from the fact that these were not just recreations of studio tracks from Machine Head and earlier albums. The extended improvs, many of them jousts between Blackmore and Lord in the time-honored tradition of jazz “cutting contests,” show true fireworks far more often than self-indulgence.
This is just one of those albums that must be listened to at ear-shattering volume or the entire point is lost.

Further evidence of Purple’s vitality as a live act is in the Mark II band’s reading of “Mandrake Root,” a track from the Mark I band’s 1968 debut album Shades of Deep Purple. Mark II really made this track its own on stage, though it doesn’t appear on Made In Japan. To get it, seek out the otherwise inferior In Concert, originally released in the early 1980s.

Ironically, Made In Japan was one of the first live albums released as “pure product” to capitalize on a band’s momentum, as opposed to The Allman Brothers at Fillmore East, the Grateful Dead’s Europe 72, and the Who’s Live at Leeds, which served to document those bands’ primacy as live acts. The pure-product greatest-hits live album became the rule after Made In Japan, give or take a few exceptions such as Cheap Trick at Budokan that prove it.

Frank Zappa’s Roxy Band

Frank Zappa’s prolific career as composer, arranger, guitarist, satirist, dada art conceptualist, producer, and record company entrepreneur spans a breathtaking array of American and European styles, often brought together in combinations through his own idiosyncratic filter.

Zappa first moved into commercial rock & roll music — relatively speaking — with his 1973 album Over-Nite Sensation. This was a collection of short songs about sexual deviants and other oddballs, like the dental floss farmer in “Montana,” which turned out to be Zappa’s first hit. Longtime fans cried sellout, while feminists were enraged.

Commercial-sounding rock would be Zappa’s primary mode of expression for much of the remainder of his career. The next album, Apostrophe (‘), featured the hit “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow” (with its “huskie wee-wee”) and the is-he-racist-or-is-he-not “Uncle Remus” in addition to brief gems liks “St. Alfonzo’s Pancake Breakfast” and “Excentrifugal Forz.”

Just as it seemed as though Zappa was descending irrecoverably into commercialism and cheap satire, he did something that saved his career trajectory for the next few years: he hired an absolutely killer band. The live Roxy & Elsewhere, from 1974, was the first document to feature the lineup of tuned-percussion virtuoso Ruth Underwood; reed player and manic vocalist Napoleon Murphy Brock; rhythm guitarist Jeff Simmons; the airy, jazzy keyboards and vocals of ex-Cannonball Adderley sideman George Duke; and the supple rhythm section of Tom Fowler on bass and Chester Thompson and Ralph Humphrey on drums. This band achieved an ideal balance of personal style with the ability to play Zappa’s daunting music flawlessly.

Roxy is a fine album, but the greatest achievement by this band is You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore – Vol. 2, one of the series of live albums that Zappa released in 1992, this one culled from a series of concerts that the band (minus Simmons and Humphrey) played in Helsinki. Where Zappa couldn’t rely on his audience’s command of the English language, he toned down some of the cheap humor and focused more on the music itself. The result was one of the best live progressive rock albums ever recorded, up there with Phil Manzanera’s 801 Live, Magma Live, and King Crimson’s Night Watch. The band rips through “serious” instrumentals like “RDNZL” and “T’Mershi Duween” along with pop tunes like “Village of the Sun,” theatrical showpieces like “Room Service,” and repertory favorites ranging from “Montana” back to “Uncle Meat.” The communication amongst the musicians is telepathic.

Zappa went into the studio with the Roxy band and produced his best studio album of the mid-70s, the unjustly overlooked One Size Fits All. This sparklingly-produced collection of songs includes “Inca Roads,” featuring one of Zappa’s most memorable guitar solos (pasted in from the aforementioned Helsinki concerts); the heavy-metal-ish “Florentine Pogen,” the two German lieder-influenced “Sofas,” and no cheap porn whatsoever. The programming, material, and playing make this one a standout among Zappa’s rock albums.

Fans of the Roxy lineup should also look for the DVD Frank Zappa: Dub Room Special, which contains clips of that lineup from a live TV special (as well as others of a later, less interesting band).