R.I.P. Roger Ebert
Posted by s woods on April 4, 2013
Posted in Movie Critics, Obits | Leave a Comment »
Notes on a Fellow Traveler
Posted by s woods on April 2, 2013
My first exposure to Williams’ way with words, insight and ardor came in his brief liner notes to the American edition of Procol Harum‘s second album, 1968′s Shine on Brightly. “This is a wonderful record, kind of a letter from a friend I guess,” he wrote, going on to suggest an intriguing exchange of influences between that British group and the Band’s Music From Big Pink. “Procol Harum is a cornerstone of my existence,” he finished, “something I would have a craving need for were it not here.
That conversational intimacy, contagious delight and dogged pursuit of revelation defined Williams’ style as a critic – and also made him more than that. He wrote with judgment but not superiority or lazy censure; he worked to find paths and connections, through committed, often repeated listening, and presented the results as if you were a fellow traveler, not just a reader
- David Fricke, Remembering Paul Williams, Rolling Stone
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Obscure Music Magazine of the Day: Black Music
Posted by s woods on April 1, 2013
Possibly not obscure at all in the UK. I used to own a book version of this, which I sadly lost in one move or another.
Posted in Archival, Obscure Music Magazine of the Day | Leave a Comment »
Synthesized austerity
Posted by s woods on April 1, 2013
But in Continental Europe, a style of disco developed that was notably more synthesized and austere, often sleazier or chillier or just plain sillier, than its U.S. counterpart. In other words, if rock fans building vinyl bonfires at White Sox games thought disco sounded inhuman, replacing musicianly perspiration and heart with icy technology and repetition, Eurodisco proved their point. Europe was farther from the nexus of African-American music and cursed by its own English-as-second-language traditions (Eurovision pop, home-grown art rock), and also, frequently, more immersed in Third World rhythms, as early as Belgian group the Chakachas’ faux-equatorial (and Top 10 in the U.S.) “Jungle Fever” in 1972.
- Chuck Eddy, Silver Connections: 8 Essentials of Eurodisco.
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Cage
Posted by s woods on April 1, 2013
From the latest edition of Perfect Sound Forever:
“….in Cagean spirit, the following is a series of aleatoric impressions of the ideas and music of John Cage…”
i.e.,
This might be a good time to put in a mention of Kyle Gann’s No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4’33″, which I read a couple months back, and, for the most part, enjoyed tremendously. (My one disappointment: a bit too much focus on the man rather than the song.) There’s a good interview with Gann (by John Ruscher) here:
“I think that as many other composers have taken environmental sound into their aesthetic, the actual impact of ’4’33″‘ will become a little diffuse; it was revolutionary at the time, but in young people’s hindsight it appears to seem more and more obvious and necessary. It will always pinpoint a crucial historical step, but like Columbus’s egg, it seems less and less surprising that someone thought of it. One student in Serbia mentioned to me recently that he thought the only real performance was the first one, a total surprise, and that the ‘aura’ of the work could never really be recreated again. Cage, who kept redefining the work for himself, would have disagreed, but for most people I think there’s some truth to it. By now, almost anyone who hears it live has an idea what will happen and how to think about it.”
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Painting red doors black
Posted by s woods on April 1, 2013
Was reading Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, a second run-through, for college, and whenever I picked up the book I’d put the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray” on the record player, over and over, my sound of Quentin Compson trying to break out but turning in on himself in loathing.
My point is that here are a couple of the many ways into hard rock, if someone wants to take them. But then, I can imagine my parents appreciating Hamlet, but I can’t imagine them being him. And I can see the similarities between Mick Jagger’s schematic wrong-end-of-the-telescope analyses of male-female relationships with my dad’s hard-headed, persistent political analyses. But I can’t imagine my dad wanting to blot the sun out of the sky, even in pretend. And my relationship with my parents wasn’t good enough for me to ever explain to them where my dad might have some Jagger inside.
- Frank Kogan mining the territory re: hard rock he more or less invented.
Posted in Punk, Quotes | Leave a Comment »
Listening to Paul Williams
Posted by s woods on March 30, 2013
I was still in high school when I found Crawdaddy in the fall of 1966. The phrase “hippie” had not been coined or placed in widespread use. Rolling Stone didn’t exist. I doubt that Williams had any ambitions beyond what he and the writers he published — who ranged from the studious Jon Landau to the brash R. Meltzer, set out to do: explain what was happening to rock and roll, to US, the tribe coalescing around the Stones Between the Buttons, Kinda Kinks, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, the Doors first album, Love’s first album with “My Little Red Book,” Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde. There were clues in this music, and the drugs we took, the streets we marched, the love we made — that had something to do with putting our collective energy into getting busy being born lest we find ourselves being busy dying. We were on a journey for which no roadmap existed. Paul Williams was our mapmaker.
- Wayne Robins, Listening to Paul Williams
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From the Archives: Paul Williams (2001)
Posted by s woods on March 29, 2013
Here’s the interview rockcritics.com published 12 years ago with Paul Williams. It was Pat Thomas, I’m pretty sure, who suggested the title, and I saw no reason to dispute it.
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The Godfather of Rock Criticism: Paul Williams
By Pat Thomas, with Christoph Gurk (August 2001)
Growing up in the late 1970s, there was very little available to read by legendary rock scribe Paul Williams. His books were out of print, old issues of Crawdaddy! were long gone, and Paul himself was M.I.A. for the most part. It wasn’t until Paul published his first major tome on Bob Dylan [Bob Dylan: Performing Artist] that I was able to get into the meat of what made Paul great. Here was a book about Dylan that didn’t worry about what color shirt he was wearing the day he recorded this song or that one. The book went past that bullshit and got into the essence of the music. How does it sound and more importantly how does it feel? Paul was able to explain feelings about Bob’s music that I didn’t know I had. And most importantly, although Paul’s writing was very personal, he left his ego at the door. Later when I met Paul, there was no ego, no “I am a rock legend” or “I know everything” attitude, that I have experienced time and time again from music journalists with far less to brag about than Paul Williams.
Paul, for many reasons, is not gonna be on MTV interviewing Pearl Jam, he’s not gonna blow hot wind in front of a video camera doing a documentary on the history of rock n roll–he’s just not that kind of guy. I strongly suggest you check out his revamped and reborn Crawdaddy!. No ads, no corporate sponsorship, just solid heartfelt writing. Paul’s writing has moved me to check out bands I never would have dreamed of checking out, because he brings the human element into it, gets inside of himself, seemingly getting inside of me. Now, I know this sounds all flowery and new agey, but Paul came out of the 1960s and he never lost his naiveté about listening to music; it still sounds fresh to his ears. He’s not some jaded hack on the staff of (fill-in-the-blank magazine) being forced to listen to crap he doesn’t wanna listen to, he only reviews what he really likes and what truly moves him. I think that’s rare these days.
One of Paul’s faves is Neil Young, who I personally have given up on (though I applaud his commitment to keep waving the flag). Nevertheless, it’s a Neil Young song title that sums up Paul Williams for me, and that’s “Mr. Soul.” What follows is a previously unpublished interview I did with Paul in a café in Germany a couple of years back. (Also joining us was Christoph Gurk, who at that time was editor of Germany’s most respected, if overly scholastic, music magazine, SPEX).
So what does Paul have to brag about, but doesn’t? The man started the first real rock music magazine, Crawdaddy!, while still a teenager–a year-and-a-half before Jann Wenner startedRolling Stone. Via Crawdaddy!, he gave a lot of other “legends” their first writing outlet: Sandy Pearlman, Peter Guralnick, Jon Landau, and Richard Meltzer, to name just a few. He also hung with Tim Leary and sang with him on John and Yoko’s “Give Peace A Chance” single, recorded in a Montreal hotel room in 1969. If you ever get a chance to see the video from that day, Paul’s clearly in it…I could go on all day. He’s the man. Long may he run.
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Something New: The Birth of Crawdaddy!
Pat Thomas: Why don’t we just start at the beginning: How you first got into writing. Were you doing any fiction or non-fiction writing before you actually started writing about rock ‘n’ roll?
Paul Williams: Well, not really, I was writing high school term papers or something like that, but I usually say that I got started as a professional writer by publishing myself, because when I started Crawdaddy! I didn’t have anyone else writing for me so I had to write all this stuff to fill up the pages. And it took a while, but after all I got a sense of what I wanted to do, you know? And I started sounding more like something that was really me. My first publications outside ofCrawdaddy! were either, like, Hit Parader reprinting something from Crawdaddy!, and then other magazines calling me up because Crawdaddy! was starting to get attention.
Christopher Gurk: That was ’66, right?
Paul Williams: Yeah, the first issue came out at the end of January in 1966.
Pat Thomas: And how old were you then, Paul?
Paul Williams: 17.
Pat Thomas: How did you get the idea? This was really the first rock magazine or fanzine…
Paul Williams: In the States, yeah.
Pat Thomas: So how did you dream this up?
Paul Williams: Well, there were two big influences on me. One was that I’d been a science fiction fan and was used to putting out magazines. When I was 14, I put out my first science fiction fanzine, and there was a whole community of people doing that, and I put that out for a couple years. You know, mimeograph stencils and writing your own magazine seemed normal to me coming out of that world. The other influence was, when I started Crawdaddy! I was at Swarthmore College near Philadelphia, I’d grown up in Cambridge and the Boston suburbs, and there was a very active folk scene, and of course there were folk music magazines…
Posted in Interviews, Paul Williams, rockcritics Archives | Leave a Comment »
Paul Williams, Crawdaddy Editor, at Peace at Last
Posted by A.C. Rhodes on March 28, 2013
A message from Cindy Lee Berryhill, singer-songwriter and wife of Paul Williams, was posted earlier this morning on her Facebook page, an update from the previous night: “Rock-writer Paul S. Williams, author and creator of CRAWDADDY magazine, (and my husband), passed away last night 10:30pm PST while his oldest son was holding his hand and by his side. It was a gentle and peaceful passing.”
http://cindyleeberryhill.blogspot.com/2013/03/paul-williamscrawdaddy-day-boo-hooray.html
Posted in Obits, Paul Williams | 2 Comments »
From the Archives: Richard Riegel (2001)
Posted by s woods on March 26, 2013
Richard Riegel: From Jester to Lester
By Steven Ward (March 2001)
There was a time when Richard Riegel worried about his idolization of a friend. Worshipping a friend, co-worker and colleague doesn’t really sound too healthy, but in Richard’s case, I think we can forgive him.
The object of Richard’s devotion was the late rock critic Lester Bangs. Although fans of rock journalism have much to praise in Lester’s writing, we can also thank him for nurturing the writing of Richard Riegel. If it wasn’t for Bangs’s inspiration, Richard probably never would have submitted his first review to Creem magazine–home to Riegel’s musings throughout the ’70s and ’80s.
Funny, irreverent, and dead-on perfect with his observations on pop culture, music, and the people who love rock and roll, Riegel’s writing continues to stand out from the pack. Consider his opening to this recent review from the Village Voice on the My So Called Band CD, The Punk Girl Next Door:
“Once upon a time, the sight of a punk girl moving in next door might have sparked a neighborhood watch for the barricades of cultural revolution. By today’s grim revolt-into-product times, the lights are on next door, but the punk girl’s not home; she’s started up a dotcom offering real-time textual analysis of Jerry Springer’s ‘Final Thought’ homilies for a fee. So much for intellectual-property values on your street.”
Riegel, a married family man who worked for years in the welfare trade in Cincinnati, writes in a voice full of wit and outrageousness; his use of the language can be as rock and roll as both Bangs and Richard Meltzer at their best.
From his musical obsessions (such as Arthur Lee’s Love) to his “psychic struggles” with writer Greil Marcus, Riegel discusses his craft, his years at Creem, his current writing gigs (which include the Voice and his own Loose Palace fanzine), and of course, the man who inspired him in the best way–Lester Bangs.
Steven: You have never made any bones about your worship and idolization of Lester Bangs. Do you feel justified about it looking back on the year 2000–the year a Lester Bangs biography appeared, the year he was portrayed in a movie about rockwriting, the year this web site about rock critics took off?
Richard: Yeah, more than justified–not because Let It Blurt and Almost Famous made Lester a media fetish of sorts for a hot minute or two last year, but because I want his memory and his writing (both infinitely influential on me) preserved for the ages, whatever it takes to do that. I was slightly embarrassed for years, even after Lester died, that I’d always loved the guy so much, but when Rob O’Connor did his special Bangs issue of Throat Culture in 1990, I found out that my feelings weren’t unique at all–almost everybody who’d been touched by Lester, either by his writing or by his personality, felt that same intense affection. He had an unusually charismatic soul.
Posted in Interviews, rockcritics Archives | 1 Comment »
From the Archives: Lester Bangs (1980/2001)
Posted by s woods on March 22, 2013
Everyone’s a rock critic: The lost Lester Bangs radio interview
In 1980, following the release of Blondie, Lester Bangs was interviewed for a radio program called “News Blimp.” A copy of the tape was sent to me anonymously by someone who “fished it out of the garbage.” The interviewer is unknown, and my searches online for “News Blimp” also pulled up nothing. I’ve been advised by someone who was close to Bangs that there’s really no issue with my running it on this site, especially given that the source is a mystery. (And yes, it’s the real deal.)
- Scott Woods, 2001
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Interviewer: First let me ask you if it was difficult writing a biography without the help of the people that you were writing about?
Bangs: You know, in a way it was and in a way it wasn’t because there’s something that happens when you get the collaboration, or the cooperation, of the people you’re working with; all of a sudden you’re on their side, they take you into their confidence and you’re all buddy-buddy, and you’re almost like a recruit to the cause. Whereas if you have absolutely no cooperation at all, then you know that you at least can maintain your objectivity, you know?
Interviewer: Lester, is this the first book you’ve written?
Bangs: Yeah…Well, I wrote a novel in 1968 when I was in junior college called Drug Punk about drinking Romilar cough syrup, but this is the first book I’ve written that’s been published.
Posted in Interviews, Lester, rockcritics Archives | 5 Comments »
Three chords and a Pauline Kael t-shirt
Posted by s woods on March 22, 2013
But I especially like this shirt as a symbol. Just the idea of people wearing t-shirts of a film critic makes me happy. I know a few of you wear a shirt of my logo, which is obviously the best thing you could do ever. But this one is amazing because it looks like a rock t-shirt. It treats analysis of film art as rock ‘n roll. It says “Fuck you. I’m wearing a shirt of Pauline Kael.”
Come on, one of you guys must be in a band or something. I want to see you up there playing bass and you got fuckin chromed out PAULINE KAEL glimmering on your chest. And the kids gotta look it up to find out what it is. And then they’re gonna scratch their heads. You need to do this for me, and for the world.
- Vern, Outlaw Critic
Spreading the love, and the logo, where and when I can. (I wonder if he takes special orders; wouldn’t mind a “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” hoodie.)
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Weekend Read: Barry Manilow
Posted by s woods on March 22, 2013
I was a kid. I cared about volume. And the tears that flowed as (in Band) we went for the crescendo. From the radio I wanted to hear the big chords, the big drums, the big horns. I didn’t know there was a such a thing as being manipulated by the right pauses — I liked Clive Davis’ ear and Clive Davis’ work and I didn’t know yet who Clive Davis was. Michael Jackson was a world apart, a king, but my regular high school favorites were Prince and Rick James, and by the time I hit college, aside from Run-DMC, Sade and Luther Vandross, I was about Whitney Houston, who in 1978 was singing backup disco for the Michael Zager Band. This was seven years before Davis would re-apply what he’d learned making hit after hit with Manilow to the woman who would become one of the most loved and bestselling artists of all time. Listen to Manilow ballads, then listen to Houston ballads. Check, as we used to say in hip-hop, the technique. If it wasn’t broke Davis saw little need to fix it. The songs Davis made with Manilow and Houston are the songs I loved. Besides, what other way had I to judge? My mother, after all, had to tell me when I was 13 who Booker T. Jones Jr.’s dad was. I thought like I used to think about all songs when I was young — that every artist’s song was purely autobiographical, and so 100 percent meaningful. And if I categorized at all, it was based on what radio station played what. So I thought Barry was rock ‘n’ roll — and not rock in a “white” frame. Rock in a frame marked “real.”
Danyel Smith on Barry Manilow at NPR’s The Record.
This is a sprawling (overused word, I know) piece that, because I’m so preoccupied with other stuff right now, I haven’t absorbed fully, but it is dynamite, the kind of music-critical piece I tend to fall hardest for, blending as it does the personal, the historical, the contextual, the musical, and, perhaps by inference — it is Barry Manilow, after all — and in the best way possible, I mean — the revisionist. The sort of piece you can tell the writer has kept stored in her head for 20 years.
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Soon
Posted by s woods on March 21, 2013
This week hasn’t gone so well in terms of finding five available minutes for this site. Will hopefully resume with some activity soon (at least until the baby comes, at which point…?).
Posted in Blabbin' | 3 Comments »
Boston Phoenix II
Posted by s woods on March 15, 2013
“As Boston After Dark, [the Phoenix] rode in on the counterculture, when the Times was the ‘Gray Lady’ and the Boston Globe often viewed (perhaps unjustly) as a repository of conventional wisdom. You could write long in the Phoenix. You could write ‘fuck’ in the Phoenix. You could make fun of the Globe and the Times. The enterprise, admittedly, was hardly pure.”
- David Edelstein on the Spirit of the Boston Phoenix
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Boston Phoenix R.I.P.
Posted by s woods on March 15, 2013
I’m immeasurably sad that the Phoenix ended with no warning (and no severance for its staff). What did it mean to me to be a part of its history? Everything. I was about 10 years too young to have participated directly in the cultural tidal wave that was the ’60s and early ’70s; I had to watch from the sidelines and wish I was an adult already. But when I got to the Phoenix in ’81, I found a tattered flag of idealism still stubbornly flying. I found a tribe, and we shared a language and we tried to share it with our readers in the most readable and elegant way we knew how. We were in a dying profession, but we acted like it was going to last forever. The Phoenix was my Summer of Love.
- Joyce Millman mourns the just-announced death of the Boston Phoenix (and provides a valuable mini-history of the paper in the process).
Pre-internet, and especially during the ’80s, the decade during which I was most actively engaged in reading every spark of intelligent music criticism I could find, the Phoenix was a rumour more than an actual thing. I’d come across references to the paper often, through various writers, and there was always the sense (at least from my perspective) that it was second only to the Voice in terms of alt-weekly music coverage. But living in London, On., and even a little later in Toronto, I never saw a copy to purchase (getting the Voice was hit and miss in London, but never a problem in Toronto). I eventually got my hands on one issue, and one issue only, of the Phoenix — incidentally enough, the 1986 issue with Millman’s great (from what I recall) cover story on Elvis Costello (which she references in her obit). Where I came across this, I don’t even remember–a cross-border day trip to Buffalo, perhaps? More likely something my brother picked up for me somewhere.
The Phoenix was also cited frequently during the original run of rockcritics.com. Former editor Milo Miles was one of our subjects (I’ll be re-posting that here sometime soon), and I’m pretty sure the paper was mentioned by a number of people we ran interviews with. It’s a shame that it was always something I only heard about but saw very little of. A much bigger shame, of course, for those who continued to write for it, and who have a greater stake in its legacy.
And the hits just keep on coming.
Posted in Obits | 2 Comments »
Moral inadequacy
Posted by s woods on March 14, 2013
He’s a case study in the moral inadequacy of authenticity.
- Christgau on David Peel’s 1972 album, The Pope Smokes Dope. Classic one-liner, positively Wildean in scope, though I leave it up to you to determine if he’s referring to Peel or to the Pope.
Posted in Archival, Quotes, Xgau | 1 Comment »
Bowie discussion
Posted by s woods on March 13, 2013
Geeta Dayal, Simon Reynolds, and Carl Wilson discuss the new Bowie album on the CBC. (Can’t access this now, will have to listen later. And in other important news, I’m going to break down and give the Bowie album a listen as well.)
Posted in Podcast, Record Reviews | 2 Comments »
From the Archives: Dave Marsh (2001)
Posted by s woods on March 12, 2013
A meaty, beaty, big, and bouncy interview with Dave Marsh
By Scott Woods (February 2001)
I recently called rock critic Dave Marsh — one of the founders of Creem (and more recently, Rock and Rap Confidential), former editor at Rolling Stone, author of a dozen or so bestselling rock tomes (including The Heart of Rock and Soul, his personal run-down of the 1,001 greatest singles of all-time), and the man who first paired (in print, anyway) the words “punk” and “rock” — at his home in Connecticut to find out why he bothers to still do what he does, to pin him down on his “disco perplex,” to bend his ear on Napster, Springsteen, anything else I could think of. I’d planned on chatting for less than an hour, but we went on for double that (and I’m sure we could’ve doubled that). During the interview, I was serenaded with all sorts of kooky records playing in the background, from O-Town to Vitamin C to some girlie-country thing to what sounded like a cheap Woody Guthrie imitation (unless it was actually Guthrie; highly possible given the no-fi acoustics of my phone receiver).
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Scott: As one of the few people who’s consistently written rock criticism for over 30 years, I’m curious to know what your primary motivation to continue to write about it is.
Dave: I guess if that was a question you thought of very much you wouldn’t…I mean, there was never a…
Scott: I guess what I’m getting at is…
Dave: I don’t mean it’s not a good question, I don’t have a good answer. [laughs] Tell me what you were getting at.
Scott: I guess that when you look at old issues of Creem and that sort of thing–or if you read some of the other interviews on this site–there just seems to be a lot of people from that period [the early '70s] who don’t seem to be doing it any more.
Dave: Some of them are dead, so I guess the first reason is I’m still alive. [laughs] You know? And the second reason is, what’s there to do that’s better? I don’t know–my lack of need for responsibility is very helpful here.
Posted in Dave Marsh, Interviews, rockcritics Archives | 4 Comments »
Sound vs. Vision?
Posted by s woods on March 11, 2013
Steven Ward, in this brief comments thread, conveyed disappointment with Simon Reynolds for not (or anyway, for barely) mentioning music in his NYT Bowie review. I concur that it’s a problem because one simple question is never answered for me, which is why are people getting excited (faux-excited?) about this particular Bowie record now? Today, in Burning Ambulance, Phil Freeman reviews The Next Day, and fair to say, I think, that his piece exists at a 180-degree remove from Reynolds’s. That is to say, Freeman’s review is entirely, I mean literally almost first sentence to last, about what is happening in the music — the way it sounds, what various players are doing, etc. — with zero concern for the Bowie context, and indeed, little concern for any context outside of the music itself (I say “little,” because the review reads like an argument of sorts, for “feat[s] of instrumental interaction,” and Freeman does draw some comparisons to other musicians).
Freeman’s review never mentions clothes or hair. Reynolds’s review says nothing about how the drums are mixed. I find both approaches wholly unsatisfying, to be honest, though I’m hesitant to say that either approach couldn’t work. I’m curious how other people feel about all this; it’s a pretty fundamental argument, one that’s been taking place in music criticism for a very long time, possibly forever. As a reader — or a writer — do you gravitate towards one approach or the other?
Posted in Record Reviews | 9 Comments »
