Popless Week 43 & 44: Your Rock 'N' Roll Lifestyle

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.

Before Ryan
Adams started cultivating a reputation as modern rock's premiere
burnout-in-the-making (and before he reformed, and became a
reliable-if-a-little-dull old pro), he was a nobody from North Carolina,
fronting the upstart alt-country act Whiskeytown. Adams began to draw attention
from the cognoscenti with songs like "Empty Baseball Park," which takes an
expression of reluctant reconciliation and expands it into an evocative sketch
of small-town sparseness. "Stumble past the record store / End up at the
movies," Adams sings, lamenting the go-nowhere patterns he keeps falling into
with the same girl, while also describing what it's like to be bored and
anxious in a place devoid of distractions. Add a few more details and "Empty
Baseball Park" could be a musical version of one of Chuck Klosterman's essays
about his misspent Midwestern youth.

At various
points during the project, I've described my interest in punk rock and its
various feeders and tributaries as "scholarly," and some readers have taken me
to task for not being fully immersed in the punk scene. I never meant to give
the wrong impression. It's not like I was listening to The Replacements with a
notebook in my hand and a set of charts and histories spread out on my bedroom
floor. I mean, c'mon, I was a teenager; I was hardly unmoved by punk's
objective to irritate, agitate, binge and purge. And I was living in suburban
Tennessee to boot—as Ryan Adams explains in "Empty Baseball Park," it
wasn't like I had a lively cultural life to alleviate my typical adolescent
ennui.

But as I
mentioned back
in Week 9's "Dilettantin'" essay, I've always been too much of a
multi-tasker to commit fully to something as all-consuming as being a full-on
punk. And I felt ridiculous when I tried. For the six months or so that I spent
ripping up my clothes, scrawling political messages on blank T-shirts, and
giving myself asymmetrical haircuts, I kept asking myself if really needed to
wear a costume to appreciate Black Flag. (And was that costume still suitable
when I was listening to The Band or Thomas Dolby?)

Even moving
beyond the clothes and the hair, I've never been one to believe that you have
to be immersed in a particular kind of lifestyle in order to fully "get" some
kinds of art. Sure, it can help. (Being a pseudo-intellectual child of divorce
with a thing for Pink Floyd and the Risky Business soundtrack probably made The
Squid And The Whale
more meaningful to me than it might've been to some.) But I'd never argue that
people can't be truly moved by Loretta Lynn unless they grew up in Appalachia,
or that they can't enjoy reading Tintin comics unless they were born in Belgium
and spent time as a boy reporter. So why would I say you have to be an
anti-authoritarian ragamuffin from a broken home to like The Germs? (And that
if you're not,
you must be some kind of poseur?)

Entertainment
is almost always about escapism of one kind or another, even if you're escaping
the blandness of your own life to vicariously experience the harshness of
another. So I get why people would want to associate themselves with gangsta
rap or death metal or straight-edge or shitkicker country or heroin chic or
Sunset Strip horndoggery or what-have-you. Whether you've actually lived one of those lives or whether you
just like to pretend, the power of music to define a whole world—complete
with its own ideologies and fashion sense—can be overwhelming. And after
all, we all get to pick our fantasies.

I just
don't understand how you can settle on only one. Being exclusively hardcore—even
if that hardcore-itude extends to punk, metal and rap—would be, for me at
least, too much like having only one channel on my TV. (And having that channel
be, like, Spike.) I think Ryan Adams would understand what I'm getting at. A
lot of his post-Whiskeytown floundering had to do with him not wanting to limit
himself to one genre or one persona. If he liked Britpop and glam-metal as much
as singer-songwriter folk-country, why should he spend the rest of his career
just as a raspy troubadour? After all, didn't he get into rock 'n' roll to avoid dead-end jobs?

A few years
after writing "Empty Baseball Park," Adams returned to the theme of wandering
through hick wastelands on Pneumonia's "Jacksonville Skyline," a song at once more mature, more
urgent, and more affected than he would've been capable of back when
Whiskeytown started. By the time Pneumonia was recorded, Adams was beginning to buck against
the idea of working with a set band, and starting to imagine a broader context
for his career than the insular realm of alt-country. Still, Adams builds "Jacksonville
Skyline" out of workshirt-worthy imagery and self-definition, from the
overcooked ("I was born in an abundance of inherited sadness…") to the mundane
("…and fifty-cent picture frames bought at a five-and-dime.") There's an
element of autopilot to "Jacksonville Skyline," as though Adams had mastered
this particular idiom and had learned to generate suitable lyrics and sounds
practically on demand. And yet the song is far, far from impersonal. When Adams
goes from singing about watching the soldiers on the weekends to becoming a soldier on the weekend, you can
hear the echoes of the person he might've been if rock 'n' roll hadn't
intervened. And behind the relief, you can hear the fear that maybe,
unwittingly, Adams had still wound up conscripted.

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

Pieces
Of The Puzzle

The Velvet Underground

Years Of
Operation 1965-70
(essentially)

Fits
Between Yo La Tengo
and Galaxie 500

Personal
Correspondence I've
written a few times in Popless about what it's like to read about a legendary
band before hearing their music, and how sometimes the sound in my head was far
different from the actual records. In the case of The Velvet Underground, the
great surprise to me was that a band so infamous for singing songs about drug
deals and sadomasochism also recorded songs that were pretty, and poppy. (Although I shouldn't
have been so surprised, since my first exposure to V.U. came via R.E.M.'s covers
of "There She Goes Again" and "Femme Fatale.") Still, it's not like The Velvet
Underground disappointed on the edge factor. If listening to Prince was like
finding a copy of Hustler on the side of the road, then listening to The Velvet
Underground was like finding a copy of Naked Lunch. Half the time, with songs like "Sister
Ray" or "Heroin," I couldn't quite believe what I was hearing, nor could
determine if Lou Reed was even singing what I thought he was singing. Part of that was
Reed's fault. As a lyricist, Reed has penned some indelible lines, but he's
also an incorrigible vulgarian, and sometimes he mistakes crudity for "telling
it plain." The same applies to The Velvet Underground's music; without John
Cale to provide a tincture of art from the start, Reed might've settled for
mere garage-rock primitivism. But that's what made the band so beloved too,
that songs about such dicey subjects were so catchy, direct and driving. I had
the good fortune to come of age in an era when The Velvet Underground's albums
were just getting reissued, after a decade-plus of being out of print. A lot of
the pre-punk bands I read about in the '80s were hard to track down in record
stores, but not only could I find V.U.'s four official LPs with no trouble, I
also had access to live albums, outtakes collections and eventually even
alternate mixes and demos. If you can define a person's musical taste based on
which Velvet Underground is their favorite, then I wonder what it says about me
that my favorite "real" V.U. record is the self-titled third one (so muted and
drone-y) but that my actual favorite is V.U., the "lost" album that sounds like all the other albums all
mixed together? It probably just means that I've never good at making up my
mind.

Enduring
presence? It's been
said that only 500 people bought The Velvet Underground's first album, but that
every one of them went on to start a rock band. I believe that only about 500
people are familiar with that saying, and every one went on to be a rock
critic.

Versus

Years Of
Operation 1990-2001
(for now)

Fits
Between Mission Of
Burma and Unrest

Personal
Correspondence One
of the major downsides to not seeing much live music anymore is that I no
longer get that experience of discovering a band in concert before buying any
of their records. These days, I often see the bands I like on TV, and I'm
inevitably disappointed. But back in college and immediately afterward, I'd buy
records by bands I'd seen live, and would often find the recorded version lacking. I remember it took
a long time for Versus to live up to my first experience of them, in the tiny
performance space in the back of Lucy's Record Shop in Nashville. My editor at
the time knew a couple of the band members, and used words like "Burma" and "Mission"
in describing to me how Versus sounded—which understandably piqued my
interest. What impressed me the most about Versus' performance was how in the
midst of these chirpy little indie-rock songs, Richard Baluyut would launch
into eruptive guitar solos—almost like Bob Mould sitting in with Tsunami.
I bought a copy of the band's EP Let's Electrify from the merch table, and the time
it was a letdown in comparison to the show I'd just seen. (The guitar sound was
tinny; the vocals thin.) Now, over a decade removed from seeing Versus live,
and with the memory of that night fading, Let's Electrify sounds a lot better, and the
records immediately after it—which once were equally unsuccessful to my
ears—strike me as far more accomplished than a lot of the indie-rock of
the era. Eventually, the studio version of Versus caught up with how I always
figured the band should sound, and I'd stack up the albums Secret Swingers, Two Cents Plus Tax and Hurrah with some of the '90s best
alt-rock. (I wouldn't put any of those records in the decade's Top 50, but if
you combined the best of all three, that new album might come in at #51.)
Mainly I think Versus learned how to play to their strengths, emphasizing
Baluyut's guitar more and more, and giving their uptempo songs more drive. Or
maybe I just feel that way because I never got to hear those later songs in
concert, when they really cooked.

Enduring
presence? I've only
intermittently kept up with the various Versus-mates side projects. I've never
heard Richard Baluyut's Whysall Lane, though I've enjoyed some of James
Baluyut's work as frontman for the impossible-to-Google +/-. (But I'll be
getting to them in two weeks.) Last I heard, Versus had reunited for a few gigs
in New York and were considering a full-on revival. If they ever tour again,
I'm there.

Violent
Femmes

Years Of
Operation
1980-present (off and on)

Fits
Between Camper Van
Beethoven and The Modern Lovers

Personal
Correspondence As a
junior in high school, I joined the Quiz Bowl/Academic Olympics team, and
encountered a new circle of friends (including my first real girlfriend) who
were all decidedly different from my Honor Roll friends, my jock friends, my
punk friends or my forensics friends. The Quiz Bowl crowd were an odd lot. They
were academic overachievers, yes, but they weren't drones or freaks. They were
a lot savvier than most of my other smart friends, who were exclusively
grade-focused. The Quiz Bowlers I knew read books beyond what was assigned in
class, and had tastes and styles that didn't precisely conform to any one
clique. And I found this to be true of other Quiz Bowl teams too, when we
competed against them. At my first citywide tournament, one team from
Nashville's more high-toned school district came to the table wearing
trenchcoats and sunglasses and sporting perfectly groomed hair, like they'd
just stepped out of a Bret Easton Ellis novel. And they carried a boombox, on
which they blasted Violent Femmes' debut album before the round started. Like
The Cure and R.E.M., Violent Femmes were a band enjoyed fairly widely, not just
by alt-rock fans. They wrote catchy, snotty songs that adolescents of all
stripes could relate to, and the fact that they said "fuck" a lot gave them a
cachet that transcended high school factionalism. Still, as the cool, rich Quiz
Bowl team sat calmly in their chairs, listening to "Please Do Not Go" at a
fairly high volume for such a small university classroom, I felt like I'd found
my role models. To be a badass at trivia, with a sharp sense of personal style, and to like
Violent Femmes? That's who I wanted to be. A year later, having taken over as
the captain for my school's Quiz Bowl team, I arrived at the citywide
tournament with my own boombox, which I wasn't allowed to play in the rooms where
the competition was held. So between rounds, I set up in the hall, leaned
coolly against the wall, and listened to Minutemen's Double Nickels On The
Dime, feeling
totally awesome. Unfortunately, I'd set up next to a room where an actual class
was taking place. The instructor came rushing out angrily and told me to switch
the music off. I was through being cool.

Enduring
presence? Though Violent
Femmes is the
band's one true classic, the follow-up Hallowed Ground is quite good too, and the Femmes
recorded at least two or three worthy songs an album for the rest of the
decade. Still, when I saw them live, circa 1992, they were fairly pathetic,
running through all the old favorites at about three-quarters speed. The band
was on the nostalgia circuit before Gordon Gano had even hit 30. I guess it's
got something to do with luck.

[pagebreak]

The Walkmen

Years Of
Operation
2000-present

Fits
Between Bob Dylan
and Clinic

Personal
Correspondence If
you'd asked me before this week to sum up The Walkmen, I'd have said that their
first album was more noteworthy for its sound than its songs, and that they
pulled it together for the one of the best albums of the '00s, the woozy 2004
disc Bows + Arrows,
which focused the atmospheric jangle of the debut into something rougher and
angrier (while no less lyrical). Then I would've referred to my review of the
even rawer follow-up A Hundred Miles Off, about which I wrote, "As lead singer Hamilton
Leithauser continues his Bob-Dylan-circa-1966 mannerisms, and his mates
continue their dust-on-the-needle sonic aesthetic, The Walkmen careen through
twelve songs that frequently devolve into sound-swallowing echo and boozy
bellow, until the whole album becomes one long, moody abstraction." But
listening to all three albums in succession this week, I heard a much clearer
progression, to the extent that I now think A Hundred Miles Off might actually be superior to Bows
+ Arrows. In 2006,
I wrote, "Too much of A Hundred Miles Off sounds enervated, which makes the rare uptempo
tracks—like the zippy and shimmering "Good For You's Good For Me"—stand
out like mountains at the edge of a flat desert landscape." Now, the album's
general feeling of fatigue strikes me as an apt response to these perilous
times.

Enduring
presence? Around
the time The Walkmen wrapped A Hundred Miles Off, they knocked out a song-by-song
cover of Harry Nilsson's 1975 LP-length collaboration with John Lennon, the
cult oddity Pussy Cats. Clearly Pussy Cats—with its heavy reverberations and wastrel decadence—inspired
the overall tone of A Hundred Miles Off, yet like Pussy Cats, A Hundred Miles Off has a taste that can be acquired,
with patience and repetition. Lennon and Nilsson came by their chaos honestly,
trashing years of pop artistry in a few drunken weekends. Leithauser has never
been a craftsmen on his idols' level, which means The Walkmen's sloppiness can
sound more like, well, slop. Nevertheless, they're a band with a focused vision
and a distinctive style. Now that it's November, I'm free to listen to their
latest album. I'm looking forward to hearing if it's another step
forward—though I don't know that I'd be able to tell right away.

Warren Zevon

Years Of
Operation 1969-2003
(solo)

Fits
Between Randy
Newman and John Hiatt

Personal
Correspondence "Werewolves Of London"
was a classic-rock radio staple in the early '80s, but our local stations
rarely went much deeper than that, so I tended to think of Zevon as some kind
of novelty singer prior to his mid-'80s "comeback" with the playful, powerful,
state-of-the-art rock record Sentimental Hygeine. Once I ventured back into the catalog, I quickly
realized that Zevon was capable of penning picaresque story-songs so packed
with memorable characters and witty, descriptive details that even now they
reveal new depths of insight. But I wasn't exactly wrong in thinking of Zevon first as a comedian. If
anything, Zevon often relied too readily on his facility for punchlines,
forgetting that even the funniest jokes lose much of their humor after they've
been heard once. Luckily, Zevon compensated with one of the most distinctive
and appealing vocal/lyrical cadences in rock 'n' roll. His sinister mumble and "Mr.
Bad Example" persona gave his songs about outlaws and yuppies an endearingly
skewed perspective, but Zevon was also capable of achingly tender love songs,
and songs that fall somewhere in between parody and sincerity. In my favorite
Zevon song, "Splendid Isolation," when he sings, "Michael Jackson in Disneyland
/ Don't have to share it with nobody else / Lock the gates, Goofy, take my hand
/ And lead me through the world of self," the line is wry and even somewhat
profound. The song combines the mundane and the fantastic in a way that's
quintessentially Zevon. It's funny too—but not too funny.

Enduring
presence? Next to
Bruce Springsteen and Ryan Adams, Warren Zevon is the artist with the most
songs permanently installed on my iPod. I tend to keep my iPod playlists lean
in order to fit in as much as possible, but if I end up with more than one
Zevon song during a shuffle session, you won't hear me complain.

The Waterboys

Years Of
Operation 1983-96,
2000-present

Fits
Between The Call
and The Frames

Personal
Correspondence Mike
Scott of The Waterboys coined the phrase "The Big Music" to describe the sound
that his band (plus Big Country, U2, The Alarm, Simple Minds and myriad others)
perfected in the early-to-mid-'80s. Since I was fully in the tank for The Big
Music—to borrow the political parlance of our times—I pretty much
flipped my shit the first time I heard The Waterboys' third album This Is
The Sea. Today,
that album makes me wince a little, with its references to "the Pan within" and
its untethered orchestral pomp. But I remember the way it made me feel at 15,
not too many years removed from reading C.S. Lewis, and still so unschooled at
romance that I could think a line like "your love feels like trumpets sound"
was really deep, and not in the least bit corny. (Now I've stepped back through
the wardrobe, and I tend to think that lines like that are deep because they're corny.) I also remember how
betrayed I felt when Scott took the band in a different direction with The
Waterboys' next album, the trad-minded Fisherman's Blues. I was a freshman in college at the
time, still reeling from the letdown of U2's Rattle And Hum and lamenting the end of the era of
booming drums and bagpipe guitars. I didn't want these bands to go searching
for their roots in Celtic jigs and Delta blues. When Scott sang, "I have heard
the big music / And I'll never be the same," I took it at face value. What a
fool I was.

Enduring
presence? I now
find much of The Waterboys too painfully earnest and florid, but a handful of
Scott's songs still stir. "The Whole Of The Moon" and "Fisherman's Blues" are
two of the best pop singles of the '80s. And "December" properly encapsulates
The Waterboys sound I like best, from the days when Scott played most of the
instruments himself, building songs a layer at a time, while shooting for a
sound akin to a stiff wind on a sunny day.

Waylon Jennings

Years Of
Operation 1964-2002
(solo)

Fits
Between Johnny Cash
and Willie Nelson

Personal
Correspondence I
went through my requisite Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash phases, but I didn't
even give a second thought to Waylon Jennings until last year, when I watched a
DVD compilation of Jennings' TV performances and subsequently fell fast and
hard. I think I'd resisted Jennings in the past because there's no clear rock,
folk or pop road into his catalog, the way there is for the freely
collaborative and broad-minded Cash and Nelson. "Outlaw" or no, Jennings was
straight-up country, and becoming a Jennings fan seemed too much like following
in the footsteps of my trad-addled Dad. But while I enjoy Jennings' early, more
rockabilly-tinged singles, it was those no-doubt, unadulterated country records
that ended up knocking me flat. Jennings' '70s albums in particular have such
purity. With only a few lines—some his own, some borrowed from
friends—and a skeletal arrangement, Jennings could evoke a heartbreak and
hope as elaborate as any symphony. I look forward to many happy decades
catching up.

Enduring
presence? Reviewing
that DVD, Nashville Rebel, I wrote, "With his square face and scraggly hair, Waylon
Jennings certainly never looked like a star, even in the elevate-the-everyday
realm of country music; and he was neither a spectacular singer nor a
top-flight songwriter. But Jennings had a dark aura that made him especially
mesmerizing on-stage, where he'd growl about heartache and pluck at his
gorgeous pearl inlay guitar, while the hottest C&W; players in the business worked
up a good head of honky-tonk steam beside him. Just hearing Jennings ramble
through Billie Joe Shaver's 'Slow Rollin' Low' isn't the same as seeing him and
The Waylors on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert, playing the song as though it was their last
earthly deed. And given Jennings early-career friendship with the poor, doomed
Buddy Holly, maybe he felt it was."

The Wedding Present

Years Of
Operation
1985-present

Fits
Between The Smiths
and Josef K

Personal
Correspondence Two
of my closest college friends and I each had our own "import bands:" UK acts
whose hard-to-find EPs and live albums we'd try to track down every time we
happened to be near a decent record store. Mine was The Wedding Present, whom I
first found via Beggar's Banquet's domestic edition of Bizarro (which I believe I picked up at my
college newspaper's office while looking for CDs to sell for beer money). As a
Smiths fan, I took immediately to The Wedding Present's muscular, warp-speed
version of Smiths-ian angst-pop, though after hitting the import bins for
copies of George Best, Tommy
and some of the band's Peel Sessions, I began to notice the distinctions
between Morrissey's withering put-downs and epic self-pity, and David Gedge's
angry rants aimed at ex-lovers. Gedge has basically spent his entire career
re-writing Bob Dylan's "Positively 4th Street," working almost
exclusively in the second person as he lays bare his grudges, regrets, and raw
sexual need. Despite Gedge's narrow focus, there was a time when The Wedding
Present seemed poised to conquer the U.S. alt-rock market. After Bizarro, the band released the staggering Seamonsters, which made good use of producer
Steve Albini's grasp of rock dynamics to put across a set of songs that
combined Gedge's usual recriminations with some poignant reflections on
childhood. And then after dominating the UK with their single-a-month project,
the band signed to Island Records and collaborated with grunge-era titan Steve
Fisk on what to me is The Wedding Present's most essential album, Watusi. Introducing a little more variety
into the music without losing the essential fury, Watusi offered a punchy, catchy, funny
study of romantic desperation. (It's high on my list of the best albums of the
'90s.) In the years since Watusi, Gedge has broken up and reformed the band, and has
continued to record EPs and LPs that sometimes make it Stateside and sometimes
not. So The Wedding Present remains one of my "import bands," lo these many
years later. Sometimes I wonder if that's why I like them so much.

Enduring
presence? David
Gedge's singing, like many British rockers' (Morrissey, Robert Smith, Ian
MacCullough) is an acquired taste—it's a breathy, mewling sound that
clings to the top of his mouth like moist bread. But Gedge can make it work
when he wants to. On The Wedding Present's fantastic EP Mini, Gedge often let his voice trail to
a mumble, allowing it to get buried by the songs' noisy, busy arrangements. The
idea is to capture the frenetic, fleeting energy of rock 'n' roll in an
intricate, memorable web. It's a rush best summed up in the chorus of Mini's song "Drive": "If you're driving
/ I'll go / And I don't care where."

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

[pagebreak]

Stray
Tracks

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

Venus
Hum, "Springtime #2"

Nashville
technopop act Venus Hum had the good and bad fortune to come along right as the music media
was buzzing about "electroclash." Riding the hype, Venus Hum landed on a major
label, released the superb Big Beautiful Sky, became go-to collaborators for
other synth/dance artists, and then… the big stonewall. The record-buying
public let BBS
gather dust, and in short order, the trio suffered the termination of their
recording contract, lead singer Annette Strean lost her singing voice to vocal
nodes, and changing musical trends put ice-cool pop-tronica out of favor again.
Undaunted—or at least only slightly daunted—Venus Hum returned with
another LP, The Colors In The Wheel, which found Strean no longer singing with operatic abandon,
though still remarkably expressive, with a core of vulnerability. For a band
founded by two computer programmers and a Montana-bred Broadway baby, Venus Hum
has done a remarkable job of mixing emotional depth and technical precision in
ways closer to moody Europeans like Björk and Hooverphonic than to the hard,
buzzy dance music that typified electroclash. Venus Hum's songs are songs first and technical creations
second, and most of them would survive the transition to acoustic piano and
guitar without losing much.

Vic Chesnutt, "Forthright"

A lot of
Vic Chesnutt's hardcore fans prefer his music the way they first heard it, on
early albums like Little and West Of Rome, where the Georgia singer-songwriter relied almost exclusively on his
craggy voice, coarsely strummed acoustic guitar, and remarkably vivid New South
storytelling. But I have too many bad memories of hanging out in Athens bars
and being subjected to interminable caterwauling solo sets by
Chesnutt—usually thrown together so that he could pay off his bar tab. I
didn't really start to enjoy Chesnutt's music until I heard him working with a
full band on albums like Is The Actor Happy?, The Salesman & Bernadette and Ghetto Bells. Chesnutt gives his gutter-cat
growl and shapeless melodies more body when he's fitting it into the context of
an actual arrangement. Even a song like the spare, seven-and-a-half-minute "Forthright"—which
mostly consists of a few idly plucked instruments and Chesnutt's dreamy,
pleading vocal—sounds notably richer with just a few additional sounds
adding atmosphere and scope.

Victoria Clark & Company, "Statues And
Stories"

I've been
skipping past the showtunes in my collection because it's an organizational
nightmare to list all the permutations of people singing on cast albums; and
anyway, 85% of my musical theater collection is Sondheim, and I
wrote a long Sondheim appreciation last year. But I can't resist this
song from Adam Guettel's Tony-winning The Light In The Piazza, which evolves past Guettel's usual
Sondheim Lite affectations and adds more overt, classically Broadway
flourishes. By and large, I was disappointed with The Light In The Piazza cast album (I haven't seen the
show), because I was a big fan of Guettel's eclectic, witty, poignant Floyd
Collins, and The
Light In The Piazza
strikes me as too repetitive and broad. But this song is really lovely, evoking
the mysteries of old world Europe as they unfold to wide-eyed American
tourists.

Vince Guaraldi, "Cast Your Fate To The Wind"

If you
asked any random music critic or music buff to do a project like this one, that
person would most likely have a very different set of musical interests and musical
histories than my own, but nearly every one—if he or she were
honest—would admit that much of their early understanding of jazz was
shaped by Vince Guaraldi. If you're an American born in the '60s or afterward,
you grew up watching the Peanuts holiday specials, and even if you didn't pay close
attention to Guaraldi's scores, the plaintive piano and laid-back rhythms
must've insinuated themselves into your subconscious. Prior to A Charlie
Brown Christmas,
Guaraldi had already won a Grammy for his song "Cast Your Fate To The Wind,"
which may be his most famous non-Peanuts recording. Still, when my kids walked into the room
while this song was playing, they stopped what they were doing and walked over
to the computer. "Hey, it's Charlie Brown music," my daughter said. I wonder
what she'll think years from now, when she hears Coltrane, Brubeck, Monk and
the like?

Vince Taylor, "Brand New Cadillac"

Webb Wilder, "How Long Can She Last"

Because I
rarely read labels or liner notes when I was a teen—mainly because I
often duped records from friends, or bought "Nice Price" cassettes with no
liner notes—there are a host of cover songs that I used to assume were
originals. Not until I heard Taylor's "Brand New Cadillac" on the Rockin'
Bones box set a
couple of years ago did I realize that The Clash didn't write the song for London
Calling. (Though
The Clash did add the line "balls to you, big daddy," which I always miss when
I hear this version.) It's a testament to The Clash that they recorded a "Brand
New Cadillac" that sounded creditably like an original 1979 version of
rockabilly, because too many modern rockabilly recordings sound corny and even
a little clownish in their overt retro leanings. Another rare exception: Webb
Wilder's 1986 album It Came From Nashville, which compiles early singles and live performances
by Wilder (and the loose assemblage of fellow Nashville songwriter mill
grinders and studio musicians he dubbed "The Beatnecks"). Though steeped in a
retro sensibility—and injected with B-movie references and TV host
smarm—Wilder in the '80s was no mere throwback. He fit squarely between

Steve Earle and post-R.E.M. college rock, sounding as sharp and relevant as his
younger contemporaries.

The Vogues, "Hey That's No Way To Say
Goodbye"

Perhaps
best known (by my generation at least) as the band responsible for The Drew
Carey Show theme
song "Five O'Clock World," The Vogues had a fairly long run in the '60s,
especially after they moved away from youthful(ish) pop and embraced their
easy-listening side, recording airy covers of contemporary rock and folk tunes.
And so we get this: Leonard Cohen, reconfigured for the TV variety show of your
choice.

The Vulgar Boatmen, "We Can Figure This Out"

Aside from
sharing personnel with The Silos and The Mysteries Of Life, The Vulgar Boatmen
shared a sensibility, preferring simple, rootsy songs about everyday
experiences and concerns. The no-big-deal-ness of The Vulgar Boatmen was a
selling point in the '90s, during an era of grungy bombast, but much of their
music has proved too plain to endure. Still, I miss the days when there were a
dozen or so bands recording songs like this, competing to see who could
out-ordinary each other.

The Wackers, "Travelin' Time"

These early
'70s also-rans opportunistically—but charmingly—combined Cosmic
Americana and bubblegum, with a few traces of early glitter-rock stirred in. A
lot of their music sounds too blatantly constructed, but songs like this sunny
shuffle are a treat. "Travelin' Time" is like the theme song to a family sitcom
that never got made.

The Waitresses, "No Guilt"

I can do
without "I Know What Boys Like," which wears out its welcome 30 seconds into
its three-minute running time, and though I like the Square Pegs theme song, I don't think it's any
kind of all-time classic. But The Waitresses are responsible for two of my
favorite pop songs of the '80s, both of which are more moving than they seem
like they should be. One is "Christmas Wrapping," a tale of loneliness and
unexpected holiday romance that nearly always chokes me up; the other is "No
Guilt," a post-breakup declaration of independence that comes on all brassy and
defiant ("I know the price of stamps now!") and then ends with Patty Donahue
muttering, "Everything's great," as if trying to convince herself.

Walter Egan, "Magnet And Steel"

A couple of
years ago, I heard "Magnet And Steel" on some '70s-focused digital-cable radio
station and had one of those common-but-still-welcome moments where I suddenly
became actively aware of a song I'd heard off-and-on throughout my entire life.
I did some quick reading up on Egan, and after seeing that he'd written songs
for Emmylou Harris before hooking up with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks
for his first two solo albums, I snagged a CD that contained both those
records, certain I was about to hear a pair of lost gems from the '70s. Alas, I
found them both pretty dull and filler-heavy, aside from about three songs on
each. (Not coincidentally, these six tended to be the songs that featured
Buckingham and Nicks most heavily.) I did however glean this fun fact: Egan's
album Fundamental Roll—with its cover images of short-skirted cheerleaders at
sunset—made a Playboy list of the sexiest album covers of 1977. Screw the
Grammy's—that's an award.

War, "The World Is A Ghetto"

Luscious
Jackson's Jill Cunniff once said in an interview that she wanted her band to
channel the good vibes of a late '70s Central Park concert by War, but while I
enjoy the easy cruise of "Low Rider" and "Cisco Kid," my favorite War song has
always been "The World Is A Ghetto," which combines the socially conscious
R&B; of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder with the bunch-of-people-banding-together
approach of Chicago. War always finessed the pop/R&B; hybrid better than
most, and here they use it to produce one of the few "Look outside your window,
people!" anthems that never sounds out of date.

Washington Social Club, "Breaking The Dawn"

Given the
tradition of committed, fan-focused, punk-leaning acts from Washington,
D.C.—from Bad Brains to Fugazi to The Dismemberment Plan—it takes
guts for a quartet of upstart young rockers to call themselves Washington
Social Club. It's like a bunch of late-coming northwesterners picking the name
Seattle Grunge Committee, or some Detroiters cooking up The Motown Garage Band.
But Washington Social Club proved it could carry off the name on the
near-perfect debut album Catching Looks, with its rousing vocals, rolling rhythms and
springy guitars. The band bangs out inviting, clean college rock—and that
"college" designation is important, because Washington Social Club isn't really
"alternative," "modern" or "indie." The frame of reference is the late '80s:
The Replacements, Pixies, The Woodentops, The Wonder Stuff, Guadalcanal Diary,
Billy Bragg and the like. Even if WSC co-leaders Martin Royle and Olivia
Mancini haven't heard half of those bands, they've still inherited the spirit
of sweaty, shouty, riveting rock 'n' roll that engages the modern world in
non-didactic ways. I noticed this week that the band has a new album out, about
which I've heard little. But now that it's November, I can check it out for
myself. I'll report back when I can.

[pagebreak]

The
Weakerthans, "Our Retired Explorer (Dines With Michel Foucault In Paris, 1961)"

Winnipeg's
The Weakerthans combine witty, moving character sketches with slightly
off-kilter pop-rock, hearkening back to the wry roots of Can-indie. The band's
recent LP Reunion Tour built on 2003's excellent Reconstruction Site with a deeper, more carefully
crafted sound, but with the same involving stories of sometimes-happy,
sometimes-pathetic obsessives. But Reconstruction Site is still my favorite of the band's
four LPs, because it contains one of my favorite songs of the '00s in "Our
Retired Explorer," a rolling two-and-a-half minutes in which the doddering
narrator reminisces about Antartica and admits that though he doesn't really
understand what his host is talking about, he must thank him "For the flowers /
And the book by Derrida."

The Weavers, "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine"

This isn't
the kind of song one would ordinarily associate with Pete Seeger, but he and
his Weavers-mate Lee Hays adapted it from a Leadbelly standard, adding new
verses and making it into a dreamy love song. It's the dreaminess that appeals
to me. Semi-sweet and semi-comic lyrics aside, the tone of the song isn't too
far removed from "Sixteen Tons." It depicts marital love as grueling
work—more rewarding than mining coal perhaps, but just about as taxing.

Ween, "Object"

I'm
distrustful of smart-asses, so I've never been fully gung-ho for Ween, who
often strike me as too smart for their own good. But I dig the way that the
Ween boys never run out of ideas. After 20 years of deadpan art-pop in-jokes,
Dean and Gene Ween could record the most earnest love song ever written, and
their fans would still nervously assume—or at least hope—that their
tongues were firmly in cheek. The band has perfectly mimicked a wide range of
genres, from country-rock to grunge-punk to sappy AM soul, and have sung
deceptively happy-sounding songs about sex fiends and spiritual phonies. Ween
has lately been embraced by the jam-band community because of their
instrumental dexterity, but for stylistic range and casual command, Ween's
closest rival may be Prince, circa Sign O' The Times. Only Ween's much funnier.

Welcome, "All Set"

Seattle
psych-pop band Welcome filled their debut album Sirs with false starts, false notes,
herky-jerky beats, and echoing vocals, and set the tone with the album-opening "All
Set," which sounds like a skipping 45 from '68. Welcome deconstructs post-British
Invasion with the kind of savage imagination that bands like Lilys and Spoon
have previously applied, and though the band really only has that one trick,
it's a wower.

Wheat, "No One Ever Told Me"

Massachusetts-born
art-poppers Wheat followed a curious arc over the course of their first four
LPs. The band's 1998 debut Medeiros was the result of a year's worth of bedroom recording, and
had the handmade charm and niggling impact of most indie-rock. For 1999's Hope
And Adams, Wheat
collaborated with Flaming Lips boardman Dave Fridmann, who helped tease out
pretty melodies and pump in some blood, for what proved to be one of the
richest, most affecting indie releases of the decade. Wheat frontman Scott
Levesque spent the next three to four years discovering that he didn't like
dealing with the snobbery associated with being a cult act; so, reteamed with
Fridmann for Per Second, Per Second, Per Second … Every Second, Wheat made a conscious effort to
alienate its former fanbase, recording a slick record that sounded a little
like a fizzier John Mayer. But Levesque didn't change his songwriting style, so
about half Per Second consisted of the kind of fragmentary lyrics and melodies that sound
obliquely meaningful in a washed-out, dreamy indie context, but sound thin when
overwhelmed by artificially beefy production. Wheat then retreated to a
relatively lo-fi mode for 2007's Every Day I Said A Prayer For Kathy And
Made A One Inch Square, an album that takes the band's piecework approach to songwriting to a
new extreme, in tracks that are little more than a series of impressions. I'm
not sure where Levesque goes next. When his elliptical lyrics and
here-and-there arrangements fail to cohere, Wheat doesn't sound like much. But
when a Wheat song works, it's unlike anything else.

Whiskeytown,
"Bound To Happen," "Win," "Sitting Around," "Tilt-A-Whirl"

If you'll
pardon the indulgence, since I've written plenty about Ryan Adams both in this
week's entry and in Week
35, I'll close out the column with four Whiskeytown songs that have
been widely bootlegged but never officially released. "Bound To Happen" and "Win"
are from the lost album commonly known as Fucker, and both show Adams working in his
best off-the-cuff mode, knocking out easygoing pop-rock songs that don't sound
like much on first pass, but get permanently lodged in the brain after a few
spins. "Sitting Around" is from Forever Valentine, and is one of Adams' atmospheric
acoustic ballads, relying heavily on his sweet rasp to add color and shade. And
"Tilt-A-Whirl" is a dreamy piece of guitar-pop that was scheduled to be
released on Pneumonia before the album got shelved, re-mixed and re-arranged. ("Tilt-A-Whirl"
used to be the second-best unreleased Whiskeytown song, until "Choked Up"
finally started showing up on anthologies.) I think if Adams had his ideal
career, he'd be a late-'70s major label recording artist, releasing a 10-song
album every nine months with two hit singles, three buried gems and a side-ful
of filler. These songs would be the gems.

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

Regrettably
unremarked upon:
The Ventures, The Verve, Viva Voce, The Von Bondies, The Waco Brothers, The
Wallflowers, Wanda Jackson, Weezer and Wham!

Also
listened to:
Vending Machine, Verde, The Vern Williams Band, Vernon Reid & Masque, The Verve Pipe, The Vestals, Vexers, The Vibration, The
Vibrators, Vic Godard & The Subway Set, The Viceroys, Vickie Baines, Victor
Bermon, Victor Green, Victory Mansion, The View, The Vines,
Vinyl Kings, The Violinaires, Virginia Rodrgues, The Viscounts, The
Visitors, VNV Nation, The Vocokesh, Voice Of The Seven
Woods, Voices And Organs, Voicst, The Volebeats, The Volunteers, W.G. "Snuffy Walden, Wade Flemons, Wakefield, Wally Pleasant, Walt
Wilkins, Walter Becker, Walter Salas-Humara, Waltz For Debbie,
Wanderléa, Wang Chung, The Waphphle, The Warlocks, Warm In
The Wake, Warsaw Falcons, Warp Nine, Warren Zanes, Washdown, The Waxwings,
Wayne Hancock, Wayne McGhie, Wayne Wonder, We All Together, We Are Scientists, We Are The Fury, We Ragazzi, We The People, The Weather, The
Weather Prophets, The Webb Brothers, Wee Hairy Beasties, The
Weird Weeds, The Weridos, Weldon Irvine, Wendell Harrison, West Coast Revival, West Indian Girl, West Magnetic, Westbam, The Western States
Motel, Westside Connection, The What Four, What Made Milwaukee Famous, What The…?, The Whigs and Whirlybird

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

Next
week: From The White Animals to X, plus a few words on academic music study
(and bass guitar)