It is now conspicuous to me that
nowhere on this list is anything by Elvis Presley (Costello, well, that’s another
matter). It is true, I have never been much of an Elvis fan. Although I liked
his music, I was never really a fan, if you know what I mean, and don’t actually
have any Elvis in my collection, vinyl, CD, or otherwise.
That may change. Last week, a
business trip to Memphis gave me the opportunity to visit Graceland, monument
to American kitsch. People had warned me about how atrociously gawdy and tacky
the place would be, but it turned out that it was not that bad. (And I’m one to talk about taste and décor?) It
really just struck me as very 1970s—only taken to the nth degree. Folks had specifically mentioned the carpeting
on the ceiling in one particualr room—but as the audio tour pointed out, that
was for acoustic purposes, as Elvis and other musicians used to jam and record
in that room.
Anyway, the audio tour and every
other location was replete with Elvis music in the background (or foreground),
and I started to get into it. I think I shall hunt down a good compilation.
Anyway, here is your blogger in
front of the main entrance to Graceland.
Anyway, while I investigate
Elvis recordings for a future update to this list, perhaps, we forge ahead with
a brief start in the last decade before time-tripping back to—appropriately—that
shameful decade known as the 1970s.
I
could be wrong, but this may be the most recent album on this list. Though it’s
not my favorite Bird record (see later in this list), I finally decided it had
to be on here.
Andrew
Bird is a multi-instrumentalist (primarily violin, but also guitar and
whistling) who began in the 1990s with The
Squirrel Nut Zippers (who had a hit with “Hell” in 1998 during that brief
big band revival period), and later founded his own band called Andrew Bird’s
Bowl of Fire, which specialized in exploring American roots music (hmm...and I
never loved Elvis?), set to Bird’s pensive, often surreal lyrics. (Rereading the
books of Don DeLillo, it strikes me that Bird’s lyrics are almost DeLillo-esque
in that they are less about telling a particular narative and mroe about the language
itself, the sounds of words and the juxtaposition of words. And Bird is often
just plain funny.)
After
three Bowl of Fire albums, he went in an entirely different direction in 2003
with Weather
Systems, an album that began his
string of utterly unclassifiable records. (The 2005 follow up The Mysterious
Production of Eggs is the one that
comes later in this list.) 2007's Armchair
Apocrypha falls slightly short of the
previous masterpiece, but still frequently gets CD and iPod play. Of course, it
opens with the track I always play before taking a flight: “Fiery Crash.” “To
save our lives you got to envision the fiery crash/It’s just a formality/Must I
explain?/Just a nod to mortality/Before you get on a plane.”
One of my favorite
Bird tracks is “Imitosis,” which repurposes bits of “Eugene” from the first Bowl
of Fire album.
Turning
to a playground in a Petri dish
Where
single cells would swing their fists
At
anything at looks like easy prey
...
Why
do some show no mercy while others are painfully shy?
“Plasticities”
points how “they’ll fight for your neural walls and plasticities” while “we’ll
fight for your music halls and dying cities.” Also, “You’re gonna grow
old/You’re gonna grow cold/Bearing signs on the avenue/For your own personal
Waterloo.” I love that phrase, “your own personal Waterloo,” a symbol of
defeat, which I use to describe a CrossFit workout that does me in. In “Dark
Matter,” Bird points out that, when he was a boy, “I threw away all of my
action toys/While I became obsessed with Operation.” You know, the goofy game
for dopey doctors. “Scythian Empires” is a true classic, and the penultimate
“Spare-Ohs” brings things to a climax—“When you tell me that I’m too obstruce
[sic]/I just thought it was a kind of bird.”
Musically,
Armchair Apocrypha has a bit of a
harder edge and drum sound than his previous records, and it introduces the
looping technique (he, and/or his drummer Martin Dosh, plays a few bars on one
instrument, it gets sampled, then repeats, while they then play over it on
other instruments) he has been using on record and especially live ever since.
As
you will see much further down this list, Peter Gabriel-era Genesis produced
some of my favorite albums. 1977’s Peter Gabriel (aka “Car,” from the cover photograph, to
distinguish it from the other three albums also called Peter Gabriel—he apparently had the idea that each album would be
like different issues of the same magazine, until Geffen Records put the kibosh
on that in 1982) was his first album after leaving Genesis in 1975, and anyone
expecting it to sound like Foxtrot or
even The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
was in for a big surprise. (It will also come as a surprise to many to learn
that Gabriel was not Genesis’
primary lyricist, save for some conspicuous classics like “Supper’s Ready” and
just about all of The Lamb.) Perhaps the best way to describe Peter Gabriel—musically and lyrically—is “eclectic.”
It
opens with the gothic and just downright strange “Moribund the Burgermeister,”
a very odd choice to open his first solo record. Elsewhere, “Excuse Me” begins
in the style of a barbershop quartet, before the tuba accompaniment comes in.
“Down the Dolce Vita” comes perilously close to disco, “Waiting for the Big
One” to cocktail jazz. “Modern Love” is a fairly straightforward hard rocker.
Lyrically, Gabriel veers off into new territories, but a few clunky lines crop
up (“Bundershaft, are you going daft?” “Hey, Valentina, you want me to beg/You
got me cookin’ I’m a hard-boiled egg,” and, of course, “I trusted my Venus was
untouched in her shell/But the pearls in her oyster were tacky as hell”— has he
been to Graceland?). The real standout track, however, is “Solsbury Hill,” his
Genesis resignation letter.
He is
joined by a number of progressive rock luminaries, such as Robert Fripp (King
Crimson), a pre-Stick Tony Levin, and producer Bob Ezrin (having recovered from
Lou Reed’s Berlin and later to
co-produce Pink Floyd’s The Wall).
It’s an album that careens from place to place, from idea to idea, without any
real cohesion, something he’d improve upon on later albums. Side 2 (aka the
latter half of the album) is less compelling than the first, but album closer
“Here Comes the Flood” was a live staple for years. Annoyingly, when I saw
Gabriel live in 1986, he did not play “Solsbury Hill.” However, when I saw him
in 2011, he did, and it was the showstopper.
I
was never much of a Led Zeppelin fan (although, to my embarrassment, liked them
more than Elvis, apparently). I had a couple of their records on vinyl
back in the day (II, Untitled [aka
IV], and In
Through the Out Door, the latter
largely because I was curious as to what was beneath the plain brown
wrapper—nothing thrilling or salacious, it turned out, they just didn't want to
put any text on the cover, to which the record company objected), but never
gave them much of a listen until the late 90s and began to appreciate them a
bit more. I thought at least one Zeppelin record should be on here, and my
favorite of theirs is Houses of the Holy. It’s an evolution from the bluesy rock of their
first two albums, not as overtly folky as III, and doesn’t have “Stairway to Heaven” on it like
the fourth one. Physical
Graffiti is too sprawling with
much filler, Presence ironically
has no presence, and In Through the Out Door is good, but more for what it hints at than what it
actually is (what Zeppelin would have evolved into had they continued). Ergo, Houses
of the Holy.
They
toy with reggae in “D’yer Mak’r” (inevitably mispronounced “Dyer Maker”—as The Hold Steady pointed out, the title is a reference to a joke about Jamaica. “Two
guys are in a pub. One guy says, ‘My wife went away on holiday.’ ‘Oh, Jamaica?’
‘No, she went of her own accord.’” (The “joke” is the pun Jamaica/d’yer mak’r,
as in “did you make her?” You know what happens when you have to explain a
joke...) Anyway, it was one of the few instances where Zeppelin displayed a sense
of humor, which appealed to me. “Over the Hills and Far Away” is favorite, even
if I can’t help but envision Jerry Lewis singing “Hey, Laaaaaady, you got the
love I need.” And where’s that confounded bridge?
Ten years ago, in September 2002, I took a three-week road
trip around California and the American Southwest. The reason for it was
simple: I had some time to kill. I needed to be in San Francisco on September
10 to give a presentation at Seybold SF (remember the biannual Seybold shows?),
and then I had to be at an event in Las Vegas three weeks later. At that time,
I did not fly (what I refer to as “the good old days”) thanks to a series of
horrible flights in early 2000 that involved bad turbulence and even worse
airlines. So it made no sense to take the train out to SF, come back to
Saratoga, then go all the way back Las Vegas. So I made it a lengthy “working
vacation.”
Prologue—A Horace of a Different Color
On September 6, I took the train from Albany (two weeks
before they opened the new Albany-Rensselaer station—gosh, I remember what a
pit the old one had been!) to Los Angeles, via Chicago, rented a car at Union
Station in LA, and, upon hitting the 110 Freeway, immediately remembered why I
hated Southern California for the three-and-a-half years I lived there—the
traffic. I will never complain about I-87 (Saratoga to Albany) again (oh, yes I
will). I made it up to San Francisco and, after spiraling around for 45 minutes,
I finally hit upon the one combination of streets that would lead to the hotel
I was staying at (the one-way streets of San Francisco are very difficult to
navigate). Driving in San Francisco is like a bad video game—kind of a
combination of a maze and that old arcade game Paperboy, where random
objects—like bicycles, vans, trucks, pedestrians—shoot out at you at random.
I did my shtik in San
Francisco, then drove down the coast, basing my itinerary on an idea I got from
a coworker of mine: visit the California missions between S.F. and L.A., for a
little bit of a California history lesson, with stops at Hearst Castle and
Solvang. In L.A., I stayed with David G. in Torrance, took a day trip to
Catalina, and then set off to explore Arizona (Lowell Observatory, Monument
Valley, etc.). There was even an ostrich farm.
This was a working trip and not an actual vacation;
TrendWatch—and there were two versions—was very much active at this time and I
had a lot of assorted projects to work on. I had, at the time, a tangerine
Apple iBook (ugh, the thought...) with a built-in screaming superfast 56K
modem. This was before WiFi (and even before any kind of high-speed Internet access was readily available, although I
had Roadrunner at home), and I had to get e-mail and file stories and reports
using dial-up in hotel rooms—I remember how slow that used to be, and if anyone
ever sent me a picture, it could take hours to download. How far we’ve come in
10 years!
What also struck me during this trip was how superfluous all
the possessions in my life really were; basically, everything I needed to do my
job and live my life fit in one large-ish suitcase, a garment bag, and a laptop
case. I really didn’t miss all the other crap that cluttered up my apartment
(aside from a few CDs, although I had a first-generation iPod with me at the
time, but it didn’t hold much).
While I was on this trip, I wrote a frequent (if not daily,
then every-few-days-ly) travelogue, which I would e-mail to selected friends
and family (I did not start this blog until a year later), along with custom
postcards.
I came across this stuff while organizing some backup CDs
and hard drives and thought it would be interesting to post these after all
these years. So over the next week or so, as my schedule permits, I will post
these travelogues. Here is the first installment of what I called “Missions
Impossible,” starting just south of San Francisco, chosen because it was the
site where Alfred Hitchcock filmed portions of Vertigo.
Phase 1: Missions Impossible
Mission San Juan Bautista (named after John the Baptist) is
the 15th in a chain of 21 Spanish missions constructed up and down the
California coast during the 18th and 19th centuries. Stretching from San Diego
to Sonoma (north of San Francisco) along El Camino Real (“The Royal Road,”
which comprises much of U.S. 101 today), the missions were a rather unique
attempt by Spain to colonize the New World, specifically California, which they
rather optimistically called New Spain. To that end, the Spanish monarchy
ordered the Franciscan order of the Catholic Church to get on with it. Their
primary goal, naturally, was to convert the indigenous peoples (the Native
Americans) to Christianity.
The missions were set up to function as religious, cultural,
and agricultural centers and smallish towns rose up around them. The Native
Americans were nonplused at first, but eventually warmed to the idea (as if
they had a choice), and they were trained in masonry, candlemaking, farming,
ranching and, of course, winemaking (from Day One winemaking was big juju in
California—after all, wine is a crucial element in the Catholic faith). For
protection against other European powers, presidios (or “forts”) were located
nearby. The first mission was actually built on the grounds of a presidio, but
everyone quickly learned that the soldiers were, shall we say, far less
charitable toward the Native American population than the padres (enforced
conversion is bad enough, but raping and slaughtering is something else
entirely) so the decision was quickly made to put some distance between the two
structures in the future.
Priesthood has its privileges.
The first mission was constructed in what is now San Diego
(whence the San Diego Padres), and the Franciscans gradually migrated north.
When the 21 missions were completed, they were spaced exactly one day’s journey
apart. In fact, most of today’s California coast cities and towns started as
missions—San Diego, San Fernando, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo (named after
Saint Louis, the bishop—“obispo”—of Toulouse), Santa Cruz, San Jose, Santa
Clara, Carmel, and others.
San Francisco, it should be noted, began life as Mission San
Francisco de Asis (after Francis of Assisi), although it became popularly known
as Mission Dolores, after the Arroyo de los Dolores where the mission was
built. The town that grew up nearby was originally called Yerba Buena, which
means “good herb.” Yes, it’s San Francisco but that doesn’t mean what you
think—it was a reference to a species of mint that grew abundantly in the area.
That’s their story and they’re sticking to it.
The mission period did not last long. Europeans brought
disease to the Native American population, and a series of devastating
earthquakes in the 19th century damaged or leveled many of the early missions.
In 1834, California was taken over by Mexico, which enforced “secularization,”
forcing the Church to give up the missions, and the missions fell into
abandonment and ruin. In the 20th century, private organizations have helped
restore many of the missions, and most are still active churches. Which is
fortunate; whatever one’s gripes with the theology, the fact is that these
structures are quite magnificent.
Anyway, back to San Juan Bautista. Mission San Juan Bautista
was constructed in 1797 and almost immediately the padres knew it was a bad
idea. They didn’t know it at the time, but the mission was built right on top
of the San Andreas Fault. Doh! It was reported that for a time in 1798 the
priests had to sleep outside as the ground shook nearly constantly. Talk about
your holy rollers… Anyway, all this whole lotta shaking going on did not do
good things to the structure, and today only about half the original mission
remains.
Filmgoers may remember Mission San Juan Bautista as a
location in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo,
and much of the location is recognizable. The livery stable in which Jimmy
Stewart has his famous kiss with Kim Novak remains intact (complete with
plastic horse), and the bottom of the belltower stairs which Stewart couldn’t
climb are still there. As for the belltower from which Kim Novak falls to her
doom, that had never been there to begin with. The original belltower had been
destroyed in the 1906 earthquake; Hitchcock used special effects to optically
insert a belltower where the original had been.
In the 1970s, a campanile (“bell wall”) was added. Although
it is in the style of similar structures that were in vogue during the mission
period, San Juan Bautista never had one before.
From seeing Vertigo, one gets the sense that the place is out in the
middle of nowhere, but it is actually right in the middle of downtown San Juan
Bautista. Not that San Juan Bautista is a bustling metropolis, but two blocks
from the mission is a downtown “strip” that includes a few pubs, restaurants,
and antique stores.
Although I had not (apparently)
included separate write-ups of the other missions—the next travelogue is from
Hearst Castle—they included:
"Taxi!"
San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo
in Carmel, founded 1770—still well-preserved, but amazingly ornate and, well, gaudy.
Nuestra Senora de la Soledad in
the remote town of Soledad, 45 miles south of Monterrey, founded 1791—had
fallen into disrepair (it is quite far from any kind of civilization) but was
(at the time) in the process of a modest restoration.
San Antonio de Padua, north of
Paso Robles, founded 1771—I must have skipped this one in favor of visiting
Hearst Castle which was nearby.
San Miguel Arcangel, north of
San Luis Obispo, founded 1797—in pretty good shape, although I recall little
about it.
San Luis Obispo de Tolosa,
founded 1772—located right in downtown San Luis Obispo, was still a working
church, as I discovered when I blundered inside right in the middle of mass.
Fortunately, the San Luis Obispo Brewing Company was right down the street.
La Purisima Conception, founded
1787—one of two missions located near Solvang (which gets a whole travelogue
unto itself). This was to the west and was in some degree of disrepair, and at
one point I nearly blundered into a wasp’s nest.
Santa Ines, founded 1804, located
just on the outskirts east of Solvang—I have no pictures but I visited it,
though did not linger. I think it also doubled as the tourist bureau for the
area.
Santa Barbara, founded 1786—I
did spend an afternoon in Santa Barbara visiting the mission, as well as the
Natural History Museum, which had a giant squid on the ceiling (the museum, not
the mission).
That was the last of the missions I visited,
deciding to skip the ones in L.A.
I guess you're old enough to know
Kids out on the east coast
Roughly twenty years old
They got coaxed out by a certain perfect ratio
Of warm beer to the summer smoke
And the Meat Loaf to the Billy Joel
Certain songs they get so scratched into our souls
—The Hold Steady
I said in my initial post in this series way back when that I’ve probably already heard all my favorite albums, but one entry in today’s trilogy proves that perhaps I’m wrong.
Yeah, okay, Billy Joel. The Stranger is probably the emblematic Billy Joel record, but Glass Houses always struck more of a chord with me. From the opening track, “You May Be Right,” I was hooked. “You may be right/I may be crazy/But it just may be a lunatic you’re looking for.” Side one (in the days of vinyl) is one of those “every song’s a gem” sides, with side two being very a much a “B side.”
This is Joel’s hard rock album, even if it does mellow out here and there, and was a response to punk and new wave that were in full swing by 1980. “It’s Still Rock’n’Roll to Me” sums up the popular trends at the time, and was a number one single, too, and resonates all these years later when I think of how much I like songs from all sorts of eras—the 60s, classic hard rock, punk, so-called new wave, alternative 80s, a few 90s grunge songs here and there, and whatever the 2000s are considered, if anything. It’s all still variations on a theme.
Side two may have been devoid of hits, but “Close to the Borderline” and “I Don’t Want to Be Alone” are highlights.
Around this time (1980), we went on a family vacation to Québec, and I became obsessed with learning French, so “C’Etait Toi” occupied me for rather a long period of time.
I got into The Hold Steady in 2006 when their third album came out (see later in this list) and since then they have become one of my favorite contemporary bands. Almost Killed Me was the band’s debut and what a debut it is. Lyricist Craig Finn is a great storyteller, and here he leads us through the seamy underworld of Minneapolis and the shady characters who dwell there. Many of these characters recur on later albums, and there are many callbacks and callforwards. This album would be higher on this list...but its relative newness (in my consciousness) keeps it down here. For now.
“Positive Jam” is the best album opener I’ve heard in a while, briefly sketching American history starting in the 1920s. Over a slowly strummed electric guitar, Finn leads us through the 20th century ending in the 90s, where “We were wired and well-connected/Went down on technology and lost everything we invested.” And then the band kicks in for the titular positive jam, and it’s a transcendent moment (in 2012, I saw them live and they opened with this song and this moment was even more transcendent). “The Swish” introduces a wide array of characters that are habitués of where the band played. “I did a couple of jobs for these guys who looked like Tuscan raiders.” At first I thought this was a Star Wars reference—which it kind of is—but (geek time) check the spelling of “Tuscan” in the lyric sheet. The Star Wars creatures are spelled “Tusken.” Here, the spelling indicates some kind of mob activity. Utterly brilliant.
“Barfruit Blues” continues and “Holly” (née Hallelujah, the central character in the band’s second album, Separation Sunday) makes her debut: “Mary’s got a bloody nose from sniffing margarita mix/She licked her lower lip and then she kissed that Hallelujah chick.” But then: “She came off kind of spicy but she tasted like those pickle chips.” And then there are “certain songs that get scratched into our souls.”
The album—like most Hold Steady albums—is a collection of old pop culture references (Craig Finn is only four years younger than me). This one namechecks (and I had to Google one or two of these) Beverly Sills, Steve Perry, Rocco Sefredi, Phil Lynott, Ellen Foley, Robbie Robertson, and many others. “She went out deep for guys who looked like Johnny Fever.” Ah, WKRP....
Musically, this and other Hold Steady albums sound as if punk never happened—big guitars, big drums, and a classic rock sound which is incredibly refreshing. Man, I love this album, and this band, suggesting to me that my favorites are not already written.... It needs to move further up this list.
A challenging album, to be sure, but one of my favorites at the time, even if I don’t still give it a regular spin. Even so, it makes more sense as I get older.
Roger Waters’ first proper solo album (if you don’t count the Music from the Body soundtrack he did with Ron Geesin in 1970—and I don’t) was released a year after what was thought to be the very last Pink Floyd album, The Final Cut, which itself is not a million miles removed from being a Waters solo album.
Pros and Cons features some of the same session musicians and the same gimmicky “Holophonic” sound that, when listened through headphones, made the stereo image seem like surround sound. Um, not so much.
The album is basically a series of dreams, which, like dreams, reflect and refract reality. (Each song title indicates at what time of the night the dream takes place—the album starts at 4:30 a.m. and ends at 5:11...so it’s about the length of the album.) The dreams start off as middle age neuroses and fantasies (funny how this wasn’t a more popular rock album among kids—well, except me, which could explain so much...)—the main character (called “Reg” when the record was performed in concert) picks up a sexy blonde hitchhiker (see cover illustration) and proceeds to try to seduce her, which—it being his dream—he succeeds. However, guilt (he is married) overcomes him and he;’s attacked in his bedroom by “Arabs with knives at the foot of his bed.” (“Careful with that axe, Adbul!”) At the start of side two, he dreams that he, his wife, and kids move to Wyoming and live like hippies—until it’s his wife’s turn to cheat. “Reg” himself hitchhikes and finally has a moment of clarity, waking and realizing that his life is actually pretty good.
Ultimately, the album is really a love letter to Waters’ wife, for Waters, is quite the achievement. (But then the two acoustic “Pigs on the Wing” songs thast bookend Pink Floyd’s Animals were as well.) Admittedly, “songs” per se are in short supply, but that hardly seems to matter. Curiously, the single version of the album’s title track had a better, more Claptonesque guitar solo than appears on the album—weird, since Eric Clapton actually does play on the album, a good ploy to try to make you forget David what’s-his-name.
One has to love lyrics like “Fixed on the front of her Fassbinder face/Was the kind of a smile/That only a rather dull child could have drawn/While attempting a graveyard in the moonlight.” Man, he went a long way for that metaphor, but I like it!
I saw Roger Waters on this tour and he was awesome.
Legends...what can you say about ’em? I have no idea; this has
been a crazy week and I’m lucky I have any energy left to copy and paste this
from Word into Blogger—and fix all the Bloggerific formatting errors. Sigh.
Anyway, today’s trilogy features three, I guess, legends: one
who is one of my favorite guitar players ever from one of my favorite bands
ever, another is a former pilot of both an Airplane and a Starship, both which
eventually crashed, and a third who influenced damn nearly everyone else on
this list.
By the way, for the record (as it were): the external hard drive containing all my MP3s is on the verge of dying and taking my entire iTunes library with it, and I am hoping I can effect a rescue of everything this weekend. All my CDs and vinyl LPs, though: still happily sitting on the shelves, ready to be played. Ah, progress. #146
David Gilmour About Face
1984
As
befitted any crazy nuts Pink Floyd fan, I had all the solo records (even the
really bizarre Nick
Mason’s Fictitious Sports. Floyd guitarist David Gilmour’s first self-titled solo album (1978) was a bit
forgettable, obviously the efforts of someone waiting for Roger Waters to
finish the demos for The Wall than any great statement of artistic purpose. But
his second record, About Face,
recorded after it seemed Floyd was done, was a really good record. I had this
on vinyl the day it was released, and played it endlessly. I could live without
“Blue Light” (the presence of Steve Winwood notwithstanding) and “Love on the
Air” (the latter one of two songs with lyrics by Pete Townshend), but the other
Townshend track, “All Lovers are Deranged” was the standout (“You know that you
don’t really fall in love unless you’re 17”).
“Murder” was also an outstanding track, while “You Know I’m Right” seems to be about Waters,
à la some of the tracks on the last Pink Floyd album The
Division Bell. This was the
Reagan era, so several of the songs are about nuclear holocaust (“Out of the
Blue,” “Cruise”). The lyrics are surprisingly strong for Gilmour, who tended to
farm out the words (“Thinking that we’re getting older and wiser/when we’re
just getting old”).
On
every level this is a great hard rock record, a bit less Floydian than one
would have expected, but still compelling throughout. Having Gilmour’s guitar
playing—and distinctive vocals—galore helps immensely. This album came out in
the same year as Waters’ solo The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking (see later in this list), hinting at the full-scale
“battle of the Floyds: that would break out in 1987. I saw Gilmour in concert
on the About Face tour and it was
a terrific show, surprisingly more affecting than Waters’ show.
Gilmour
would not release another solo album until 2006.
After
Woodstock and the counter-cultural manifesto Volunteers, Jefferson Airplane was losing altitude like a
Southwest flight (oh, but I kid Southwest); founder and singer Marty Balin had
left, following drummer Spencer Dryden’s departure. While waiting to assemble
the next, not very good version of the Airplane (Bark, anyone?), Paul Kantner recorded a science-fiction
rock opera loosely based on Robert Heinlein, about a band of hippies who steal
a starship and escape the hell of Earth (aka Nixon-era America and the Vietnam
War) to colonize another galaxy. (The album was actually nominated for a Hugo
Award, although it kind of reminds me of the awful “Way to Eden” “space hippie”
episode of Star Trek.)
As a
concept album, it doesn’t entirely work (like just about any concept album),
but it has some of Kantner’s best songs, including the absolutely beautiful
“Have You Seen the Stars Tonite” (written by Kantner and David Crosby). “A
Child is Coming” celebrates Grace Slick’s pregnancy with future MTV VJ China
Kantner, who graced (as it were) the cover of Kantner and Slick’s 1971 album Sunfighter.
The
opening track “Mau Mau (Amerikon)” is a charging rocker with the great a
capella opening: “Hide, witch, hide, the good folks come to burn thee/Their
keen enjoyment hid behind a gothic mask of duty.” True dat. Somewhere around
the middle of side two is when the hippies hijack the starship and decide to
try to fly to Andromeda. Yeah. Still, the album boasts a great list of guest
musicians, including Airplane members, most of The Grateful Dead, David Crosby,
and most other Bay Area musicians at the time. And whilst Kantner never had the
best voice in the world, he did manage to harmonize with Slick very
well—predating the vocal harmonies of John Doe and Exene Cervenka in X.
The
album was released under the moniker “Jefferson Starship,” which wouldn’t be an
official band name until four years later.
In
the grand scheme of things, this is not the greatest Dylan album, but it was
the first one I ever bought, so it gets points for that—I really liked
“Neighborhood Bully,” a thinly veiled song about Israel. It was Dylan’s first
secular album after thankfully getting over his born again period and it had the added
advantage of being produced by (and featuring the guitar-playing of) Dire
Straits’ Mark Knopfler.
As a Dylan record, it has the cryptic stuff
(“Jokerman”), the political stuff (“Union Sundown,” “License to Kill”), and the
relationship stuff (“I and I”). It was also the album that launched me into
much of Dylan’s back discography. Damn
if “Union Sundown” wasn’t prescient: not that offshoring was unheard of in
1983, but “they don’t make nothing here no more” is even truer today. “I can
see the day coming when even your own garden is going to be against the law.”
“You know, capitalism is above the law.” Indeed. The last two tracks kind of
run out of steam, but still.
What’s
remarkable is how well Knopfler’s guitar playing suits this material—which is
not surprising when you consider that much of Knopfler’s own songwriting was
influenced by Dylan. I wish Dylan and Knopfler had done more records
together...1985’s Empire
Burlesque, an attempt at getting
Dylan to sound all 1980s contemporary, was awful.
At some point, it would be
interesting to track the titles on this list by decade, and I suspect the
majority of them would be from the 1980s. Of course, there would be nothing
surprising about this; I came to musical consciousness (generally) in the
1980s, graduating high school in 1985 and college in 1989—the prime
music-listening period of one’s life. So most of the albums on this list would
be those that came out contemporaneously, right? Right!?
I was not into all the 80s albums on this list. True, I did pick up the latter two in today’s trilogy of tonality the year they were released, but I came to the first a couple of
years after the fact. Let’s venture in, shall we? Shall we!?
The choice of Sound Affects here could stand in for most of The Jam’s
discography, as they were predominantly a singles band, and All Mod Cons could
just as easily have fit here, with great songs like “Down in the Tube Station
at Midnight,” etc.
Sound Affects found Paul Weller backing off the Ray Davies-esque
narratives in favor of more abstract songs, although “Pretty Green” is pretty
overt meaningwise. These are just great pop songs—“Monday” (unlike The Mamas
and the Papas, Weller is “dreaming of Monday”), “Boy About Town,” “Start!” (and
if you’re gonna nick a riff, why not nick from the best, “Taxman”), and, my
favorite Jam song, “That’s Entertainment,” which was the song that reminded me
most of living in New York—and why I had to stop living in New York:
A police car and a screaming siren
A pneumatic drill and ripped-up concrete
A baby wailing and a stray dog howling
The screech of brakes and a lamp light blinking
That’s entertainment
Weller also has little patience for the politics of hate—“Set
the House Ablaze” and “Scrape Away” take National Front-ish characters to task,
pointing out that “Hatred has never won for long” and “Your twisted cynicism
makes me feel sick.”
I’ve never been as big a Jam fan as
some folks I knew back in the day, but every once in a while I give them a
spin. On my first trip to London, I was walking around Soho and came across
Wardour Street. There was not an “A” bomb in it, I’m happy to say. Actually, my
favorite Jam song was a B side called “The Butterfly Collector” that only
surfaced on the vinyl version of the Snap! compilation
and later on the Extras rarities
collection.
Context is everything when it comes
to many of the titles on this list. In the case of White City, the year was 1985, and I had just gone off to
college so the album brings back memories of my freshman year—I still remember
listening to it on my Walkman (ha! remember those?) walking from class to class
in the cold Syracuse winter of 1985–1986. I still think it’s the best of his
solo records, although Empty Glass is
close. It helped that Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour played guitar on a few tracks—even
getting co-writing credit on “White City Fighting,” a rarity on a Townshend
album (Townshend had written lyrics for two tracks on Gilmour’s About Face a year earlier—see later in this list). His backup
band also included members of Big Country.
“Give Blood” is a phenomenal album
opener, leading into the poppy “Brilliant Blues,” where Townshend mistakes “clique”
with “cliche,” which confused me for years. In the NFL postseason in January 1986, the Patriots played the
Dolphins and someone in the Boston area had done a parody of “Face the Face”
called “Squish the Fish.” OK, dolphins are not fish, but it was still
amusing...maybe “Mush the Mammals” would not have been as catchy. “Crashing By
Design” is my favorite track.
There is apparently some kind of
concept behind the album but I have no idea what it is. More than 20 years
later, in the London Underground, I saw on the Tube map a stop called White City,
although I have no idea if it's “a black violent place.” Townshend only
recorded two more solo studio records since then—neither of them anywhere as
good as White City.
In 1993, Colleen Q., Jon M., and I
saw Townshend in New York on his Psychoderelict tour. The only thing I recall from the show was that at the beginning
there was a commercial for tour sponsor Tommy Hillfiger that used bits of “Tommy
Can You Hear Me”—and the audience booed. Townshend can sell out as much as he
wants, but we don’t have to like it!
It’s always the way. Well, sometimes. You buy an album because you really like a song that gets played on
the radio (in this case, “Under the Milky Way”) and then it turns out that the “hit”
is actually the “least good” song on the record. Such was the case of Starfish by Australia’s The Church. It was the first I had
heard of them, even though this was their sixth album. (Their previous record Heyday was their
masterpiece.) Starfish saw them signed
to a major US label (Arista) and working with LA producers (Greg Ladanyi and
Waddy Wachtel) which made the band sound a bit slicker (the band reportedly
hated LA—I can sympathize—and the sessions were fraught), but still kept their
basic raison d’etre of mixing
chiming guitars and a psychedelic atmosphere, with Steve Kilbey’s often
surreal, occasionally amusing lyrics.
The Church have great album openers,
and “Destination” does not disappoint (“In the space between our bodies, the
air has grown small fingers”). It’s one of those songs that always gives me
chills. Kilbey loves wordplay; the album Remote Luxury had
the track “Constant In Opal” and here we have “Hotel Womb” (and “I’m priceless,
you’re worthless, that’s not a bad match” in “Blood Money”).
The other alternative radio track
was “Reptile,” which was far superior to “Under the Milky Way,” with one of the
greatest guitar themes ever. Guitarist Marty Willson-Piper gets a track (“Spark”)
as does second guitarist Peter Koppes (“A New Season”), their usual album
allotment. And damn if I didn’t always sing the chorus to “Lost” whenever I
watched the show Lost. This would be the
last full album by the classic lineup of The Church (to the extent there can be
a “classic lineup”); drummer Richard Ploog would be forced out during the
making of the next album, Gold Afternoon Fix,
and the band would dwindle to a duo by the mid-90s before resurfacing by the
end of the decade. They’re still around, although I confess I lost track of
them circa 2002. Still, they’re the closest I have ever come to a church in decades.
I have never been one to reread books. I know I’m not alone
on this, but as much as there have been books I have absolutely loved, I have
only very rarely been tempted to revisit them. This is a bit odd,
ina way; after all, I have no
trouble seeing movies over and over again, and I can watch episodes of TV
shows I like until I can repeat lines from them verbatim. (Anything from early
Aaron Sorkin falls into this category—Sports Night and the first four seasons of The West Wing. Studio 60...not so much. And I have not seen The Newsroom.) Anyway, I suppose it has to do with the fact that
there is not much of a time or energy commitment to rewatch a movie or TV show.
But a book...
That all said, last year I revisited some favorite books for
the first time ever. Just prior to the release of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, I reread some of his early books—Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball 1973, A Wild Sheep Chase, Dance Dance Dance, and, my favorite, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. And I really enjoyed them again,
as I had forgotten over the years a lot of the plot and other details
(1997–1999 was my prime Murakami phase).
Last May, before and after Towel Day, I revisited Douglas
Adams five Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
and two Dirk Gently books and, again, there was much that I had missed and thus rediscovered.
In my own perverse, OCD-esque way, I like going through an
author’s works chronologically, much like I enjoy listening to a band’s albums
chronologically, as it is interesting to see how they develop, how certain
recurring themes and tropes are introduced, and so forth. So, in whatever
meager spare time I have (and travel is good for this, actually—although you
can tell by the telltale curl and downright mangling of the pages at what point
in a book the plane I was on hit turbulence...) I have been revisiting two old favorite authors—and who could not be more dissimilar.
First off, when I was in Florida a couple of weeks ago, I
was watching The Daily Show, and the guest was some guy from those vampire
movies (no idea what his name is and I have not seen any of those movies) who happens to be starring in an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel Cosmopolis. At the instigation of Steven H. back in 1989, I
became a very big admirer of DeLillo, starting with his classic White Noise, which I fell in love with (and
subsequently loaned to someone I worked with at St. Martin’s Press in 1990 who
then vanished with it...grrr...). Being the completist I am, I delved into his
back bibliography and although few of his earlier books were anywhere as good as White
Noise (there is a scene on an airplane
where the captain comes over the intercom and screams “We’re a silver gleaming
death machine!” I can’t imagine why that scene has always stayed with me...) I
recall reading DeLillo’s bestseller Libra (a fictionalized account of the life of Lee Harvey
Oswald) while I was living with my grandmother in Brooklyn in 1990, when I had
first moved to New York City and had not yet found a job. I was less than
impressed with it, compared to his past work. I kept up with him, and
especially loved his 1997 magnum opus Underworld, which was utterly brilliant.
I sort of lost track of DeLillo after that, and didn’t read
a new book of his until Falling Man in
2008, which was his 9/11 book which I really did not like all that much.
So, before I read and then see Cosmopolis, I am working my way through his bibliography. I
have already made it through Americana, End Zone, and Great Jones Street—the first two I recall having read way back when, but the latter I have no recollection of at all, probably for good reason, as
upon reread I did not care for it all that much. (I also actively hated Americana, both the first time through and again on rereading, but still
liked End Zone a lot. More specific comments in
a later post.)
As for the second author...OK. This should be interesting.
Also whilst I was in Florida, I began (and very quickly finished) Stephen
King’s latest 11/22/63, which I thought at first was the tritest idea in the world (a guy goes back in time to try to stop the
Kennedy assassination...gee, Steve, could you be less imaginative?) but it turned out the book was not
really about that at all, and it ended up being perhaps one of King’s best and certainly most touching books. It had one of the best endings he’s ever
written. That’s probably not saying much, but it was very good.
So I happened to come across a blog at the Guardian, begun in May 2012, in which the blogger is reading all of King’s books
in chronological order. I kind of started this a couple of years ago, buying
Carrie as an ebook (which my iPad subsequently ate and Barnes & Noble won’t
let me redownload, and, it turns out, ebooks are now the exact same price as
paperbacks, which makes zero sense, so what’s the point? So as far as I am concerned,
f— er, forget about ebooks. I’ll stick to print, thank you very much.
I remember first reading Stephen King back when he had only four
books out. In 1979, there was a TV movie version of ’Salem’s Lot starring David
Soul and James Mason (now they would have made a great Starsky & Hutch),
which enthralled me, and I subsequently sought out the book in Bradlee’s book department
(when I was a kid, the town I grew up in did not have a bookstore, which
says so much about that town). In fact, I still have the $2.50 paperback! Man,
people must have had better eyesight back then. I read King faithfully from
that point and I think stopped around 1985 when bookstores started selling his
titles by the pound. I’ve read a few over the years, and I thought it
would be interesting to try to read along with the Guardian guy. I have
finished Carrie, ’Salem’s Lot, and Night Shift (spoiler alert: a short story about a demonically possessed laundry machine is just as goofy now as I thought it was when I was 13) about to plunge into The Stand (again, my original $2.50 paperback
set in agate type). Again, I’ll post specific comments at a later date. Assuming
I have any eyesight left.
I freely admit: I love lists and countdowns. Even when I don’t agree with them, or with the placement of certain favorite items on them, I still am bizarrely attracted to them. I don’t take them seriously, of course, reflecting as they do simply someone’s opinion. So, no, I am not one to start bombarding online comments sections with “how dare you say x belongs at #203, when it clearly belongs at #2.” And vice versa.
So it was some months ago, I came across Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, surely an entertaining bit of flamebait if ever there was one. Naturally, I have my points of disagreement, but ultimately, why argue? It’s not that important.
As I was flipping through the Rolling Stone list one lazy Sunday last spring, I began to think about my own favorite albums—and it dawned on me, perhaps incorrectly, that at age 44 (well, 45 today), all the albums that were ever destined to be my favorites have probably already been released. A bit of a sad prospect, I suppose, and I have to admit that if I had one wish, it would be to be able to go back in time and hear Dark Side of the Moon again for the first time.
But then, that may not be true; there are a handful of titles on my list of personal favorites that actually date from the past decade, and two of my favorite bands of all time—The Decemberists and The Hold Steady—were formed in the 2000s and are still very much active. So never say never. Plus, I have not listened to everything that has ever been recorded, and it is entirely likely that I will discover a band I had previously not heard and an album or two will hit me in that certain way that some records do, when—as the man said—certain songs get scratched into our souls. (In fact, I had never really listened to 1980s jangle-pop college rock faves The dBs but I just discovered their first two albums and now I can’t stop playing them. So there is still a lot of stuff ou there waiting for me to discover it.)
Music has always been a vital, integral part of my life—and I don’t just mean as background music. I mean, being enveloped by words and music, of connecting to a sound or, especially, a lyric in a very real, emotional way. We all do this to some extent, but some of us more than others (I recommend reading Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity—or see the movie—which explains how obessive we can get). In my teenage years especially, music was a form of not only escape, but also of some kind of validation. And, of course, entertainment. I used to (and still do) make mix tapes (and now mix discs) and if anyone ever bothered to listen to them closely, they were probably the best way of understanding what I was thinking or feeling at any given moment. They were always kind of like therapy, in a way.
It’s not just about songs. In this day and age of iTunes, the album as a concept—a set of songs sequenced in a particular way, that form a more or less cohesive whole unit—may seem foreign to a lot of people. But remember, though, before (arguably) Sgt. Pepper, albums were subservent to singles, and albums were assembled piecemeal without any real structure. Especially in the British Invasion, UK and American albums—even those having the same name—could have wildly different songs on them. (See The Beatles and The Kinks, to name two bands whose British and American albums differed drastically from each other.) The album as some of us think of it is really only about as old as I am. And that’s not very old at all!
Anyway, what will follow over the following months—if only to keep this blog active again, after I had spent far too much time over on The Facebook Machine—is my own 152 Favorite Albums of All Time. A couple of ground rules:
No greatest hits albums—I mean, come on, that’s cheating.
No live albums—I never really cared for live albums, with a few exceptions, but, again, that’s cheating because they’re usually “greatest hits live” albums. Exceptions are a couple of Frank Zappa live albums which contain all original songs that never had a studio release.
No more than five albums by the same artist. We all have our favorite musicians, and it would be easy to frontload this list with almost everything Pink Floyd or Rush or The Beatles or Robyn Hitchcock ever released. You gotta draw a line somewhere. I think I adhered to this rule, but I may be wrong.
I did not spent an inordinate amount of time mathematically determining which number each album should appear at. I’m obsessive, but not that obsessive! And who has the time? (It’s 3:21. No, wait...) Ahem. Anyway, this ordering is a rough guestimate—not too much should be read into any qualitative difference between #51 and #50. The top 20 or 25, though...they’re pretty solid, I would say.
Bear in mind that this is also a snapshot in time. In a couple of years time, some records may fall out of favor, and some may shoot up the list. Who knows?
Of course, this is just a list of my personal favorites. This has no bearing on the respective musical merits of any musician or album relative to any other musician or album. If someone is not on this list...well, it just means it never struck me particularly hard. Or I am unfamiliar with it. Like any list, it’s all completely subjective, is really just for a bit of fun, and is not intended to be taken internally.
We’ll be proceeding from number 152 (round numbers are boring) all the way up to number 1, with three new entries every Tuesday and Thursday. (Although, since I was away, Blogger has been made virtually unusable. It used to be such a great blogging platform, and now it is utterly horrible. Just getting this post up has been nine kinds of frustrating.)
We kick off with the most atypical album on this list (well, no, not really; there is a Residents record lurking further up the road)—but it is the oldest. Song satirist Tom Lehrer was not especially prolific (he was actually a mathematics teacher and only released three proper albums, plus a couple of live albums that replicated track-by-track the studio albums), but his funny, erudite, sarcastic piano-accompanied rags were staples of Dr. Demento and still hold up today (generally—one or two songs are a bit less than PC, but not offensively so; “wetback” is the roughest word he uses, so there’s no need to haul out the fainting couches). He occasionally contributed songs to TV shows, such as PBS’s Electric Company.
Dark humor masked by bouncng melodies was one of Lehrer’s fortes, and “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” gets things off to a jaunty, if disturbing, start. “When they see us coming, the birdies all try an’ hide/But they still go for peanuts when coated with cyanide.” And if you’re thinking what I’m thinking: “We’ve gained notoriety/And caused much anxiety/In the Audubon Society/With our games.” And, of course, “maybe we’ll do in/A squirrel or two.” “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” was later orchestrated, a version that really is quite lush, but no less amusing.
“The Masochism Tango” is another favorite that was also later orchestrated. “I ache for the touch of your lips, dear/But much more for the touch of your whips, dear/You can raise welts/Like nobody else/As we dance to the masochism tango.” How can you not love lines like “You caught my nose/In your left castanet, love” or “Before you here I stand/My heart is in my hand...ecch!” It was another Dr. Demento favorite.
“The Elements” is essentially nerd heaven, being a recital of all the elements on the Periodic Table (at least up to that time) set to music by Sir Arthur Sullivan. It ends: “These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard/And there may be many others, but they haven’t been discovered.” He loves weird forced rhymes.
Elsewhere Lehrer sings about Oedipus Rex (“He loved his mother”), Christmas (“Hark, the Herald-Tribune sings”), and schooldays (“Soon we’ll be sliding down the razor blade of life”). “Clementine” reinterprets the old folk song via Cole Porter, Mozart, Gilbert and Sullivan, and (then) modern jazz. “It Makes a Fellow Proud to be a Soldier” was curiously militant for the pre-Vietnam era (Lehrer did a stint in the Army just after the end of the Korean War).
And now for something completely different. Although I remember when this record came out (it was prominently displayed in the Syracuse University on-campus record shop back in 1988), I didn’t get into Sonic Youth until the follow up Goo came out in 1990, and I never got around to picking up Daydream Nation—their magnum opus—until 1998 (when A Thousand Leaves came out, I went through a bit of a SY period). It is very much their White Album (and that same year they did release a spoof—if unlistenable—record called The Whitey Album, credited to Ciccone Youth). Daydream Nation is a sprawling two-LP affair (back in the days of vinyl) with classic songs (“Teen Age Riot,” “Candle”), extended jams, their signature alternate tunings, explosions of noise and feedback, found sounds (“Providence” is a sound collage featuring a solo piano over the sound of an amp exploding and an answering machine message from Mike Watt), and even a concluding “Trilogy” (the three parts share a common guitar tuning so they were recorded en suite).
SY was always more about NYC avant garde performance art than traditional rock, or even punk. The elaborate gatefold cover—featuring a Gerhard Richter painting—caused printing problems which led to availability issues, and was one reason the group decided to abandon indie labels a year later. Go figure: an indie band goes to a major label because of printing. Gotta love it.
Pop culture jokes and references abound; “Hey Joni” pays simultaneous homage to the old classic “Hey Joe” and Joni Mitchell; the third part of the closing trilogy, “Eliminator Jr.,” was so titled because it sounded like a cross between Dinosaur Jr. and ZZ Top’s Eliminator (it’s even labeled part “z” on the album sleeve in case you missed the reference). The bandmembers even chose special symbols for themselves, à la Led Zeppelin IV.
Daydream Nation doesn’t get an awful lot of play on my CD player or iTunes—it’s one of those records you tend to appreciate more than actively enjoy—but I do wish I had heard this when it came out.
Gaucho? Really? Well, OK, the selection of Gaucho as this album entry is meant to stand in for Steely Dan’s entire 1972–1980 output. Naturally, I heard the hits on the radio in my youth, but never really got into the band in earnest until a cross-country train ride in 2000, after which I bought the Citizen Steely Dan box set that ran all seven of their classic albums in a row. As a result, each record never really had its own identity for me, although my mother had Gaucho and I recall “Hey Nineteen” and “Time Out of Mind” when those singles were on the chart in 1980.
Delving into them in detail one begins to figure out that what sounds like pure AM pop actually is a bit subversive (not a shock, given where the band’s name came from). “Reelin’ in the Years” (from their first album, Can’t Buy a Thrill) sounds like cheery, if sentimental, ode to the past or some such, but is actually quite a bit darker, even if you don’t know what exactly it’s about. That’s what I like about them—behind the surface of highly polished, radio-friendly sheen are clever, often fairly twisted lyrics. (Bit of trivia: Craig Finn, lyricist and singer for The Hold Steady [see later in this list], purportedly took the name of his recurring “Charlemagne” character from the Steely Dan song “Kid Charlemagne” which is a satire about a drug dealer.)
Their final album, until reuniting in 2000, Gaucho was the result of Donald Fagen and Walter Brecker’s studio obsessiveness; some have said the album is all sheen and gloss and no soul, but you could make the same argument about any Steely Dan album. It does have my favorite Steely Dan song, “Hey Nineteen,” which I understand more and more the older I get (and understanding Steely Dan lyrics is rarely an easy task!):
Hey Nineteen
That’s ’Retha Franklin
She don’t remember the Queen of Soul
It’s hard times befallen
The sole survivors
She thinks I’m crazy
But I’m just growing old
I get that a lot... The perfect track for anyone whose cultural references are decidedly passé!
It did seem only fitting that they broke up after Gaucho—for a while. No, Gaucho is probably not their best or most definitive album, so if you prefer subsitute their entire oeuvre—or Citizen Steely Dan—as in my mind it’s all of a piece.
Reposted here from The Facebook Machine, which I think I shall gradually be weaning myself away from...
Here's an interesting little game for all you literature nerds who happen to also get into NCAA bracketology: the greatest novel of all time brackets. (Yeah, this stuff is fraught with issues, but, heck, why not play along.) So here is the first round, where you vote certain novels against others. (Repeat parenthetical caveat above, three or more times, one of which in a loud, high, squeaky voice.) My one rule? Not to vote for a book I have not read.
So: I had to pick The Great Gatsby over To Kill a Mockingbird--I adore The Great Gatsby, and To Kill A Mockingbird was actually a better movie... One Hundred Years of Solitude vs. Emma--actually I disliked both of them, but Gabriel Garcia Marquez gets extra points for magic realism. Crime and Punishment vs. To the Lighthouse? Though I'm not afraid of Virginia Woolf, Dostoyevsky played an important role in my youth (which could explain so much...). But why not The Brothers Karamazov? Ulysses vs. Invisible Man? No contest; James Joyce has always been my man. And, whoa, Great Expectations vs. Lolita (aka Great Sexpectations?)? Dickens conquers all, but I hated Lolita except for one parenthetical expression "(picnic, lightning)". So no contest there. I never read Madame Bovary or Song of Solomon, so I abstain. I have read War and Peace, but not Things Fall Apart, so again, I abstain, but how can you beat Tolstoy?; and whilst I have read Moby Dick, I never did read Middlemarch. Votes closed apparently today at 9 am.
In a development that many analysts feel will simplify the print buying process, all the printers in the country have been acquired and have merged into a single entity. Called ConglomoPrint, the new entity is based in Kansas at the geographic center of the United States and controls the operation of every print shop and plant in the nation.
“We’re extremely excited about engulfing and devouring our every competitor,” says CEO Chester Q. Carnivore. “We will immediately begin eliminating those firms and people who are not cost effective. And if anyone reading this plans to open a print shop, prepare to be crushed like the weak little insects you are! Ha ha ha ha ha!”
“We’re excited to be a part of ConglomoPrint, and we’re optimistic that this will help our division thrive,” says Arnold Ductman, former owner of It’s Printing!, a Ballston Spa, NY-based print shop whose firm was absorbed by ConglomoPrint following an armed assault by ConglomoPrint troops.
Chester Q. Carnivore (artist's rendering)
It’s Printing! was the last holdout against the forces of ConglomoPrint. All of It’s Printing!’s staff will remain, with the exception of the vice president of marketing, who was killed during the takeover.
“I’m the god! I’m the god!” adds Carnivore. (1998)
Back in the 90s—and even today—you can't go to any kind of industry or technology event without finding people making predictions, which are usually wrong. Even amidst the tech bubble there were always pockets of analysts (usually in the printing industry) who insisted that the whole "Internet" thing was a fad that was just going to go away (some people in the printing industry still say that!). So in that 1999 faux news column in Micro Publishing News, I had to include a panel of expert predictions, written from the perspective of 1996:
Panel of Experts Predicts Death of Web by 1998
A panel of leading industry experts convened in San Francisco in January to discuss the future of computing. The leading experts in both the print and computer graphics industries unanimously agreed that the World Wide Web, which has seen tremendous growth in the past six months, will be dead by 1998.
“We really don’t see this continuing,” said Cassandra Doomsayer. “Who in their right mind is going to want to sit at a computer for hours on end waiting for graphics and text to load?”
“I give it two years,” concurred Nestor C. Calhoun. “By ’98, the Internet will be but a footnote to the history of technology.”
The panel also agreed that proposals to begin what has been referred to as “E-commerce” will fail dismally.
“Oh, come on,” said Doomsayer. “Buy stuff online? Give me a break. These people are idiots.”
The panel also recommended against investment in Internet startups. “Anyone buying stock in an Internet company will never see a profit,” said Calhoun. “They’re just going to lose a ton of money.” (1996)
That last paragraph, though, was eerily prophetic...
Maybe it's because there is an impending Micro Publishing News reunion in CA in August, but I am curiously nostalgic for the late 1990s (for a wide variety of reasons...), and I never succumb to nostalgia. Anyway, that September 1999 MPN column (see previous post) also featured a faux news story inspired by actual AIGA calendars we would get in the office. David G. and I often would talk of starting an actual award called the Illegies:
Design Firm Wins Award for Unreadable Events Calendar San Francisco-based cAribA +/& Associates, a design firm specializing in advertising collateral and branding, recently won the award for Most Overdesigned and Unreadable at the Illegies, a Bay Area competition for illegible and unreadable design.
The winning piece was the 1997 events calendar, created by cAribA +/& Associates for the San Francisco Symphony.
“What made this events calendar stand out is that it is designed in such a way that it’s not only completely impossible to determine what is taking place on any given night, but it also isn’t clear without intense study that it even is an events calendar,” said judge Dennis Amoeba.
“cAribA +/& Associates is proud to be so thoroughly incomprehensible,” says firm principal Usndeir Skhtysweyy.
cAribA +/& Associates is a full-service design firm whose clients include…well, we’re not really sure. (1997)
Yesterday, I ventured down to NYC for the annual OnDemand Show, which used to be a showcase for the latest in digital printing and its associated technologies and paraphernalia. In recent years, a glut of shows and a declining printing industry, has shrunk the once-mighty OnDemand--and yesterday it was easy to walk the floor in less than an hour. In fact, it seems to have morphed into one of its co-located shows, Info360, with a focus on document imaging, document management, and cloud storage.
The heart-pounding excitement of document imaging always reminds me of a faux news story I wrote for Micro Publishing News a very long time ago. In September 1999, MPN was celebrating its 10-year-anniversary, and at the time I wrote--among many many other things--a monthly humor column. So for that issue, I did an Onion-like roundup of silly news stories from around the industry, which included:
Tedium Magazine Changes Name, Design Ames, IA-based Tedium magazine, in an attempt to recover from three financially poor quarters, has decided to rename itself Document Imaging Today. The company will retain its editorial focus on hardware, software, and workflows in the document imaging field.
“We’re very excited by the new developments,” says publisher Rupert T. Snoreman, speaking in a low, droning monotone. “We felt that the name of our publication was not effective enough at conveying the excitement of the subject matter we cover. And to that end we have also decided to completely redesign the magazine. For example, we will, for the first time in our history, add color. And images.”
Sandor Queep, the new art director, is excited to be part of the team. “I felt that the page after page of dense, unbroken, imageless text was probably not going to capture the imaginations of readers, or advertisers,” he says. (1994)
To all of you out West, hope you enjoy today's annular eclipse--the first solar eclipse seen in the U.S. since 1994, but not here in the Northeast. We're all terribly jealous, or at least I am. But then it won't be a *total* eclipse, since the Moon is one day shy of being at apogee (furthest away from the Earth--it was at perigee, the closest, back a couple of weeks ago when we had the so-called Supermoon). As a result, the lunar disk will only block about 88% of the Sun, but it should still be a great show. If you're venturing out to see it, remember not to look directly at a solar eclipse, as it is a good way to fry your retinas. Mmm...fried retinas....
Writer and analyst for the graphic communications industry. Has written about half a dozen books on the subject of computer graphics hardware and software, and writes extensively on the printing and publishing industries.
