Overwhelmed by Talent

 I recently read The Road Home, by Jim Harrison and, during a pause in reading this book, I watched an interview with Pat Metheny. Every once in awhile, everyone is overwhelmed by someone else's Talent. Jim Harrison was the kind of writer that wannabe writers probably should avoid. He was so supremely talented that reading anyone else for attempting to write seems like a pointless exercise.

Pat Metheny, in this interview, described the first time he was around "a real jazz guitarist," (Something that happened to him long after he had recorded albums with Gary Burton and his own groups and had established Pat as a jazz guitarist. To the rest of us, Pat has always been "a real jazz guitarist," but his standards are obviously higher.) At that moment, Pat realized how far he had yet to travel before he considered himself to be the real thing.

I've owned guitars for more than 60 years and even played them off-and-on for that long, but I haven't described myself as "a musician" since the late 60s. I have been around real musicians for much more than 3/4 of my life and I know what they look, sound, and act like. I'm not like them. I'm a music hobbyist, at best. My knowledge of music theory is shallow, my physical abilities and skill are remedial, my willingness to study and practice music is limited, and my natural talent is nearly non-existent. After 2/3 of a century, I have nothing that resembles "a voice" as a musician. I sound like everybody else, at best, and like the worst too often.

Several years ago, I invited a friend, Scott Jarrett, to a local jam session when he was visiting us. Scott is a monster on every instrument I've heard him play and he borrowed a mandolin for that jam session. The group was mostly old guys who either picked up music after retirement or restarted playing at that time and the range of "talent" was pretty narrow. And there was Scott. When we left to find lunch, he commented, "There are three things you need to be a musician: a sense of rhythm, some kind of grip on melody and harmony, and an ability to listen. At the least you need one of those. Those guys don't have any of them." To be honest, most of the time the musical output from our little group could best be called "cacophony." You would have to stretch your imagination to find an artistically redeeming moment in an our of our playing. None of us, except Scott and Brian, would be called "musicians" by any real musician.

Lots of no-talent writers are beating up the "10,000 hours" theory of how you become an expert, but it's pretty clear from reading their "analysis" that becoming an expert writer/author is a long ways out of their grasp. More likely, they aren't even inspired enough to do the work to become expert writers (like me). They just got where they are the old fashioned way: they inherited enough money to work for free or incredibly cheap. Becoming a "musician" is, as Pat described in his interview, a hard road. Most of us just want to be guitar collectors, not musicians.

Jeff Was My Beatles

90% of the British Invasion went over or under my head. I was not a Beatles fan, but I liked the Who a lot and Stones fairly well. The rest of that lot was just elevator noise. But Jeff Beck changed my world. And now he’s gone. Since I heard the news, last night, I’ve had my office stereo system on an endless Jeff Beck loop. I own eight of his eighteen albums, plus two Yardbirds records, which amounts to about seven hours of non-stop Jeff Beck. Not nearly enough.

Geoffrey (Jeff) Arnold Beck (24 June 1944 - 10 January 2023) was four years older than me and light years beyond me musically from the moment I first noticed his guitar playing in “Jeff’s Boogie” on the 1966 Yardbird’s record (on Epic Records at the time, in “Simulated Stereo”). A friend and I travelled from Dodge City, Kansas to Denver, Colorado in ‘66 to see the Yardbirds. Specifically, to see the guy who played “Jeff’s Boogie.” Sadly, I don’t remember a lot about that show. It was in a fairly small venue, there were a pile of those weird looking Jordan amps on the stage, we weren’t able to get particularly close to the state, and I didn’t learn a thing from watching Jeff play. He was at least that far over my head when he was 21 and I was 17. I stupidly thought his guitar was fretless, based on his fluid technique and went home to rip the frets out of my Airline electric, rendering it useless.

The second time I saw Jeff in concert was in 1976 at the Music Hall in Omaha’s old Civic Auditorium. He was touring to promote the “Wired” album with the Jan Hammer band; Believe it or not, Billy Joel’s band was the intro act; talk about an odd couple. Mrs. Day and I had front row seats, stage right smack between Hammer’s keyboards and where Jeff stood. There was nothing between me and Jeff except a few feet and I still learned . . . nothing from watching him play. The band I was in at the time covered “Freeway Jam” and often ended our practices with “Scatterbrain.” “Scatterbrain” was slightly past my level of competence, which is why that song did not make it into our setlist, ever. There was a moment when Jeff appeared to be concentrating and I briefly imagined that if I could just get to the point where I could play the song at that speed, I’d have finally caught up to Jeff after a decade of floundering in his wake. Then, he noticed that Hammer was waving a scarf over his head while he played the song’s Lydian scale riff. Jeff walked over to Hammer, had a short conversation, and he laughed and they began to double-time the song (roughly the tempo of this 1976 live recording). At the new impossible pace, he didn’t look even slightly pressured.

Around that time, poor, sad little no-solo-hit-wonder John Lennon was whining about the credit George Martin received for turning their pitiful little bar band into a massive success, “"When people ask me questions about 'What did George Martin really do for you?,' I have only one answer, 'What does he do now?'” What George was doing about that time was Jeff’s “Blow by Blow” and “Wired.” Can anyone remember anything other than “Give Peace a Chance” or “Whatever Gets You Through the Night” from post-Beatles-Johnny? One more reason I do my best to avoid Beatlemania.

This is a quirk, I know, but vocal music rarely connects to me emotionally. Blow by Blow's "Diamond Dust" is one of the songs that practically reduces me to putty, especially when I'm listening to it on headphones. Pat Metheny's "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" is another song that effects me that strongly. This Rolling Stone interview has Jeff talking about the clarity of sound, purpose, and musicality George Martin brought to the studio and Jeff's music: "Jeff Beck Remembers George Martin: ‘He Gave Me a Career’." This one of my favorite stories from that interview, "Beck has particularly vivid memories of the album’s last track, the gorgeously orchestrated 'Diamond Dust.' When they first cut the song, Beck thought his band’s version 'sounded a bit lame.' But Martin suggested adding a string section to emphasize the drama in the melody. 'When he finished it, he came wafting in and said, 'This reminds me of a French love movie!'' Beck laughs. 'I said, ‘You’ve just spoiled the whole effect! I might not put it on the album!’ He didn’t realize it was the worst thing he could have said to me. But I thought it was beautiful. George lit a fire under it.”

In 2011, my daughter Holly (through a connection from her Guitar One column of the time), got a couple of amazing seats at the Minneapolis State Theater for Jeff’s group of the moment. I swear my wife was the only non-guitarist in the audience. Every time I looked away from the stage at the audience everyone around me was fumbling air guitar, totally baffled at every note Jeff played. Me too, of course. Finally, I learned something from watching Jeff play, “There are no picks in his fingers!!” said my hillbilly-self probably out loud to nobody in particular. Holly, of course, had figured that out either before or after the interview and we had a conversation about my big breakthrough. I watched some YouTube and learned even more. Jeff’s biography documentary, Still on the run: the Jeff Beck story, gave me more insight than I needed or wanted to know about his genius. As Jan Hammer said, “Jeff is the guy who took the instrument of guitar into the furthest reaches of guitar universe and nobody ever - nobody even comes close.“

 I think I’m going miss his smile the most. Not just that he was having a great time on stage, but that “Did you see what I just did?” look that every guitar player within earshot heard, saw, loved, and desperately wished they could do. Even at 78, he was pulling off stuff nobody else in the world could do. Nobody. We’ll never hear anything like Jeff Beck again.

This is one of the few moments I wish I could believe in a life-after-death. The world would be far less empty if I could imagine Jeff is still playing guitar somewhere, anywhere. Today, his live version of “Elegy for Dunkirk” seems particularly sad and relevant. When I saw him perform this song live at the State Theater in Minneapolis in 2011 (not listed on the setlist, but he did play it), it was heart-stopping then. Today, a part of me wishes my heart had stopped with his.

My Life in Surf Music

The Ventures were my first roadie gig, when I was 14. They played the Dodge City Civic Auditorium, sponsored by the local Catholic college, St. Mary’s of the Plains, in 1963 or around then. I was in a kid-band at the time and the other 3 guys in the band were a year or two older than me. They all attended the local Catholic high school and had some connections including their parents. Most importantly, they knew the nun in charge of promoting/managing the concert and they got me an invitation to be the volunteer one-man stage “crew.”

I knew how to setup a two-piece guitar amp, I could tune a guitar fairly well and set it on a stand by the amp, and I could plug all that in correctly. Mostly. The auditorium’s sound goober was an old guy named “Sears.” I don’t remember much about him other than the fact that he set out one mic, probably a Shure 55 or something like that and connected up a Shure Vocalmaster PA (two columns and a mixer/power amp tube-type head).  Once he had said “test, test, one,two, three” into the mic and heard himself from both of the columns set at opposite ends of the stage, Sears plopped himself down in a folding metal chair just behind the stage right wing curtain and . . . went to sleep during the first song of the sound check. He didn’t move again till the show was over and the audience applause woke him up. Once my tiny bit of stage-handedness was finished, I climbed up a ladder at the back of the stage left wing to the scaffold plank and sat right over the band, with my legs dangling at least 20’ over their heads.

Sadly, I remember very little about that concert. I remember almost falling off of the scaffold on to the band, bouncing up and down to the opening chords of “Slaughter on 10th Avenue.” Their hit, “Slaughter on 10^th Avenue” was yet to be released, but they played it in that concert and knocked me out. The year before, my kid band played “Walk Don’t Run” and “Wipeout” on our way to winning a city talent show. I thought I knew all of their music, but they played all sorts of songs I’d never heard before and I was so jazzed to be there, to hear them live, and so pumped to have actually talked  to them before the show that I probably bulk-erased a lot of that night with pure emotion and excitement.

Before and after the show, I got to hang out with the band and I remember walking out of the auditorium with the band, after loading their gear into a trailer. I asked Nokie Edwards for an autograph. He said, “Surely,” and took the album from me. Bob Bogle said, “Don’t call that kid Shirley.” First time I ever heard that joke. Not the last, by 100s, though.

When I moved out a year later, my parents threw out that record and a ton of other stuff. After all the times we’ve moved, there is no chance I would still have it under any circumstances. Still, it would be cool to have that record cover and have it framed in my office.

In the late-1980s, I ran Front-of-House for Dick Dale at Anaheim Stadium. The sax player/bandleader, Jack Freeman, for a group I worked with for almost a decade there, Sum Fun Band, also had a small live sound rig he rented out. Since he was playing sax in Dale’s band that day, Jack hired me to run sound for the show (a pre-baseball game warm-up act outside of the stadium to entertain the tailgaters). Dale notoriously hated sound guys and Jack and a few friends in the business warned me that he might even take a swing at me if I pissed him off. His shows were notoriously loud, past the point of pain and permanent hearing damage and I’d seen him play a couple of times at the Huntington Beach national surf championships. It was a 5-piece band and we had 5 stage monitors to work with and a bunch of QSC power amps to drive them with (thanks to my employer). I put all of the monitors around Dale and drove them as hard as possible with almost nothing in any of the monitors except “the star.” It was so loud the sound pressure moved Dale’s clothes and strands of his scrawny ponytail like a breeze.

After the set, he hunted me down and told me I was the best sound goober he’d ever worked with. Jack was less impressed because he didn’t have any sort of stage monitoring and he and the rest of the band struggled to figure out what was going on. ;-) Not my problem, Dick paid the bills.

From Whence It All Began

Recently, I saw a Facebook post on Pat Metheny’s page where he said, “"The Beatles were huge for me. Without them, I don't know if I even would have become a musician or a guitar player. When their hits started coming out, I was 8 and 9 years old and it had a tremendous impact on me. . .” and he proceeded to play “And I Love Her.” Obviously, Pat turns a fairly deplorable song into something very likeable and almost infinitely more complex than the original composition.

I have been a Pat Metheny fan since his Gary Burton days and he is in my Top 5 guitarists, some days at the top of that list. I played in bands that had a fair share of Beatles songs for 20 years, but in my mind I was always pandering to the lowest common denominator when I played most of those songs. (I admit to liking “Taxman,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “Got to Get You into My Life,” and “Birthday” [for about a decade, the only song I would play when someone requested “The Birthday Song” and one of the Beatles only actual rock songs]). Otherwise, the band often labeled as “the greatest Rock and Roll band ever” mostly left me wishing for silence.

I absolutely admire George Martin’s genius in recognizing that 4 moderate talents were visually (and could be made to aurally be) the exact right thing for a crowd of blooming Boomer teenagers to obsess on. His commitment to molding that mess of “talent” into what the Beatles became is historic in R&R history. If Martin hadn’t forced the Goofy Three into dumping a mediocre drummer and accepting a professional musician who rewrote the job of pop drumming forever, they likely would have been a one-hit-wonder; if that. To highlight that point, in 1971 neglected and mostly unsuccessful John Lennon asked “What's he done now?” in regard to George Martin’s post-Beatle career. I have loved that typically clueless moment in John’s feet-in-mouth career for 50 years. Wikipedia’s George Martin discography is only a partial list of Martin’s accomplishments before and after the Beatles. “Blow by Blow” alone changed as much in pop music and recording history as had most of the Beatles’ output. (There, I said it and I hope that is out of my system forever.)

But Pat’s comment started me thinking about my own considerably less creative or interesting original musical path origins. One band is probably most responsible for me giving up on my Dizzy Gillespie clone trumpet-player pipedreams and that would be The Ventures. I’m older than Pat, so there is that, too. I was 12 when Walk Don’t Run became a hit in 1960 and had been flailing at the trumpet for 3 years by then. With paper route money, I bought a terrible Sears acoustic guitar and two years later gave up on the trumpet forever. When I was 13, I was in a kid band playing (badly) surf music and Venture’s hits and the summer I turned 14 someone in that band had a connection to the nun (not a typo) who was responsible for bringing the Ventures to the Dodge City, Kansas City Auditorium. Their concert was being promoted and organized by the now-defunct St. Marys of the Plains Catholic College and two of my bandmates were very Catholic Italians and at least one of them had a good enough connection to the college to get me a “job” as a stage hand for the Ventures’ show.

Back in those days, setting up a stage for a rock and roll show was a whole world different than the past 40 years of pop music. The Ventures had three guitar amps and one bass amp, all Fenders, and their instruments, also all Fenders. The auditorium provided the “sound system” for any vocals or dialog, a three or four-channel Bogen tube mixer with about 20W of power and a pair of awful Bogen columns. Worse, it was all being manned by an old man who, I think, was a plumber by day and, later, ran a Suzuki motorcycle shop. As I remember, the “sound check” amounted to him plugging in a mic on a stand and tapping on it. He quickly went sleep next to the mixer before the show even started. Talk about a harbinger of what live sound would become in the future!

I carried amps and guitar cases from the loading dock to the stage and did whatever the band wanted me to do and was finished with my part of the job in an easy hour or so. They noodled around a bit with the guitars and amps, but didn’t really do anything resembling a sound check or rehearsal before they headed off to the backstage area to wait for the crowd to show up. With no adults in the room to care about what I did until after the show and load-out, I climbed the ladder to the grid over the stage and found a great seat right over the middle of the band about 20’ up and well out of sight of the audience. In the dark, I dangled my legs over the edge of the waffled grid and hung out in nervous excitement for the band to appear and the curtains to open.

Someone from the college walked in front of the curtains and said something like “Ladies and gentlemen, the world famous Ventures!” and the current opened up, the band walked to their instruments, strapped them on, and with a short count-in started with the as-yet-to-be-recorded or released Ventures’ version of Richard Rogers’ opera “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.” When they struck the opening chord, I almost bounced off of the grid and rained down on their unsuspecting heads. Only luck and a good last minute grip kept me from “bringing the house down” before the first verse. As good as this remastered version of their record sounds, in my memory the live performance was 1,000 times better and more powerful.

Except for the songs they played that night that I’d yet to hear, my band covered almost everything in their catalog from “Walk, Don’t Run” to “Sleepwalk” and all of the surf tunes. Nothing I’d heard in those recordings prepared me for the real, live Beatles . . . I mean Ventures. My life was changed forever and for the next 15 years I was focused on becoming as much like those four guys as possible, except for the greasy hair. Not that I didn’t admire their hair, I was just too lazy to comb mine let alone coat it in Brylcreem.

After the concert was over and I’d helped load everything back into their vehicle, I remember walking across the parking lot with Nookie Edwards, Bob Bogle, and Don Wilson and asking them to autograph something I’d managed to find that was autographical. The response from Nookie Edwards was, “Surely.” And he reached for whatever I had to sign.

Bob Bogle said, “Don’t call the kid Shirley.” And they all broke up. That was the first of a few thousand times I head that joke, but every other time I’ve heard the lines it brings up a fabulous memory of getting to hang out with my childhood idols. For me, the Ventures started it all, first with their records, second with a live performance. Live sound, recorded music, technology and a life-long fascination with audio electronics, and whatever music I have managed to reproduce or create in my limited-talent life as a bass and guitar player. No band, ever, more deserved to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Making Mistakes and Living with Them

Exactly seven years ago, today (8/23/2013), I sold my 1973 Dobro D-66 to Paul Mayasich for $1700. I wrote the following words the day after that guitar walked out of my life. I was incredibly depressed at the time. I had quit my teaching gig at MSCM after a 13+ year career there; probably the best job (at times) I had in my 55 year working life and when it ended almost all of the things I loved about that school were gone. My wife and I were leaving home for the winter and I wasn't looking forward to any part of traveling in a camper. 

This piece sounds really self-pitying; and it was. I was whipped. Since then, a few things have changed. Due to the onset of arthritis in my hands, I went back to playing guitar after we moved to Red Wing in 2015. In fact, I'm playing more now than I have in the last 30 years. I still suck, but I'm enjoying myself. I have been diagnosed with myasthenia gravis, which pretty much puts a terminal punctuation mark in my future. I'm not sure what the point in allowing this to post in 2020 would be, but I decided to let it stay on the queue to remind myself of . . . something.

I bought the Dobro (pictured at left) from one of the blues guys who used to play at the Howard Street Tavern, sometime around 1976. It was a well-used instrument when I bought it. Back in those good days, I ran sound occasionally at the Tavern, rented guitars, amps, and other gear to the bar when a traveling musician or band needed gear that wasn't available from the usual culprits, and bought and sold instruments, petals, and amps to pretty much anyone who called in the middle of the night strung-out, hung-over, in jail, or broke in Omaha or Lincoln. This great old guitar was the last holdover from that period of my life.

I can not explain this, but I was almost infinitely sad about giving up this instrument. I know, "Why did you sell it if you were going to miss it that badly?" The reason was that I was dumping all of my old pipe-dreams, one at a time, until I either found something to care about or decided I was too old, too burned out, too disappointed to care about anything.

After the guitar walked out of my life, I took our dog for a walk. It took about a mile of walking before it sank in that I'd given up an instrument that had been so much of my life during some of the best moments of my life. The real reason I was selling all of my guitars and equipment also sank in; at 65 if I never played another note, sang another song, or even whistled a tune, nobody would care. Not a single person who has ever heard me play guitar or sing has been positively affected by my love of music. A few weeks back, the wife of a friend was bugging me to pick a song and sing for a small group of friends. I begged off, eventually leaving the party to get out of being asked to perform. The real reason was that I was convinced that once she heard me sing or play that would be the last time she'd ask for that torture. When you know how the movie ends, you don't need to stay for the credits.

If you need a definition of failure, this is it. A friend, Scott Jarrett, quoted a car mechanic as saying, "You haven't failed, if you haven't quit." I quit on music, more than once in the last 60 years. When I was a kid, I was one of the few guys I knew in bands who wasn't playing music "for the chicks." In fact, I had almost no interest at all in the girls who hung out around bands and bars. I was there for the music. Worse, I didn't want to be a rock star, I wanted to be a jazzman.

Growing up in western Kansas with shit for a musical environment--and the polar opposite of the parents who used to drag their bored adolescent douchebags into the Musictech/McNally Smith College open houses hoping their offspring would become famous musicians--was a lot more than an uphill battle. It would have required superhuman abilities and commitment. I was more like subhuman. I copped out and played pop music, including a fair number of original tunes, because I had no idea how to get from beginner to jazz player. There were no such animals in Dodge City, Kansas in 1963. When I left home in 1965, there were still no such animals in Dodge or western Kansas and I wouldn't meet any until a decade later.

I got married when I was 19. Somehow, I thought my new wife liked my music and my playing. It turned out that she liked my "dependability" and the fact that I could manage to hold a job and support her. My music was rarely a significant part of me, as far as she was concerned. By the time we'd been married for six or seven years, she was close to hating the aspect of my playing that required practice. There wasn't a place in any of our homes that was far enough away from her to keep her from complaining about my playing. A real musician would have taken that as a sign that we were incompatible. I have never been a real musician or any kind of artist. Over the next two decades, I quit practicing and the less I practiced, the less I could tolerate my playing and less I wanted to play. Today, I can barely stand to touch a guitar because I suck so badly. So, seven years ago I sold my favorite guitar to a man who was a musician. I can't decide if I missed the guitar or the hope once had that I might become a musician.

It Just Doesn’t Matter to Me? I Guess Not

The title of a GetPocket.com article, “Are You Forgetful? That's Just Your Brain Erasing Useless Memories” struck a nerve with me. The contents of the article reinforced that reaction. For almost 40 years, I’ve complained that when I quit playing in bands in the early-80’s I lost the ability to remember song lyrics. A neuroscientist, Dr. Blake Richards explains that we mistakenly believe that the “argument is that memory isn’t supposed to act like a video recorder, but instead like a list of useful rules that help us make better decisions.”

For 15+ years, I had hundreds of songs memorized—lyrics, chord progressions, solos, harmonies and melodies—and within a few weeks, of my deciding that playing in a live band wasn’t for me, all of that vanished. Before the year was out, all of those once-useful memories disappeared and, for the most part, I didn’t give it a moment of thought. I was very busy in my new life. Off and on over the next four decades I would occasionally and unsuccessfully try to learn a new song and be mildly baffled at my lack of success. I wouldn’t make the attempt again for several years each time.

This idea that importance is linked to memory isn’t new to me. 30 years ago, I started a new career as an engineer in a medical device company. Part of my job included training new employees, sales representatives, doctors and nurses in the company’s products. I had been doing in-house industrial training since the 1970’s, but those experiences were considerably less formal (product certifications were involved in medical devices) and the outcome of my new job’s training product could be life-or-death. I was renting a room from a friend when I first started in that job and he regularly amazed me with his ability to remember our “students’” names. I am sure I told him, “I just can’t remember names.”

We regularly watched NBA games after work, I was still a big Showtime L.A. Lakers fan and we were watching a game at the time. He replied, “Bullshit. You know the names of every NBA player down to the 13th guy on the bench. You just don’t care about the sales reps’ names.”

Of course, he was right. I didn’t. For the most part, I never did care about sales reps’ names, ever.

A decade later, I was beginning another new career as a college educator. One of the instructors in my new department was fired, partially, because he couldn’t be bothered to learn the names of the students in his half-dozen student labs. Listening to my new boss talk about how he felt that was disrespectful, I promised myself that I would learn my students’ names if it required tattooing their names on my eyeballs. For the most part, I managed that objective and I did it be making sure that I always cared about my students as human beings and potential associates in the industry within which we were all aspiring to work.

Finally, back to why I can’t remember songs today, I really don’t care about individual songs enough to memorize them. I have to admit that. I don’t believe, at this point in my life, songs are an important thing in my life. Music is important, but specific songs are not. Pop music has been the soundtrack to my whole life, but it has been a 50-year-long soundtrack. Other than the jazz that I stumbled upon when I was 11 or 12, specific pieces of music have held almost no claim to my life. Music as an overall thing is not-lifesaving or threatening. Musicians and their music comes and goes and is forgotten or remembered at random based on mostly emotional, juvenile nonsense. People in my generation “love” the Beatles because they were young and cute and hopeful when they first heard that music. Today, they are mostly MAGA assholes who would burn the world to a crisp just to hang on to their gas-guzzling SUVs and golf carts. My kids’ generation clings to punk and metal and disco for the same lame reasons. And on that silliness goes.

I like all kinds of music from pretty much every generation that has touched my life: not all of any of it, but there is some music from every period between the 1920’s (my grandparents’ music) to today (my grandkids’ music) that strikes my fancy in some way. But I don’t love any of it, at least any of it that I’m technically capable of playing, enough to spend the energy and braincells to memorize it. And now that I know why I seem to be unable to memorize music, I’m going to quit beating myself up for that “inability.” I have almost 500 songs on my performance tablet, charted, organized,

The one exception to that failed memory in the last 10 years has been Tom Waits’ “Shiver Me Timbers.” The lyric to that song, if you know me and my life, is clearly why that song remains important to me:

• I'm leaving my family,
• leaving all my friends.
• My body's at home,
• but my heart’s in the wind.

The first time I heard that song, at the end of a “Numb3rs” television episode, it struck a chord (literally and pun intended) with me that stuck like glue. That song’s lyrics are important to me. In the last year, a John Mayer song, “Walt Grace's Submarine Test, January 1967," is beginning to stick, too. The lyric, “with a library card and a will to work hard” found a place in me that is as personal and important as “Shiver Me Timbers.”

Double-Edged Swords

A friend recently ended a jam session complaining, “I’m worried that musicians today don’t even know the names of the people I grew up idolizing and imitating.” (Or something close to that.) 

I responded with, “That goes both ways, with most of the folks in our generation pretending that no good music has happened since the 70’s or 80’s.” That was not received well. 

I just reviewed a book that I, mostly, disliked for the same reasons, A Craftsman’s Legacy by Eric Gorges, and you can read my opinion of that book on my Geezer with A Grudge blog. Every old generation imagines that it not only invented the wheels of society but perfected them so that every following generation can only screw up the work that went before them. It takes a special sort of arrogant blindness to believe that, but humans are really good at both arrogance and blind belief. It’s one of many things that has always convinced me that the natural state of human “civilization” is chaos. I wrapped up my review of A Craftsman’s Legacy with this: 

“Finally, I firmly believe that everything that requires skill is improved by every generation. You may be one of those addled characters who imagines that ‘good music’ stopped being made in 1960, 1970, 1980, or whenever, but you’re wrong. Likewise, most 1970’s era pro basketball players wouldn’t make the team for, even the freakin’ Clippers, today. Even Michael Jordan would have a hard time playing on a winning team today. It’s true that many people knew how to repair their cars and motorcycles in the 1950’s; because they needed to. A vehicle that lasted 25,000 miles without needing major work in 1950’s was a rarity. Today, we call any vehicle that fails before 200,000 miles a ‘lemon.’ Today, if I had to go to battle with a 15th Century sword I’d just use it on myself to get it over with efficiently. Vintage ‘skills’ are that because they are no longer state-of-the-art and, as such, are obsolete. If you think someone with a hammer and coal-fired forge can turn out a better steel tool than a modern factory, you’re only fooling yourself. If you don’t think a modern adventure touring motorcycle isn’t as well crafted as one of Gorge’s hippo-bikes, you don’t know what the word ‘craftsmanship’ means. If you think someone cobbling out plodding, non-functional ‘choppers, bobbers, and diggers’ could get a job on a modern factory motorcycle race team doing . . . anything, you are probably the ideal reader for A Craftsman’s Legacy.”

I absolutely believe all of that and even a moderate amount of exposure to the best of today’s young musicians would force almost anyone to acknowledge that the “good old” stuff is practically unlistenable in comparison. I admit that I’m not a typical Boomer in my tastes. I didn’t like the Beatles (but I am a huge George Martin fan, he could turn sow's ears into silk purses, repeatedly) or much of the British Invasion in the 60’s and I like most of that stuff even less now. A lot of great music, from R&B to jazz, was bounced off of popular radio by “yeah, yeah, yeah” and other teenybopper bullshit between 1964 and the early 80’s and I don’t think popular music has ever recovered from the damage done. Another Boomer friend commented on the “trivial character” of current music lyrics, as if songs-about-nothing like the Beatle’s “Hey Jude” or “Long and Winding Road” or “Number 9” and pretty much every Led Zeppelin song that wasn’t stolen aren’t only trivial but annoying. At least the Stones had “Street Fightin’ Man” had a point. 

That is such a lame complaint. It’s pop music, dude; music for kids by kids. Don’t expect poetry or meaningful commentary on the state of humanity from kids. 

Just because we’re old and full of ourselves now doesn’t mean that we were solid citizens or brilliantly insightful and creative 50 years ago. I am a firm believer in Theodore Sturgeon’s “90% of everything is crap” rule. I can’t think of a period where the overwhelming majority of popular music wasn’t garbage. For example, the furthest up the US pop singles charts Jimi Hendrix ever made it was #20 with “All Along the Watchtower” in late 1968. The chart topper at that time was “Harper Valley PTA” followed by the Beatles’ lamest ever “Hey Jude.”  Hendrix had 4 successful albums, If you look at almost any moment in pop music history, you’ll be discouraged at how generally mediocre the “hits” are. It was true in 1920 and it will be true in 2020 and 2050. The tastes of the average imbecile are predictably dismal. That casts no reflection on that period’s best and brightest, who will likely be an improvement on the skills and creativity of previous generations until humans vanish from the planet.

Requests, Are We Musicians or Just Player Pianos?

One of the many things I do not miss about being a working musician is requests from the audience. For all of my life, audience members not only assume they have the right to ask performers to play "their music," but that it is the obligation of the musicians performing to accommodate individual audience member's tastes; even when the request is in no way similar to the obvious performer's style. Throw in a tip jar and now you have a fully entitled audience who believes that the performers are barely more (or maybe less) than a player piano. Hell, even player pianos have a limited number of song selections, so being a performer in those situations is existing somewhere below the status of 1800's music replication equipment. 

What's the reward for putting up with that sort of disrespect? Continued employment, I guess. Of course, at the pay rate most music provides you'd be much better off taking a 2nd job at a convenience store. 

The often neglected motivation for doing any art is self-gratification. With music performance, there are at least two ways to achieve that: 1) pleasing yourself and 2) the power associated with manipulating an audience. Most art is some kind of self-expression, but not all art is that. Advertising art is absolutely designed to manipulate consumers; the "art's" audience. Cover bands are very similar to advertising art, especially show bands that cater to corporate gigs. A good friend has occasionally mentioned how much he enjoys reading a crowd and manipulating their energy with his song selections (and the resulting small fortune he makes in tips doing that). When I read the chapter on performing in Rockonomics, I was intrigued and a little baffled by the idea that many artists feel "powerful" or "indestructible" on stage, which sometimes leads to feeling weak and fragile when they are off-stage; followed by drug abuse and death. Tom Petty's story, alone, is a terrible example of that, since Petty practically had to be carried to the edge of the state, due to his broken hip and pain, but once he stepped out on the stage he was "indestructible." Until he wasn't.

Performing has never made me feel anything but incredibly nervous. In my cover-band and original music band years, I would almost always stay on stage playing solo while the rest of the band took a break, because the odds were good that if I left the stage I'd find a reason not to go back. Some of the open mics I frequent locally "offer the opportunity" to take a second pass at the performance stage. I often avoid that. Once I've managed to struggle through a song or three, I'm ready for a drink, something to eat, and a good while to unwind.I have to believe that if I had become a performing, professional musician I would, also, have become a drunk or drug addict to calm my nerves. None of that has improved with age, either.

Where Did You Come From?

Kids in class who have an over-inflated sense of their self-awareness and experience remind me that, someday, there will be a payback and it will be a bitch.

Not that many years ago, my author-music-reviewer-daughter Holly, wrote a review of Bad Plus that included some pretty silly proclamations about the gap between her music knowledge and appreciation and mine. I was entertained. In a similar conversation earlier, she had said, "Dad, I'm a music reviewer" as a statement of superior expertise when we had a disagreement about what qualified as ‘good music” and what didn’t. There are few things on the planet musicians or artists of any sort despise and ignore more than reviewers.

Our other daughter once told me that "It is great being in a family that is so musical," in reference to her husband's family who are dedicated karaoke fans. My kids grew up in a house full of musical instruments, musicians, recording and live sound equipment, and with music of some sort happening all the time, but somehow none of that registered. With all of that background, the first time she held a cheap microphone and sang along with canned muzak in front of a crowd of drunks in a karaoke bar was her first “real musical experience.”

Holly's son is now 22 and is convinced that none of the adults in his family know squat about music. Holly has written one of the biggest selling music theory books ever, The Dummies Guide to Music Theory, and gets a buttload of free CDs in the mail every month from her history as a music reviewer. Not a credential in her son’s mind, because . . . I don’t know what. When I was paging through the weirdly disorganized music list on my car stereo, he had to ask, “Why do you have all of that crap in with your music?” I don’t even want to know what he calls “crap.” He is his mother’s son, with even sillier tastes, and my interest in educating or even talking about music with non-musicians is vanishing into nothingness.

No matter what you have done, your kids will think you have done nothing. Tony Hawk’s kids, apparently, think he is a loser. Of course, most likely the only thing Tony Hawk’s kids will be ever be known for is being Tony Hawk’s kids. So, there is that.

Peter Mayer and Live Music

Saturday night (9/14/2018), I was the sound tech at Zumbrota’s Crossings Gallery for a Peter Mayer show. I’ve been a fan of Peter’s since I first heard “Brand New Harley” at least a decade ago. I bought the CD that song was a part of and discovered other Mayer gems: “John’s Garden,” “Africa,” “Holy Now,” among many other great songs of Peter’s that I’ve discovered (for myself) since. Peter has a solid, dedicated following of fans across the country and, according to posts on his Facebook page, the world.

He earnes it. Not only does he put on a show that covers as much of his huge discography as you would hope and could expect, he puts so much of himself into the performance he has to wind himself up and, then, down again; before and after the show. The sound check is as much a ritual he uses to gear himself up for the performance as it is an opportunity to optimize the sound system.

There is an aspect of performing this kind of personal music in this kind of venue that feels like someone has stripped themself naked in front of you. An audience can sense that kind of intimacy and, if the performer is lucky and talented, the audience can feedback some of that energy and love to the performer closing the loop and creating an environment that is particularly special to music.

Cool Snarky Puppy Stuff

In case I haven't made this clear, Snarky Puppy is my current favorite recording act. Someday, I hope to see them live and I really hope to make them my favorite live act. These are just a few of my favorite performances from this amazing band. At the least, listen to these pieces with decent headphones. SP goes to incredible lengths to produce high fidelity recordings. They deserve the respect of a decent reproduction system, at the least.

Flashing Backwards

While doing some cabinet making in the shop, I listened to Chicago’s self-produced “documentary” (or promotional video, depending on your perspective) “Now More Than Ever: The History of Chicago.” For me, the movie could have stopped about 1/3 way through, when the story got to Terry Kath’s suicide/accidental death/whatever it was. Kath died in 1978 from a self-inflicted “accidental gunshot wound to the head.” Do what you want with that, but I have a hard time imagining accidentally shooting yourself in the head. 

Kath played and sang on Chicago albums from CTA (Chicago Transit Authority) to Chicago VI. Most of the ballsy Chicago vocals were Terry’s, from “I’m A Man” to “Make Me Smile” to “Color My World” to “Now That You’ve Gone.” The other male vocals were Peter Lamm. After Chicago VI, the band went for whiny tenor almost-male vocals and I mostly forgot about them from 1974 on. It’s possible that Chicago did something I liked post-Kath, but I can’t think of what it would be.

In 1970, I was a married trade school dropout with a first kid on the way. I was offered a job in Hereford, Texas with an agricultural equipment company. When my wife and I drove to Texas for my interview, we passed through Amarillo at the moment a local AM radio station decided to play The James Gang’s “Funk 49.” That song allowed us to fool ourselves into imagining that Amarillo and west Texas were at least as hip as western Kansas. It wasn’t. West Texas was and is as backwards as Alabama; and that might be insulting Alabama. I’ve written about my R&R screw-up in “The Last Wagon Wheel Gig.” I haven’t written about what drove me to trying out country music during that miserable period of my history. This is that story.

After we settled into our new home and I got moderately comfortable in my new job, I started looking for a band to join. From the local music store, I quickly learned that there were only three options for a pop musician in Hereford, Texas: C&W, high school kid rock banks, and two horn bands mostly populated by college players from West Texas A&M in nearby Canyon. The kid rock bands didn’t play for money and the horn bands pretty much only worked the college circuit from Amarillo to Canyon to Lubbock and back. The good news was that the horn bands made some money, intermittently. Not much, though, since the cash was shared equally among seven to nine players and a management company out of Oklahoma City.

My last rock band was a fairly successful power trio in the Cream/ Led Zeppelin vein. To be honest, I thought I was a pretty hot guitar player. I could reasonably accurately reproduce Clapton, Page, and everyone British except for a few Jeff Beck solos, I’d been picked (by local musicians) for local All Star bands (on bass) for several years running. Before that, I’d played in a couple of bands that were considered R&B bands, doing Motown and Muscle Shoals hits without a horn section. I played bass with those groups, too. With a recommendation from the music store guy, I got a tryout with both of the horn bands as a guitar player. They both already had excellent bass players.

To make a short story honestly short, I got my ass handed to me during both tryouts. Songs like The Ides of March’s “Vehicle” were right up my alley, but both of those groups were keyed in on Chicago before I knew much about the band. “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is” got a little radio play, but not enough for me to recognize how great a song it was. The first audition started off with the band leader putting the Chicago Transit Authority record’s charts in front of me. With about a minute to study it, he counted off the tempo and away they went with the intention of doing the whole record straight through. By the time they got to “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” (the 2nd cut on the record), it was obvious I was out of my league. I thanked them for their time and slithered away with my tail between my legs. The 2nd band tryout didn’t get past introductions when they realized I didn’t read music and would need to hear the songs they wanted to play, practice them until I mastered the changes and solo, and come back a few weeks later ready to audition. Again, slithering away.

Several years later, when I was working with the Sum Fun Band in California, I learned that horn players often have an unfair advantage: they are committed musicians rather than guitar hero wannabes. They have been playing their instrument, often, for most of their lives; practically all the way through K-12, college, and adulthood. They read, they know theory and composition, and have been playing in a variety of performance settings from jazz clubs to college marching bands at the Rose Bowl. Using the horn player musicianship standard, most guitarists are as close to being a musician as donkeys are to being unicorns. It’s freakin’ scary how many hours a horn player has practiced by age 20.

Some time passed and Chicago came to Amarillo. I got tickets, partially because the James Gang was the headline band (or the opener, I don’t remember which). My wife was either pregnant or tending to our first daughter, but she was definitely not interested in either band. Probably, especially Chicago because, to this day, she isn’t a fan of horns or B3 organs. So, I was there on my own, which meant I found a spot near the stage where I could closely watch Kath with Chicago and Walsh with James Gang.

All I remember about Joe Walsh was that he was incredibly drunk and had roadies pretty much propping him up against amps or stage gear. His guitar playing was nothing interesting.

Terry Kath, however, ruined my day by demonstrating how much better he was than guitar playing I’d seen to that moment and any chance I ever had of getting into his league. There were guitarists of practically all sorts and Terry Kath was so far into extreme territory that he seemed like he was floating by himself. I couldn’t guess where he was going anytime during Chicago’s performance. I can count on the fingers of my hands how many times a guitar player has left me so damaged, confused, and demoralized.

Somewhere between the Wagon Wheel Gig and seeing Chicago and Terry Kath, I decided I wasn’t going to put much hope into my music career and I began to concentrate on my electronics career. I started a music equipment repair business and sold my electric guitar and amp. At the time, I thought I was through with bands and music. That sabbatical lasted two years, when I changed employers and we moved to central Nebraska. In Nebraska, I hired a kid who turned out to be a drummer. He introduced me to what he was listening to in 1974 and we started a band together. And so it goes. A few years later, I was in eastern Nebraska, met another kid, started another band, canned the band and started a sound company and recording studio. The kid tired of music and we closed the sound company and recording studio. I moved to Omaha where I started another studio with another kid and we wrote and played jingles and made some money. He moved to Washington and I moved to California. And so my quitting and returning to music looped a few more times until I ended up retiring in 2013.

Though it all, that evening watching Terry Kath play has stuck with me for almost 50 years. When I watched the Chicago documentary, it brought back some of the feeling of heartbreak and disappointment I felt in 1978 when I heard Terry Kath had died. Chicago was something amazing with him and something ordinary without. I can still imagine myself competent enough to play with a horn band, I just don’t have the energy or time to get there from here.

The Freight Train Is Derailed

I’ve been putting this off, along with sleep and anything resembling confidince that my country isn’t going down a fascist shithole, since late January. It’s probably no news to anyone what the Allman Brothers Band drummer, Butch Trucks, is dead. He used the Republican healthcare plan and shot himself on January 25th.

In the 70’s, the Allman Brothers band was the poster band for musical committment. Post-Dwayne, the band combined with a southern fusion jazz band, Sea Level, and the result was “Win, Lose, or Draw” and a terrific collection of additions to the Allman history. I was lucky (Thanks Mike!) to see the group perform in ‘75 and it made an impression on me that still sticks.

Like today, those were tough years. The Vietnam War turned the US into a deficit nation and we have never recovered. The resulting recession was beginning to close off opportunities and hope for the future. Music was about the only positive thing happening for many of my generation. The Midwest, in particular, was undergoing a change that would be relentlessly painful for the next 40 years. By 1983, that change was so complete that it drove me to move to southern California because technology jobs were no longer available anywhere else. Nixon escaped his criminal prosecution with a deal Ford made to become “president for a moment.” The right-left split that finally resulted in Trump and the likely end of the United States of America experiment went into full throttle.

The Allman Brothers Band was a standard of excellence and energy that could levitate listeners above all of that depressing reality for a few moments. Butch Trucks was the “freight train” that moved the band. “High Falls” might be the best example of how important Butch Trucks was to that large and talented ensemble. There are, as far as I can tell, no good video recordings of that band live.

About five years later, a greatly reduced (in talent, energy, and inspiration) version of the Allman Brothers played at the college in Lincoln, Nebraska. My company provided the stage monitors and I did the stage left monitor mix. Butch Trucks was almost close enough to touch throughout the show.

For the most part, it was Dickie Betts’ band and that was not a good thing. Greg Allman was a drug dazed shadow of himself and when he sang his keyboard playing stopped almost entirely from the effort required just to manage the lyrics of songs he’d been singing for two decades. He had to be led onto and off of the stage, like a brain damaged child. Dickie’s solos were interminable and boring. Getting to work with the band was something I’d looked forward to since the first time I saw them, but after the first couple of songs, I just wanted it to be over with so I could pack up our gear and go home.

The only worthwhile bit in the gig was getting to help Butch Trucks setup and watch him play. Regardless of the band’s turmoil and dysfunction, Trucks just kept truckin’. He was a human freight train who propelled the band through their repertoire, in spite of themselves. Unlike the rest of the band members, Butch stuck around to help disassemble his kit and thanked us for our work on the show.

I’m sorry his last years weren’t happy enough to make him stick around to see how it all turns out. I understand, though. My wife says that age illustrates a person’s character in the lines of their face. I think you can see Butch’s character pretty clearly in this picture.

Making Real Music

A few years ago, a good and perceptive friend remarked that a point was passed about two decades ago where (then) musicians made music and engineers tried not to screw up the performance with limited and unreliable technology and (now) musicians make limited and flawed attempts at providing aural content for the engineers to turn into music. This is not a brag, but a sad commentary on the state of what’s left of the art of making pop music.

This month’s ProSoundNews has a wonderful front page article titled, “Seeing the Small Picture” that describes the half-hearted attempts some engineers and musicians are making to reverse this disgusting trend. Some of the highlights of this excellent article from the Sound Quality Matters event described a scene where “Engineers face the same sort of conundrums. Too man options slow progress. Unfortunately, musicians know that their contributions can be endlessly finessed—by the engineer as opposed to them polishing their own performance. That knowledge multiplied by a room full of players can turn an efficient session into a quagmire of minutia. Then you add a producer who is satisfied to play with the recorded tracks ad nauseam, rather than entice the desired performance out of a human being. The same morasses of options that can drag a tracking session down apply to the mix stage as well. Particular after overdriven tracking and overdub sessions, the mix engineer can have too many details to deal with, too many tracks, too many choices and possibly tracks overproduced to the level of sterility.” Chuck Ainlay summed up the dead music problem’s solution with, “The less you do as an engineer, the better the record.” The Orson Welles/Stephen Webber comment, “The absence of limitations is the enemy of art” carries some significant impact, too.

This is not, however, the direction what passes for “recording engineer education” is taking. I have a sense that somewhere there has been an industry/academic consensus that the Eagles’ “Hotel California” is the greatest record ever produced and that “edit every syllable until the song is completely lifeless” attitude is considered state of the art. Not being any kind of Eagles fan, I missed the meeting or was not invited because I’m not a “true believer.” (The only image I pull up from hearing anything from Hotel California is Ronald Reagan and his merry band of economic and cultural bandits, so it’s not high on my list of fond aural memories.)

Debating “good music” and recording engineering philosophy with 19-year-olds is a depressing activity/occupation. These kids have grown up believing that stringing together loops in Garageband is “making music.” It’s how their heroes do it, so why shouldn’t they buy into this bullshit? I admit, I’m not a modern poetry fan and I really don’t like monotonic, monotonous, childish, whining chit-chat scored with an irritating, repetitive “beat,” so what do I know? Not much, I admit. But I’m willing to bet that this generation of “music” is going to be poorly reflected on in a couple of decades. Like the “lost generation” of No Kid’s Behind Left Untouched, this has been largely a lost generation of music; music by machines for machines.

However, if you are a recording engineer with an interest in music that actually has life, I strongly recommend you read and think about “Seeing the Small Picture.” If you are a Pro Tools certified douchebag who believes musicians are just the data source for your brilliant sonic manipulations and amazing plug-in and keystroke chops, none of this will mean anything and you should carry on with your hobby in your mom’s basement until the trust fund runs its course.

 

The author, Frank Wells, sums up the state of current confusion with, “Ponder how many of the recordings you love best are based on simple arrangements of honest, if imperfect, performances.” In fact, all of my favorite recordings have serious imperfections that make them as close to “perfect” as I can imagine.

Milk of Human Kindness

Not much more to say about this, is there? Scott Jarrett is one of the most insightful artists I've ever known and you can never go wrong with his music.

Getting It Right, Getting It Wrong

Sports Illustrated recently ran a portion of Jerry West's biography and it revealed that the NBA's iconic figure (literally) led a miserable life of depression and self-loathing. The NBA's logo is an artistic rendition of West on the move. Nobody moved quicker, with more determination, or with better accuracy. West played before the 3-point era, but that didn't stop him from shooting from that territory or beyond (even beyond the half-court line). Reading this biography reminded me of a day when elite athletes played for something other than giant bags of money.

That, in turn, reminded me of the real and practical reason ordinary people pay attention to elite athletes, musicians, and artists of all stripes; they remind us that humans can be incredibly special and near-godlike (by a believable definition of "godlike"). Money removes that reminder and replaces it with something more crass and less admirable. Jerry West played like a demon to quiet the demons in his head and from his past. The best musicians have something to prove, too. Songs to express, heart to expose, words to ventilate and enlighten, and sounds in their heads that need to find air to move and ears to respond. When those moments are preserved in a recording, music takes on history and it's a rare kind of history that can be repeated in the privacy of our homes or even all but inside our heads with in-ear monitors and a mobile player. To clear out the Thanksgiving dust, here's a little inspiration:

Nothing like a little Jeff to brighten up a winter's day. My kind of Xmas music.

Serving Music?

In my manufacturing career as a quality and manufacturing engineering manager, I was always asking my employees and managers, “Who does this serve?” whenever they wanted to implement a procedure, change a process, or add paperwork to our workload. One of the late-great Quality Management concepts was that everyone in an organization "serves" someone. From the CEO to the shipping clerk, all of those jobs exist to provide service to someone in the customer or organizational chain. When that system fails, we end up with a society like the one the 1% have created today and, historically, that never lasts long.

Last week, I took some friends to the local jazz club, the Artist Quarter, to listen to a well-known local jazz saxophonist and that question popped into my head for the first time in a few years. In my opinion, the best music is created by musicians who are “serving” the assembly of sounds the whole group creates and that the rest of us call “Music.” In the classical world, I think this goal is commonly accepted principle. In an orchestra, everyone, including the featured soloists, is focused on the whole they are creating. They all obey the conductor who is the conduit to the audience for the musical environment being created. There is no shortage of oversized egos, varying talents, or personality conflicts in classical performances, but they are mostly sublimated in the service of the music printed on the page in front of every player. Even solo classical performances are still directed by the directions on that page that describe how to best service the composer’s aural vision. On average, I would argue that classical music performed in groups is more closely directed toward the service of the music.

In the pop world, this ideal is rarely reached because the service goal for popular music is profit, not music. The engineer, producer, and record label drones all serve as focus groups who analyze the gross aspects of a recorded performance for the possible financial return. “Will it sell?” is infinitely more important than “is it beautiful?” There are obviously violations of this generalization, but those only occur when the “music industry” is in disarray and the financial interests have lost control of where the music is going. That may never happen again in our constantly-connected, followed, friended, and information-manipulated world. Pop music is so thoroughly commercialized that musicians call it that, “commercial music.” That’s a term that used to apply to music made as background for advertisements. Today, a prime goal of popular musicians is to have a song end up in a commercial or as background in a television series. The service of music as an ideal entity is becoming a vanishing cause in the pop world.

Jazz pretends to be a different animal than either pop or classical music. Since jazz presents practically no possibility for financial reward, jazz musicians can imagine themselves to be in a similar boat as classical musicians. Since improvisation is valued over sheet music regurgitation, jazz musicians tell themselves they are more purely serving music, following the muse, as it pops into their heads.

In application, jazz often fails to live up to the best goals of either pop or classical music. The performance I took my friends to was a case-in-point. As if there were some rule that stated each of the four musicians would be allowed a moment in every song to show off, every tune followed the same sax-melody-sax-solo-piano-solo-bass-solo-drum-solo, rinse, and repeat routine.

To be upfront, I have to say that 99.9% of every bass and drum solo I have ever heard has been a miserable exercise in gymnastics. Bass players insist on showing off how fast they can play “pittoon-pitoon-thump-thump-pitow.” Drummers piddily-piddle, paradiddle, and whack the crap out of their percussion paraphernalia until the audience is looking for any excuse to drink more or take up smoking outside in the rain. There is nothing musical about listening to the rhythm section be non-rhythmic. On a commercial basis, selling a drum solo (outside of the Safari’s 1963 fluke hit Wipeout or the few seconds of Steve Gadd’s work in Steely Dan’s Aja) or a bass solo (I have no examples of that.) is ludicrous. Can’t happen. Outside of nihilistic minimalist modern weirdness, classical music is without any examples of extended bass or drum solos. Only jazz musicians imagine that an audience wants to listen to that silliness.

Music is not what is being served in traditional combo jazz, at least in the live performance venue. Musicians’ egos are the one and only focus. Everyone gets a place to show off and disrupt the music for a moment of self-proclaimed glory.
I believe, that’s why modern jazz musicians like Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays, Stanley Clarke, Keith Jarrett, Gary Burton, Larry Carlton, Chick Corea, Larry Coryell, Al Di Meola, Mark Egan, Béla Fleck, Jeff Lorber, and hundreds of other pop-influenced, jazz oriented musicians have found an audience. They waste minimal time stroking their egos and maximum time serving their vision of Music. Sometimes, that veers toward commercial music, for the same reason pop music was perverted by hard cash, but just as often modern jazz musicians reflect the attitudes and dedication of the players who created jazz. While many of the players in Duke Ellington’s bands received solo opportunities, they didn’t expect ten minutes of attention in every tune. Most of the acknowledged classic jazz albums featured incredibly brief moments of rhythm section solo time, if any at all; Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, Dizzy Gillespie’s An Electrifying Evening, and Charles Mingus Mingus Ah Um, Dave Brubeck Time Out, and an almost infinitely long list of great performances that created a genre and audience.

Live jazz, however, still appears to be working at repelling all but the most tolerant audience more interested in X-games performance and less absorbed in Music.

In Times Like These

No particular reason for this entry, other than the fact that I love this song and this performance. Wish I'd have been there. Alan Price is one of my favorite 1960--70's performers. The low point in his career was as the keyboardist for the Animals. (Any time spent behind or anywhere near Eric Burton would have to be regarded as painful at best.) His follow-up band, The Alan Price Set, was terrific and his version of "I Put A Spell On You" is freakin' spooky. Last I knew, Price was screwing off on a beach in Australia. I hope he's having fun.