It is with that said that I turn to the subject of Jackson Browne, who is known in rock circles as the dashing, sensitive, and politically-oriented sage (or sex-god) of the Laurel Canyon music scene that emerged in the early 1970s and included contemporaries and co-writers such as members of the Eagles and J.D. Souther. The irony of his career as a sensitive artist (and sex-god) is the infamy he generated regarding his history with women. In fact, among those who recognize the name Jackson Browne and are not fans of his music, he is probably still known as “that guy who beat up Daryl Hannah”.

Now, this is one man’s opinion, but I happen to find Jackson Browne one of the most overrated artists who have had bestowed upon them the title of “legendary singer-songwriter”. The album I will refer to today is indeed very moving, filled will subtle yet excellent tunes, and does a good job at reflecting the personal turmoil that many younger idealists may have felt as the visions of the 1960s turned into the days of Watergate, nuclear paranoia, and the U.S. struggling to end Vietnam while “saving face” on the world’s stage. However, there are times on even this album that Browne comes off flat, with his empathy and worldview extending little past the end of his nose. This is the odd duality of Jackson Browne: he is most successful when either being extremely self-reflective, or going way outside himself and looking at social and world matters through a much more political viewpoint. When it comes to writing about the most popular subject matter in the history of rock music, however (love and personal relationships), Browne finds himself strangely lacking in his ability to pull that off, falling creatively behind all the other “great” male singer-songwriters who emerged around the same time (and who are now, like him, part of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame): Bruce Springsteen, Bob Seger, Tom Waits, James Taylor, even Billy Joel.

Instead, we get songs throughout his career where beautiful tunes belie what are, let’s face it, pretty damn sexist lyrics: Songs like “Rosie“, in which the protagonist’s girl is a rock groupie who’s going to sleep with the drummer after the concert, but it’s cool, because she wear’s the narrator’s ring, and will eventually come home to him (or it could just be about jerking off, which isn’t really any better–in fact, it could be worse, being both sexist and engaging in 12 year-old toilet humor). Or, on the other side of the coin, we get “Love Needs a Heart“, where Browne writes that “Maybe the hardest thing I’ve ever done / Was to walk away from you / Leaving behind the life that we’d begun / I split myself in two“. And why does he do this?: “But apart from all that I hope to find / Where’s the heart that’s been looking for mine? / I hope it finds me in time“.  So it seems to me that what Browne is admitting is something along the lines of: “Yeah, babe, I’ve got no complaints, but you know what? You’re not really rocking my boat anymore. It’s not that things are bad, it’s just time that I, y’know, started a relationship with someone on my current terms: one where a woman comes up to me and says ‘Jackson Browne: you’re the man I’ve been looking for. Let me worship you like the soft-rock God you are.’”

Even his most successful love song of all time (in terms of chart success), “Somebody’s Baby”, a rather straightforward pop song in terms of lyric and arrangement, comes off a bit icky when you look at it under the magnifying glass. The vagueness of the lyrics could lead one to believe the narrator is chasing a girl out of his league, a popular girl, a girl who ‘s popular specifically because she sleeps around, or an actual prostitute. The fact that the song was composed for the soundtrack of “Fast Times At Ridgemont High”, whose plot is sex drenched to say the least, could lead one to conclude that Browne’s intentions within the song are more lascivious than they may seem at first glance.

In truth. the best Browne compositions about love are not about the feeling of finding love, or being in love-things which refer to love as something tangible, involving togetherness, romance, security, etc.-but about either searching for it (usually while fleeing from another person), or talking about it in terms of its illusions: how it leads one to believe things about another person that aren’t true. It’s love as a negative trope; as the representation for philosophical, internalized problems that likely will not come to resolution (at least, not in the course of the song). And while that, yes, can lead to some great lyrics, and great songs when well matched to the right tune, it still bespeaks of a very cynical attitude towards life, and of relations between people as at best temporal, and often illusory, which really sounds depressing, doesn’t it?

So why does it seem that to me Browne doesn’t appear to have a great ability to write the types of love songs the way his 70s brethren do? It is possible that his notorious history with women might play a part.

Right at the time Jackson Browne’s first album came out in 1972, he started a relationship with his tourmate, Joni Mitchell. In Sheila Weller’s book Girls Like Us, it’s reported that Browne dissed Mitchell onstage one night, and then hit her during a fight they had after the show (407). Then, while still dating Joni, he took up with his future first wife, the actress Phyllis Major. Devastated, Mitchell suffered a breakdown one night after Browne said he would come over to her apartment, but never did. According to Weller, Mitchell attempted suicide by downing pills, cutting herself, and hurling herself against a wall. Eventually, she was rescued by the head of her label, David Geffen. (408) The most that Browne has apparently commented on all this was to state in 1994 that Mitchell was a “troubled person” who had “never gotten over” him. (Weller, 412)

Browne would have a son with Major in November 1973. And while Jackson “ended up marrying her–basically because she was having his baby.” (Bego, 70), he actually waited to marry her until December 1975, the same month she attempted suicide with an overdose of pills she had stolen piecemeal from her and Browne’s immediate circles. (Weller, 410) This was actually the second suicide attempt during her life, though apparently not many people knew about the first one back in 1966, when (while dating Keith Richards) she attempted to OD on LSD. A few months later, on March 25, 1976, while Browne was in the studio, Major succeeded in killing herself with other pills she had had delivered to their house.

Knowing these facts, I found it a bit strange that in all my reading on Jackson Browne, little is written about this point in his life that goes beyond his trying to record The Pretender, and then stating he was devastated by her suicide. (Wiseman; quoted in Bego, 92) There isn’t really anything that talks about the state of Browne and Major’s relationship around the time of her death, nor has anyone questioned why Browne would leave a woman who he knew attempted suicide just three months earlier alone with his two year old (though by the time of her death, Major had hired a babysitter). The most said about all this is by Barney Hoskyns’ in his book on California Rock Hotel California, in which he states certain songs on The Pretender “make clear [that] relations between the couple were already frought” by the time she took her life. (247)

Browne would marry again in 1981 and have a second son. That marriage ended in divorce two years later, around the same time Browne began a relationship with the actress Daryl Hannah. In September 1992, though, problematic relationship patterns seemed to resurface when Hannah accused Browne of beating her up. The police were called, but no charges were pressed. The police department even released a statement that said no assault took place. However, soon after, a photo of Hannah appeared on the cover of the National Enquirer showing the actress with a black eye. Over the following years, there has been a lot of back and forth about what really did happen: A letter in US magazine from Hannah’s uncle stating he was at the hospital with her and witnessed her injuries. Then, a denial by Browne (with intimations that anything physical that appeared on her were self-caused), and possibly even by Hannah herself years later [1]. John F. Kennedy Jr. (another of Hannah’s ex-boyfriends) stated that Hannah was not beaten, and given to dramatic displays. One person who obviously did not support Browne’s side was Mitchell, who wrote “Not to Blame” about domestic abuse for her 1994 album Turbulent Indigo [2], barely covering up that the majority of the song is about Browne.

Having said all that, we now turn to Browne’s masterpiece, 1974′s Late for the Sky, which is a perfect expression of the best of Browne’s writing style: the balladeer and the observer; the personal philosopher and societal critic.  Perhaps the album’s high point comes in the album’s second song, “Fountain of Sorrow”. Though it uses Browne’s seemingly standard trope of love as more of a negative when spoken of in the present tense:

But when you see through love’s illusions, there lies the danger
And your perfect lover just looks like a perfect fool

Browne actually states that the search for the “greener grass” (the type of thing his lyrics seem to support in “Love Needs a Heart”, which came out three years after this) can be as damaging as the illusions that wrecked previous relationships, leading to the creation of greater sorrows:

So you go running off in search of a perfect stranger
While the loneliness seems to spring from your life
Like a fountain from a pool

A similar sentiment (and lyrics) run through the opening title track:

You never knew what I loved in you
I don’t know what you loved in me
Maybe the picture of somebody you were hoping I might be

If this seems like a “damned if you do”, damned if you don’t kind of attitude…yeah, it kind of is. But that’s really what Late for the Sky is trying to say: it’s 1974, and things pretty much suck. Much like Elvis Costello would do about five years later with Armed Forces, Browne combines the personal with the political, though in a much (much) more subtle way than Costello does. Thus, in “Farther On“, Browne will move forward “with my maps and faith in the distance”, even though he’s spent the majority of the song talking about how nothing really has come of his previous “schemes” and that the things that drove him further in the past no longer exist as he’s grown older. Here, “faith” is not a belief in something higher, but an almost tragic need to believe that things get better in the long term, even after failing repeatedly. It is a very solid metaphor for the state of an America which within the next few months would see the president resign in scandal, which in turns leads to its first president not elected by any voting body, while continuing the final pullout from probably the first war they truly lost, and on top of that was heading into an economic malaise that would last the rest of the decade. That is, “faith in the distance” is a necessary tool to keep people going, even when the relationship (or society) they were accustomed to or believed in broke apart and left illusions in its wake.

While the album does still tend to lag a bit, with the length of some of its songs and its overall ballad-heaviness, Browne succeeds here more than on any of his other albums because he sticks to his strengths (e.g. not letting icky or sexist wording ruin the talk of relationships), maintains a strong consistency in both message and material throughout while letting a bit of light shine through the general darkness (the cover is a very good metaphor for the tone of the album), and remains subtle throughout, not giving in to the preachy tone that tended to needlessly date or denigrate later works.

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As a final note to this article I should point out that Jackson Browne has been in a rather low-key relationship for about the last fifteen years with the same woman: artist and environmental activist Dianna Cohen. There have been no reports of problems in this, his longest relationship to date, unlike like the ones previously mentioned. This would seem to hopefully bespeak a permanent change in Browne’s history with the opposite sex, and perhaps his attitude about love and relationships in general. Coincidentally (or ironically), this relationship has coincided with the slowest output of new material in his life, with only three albums released in the last fifteen years. What one may have to do with the other (if anything) is anyone’s guess.

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[1] I haven’t found a second source to corroborate the post I read which said she has now stated that Browne did not hit her. That doesn’t mean she didn’t say that, I was just unable to turn up any additional sources that quote her backing off her 1992 accusations.

[2] Mitchell’s final masterpiece. Buy it. Now.

Sources:

Bego, Mark. (2005). Jackson Browne: His Life and Music. New York: Citadel Press.

Hoskyns, Barney. (2006). Hotel California: The True-Life Adventures of Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Mitchell, Taylor, Browne, Ronstadt, Geffen, the Eagles, and Their Many Friends. New York: Wiley.

Weller, Sheila. (2008). Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon–and the Journey of a Generation. New York: Atria Books.

Wiseman, Rich. (1982). Jackson Browne: The Story of a Holdout. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Robertson’s story has already been detailed in an earlier entry in this series. As with Fogerty, most of the crap that can be be laid at his feet arose from him acting as default manager and voting bloc of one for Credence Clearwater Revival (or CCR for short). With no business background, Fogerty negotiated what bandmate Stu Cook (who had a degree in business) called “the worst record deal of any major American recording artist” with their label Fantasy Records, run by Saul Zaentz. It was this contract that became a touchstone for a band feud that caused John’s brother Tom to quit CCR in 1971 and become estranged from his brother pretty much for the rest of his life (Tom died of AIDS in 1990 after contracting HIV via a blood transfusion).

The band also lost a great deal of future income when John used his solo veto power to have themselves removed from the Woodstock film and soundtrack. While Creedence was one of the headliners of the three-day festival, John was unhappy with the sound of their set, the early time they went on, and the underwhelming response from a sleepy crowd who had been further lulled by a long set from the previous band, the Grateful Dead. CCR’s Woodstock set has become a footnote in time, as evidence of their appearance didn’t make it to the general public until a deluxe set of the movie and soundtrack were released for its 25th anniversary in 1994.

The year after Tom Fogerty left CCR, Creedence put out their final album, Mardi Gras, which in itself was greatly hampered by Fogerty’s dissatisfaction with the Fantasy Records contract. After being asked over the years by his bandmates to be allowed more voice in the band’s music decisions, he went from one extreme to another, and flat out told them that they would each have to write and sing a third of the next album themselves, with no creative input from him, and Fogerty only playing rhythm guitar. If they didn’t accept that all or nothing offer, he would quit the band. In a way, Fogerty was breaking up the band in forcing them to make a record that really wasn’t a true CCR album; but by framing the decision as his bandmates’, he seemingly was able to avoid blame and responsibility when the resulting album and tour stiffed, tensions continued to escalate, and the band officially called it quits at the end of 1972.

Due to the horrible Fantasy contract that Fogerty signed off on, though, John still owed the label eight more albums after the band dissolved. Fogerty was able to stomach making one more, but refused to create the other seven. Eventually, Asylum Records bought out Fogerty’s contract for one million dollars. By separating from Fantasy Records, though, which was assigned publishing rights for the songs Fogerty wrote while recording for them, Fogerty voided his own publishing rights to the songs. This became a crucial sticking point–not just in Fogerty’s craw, but in his career. Due to his ongoing hatred for Saul Zaentz and Fantasy Records, Fogerty refused to play any Creedence songs during his 1985 and 1986 tours, much to the dismay and sometimes anger of the crowd.

As an aside, it should be noted that as a “reward” to Asylum records and their founder, David Geffen, for spending seven figures to get him away from Zaentz, Fogerty gave them the grand total of one album before declaring that he had writer’s block over the financial hassles of the CCR breakup and his Fantasy hassles, and took the next nine years off. Mind you, Fogerty said this in 1976, four years after the CCR breakup, and more than a year after joining Asylum. Additionally, regardless of the publishing rights, as the sole writer of the CCR hits, Fogerty obviously was able to still get paid enough to (let me repeat) take nine years off from the music industry.

Finally, Fogerty’s pettiness towards his former bandmates continues to this day. Seeing the rest of CCR as siding with Fantasy and Zaentz by not actively trying to help him out of his contract problems (the contract that he made them sign), Fogerty remained estranged from his brother Tom until the latter’s passing, meeting with him on his deathbed, but apparently not willing to reconcile with him because of Tom’s friendship with Zaentz. Then, three years later, when CCR was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Fogerty refused to play with Doug Clifford and Stu Cook at the ceremony, instead using session musicians to back him (much like, to bring this full circle, Robbie Robertson not playing with Levon Helm at The Band’s Hall of Fame induction ceremony).

Fogerty has spent much of his post CCR musical life distancing himself from that band for various reasons. But while most of that work is usually received (at the time) by many rock critics as “a return to greatness,” upon further reflection, much of it seems quite passionless and middling; more the work of someone influenced by Fogerty rather than the man himself. Ironically (or perhaps not so much), his greatest true critical and commercial success as a solo artist came with the album Centerfield, which played nostalgically upon the sounds and memories of Creedence. So much so, in fact, that the first single (and top ten hit) “The Old Man Down the Road” led to a lawsuit from Fantasy Records that claimed Fogerty had simply put new words over the CCR song “Run Through the Jungle.”  Fantasy vs. Fogerty eventually made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, which  ruled that Fogerty did not plagiarize himself.

Of course, Fogerty could have probably avoided the legal trouble had he not decided to antagonize Saul Zaentz directly in the songs “Mr. Greed” and “Zanz Can’t Danz,” the latter of which portrays the Fantasy Records chief as a pickpocketing pig. “Zanz” was changed to “Vanz” in later copies of the record after Zaentz threatened yet another lawsuit, most likely this time for slander.

While “The Old Man Down the Road” was originally the biggest hit off the record, it is the title track that remains in the public consciousness a quarter century later, due to it being played at numerous major and minor league baseball stadiums throughout the years. Starting off with a pile of overdubbed synth claps (obviously trying to mimic the noise of the crowd), followed by the familiar twang of Fogerty’s guitar lines, the song is a light, breezy ode to the “national pasttime,” from the perspective of what appears to be Fogerty singing as his younger self (“put me in, Coach”), as the most recent player mentioned in the lyrics is Willie Mays, whose peak playing days came when Fogerty would have been between the ages of nine and 15. The sense of nostalgia extends even deeper, as the song’s first verse cribs two lines from Chuck Berry’s 1956 hit “Brown Eyed Handsome Man.”

Perhaps the high point of the album, though, (at least for me) is one of the other singles, “Rock & Roll Girls,” another slice of “instant nostalgia” that you swear sounds like a dozen other songs that you can’t quite remember but are on the tip of your tongue. With a sing-along chorus, searing sax solo, and a rawness to Fogerty’s vocal that has rarely been heard since, it may be the great “lost” song in his canon.

As mentioned in the first paragraph, the problems that have befallen Robbie Robertson as a solo artist parallel Fogerty’s. Fogerty, due to a combination of anger and a need to distance himself from his past, has spent most of his time since Creedence putting out records that do not play to his main strength as a writer and musician who combined the blues and roots sounds and feel associated with New Orleans with the pop sensibilities and folk influences of late ’60s San Francisco. As Fogerty moved away from this niche, incorporating more straight ahead rock, more country, more what have you, he became no different from a number of other lesser-level retro-rockers, like Dave Edmunds or The Blasters, to name two. Centerfield, on the other hand, shows Fogerty (albeit with a slick ’80s production over everything) returning to the sounds and styles that fit him best, and pulling it off well.

Yes, Robert Kelly has interesting tastes to say the least. Luckily, he also has effective lawyers and P.R. people, because he is still able to continue making slow-jam bump and grind music to this day, instead of being jammed and ground from behind in a federal prison as an incarcerated child molester.

And while Mr. Kelly apparently owns a predilection to pubescent women and water sports, one thing that he doesn’t seem to have is a sense of shame: when the heat is turned up on Kelly, he revels in it, sometimes turning it into a big joke. Take for instance one of the nicknames which which he has glossed himself in recent years: The Pied Piper. Yes, that’s right, the man who married a 15-year-old, who was arrested on multiple counts of child pornography, who is infamous for a predilection towards female partners under the age of 18, now proudly refers to himself under the name of a fairytale musician who stole KIDS away from their parents and took them away to his “magical land.”

Kelly’s infamy is so great that it isn’t necessary to go into detail about his two most extreme cases of notoriety, but at least a glance is required for completeness:

On August 31, 1994, Kelly married Aaliyah D. Haughton, niece of Kelly’s manager Barry Hankerson, in a hotel room in Rosemont, Illinois. According to a number of sources, including (in 2000) Kelly’s own spokeswoman, Kelly and Aaliyah had been dating for months prior. Unfortunately, Aaliyah was also 15 years old at the time of the wedding, and the marriage certificate had been secured with a fake ID obtained by one of Kelly’s assistants, which listed the young singer as 18. While both singers denied the marriage and any relationship, a Chicago Sun Times investigation found a certificate of marriage for the two on file with the Cook County Registrar. The marriage appears to have been almost immediately annulled with the help of Aaliyah’s parents.

In June 2002, Kelly was arrested on a number of charges involving child pornography, as a videotape surfaced of Kelly having intimate relations with a girl reportedly only 14 years old. This is the videotape that involved an act which became immortalized a couple of years later in a Chappelle’s Show sketch. While Kelly’s purported sex partner stated that she was not the person shown on the tape, more than 50 other witnesses familiar with both the tape and the girl said that she was (there was also the fact that the girl was referred to by her first name in the tape). After just over six years of hearing, motions, drag-outs, and postponements, Kelly was eventually “cleared” all 14 counts against him. I put cleared in quotes because the main reason Kelly was found not guilty seems to be because his accuser would not testify against him. It was also rumored at one time that part of the defense’s argument would be that Kelly was actually digitally inserted into the video. At another point, one of Kelly’s estranged brothers stated that he was contacted by Kelly, who pled with him to take the fall in exchange for money and a recording contract.*

*Chicago music journalist Bill Wyman did excellent work on his blog regarding the R. Kelly trial, and put together a string of articles labeled “R. Kelly SexFacts” that showed the two stories above were just the tip of the iceberg when it came to Kelly’s inappropriate physical behavior with the opposite sex, especially in the area of underage girls.

In addition there are the other accusations of bad or just plain weird behavior, including a series of in-concert arguments that led to his getting kicked off of his own co-headlining tour with Jay-Z in 2004. After one of the arguments (where he reportedly assaulted a lighting technician), Kelly stormed out of the venue before the show was over, went to a nearby McDonalds…and proceeded to serve customers through the drive-thru for a number of hours. Then there was the 2003 interview he gave where he stated “Osama bin Laden is the only one who knows exactly what I’m going through.” Probably not the best choice of words to get people to sympathize with you. At least Kelly is able to keep humble about his music and his place in black history, right? Not so much. In a 2007 magazine interview, he compared himself to Marvin Gaye, Bob Marley, and Martin Luther King.

It is Kelly’s enlarged ego that, I believe, has led him to not only blur the lines of the moral and the criminal, but has affected his music as well. With a seeming lack of ability to be self critical, Kelly not only makes excuses for the weaknesses in his actions, but also cannot edit out the weaknesses in his recordings. Every one of his solo recordings clocks in at over an hour, while one of them (1998′s R.) clocks in at over two hours. So while he has been able to fill up a greatest hits album full of tremendous singles over his 15-plus years in the industry, he has never made an album devoid of filler. There is simply too much repetition in his work. Even his best ideas — whether it be the “Trapped in the Closet” series, or his use of borderline hysterical metaphors to describe the sexual process — get hammered into the ground, sometimes during the course of a single disc, until they become more tedious than clever.

But this series is not about bad people making masterpieces, merely “good albums.” And judging it on that scale, Kelly’s 1995 self-titled album qualifies. The album opens, after a pulpit-style diatribe by R. Kelly against those who want to see him fail, with the smooth, summery jam “Hump Bounce” (download), nicely incorporating samples of James Brown’s “The Payback.” A similarly laid-back party anthem shows up on the second half of the disc with the album’s third single, “Thank God It’s Friday.” The breezy “Step in My Room” (download) has a classic Babyface feel to it, and an excellent hook at the end of the chorus (though his frankness as to letting his lady know not only how but exactly where in his house he’s going to satisfy her is a bit of a laugh-inducing moment). Kelly also brings the Isley Brothers out of nowhere and gave Ronald Isley the new identity of Mr. Big in the song and video for the slow and satiny “Down Low,” which became a number #4 Pop and #1 R&B hit.* And “Religious Love” (download) is such a lovely track (with an almost haunting keyboard wash backing the arrangement) that Kelly saw fit to later include it as the B-side of his monster smash, “I Believe I Can Fly.”

*I’ve always thought this was a bit of an odd song, since by the time it was recorded, the term “down low” had already started being referred to in black culture as the practice of heterosexual men having homosexual encounters separate and unknown to the other areas and individuals in their lives. And yet Kelly’s song is strictly heterosexual. What was his intention with this? Was it a play on the fact that the two voices singing the song are men? Was he thumbing his nose at homosexuals? Or did he simply not know about the varied ways “down low” was being used in black culture? (It should be noted that mainstream media did not jump on the concept of “down-low as homosexual duplicity” until a New York Times story in 2001.)

The album’s true work of art is the never-ending double-entendre “You Remind Me of Something,” in which Kelly — trying to jog his memory as to exactly what the lady in the song is like — proceeds to give a list of things he likes to “ride,” “pump,” “wax” and “spend” (wait….spend? How do you spend a woman?). The video matches the pseudo-cheeky nature of the lyrics, as R. Kelly demonstrates the fine art of seduction by showing off one’s rides, house, and basketball court.

On the morning of November 21, 1980, the Los Angeles fire department responded to Don Henley’s call to help someone at his house who apparently was having a seizure. The person turned out to be a naked 16-year-old prostitute who had been taking large amounts of cocaine and Quaaludes. While Henley pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and admitted the girl arrived after he called a madam to find girls to party with, he still claims that he didn’t have sex with her, didn’t know how old the prostitute was, and didn’t know how many drugs she was doing–he seems to place the blame for her mass ingestion on roadies who were at his house. In the end, Henley got a fine and two year’s probation, and avoided any harsher drug or sex-related charges. [1]

If this was merely an isolated speed bump along the road of life…well, I wouldn’t be writing this article. Fact is, Henley has had a long history of debauchery in his past. The book You’ll Never Make Love in This Town Again — a tell-all from four high-priced call girls with celebrity clientele — goes into Henley’s love of coke orgies. I once saw a comic in Los Angeles that “acted out” a supposed event from the book, where multiple prostitutes visited Henley in his hotel room. I won’t go into detail, except one of the call girls mentioned that she had never in her life been around anyone who reeked more of alcohol than Henley.

And while Henley kicked his drug and alcohol habits apparently some time in the 1980s, his well known egotism and flippant attitudes towards other individuals seems to have stayed well intact. According to Marc Eliot’s biography of the Eagles, this behavior extended across his business, musical, and even personal relationships:

As had become his pattern, in the beginning Henley played the ultimate Southern-charm gentleman — flowers, phone calls, words of love, Lear jets to Paris for romantic dinners. In the end he was distant, unreachable, brooding, argumentative, and elusive. It was a pattern by now so familiar to the Eagles crew it had become a running joke. [2]

The most famous (or infamous) example of this was Henley’s relationship with Stevie Nicks right after her breakup with Lindsey Buckingham.[3] The initially passionate relationship quickly flamed out after Nicks got pregnant, told Henley she was thinking of having an abortion, and he reacted extremely carelessly to the idea. According to Eliot, this deeply hurt Nicks, and caused her to realize that Henley had no interest in a long-term relationship. Nicks had the abortion while in the middle of the Rumors tour, and later wrote about the unborn child as “Sara” for the Tusk album.

Even on the very day that I started researching this article, new examples of Henley’s narcissism showed up: a short email interview with the Cleveland Plain Dealer was posted to help promote the Eagles show of March 24, 2009. In just a few lines, you find Henley going on about one of his pet projects — the Performance Rights Act to try and gain radio royalties for singers in the U.S. — overstating the amount of money that is currently being generated by radio these days, and ignoring the question about the difficulties of working on the bill in the current economy. Then, he responds in a completely overblown and irritated fashion to a question about the use of the term “spirits” to describe wine in “Hotel California,” when the latter is not actually an example of the former:

A: Thanks for the tutorial and, no, you’re not the first to bring this to my attention — and you’re not the first to completely misinterpret the lyric and miss the metaphor….My only regret would be having to explain it in detail to you, which would defeat the purpose of using literary devices in songwriting and lower the discussion to some silly and irrelevant argument about chemical processes.

Okay, so Henley is frustrated by someone bringing this up for the umpteenth time. You or I would probably be frustrated too if we were walking in his shoes. Here’s the thing, though. He was giving an e-mail interview. He had the time to read back over his answer, say “man, that was a bit harsh…glad I got it out of my system,” edit the snark, or delete the question and answer entirely, and then move on. Henley didn’t do that, though, and his response reeks of something along the lines of: “Listen, hack: I’m giving you my time — Don Henley‘s time — and you choose to do something stupid with part of it? Who do you think you are?”

Finally, this article would not be complete without addressing the control that Henley has taken and continues to take over the Eagles. According to Don Felder’s autobiography (which Henley in part tried to have quashed [4]), the Eagles is not a band with a democratic distribution regarding either decision making, or the pay split amongst its members, but an actual corporation, including a board containing the remaining original members of the group. With Felder kicked out, the only group members left to vote on Eagles-related matters are Henley and Glenn Frey, who, according to an article in a 2008 issue of Rolling Stone, has finally come around to deferring to Henley’s position on Eagles matters: “Without Don…we’d be Air Supply.” [5]

Based upon the preceding, you would probably guess that Henley would be a better artist without a band to hold him down, and keep him from doing exactly what he wanted to do musically. And that assumption would be pretty reasonable. While all Eagles albums (with the possible exception of Hotel California) feature some dross, and sometimes songs either embarrassing (“The Greeks Don’t Want No Freaks”) or hackneyed (Glenn Frey’s lyrics are perhaps the tritest this side of Jon Bon Jovi), Henley’s solo work has been rather good. And though each of each of his non-Eagles discs also contains some filler, his 1989 release The End of the Innocence is the most consistently rewarding, and has aged the best over the years.

Beginning with the Bruce Hornsby co-penned title track, Henley sets the mood of album as one of two intertwined themes: the harsh business of American existence at the end of the Reagan administration, and the additional work involved in finding and keeping relationships as one nears middle age. Sometimes this blend leans much more towards the former, like the first two tracks on side two, “Shangri-La” and “Little Tin God,” which speaks of a leader crafted in the form of Reagan, but which could also succinctly describe G.W. Bush to today’s listener:

The cowboy’s name was Jingo and he knew that there was trouble
So in a blaze of glory he rode out of the west
No one was ever certain what it was that he was sayin’
But they loved it when he told them they were better than the rest

Sometimes the themes lean towards the emotional rather than the sociopolitical, as in the single “The Last Worthless Evening” or the excellent rock-track “I Will Not Go Quietly” (“Too many tire tracks in the sands of time / Too many love affairs that stop on a dime / I think its time to make some changes round here”), one of the hardest songs in Henley’s career, featuring the distinctive harmony vocals of one W. Axl Rose.

Perhaps nowhere are the album’s two themes brought together as well as in the closing track, “The Heart of the Matter,” co-written with former Heartbreakers drummer Stan Lynch. Still a bit shocking in its honesty, the lyrics speak of the end of an era that drove individuals like Henley to “win” at all costs, while sacrificing human relationships along the way. After getting a phone call from a friend about a mutual acquaintance, the narrator reflects on their broken relationship, and his responsibility in its destruction by forgoing others’ considerations in a quest for temporal rewards:

These times are so uncertain,
There’s a yearning undefined, and people filled with rage
We all need a little tenderness,
How can love survive in such a graceless age?
The trust and self-assurance that lead to happiness:
They’re the very things we kill, I guess.
Pride and competition cannot fill these empty arms;
And the work I put between us, you know it doesn’t keep me warm

Knowing that it is far too late to say “I’m sorry” and have it mean anything, the narrator still pleads for forgiveness, knowing that anger taken to the grave will bring neither the spoils of victory nor happiness. It’s a stunning statement, and re-reading the lyrics, it could have been written both for and sung towards either a man or a woman. Henley could be singing it to Stevie Nicks or Glenn Frey; or perhaps both of them. While Henley’s continued behavior in the last 20 years may give a bit of lie to the fact that he takes the philosophy of his recordings to heart, a work like this — indeed, of much of The End of the Innocence -- is partly appealing because it shows both the man and artist is capable of addressing and recognizing those flaws, not just in the world but in himself.

[1] Christopher Connelly (Aug. 1991). “The Second Life of Don Henley”. Gentleman’s Quarterly Magazine.

[2] Marc Eliot (1998). To The Limit: The Untold Story of the Eagles. New York: Little, Brown, 128-129.

[3] According to Buckingham, Henley suggested while the two of them were working on Henley’s track “You Can’t Make Love” (off of Building the Perfect Beast) that they should go out on a joint former Nicks-lovers tour. Apparently Buckingham didn’t find this idea appealing.

[4] Don Felder (2008). Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles (1974-2001). New York: Hyperion. It actually was pulled by its first U.S. publisher in 2007 due to pressure from the Eagles, but eventually came out in the States in 2008. Henley also tried to quash Eliot’s biography, only agreeing to let it be published if he was interviewed for the work, and it met his approval, which led to little new insight, and some events, like the underage prostitute bust, glossed over.

[5] Charles M. Young. “Peaceful, Uneasy Feeling”. Rolling Stone (No. 1053), May 29, 2008.

When he contacted me to express his displeasure with some key elements of what had been published, I asked him if he'd be interested in writing a rebuttal, to be posted here in its entirety, and he agreed; I also pitched him an idea for a series in which he'd regale you with stories of his years behind the boards for a number of multiplatinum acts, which he says he's considering. I imagine the more comments he gets here, the more likely he'll be to join our little family, so if you're interested in hearing more from him, please chime in.

Finally, while Mr. Werman and I do disagree in a couple of areas, his point about Popdose contacting him for comment regarding the initial point is a great one -- and it's something we will be doing as we move forward into our second year and beyond. Now, without further ado, we'll yield the floor to Tom Werman. --Jeff Giles]

It’s easy to find me. Just Google me and you’ll find the website for my Bed & Breakfast. I still get letters and emails from enthusiastic musicians and music fans. One must assume, then, that Matthew Bolin specifically chose to avoid speaking with me before he wrote his April ’08 piece on the impending “new resurgence” of Mötley Crüe, which I have only recently discovered.

Quite a number of things have been written about me over the years – almost all accurate, almost all positive. So I was fairly puzzled by Mr. Bolin’s post, in which he not only calls me an “infamous a-hole,” but reports that I have cheated on my wife. Mr. Bolin credits no sources. When I referred Popdose editor Jeff Giles to this allegation, he replied that Mr. Bolin was simply “connecting the dots,” referring to my response to Nikki Sixx on Blabbermouth.net. I guess editorial standards have loosened somewhat, since declaring on the internet that someone you have never spoken with has cheated on his wife seems as though it would require some sort of substantiation. Apparently not.

But since I hold myself to higher editorial standards than the ones Mr. Bolin affords his readers, I’ll skip the grade school name-calling, and I won’t speculate on Mr. Bolin’s personal behavior or his motives. By the looks of Popdose.com, I think its readers would be more interested in things musical than in things ethical. You look to Mr. Bolin to provide you with the real story – the actual facts behind the music. I think readers deserve accuracy, so let’s address Mr. Bolin’s piece carefully, shall we?

Bolin: “Two things are consistent with bands who work with Tom Werman – they often have some of the biggest-selling albums of their career with him as their producer, and, regardless of point one, they leave him for other producers because they can’t stand him.”

Fact: There may have been a handful of modern bands who spent their entire careers with the same producer. I chose not to continue working with Ted Nugent after five albums. I chose to stop producing Molly Hatchet after five albums. Cheap Trick and I had a very positive relationship, and they chose George Martin after we had three very successful albums. Mötley Crüe and I had a positive relationship for three albums, as well. After three albums, it’s not at all unusual to change producers. It is, in fact, standard procedure.

Fact: There were two individual musicians who had a problem with me in the studio out of about 200 musicians I produced. Nikki Sixx was a friend until he revised history in his book. Dee Snider was a friend, until the Twisted Sister album became a hit, and he couldn’t deal with sharing the credit for its success. Both of these guys were literally back-slapping glad-handers; years later, they soured badly. I had fine relationships with all the other members of those two bands. Don Purnell of Kix hated and distrusted me. As far as I could tell, he felt that way about everyone he ever met. On Tooth & Nail, George Lynch of Dokken had a problem with my request that he play a more substantive lead break on one song, and he pitched a fit, so I left after recording the project, and Michael Wagener mixed it. That’s one album out of more than 50 that I produced.

Bolin: “Bossy, egotistical, and either in denial or oblivious to the damage his attitude has caused him, Werner…. was known for his dogmatism in the studio, preferring to force slick arrangements on bands whose type of music would seem to call for something louder and rougher.”

Fact: Well, if we were to believe Nikki Sixx, I was neither bossy nor egotistical, since I was too busy idly chatting on the phone. How could a producer who’s distracted and uninvolved be bossy? And that’s Werman, Mr. Balin, not Werner.

Before I began every record, I told the band that this was their record, and that I was hired by them to help them realize their musical vision. I also requested that a designated member from the band sit in on every final mix and approve those mixes. Many times the band was on tour by the time the mixes were finished, so I’d send the bandleader or the manager a final mix for the band’s approval. A producer simply doesn’t have the power to tell the band what to do. The producer is a hired independent consultant, paid by the band through a label advance. The band is perfectly free to replace the producer at any time. Either the band or the record label — not the producer — has the final say in all studio matters.

I never forced anything on any musician at any time in any place. Even if I had wanted to, it simply isn’t possible. So what “damage” did “my attitude” cause me? I had a wonderful, successful and enjoyable career. Does Mr. Bolin know something I don’t?

And guess what, Mr. Bolin — I’m a pop producer! I never chose hard rock. It chose me. I tried many times to get the opportunity to produce pop bands. The A&R community wouldn’t have it. When I produced my early records, like Ted Nugent’s first albums and Cheap Trick’s early albums, I was a staff producer at Epic, and my specific job was to get these bands on the radio. How does one do that?

We make singles, Mr. Bolin.

In those days, AM radio sold records a nd FM didn’t. FM played only album tracks, and AM played only singles. So I made singles with bands who were only being played on FM radio. This is why Doug Morris called me when he was the president of Atlantic Records and said I was the only producer he knew who could make a hit with Twisted Sister, who up to that point was a little known band in America. So I made sure there were two singles on the record, and they sold several million albums as a result. Same with Ted Nugent. Same with Cheap Trick. Same with Molly Hatchet. Same with Mötley Crüe. Same with Poison. Are we seeing a trend here, Mr. Bolin?

Bolin: “For instance, he accused Cheap Trick of leaving him because he “wanted them to be the Who” and “they wanted to be the Beatles,” yet the album Werman produced for them was 1977’s In Color, easily the poppiest of their career. Werman’s arrangement of “I Want You to Want Me” was a piece of British dance-hall music, for God’s sake!”

Fact: First of all, I signed the band to the label, and I produced not one but three albums for them (In Color, Heaven Tonight and Dream Police). I was asked to go to Japan to oversee Live at Budokan, but was tied up with Ted Nugent at the time. I have spent time and worked with Sir George Martin. I admire and respect him. I never “accused” the band of anything. The Cheap Trick LPs were the most enjoyable albums I ever did. I would frequently turn to them after we did something I suggested in the studio and ask them if they liked it. Rick would shrug his shoulders and say “you’re the producer.” If the band wanted to do something, we’d do it. Period.

In the case of “I Want You to Want Me,” congratulations, Mr. Bolin – you have correctly identified the style of the song. We (that’s we) chose a tack piano to create a bygone dance-hall feel, and hired jazz session guitarist Jay Graydon to play guitar. The song has finger snaps, Mr. Bolin. Did you think I used finger snaps to create a Led Zeppelin feel? In live performance, the band changed the whole nature of the song, to great success.

I also did the percussion on all my albums. I’d do it for free, off the clock. I told each band that if they didn’t like what I had done, we’d hire a session percussionist. Not one band in over 50 albums chose the latter option. I also played guitar and sang backing vocals on occasion.

Bolin: “So with Werman you have a guy with a hard-rock resumé and a soft-rock mind, who says his favorite production is Glyn Johns’s work on the first Eagles album, and who, when his production career dried up, moved to Massachusetts and opened a bed-and-breakfast. Seriously.”

Fact: Mr. Bolin, not surprisingly, chose to omit my mention of Who’s Next as the other Glyn Johns productio n that served as an inspiration. I do like a range of music. The iPod I run with has songs by Ministry, ZZ Top, the Who and the Foo Fighters. It also has Bruce Hornsby, the Eagles, Phil Collins and Don Henley. But Mr. Bolin seems to have determined — from not speaking with me and perhaps scanning one or two of my interviews – that I have a “soft-rock mind.”

A small percentage of those who choose music as a profession enjoy success. Those who do usually enjoy it for perhaps three to five years. I was fortunate enough to have made a living in the studio for 20 years. How many producers have active careers beyond the age of 55? Phil Ramone, Jerry Wexler, Arif Mardin and Tom Dowd come to mind. That’s four. Perhaps Mr. Bolin can enlighten us about the hundreds of others, whose careers “dried up” when it became a little illogical for them to be making music for music consumers less than a third their age….so when I tired of the studio and the industry tired of me, I left LA for the countryside of New England, where we’ve been fairly blissed out for eight years. I work the land, I thin the forest, I split firewood, I prune trees, I burn brush, I mow acres of lawn. I’m host to hundreds of wonderful people from around the country and the world who have reinvigorated my mind with their stories and conversations – guests as diverse as Bonnie Raitt, Linda Ronstadt, Leonard Nimoy, Alan Menken, Malcolm Gladwell, Alan Alda and Rudy Giuliani – and I live in Berkshire County, which is drenched in music, theater, art and dance, whose residents form a caring and thinking community.

And what does Mr. Bolin think of this? Well, he sums it up in one sarcastic comment – “Seriously” — as if to say “would a record producer worth his salt ever do something so ridiculous?” If I’m misinterpreting your thrust, Mr. Bolin, please set me and your readers straight. Meanwhile, I’ll try hard not to be embarrassed by my choice of a second career.

A note to Popdose readers:
If you’re logging on to this site to read blogs about music that are allegedly written by people who are qualified to do so, then demand a modicum of accuracy. Check some facts now and then. Somehow, in some way, I must have slighted or offended Mr. Bolin in the past. I can see no other reason for this left-field assault on my professional and personal integrity. These days, irresponsible reporting can cause serious damage. I have a wonderful family. I have three grown children, and I certainly don’t want them cruising the internet only to find that someone I never met is “reporting” to his readers that I cheated on their mother. As I said once before in my online response to Nikki Sixx, enough said.

Thanks for letting me rant. Popdose readers are welcome to get the rest of the facts by emailing me.

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.

• There’s really too much to cover when talking about Prince’s ridiculous behavior, so I’ll just elucidate on two things: that damn symbol and the way he treats his fans. As for the first, I’m sure most of us are aware of Prince’s decision in the mid-’90s to change his name to an unpronounceable and typeface-unfriendly symbol (which, laid on its side, looks sort of like this — O{+> — leading most media outlets to refer to the Minnesota native as “the Artist Formerly Known as Prince,” or “TAFKAP”) as well as performing with the word “slave” written across his cheek. Supposedly the former was a sign of his “rebirth” as a new artist and the latter was because he was being treated by his record label, Warner Bros., as … well, as a slave. What people may not know is that both of those actions were directly tied to one specific and calculating reason that makes Prince look like little more than a petulant brat.

In 1992, after Diamonds and Pearls became the second-biggest-selling album of his career, Prince signed a new five-album, $100 million contract with Warner Bros., his home since 1978, which had two main clauses upon which each new album turned: (1) he was to be given an extremely large advance per album, and (2) the amount of the advance was subject to renegotiation if his previous album did not hit an agreed-upon sales number. Well, the first album in that deal, whose title was the unpronounceable symbol (it was nicknamed “The Love Symbol Album”), failed to meet that sales baseline. So Prince did what anyone would do in his situation: he changed his name to the symbol, declaring that his Warner Bros. contract was null and void because it was signed by a man named Prince Rogers Nelson, who no longer existed. When that rock-solid legal argument didn’t work, Prince, who now asked to be addressed as “the Artist,” wrote “slave” on his face and railed about how record companies were unfair because they owned their artists’ masters. Now, this is an important point that raises a legitimate concern regarding an artist’s control over his work in the modern corporate environment, but in this case Prince left out the fact that he didn’t say shit about the subject during his first 15 years with Warner Bros., and only became interested in the matter when the label asked him to take the pay cut he had already agreed to!

If one needed any more proof that both the name and the slavery argument were nothing more than narcissistic cash grabs, remember that as soon as Prince finished his five albums for Warner Bros. he removed “slave” from his face and seemingly stopped addressing how other recording artists were being treated. Then, in 2000, after his songwriting/publishing contract with the label finally expired, Prince immediately changed his name again — to Prince. What happened to the new musical direction? The artistic rebirth that necessitated another identity? Yeah, not so much.

• In 1998, toward the tail end of the symbol-name part of his career, Prince said in an interview that “when people made fun of my name change … it was mostly white people, because black people empathize with wanting to change a situation. My last name, Nelson, is really a slave name … and it was white slave owners who gave it to their slaves, so why should I go by that name now?” It would be dishonest to say there isn’t a bit of truth to the statement about his surname, but it was far from prudent to make such sweeping generalizations about the races that make up a large majority of his fan base. How did white fans react when told they weren’t empathetic? And how did black fans, who Prince painted as being in solidarity with him due to a shared history and the bond of slavery, react when he returned to his “slave name” two years later?

Prince has a troubling history of attacking or dismissing those who care about him and his music the most, including long periods of estrangement from his parents, especially his father. But the fans — the ones who, especially nowadays, pay his salary — come in for the worst of it. Partly through a desire for complete control after the fiasco of his record deal in the early ’90s, Prince regularly cracks down on any fan site on the Web that uses his image. In the last couple of years he’s also become notorious for threatening YouTube with lawsuits for allowing any videos on the site that use his image or music, whether it be a film clip, a live performance, or a baby dancing to one of his songs for 30 seconds. It wouldn’t be out of line to think that both the quality of Prince’s output in the last 15 years and the reduction in his sales figures for the better part of that period are linked to his increased paranoia over control of his works, his image, and other intellectual properties, and the repercussions that he’s had in his dealings with his fan base.

But getting back to my past week’s reflections, the second thing that struck me was how the madness surrounding the recent release of The Dark Knight is very much in line with the madness that surrounded Tim Burton’s Batman in 1989, whose “soundtrack” was by Prince. I put “soundtrack” in quotations because even though the packaging contained the words “motion picture soundtrack” as well as the Batman insignia and pictures of Michael Keaton, Jack Nicholson, and Kim Basinger, it really wasn’t one — only the songs “Partyman” and “Trust” actually appeared in the film. It was really a Prince album through and through, using the film as an influence more than anything else. (A second soundtrack, Danny Elfman’s “original motion picture score,” was released in August of ’89.) Supposedly Prince was asked to contribute a song to Batman and was shown a rough cut in early ’89 to gauge his interest. He must’ve liked what he saw, because he proceeded to come back the next week with about ten songs that were already near completion.

While the Batman album and its first single, “Batdance,” rode the wave of Batmania to #1 on the Billboard charts, Prince — and many of his fans — look very unfavorably on this movie tie-in nowadays. In fact, the only Batman-related song that appeared on Prince’s three-disc set The Hits/The B-Sides in 1993 was “200 Balloons,” the B-side to “Batdance.” (On the other hand, Wikipedia says that “ownership of the ‘Batman’ franchise is complex, and the hit singles from this album were not permitted to appear on any of Prince’s ‘hits’ collections. Even on the concert t-shirts which listed all Prince’s album titles to date had the song ‘Scandalous’ rather than Batman. Despite this, Prince has performed a number of the album’s tracks in concert over the years.”)

This is a shame, because the Batman album is an underrated work in Prince’s catalog, containing some highly enjoyable and creative compositions. Throughout the album he takes productions of the Sounds of Blackness Choir, an orchestra, and his own voice and guitar work, then digitally manipulates them and “plays” them through a synthesizer, creating some interesting effects that match well with the dark atmosphere of the film. He also throws in dialogue from the film (Keaton, Nicholson, and Basinger are listed as “special guest presences”), editing it in a way that makes the first eight songs Prince’s loose retelling of the film’s narrative as a love triangle between Bruce Wayne/Batman, the Joker, and Vicki Vale, with Prince casting himself in the additional hero/antihero roles of himself and a dual Batman/Joker character named Gemini. The ninth and final song, “Batdance,” is in a way a retelling of the retelling, a deconstructive breakdown and reassemblage of both the film and the album using additional dialogue, samples from both the album and nonalbum outtakes, and spurts of almost Dada-esque sexual nonsense, such as “Hey, ducky, let me stick the seven-inch in the computer.” The fact that an abbreviated version of it topped the U.S. pop charts may have been due to the hype and excitement that surrounded the film, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that “Batdance” was a #1 song, and one of the strangest ones to ever occupy that slot.

Additionally, even within the limitations of writing for a particular movie and trying to make the music “fit” what’s on the screen, Prince comes up with a diverse collection of songs that are mostly tuneful and well constructed. In fact, the two songs Burton (or, more likely, Batman coproducer Jon Peters) used in the film may be the most “generic” Prince songs in the batch — both “Partyman” and “Trust” are straight-ahead, danceable pop-rockers with funk touches here and there. On the other hand, among the tracks available for download here, there’s a nearly straight-up rocker in “Electric Chair,” an atmospheric pop ballad in “The Arms of Orion,” the midtempo R&B grinder “Vicki Waiting,” and the fast, sexy funk of “Lemon Crush.” It’s unfair that the Batman album has slipped through the cracks of late-’80s nostalgia, and in fact it looked to be out of print until recently, as there were no new copies available of it on Amazon. One of the entries for the CD version still doesn’t have the album cover on display, and since the cover is just the Batman insignia, it couldn’t be missing because Prince wanted it taken down … or could it?

Electric Chair

The Arms of Orion (with Sheena Easton)

Vicki Waiting

Lemon Crush

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.

- The biggest accusation leveled against Danzig is that he is a straight-up asshole: a mini-man with a Napoleon complex, who tries to intimidate to make up for the fact that he looks (and sounds) like a smaller version of what Fat Elvis and Jim Morrison would appear as if their DNA were combined. The reason he gave for breaking up his first band, The Misfits, was that he was dissatisfied with the “group’s musical abilities” — but you think he would have figured that out in less than six years if that were the case. The more likely reason is connected to that sweeping phrase “inter-band tensions,” or more to the point, he broke up The Misfits because he could.

-He has also used intimidation tactics to get his way over other bands. The most infamous example (thanks to YouTube) being a 2004 fight he had with the lead singer of the North Side Kings, after Danzig bogarted other bands’ slots after a concert delay, then had the site crew pack up the gear so that no other bands could go on after him. When Danzig was confronted by the lead singer as to why that happened, Danzig explained that due to local weather alerts he was told to get their gear packed up….just kidding: As the video shows, he decided to go apeshit on the other guy, suddenly yelling “Motherfucker!” and shoving him. Unfortunately for him, he wasn’t dealing this time with someone too in awe of Glenn Danzig to not fight back.

-Much more seriously, though, especially as it regards the relationship between Danzig and his audience, are the accusations of homophobia and racism that have been put towards him — and never really denied or addressed. For instance, online white-power sites have members who claim Danzig as one of their own, saying that he’s actually a racist who is liked by (or putting one over on) anti-racists. It doesn’t help matters that Danzig himself says or does some things that might back up these accusations: In an interview last October with the L.A. Times, Danzig says that the rumors that he was first offered the Wolverine part in the X-Men series of films were true, but….

“……the shoot was like eight months up in Canada and my band was touring. So, even if I’d gotten the role, I couldn’t do it. I’m kinda glad because the movie was pretty gay. It wasn’t the Wolverine I knew; it was some kind of weird Christopher Street ’X-Men.’“

Christopher Street being, of course, the recognized center of New York City’s gay community. Then there’s the filmed interview with Danzig where he goes through his book collection, pulling out various selections, including a 1985 tome entitled The Occult Roots of Nazism. But while Danzig summarizes or reads excepts from the other books in this interview, for the Nazi text he merely smirks and states “every schoolchild should have this book.” What does he mean by this? While a lot of meanings could be infused into those few seconds, Danzig keeps his true meaning to himself, leaving it up for the viewer to determine if he’s into white power, an ironic poseur, or a little from both columns. And again last year, the release of the 2-CD set The Lost Tracks of Danzig gave the world the track “White Devil Rise,” which was supposedly a response to (uncited) comments by Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, but lyrically “expresses” (in Danzig’s own words) “the white race rising up and answering his call for a race war.”

One of the reasons I think Danzig has been able to wear his mask for so long is that it’s one that can never be taken 100% seriously. While he has been associated-and associates himself-with the occult and darkness and evil and all that, there’s something about the way that he looks and sounds that seems less than serious. Additionally there’s the fact that, for the most part, the music that goes with the lyrics doesn’t always match up. Much of his late 1980s-mid 1990s work has more in common with Led Zeppelin or AC/DC (or even Stevie Ray Vaughan) than any sort of death or black metal. Not that that’s a bad thing, especially since the original lineup of Danzig was so cracking good.

Perhaps nowhere is this fact more on display than 1990′s Danzig II: Electric Lucifuge, which musically is heavily influenced by both electric Northern and acoustic Southern blues. Then there are the chord changes — or rather, the fact that there are chord changes (as opposed to, say, speed changes). For instance, a track like “Her Black Wings” (download) was much more hook-driven than most anything coming out of the music scene(s) with which Danzig has been associated. “Devil’s Plaything” (download) continued in the tradition of “Mother” from the band’s first album — a “soft” opening verse crashing into a thunderous chorus. To a degree, this arrangement has more in common with college or alternative rock at the time (think The Pixies) than punk or metal. The tune “777″ (download)  follows a similar arrangement pattern, but increases the disparity between the two parts by using a little more than a doubled electric and dobro steel guitar in the verses, then pouncing into an electrified chorus heavily influenced by Zeppelin’s arrangement of “Traveling Riverside Blues.”

One of the other reasons I chose this album in particular, instead of the first or third Danzig albums, which have been argued as being as good if not better than Lucifuge by various constituencies, is it allows me to show you perhaps the best Danzig cover to date. Here’s former Hole and Smashing Pumpkins bassist Melissa Auf Der Maur and Karen Elson, model and singer (and Mrs. Jack White), doing a live version of “Devil’s Plaything” in a room of the famed Chelsea Hotel:

Damn.

Special thanks to Aaron Fichtelberg for his suggestion of this week’s Bad Person.

-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.

-Like a lot of bullies, Nuge tends to talk tough after the fact, or at least until someone calls him on it. In addition to his admission of cheating, he also claimed to have dodged the Vietnam draft by stopping showering, eating poorly, and literally shitting his pants weeks in advance of when he had to see the draft board. Of course, these admissions were made in High Times magazine in 1977, back when he talked to filthy stoned hippies and it was cool to say you avoided the war. Now that he’s a tough guy, he admitted a few years back that he avoided Vietnam by getting a one-year student deferment, so that he wouldn’t get his “ass blown off in Vietnam,” but that he regretted that decision 30 years after the fact. In 2004, he showed he’s “not a coward” by taking a USO trip to Iraq — where he was under 24-hour armed protection.

-My favorite story which shows that Nugent may not be able to cash every check his mouth writes: In a 2001 editorial he scribed for the Wall Street Journal railing against Napster and for intellectual property rights, The Nuge tells a story of going up with his posse to — what else? — hippies selling bootleg t-shirts outside his concerts, stealing the shirts and the guys’ cash, then later using some of the shirts to clean his guns. He said he did this for years, and his message for anyone who wanted to try this was “bring it on, greaseballs!”, because he’s a guy who “hunt[s] grizzly bears with a bow and arrow.” A couple of flaws in this story, though: Firstly, if the headlining act were coming out of the stadium into the parking lot among a swarm of tailgaters, wouldn’t there be some sort of commotion? Would he just be able to walk up unnoticed to his target? Also, other than this editorial, there is no report of Nugent doing this once, let a lone on a regular basis — not in newspapers, not on fan communities, nowhere. And most importantly, this story bears some resemblance to the plot point of an episode of That ’70s Show that The Nuge guested on and which debuted two months after he wrote this editorial — an episode in which Nugent is shown happily surrounded by stoned groupies.

Which leads us into the greatest irony in the life of The Nuge: While the man is a teetotaler and has supposedly never used illegal drugs, I don’t think anyone who has ever attended a Nuge concert has done so sober. It just seems a mandatory requirement to getting one’s Nuge on. I don’t even drink much myself, but listening to this album I get the sudden craving for some ice cold PBRs. This is especially ironic, because Nugent himself has stated that drunk drivers are terrorists who are helping Al-Qaeda, and they should be put away for life after their third DUI. As one commenter aptly put it, if you “locked up all the people who use and drive I really doubt there would have been many people left to buy tickets” to a Ted Nugent concert.

As for his music. Rolling Stone once stated that the only good song Nugent has released after 1975 was the title track to Cat Scratch Fever. That does seem a bit harsh, even towards a man who has created possibly more generic cock rock than anyone should have a right to make. Is this album a classic? No. Not even close. Even at his most powerful, Nugent is nowhere near the upper echelon of guitarists — not enough soul nor creativity, too much useless fretboard wankery. And his guitar is pretty much the only reason to listen to his records, as there is usually something lacking in the quality of the lyrics and overall songcraft — though it is a bit of a kick to hear Nugent’s singer, Derek St. Holmes, sounding like a young John Mellencamp. However, Cat Scratch Fever holds the most positive exceptions to this rule. Forget about the other “hit” from this album, “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang,” which is pretty lame even by Nugent standards. Among the pleasant surprises here are “A Thousand Knives” (download). One of the album’s more hook-laden offerings, it’s built around a riff very much like The Beatles “If I Needed Someone,” and includes nice pedal effects which create a guitar sound very close to an amped harmonica. The Bo-Diddley-esque “Live It Up” (download) has a couple of very well crafted, straightforward solos by the Nuge, and solid drum and percussion work, including the appearance of, yes, a cowbell. And then there’s “Workin’ Hard Playin’ Hard” (download), which opens with some Dick-Dale styled surf-guitar work, before deciding to switch into a bad-ass Southern Rock-cum-Eddie Money song.

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).

-As for the issue of royalties, while most of The Band’s songs — especially after their first album — are listed as Robertson solo compositions, Helm says that there was much more of a group dynamic to the musical construction of the songs, but that due to some boilerplate in their recording contract, Robertson ended up able to claim full credit for both the lyrics and music after a certain point. Helm says that this became more and more a point of contention as The Band continued on, especially when other artists started covering Band songs. On top of that, the other four members of the band had seemingly no power to renegotiate the contract, nor was their any desire from Robertson to help his other band members out. This argument continues to this day, as just last year Helm sued Cingular Wireless for using “The Weight” in one of their commercials. Apparently, they got consent to use the tune from Capitol Records and Robertson, but didn’t bother talking to the other two living members of The Band (Helm and Garth Hudson) before using the original recording in the commercial. Helm’s statement to a journalist on the ad — “It was just a complete, damn sellout of The Band — its reputation, its music; just as much disrespect as you could pour on Richard and Rick’s tombstones” — seems to also say that someone (hint: initials RR) cared so much about making money that he couldn’t be bothered asking what his former bandmates wanted, and in doing that, he was basically pissing on another two men’s graves.

-As to the breakup of The Band, it seems it was a unilateral decision by Robertson that The Last Waltz was the end of the line, though Robertson has also said that he had wanted the group to continue on as a studio unit, like what The Beatles did after Revolver. Even if that was Robertson’s original notion, it didn’t hold true, as he became more interested in living a Hollywood lifestyle afforded by both his exposure in the film and his Band royalties: hanging and partying with his new best friend Martin Scorsese, being musical “selector” for films, taking copious amounts of cocaine, and spinning off his leading-man good looks into the occasional acting gig. Helm, meanwhile, has disassociated himself from The Last Waltz, calling it a disaster, what with the WTF? appearance of Neil Diamond, and nary a shot of Richard Manuel throughout the film. More than that, though, it promoted the false mythology that Robertson was a true leader/director of the band, and the other four were really his backup. Helm talks of seeing the completed film at a preview: “For two hours we watched as the camera focused almost entirely on Robbie Robertson, long and loving close-ups of his heavily made-up face and expensive haircut. The film was edited so it looked like Robbie was conducting the band with expansive waves of his guitar neck. The muscles on his neck stood out like cords when he sang so powerfully into his switched-off microphone.”

This is a feud for the ages which nothing has or likely will ever lessen: not Manuel’s death, not the induction of The Band into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (Robertson refused to play on the same stage as Helm at the induction concert, and played instead with a session drummer and the other two (at the time) living members of The Band), and not through either Levon’s throat cancer, or the pancreatic cancer that nearly fell Ronnie Hawkins, who The Band fronted before they went on to backup Bob Dylan. These dudes just hate each other. It would not be surprising to discover that the opening salvo of Robertson’s “Showdown at Big Sky” (download) was based not just on Robertson’s view of American history, but his history with Helm, the only American in The Band: “Soldier of fortune / He’s a man of war / Just can’t remember / What he’s fighting for.”

Who to side with? Should this post actually be about Levon Helm and his comeback album Dirt Farmer (the second-best album I heard last year)? Perhaps, but the tiebreaker, for me, is how both the general public and former colleagues tend to view each of the men, and on that basis, Helm comes out on top. Even Bob Dylan, in his autobiography Chronicles, Vol. 1, has negative words for Robertson, while on fan sites for The Band and guitar-related chat boards, people praise Robertson as being a great guitarist and good composer….in spite of him being an asshole. Meanwhile, nary an unkind word is to be found about Helm from the same crowds.

Finally, that great social arbiter Google has this to say: search for the phrase “Robbie Robertson is an asshole” and you get four exact matches. Search for “Robbie Robertson” with either the word “asshole” or “jerk” nearby, and you get a few more matches about him being one or the other. Do the same searches, but using “Levon Helm” instead: nothing.

-Waters became the default main writer in Pink Floyd after Syd Barrett’s descent into mental illness, apparently exacerbated by a horrible LSD experience. And while Waters often spoke about how he wished to find and kill the man who gave Syd bad acid, this level of care did not apply to the addictions of other members of the band. Waters made the unilateral decision to fire founding Floyd member and keyboardist Richard Wright during sessions for The Wall, when he deemed Wright’s addictions too much of a distraction. Then, as an added slap in the face, he hired Wright back as a session musician to complete the album and go on the abbreviated Wall tour. In other words, Wright was not messed up enough that his talents couldn’t be used, but was messed up just enough that Waters wished to symbolically disassociate himself from him. Charming.

-More than just the main lyricist, Waters made himself de facto leader of the Floyd, taking complete creative control of the direction of the group. This culminated in refusing to put any Gilmour’s songs in 1983′s The Final Cut, then leaving the group after its release and declaring them over, with that album as their final, definitive statement, as if the rest of Pink Floyd really wanted to have their last album be a de facto Waters solo album: The record jacket even said “The Final Cut by Roger Waters, performed by Pink Floyd.” Waters then sued the other members of Pink Floyd to stop them from carrying on under that name after he left the group. His defense was that Pink Floyd should not be allowed to continue because he was the creative leader of the band, and additionally there remained only one original member (Nick Mason) who wanted to carry on. In other words, though Gilmour had been the musical centerpiece of the group for two decades, he was still nothing more to Waters than a hired hand to replace Syd Barrett, so f-all what he wanted.

-Perhaps the most irritating thing about Waters, at least as a musician, is that he guided the band over time to an express purpose, and in his mind, logical conclusion, which was….to whine about how unfortunate he was that his father died before he was born. He genuinely acts as if no one else in the history of the world had even grown up without a father, lost a family member in war, or would be shocked to hear that war in not simply a positive experience. As an added note, perhaps it is a bit ironic that his father’s death, and the war which Waters constantly writes about, is World War II, one of the few modern wars that could be said to be morally just. But no matter: Hitler, Third Reich, fascism, etc., etc. All that has been reduced ad absurdum (though with epic rock instrumentation) to how it’s all really shit because one kid got emotionally stunted by his mother because he had no proper father figure.

Ironically, all of this “Woe is me/daddy where are you/living my life is like being persecuted in East Germany” obsession lacks one seemingly important thing: emotion. His entire body of work (at least from The Wall onward) is supposed to be immensely personal, but is constructed in a very cold, impersonal way: splices of interviews, phone calls and TV programs are mixed with lyrics heavily imbibed with metaphoric commentaries–all substituting for anything that would really make the listener feel sympathy or empathy for their creator. Waters is too caught up in his own martyr complex to realize how distant from his subject, and thus full of shit, he sounds. Robert Christgau, whose own pomposity might make him the Roger Waters of rock criticism, actually wrote something I agree with when he said that Wish You Were Here was Waters’ best work, because it had “soul.” In other words, you could believe that he cared about what he was writing. And it’s true: while Waters has spent a great deal of his songwriting since WWYH trying to connect big statements to his personal history, his songs about Syd Barrett pack much more punch, because you actually get the sense in what is written and how it is played that the subject matter — the man — is important to him. Yes, yes, I know, Waters has put up his own “wall,” like in the album of the same name, and that effects both art and action. But remember: that wall fell. Water’s self-serving wall continues to stay up, and it has affected his writing, his relationships with people, and his very tolerability as a human being.

These same problems arise in even the best of his post-Floyd work. But for all of the pomposity, ham-fisted philosophizing, and songs needlessly listed in multiple parts, Waters’ Amused to Death is still a pretty good album. On one track, in fact, Waters shows an actual sense of humor for once in his life: during part of “The Bravery of Bring Out of Range” (download), sportscaster Marv Albert is brought in to narrate a sea battle like it was a Knicks game. And, whatever the political (or perhaps just lyrical) incorrectness of talking about a Chinese lover’s “almond eyes” and “yellow thighs,” “Watching TV” (download) is a lovely song, featuring nice, uncredited harmonies from Don Henley. One sad fact though, is that perhaps the best performer on the album isn’t Waters, but featured lead guitarist Jeff Beck. Beck’s crisp and bluesy guitar playing throughout the album helps elevate the majority of the songs above the turgidity that at times threatens to sink much of Waters work. In doing so, Beck actually exposes an additional irony of how integral the guitar sound (and thus Gilmour) was in Pink Floyd, something that Waters seemingly never got through his thick freaking skull.

Well, that’s all I can stomach saying about the man. Join me next time (and hopefully next week), when I talk about a version of Waters from this side of the pond, someone that will make you say: “Are you sure he’s Canadian?”