Popless Week 45: Daddy Played Bass

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.

One of my
most enduring mental images of my father is of him sitting on the edge of his
bed at the end of a day, picking away at his acoustic guitar. But when he
played in bands—which he did more as a hobby than a vocation—my dad
was the bass player. He was a tall man, with a wide oval face that could hold a
steely glare and an impish smile with equal credibility, and though he held
plenty of jobs that required him to be in the spotlight—from disc jockey
to preacher—I think he envisioned himself as one of life's reliable
pluggers, hulking in the margins and keeping the beat.

When kids
pretend to be rock stars, very few choose to play air-bass. Heck, I didn't even
know what a bass guitar was until I was 12—and my dad was a bassist. I
first started to notice the bass when my dad borrowed a laserdisc player from a
friend and checked The Kids Are Alright out from the public library. As I watched the movie
with him, he pointed out what John Entwistle was doing, and I began to
understand who really put the meaty, beaty, big and bouncy in The Who.

Of course
Entwistle's riffs were easy to hear, once I could differentiate them. He
practically played lead on a lot of Who songs, and his solo on "My Generation"
is one of rock's signature moments (and an inspiration to unsung bass players
everywhere). But for the most part, if bassists are doing their jobs, the
sounds they make get absorbed into the mix, filling out the arrangement in ways
too subtle for the casual listener to pick up.

Even
experienced listeners might have a tough time paying attention to what the bass
is doing—or how any non-lead instrument is supporting the overall song. I've
done a lot of reading of rock criticism, but I've never taken a music theory
class, nor have I read much in the way of academic studies or explanations of
how a composition comes together. I can make a pretty good case to excuse my
ignorance: namely that I'm writing for a general audience likely to be crudely
educated as I am, which means it makes more sense to speak in plain language
rather than getting all scholarly. But I don't accept that kind of "I'm just
one of you" argument from a politician, and it seems a little disingenuous
coming from a critic too. There's no reason I couldn't bring readers up to
speed on any terms-of-art I picked up from music theory, if I chose to make
that kind of study. At the least, expanding my critical vocabulary could
improve my ability to get across what I'm trying to say. (I've actually bought
a few books about music theory at flea markets over the years; maybe next
year's projects should be about becoming a student again.)

Of course a
lot of actual musicians are equally clueless as to how they do what they do. Whenever I'm
fumbling to describe an effect or a style—without the words at my command
that any high school band geek would probably know—I think about Pete
Townshend. I followed my father's lead and became a big Who fan as a teenager,
and found myself returning over and over to two texts: Dave Marsh's Who bio Before
I Get Old, and Townshend's
late '60s interviews with Rolling Stone. To Marsh and to Rolling Stone, Townshend talked at length about
what he was trying to accomplish with albums like Tommy and Who's Next (formerly Lifehouse), and he didn't talk in terms of
measures and contrapuntal melodies, but about letting go of rigid structures
and letting the audience shape the music with their responses. Granted,
Townshend was likely high at the time, but as a teenager I found his ideas
inspiring, even if I had no idea about the steps necessary to make them work.
And neither did Townshend apparently; neither Tommy nor Who's Next ever fully dislodged from his head.

Would Pete
Townshend—the son of two musicians, and likely more classically educated
than most guitarists of his generation—had been more successful at
achieving what he meant to achieve had he dedicated himself to the nuts and
bolts of his craft, rather than gallivanting around the world taking drugs and
cashing checks? Perhaps. Or maybe The Who's albums would've sounded overly
studied and dryly intellectual, rather than messy and visceral and thrilling in
their thwarted ambition. Maybe it's enough that Townshend was able to convince
other people to help him build the outlandish. At the least, it was his good
fortune that he had Entwistle around to carry the lumber.

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

Pieces
Of The Puzzle

The White Stripes

Years Of
Operation
1997-present

Fits
Between Led
Zeppelin and House Of Freaks

Personal
Correspondence The
White Stripes' ascendancy coincided with a shift in my way of thinking about
music and film. In the '90s, during my first decade as a pro critic, I was
deeply concerned with sincerity and authenticity, and looked askance at artists
I considered to be hucksters. But around the turn of the millennium, I started
to see appropriation and phoniness as a fundamental right of pop artists, and I
began to appreciate the bravura with which some of those artists constructed
their personae. Like a lot of people, I came to The White Stripes' via White
Blood Cells, which
I didn't hear—and thus didn't get to write about—until well after
the hype started building. By the time Elephant came out, I'd spent a year thinking
about the band, and I wrote the following: "I can't blame anyone who regards
The White Stripes' snappy look and garage rock variations on dirty blues with
suspicion. It's not like coordinated clothes and raucous Muddy Waters steals
are tough to pull off, and it's not like The White Stripes are the first
guitar-and-drums duo to make a virtue of stripped-down necessity. (See also
House Of Freaks, Chickasaw Mudd Puppies, early Spinanes, and on and on.)
Nevertheless, the Stripes are legitimate rock stars, thanks primarily to Jack
White's offbeat sense of humor and his left-field pop sensibility. Simply put:
The man can write a hook, and he knows how to marry them to sweetly odd lyrics
about kids on playgrounds, Detroit auto factory pollution, and the
correspondences between Citizen Kane and a failing relationship. White makes boasts as strong
as, 'Everybody knows about it, from The Queen Of England to the hounds of hell'
and as vaguely threatening as 'I'm going to Wichita,' while stopping every now
and then to spit out snaky electric guitar leads. He seems interested in the
blues and its variants mainly for the inherent simplicity, which matches the
sentiments of giddy goofs like 'The Hardest Button To Button' and 'Girl, You
Have No Faith In Medicine.' In Elephant's centerpiece, the seven-minute slow-stomp 'Ball And
Biscuit,' Jack White lays down a line of bullshit about being 'the seventh
son,' and though it would be easy to take umbrage at a runt like White
pretending to be wicked, it's just as easy to relax, and remember that rock
music is often about taking what's real, and turning it into play."

Enduring
presence? A
scattered few may have predicted that The White Stripes would become
international rock stars based on the band's first two catchy, witty neo-garage
albums, but even those early supporters probably doubted that Jack and his
ex-wife Meg would be able to maintain creative momentum with a sound based
solely on drums, guitar, and the occasional piano. Given the peppermint candy
drum kits and red-black-and-white costumes, The White Stripes clearly have as
much affinity for pop art as roadhouse boogie. They're put-on artists, no
doubt. But between Meg's reticence and Jack's habit of feeding
mystique-building baloney to the press, the band has become heirs to the
room-filling, attitude-heavy pseudo-blues of The Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin.
When I interviewed White prior to the release of the wonderful Icky Thump, he talked about his interest in
the transient qualities of performance, and how he likes working with Meg
because together they create something like a happening. In concert, Jack tends
to hide behind a mop of black hair when he's at his audience-facing microphone,
but push his locks back when he's at his Meg-facing microphone, which he jumps
to when he wants them to goose each other. The spontaneous tempo shifts and
loud-quiet dynamics establish a framework within which White can work in little
fillips at the end of a guitar solo, and spout a line of patter in a carnival
barker growl. White's persona is part hype, and part sincere shilling for the
ecstatic, liberating effect of roots music. But most of all, it's fun.

The Who

Years Of
Operation1964-present
(off and on)

Fits Between The Kinks and The Pretty Things

Personal
Correspondence I
was devoted to The Who and Pete Townshend as a teenager, then found Townshend's
combination of neediness, arrogance and pretension grating in my 20s. But in my
30s, right around the time I started to celebrate bravura (as mentioned in The
White Stripes entry above), The Who came back to me in a big way, and
Townshend's weaknesses suddenly seemed more like strengths. In some ways it's
easier to stick to the early Who, which banged out catchy, ferocious rock
singles with an art school sensibility and the careless muscle of a street
tough. And it's definitely easier to shrug off the later Who, which wrapped
songs in synthesizers and frequently broke from hammering away at an audience
to coo pretentious nothings in their ears (as parodied so savagely in This
Is Spinal Tap). But
of all the big-name, multi-millionaire, classic-rock-radio-staple British
Invasion bands, The Who are the ones that strike me as the most humanly flawed,
and thus the most approachable. There's a real continuity between the protozoan
howls of early Who singles like "My Generation," and "Substitute," and the
mid-life-crisis Who albums like Quadrophenia and Who Are You, where those dispatches from the
post-juvenile id are recontextualized by an adult—one who has compassion
and nostalgia for the angst of his youth, but also understands that brutal
compromises must be made. Townshend's initial burst of creativity from 1964 to
1970—as he learned how to write songs in a voice all his own, then
immediately tried to use that voice to say something more personally revealing
than "Hope I die before I get old"—has rarely been equaled in popular
music, and I'm sure Townshend has often wondered exactly how he made it happen.
But I admire the way he's continued to bull ahead even when uninspired, and how
he's sometimes made his inability to be brilliant the subject of his songs. In a way, Townshend
laid out the course of his whole career in the opening lines of The Who's first
single: "I've got a feeling inside I can't explain." And in a way, I started
loving The Who again when I realized how much I sympathized.

Enduring
presence? Because
of their heavy British-ness and Townshend's conceptual and theatrical
pretensions, The Who have a different sort of fan base than most classic
rockers. They're almost like the biggest cult act in the world, if that's not
too much of an oxymoron. Or at the least, they're some kind of bigger-than-life
superhero version of a rock quartet. (The Fantastic Four say, or Challengers Of
The Unknown,) For Who fans, it's easy to conjure a mental image of the band in
full flight: Roger Daltrey swinging his microphone, Townshend windmilling, John
Entwistle standing stock still, and Keith Moon pounding away recklessly, his
drums sounding like the rapidly beating heart of a teenager veering between
ecstasy and disillusionment. In fact, forget Townshend's lifelong struggle to
articulate; watching Keith Moon rip through "I Can't Explain" is really
explanation enough.

[pagebreak]

Wilco

Years Of
Operation
1994-present

Fits
Between Stephen
Stills and Neil Young

Personal Correspondence I liked Wilco's AM reasonably well, but it didn't automatically change
my perception of Jeff Tweedy as the other ex-Uncle Tupelo guy, even though he'd clearly moved beyond the rigid
folk, punk, and country-rock turns of his old band in order to dabble in
bluegrass, swamp-rock, and early Beatles jangle. No, Tweedy didn't become a
major player in my eyes until Wilco's stunning Being There, which took an aggressively eclectic and confident
approach to heartland rock, reminiscent of Tom Petty and John Fogerty. Being
There is a big, important-sounding
record: Two CDs' worth of spirited, carefully crafted, endlessly inventive
American popular music. The record opens with "Misunderstood," a piano ballad
about wasting time in a dead-end town; and when the song unexpectedly veers
into violin-fueled noise in Tweedy's final refrain, the rickety sonic
construction underscores the way rock 'n' roll can provide a cathartic release
for people who feel ground down by their surroundings. The whole album
continues in that vein, matching the urgency of the performances to Tweedy's
innate understanding of how rock 'n' roll can both make life bearable and can haunt a person with its unfulfillable promises.
Stretching Being There to two
discs may have overstated those themes a bit—it's as though Tweedy
decided to release a classic album and its disappointing follow-up all at
once—but perhaps Wilco needed the sprawling space to reach a newer,
deeper level. Following that lead, Tweedy has continued to overreach, whether
it be via the production frippery of Summerteeth and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot or the downer jams of A Ghost Is Born. So if I bristle when some smug critics wave off
Wilco as "Dad rock" or "NPR rock," it's in part because I think dismissing the
validity of music that appeals to public-radio-listening parents is really
fucking shallow, and in part because those kind of flip knocks ignorantly gloss
over the story of the person making the music, and what he's struggled
with—creatively more than personally—over the past 20-plus years as
a working musician. For Tweedy, the journey of Wilco has been about finding his
own identity, and figuring out the best way to present it. His music may not be
for everybody, but his dilemma should be familiar to anyone who's ever gathered
an audience then tried to come up with some way to entertain them.

Enduring
presence? Or maybe
I'm just defensive because Wilco has become one of my favorite bands. Reviewing
last year's Sky Blue Sky, I wrote: "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot may have been the best and worst thing to happen to
Wilco: Worst because it invited a backlash among fans who balked at Jeff
Tweedy, one of roots-rock's premiere tunesmiths, pulling his songs apart in a
fit of inexpressible irritation; and best because Tweedy almost immediately
rejected that style of album-making. While the songwriting on A Ghost Is
Born and the new Sky
Blue Sky remains
restless and occasionally experimental, the songs themselves are much less
fussy, and more of the moment. Again and again, Wilco builds quickly from
lovely, breezy openings to rough-hewn jams, spotlighting loose guitar interplay
and chunky rhythms. Again and again, the band starts a song that sounds like it
could be a new pop-folk standard, and then abandons it after a minute or two to
go rooting around in the soil. When Wilco rocks, it goes full-out, as deep in
the pocket as six alt-rock-addled boys can go. And in between the loud, jammy
interludes, Tweedy coos sweet words of regret and reconciliation, poignant but
never pat. The soft rock sheen always sports thin cracks, letting in fresh air."

Willie Nelson

Years Of
Operation
1956-present

Fits
Between Ray Price
and Waylon Jennings

Personal
Correspondence I
didn't have my own car until almost a year after I graduated from college, so I
frequently traveled back and forth from Nashville, TN to Athens, GA via
Greyhound Bus. On one of those trips, I found a cassette copy of Willie
Nelson's Red Headed Stranger in the $4.99 rack of the bus terminal's sundry shop, and
since that album frequently showed up even on rock magazines' best-of-all-time lists,
I picked up a copy for the road. As it happens, I can't think of too many
albums better-suited for a bumpy bus ride through the back country. For one
thing, Red Headed Stranger tells a story after a fashion, about crimes of passion and
the long road to recovery. It's also a strikingly spare record, stepping back
from Nashville's "countrypolitan" sound of the '60s and helping to usher in a
new era of traditionalism and simplicity (at least among a few key artists). In
other words, Red Headed Stranger sounds like it came from just the kind of American nowhere
that Greyhound winds through on its way from city to city, and it both diverted
me and moved me as I endured the long journeys home. After that record, Nelson
became a big star, and went on to have a career that mixed saccharine pop
crossovers with lonesome cowboy songs. For the most part though, Nelson has
maintained his affinity with the Young Turk singer-songwriters who flooded the
country-music capitals of Nashville and Austin in the '70s. After all, it's not
like Red Headed Stranger is Nelson's only great, ambitious album. For example it's immediately
preceded by Phases & Stages, an attempt to chart the end of a relationship from the
wife's point of view (on side one), and then the husband's (on side two). The
songs are linked by a miniature theme song, which pops up repeatedly like the
bumper music on a sitcom; and unlike the spare Stranger, Phases & Stages sweetens its sour scenario with
jammy roots-rock. It's like a John Cassavetes film, edited for television and
scored by The Grateful Dead.

Enduring
presence? Of the "Outlaw"
trifecta of Nelson, Jennings and Cash, Nelson arguably had the best voice and
the most focus. He's been generally savvier about his career—IRS problems
and pot busts aside—and has put together a body of work that's easier to
navigate than his fellow highwaymen. But there's also a higher percentage of
schlock in the Nelson catalog than in Jennings' or Cash's. He's burned steady,
but he's only occasionally burned bright.

Wire

Years Of
Operation
1976-present (off and on)

Fits
Between Pere Ubu
and Minutemen

Personal
Correspondence
Because of R.E.M.'s cover of "Strange" and the frequent mention of Pink Flag in articles about the Minutemen, I
knew Wire were a significant band in post-punk and art-rock history, but the
Wire described by fans and critics was very different from the one I heard on
college rock radio at the time. Over their now-32-year-long career, Wire has
experimented with brevity and long drone, and has played music for dancing as
well as music for staring intently at blank walls. The band has made guitars
sound like power tools, or rushing streams, or forests of birds. And on a
semi-regular basis, Wire has dropped all illusion of compositional intelligence
and stripped down to a jittery, fuzzy groove dubbed—on the seminal 1986
techno-thrash single "Drill"—its "dugga dugga dugga" style. The Wire I first
knew was the Wire of "Drill" and the Wire of the technopop delights "Ahead" and
"Kidney Bingos." They were all about the machines, and the beat. So when I
finally heard Pink Flag (followed closely by Chairs Missing and 154), I was taken aback by the prevalence
of guitars on Wire's early albums, as well as their stylistic breadth, which
ran the gamut from bashing punk to soft pop to
experimentation-for-experimentation's-sake. But mostly, with Pink Flag in particular, I was impressed with
the same thing that impressed people who first heard Wire back in the late
'70s: the way the band said what they intended to say then quit, whether it
took one minute or six.

Enduring
presence? Lately,
the reformed Wire has been cross-pollinating its disjointed early work with the
poppier dance grooves of its mid-'80s comeback and a mutant strain of
headbanging fury that's only tangentially been part of prior Wire. For sheer
blitzed mayhem, few of the current wave of new rockers, neo-garagers and
retro-punkers can match "Spent," which drives dual live-wire guitar riffs and
shredded shouts around in circles, getting off on aggressive aimlessness. It's
an exciting four-and-three-quarter minutes of rock music, especially given that
it comes from the minds and hands of men in their fifties.

X

Years Of
Operation 1977-93

Fits
Between The
Blasters and The Clash

Personal
Correspondence
Shortly before Sonic Youth made punk rock safe for aesthetes on the east coast,
X did the same out west, fusing art and music unpretentiously. X's songs were
fluidly aggressive but conceptual, ladled from a thick stew seasoned with
rockabilly, Catholic icons, artifacts from seedy motel rooms, and droppings
from rabid wolves. I'm pretty sure the first time I heard X was when album-rock
radio started playing the band's walloping cover of "Wild Thing," a masterful
exploitation of the arena rock aesthetic that didn't really match the sound of
X at any other time in their career (not even on the mid-'80s major label
cash-ins). The first X album I bought was More Fun In The New World, and though the band has arguably
made better records, I can't think of one that makes a better introduction to
X, since it catches them poised between ratty punk and mainstream rock, exploring
their interests in country music and funk along with their signature style, and
making direct nods to Woody Guthrie, Motown and their favorite American
post-hardcore bands. It's that cultural awareness—and the purposeful
channeling of same—that endeared X to me when I was 15, and I still
respond strongly to their mix of the high-minded and gutter-bound. I'm even
willing to admit something kind of embarrassing: Whenever "See How We Are"
comes up on my iPod, I find myself wishing I was young enough (and talented
enough) to try out for American Idol or one of its imitators, just so I could share with the
world X's most powerful anthem, about the separation we all keep between our
reality and how we choose to perceive it. I guess something about X just brings
the teenage idealist back out in me.

Enduring
presence? Let's
take a moment to give all four members of X their due: moaning thrift store
poet Exene Cervenka, the dapper, deep-voiced John Doe, Lionel Hampton-loving
drummer D.J. Bonebrake, and hot rod superhero guitarist Billy Zoom. Not since
The Who has a quartet had such distinctive, clashing personalities, or such a
unified vision.

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

Stray
Tracks

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

The
White Animals, "Don't Care"

Straight to
you from Elliston Square, here's the band that was Nashville's Great Rock Hope
prior to the emergence of Jason & The Scorchers. Founded by a group of
Vandy students, The White Animals were a party band first and foremost, blending
college-rock jangle, garage-rock raunch, and—for art's sake—an
eccentric interest in dub. They won converts at concerts up and down the
Eastern Seaboard, but they never really recorded a great record, and couldn't
make many inroads with critics. Still, for Nashville kids who grew up in the
'80s, The White Animals were a big deal as much for their reputation as their
music. They were a symbol of possibility, proving that we didn't have to wait
around for the big-name touring rock acts to add Nashville to their itinerary.
We could just as easily grow our own.

White Zombie, "Thunder Kiss '65"

To be
honest, I never gave White Zombie a second thought when they were MTV staples
back in the '90s, though I did appreciate that they were more groove-oriented
than a lot of the grunge-metal of the time, and seemed to be having a lot more
fun than their Ozzfest contemporaries. But now that Rob Zombie has established
himself as one of the most interesting (and potentially influential) genre
filmmakers of the '00s, I'm inclined to return to White Zombie and see if I can
hear the seeds of the grimy vision that flowered in The Devil's Rejects. But at the moment, all I have by
White Zombie are a few compilation tracks. Any suggestions for an album to buy?

[pagebreak]

Whodini,
"Magic's Wand"

Whodini's "Freaks
Come Out At Night" and "Five Minutes Of Funk" were staples of the schoolbus
when I was in junior high, but for some reason I wasn't aware of this Thomas
Dolby-produced Whodini track until about five or six years ago. What strikes me
about it—besides Dolby's appealingly wiggly synthesizer—is how
prematurely nostalgic it is for hip-hop's golden age. It's only 1981, and Whodini
is already reminiscing about jamming at the neighborhood center. They were
pining for the old school before the dismissal bell had rung.

The
Wildbirds, "Shake Shake"

The Wombats, "Kill The Director"

Every now
and then, publicists send me teaser CDs for albums by bands that are getting a
big label push, and then they neglect to actually send me the albums when
they're done. (And not coincidentally, those albums often stiff…. not because I
didn't write about them, but because the label withdrew their support.) In the
end I'm left with a handful of good songs on my hard drive and no idea what
happened to the bands who recorded them. Here are two: one by the Kings Of
Leon-esque The Wildbirds, and one by Liverpool's The Wombats. Both of these
bands were being promoted heavily in 2007, but a cursory Google search didn't
turn up much in the way of coverage in '08, when their full-length LPs were
released here in the States. Did their label drop the ball? Did music writers
fail to spotlight two worthy bands? Or are these two entertaining rock songs
just anomalies by mediocrities?

Will Hoge, "Let Me Be Lonely"

I've been
disappointed by the arc of this Nashville roots-rocker's career, which started
out with such an explosion of force and creativity and then retreated to
uninspiring conventionality. In 2001, I was excited by Hoge's studio debut Carousel, which found him dancing in the
same shoes as Van Morrison, Bruce Springsteen, and every other sweaty pilgrim
who looked for the meaning of life between the scratches of a flea market 45.
Sounding like a jumped-up Counting Crows, Hoge hopped and roared, blasting
forth with purposeful energy and the joy of music-making. Hoge recently
suffered multiple broken bones in a traffic accident. Here's hoping that when
he recovers his health, he also recovers his fire.

Will
Oldham, "O Let It Be"

I've
written up Bonnie "Prince" Billy and Palace already, but I so dearly love Joya—the only official LP credited
to "Will Oldham"—that I thought I'd close out Oldham's presence in this
project with one of my favorite Joya tracks, which finds Oldham in a profoundly mournful mood,
using up the last of his energy to complete the day. (By the way, on iTunes, Joya is credited to Bonnie "Prince" Billy,
so this may no longer officially be an Oldham song. But I'm including it
anyway.)

Will Rigby, "Ricky Skaggs Tonight"

The Woodward Brothers, "Hot Rod Race, Navy
Style"

Here's a
couple of country-rock/rockabilly novelty tunes: The first a tall tale about a
bluegrass legend, performed by Carolina Rock stalwart Will Rigby; the second a
story about bad-assin' across the waves, by the long-forgotten Woodward
Brothers. Both are perfect for iPods set on shuffle, breaking up the blandness
of any mix with the sweet taste of cornpone.

William
Ackerman, "The Bricklayer's Beautiful Daughter"

Speaking of
music just right for certain occasions, here's a song by the founder of Windham
Hill: a guitarist who lacks the energy, virtuosity and daring of Michael
Hedges, but who's terrific at creating pleasant aural environments for
listeners to relax in. Light some scented candles, slip into your pajamas,
close your eyes and just breathe.

William Bell, "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man"

Wilson Pickett, "I'm A Midnight Mover"

And now for
a couple of Stax/Volt artists: one well-known, one a little less so. Bell cut
his most enduring hit—1961's "You Don't Miss Your Water"—before a
stint in the military sidetracked his career, then recorded his amazing debut
album The Soul Of A Bell in 1967. That record—made in collaboration with Isaac
Hayes and David Porter, among others—is divided into two halves, spending
the first six songs revisiting the stately paced laments that first made Bell's
name, and stringing them together like one long, dignified expression of loss.
Then, for side two, Bell picks up the pace, bringing southern grit to the
swinging R&B; style of the day. Pickett, meanwhile, came south from Detroit,
and brought that rollicking style of soul with him, recording songs that were
brassy and sweaty and just a little bit indecent. Both artists are rooted in gospel,
but they follow decidedly different routes to salvation.

William Shatner, "It Hasn't Happened Yet"

The largely
spoken-word album that Shatner made with Ben Folds a few years back is
surprisingly effective, even though some of that effect is about making
listeners cringe. Still, Has Been
is a real record, with real songs, some of which are moving and curiously
revealing. The best in the latter regard has to be the torchy, melancholy "It
Hasn't Happened Yet," in which Shatner laments the lack of certainty in his
life, even at this late date.

Willie
Williams, "Master Plan"

Wilson Simonal, "Nem Vem Que Nao Tem"

The Clash
covered Williams' "Armagideon Time," but he recorded quite a few similarly
offbeat reggae and dub singles for Studio One, including the woozy, catchy call
for peace "Master Plan." Simonal, meanwhile, is one of the few Brazilian pop
artists to cross over to worldwide success, most notably with the hit "Nem Vem
Que Nao Tem," an expression of roguish glee that offers another response to
this world of strife: a sardonic chuckle and a fuck-you attitude.

Wire Train, "Chamber Of Hellos"

Like a lot
of American new wave bands—including their San Francisco neighbors and
415 labelmates Translator—Wire Train hung on for the better part of a
decade despite never landing a big hit outside of college radio. They played a
lot of opening sets on arena tours, and landed on a movie soundtrack or two,
but never created a sound distinctive enough to whip up much of a groundswell
of support. Now they're one of those bands whose music for me conjures up
general impressions of a time and place, but no specific memories. Listening to
"Chamber Of Hellos" is like visiting an '80s theme park, but not at all like
connecting directly to my youth. Luckily, I like theme parks.

The Woggles, "Abba"

Two Woggles
stories: I interviewed Woggles frontman Manfred Jones for the UGA paper back
around 1991, before I knew much of anything about the neo-garage movement, and
I found his advocacy of old records over CDs (and the way he stayed in
character even in interviews) to be incredibly bizarre. Now, nearly twice as
old as I was then, I better understand Jones' clinging to his favorite past.
Second story: I drove back down to Athens to see some friends in early '93, and
went to see The Woggles because a girl I liked—whom I'd been exchanging
letters with for a couple of months—had started playing organ in the band
while preparing to move up to Charlottesville to work on her doctorate. This
picture is small, but she's the blurry one up front, and she's still every bit
as awesome, even with two kids clinging to those fabulous gams:

Wolf Parade, "Grounds For Divorce"

I've got
the new Wolf Parade sitting on my iPod right now, and considered listening to
it this week, since my moratorium on new music has been lifted, but I decided
that would run counter to the spirit of this project. So here's some quick
thoughts on the old Wolf Parade, cribbed from my review: "Following the dual
models of Modest Mouse and The Arcade Fire, Apologies To The Queen Mary is aggressively poetic, and
hand-crafted by the kind of scary idealists capable of bellowing lines like,
'I'll draw three fingers on your heart / One of them will be me as a boy / One
of them will be me / And one of them will be me watching you run.' The band's
melodies are counterintuitive, and their instrumentation deceptively busy. For
the most part, Wolf Parade makes a big, echoing noise with guitars and
keyboard, while steady-on drummer Arlen Thompson provides the foundation and
the frame. It's a rare band that sounds equally indebted to Talking Heads, Big
Country, and Pixies." Good enough? Okay, now I'm off to listen to the new one.

The Woodentops, "Everything Breaks"

What I
liked best about this mid-to-late '80s British alt-pop act was the way nearly
all of their songs sounded like they were composed by someone sitting
underneath a train trestle, using the steady clatter of boxcars as a metronome.
This song, the concluding track on The Woodentops' one great LP Giant, sums up the band's permissive
stance on disorder, along with their casual elegance.

Woody Guthrie, "Two Good Men"

Guthrie
wrote and sang a whole suite of songs about Sacco and Vanzetti back in the
'40s, and this song to me is the best of the bunch, serving as a kind of
overture to the project. "Two Good Men" explains who Sacco and Vanzetti were,
and why their story affected Guthrie so much. Most importantly, in the line "left
me here to sing this song," Guthrie establishes the responsibility of pop
artists to engage with their times, and carry on the traditions they consider
important.

Wool, "Kill The Crow"

This song
is Stray Tracks in a nutshell: An excellent, largely forgotten modern rocker by
a band that I honestly care nothing about, beyond this song. I've increasingly
used Stray Tracks over the course of the year to write about great artists I
like more than love, along with some semi-favorites, but the original intent
was to spotlight songs like this one, which stick around on my iPod
year-after-year, because I honestly enjoy hearing it, even though I have no
interest in hearing a whole Wool playlist.

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

Regrettably
unremarked upon: Widespread Panic,
Willard Grant Conspiracy, William Orbit, Willie Nile, The Wolfgang Press,
Wolfmother, Wooden Wand, The Wrens and Wyclef Jean

Also listened to: White Denim, White
Flight, White House, The Whitstein
Brothers, Wilbur Hatch & Orchestra, The
Wilders, A Wilhelm Scream, Will Kimbrough, Will
McFarlane, Will Stratton, Will Taylor &
Strings Attached, Will.I.Am, The William Caslon Experience, William Duel, William Lee Ellis, William Onyeabor, Willie
Hutch, The Willowz, Willy DeVille, Willy Porter, The Wilsons, Windjammer, Windsor For The Derby, Winston's
Fumbs, Winterpills, Wisdom Of Harry, Wiseguys, Witch Hazel Sound, Without
Gravity, The Witnesses, Wolfgang, The Wolfhounds, Womack
& Womack, Wonderful Smith, The Wonders, Wooden Shjips, Woodrow Jackson
Orchestra, The Woolies, World Leader Pretend, Wormbelly, Woven Hand, Wreckless
Eric, Wreckx-N-Efftect, Wretch Like Me, The Wyos, The
X-Executioners, X-Ray Spex, X27, Xavier Rudd, Xisco Ponce Jr. and Xiu Xiu

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

Next week: From XTC to
!!!, plus a few true confessions