This Bert Jansch adaptation of a folk song, “Black Waterside,” sounds an awful lot like “Black Mountain Side,” does it not? And here’s the original “Dazed and Confused.” (MP3)
Well, that’s not all that Jimmy Page was ripping off from other musicians.
(via MeFi)
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Ladies and gentlemen, denied a label in his native country, I introduce to you (if you don’t know him already) B.C. Camplight (more music here), who may very well be Pennsylvania’s answer to Todd Rundgren — that is, if Rundgren himself weren’t from Pennsylvania. Oh, what the hell, there’s room for two Rundgrens, is there not? I hope that B.C.’s latest album, Blink of a Nihiist eventually gets some kind of American release. The man is also neurotic as hell. Get this: “So nervous is he that he apparently has every doctor in his home town of Philadelphia on speed dial and recently diagnosed himself as suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.”
So there you have it. Batty melodic tunes like “Blood and Peanut Butter” and “Lord I’ve Been on Fire,” more hypochrondia than Glenn Gould, and possibly quite misunderstood in his own country. What more can you ask for in an indie act?
So Mollie Wilson took issue with John Colapinto’s article, “When I’m Sixty-Four,” a Paul McCartney profile riddled with the kind of spoon-fed, been-there-done-that tone of a bona-fide hack. Why, asked Wilson, would The New Yorker, one of the top magazines in the country, revisit the same tired legends? Any remotely educated culture vulture knows very well that “Yesterday” started off as “Scrambled Eggs.” Further, Colapinto idiotically suggests that some hard-core fan asking for an autograph “could have been another Mark David Chapman” and then has the temerity to put this social gaffe in his piece!
But the story gets even stranger. Colapinto began leaving comments on Wilson’s blog, including this morsel:
As for my re-telling of the often-told tale of “Yesterday” beginning with the nonsense lyrics about scrambled eggs: any true Beatles fan would know that the point of re-telling that story was that Paul has added vital new info–something of which he’d only lately been reminded: that the actual lyrics to Yesterday were written while on a 3 hour car trip from Lisbon to southern Portugal with Jane Asher.
I’m a true Beatles fan. And Colapinto is dead wrong. The information concerning Jane Asher has been floating around for some time. And while my Beatles books are currently still packed, I do know that this information has been reported since at least 2003. (e.g., see “McCartney’s Yesterday had a nudge from Nat” by Maurice Chittenden, The Times, July 6, 2003). In fact, the far more interesting question, which came up around the same time, is how close “Yesterday” is to Nat King Cole’s “Answer Me.” Then again, since Colapinto is less concerned about the musical origins of one of the most remembered pop music ballads of the past fifty years and more interested in who McCartney was fucking when he wrote “Yesterday,” one shouldn’t look to Colapinto for compelling arts criticism.
This is by Colapinto’s own admission:
You, instead, wanted an essay on the subject. And that’s why you’re a blogger and not a writer. And, if you can handle hearing this, it’s why you’re barely a reader. You should also understand that the New Yorker is divided into sections; there are feature stories, like the kind I write, and there is the critics, at the back; I do not and never will be a critic. I don’t like them. They’re usually up-their-ass on precisely the matters you and I have been discussing here.
So there you have it. A New Yorker writer, vastly uninformed about the origins of “Yesterday” and their ubiquitous availability to any Beatlemaniacs, isn’t interested in writing, much less reading the kind of in-depth music features that you and I might be interested in. This is arrogance of the first order. And I’m truly stunned that the New Yorker would be dumbing down their features by assigning them to clumsy thugs like Colapinto.
If a 5,000 word essay that goes out of its way to investigate in a way that nobody else has tackled the subject makes one a blogger and not a writer, then call me a blogger any day of the week. Even if my “blog post” is published in a newspaper or a magazine.
Free from the constraints of a supposedly all-lit lit-blog, here I go with some reflections on music. (I’m allowed – there’s a category for it, see?) Internets, ho!
Pitchfork has a pretty clear-eyed look at Wilco’s new album. The whole thing should be read for the full effect, but here’s the money shot:
Jeff Tweedy’s restlessness has always been one of his greatest strengths. Since Wilco’s inception more than a decade ago, his willingness to explore an ever-widening spectrum of sounds and genres, and to keep the revolving door of the band’s line-up well-oiled, has paid off in a discography that’s as diverse as it is indispensable. Though his songwriting DNA was bound tight during the later days of Uncle Tupelo, Tweedy has nurtured it in different ways with each successive album, from the transitional sunset country-rock of the first two, through the keyboard-thick pop of Summerteeth, the fractured deconstructions of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and the languid abstractions of A Ghost Is Born. Following that last record, Wilco swelled to its largest and (according to Tweedy himself) best lineup ever, with the addition of guitar hero Nels Cline and utilityman Pat Sansone. Charged up and bursting with eccentric and experimental talent, Wilco Mk. 5 seemed poised to generate the band’s finest– or at least most interesting– music yet. Instead, it produced Sky Blue Sky.
An album of unapologetic straightforwardness, Sky Blue Sky nakedly exposes the dad-rock gene Wilco has always carried but courageously attempted to disguise. Never has the band sounded more passive, from the direct and domestic nature of Tweedy’s lyrics, to the soft-rock-plus-solos format (already hinted at on Ghost’s “At Least That’s What You Said” and “Hell Is Chrome”) that most of its songs adhere to. The lackluster spirit even pervades the song titles: “Shake It Off” is probably most accurate (not to mention the album’s worst track), but “On and On and On” and “Please Be Patient With Me” are both strong alternatives.
I agree with this assessment. I’ve listened to this album a whole bunch, with pretty mixed results. “Either Way” and “You Are My Face”, early pre-released tracks, are solid; the latter more so, with some fine singing from Tweedy. “Either Way” is unoffensive, and dad-rock sums it up nicely. (Sums up the whole album nicely. Being a Dad, this is appealing at times; I do like the mellow. Have you heard Neil Young Live at Massey Hall? You should. At other times, Tweedy for fuck’s sake I get a whole lot of being a dad when the kid needs to be carried downstairs at 3 am for a pee break, can I please rock out in my truck a bit, thanks) From there, the album goes completely off the tracks with the horrid “Impossible Germany”. Sorry, that isn’t a good guitar solo. Not at all. “Sky Blue Sky” and “Side with the Seeds” are very nice. “Shake It Off” – god, I want to like it, I want to imagine them wailing on it live, but it just won’t gel. “Please Be Patient with Me” is ok, but Tweedy solo is better for this track. Same with “Walken”, which is pretty bad – I saw one review declaring it to sound just like ZZ Top, which couldn’t be too much more wrong.
“Hate it Here” sucks.
“Leave Me Like You Found Me” seems to be holding up the best under repeated listens. (“Please Be Patient with Me” sounded like I’d heard it 3,000 times the fourth time I heard it. This is not good.) “What Light” is good enough, as is the closer. But as a whole, the album is sub-par Wilco. Comparisons to The Band are legion for this album, but there’s enough rootsy Band-ish tracks on their other albums for you to burn onto one CD that really deserve the comparison. The gentle-Tweedy tracks on this album have too much cliche to them; there are no rockers, no “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” anywhere near this album. And why did they exclude the mighty fine “Is That the Thanks I Get?”
For all my grousing, the album is not destined for the dustbin; some music you need to let soak into you over time. I hope this is the case here. If not, well, pass the Summerteeth.