As you may have heard by now, Rod Stewart confirmed last week that all the surviving members of his old band, the Faces (including current Rolling Stone Ron Wood and former Who drummer Kenny Jones), are planning to reunite for at least a tour next summer.

Could this be a case of Rod redeeming himself? Well, perhaps. I did mention in an earlier post that the best thing Rod could do at this point in his career was record a quick album with Wood and a tight rhythm and horn section. This is probably the next best thing to that. It sounds, too, from Rod ’s quotes that he’s quite into this reunion idea; maybe he was even the driving force behind it.

But before you or I get too vibed about this, I do think it is necessary to temper everyone’s excitement. After all, the man is now in his 60s, more than 30 years past the last Faces recordings and tours. What will be heard in 2009 is simply not going to be more than a good approximation of what occurred in the early 1970s. While Rod can still hit the notes with the same regularity as his did back then, the tone, the texture, the feel and the soul are not going to be the same. The voice is there, but it’s changed, no buts about it. Anyone interested in seeing the outcome of this possible reunion has to — like most band reunions — hope for the best but expect much less. Better to be pleasantly surprised by what happens than to feel that what you’ve just experienced was yet another sad coda to a historic band and a waste of money.

A second point that needs to be considered is that, while Rod seems to be genuinely excited about this reunion, he has been genuinely excited about lots of other things in his musical career that haven’t turned out to be what we, as fans, wished for. In the last couple of decades we’ve heard very good things about albums like A Spanner in the Works or When We Were the New Boys, and while they may have been the most solid works he’s laid down in the studio during that period, they were far from the “returns to form”
that many Rod fans may have built them up to be. (more…)

To me, Todd Rundgren’s 1972 Something/Anything? is kind of the white Sign ‘O’ the Times. Like Prince’s masterwork, Rundgren’s is a sprawling, two disc, self-contained epic, bouncing from style to style and voice to voice, where pure pop pleasure press up against faux artiste spiritualism. Another thing they share is at least a couple of songs that bring a dash of creepy to the musical stew. For Prince, the weirdness surfaces via the inclusion of songs from an aborted album recorded by his female persona, Camille. In fact, the biggest hit single “U Got the Look,” is actually listed on Sign’s liner notes as a duet between Sheena Easton and Camille, not Prince.

But I’ve written about Prince just within the last couple of months, and enough ink has been spilled over the years on both His Purple Badness and this album in particular. There’s no joy in repetition of previous articles that have likely come before me. And besides, most anyone reading this is both familiar with Sign ‘O’ the Times and used to Prince’s weirdness. Rather, I’m here to focus on a couple of Rundgren’s more experimental (and creepy) tracks from the first disc of his oft-called magnum opus.

“The Day the Carousel Burnt Down” (download) starts out like a Carole King solo song, with a slow but jaunty electric piano line. It has a nice switch twice within the song from 4/4 to 3/4 time and back that feels natural and appropriate given the subject matter and arrangement.

At 1:56 at the first musical break, though, things start to get weird. The sounds in the right channel start to back off and shift to the left channel, then reverse back to the right. At 2:09, Rundgren starts to play with the tape speed slightly while he continues to make the music swirl from channel to channel–like a carousel going in a circle around its central musical source, only inverted. After a few rejoinders of the tag line, the second musical break begins in 3:20 with a another slight speed change. Then, around 3:35 a whooshing noise starts in the back, emulating a fire, and the speed changes becomes more distorted and pronounced. This continues on for another 20 seconds, until this madness sinks behind the original piano line that began the song, and plays itself out into the fade for the last half-minute. (more…)

Last week I talked about the Beatles’ 1968 masterpiece, The White Album; this week, I’m talking about the Rolling Stones’ masterpiece from the same year, Beggars Banquet. A good deal of credit for the album’s feel needs to go to its producer, the late Jimmy Miller. Banquet was actually one of the first albums he produced, and would be the first of the four consecutive records he would helm which also formed the peak of the band’s career (along with Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and Exile on Main Street), in the years proceeding Mick in Keith’s full transformation to the Glimmer Twins, and eventual full parody of themselves from the 1980s onward.

Back in 1968, though, the Stones were a different band, fully absorbed in American blues and country, and Miller helped generate a sound that played to those strengths. And actually, he helped create a sound that also played to their greatest weakness at the time: namely, that the band’s founder and multi-instrumentalist, Brian Jones, was in bad shape. Heavily into drugs by this point, Jones was as much a band liability as a contributor. Film footage of album sessions show him out of it at times, and limited to the most minimal levels of participation: slide guitar on one track, harmonica on three others, and a bit of keyboard here and there. Thus, Miller often had only a four-piece combo to work with, and the arrangements that could be brought out of them play directly into the final mix: Stripped down to something more acoustic, murky and lo-fi throughout much of the proceedings, the album sounds at times like it could have been recorded after hours at a Louisiana gin joint.

(An added serendipitous reason that the album may sound as menacing as it does is that it was originally mastered at a speed just slightly slower than it was recorded. This made the record in total only 30 seconds longer than when it was finally corrected for a CD re-release in 2002, but did set things just off-key enough that things would not seem quite “right” to the listener’s ears.) (more…)

1968’s The Beatles, aka “The White Album,” is the Beatles at their most frightening: the sound of drugs, of implosion, of tension and competition. Added to that are the numerous songs which present the band at their most menacing, loaded with echo and reverb; sound collages and mumbles; the sudden bursts of vocals from Yoko Ono on “The Continuing Adventures of Bungalow Bill” and “Birthday.” A primary example is the slash and burn of “Helter Skelter,” which leaves the listener on edge as it fades out and back in, then starts to fade out again, but rushes back with a final crash, followed by the most punk moment in the history of the band: Ringo’s scream of “I’ve got blisters on my fingers!” and a final guitar slash. This song is scary enough as it is — made even more so by the claim from Charles Manson that it contained secret messages that led him to order the Tate-La Bianca murders.

Then there’s “Revolution 9,” which really isn’t a song — it’s an experimental art piece — but is spooky enough as it is, with the seemingly endless swirl of moans, crowd noises, backwards tracks, and the monotonous repetition of “number nine.” Add the rumors that it contains a secret message — that if played backwards, the “number nine” becomes “turn me on, dead man” — and you’ve got more possible chills. (As for the “dead man” rumor: yeah, it sounds a bit like that, if that was specifically what you were listening for when you played it. Otherwise, nuh-uh.)

But the track that really gets me on “the White Album” is what follows “Helter Skelter”: a track by my favorite Beatle, George Harrison. “Long, Long, Long” is, for some critics, Harrison’s high point with the group: a languid, swirling love song — possibly to God. Both the composition and arrangement are effective at keeping the listener on edge: it opens with an acoustic guitar amped to sound almost sitar-like, and doubled with a Hammond organ playing slow, Gothic triplets through a Leslie speaker to give it a swirling effect. George starts singing, double-tracked with himself — almost in a whisper, and a little behind the chord, as if he’s caught up in prayer. Then….THWACK, Ringo’s drums come in, puncturing the quiet with rolls drenched in echo. The basic structure of the song plays out a second time, then producer Chris Thomas joins in with a piano in the more forceful bridge, as at least three Georges sing in unison, almost screaming the “Oh!”’s at the end of this portion, then switch back to the creepy placidity of the verses one final time. (more…)

I don’t think any other song scared me more as a child than “If You Could Read My Mind,” the moody ballad that became Gordon Lightfoot’s first self-sung hit in the United States (peaking at #5 in 1971). And I heard this song a lot: my father was a big folkie, and when I was a kid, this was still a regular staple on many FM radio stations. So, my indoctrination to this song was swift and total during these formative, psyche-building years. With that in mind, imagine hearing the lyrics to the first verse as a kid, especially at night:

If you could read my mind love, what a tale my thoughts could tell
Just like an old time movie, about a ghost from a wishin’ well
In a castle dark or a fortress strong, with chains upon my feet
You know that ghost is me
And I will never be set free, as long as I’m a ghost that you can’t see.

Holy. Crap.

Now, being the analytical young chap that I was (and still am), think about what my mind was trying to process here: The guy singing this song…is a ghost….chained up…..in the bottom of a well….and the well is in the middle of a dark (and likely abandoned) castle or fortress.

Add to that the sparse arrangement and production — the lightly finger-picked guitar, the rhythmic heartbeat of the bass, and the swirling strings, which move increasingly higher as each of the verses progress, ending almost as a ghostly whine that doubles with the stark dissolution of the lyrics — lyrics sung by a man whose voice had enough of a natural trill that if you were young, and thought about it enough, you could convince yourself was coming from the living dead. (more…)

With summer moving towards fall, and the greatest and creepiest holiday of the year now less than two months away, I thought I’d take a break from flogging the careers of bastards, and move onto another subject near and dear to my heart: Songs that unintentionally give one the creeps.

I’m sure if you’re like me, you have at least one childhood memory of sitting in a dark room listening to the radio. Suddenly, a song comes on that’s so weird, so dark, so strange, that you rush to turn the lights on and the radio off at the same time, for fear of losing your mind — or to ward off the beasts of hell that surely lurk within the song.

Of course, the song in question might be something by Gordon Lightfoot — but dammit, back then it was freakin’ scary, so lay off, man!

Anyway, these next few weeks, leading up to Halloween, I’m going to be giving you some of the most unintentionally creepy compositions that have burned themselves into my brain. I’d love you to use the comments sections to tell me about some of your own that you think I should cover.

So, let’s start things off with a bang — or a crash, if you’re talking about this group’s most popular song. The Shangri-Las might pack the most per-capita creepiness into their career than any other pop group (or at least girl group). Riding the early-’60s wave of both girl groups and teenager tragedy songs, the Shangri-Las’ first hit, “Remember (Walking in the Sand)”, provided a template for the rest of their career, using all the elements that would make them memorable: spoken lyrics, sound effects, and melodrama so rich it bordered on camp. These were mixed together with echo-drenched vocals that varied between emotive belts one second and almost zombie-like monotones the next, and all of it was produced via a dime-store recreation of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound courtesy of Brill Building oddball George “Shadow” Morton (so nicknamed because he had the habit of often disappearing for days without telling anyone where he was going). (more…)

Normally, this series takes on an artist who’s a bad person and whose “badness” has tempered his or her ability to make quality albums with consistency — in other words, those who have more or less stumbled onto a good album or two in their careers. If someone is too busy getting arrested, treating people like crap, letting his ego get in the way of other people having creative input, and spending his time punching gift horses in the mouth, it follows that his musical career will suffer. With this as my starting point, there shouldn’t be any write-up about Prince, namely because he’s remained generally successful for more than 25 years and was a superstar for most of the ’80s and the first half of the ’90s. On top of that, he put out a number of very good to excellent albums during that time, from Dirty Mind in 1980 to The Gold Experience in ‘95.

But then something struck me in the past week: it’s been more than ten years since Prince has put out anything really decent. I don’t agree with the gushing praise some people (I’m looking at you, All Music Guide) have given his last two albums — they’re paint-by-numbers bland. Maybe this is due to Prince getting older and “running out of things to say,” not to mention funky ways of saying it, but maybe it’s because his badness (as opposed to His Purple Badness) has finally caught up with him after all this time.

(more…)

Many artists put on emotional masks, and there are a multiplicity of reasons they do so. Some simply wish to distance the “real them” from the audience, in order to allow some semblance of their “true” nature to remain private. Others enjoy putting on an act, and feel that the creation of multiple personalities, fully controlled by them, is either an extension of their work, or perhaps just a way to mess with other people, or “give them what they want.” Others don’t start out with masks but grow to wear them, as the boundaries between what is internal and external blur, finally leaving an individual whose psyche is little different from what the gossip columnist or their own press agent claims them to be.

In most cases, the greatest danger that these masks, these falsehoods pose is to the artist him or herself. People who end up losing themselves in their character often end up emotionally distressed, spending their later years trying to get back to the time they lost, or they over-compensate, becoming a caricature of their public persona, as if to try harder to show that their problems are really just normalcy. We pity Michael Jackson, perhaps we hate him, but he isn’t changing our philosophies with his plastic surgeries. A few of us may on occasion ponder what will become of children raised by a parent like him; but we don’t think the mask he wears is really dangerous, even if he wants us to believe it is.

But then there are those who we really can’t tell are serious or not, and on top of that, who may, with their behavior, promulgate some of the worst tendencies among people. If they’re serious about that, that’s bad. If it’s just a put on, well, that’s possibly even worse. Take the example of Glenn Danzig, who has gained a reputation as diverse as his musical career. He’s been a godfather on the American punk and metal scenes. He’s been underground, and he’s been a sellout. He’s been seen as dead serious, and as either a master of irony or a put on. What he is — what he really is — is debatable, even after 25-plus years in the music business. But the fact that he has never sought to clarify some of the most hideous of his supposed tendencies makes him a classic candidate for this column. (more…)

At least in the mind of the man himself, Cat Scratch Fever is the work of the baddest mofo alive. A dude who will take your little ones crossbow hunting for bison in the surly woods of Michigan, take out a beaver or two with a semi-automatic, then serenade everyone around an open campfire with his bullet-deflecting rock and roll magic. To a great many more people, though — perhaps the majority of Americans, now that we no longer think fringe jackets and peach fuzz mustaches are de rigueur stylings for a job interview — The Nuge lies somewhere between a pathetic asshole that’s cool to make fun of, and that strange uncle that you don’t acknowledge is even a blood relation. A cursory glance at the man’s life instantly reveals the major levels of hypocrisy, idiocy, and in some cases, blatant criminality.

-Nugent is so cartoonish in his continued belief that “stoned, dirty, stinky hippies” and homosexuals are totally responsible for the ills of America that at times it seems that he could be a covert liberal in disguise as a Republican. He has stated that George W. Bush is not conservative enough, and that the problems the U.S. has had in Iraq are because we didn’t “Nagasaki them.” In August 2007, he threatened Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton at a concert, telling them to “suck on [his] machine gun.” He later directed a similar threat to both California senators, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein.

-The Nuge’s one admitted vice is women. When he’s not threatening to assassinate them, he’s fucking them. He likes a lot of them, and he likes them young. In fact, in order to once avoid likely statutory rape charges in 1978, he bought off the parents of his 17-year-old girlfriend, so that they would sign over the rights of legal guardianship to him, and he could continue to sleep with her without consequences. He also admitted a British newspaper in 2004 to cheating on his second wife and having a child out of wedlock with another woman in 1994. Of course, by the time he admitted to “being a prick” for his actions, he had already been sued twice by the mother of his child for child support. (more…)

Robbie Robertson’s recorded output with his legendary band — that is, The Band — and his solo career would seem like different beasts on the surface. While The Band was known for its exploration of the various forms of American roots music — folk, country, and rhythm and blues — his solo recordings have aimed for a more expansive sound, incorporating electronic instrumentation, prog-rock arrangements, and even dance remixes. But beyond that, Robertson’s solo career actually follows a similar level of output as The Band: two good albums (or in the case of The Band’s first two, great albums), followed by a few more middling works, and then absolutely nothing for at least a decade. Eleven years passed between The Last Waltz and Robbie Robertson, and it was ten years this March that Robertson’s most recent record (Contact From the Underworld of Red Boy) came out. Don’t expect that drought to be broken any time soon: The only times in the last few years that Robertson has been attached to music was to help oversee The Band’s 2005 retrospective box set, and to make an abbreviated appearance at Eric Clapton’s Crossroads guitar festival last year.

Robertson’s solo career also follows a similar pattern as to his time both within The Band, and after their breakup: the pattern of being a flaming jag-off. How much a jerk you believe Robertson to be is usually inversely proportional to how much you like his former Band-mate, Levon Helm, since most of the more juicy tales about Robertson are tied to the decades-long feud between the two men.

-Both blame the other for the suicide of The Band’s Richard Manuel. Robertson blames Helm because Helm supposedly dragged Manuel along on the sans-Robertson incarnation of The Band, putting more pressure on the depressed and alcoholic Manuel until he got to the breaking point and hung himself in his Florida hotel room during a 1986 tour. Helm blames Robertson for breaking up The Band via his unilateral decision, and leading Manuel to be in no financial position to to afford proper treatment (since Robertson controlled almost all the songwriting and publishing royalties), and contends that re-forming The Band actually allowed Manuel to survive longer, regardless of his tragic end coming on tour. Robertson would eulogize Manuel on the opening track of his first solo album, “Fallen Angel” (download). (more…)