Popless Week 18: The Mind-Changers

After
17 years of professional music-reviewing, Noel Murray is taking time off from
all new music, and is revisiting his record collection in alphabetical order,
to take stock of what he's amassed, and consider what he still needs.

As explained
in Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point, sometimes a product, a concept, or
even a perceived threat can go from being the province of a few to being an
international phenomenon, just by virtue of it reaching a certain saturation
level in the public awareness. That's sort of what happens with critics too,
whenever a band, rapper or a singer comes out of nowhere and becomes the only
thing anyone wants to talk about for weeks and months on end. And the reasons
why are sometimes hard to discern. Clever marketing, a few well-placed rave
reviews, genuine quality… whatever gets the chatter started, it all leads to
critics and fans scrambling to get their hands on a record and then,
inevitably, responding with an, "I don't know, it's fine I guess, but kind of
overrated." Which raises the question: What would they have said if the record
hadn't been "rated" before they heard it?

There can
be a kind of "tipping point" on an individual level too, related to the one I
just described. When I was young and flippant, I took some pretty obnoxious
potshots in print at the alt-rock heroes of the day. Show me an act that was
getting a lot of hype in the mid-'90s—Beck, Green Day, Weezer, Guided By
Voices, Pearl Jam, Hole, Radiohead—and I can probably dig through my clip
files and find pans and semi-pans under my byline. But at the same time, I've
also always been in thrall to the idea of the Big Shared Pop Moment. I like
blockbusters on opening weekend, hit TV shows when they're in full stride, and
new albums by musicians with sizable followings. So I'll keep on buying albums
by acts I don't much like, provided that some combination of sales and critical
acclaim makes those albums "a must-hear." And sometimes, if I'm persistent
enough, an album comes along that flips a switch in my head, and makes it so
that I not only start to like an artist, but begin to reevaluate all the albums
I hated before.

I wouldn't
say I hated
Guided By Voices prior to 1995's Alien Lanes, but when I dutifully bought Bee
Thousand and the
combo CD of Vampire On Titus and Propeller when they were all the rage, I failed to see why critics
and friends of mine had fallen in love so easily. I tended to agree with Robert
Christgau, who wrote of Bee Thousand, "On most of these 20-tracks-in-36-minutes, the tunes
emerge if you stick around, but they're undercut by multiple irritants. The
lyrics are deliberately obscure, the structures deliberately foreshortened, the
vocals a record collector's Anglophilia-in-the-shower; the rec-room production
is so inconsistent you keep losing your bearings, as befits resident art-rock
fan Robert Pollard's boast (which echoes Lou Barlow's, what a coincidence) that
some recordings aren't just first takes but first plays, of songs he'd dreamed
up since the last time the band came over. In short, this is pop for
perverts—pomo smarty-pants too prudish and/or alienated to take their
pleasure without a touch of pain to remind them that they're still alive."

But for
some reason. Alien Lanes clicked with me, even though it's more a collection of snippets, fragments
and first takes than anything Pollard had thrown together before. It's like an
album-long suite of the best parts of old power-pop and garage-rock chestnuts,
and it achieves a cumulative majesty that, to me, Bee Thousand still doesn't. That said, I do like Bee Thousand
more now than I once did, because I've come to trust Robert Pollard. Now that I know he
can deliver in the clutch, I see his early work as the tentative steps of a
hero-in-training. (And I gave him the benefit of the doubt from then
on—at least for a while.)

Maybe it's
just that I respect people with sizable bodies of work more than
one-hit-wonders. If artists stick around long enough, I take them more
seriously. Or maybe there's a maturing process necessary before artists are worth taking seriously. (I'll add that
this isn't just a musical phenomenon either. It took P.T. Anderson's weird and
wondrous Punch-Drunk Love before I started to see Hard Eight, Boogie Nights and Magnolia as more than just hammy and fitful,
and I've had similar mind-changing experiences with Tim Burton, Steven
Spielberg and others.)

An odd
byproduct of this phenomenon though is that I seem to get into a lot of artists
right when their die-hard fans start to lose interest. I'm not sure why this
is, because I'm not a contrarian by nature, but from Alien Lanes to The Arcade Fire's Neon Bible, it seems I'm perpetually declaring
my devotion to an album only to hear in return, "Eh, they aren't as good as
they used to be." The early adopter types seem as quick to jump off as I'm
hesitant to jump on. It's enough to make you wonder how much of music
fandom—and music criticism—is in reaction to everything but the actual music.

*****************

Pieces
Of The Puzzle

Graham Nash

Years Of
Operation
1971-present (solo)

Fits
Between Colin
Blunstone and Peter Noone

Personal
Correspondence As
I've mentioned before, my Crobsy, Stills and Nash iPod playlists are organized
by songwriter, and as you might imagine, Graham Nash's is the shortest, at
around 50 minutes. But that doesn't mean I play Nash any less than the others.
The key to any good Graham Nash collection is to include the songs he's largely
responsible for as a member of The Hollies, including Britpop classics like
"Carrie-Anne" and "King Midas In Reverse." Nash's more overtly poppy (and
occasionally trippy) Hollies work fits cleanly between his hyper-mellow solo
stuff and the chirpy songs he contributed to CSNY, and while he's never been
the most prolific songwriter, he's got good quality control, recording and
releasing a proportionately significant number of memorable tunes. There's a
unique feel to the best Graham Nash songs: something wide-eyed in its
philosophy, craftsmanlike in its construction, and elegant in its brevity.

Enduring
presence? In a lot
of ways, Nash is the odd man out in CSNY, because songs like "Our House,"
"Teach Your Children" and "Marrakesh Express" are so different from Crosby,
Stills and Young's more freeform hippie jams. But then that's always been one
the group's core missions, to integrate the remnants of the British Invasion
sound with Greenwich Village folk and Sunset Strip rock, and thus present the
maturing face of the '60s pop scene.

Graham Parker

Years Of
Operation
1974-present

Fits
Between Van
Morrison and Joe Jackson

Personal
Correspondence You
could write a very compelling alternate history of '70s rock if you ignored the
usual critical sniping about corporate rock, prog and disco—and how the
industry was redeemed through the saving grace of punk and new wave—and
instead just followed the singer-songwriters and bandleaders, from Marvin Gaye
to Jackson Browne to Willie Nelson to Van Morrison to Stevie Wonder to Nick
Lowe to Bruce Springsteen to Mark Knopfler to Prince to Elvis Costello and
beyond. In that new framing, Graham Parker stands out more. I've always liked
Parker quite a bit, having spent many happy hours in high school spinning Squeezing
Out Sparks
(Parker's acknowledged masterpiece) as well as The Real Macaw and The Mona Lisa's Sister (less celebrated, but hey, I picked
them up cheap). But at the same time, I've always had difficulty making sense
of his sound, which shares some of the bite of punk—or at least its
forerunner, pub-rock—and some of the swing of blue-eyed soul, and yet is
never exactly hard enough or fluid enough to supplant the music with which it
has an affinity. The selling point for Parker isn't his music so much as his
lyrics, with their peculiar bite and acidic aftertaste. And if you stack
Parker's words and persona up against folks like Browne and Springsteen and
Gaye, he sidles up easily.

Enduring
presence? On the
other hand, the quality of Parker's output has declined more severely over the
past decade or so than that of his contemporaries, though he generally manages
to come up with something listenable (if a little dull). He certainly hasn't
damaged his rep too much, anyway—especially since he's always been one
for the connoisseurs. (Side note: For some reason I can't think about Graham
Parker without remembering this
Hulk comic, which was named for a song off Squeezing Out Sparks. The brain connects things up in
odd ways sometimes.)

Gram Parsons

Years Of
Operation 1963-73

Fits
Between Buck Owens
and The Jayhawks

Personal
Correspondence It
took Ryan Adams to finally get me to break down and buy a bunch of albums I
should've bought years ago. In my mania to track down Adams bootlegs and stray
tracks back in the early '00s, I found his cover of "A Song For You" from the
Gram Parsons tribute album that came out several years ago, and I listened to
it a couple of times before I knew the source material. Around that same time,
I re-bought The Byrds' Sweetheart Of The Rodeo—an album I'd gotten on
cassette back in college and hadn't liked much at the time—and I finally
began to piece together Parsons' philosophy of "Cosmic Americana," and to hear
it not just for its influence on artists I liked better, but for its inherent
quality. I think I'd been resistant to Parsons for so long because it takes a
lot for respected country-inflected singer-songwriters to slip around the
defenses I'd erected against them back in high school. (I've never had a huge
problem with country music, or with singer-songwriters in the pop-folk mold,
but guys and gals with acoustic guitars who limit themselves to a certain
rootsy framework tend to irritate me for no rational reason. It's a
rejecting-your-father sort of thing, I'm sure.) As much as I've subsequently
grown to love The Flying Burrito Brothers and Parsons' two solo albums, I still
wish they had a little more of the "Cosmic" and a little less of the
"Americana." But I understand that Parsons was still in back-to-basics mode
there in the early '70s, and that he likely would've expanded his vision had he
lived long enough to do so. In a way, that's part of the wonder of his
recording legacy: we can imagine where Parsons might've traveled, and we don't
have to suffer the letdowns of lousy reality.

Enduring
presence? For
better or worse, Parsons is the godfather of alt-country, both in terms of its
emphasis on retro-twang and its once-removed tales of despair and poverty. I
both love him and curse him for that. But mainly I'm pissed at Parsons for
dying so young, and I'm glad that Ryan Adams hasn't gone out the same way.
(Yet.)

[pagebreak]

Grandmaster
Flash & The Furious Five

Years Of
Operation
1976-present

Fits
Between The
Sugarhill Gang and Whodini

Personal
Correspondence When
my older brother went off to college in upstate New York in the early '80s,
he'd come home every break with cassette tapes full of Britpop and dance music,
including the Grandmaster Flash classic "White Lines." At the time, hip-hop's
presence in popular music—at least in suburban Nashville—was more
at the novelty level, and until Run-DMC, LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys helped
make rap the first option for a lot of teenagers, almost everyone I knew
treated the genre as something light and goofy. I confess that was my initial
reaction to "White Lines," too. I liked it, but mainly because I thought it was
kind of silly. But then I listened to it again. And again and again. And
eventually I started to hear the complexity of the mix, and how the preachy
rhymes contained a miniature document of New York cocaine culture at the onset
of the '80s: the terminology, the social strata, et cetera. The only problem
with my coming to appreciate Grandmaster Flash was that it made me more
resistant to the stripped-down beat-and-boast hip-hop that dominated the middle
of the decade. I expected more of a groove, and more sonic density, and too
much of rap at the time sounded comparatively remedial to me. That is, until
Public Enemy. But that's a subject for another day.

Enduring
presence? There are
some people who are bothered that Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five are
in The Rock 'N' Roll Hall Of Fame, because they're not "rock." These are the
same kind of people who nitpick my pal Scott's "New Cult Canon" entries every
week, not because of what he writes, but because the movies he writes about
don't strike them as "cult-y" or "canon-y" enough. Look, terms of art aren't
legal judgments. They're just ways of grouping, and sometimes they have
personal meaning, and sometimes they have institutional meaning. "Rock 'n'
roll" doesn't have any more of a hard-and-fast definition than movie genres
like "comedy" or "drama" do. Ultimately, hip-hop shares the same roots as rock,
and the Grandmaster Flash crew didn't just emerge from those influences, they
extended them, and have proven influential themselves. That's what halls of
fame are meant to honor.

The Grateful Dead

Years Of
Operation 1965-95

Fits
Between The Band
and The Allman Brothers Band

Personal
Correspondence
There was a combination of factors that turned me into a Grateful Dead fan
after years of willful resistance. In high school, when I was exploring '60s
rock, I stopped short of the Dead, because their critical rep was low, and the
few songs I'd heard on the radio sounded like a soggier version of The Band,
whom I revered. In my college years, the Dead were beloved by the kind of
mush-heads (and mush-head bands) whose company I couldn't abide… though to be
fair, I probably wasn't such great company myself. Then I got one of my first
real jobs—one that didn't involve tips or uniforms—working as a
formatter for a legal publishing house, and one of my co-workers was a major
Deadhead, who sang cool-sounding Robert Hunter lyrics at odd moments throughout
the day. A few years later, I was impressed enough by the series finale of Freaks
And Geeks—in
which one character has her life changed by American Beauty—that I bought my first
Grateful Dead album, and came to at least hear what was good about it, even if
I didn't yet love it. But the real transformative moment happened six years
ago, when I
reviewed Dennis McNally's book A Long Strange Trip for The A.V. Club, and I started to
understand better that what seems formless and lackadaisical in The Grateful
Dead's music is actually built on solid foundations and thoughtful ideals, with
far more complex explorations of rhythm than I had expected. (And as I hope
I've made clear over the past 18 weeks, I'm a sucker for complex explorations
of rhythm.) I bought some of live albums—including a few of the licensed
bootlegs—and started to hear those hazy, sub-Band songs in the context of
three hours of non-stop playing and subtle mood shifts. I'm still not a full-on
Deadhead; I'm more an interested observer. But from their communal vibe to
their DIY ethos to their constant grappling with how to amplify and record a
mood, I've found they have far more in common with the art-punk and indie-rock
I like than the anti-hippie crowd had led me to believe. I mean, I was already
a Meat Puppets fan. Jumping to the Dead wasn't all that hard.

Enduring
presence? I believe
the knee-jerk Dead-disgust has died down some now that Jerry Garcia is
dead—and thus no longer inching the band across the country for
increasingly inert shows—and now that the jam band mania of the late '90s
have subsided. I've even discovered that some respected rock critics—most
notably Robert Christgau—have been Dead defenders for decades now. Tides
do turn.

Green Day

Years Of
Operation
1987-present

Fits
Between The
Buzzcocks and Cheap Trick

Personal
Correspondence The
mind-changing process for me with Green Day has been slow, and remains
incomplete. The first time I heard Dookie, I didn't just dislike it, I feared it, for the way it seemed to
undermine two decades worth of aggression, rebellion and pop songcraft by
giving it all a coat of arena-rock gloss. In the years since, a whole
generation of pop-punk bands has made the Green Day formula even more sugary
and fizzy, such that Green Day now sounds a lot more like ragged old-school
traditionalists than they did in 1994. (Although truth be told, those
distinctions have lost much of their meaning for me.) My problems with Green
Day now are more basic: I think their songs tend to sound pretty samey, and
most of their albums are about a half-dozen tracks to long. (It's the curse of
the CD era.) And I think American Idiot was fussed over a bit too much by the press, though
that's hardly the band's fault. Anyway, I give the boys credit for ambition,
and I do take them seriously now.

Enduring
presence? Much like
Foo Fighters and Pearl Jam, Green Day have become rock elder statesmen simply
by virtue of surviving.

They're
among the most likely candidates of their era to one day make it into The Rock
And Roll Hall Of Fame, even though they were rarely the most acclaimed band of
their generation. In about 10 or 15 years, rock's Hall Of Fame might well end
up looking like baseball's Hall Of Fame, but only if the baseball's Hall Of
Fame started inducting the likes of Bernie Williams over Ken Griffey Jr.

Green
Rode Shotgun

Years Of
Operation 2002-06

Fits
Between The
Raspberries and The Strokes

Personal
Correspondence
Towards the end of my time on the local music beat, I had the bright idea to
write a feature story that delved into some of the questions I've always had
about success and failure in the music business. I had to perfect subject, too:
Green Rode Shotgun, a very good Middle Tennessee rock band that at the time had
released a promising EP and were shopping around their debut album, trying to
get the attention of a label—indie or major. The band's manager,
appreciative of some of raves I'd thrown GRS' way, agreed to let me come hang
out with the band for a day, conduct an extended interview, and check out one
of their shows. He also gave me contact info for some of the people they'd
worked with (not always fruitfully) in the past, and gave me permission to play
some new songs for various people I knew in the music business. The point of
the article: Does this band stand a chance? And if not, why not? Ultimately, I
think I sensed that Green Rode Shotgun were never going to break wide, and
since they were one of my favorite new bands at the time, I was planning to use
this feature to examine why my own tastes were so out of synch not just with
the mainstream, but with the alternative crowd as well. My editor was gung-ho
when I pitched the idea, but though I turned in a piece that I felt good about
and that he mostly liked, in the editing process it got sliced nearly in half,
and turned into a
fairly conventional band profile, with only traces of the critical
perspective I'd planned. As for Green Rode Shotgun, well, they didn't make it. A brief flirtation with a
major label didn't pan out, and since the guys in the band were all approaching
middle age—and most of them had decent day jobs—they called it
quits, likely figuring that if they couldn't draw flies with music as good as
what they were making, what was the point? On my end, the whole experience
added to my growing disillusionment.

Enduring
presence? Listening
to Green Rode Shotgun again this week, I still think they were a great band, who
with the right breaks (and maybe a better name) could've won some people over.
From the moment I first heard it, I've been putting "Lost Song"—one of my
favorite rock songs of all time, actually—in front of everyone I can. Not
everyone digs it. I don't understand why.

Guadalcanal Diary

Years Of
Operation 1981-89

Fits
Between Matthew
Sweet and Commander Cody

Personal
Correspondence I've
got an essay about Christian Rock in mind for some far-off future Popless, and
when I finally get around to it, I'll likely return to Guadalcanal Diary, a
sort of stealth CCR act that has dealt with faith and spirituality the way I
prefer to see it dealt with in music—with healthy doses of doubt and humility,
and with the maturity to make religion only one subject among many. On their
stirring first few albums, Guadalcanal Diary sang songs about The Civil War,
alcoholism, African safaris, The Three Stooges and genocide, all with a kicky
sound that combined the Byrds-y jangle then-common to college rock with a heavy
shot of roadhouse twang. The band's debut album, Walking In The Shadow Of
The Big Man, was
one of those mid-'80s cult favorites that didn't sell a lot, but was beloved by
nearly everyone who bought it. (Although one of my mom's Civil War re-enactor
pals bought that album because he liked the book the band was named for, and
I'm sure he didn't get quite what he was expecting.) Guadalcanal Diary's follow
up Jamboree
didn't sound quite as fresh or tight, though it did contain some great songs,
and when the band muscled up some for the next two records, they gradually lost
a lot of their individuality. During the transition though, they knocked out 2×4, which contains arguably their most
enduring anthem, "Litany (Life Goes On)." There were dozens of bands that
sounded like Guadalcanal Diary on college radio and cluttering up local rock
scenes in the '80s, but few had GD's scope or sense of purpose. They were
something special.

Enduring
presence? There's a
two-fer CD that contains Walking In The Shadow and Jamboree, which I would almost call an essential purchase if it
weren't for the fact that the disc's sound quality is too soft. Rhino Handmade
released sterling limited editions of Walking In The Shadow and 2×4 a few years back too, but as with
all the Handmade products, they're extra-expensive. Obviously, there's still
some interest out there in Guadalcanal Diary, since their albums haven't
exactly fallen out of print like some other bands' have, but they could
certainly do with a good anthology, with decent sound.

Guided By Voices

Years Of
Operation 1983-2004

Fits
Between The Who and
Half Japanese

Personal
Correspondence As
mentioned above, Guided By Voices were one of the acts that I was iffy about
until I heard an album (Alien Lanes) that changed my mind for good. One of the ways that Robert
Pollard eventually wore me down was with his lyrics. Tossed-off phrases like
"senators sipping on Gentleman Jack," and "we'll put on some Kraftwerk and do
it up right," and "post-punk X-men" rattled around in my head, and even today
stray GBV titles and lines leap to mind, depending on the situation (almost
like Simpsons
quotes). For example, my wife and I sometimes refer to our methodical six-year-old
son—a high-functioning autist who speaks in loud, flat tones and can
already do math on a sixth-grade level—as "robot boy," after GBV's song
"Gold Star For Robot Boy." And as it happens, there's nothing my robot boy
likes better than getting gold stars, so the name fits.

Enduring
presence? I had an
alternate GBV-related essay idea for this week, related to musicians who are so
prolific that they eventually start to damage their reputations by drowning
their fans in dreck. (I'll probably return to this subject later on.) Surely if
Robert Pollard had quit making music after Alien Lanes, his output up to 1995—much
of it as shoddy as his output afterward, honestly—might be more revered
than it already is. But critics and fans alike got to the point where they
greeted yet another spotty Guided By Voices release—and now yet another
spotty Robert Pollard solo release—with something more like dread than
anticipation. Pollard likes value for money, so it's a hard slog through a lot
of mediocre bashers to get to the three of four pure-pop gems he buries on each
new record. And yet, put any one of those late-period Pollard "good" songs on a
mix CD, and they nearly always stand out. Put them all together a Pollard-only
mix CD and you'll really have something.

[pagebreak] The Gun Club

Years Of
Operation 1980-96

Fits
Between The Cramps
and The White Stripes

Personal
Correspondence I
had a friend in 10th grade who loaned me punk albums when I was
first getting interested in the genre's history and canon, but my friend was no
punk scholar himself, so his recommendations were often fairly random. He just
picked things up here and there, and then he'd pass them on to me, usually
without comment, leaving me completely at sea as to where these records came
from and whether anyone else in the world cared about them. One of those albums
was The Gun Club's debut, Fire Of Love, which I recorded on the flipside of my tape of The
Rolling Stones' Beggar's Banquet—a good match, as it turned out. In the years to come,
I'd stumble across The Gun Club in strange places. I found a cassette copy of Miami in my brother's college roommate's
collection, a live bootleg in a used record store, a budget-bin copy of The
Las Vegas Story, a
cheap import of Mother Juno at a thrift shop, a copy of bandleader Jeffrey Lee Pierce's
solo album in the collection of my first girlfriend, and so on. But none of
these pieces of music seemed to connect up, and I couldn't find much written
about Pierce or The Gun Club that wasn't skimpy and often somewhat derisive. (I
remember a quote from former Gun Club associate and spook-rock stalwart Kid
Congo Powers, complaining that Pierce "was singing about hellhounds on his
trail while he was living with his mom.") I found out later that The Gun Club's
meager fortunes were largely maintained by the Euro-circuit, where people have
generally been more forgiving of adulteration, and where Pierce's blend of
faux-blues, gutter-punk, gauzy goth and heavy echo resonated more than at home.
In the alt-country era, The Gun Club had a minor revival, and I've heard some
of Pierce's songs covered here and there. But because he was yet another lousy
addict who died young, Pierce never really got to manage his legend. Was he a
poseur or a prophet? A colossal fuck-up, or merely human? The Gun Club story,
properly told, deals with appropriation, maturation, expatriation, and
validation. It's the story of rock 'n' roll.

Enduring
presence? For all
the band's ups and downs, The Gun Club discography is surprisingly strong, and
mostly in print. Their best-known album is Fire Of Love—my high school friend started
me off right there—but from the moment I heard it on the tape I boosted
from my brother's roommate, my favorite has been Miami, a shoddily recorded,
country-tinged death-rock record that reeks of pulp novels, tourist traps and
graveyard shifts.

Hall & Oates

Years Of
Operation
1969-present

Fits
Between The
Righteous Brothers and Boz Scaggs

Personal
Correspondence My
soft spot for Hall & Oates dates back to an HBO concert special I saw
sometime in the early '80s, around the Private Eyes/H2O era. The duo was pretty ubiquitous
by that point, seemingly popping out new hits every few months, with said hits
ranging from the blandly innocuous to the genuinely catchy. In concert
though—in cablecast concert anyway—the succession of familiar songs was
impressive and infectious, and Daryl Hall's full voice and slick stage presence
made sense of all the lip service he'd paid in interviews to his Philly soul
roots. From a skeptic's perspective, Hall's a talented vocalist who's spent his
whole career straining to sell out, by burying his influences behind whatever
his expensive producers wanted to throw into the mix. But you could just as
easily look at Hall—and Oates of course—as smarter-than-average pop
stars who elevated chart-ready material via their more expansive tastes. After
years of being content with my copy of the singles collection Rock And Soul, I went on an H&O; binge on
iTunes one day a couple of years ago, and cherry-picked the best songs from all
the albums I could find. I enjoyed hearing the duo transition from folk-pop to
pillowy soul to punchy pop, all while maintaining an identifiable core sound.
From "Sara Smile" to "Out Of Touch," they're basically the same dudes, wearing
different clothes.

Enduring
presence? In my
experience, more people are willing to adopt Hall & Oates as a guilty
pleasure than just about any other "guilty pleasure act" of their era (outside
of maybe Billy Joel). Perhaps that's because there's not a whole lot to feel
guilty about with Hall & Oates. Sure, there are some songs of theirs that
are more enjoyable as kitsch than great pop—"Adult Education," for
example, and "Method Of Modern Love"—but songs like "Everytime You Go
Away" and "One On One" are pretty unassailable, and Hall & Oates has a
wealth of lesser-known material that holds up as well as the hits.

Stray Tracks

From the fringes
of the collection, a few songs to share….

Grafton,
"The Best Part Of La Grange"

This song belongs in
the ranks of killer small-town kiss-offs. It reminds me of Hüsker Du
crossed with neo-garage, then twanged-up a little, and it's another one of
those songs that found me rather than vice-versa. I was sent the CD it came
from, I played it dutifully, and my ears lit up when this song came on. That
was a good day.

Grandaddy,
"El Caminos In The West"

When Jason Lytle's
California indie-rock collective showed up on the pop-culture radar in the late
'90s, their attempts to integrate sputtering electronics into country-tinged
loping resulted in an impressive match between music and message, as Lytle's
lyrics about decaying technology and his shambling compositions evoked the
bleed of the futuristic into the mundane and vice versa. Grandaddy subsequently
smoothed out too much, but on songs like the steady-rolling "El Caminos In The
West," Lytle crafts trinities of humanity, landscape, and machine, putting the
three in opposition to each other to establish a feeling of inescapable
loneliness. The quintessential Grandaddy character sits brokenhearted and lost
on a stretch of hot pavement, next to a malfunctioning car. The quintessential
Grandaddy sound melts pretty Todd Rundgren piano balladeering with melancholy
Neil Young twang and a modernism-damaged sensibility equally derived from Pink
Floyd, Pavement, and Radiohead—all musicians who like to celebrate the
sad little triumph of being.

Grandpaboy,
"Hot Un"

Here's an
example of how badly critics want to hear something amazing in the
past-their-prime output of musicians who used to be amazing. It's what I call it
The Chrissie Hynde Effect, named in honor of the way that nearly every mediocre
Pretenders album post-1985 (which is to say all of them) has been miraculously
hailed as a return to form by critics who apparently forgot that they said much
the same about the previous Pretenders album. When Paul Westerberg released an
anonymous EP in 1997 under the moniker Grandpaboy, critics called it a welcome
retreat to the rough-and-ready sound of The Replacements… which it's clearly
not. Songs like "Hot Un" are enjoyable, certainly, but they're still tamer and
slighter than Westerberg at his best. But people so badly want to hear him rock
out again that they're willing to accept any uptick in tempo as a full-on
resurrection.

Great
Lake Swimmers, "Various Stages"

These
whispery Canucks came out of nowhere a few years back with a self-titled debut
that plunged into quietude with a reverence rarely heard since Cowboy Junkies
turned a church into a recording studio for The Trinity Session. Great Lake Swimmers' sophomore
effort, Bodies And Minds, traded the makeshift grain silo studio of its predecessor for the softer
acoustics of a country church, and the songs were a little fuller too, with
banjo, lap steel, and watery organ shading bandleader Tony Dekker's stark
acoustic-guitar-and-percussion outlines. The cozily honest "Various Stages" is
perfect make-out music for sensitive singles in off-campus housing, after a
bottle of 10-dollar merlot and a gourmet dinner straight from Kroger's freezer
section.

The
Greenhornes, "It's Not Real"

I used to
tell people that I was building up an eclectic library on my iPod so that I
could set the device on "shuffle" and make some unexpected connections between
different eras and styles of popular music. But there have been unintended
consequences as well. I was gung-ho for neo-garage act The Greenhornes when the
genre exploded at the dawn of the '00s, but one day one of their songs came up
after an actual Nuggets track, and the contrast between genuine garage-rock and The
Greeenhornes' overly rigid retread shook my faith. I still basically like the
band, and they've taken some strong steps towards loosening up on their last
couple of records, but I find I've gotten less and less interested in retro for
its own sake, unless the musician has found a vein that's under-mined, or they
have a unique take. Otherwise… contemporize, man.

Greg Ashley, "Fisher King"

As a solo
artist and with his band The Gris-Gris, Greg Ashley provides a good example of
how to give older styles a fresh spin. His music takes the basic atmosphere of
garage-rock, Euro-sleaze and murky basement folk, but his particular
combination of surrealism, literary flourish and unexpected lyricism feels
wholly personal. Ashley's recorded output so far has been small but solid, and
I get the feeling that he could be a very big deal before the decade is out.

Greg
Kihn, "For You"

That
alternate history of '70s rock that I spoke of in the Graham Parker entry would
do wonders for Greg Kihn, an erstwhile barfly who scored two fairly big hits in
his career ("The Breakup Song (They Don't Write 'Em)" and "Jeopardy") but
mostly languished in the limbo that swallowed up countless gimmick-less rockers
in a fast-changing era. This Kihn cover of an early Bruce Springsteen
song—originally recorded at a time when Springsteen was on his way to being
a non-starter—shows how Kihn fits in with his contemporaries. He was a
clean-sounding post-boogie boy, who sounded best at 11:30 PM, well into his
second encore and thinking about a third.

The
Grifters, "Eureka I.V."

There was a
time when I would've counted myself a fairly big Grifters fan, and expressed
appreciation for the way the Memphis indie-rockers seemed to build sounds
haphazardly, nailing good riffs to interesting lyrics whether they could
support each other or not (and often savoring the collapse when they didn't).
But I've been whittling my Grifters collection down further and further each
year, until this week I was surprised to find before I'd even started listening
that I only had 10 Grifters songs left. But at least I didn't cut any more.
That 10 is a good 10.

The Guess Who, "Sour Suite"

Give me The
Guess Who. They've got the courage to be drunken buffoons, which makes them
poetic.

Guns N'
Roses, "Nightrain"

I'm not
sure if rock history has properly registered the impact that Guns N' Roses' Appetite
For Destruction
made when it was released in 1987. At the time, the hard rock scene was fairly
splintered, with fans of the loud, fast and ugly dividing their attention
between thrash, hardcore punk, art-metal, newly synth-heavy dinosaur acts, and
power-ballad-wielding hair bands. Guns N' Roses roared off the Sunset Strip
looking like just another hair band, but with a sound informed by The Rolling
Stones, early '70s arena-rock and proto-punk. The band's subsequent elevation
to Gods Among Men status—and the inevitable bloat in their sound and
style—kind of obscures the fact that in the late '80s, it was rare to
hear a song as smart and savage as "Welcome To The Jungle" on the radio. One
could argue—and I definitely would—that there would've been no Nirvana breakout
without the market first having been softened up by GNR. And ironically, in the
wake of Nirvana, GNR sounded instantly out-of-date. No wonder we've been waiting
so long for a new album.

Guy
Clark, "Black Diamond Strings"

Clark's one
of those old-guard singer-songwriters who's penned hits for big-time country
artists and released thoughtful solo albums that sell mainly to other aspiring
singer-songwriters. Songs like this paean to cheap goods are exactly what makes
Clark a songwriter's songwriter. You could spend all day analyzing the simple
structure and direct-but-profound message of "Black Diamond Strings," and only
scratch the surface of what Clark does here that's so beautiful.

Haircut 100, "Love Plus One"

I could
probably just cut-and-paste the entry I wrote on Aztec Camera back in January
in order to describe the appeal of Haircut 100's breezy Britpop, with its luxe
orchestrations and faintly tropical feel. I don't know whether a whole
generation of young European men were actually jetting from ski resorts to Ibiza
in between stints at university, but a bunch of UK musicians certainly tried to
create that illusion in recording studios. It's like they were making music for
Howard Hughes: arid and germ-free. There was a subset of indie-rock in the
early '90s that tried like hell to recreate this sound, but it's hard to do on
a budget, and without the original impulse. But I understand why people would
want to call back to the crisp early '80s. It's like double-escapism,
retreating to the nostalgia of an earlier era.

Half-Handed
Cloud, "The Famine's Hard"

Here's another one
to bring back up when I write about Christian Rock in a few weeks. Half-Handed
Cloud is the Biblically informed, whimsically inclined outlet for charismatic
singer-songwriter John Ringhofer, who on the recent album Thy Is A Word
& Feet Need Lamps offered
musical versions of Old Testament stories, delivered in a high, flat voice
that's like a cross between Michael Stipe and Wayne Coyne. Ringhofer favors
brevity, and shows a real gift for combining hummable melodies with avant-garde
structure on songs like the explosive 90-second historical sketch "The Famine's
Hard," a tight burst of experimentalism that proves it's possible to cram Syd
Barrett and The Who into a single song.

The Halo
Benders, "Your Asterisk"

I've been
asked several times why I didn't write about Beat Happening back in the "B"s
(or during my backtrack week), and the reason is both simple and shallow: I
can't stand Calvin Johnson's voice. I abide it in The Halo Benders because it's
tempered by the sweet whine of Doug Martsch, as well as his uncoiling guitar.
But when Martsch and Built To Spill re-recorded The Halo Benders' best song,
"Virginia Reel Around The Fountain," for their 2000 live album, I realized how
much more I'd like my Halo Benders albums if one key element were removed.
(Although actually I had that revelation a few years earlier, when I was
enjoying The Halo Benders on the living room stereo and my wife wandered
through, stopped, and said, "This may the worst thing I've ever heard.")

Harmonica
Frank Floyd, "Swamp Root"

As Greil
Marcus would eagerly point out, this rambling mid-20th-century roots
musician had a much further-reaching influence than his scant recorded legacy
would indicate. Harmonica Frank's short stint on Sun Records reportedly
convinced Sam Philips that a white musician recording black music might be very
successful, if said musician weren't an old coot. And it's not too hard to
listen to "Swamp Root" and imagine a teenage Robert Zimmerman in rural
Minnesota having his mind re-wired with each sputtering line.

Regrettably
unremarked upon: Grace Jones, Grant
Green, The Grass Roots, Greg Trooper, Grizzly Bear, Guster, The Hacienda
Brothers, Handsome Boy Modeling School, Hank Williams, Hank Williams Jr., Hank
III, Hanson, Harold Melvin & The Bluenotes, Harry Chapin and Harry Connick
Jr.

Also
listened to: The
Gossip, The GoStation, The Gourds, Gow Dow Experience, The Grabs, Grace Potter & The Nocturnals, Graham Coxon, Graham Smith, Grails, Gran
Torino, Grand Champeen, Grand Funk Railroad, Grand Ole
Party, Grand Prix's, Grand Serenade, Grand Theft Audio, Grandmaster
Melle Mel, The Grandsons, Grant Lee Buffalo,
Grant McLennan, Grant-Lee Phillips, The Grates, Gravel Pit, Gravioli, Grayson Capps,
Great Lakes, Great Northern, Green Jelly,
The Green Pajamas, Green Pitch, Green To Think, The Greenberry Woods, The Greencards, Greens Keepers, Greg
Foresman, Greg Hawks & The Tremblers, Greg Lake, The Greg Lowery Band,
Gregory Douglas, Greta Gaines, Greta Lee, The Grey, Grey Does Matter, The
Grey Race, Greyboy, Griffin House, Grinderman, The Groop, Groove Addiction, Groove Armada, The Groove
Farm, Ground Components, Growing, Guards Of Metropolis, Guff, Guppyboy, Gurf
Morlix, Guru, Gus Black, Gustavo Santaolalla,
Guv'ner, A Guy Called Gerald, Gwen Guthrie, Gwil Owen, Gym Class Heroes, H.I.M., Ha Ha Tonka, Hail Social, Hajime
Tachibana, Half Man Half Biscuit, Hallelujah The Hills, Halou, Hammell On
Trial, Hamilton Camp, Hanalei, The Handsome Family, Hang Ups, Hangar 18, Hangnail, Hank Cochran, Hanne Hukkelberg, The Hanslick
Rebellion, Haram, Harmonizing Four, Harold Burrage, Harold Hill, Harper's
Bizarre and Harold & The Majestic Kind

Next week: From Harry Nilsson to Idaho,
plus a few words on glorious crackpots