Delivering the death metal: A new Cannibal Corpse LP

The death-metal band Cannibal Corpse released a new album this past September: A Skeletal Domain, their 13th LP. As with the prior two Corpse records, 2012's Torture and 2009's Evisceration Plague, it took me a second to come around to ASD. What typically happens is that I register the fact of the album release without really registering its considerable significance to me, a serious Corpse fan. I spin the record once, half-listening and thinking, "Yep, another Cannibal Corpse album" (you'll often read this sort of dismissive phraseology applied to the Corpse; Brooklyn Vegan recently wrote that ASD was "notable simply for being Another Cannibal Corpse Record"), and then I move on. Some weeks or months later, I think to myself, "Wait a minute, a new Cannibal Corpse album?!" Then I load the record onto my iPod, and the serious engagement begins. This time around, it took a couple tries. Even after I started listening closely, I wasn't crazy about ASD. But within the past week or so, something has clicked: I've been spinning ASD obsessively, and I'm now thinking it might be the best Corpse disc of them all.

As I've discussed here before, Cannibal Corpse turned a corner with 2006's Kill. In my opinion, that's when the latter-day incarnation of the band—fronted by George "Corpsegrinder" Fisher, who replaced founding vocalist Chris Barnes back in 1995—really got their shit together and began cranking out truly elite product worthy of their elder-statesmen status within the death-metal realm. I believe that, taken together, Kill, Evisceration Plague, Torture and A Skeletal Domain are the best that contemporary death metal has to offer. Not necessarily the most challenging or the most innovative, or the most extreme or harsh or thought-provoking or unsettling or what have you, but simply the best. This is death metal that perfectly balances technicality and brutality, chaos and catchiness. These are albums you can play all the way through, again and again, full of songs that sound great on record or onstage. Like most great music, the recent Cannibal Corpse output is music you can use.

A veteran band besting themselves with each album. Not just upholding a standard but pushing. This is not a common phenomenon. As evidenced by the Brooklyn Vegan quote above, it's not the sort of career arc that's going to gain you much respect outside your own die-hard fan base. But death metal is, at its core, an insular art form. I recently stumbled across a making-of documentary dealing with The Wretched Spawn, the Corpse album that preceded Kill. There are many beautiful moments here, many of them dealing with the idea of the fan/band symbiosis, and the members' gratitude at being able to do what they love for a living. At 32:45, drummer Paul Mazurkiewicz says, "That's our job: delivering the death metal." Fisher follows him up: "This music is everything to me. It's given me so much, and the fans have given me, and all of us, more than we could ever give back. But we try to give back."

I'm still somewhat iffy on mid-period Corpse, the years between when Fisher joined the band and Kill. But when I've heard each of the prior three Corpse records, I've heard exactly what Mazurkiewicz and Fisher describe above. A band giving back, delivering the death metal. Professionals doing their job. ASD upholds this standard. There is so much craft and care and love, and so little bullshit, on this record. Barnes-era Cannibal Corpse had a certain seedy grime to it. (Yesterday, I stumbled across this incredible 1994 soundboard boot, which captures that lineup in its prime.) Corpsegrinder-era Corpse, on the other hand, is all about the fury, the relentlessness, the onrushing mincing machine that is the band's riff factory / nervous system: guitarists Rob Barrett and Pat O'Brien, and bassist Alex Webster, the Corpse's three principal songwriters.


Like the last couple Corpse discs, ASD actually improves as it goes on, growing steadily more demented and adventurous. The first three tracks are total anthems—clear future live staples. The title track and "Headlong Into Carnage" up the speed and intensity and breakneck Corpsegrinder word-munching to near-absurd levels. "Icepick Lobotomy," probably my current favorite track on the record, shows off two of late Corpse's signature moves: the agonizing doom breakdown (:33) and the thrilling uptempo 6/8 rock-out (2:00). "Vector of Cruelty" is one of the grooviest songs in the band's discography, orbiting around this sort of cruising midtempo feel, while "Asphyxiate to Rescuscitate" is one of the most manic and mathy, frantically juggling five- and seven-beat clusters. The last track, "Hollowed Bodies," starts off with a needling blast-beat riff that harks back to the Barnes-era heyday of 1994's The Bleeding, and goes on to effortlessly juggle tempos and feels—there's no last-track curveball here; just more Corpse-y excellence.

Basically, you finish the album and you want to play it again. There's no drop-off. ASD is just the latest example of Cannibal Corpse giving back, delivering the death metal. There's no ceremony about it. The next chapter is built in. You know the next LP will arrive in two or three years and you know it will be humbly outstanding. You know the casual spectators will take it for granted. You know the fans will show up to the concerts. You can count on this reliable cycle, and though you might grow temporarily numb to it, you know that when you hear what the Corpse does next, you will remember why they are at the forefront of their genre, 26-plus years after they started. It's a simple matter of releasing quality product. Of evolving without losing the thread. Of balancing immediacy and cleverness. Of doing their work lovingly and with full commitment. Art and craft, craft and art. Job, done; death metal, delivered. Fans, like this one, happy as hell.

Filmage: Descendents/ALL, all at once

Like all successful documentaries, Filmage is a work born out of both love and advocacy. In many ways, this is a straightforward rock doc dealing with two great American bands, Descendents and ALL, which you could, if you were so inclined, pigeonhole with the genre tag "punk." But in another sense, it's a probe into the strange, imbalanced symbiosis between these two bands, the way they're at once exactly the same entity and entirely different beasts.

If you don't know the basic facts, the saga is pretty simple. From roughly 1982 through 1987, Descendents, with a fluid lineup that always included drummer-mastermind Bill Stevenson, recorded several albums' worth of short, brilliant hardcore-meets-pure-pop, often driven by adolescent love/heartache but also at times bracingly bitter or audaciously silly. The musical spectrum was just as wide, ranging from timeless rock and roll to some sort of mutant DIY prog. The band's frontman, Milo Aukerman, wanted to pursue a career in biology, so he left the band several times, eventually on what seemed like a permanent basis. The remaining members kept right on going, changing their name to ALL (the name of the final early-era Descendents LP, as well as the band's insular, funny-serious belief system) recruiting a series of different singers, and touring incessantly and releasing new albums at a steady pace through the early aughts. At first, they performed the Descendents songs everyone wanted them to play, but eventually, they began focusing exclusively on ALL material.

Anyone who's seen Filmage, or paid attention to these bands over the years, knows the outcome of this story well. Basically, ALL never really "caught on" in the sense that the Descendents did. While Descendents were greeted with a hero's welcome when they returned in the mid-’90s with the stellar Everything Sucks LP, ALL just sort of hummed along, eventually finding themselves opening for forgettable Warped Tour bands on increasingly unfulfilling tours.

No need to be dramatic about it, but this imbalance is a shame. The ALL body of work is extraordinary, and together with the Descendents output, it forms one of the great American songbooks. The story is not complete without ALL: to my ears, the band's early work with Dave Smalley on vocals can come off a bit like a paler, blander Descendents, but once they brought Scott Reynolds on board around 1989, ALL become something truly distinct, equally as innovative as the band that spawned it. The emotions grew more mature and complex; the songs grew weirder and more outlandish; and the mix of songwriting personalities (at any given time, all four members of the group have contributed their own material) grew richer and more diverse. The arrival of the gorgeously grainy-voiced Chad Price on 1993's Breaking Things brought a more classic feel to the group; ALL began to sound more like a ferociously intense power-pop band than a group with hardcore roots. Later albums such as Mass Nerder and Problematic re-embraced "punk" aesthetics—shorter songs, speedier tempos—but combined them with hard-won, sometimes excruciatingly honest middle-age wisdom. The Descendents' output is timeless, magical, but it's only the first part of the story; you can't really understand these musicians' lifelong quest for what they call ALL—as I understand it, a quest for total honesty, total fun, total artistic incorruptibility, total friendship (basically, like, the precise reasons anyone should make any kind of art)—without, well, ALL.

Filmage asks us to consider this entire oeuvre as one thing, and for that—as well as for the fact that it's simply a very well-made and enjoyable chronicle of these incredible parallel careers, with the enigmatic and hugely endearing Bill Stevenson at the center—I salute everyone involved in the project. It deals with the whole Descendents vs. ALL question (and that rivalry is entirely a matter of audience reception, not a reflection of any internal dynamic) from every angle: We hear Milo discussing how frustrated he is that fans haven't embraced the ALL catalog with the fervor that they've greeted Descendents classics such as Milo Goes to College; we hear Dave Smalley talking about the impossible position he was thrust into, i.e., attempting to step into the shoes of a legendary frontman; we hear everyone from NOFX's Fat Mike to Descendents/ALL guitarist Stephen Egerton's own kids voicing their extreme preference for the Descendents over ALL; we hear Bill Stevenson not-defensively-but-maybe-a-little talking about how ALL's limited audience doesn't bother him in the slightest; and perhaps, most poignantly, we hear Scott Reynolds talking about attending a recent Descendents show and marveling at how the audience welcomed them as they would, say Van Halen. From a sympathetic insider perspective, he, Smalley and Price are such a key part of this story, but in the general view, they're mere footnotes.

So I thank Filmage for confronting this issue honestly, for unifying two hemispheres that never should've been separate in the first place. It all comes from one source, grows out of the brain and heart of this peculiar, ultra-driven genius Bill Stevenson. He did what we all dream of doing: visualizing our own personal ALL as an adolescent, realizing that vision and carrying it through our entire lives. This is a fountain-of-youth story, no question. You pick your passion, or it picks you, and you go all in with it, and it keeps you alive. Descendents persist, selling out enormous shows and headlining huge festivals; ALL persists, sometimes co-billing with Descendents or playing their own more modest headlining gigs. Everyone screams along to Descendents songs; a select group of ALL faithful screams along to ALL songs. It's not some sort of tragedy, this tale; it's just sort of, like, what happened. But, crucially, the reception didn't dictate the path; that is to say, ALL kept right on going, making incredible music, questing for ALL. The evidence is there, in the form of a meaty, wonder-filled discography; hopefully, Filmage sends us back in the direction we should always be headed, toward the music.

The ALL records I would recommend most highly are, in chronological order, Allroy's Revenge, Allroy Saves, Breaking Things and Mass Nerder. I treasure this music every bit as much as I treasure the Descendents' output. Here, off the top of my head, are ten of my favorite ALL songs:



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Learn more about Filmage here. Here's the trailer: 

In praise of the big: Antemasque's stellar debut

Here, via Wondering Sound, are my thoughts on the new self-titled debut by Antemasque, one of my favorite records of 2014.

As a child of the ’90s, I grew up in a time of big, weird, bombastic, accessible rock music. Metal, alternative, rap-rock, what have you. The subgenre wasn't as important as the high level of quality and the unabashed polish of the presentation. I grew up loving records like Clutch's self-titled 1995 LP, Quicksand's Slip, Rage Against the Machine's Evil Empire, Jawbox's For Your Own Special Sweetheart, Pantera's Far Beyond Driven, Helmet's Betty. Big, splashy, major-label records made by innovative bands with (for the most part) what was then thought of as indie cred. To me, there was nothing more exciting than the mingling of idiosyncrasy and massiveness. These records sounded and felt huge. I cherished my Dischord and Touch and Go albums, too, of course, but I found the replayability of the albums above, and others like them, to be unusually high. I wanted them on all the time.

When I first heard the Mars Volta's De-Loused in the Comatorium, it struck me as the early-aughts version of the kind of record I'm talking about above. It was a huge record, with crystal-clear production and heart-punching hooks. But it was clearly also the product of a weird, personal, insular vision. I didn't know At the Drive-In's work well at the time, but in hindsight, De-Loused was very much aligned in spirit with a record like Slip or Betty—the work of kids with one foot in punk/hardcore and one foot in, for lack of a better term, Big Rock. Like Walter Schreifels or Page Hamilton or J. Robbins or the Clutch dudes, the Mars Volta's Omar Rodríguez-López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala wanted to retain their identity while expanding their scope and reach. It's a tricky balancing act, but when a band really pulls it off, the results can be magical and timeless. On De-Loused, the Mars Volta pulled it off. That record is a classic. Like several of the others listed above, it still sounds absolutely explosive and fresh to me today.

The Mars Volta's subsequent output didn't click with me in the same way. When I heard Frances the Mute, the follow-up to De-Loused, I was disappointed to find a more diffuse and, to my ears, pretentious presentation. The rock, the hugeness, the fun was more elusive; the tedious neoprog sprawl seemed to dominate. (I'm absolutely not disparaging prog or neoprog here; I'm just saying that I preferred the obviously proggish but much more immediate Mars Volta of De-Loused to the more self-consciously arty one of Frances.) I gradually lost track of a band that had once seemed to me like a great hope of smart, eccentric mainstream rock. I heard bits and pieces of the later Mars Volta records, but nothing that really drew me in.

Flash forward to this summer. Rodríguez-López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala had reconciled after the Mars Volta's messy split, and they were teasing a new project. A few singles emerged, and they sounded good to me. I kept an eye out for the full album, and got ahold of it after the band posted it to Bandcamp momentarily. Antemasque hooked me instantly. I felt that rush of immediacy that I'd been looking for since De-Loused, since all those ’90s records I mentioned above. I knew very quickly that this was one of those huge records, a definitive statement by dudes with arty impulses but the good sense to streamline their output, to craft a record that you can just crank up and feel, really live with. Antemasque simply flows, and explodes, and kicks major amounts of ass. Like De-Loused—although Antemasque is a very different, more straightforwardly rock-oriented band than Mars Volta—this album is a blast.

While preparing for my write-up, I caught up on all the Mars Volta and At the Drive-In I didn't know. I found great tracks nestled everywhere in the discography, from the earliest ATDI ("Star Slight" and "Initiation," from their first LP, Acrobatic Tenement, blew my mind with their scrappy, passionate emo-ness) to the latest MV (I found myself gravitating to their final album, Noctourniquet—maybe the most un-rocking, un–De-Loused-like of their records).

I think Rodríguez-López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala are geniuses (especially when working together), and have been pretty much since they began collaborating. But making a truly great record is about more than genius. It's about crafting something that truly engages all the way through. Concision is one method. It's the one these artists have chosen on Antemasque, and it works beautifully. I saw Antemasque live the other night, and the show was everything I hoped it would be—fun, concise (Rodríguez-López's spellbinding guitar-heroics and Bixler-Zavala's magnetic stage presence—these two really are our generation's Page/Plant—saved a couple fairly lengthy jams from tedium), energetic as hell. It was about the songs, and this band has a lot of great ones.

I'm not going to refer objectively to a return to form, because that implies that mid-to-late period Mars Volta was somehow a mistake. Clearly the band didn't think it was, so in a sense, it wasn't. But to this listener, Antemasque does represent the point at which I jump back on the bandwagon. I'm all in with these guys again, and it feels wonderful. I hope they keep making more massive, molten masterpieces like Antemasque. Let's hear it for the big.

Blood so real: Samhain live / Danzig devotion

For me, Samhain was always the weird, shadowy middle chapter of the Glenn Danzig saga. There's an immediacy to basically the entire Misfits discography, and to the cream of the Danzig one (essentially albums one through four, plus odds and ends afterward), that seemed to skip over Samhain. I've often come across passionate Misfits and/or Danzig fans who haven't heard a note of, say, the classic November-Coming-Fire.

So to me, it was a strange and intriguing decision for Glenn to bring Samhain back out on the road this year, for an appearance at Riot Fest and a subsequent mini tour, which I saw at Best Buy Theater last night. A few years back, I attended a show billed as Danzig Legacy, in which Glenn and assorted sidemen played three short sets focusing on each of his bands in turn. In some ways, the Samhain portion was the most intriguing—both because the songs are less iconic than the Misfits and Danzig classics, and because the lineup (unlike that of the Danzig segment, which featured no vintage-era members, or the Misfits one, which featured only guitarist Doyle) included two actual old-school Samhain-ers, Steve Zing and London May, trading off on bass and drums.

Last night's set was a chance to focus exclusively on Samhain, and I have to hand it to Glenn for keeping the parameters tight. The band played only three Misfits songs, and two of those ("Horror Business," a.k.a. "Horror Biz," and "All Hell Breaks Loose," a.k.a. "All Hell") showed up in their subtly but effectively rearranged Samhain versions; the third, "Halloween II," always sounded like a Samhain song to begin with, so it fit right in. Having not met a whole lot of die-hard Samhain fans in my peer group, I was surprised to see how passionate the crowd response was. People were singing along to every word of even the obscure Initium songs, like "Macabre" and "The Shift," and the pit was raging more or less the whole show.

The experience of seeing Glenn Danzig live in 2014 is complicated. I've seen him several times in recent years, so I knew what to expect, but last night, his age, and his bitter, out-of-touch demeanor hit home even more. To put it mildly, his onstage persona, which I gather is not too different from his offstage one, is not a pleasant one. He's developed an obsessive loathing for fans filming his shows on their phones, and he has a habit of aggressively calling out specific members of the crowd. There were several distracting instances of same last night, as well as an utterly absurd episode where a roadie apparently handed Danzig an out-of-tune guitar (Danzig played some sparse rhythm guitar on the strangely uplifting Initium closer "Archangel") and Danzig proceeded to make a laughingstock of the poor guy in front of the whole crowd. (I don't recall the entire rant, but he definitely employed the term "Einstein" in the classic sarcastic-’80s-jock way, and said something like "What is this, Ethiopia?" when the same roadie forgot to set up a mic stand for him.) There was also this classic rhetorical question posed to the audience: "Does anyone else out there fucking hate hipsters?" I could go on, but you get the point.

The odd thing is that another bit of banter was one of the most endearing moments of the set. You always hear artists give these "Thanks for your support—it means a lot" speeches near the ends of shows, but the one Danzig gave last night was one of the most sincere-seeming I've ever heard. In so many words, he thanked the audience for supporting him all these years (keep in mind that Glenn Danzig is 59, and has been performing since the late ’70s), and made the point that fan loyalty is the driving force behind underground art forms like punk and metal. Again, we've heard all this before, but Glenn Danzig is someone who has lived this dream basically his entire life, willing three bands into worldwide icon-hood (and inspiring countless others) through the force of his own vision, conviction and, it must be said, talent. You can't do that without a passionate and devoted fan base.

I'm proud to call myself a member of same. At this point, I've been obsessed with Danzig's body of work for more than two decades. For a few years during my adolescence, I plastered one entire wall of my bedroom with Danzig/Misfits/Samhain memorabilia. (Another friend and I competed to see who could construct the grandest Danzig Wall, as we called it.) The music of these projects has never lost its resonance for me, and to me, it's some of the best-made—and most soulful, intense, dark, tough, sensual, smart, atmospheric, idiosyncratic and sheerly enjoyable—rock I've ever heard. In recent years, I've seen my teenage idol turned into a caricature—with the Henry and Glenn comic, the infamous backstage punch-out, the kitty-litter pic, the admittedly hysterical bricks anecdote—and I'll admit that I'm a little defensive about it. But when you see the man onstage, willingly giving detractors all the ammo they need to ridicule him, you realize that defending Glenn Danzig as a guy is a losing battle.

What I will do, though, is defend Glenn Danzig as an artist and, just as importantly, entertainer. The Misfits songbook is straight-up Beatles-worthy in its density of brilliance per capita. We're talking about buckets' worth of perfect songs—true anthems. The first four Danzig records are almost as good in terms of sheer swagger and baddassery and vibe cultivation. And the Samhain catalog is a creepy, esoteric wonder unto itself. You see Glenn Danzig perform these songs—not talk between songs, or otherwise make an ass of himself, but actually perform them—and you feel how much he wants you, the audience member, to feel, to embrace the liberating power of dark, punishing, violent and—paradoxically, but maybe not at all—fun music.

"All Murder, All Guts, All Fun," one of the most rousing songs Samhain played last night, says it all. Yes, Danzig's all about the tough-guy posturing—the snarls, the air-punching. But what he really is, is an entertainer in a classic escapist-minded mode. He dreamed up a character, that of "Glenn Danzig," and has spent his life embodying it to the fullest. When he's in the midst of that embodiment, performing a brilliant punk song like the urgent "Let the Day Begin" (last night's set closer) or the gothy "Black Dream," or a stirring proto-Danzig (i.e., the band) dirge like "To Walk the Night," he is 100% believable. You go along with him on this possibly cartoonish, but ultimately transporting and empowering journey. In short, you believe. Or at least I do.

The spell might break as soon as a song ends, but for those several minutes, you're in that alternate world that he's created—one that's not just sonic but also visual. The band took the stage splattered in fake blood à la the Initium cover, and at one point Danzig made a comment to the effect of "How many other bands would come out here and put on all this blood for you?" This is the man who told his audience way back when, "I want your skulls." (I saw a band cover "Skulls" on Halloween, and it united the entire audience in Danzig worship; like I said, classic songs.) And the sentiment feels reciprocal: I want your skulls, essentially your loyalty, and I'll give you back total commitment in my performance. At certain moments during the show, I saw Danzig wipe fake blood out of his eyes and lapse momentarily into an "I'm too old for this shit" slouch. But then he'd snap right back into the sneering, the headbanging, the giving of himself unto the fans, the keeping of the faith, the embodiment of his own shock-rock anti-hero-hood. (And I should say that the rest of the band—Zing, May and Baroness guitarist Peter Adams—all abetted the Danzig vision with total commitment. I believe that they believe.)

Glenn Danzig appears to me to be, despite all his bitter lashings-out, a man in love with what he does, what he's created, and what he brings out in those who share that love for what he does. I wouldn't want to be him, but I respect the sacrifice he's made—essentially, apparently, trading his own, like, development as a decent human being for the blessing/curse of metamorphosing into the ultimate fantasy character. Like a pro wrestler, or something? Perhaps, but pro wrestlers don't write transporting, immortal, impossible-not-to-sing-along-to songs like "Unholy Passion." And they don't put on shows as galvanizing and true and passionate as the one I saw last night.

Yes, I came away from the show, as any sensible thinking person would, recounting Danzig's various between- or intersong absurdities with my friend. But in my heart, I knew that I still believed. It takes a little effort, but really not that much at all, to separate the myth from the man—to set your feelings about the latter aside out of respect for your love for the former. That's what art, and just as importantly, entertainment, are all about. Glenn Danzig is a master entertainer, in part because he is a master artist. He has made so many things that resonate so widely: songs, yes, but also an entire worldview, a collection of imagery, a persona, a unified space where the emotions he has worshiped all his life—basically evil, violence, passion, anguish, lust, what have you—can rise to the surface and boil over in this kind of communal exorcism. It's the same principle behind a great horror movie, but in the case of the Danzig brand, and specifically a concert over which he presides, it's a real group ceremony. Superficially, I don't feel like I have much in common with the average Danzig fan, but the goosebumps I frequently found myself getting during last night's show let me know that I'm going to be a member of this brother-/sisterhood for the rest of my life.

"And that blood's so real," Glenn Danzig sings in "Bloodfeast," one of my favorite Misfits songs, "Because I just can't fake it." I know exactly what he means, and I take him at his word.

Stopped making sense: CSNY 1974

I've been spending a lot of time with CSNY 1974, a new 3CD/1DVD box set culled from the famed folk-rock group's arena tours of that year. I've been a fairly casual Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young fan for a long time, but a fan of a certain type—namely a Neil Young obsessive with a lesser regard for the rest of the group. Yesterday's heavy listening to this (fucking awesome, I should say up front) box shifted my thinking significantly.

When I first spun CSNY 1974 a few months back, I remember taking note of the vast chasm separating a Neil contribution like, say, "On the Beach"—one of his deepest and most haunting songs—from a Graham Nash tune like "Our House." The difference between Young's uneasy existential meditation ("I went to the radio interview / But I ended up alone at the microphone"—whew!), and Nash's wholly placid campfire-singalong love ode. My impulse was to rank, to set up a snobby hierarchy, pegging the former as clearly more weighty, and thus more valuable, than the latter.

But what I was overlooking was the weird alchemy of the so-called supergroup. The way that the coexistence of disparate talents can shed new light on each one, even if, for a moment, one seems like the obvious sun, with the others acting as mere minor satellites. I'm not sure CSNY quite rivals Fleetwood Mac in this department, i.e., in the sheer depth of their genius arsenal. Seeing Nicks, Buckingham and Christine McVie on the same stage a few weeks ago reminded me how unlikely it was that those three pop magicians, each with such a different appeal, ended up in the same band, but CSNY have their own special kind of wonder.

Listening to this new box set, you really feel the cycle of personalities in this band. I've spent countless hours with Young's solo work, and a lot of time with Graham Nash's excellent 1971 solo debut, Songs for Beginners, but before I got ahold of CSNY 1974, Stephen Stills and David Crosby were both a bit of a mystery to me. This set has made me an ardent fan. There's something so soulful and plainspoken about a song like "Almost Cut My Hair," Crosby's meditation on "letting [his] freak flag fly" after nearly stowing it for good, or Stills's ragged roots-rock jam "Love the One You're With." There's a sense in which Nash and especially Young are operating in this sort of ethereal realm due to the riveting, angelic qualities of their voices—sounds that it's hard to imagine are coming out of actual humans. The other two, though, personify these sort of hard-living bros, the kind of musician who has to really work to get off the ground.

And when you stop trying to reconcile it, and just let it happen, the contrast between Young's eccentric lone wolf—recounting this tour in his great new car-themed memoir, Special Deluxe, he writes about how he traveled separately from the main CSNY entourage on this very tour—and Nash's bleeding-heart protest singer starts to seem revelatory. To hear Young's "Revolution Blues," (where the narrator confesses that he hates the "famous stars" that have flocked Laurel Canyon "worse than lepers," and threatens to "kill them in their cars") back-to-back with Nash's "Military Madness," during which he leads the crowd in a "No more war!" chant, drives home the essential hodgepodge nature of this band, and how the members' decision not to smooth over their differences and distinctions, but to simply present them alongside one another in sprawling night-long performances, was the source of their genius.

Crosby, Stills & Nash without Neil Young was a highly skilled but essentially harmonious (pun-intended) group; Crosby, Stills & Nash with Neil Young was a weird, brilliant ragtag assemblage—a band whose performances present the exact opposite of a unified front. Perhaps—given the widely reported dysfunction in the group—even men united, during a tour like this one, in a sort of money/power/fame alliance, or for some other crass end. While many great rock bands work as a single mighty engine, CSNY were like four separate motorcycles cruising down the highway in a temporary alliance, holding their formation long enough to make a record or complete a tour, before Lone Wolf Young decided, yet again, that he'd had enough.

And from what I've read, that dynamic continues to this day. C, S and N always keep their door open to the possibility of touring with Y, but Y, as he seems to do with all his creative partnerships, follows his own star, returning to earth only when he's ready, and who knows when that will be. But what CSNY teaches me is that he gets as much from him as they do from him. The CSNY context humanizes, popularizes, arena-izes Neil Young. Yes, say, a Crazy Horse concert is always going to be this monolithically awesome event, but it is an event shot through with Young's inherent stubbornness and lack of interest in the art of crowd-pleasing, of inviting an audience to sing along and smile. 

Those populist arts are right in Graham Nash's wheelhouse—and in Stills's and Crosby's, in slightly different ways—and they are the gifts embodied in an immortal song like "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes." You put that open, communicative force together with Young's borderline-hallucinatory introspection, and you have something volatile, just shy of nonsensical. (Even the relatively innocuous "Old Man," for example, means something entirely different—more extreme and dire—here than it would at a solo Neil show.) You have the tension that separates the supergroup from the non-. You have men who may not even belong on the same tour bus, let alone stage, making it work for whomever's sake—their kids', their record company's, their wives', maybe their own, but who knows. And weirdly, paradoxically, you have magic. A byproduct of this whole messy jumble. You don't know how it got there, but it's happening. CSNY 1974 is all of that—a band, a tour, a box set that makes no sense until you stop trying to make it make sense.

The price of right: 'Whiplash,' a jazzless jazz movie

When a more or less mainstream movie comes out about a topic you specialize in, you take notice. You almost feel compelled to form an immediate opinion, because you know someone will ask: "Have you seen this new film about a jazz drummer? What did you think?!"

The movie I'm talking about is, of course, Whiplash, which deals with a sadistic—or is he enlightened?—jazz-band director at a Juilliard-like NYC music school and his super-driven student, possibly also on his way to a life of cold inhumanity and artistic immortality.

I should say up front that I found Whiplash really compelling as a straightforward human story. The acting was solid all-around, and the transformation of the main character, Andrew (Miles Teller), into a kind of Art Monster felt believable and suitably complex, i.e., you weren't sure whether to admire him or pity him as he drove himself ever harder, past blisters and bleeding and beration at the hands of his teacher, Fletcher (J.K. Simmons, a.k.a. that dude who's in everything but whom you probably don't know by name).

This question of how far you need to go—or maybe, how inhuman you need to become—in order to be great is one worth asking, and Whiplash thrusts it in your face for pretty much its entire running time. But what I found almost more interesting were the questions it didn't ask. Whiplash ostensibly concerns itself with jazz, with drumming, with music in general, but to me, it felt strangely divorced from any of those things. What I mean is that Andrew's entire quest is presented as no different from that of, say, a marathon runner or mountain climber. The drumming in the film is entirely tense, joyless, athletic, extreme, punishing. We hear music being played in Whiplash, but mostly we see and hear practice, and practice that looks and feels very much like self-flagellation.

Director Damien Chazelle apparently played in high-school jazz band, so I guess I should assume that in addition to posing his core inquiry of "At what price art?," he's also asking questions about the sort of militaristic regimentation of jazz during the past few decades. But this seemed sort of like an undercurrent rather than anything the movie came right out and addressed. I couldn't help noticing that there were really only two actual musical fixations in the film, two hallowed icons held up as examples of the greatness that Andrew is trying to achieve and Fletcher is trying to inspire: Buddy Rich and Charlie Parker. I could be mistaken, but I don't think a single other drummer was named in the film besides Rich. That makes perfect sense, in a way, because to me—respectfully, Buddy Rich has no place in my personal drum pantheon, jazz or otherwise, but to be fair, I haven't dug very deep into his work—Buddy Rich is the icon of jazz as sport, jazz as "My band is going to wipe the floor with your band," jazz as a chops war, jazz (or music in general) as a thing not to be studied, enjoyed, savored, but as a battle with clear winners and losers. Is this why Chazelle chose Rich—i.e., as a sly critique of those who would model themselves after the wrong kinds of artistic heroes—or was it simply that he, as a young jazz hopeful, worshiped at Rich's altar? Or that Rich is simply the go-to shorthand idol of "every aspiring jazz drummer"? (Another thing: Like Rich, almost everyone shown playing jazz in Whiplash is white. Again, I wonder: critique, commentary or coincidence?)

In terms of Parker, there's not a single mention of the fact that he was, like, a brilliant alto saxophonist and improviser. All we hear about is that he was an inferior player who became an immortal one after—in the famous story, recounted ad nauseum in the film and elsewhere—drummer Jo Jones threw a cymbal at him during a jam session. (I've heard this anecdote so many times that I can't even remember where the supposedly definitive version comes from—does anyone else happen to recall?) In any case, I thought it was very telling that there's not a single mention of, or even allusion to, the idea of improvisation in the film. Andrew's entire quest revolves around mastery: mastering rudiments, mastering certain tempos and feels (all the while being verbally and physically assaulted, both by Fletcher himself and by his own ever-developing inner Fletcher), mastering charts, mastering a sort of samurai-like ascetic discipline. The idea of inspiration, of expression, of putting one's personal stamp on the music never comes up. Jazz as it's portrayed in Whiplash is about rigor and bombast, mostly in an ensemble context, and that's it. And it was hard for me to tell if Chazelle intended his movie as a critique of this ghoulish perversion of jazz in the academy, or if that version of jazz—the one where jazz looks very much like, say, wrestling or football or rugby—was the only one he knew, and was therefore the only one his film dealt with. I'm splitting hairs here, but I came away from Whiplash wondering all this.

Chazelle leaves it up to the audience to decide whether Andrew's quest, the one that will very likely result in him become a famous drummer with no personal relationships whatsoever, is worthwhile, or even fated for someone of his constitution. But I couldn't tell if were also meant to be asking whether "succeeding" at this version of art—i.e., not the version where you change the world through the depth and specificity of your vision, i.e., the Miles, Mingus, Ellington and, yes, Parker version, but the one where you basically become a charts-obliterating robot—was even a worthwhile goal to begin with. Is Whiplash simply a film, in other words, about the price of getting jazz right, or is it also a film about how profoundly the jazz-education system—teachers, students, everybody who embraces this apparatus for the learning/inculcation of jazz—has gotten jazz wrong? Because, yes, relentless practice is what turned Charlie Parker into Bird, but it wasn't the relentless practice of, like, the saxophonic equivalent of rudiments and snazzy ’70s-style big-band charts. It was mechanical study combined with the drive to make a personal statement, with actual passion and curiosity, a concept that is not even remotely touched on in Whiplash (again, a calculated omission? Hard to say…). Passion not just to "improve" but to discover.

So Whiplash definitely made me think—just maybe not along the exact lines it seemed to be trying to make me think. But as a visual, visceral and emotional document, I thought it was extremely successful. Jazz, music and drumming aside, it's basically about the idea of a young man pushing past his breaking point and going into a kind of transcendent/purgatorial free fall, a portrait of what the obliteration of "normalcy" in the name of excellence looks and feels like. (My friend and Time Out colleague Josh Rothkopf nailed all this in his Whiplash review.) Chazelle really rubs your nose in the madness of it all—the rehearsal scenes in particular, with Fletcher halting performances time and time and time again with a bulging bicep and clenched fist, are suitably excruciating. And the film's dark pull really centers on how much you find yourself agreeing with Fletcher's worldview at times. This idea of "Is the desire for greatness unreasonably extreme, or is the rest of the humanity too content to settle?" is a profound one, whatever your chosen field or life path.

Yes, the "jazz" in the film looked and sounded nothing like the jazz I love, but then again, I've never studied jazz at a conservatory. (I'd be really curious to hear how someone from that environment would respond to Whiplash.) Bottom line: a good, thought-provoking night out at the movies, and a rare chance to see a feature film that touches on some of my chief obsessions.

P.S. Forrest Wickman goes deeper into the cymbal-throwing incident (myth?) and its relationship to Whiplash here.

Linked: Casablancas/O + 'C&C' @ 20

I'm proud of the current Time Out New York cover story, which I had a hand in. Since Julian Casablancas and Karen O both have new solo albums out, we thought it would be fun to have them interview each other. Thankfully, they were game, and I think we ended up with a really cool conversation: wide-ranging, alternately insightful and silly, and (as far as I know) unique. I'm pretty sure these two have never sat down and had a conversation this extensive, let alone on the record. Read it here if you have a chance. A big thanks to my too-numerous-to-name Time Out colleagues and photographer Jake Chessum for helping to make this awesome.

A bit of background. I adore the Strokes, as well as scattered bits of Casablancas's extracurricular discography: a handful of tracks from his first solo record, 2009's Phrazes for the Young ("11th Dimension" and its accompanying video floor me; I really respond to the combo of kitschy flamboyance and self-deprecating wit that's on display here); his incredible Daft Punk collaboration from Random Access Memories; and various fleeting moments on his insane, sprawling, seemingly willfully opaque new one, Tyranny. When I saw the Strokes at Governors Ball this year—awesome show, btw—I Tweeted something to the effect of, "The Strokes have had the last laugh. Their songs are now every bit as classic, if not more so, than the output of the bands everyone said they ripped off." I really do believe that they belong in the all-time-great pantheon, despite the spottiness of some of the recent records. Even on First Impressions of Earth, Angles and Comedown Machine, the band's signature baroque-but-economical brilliance shines though.

I'm definitely a fan of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, though I don't know their catalog as well. A song like "Date with the Night" is indisputably badass. Karen O's new solo record, Crush Songs, is fragile and beautiful—exactly, it seems to me, as intended. There are some real gems toward the end of the album: "Body," in particular, is a quiet killer.




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And for Stereogum, a 20th-anniversary look back at Chocolate and Cheese. I couldn't help but recycle some themes from my book, but there are definitely new ideas here. I adopted the above image as an emblem for the album, and the band, as a whole. I also dug out a choice interview outtake that didn't make it into the 33 1/3 volume (the "They're classicists, you know?" bit)—I'd forgotten how insightful former Ween manager Dave Ayers was.

Speaking of 33 1/3, the series celebrates its tenth anniversary this year—Lit Genius is kindly hosting annotated excerpts from various books in the series; here's mine—and there's a party at the Powerhouse Arena in Dumbo this coming Thursday, October 2. I'll be there during the early part of the evening, so come on out if you're around!

The fleeting snarl: King Crimson live in 2014

This past Thursday, I saw King Crimson perform (as part of a four-show NYC run that continues tonight and tomorrow). I wasn't sure I'd ever type that. The band had toured as recently as 2008, but I was a relatively late-blooming fan, and after I heard that bandleader Robert Fripp, pictured, announced his retirement from music in 2012, I figured I'd never have the chance to see them.

The concert was frequently fascinating, but it kept me at arm's length, and I've been trying to figure out why. By way of context, I should mention that I have a complex relationship with the idea of progressive rock. (I delved into that in my math-rock mixtape a couple years back, and in various other posts.) I distrust all genres, pretty much as a rule, and prog is no different. My view is always, show me the music, not its traits or trappings. Is it worthy? Is it great? Cool, then—I'm on board.

With King Crimson, the music frequently is great. Partially by following my own nose, and partially with help from KC expert/completist/megafan Steve Smith (who put together a great preview of the Crimson show in Boston), I made my way to the classic early-’70s band featuring Fripp, John Wetton and Bill Bruford, and dove pretty deep into their ever-expanding (thanks to the indefatigable DGM Live) archive. Where to start with this monster group? I doubt I'll be able to express my love for them more deeply than I did here, when I was first in the throes of my ’70s-Crimson obsession. This period of Crimson speaks to me so clearly, pushes so many of my musical pleasure buttons through its combination of virtuosity and fierceness. I don't care about prog; I care about music that lights me up, and when this incarnation of King Crimson (or, say, Rush…) gets going, such as on this ungodly-great 1974 Pittsburgh show (if you don't own this, please, for the love of God, remedy that), I'm straight-up glowing.

When it comes to the rest of the Crimson oeuvre, I'm no expert. I know and like 1981's Discipline, as well as the live material I've heard featuring that version of the band; I've got a special fondness for the poppier Adrien Belew–driven material such as the outstanding "Frame by Frame." But in my consumption of proggish rock/metal, I'm always looking for the edge, the bite, and King Crimson was at this later point a much cleaner, more streamlined band. From the bits and pieces I've heard of ’90s and 2000s–era Crimson, my sense is that some of that visceral quality returned, but in a more "state of the art," high-tech guise—not in the ratty, ugly form you hear all over the Bruford/Wetton material.

So going into the show, I understood that I would be encountering a completely different band than any of the Crimsons that I knew. The current edition is a hodgepodge of various eras: bassist / Chapman Stick dude Tony Levin, a member on and off since the Discipline era; saxist-flutist Mel Collins, who worked with the band during the strange transitional period between 1969's In the Court of the Crimson King and 1973's Larks' Tongues in Aspic (the recorded debut of the Bruford/Wetton band); ’90s and 2000s drumming mainstay Pat Mastelotto; drummers Bill Rieflin and Gavin Harrison, a new and newish recruit, respectively; and new singer-guitarist Jakko Jakszyk—all joining Robert Fripp, of course. I'd heard rumblings about how the band would be playing a lot of vintage material, but as is my custom, I didn't do a whole lot of set-list research beforehand.

The production was pretty stagy. Long clips of recorded voiceovers, both before the set and between songs. Beforehand, we got, over the PA, a long rambling message from Fripp and various other members about the virtues of turning of your phones and other devices and experiencing the show in real time. Fair enough. Then, between songs, there were frequent, humorously edited clips of conversations between Fripp and various stereotypically "clueless" (though maybe they were, God forbid, merely curious, or simply doing their jobs?) journalists. I remember one exchange when a writer asked something to the effect of "What's the main difference between this and that version of King Crimson?" In that inimitable dry, British way of his, Fripp deadpanned something like, "Well, I think the main difference is that there are different men in the group." That definitely got a laugh, probably because that attitude—the visionary's arch impatience with the follies of the sticklers and record keepers—seems to prevail among the Crimson fan base. I don't mean to generalize; only to say that it's my impression that in the Crimson universe, fans fetishize Fripp's eccentricity, his difficult-ness, and the notion that they, as devotees, are somehow in on a joke that fans of, God forbid, less willfully esoteric music, have no way of understanding or even accessing.

(If it's not already clear, this attitude turns me off. I love plenty of obscure music, but I'm not really into the idea of fixating on its obscurity or eccentricity. I love it because I like the way it sounds, period. I also love the way plenty of way more "straightforward" music sounds. In both cases, it's gut reaction, and nothing more.)

These contextual elements, the recorded dialogue and such, set a certain tone that ran through the show as a whole. I mentioned "stagy" above, and the other aspect of what I was getting at was that the band appeared onstage as participants in a sort of pageant: the three drummers in front, and the other four in back, standing side-by-side on a riser (except for the perpetually seated Fripp), with a backdrop made to look like a forest, and little identifying signs in front of each man that represented his name in the style of the periodic table. As a spectacle, it almost suggested an Epcot Center rendering of a prog concert.

The set list was surprisingly crowd-pleasing. The band drew heavily on the Bruford/Wetton repertoire (all the jams you know and love: "One More Red Nightmare," "Starless," the first two installments in the "Larks' Tongues" saga, "Red," etc.), as well as on the early Mel Collins years (I don't know those records well, but I did recognize the stately and eerie "The Letters" from ’71's Islands). My friend and TONY colleague Josh Rothkopf pointed out a Thrak track in the set, and there were a couple songs I didn't recognize that I'm guessing were from other ’90s or aughts-era releases. Interestingly, I'm pretty sure that the Discipline era was barely touched on. (Spoiler alert, in case you have plans to see another show on this tour: The encore was, yes, a long, flashy, drum-heavy version of "21st Century Schizoid Man.")

One thing that struck me throughout the show was that, despite the three-drummer lineup, the band lacked a certain oomph. The parts of King Crimson that, on record, move me the most—the dark, crunchy, clattering grooves, such as the classic 7/8 stomp in "Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Part I," which came right near the beginning of the set—were the parts that, at this show, moved me the least. With all due respect to the drummers, all clearly fine technical players (there was a lot of cool/complex interlocking drum arrangement going on, with Mastelotto, Rieflin and Harrison acting as cogs in a larger percussion section rather than simply as three adjacent trap-set players) and imaginative texturalists, I didn't feel a lot of fire from any of them. Precision, yes, and density and volume, some of the time, but not a lot of sweat or brutality. I understand here that I may be engaging in classic apples-to-orange-isms here, and unfairly stacking up this Crimson, an entirely different band, against the one I know and love the best. But given the fact that the focus was on repertoire from that earlier era, it was hard not to notice the contrast with Bruford—such a daring, crafty and surprising, not to mention straight-up nasty when he wants to be, player. When the grooves would kick in, I tended to feel that they "rocked" rather than rocked. With music like this, I want to be punished; at Thursday night's show, I often felt more like I was being addressed, in a sober, straightforward manner.

All the classic knocks against prog, yes? And that's what disheartened me a bit. I'm always the guy who's arguing against that kind of reductionist thinking, i.e., the absurd idea that virtuosity and passion are always mutually exclusive (or that a lack of virtuosity is somehow inherently, you know, virtuous). But watching this show, I often felt that a non-Crimson-sympathetic listener would have all the ammo he or she needed to dismiss it in the most clichéd and uninformed of ways. Given that, in my opinion, Bruford/Wetton Crimson flies in the face of all that tired anti-prog propaganda, I found this troubling.

There were plenty of moments and elements that flew in the face of my overall characterization, though. Jakszyk, in particular, deserves a lot of credit—he did an excellent job of inhabiting the Wetton role, in particular, belting with plenty of grain and poignancy. Levin, too, played with muscle and heart, especially when he traded the Stick for either acoustic or electric bass. In some ways, Mel Collins was the star of the group. He's got a really bluesy, soulful style, and he seemed to have clearance to blow pretty much whatever he wanted during a good 75 percent of the set. I'd never really felt like "Red," for example, was lacking an ongoing free-form sax commentary, but Collins won me over. His contributions went a long way toward humanizing and lightening a presentation that often felt sterile and plodding to me, getting the blood pumping through the heart of the music.

Robert Fripp was resolutely in the background for the majority of the set. But there was one tantalizingly brief moment where he stepped forward. I'm pretty sure the bit I'm talking about came in the middle or at the end of "Sailor's Tale," another track from Islands. What I remember is that the rest of the band cut out entirely, leaving the maestro to play solo for what couldn't have been longer than two or three minutes. This episode was technically a "guitar solo," but it was entirely free of bravado. It was halting, ugly and fractured. Tough, fuzzed-out chords that elicited and completely transcended all the usual clichés: "metallic," "angular," "jagged," "clanking." But none of those descriptors were adequate for what this was. It was only Fripp, being Fripp, serenading the chaos that at one point was a major component in this shapeshifting art-rock odyssey of his. You felt at that moment completely wired into the twisted heart of King Crimson, the mad eccentricity that has powered it for all these years. I felt here like I was witnessing what I'd had hoped to witness, which was the snarl behind the band's poker-faced facade. It was fleeting and it was glorious, and I wish I could hear it back right now.


Though I might not have fully connected with the show as a whole, I'm so glad I got to witness that ornery mini tantrum, delivered in classic undemonstrative Fripp style. With this tour, he's clearly taking King Crimson in a relatively cozy direction. Familiar repertoire, plenty of crowd-pleasing musical pyrotechnics, the prerecorded in-jokes between songs. It all felt like the KC version of a hug or a high-five to fans—a King Crimson revue, almost. Which is totally fine! We're talking about a nearly 50-year-old band here, led by a nearly 70-year-old man. If he's choosing to put on a good, long, retrospective-oriented show, a sort of digest version of all this band has been over the years, filled with tightness and looseness, riffing and texture, familiar faces and new ones—the whole bit—that is certainly his right.

But being the kind of listener I am, I'm always looking for the edge, the bite, the snarl. And following certain musicians into their elder years, it's always fascinating to see where you find it. (Scanning my brain for a shining example of the former case, I settle on Lindsey Buckingham, a Fripp contemporary, and, the more I learn about him, a musician whose core impulses, his prickliness and perversity—not to mention his caustic, almost sadistic virtuosity and stubborn originality as a guitarist—aren't all that far removed from Fripp's.) Having witnessed those glorious few minutes recounted above, I know that Fripp still has all this in him; the beast is there, should he choose to pay it a visit. And I'll be paying close attention to see if he does, not to mention digging back through the discography to find those isolated forays of pure mania. Forget "prog"; what I'm looking for is wildness, electricity. And, as he's demonstrated countless times in the past, Robert Fripp, captain of the weird, winding, unwieldy endeavor that is King Crimson, knows the way there.

Freedom from choice: Goodbye, Jimi Jamison

I've just heard the sad news that Jimi Jamison has died of a heart attack at age 63. I first learned of Jamison a couple years back, after hearing the song "High on You" somewhere. If you grew up on any kind of rock radio, you'll probably recognize that one after sampling a few seconds of the opening keyboard riff. The song grabbed me, just as it had when I was a kid, and I realized I had no idea what band was responsible. I found out that it was Survivor, and that Jamison was the lead singer.

Survivor's history is pretty convoluted. Their biggest song is, of course, "Eye of the Tiger." Jamison didn't sing that one; he joined in 1984 after his predecessor, Dave Bickler, left the band due to vocal-cord polyps. Jamison's first album with the band, ’84's Vital Signs, was a big one, yielding three hits that remain radio-rock staples to this day: "High on You," "The Search Is Over" and "I Can't Hold Back."

To me, the last one is about as good as mainstream rock gets. It's got a pretty ingenious structure (kudos to cowriters Jim Peterik and Frankie Sullivan, Survivor's keyboardist and guitarist, respectively): a majestic acoustic intro segueing into a nice chorus fakeout before the big kick-in, a great moody little bridge. But let's be real—like any great pop song, this isn't a track we need to analyze. It just works, and a lot of that working has to do with Jamison's incredible vocal. Listen to the "…froooooom you!" at :58, or the title line at 1:24. It's hard to know how to describe Jamison's singing aside from simply great. There's no quirk or idiosyncrasy to what he does; he's basically the archetypal ’80s-style arena-rock frontman. His is the kind of voice that anyone who's ever belted karaoke would kill for. Perhaps he's not on Steve Perry's level—I don't really think anyone is—but in terms of nailing the notes and projecting urgency and emotion, he's got this thing sewed up.

We're taught to mock, dismiss or even hate this kind of music. We're taught that "I Can't Hold Back" is the kind of bombastic stadium-rock dragon that our punk-rock heroes had to come along and slay. Perhaps, for some, that is the way music works, in these tidy binaries. For me, it was never that simple. I grew up adoring big mainstream rock of the ’80s: Journey, Foreigner, Survivor, Loverboy, whatever else was on the radio, as well as all the hair-metal bands that were my first true musical heroes. Of course, I got into punk and all sorts of underground miscellany later on; any curious music obsessive eventually does. And if you start reading about DIY music, you start reading about this adversarial underground vs. mainstream idea(l)—how you're supposed to ditch all that big, catchy, steroidal above-ground rock once you discover the seething, visceral, difficult subterranean stuff.

People love punk, so they buy into its antagonism—the idea that to really sign up for it, to go all in, you have to renounce all the pop stuff that it openly combated. Over time, I've cared less and less and less about that kind of thinking. Right now, my position is: Fuck that. I adore the Misfits, the Descendents, the Wipers, Black Flag, and on and on; I also adore Survivor, to name just one of hundreds of similarly big, populist rock bands who have managed to compose/perform perfect-10 singles like "I Can't Hold Back." (Just before I clicked onto Twitter and saw the news about Jamison, in fact, I was reading Bob Mould's memoir, See a Little Light, which is a really good book. I'd just finished the section on Zen Arcade, which came out in ’84, just two months before Vital Signs. I give equal props to both albums.) Loving music, or any art form, grants you the freedom not to choose, to factionalize, to pit styles against one another, even if your heroes took pride in, and drew inspiration from, their own adversarial stances.

So I may have once attempted to conform my own experience of music to the tidy "punk killed off Big Rock" narrative. But over time, I'd hear songs like "I Can't Hold Back" on the radio, and they'd absolutely captivate me. I realized that I bought them entirely, and that I always had. Sure, I can see the surface absurdity in ’80s stadium rock. But honestly, I identify way more with the screaming, fist-pumping hordes of fans in the live vid above. In the end, I vastly prefer submitting to music to thinking about it, or standing apart from it, and this music is custom-built to induce submission. I adore songs like this without shame. (I touched on a lot of these same themes in one of the earliest posts on this blog, written nearly eight years ago.) In fact, it feels shameful to even bring up the topic of shame when I'm discussing musical experiences such as this, which I basically consider holy. It's just you, your soul and a song. You've heard it 10,000 times, and it never gets old. You dial it up on your iPod, and for those three minutes or so, you're invincible. This is what "I Can't Hold Back" has done for me, and will no doubt continue to do. So for that, I thank you, Jimi Jamison and the rest of Survivor.

There's no either/or here. I'm still on the Cecil Taylor kick that I wrote about a couple weeks ago. Earlier today, I listened to Cecil with both Louis Moholo and The Feel Trio. I may throw one of those on again later on tonight. But right now, I'm paying respects to Jimi Jamison.

A few weeks ago, I was at a get-together with my bandmate and dear friend Joe. We commandeered the stereo, as we often do, threw on some Strokes and started geeking out. Another friend mentioned that he was surprised that two guys whose musical stock-in-trade was labyrinthine math rock were so into such a straightforward, poppy band. In so many words, I responded that I just like music that goes really, really far in whatever direction it goes in. So, in a macro sense, Craw, for example, holds the same appeal for me as Survivor does. Artists who knew exactly what they wanted to do, who dreamed up a sound and just went there.

Jimi Jamison was a singer who went there. Every time I listen to him, he helps me go there. I thank him for that, and I bid him a sincere fan's farewell.

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P.S. I realize that the punk vs. Big Rock dialogue is more nuanced than I've made it seem. The SST crew in particular have always given it up for select mainstream favorites (the Dead, Creedence, etc.); Ian MacKaye frequently namechecks Ted Nugent; and Mould's book recounts an early Kiss obsession. But in general, you'll hear very few undergeround-oriented tastemakers copping to a love—specifically, one that's not couched in the idea of love/hate—for the kind of grandiose stadium rock that Survivor epitomizes.

Dealing with CT: 'Nailed' and beyond

Plenty of times, when listening to Cecil Taylor (either live or on record), I've taken notes, diligently trying to process what I was experiencing. I've listened to a lot of Cecil Taylor this week—all recorded, of course; to my knowledge the Maestro hasn't performed live since last year, when he dueted with Min Tanaka after receiving the Kyoto Prize. For much of that time, I've happily let my pen fall pretty much slack. My jaw, as well.

To digress, I have these Cecil Taylor phases. They've been a fixture in my life for more than a decade (and an intermittent central theme on DFSBP). Periods where I need his music—often a certain phase or group—in my ears more or less constantly. Until this week, it had been a little while, maybe even a couple years, since I'd gone really deep with Cecil. What kicked off this latest listening jag was the troubling recent news of Taylor's swindling at the hands of a contractor. It's an outlandish story, one that would be absurdly comic if it hadn't happened to an 85-year-old man, let alone one who happens to be, in my opinion, one of the greatest artists who has ever walked the earth.

In keeping with my post last week, which only brought up the recent Sonny Rollins New Yorker flare-up so that I might do my best to dismiss it and deflect attention elsewhere, I feel the need to shoo away this real-world Cecil insanity. Let's hope and trust that he's getting the legal help he needs, and let's not fixate on the incident, reduce the man to a caricature—the batty eccentric he's being portrayed as. (Maybe I've been guilty of same.) Let's use the opportunity, rather, to get back in touch with his art, which is what matters.

So, the note-taking, or lack thereof. I just spent a restorative near-hour with "First," the 52-minute lead track on Nailed, a Taylor quartet record (with Evan Parker, Barry Guy and Tony Oxley) on FMP that, like a bunch of other Taylor FMPs, is available as a Bandcamp download through the noble efforts of Destination: Out. (I'm grateful to Seth Colter Walls for pointing me toward Melancholy, recorded a few days after Nailed—SCW singled it out as one of the more precise, coherent Taylor large-group recordings, and I fully concur.) While listening to Nailed today, walking around Crown Heights, I scrawled down just a few hyperbolic phrases: "Raining down of hell, or heaven"; "Nobody has ever come close to describing this experience."

I guess with that last one, I was thinking about all the times I myself had written about Taylor, and how much I'd read about him. (After flipping back through Howard Mandel's Miles Ornette Cecil during the past few days, I've been reminded that the lengthy CT section in this book is perhaps our definitive contemporary Cecil Taylor reference work—the key early-Cecil text being, of course, the lengthy CT section in A.B. Spellman's Four Lives in the Bebop Business—containing as it does both an honest critical grappling with the essential unknowability of Taylor's art, and a wealth of intermittently lucid interview material with the man himself, and with key collaborators ranging from Dominic Duval and Jackson Krall to one Max Roach.) And how inadequate all those words felt in the face of what I was hearing. Eventually I stopped writing phrases and began jotting down only time codes, denoting moments when, basically, I was in blissful disbelief. The other night, while listening to the equally marvelous Celebrated Blazons (another 1990 CT set available via the D:O/FMP Bandcamp, recorded a few months before Nailed; the band here is the divine Feel Trio, with Oxley and William Parker), I wrote, at one point, "How could this have occurred in, like, human life."

So you reach the end of words, the place where there is no substitute for the listening. And why would you want there to be? I have about ten time codes here referring to different sections in "First." Interestingly, many of them refer to moments that don't feature Evan Parker. With all due respect to EP, he almost seems like an onlooker during this performance. He's in the mix, of course (there's a nice Parker/Taylor duet section around the 30-minute mark), but he also lays out for long stretches. It's hard to blame him. The amount of sustained "Are you fucking kidding me?"–level intensity in this track is almost comical. During the trio sections, when Guy and Oxley are going full-tilt, which they are most of the time, you get this riot of sound, a flurry of sonic event. I've dialed up one of my notated time codes: the 26-minute mark. Taylor scampering across the keys with his patented frenzied whimsy, sounding simultaneously savage and mirthful; Oxley approximating wind whipping through a junkyard, furnishing a mist of thuds and scrapes and clangs; and Guy tearing through—or attempting to—the thicket of sound.

Collective mania around the 34-minute mark. All four players this time, racing and gushing. You can feel the Englishmen's desperation: "How long can this guy keep this up?" (A long, long time. I think it was in the Nailed CD booklet that I first read Oxley's classic quote, maybe my favorite thing ever uttered about CT: "To play with Cecil Taylor you need the stamina of an athlete and the imagination of a god.") There's a brief respite around the 40-minute mark, with Cecil ramping down, segueing into his classic murmuring warm-up/cool-down motif, which I think of onomatopoetically as bangada-banga… bangada-banga-banga. And then he can't resist speeding up again, going back in for one more assault. Again, Parker is laying out here. Guy is playing with the bow. Pure mayhem around 43 minutes, more flirtation with the warm-up/cool-down, and then the flailing madness returns. There is something so magical about the outpouring of energy in these moments. You can't get this anywhere else in life, this sort of incandescent freak-out. When it's musicians of this caliber doing the freaking out, and you get to pay witness, it's like seeing/hearing God. 

Buy Nailed if you don't already own it. Drop the needle at 45:40. Let this splatter of precision and brutality just happen to you. I don't know how to talk about music like this. I don't know why you would, unless you, like me, have an obsession with trying to process your own relationship to sound, or you, like me, are trying to encourage others to listen. In moments like this, the engagement of player and, ideally, listener, is total, the level of detail infinite. There is so much of that on Nailed, and on Celebrated Blazons too—and in the ’88–’90 zone of the CT discography generally, with all those divine European encounters. 

Some of the thorniest moments of Nailed come around 49 minutes. The velocity and density decrease here, but not the jagged intensity. All four players are taking their last stabs, measuring their blows instead of flurrying maniacally. And Taylor gets the coda. Around 51 minutes, he quiets for good, musing with consummate restraint. Guy and Oxley providing perfectly attuned accompaniment. There is less than a minute to go in the performance, but this last section is a mini mansion of mystery. All the wildness that's come before, slowing to a trickle. Just like the barrage that precedes it, this ending brims with purpose and precision. That is Cecil's gift to us: total concentration, total conviction, whatever the dynamic zone. He is always, always, always going for it. That is why I have collected his records and attended his performances obsessively over the past decade-plus. When I go and commune with CT, I'm never disappointed. We can't all live in that zone every day, but when you take the time out to really sit with this music, you feel a kind of solar heat. (And you might, as I have, worry that the man is aging and, selfishly, that you might not get to see him perform again…)

We have to appreciate him now—even in the wake of this week's insane real-world news, we have to refocus and remember what the point is: CT is still here. His music is a rich bounty. There's a ton of it. Dip into whatever period you choose—1978 and ’88–’90 seem to call out to me most often—and spend real time there. Put down your pen, your phone, anything that's getting in the way. Let words go; let time go; just deal with CT. It's one of the best feelings I know.

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Other treasures I've turned up during my current Taylor fixation:

*A 1970 live performance with Jimmy Lyons, Sam Rivers and Andrew Cyrille. CT's fierceness and frenzy here are almost unbearable. Till yesterday I had absolutely no idea that footage of this band (heard on The Great Concert of Cecil Taylor, from ’69) existed. The CT portion starts around 11 minutes in.



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*A genial, charming, lucid 2013 interview, in conjunction with the Kyoto Prize. Definite parallels with the lovely CT episode of Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz, which you can grab here. I've said before that CT is impossible to interview. That's unfair. He was impossible for me to interview, when I visited him in 2009 for the Time Out piece linked above. The truth, I think, is that he's simply selective re: whom he'll converse with linearly and warmly—certainly his right.

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*Some fascinating audio documentation—boots from a series of 1998 shows—of an unusual, short-lived Taylor quartet with vibraphonist Joe Locke, bassist Santi Debriano and drummer Jackson Krall, augmented in spots by Oluyemi and Ijeoma Thomas. (For an easy MP3 download, scroll down a bit in the comments and check out the links provided by "mew23.") The Locke/Taylor chemistry is really something to behold. Another fascinating oddity is the Taylor/Parker/Oxley meeting with Anthony Braxton. I think this group played a few times back in ’07; audio boots are floating around, though I can't find any active links at the moment. (Can anyone help?) There is this tantalizing snippet on YouTube:



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*A complete stream of Burning Poles, a live-in-studio performance (date uncertain—’90/’91?) by the Feel Trio plus percussionist Henry Martinez. I remember renting this ages ago on VHS and being somewhat baffled by the pacing—at that time, I wasn't accustomed to CT's famously circuitous invocations/introductions—but rewatching this morning, I was just extremely grateful that we have a proper video document of this band.



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*Again, I'm in disbelief that this exists: a video from CT's 1974 Montreaux Jazz Festival performance, which would be released as Silent Tongues, simply one of Taylor's greatest recordings. The balance between abandon and deliberateness that, to me, defines CT's work has rarely been captured so well. The passage that begins at 9:27 blows my listen—listen to how Taylor sets up this repeated figure, a two-handed run up the keys, and then mutates it, first answering with his patented declamatory left-hand pounds and then upending the call-and-response structure with a tempestuous flurry. Then at 9:50, he begins this sort of see-saw motion between a version of the aforementioned chilled-out warm-up/cool-down figure and these manic action-painting outbursts. Throughout this clip, the clarity and speed of execution are astonishing. As I've described above, later CT has its own magic, but during this period, he seems superhuman.

 

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More:

*All the Notes (full-length documentary by Chris Felver from about ten years back; as accurate a portrait as you're going to find of what it's like to actually spend time in CT's presence; essential)

*Imagine the Sound trailer (incredible 1981 doc w/ CT, Archie Shepp, Paul Bley and Bill Dixon; see the full film at all costs)

*CT live in studio, 1968 (w/ Lyons, Cyrille and Alan Silva, the band from the album Student Studies)

*CT w/ the Art Ensemble of Chicago (need to give this one a good, hard listen, along with the record this group made together)

*2 Ts for a Lovely T on Amazon MP3 (less than $12 for a download of the entire 10-CD box?! I've heard a few discs of this limited-edition Feel Trio set, and the thin sound quality—drastically inferior to, say, Celebrated Blazons above—has always turned me off. But at this price, I can't resist giving it another shot.)

*Q'ua: Live at the Irridium [sic], Vol. 1 (another reconsideration; I've sometimes been on the fence about CT's mid-’90s–through–early aughts working trio with Dominic Duval / Jackson Krall trio, but this one is sounding awesome to me at present. Pluses: rich recording quality; Krall's organic, swinging feel—so different from Oxley's alien sound factory; engaged, sympathetic playing from Duval and soprano-saxist Harri Sjöström.)