Ed Batista

A Mystery I Must Unravel

Haywood is, well, was one of my favorite bands.  And tonight I discover a reference to my obscure hometown, Mechanicsburg, PA, in the "final thanks" section of their memorial site (link's at the bottom right.)  Now, technically, I lived in Hampden Township as a kid, but my mailing address said "Mechanicsburg," and I can attest that at no time from 1973 to 1985 was that locale likely to attract the likes of Haywood, and I'm confident that remained true during the band's lifespan, from 1992 through 2000.  But not only did they venture to the 1705x, it apparently made a meaningful impression on them.  Uh, WTF?

Aimee Mann

In 1985, I thought Aimee Mann was a vapid puff of corporate-rock trash and Paul Westerberg was God.  Twenty years later, I think Mann's one of the finest pop artists alive, and I don't really know what to think of Westerberg, whose post-Replacements output is just barely good enough to keep me interested but never actually good enough to fully satisfy.  What the hell happened?

Perhaps I shouldn't be so hard on 'Til Tuesday, but everything from their name to their pouffy hair signified utter crap at the time.  And their one hit truly was shite, redeemed only by Gang Green's sarcastic cover.  When TT inevitably faded from the pop charts, Mann probably thought her 15 minutes of fame were over--but did she sulk about it?  Well, maybe--I have no idea what she was doing between the last TT album in '88 and her first solo disc in '93.  But in the mid-'90s she got her groove on and started cranking out these fantastically rich, resonant pop albums.  Paul Thomas Anderson was so impressed he based Magnolia on a suite of songs by Mann.  I can't listen to her enough these days--she's making some of the best, most thoughtful, mordantly moving music for grownups.

Westerberg, on the other hand... Well, the Replacements were the coolest kids in school (uh, out of school, actually) in the mid-'80s, rock legends in the making.  But all the critical raves and the undying love of indie music nerds like me weren't enough.  They never actually made it big, sunk by their own bad habits, the agonized politics of pre-grunge indie music, and the bitch that is Fate.  God knows they went down fighting--their last album (really Westerberg's first solo album), All Shook Down, is a lamentably unsung masterpiece.  But today I get the feeling that Westerberg never got over his missed shot at stardom, and that seems reflected in the unevenness of his solo output. 

Obviously, I'm drawing a parallel based on convenient circumstances--both Mann and Westerberg had their moments in the '80s pop spotlight, migrated to Los Angeles, and built modestly successful solo careers focusing on themes of love and loss.  And in fairness to Westerberg, 1) It's easier for Mann's current work to look good in comparison with her earlier stuff--she doesn't have a Let It Be on her resume, and 2) When he's good, he's still very, very good.  But if you would have told me in 1985 that someday I'd buy the new Aimee Mann album and leave Paul Westerberg's on the shelf, I'd have clocked you.      

Icky Mettle

God damn, the Archers of Loaf's Icky Mettle is a fine disc.  How the hell did  it escape my attention in 1993?  I was listening to the indie rock bands the Archers are commonly compared to--Pavement and Dinosaur Jr. and the like.  But I didn't pick it up until a few years ago, and even then, "Web In Front," the opening track, is so good that it overshadowed the rest of the album.  I'd repeat "Web" until I got sick of it and then move on to something completely different.  But the wonder that is my iPod's "Alt, Punk, Pop & Rock" playlist kept pulling up other Icky Mettle tracks until I finally saw the error of my ways.

It's weird to feel so freshly enthusiastic about a 12-year-old album.  A number of my faves from the same era haven't aged all that well, and I wonder if I'd like Icky as much today if I'd heard it back in '93.  But I didn't (hear it then), so I do (love it now).

Steely Dan

I wasn't a fan during their heyday--too young--but their hits saturated the '70s, so they felt familiar when I started to listen to them more seriously a few years ago.  And my appreciation for Walter Becker, Donald Fagen and their shuffling cast of bandmates just continues to grow the more I listen to them.  I love the way they bring so many things together--cryptically smart lyrics, richly complex tunes buried under those FM-friendly hooks, and this whole ethos that suggests that they got the most out of the '70s without letting the era overwhelm them.

And what a history.  Laboring as ABC studio songwriters, Becker and Fagen recorded their own songs on the side, and when "Do It Again" turns into a surpise hit (#6!) in the Fall of '72, they're suddenly rock stars.  They tour for months on end, driven mercilessly by ABC.  I have to assume they enjoyed at least some of the fruits of the touring life in '73-'74, the nadir of the Decadent West, but it ultimately burned them out, and in July '74, with three successful albums under their belts, they quit the road for good--well, for 20 years, anyway.

Between '74 and '80 they release four more albums, peaking critically and commercially with Aja in '77, which hit #3 behind Fleetwood Mac's Rumours and Billy Joel's The Stranger.  But although 1980's Gaucho is relatively successful, it seems overshadowed by record company wrangling, car accidents, etc.  Becker and Fagen are apparently ready for Steely Dan to be over, and they just...stop.

Fagen puts out The Nightfly in '82 to good reviews (if you're in my demographic you might remember an unusually tasteful music video for "The New Frontier"), but he and Becker basically spend the '80s and early '90s kicking back, noodling around on some cool side projects, and fading into cult status.  And then in the mid-'90s, the bug bit them, and they started playing together and even touring again.  In 2000 they released Two Against Nature, their first new album in 20 years, and it hit #6, and they just kept going, putting out Everything Must Go in 2003.

Looking at Steely Dan's career as a whole, three things make them unusual.  First, it's hard to think of other artists who were as musically and intellectually serious and who also had so many huge hits.  (I'm not saying there aren't any--but off the top of my head none come to mind.)  I'm not sure if that's because Steely Dan essentially buried their bad attitude in head-scratching lyrics and brought fusion to the masses by wrapping it in hooks, or if it's just because the listening public in those days was more comfortable with complicated music.  Eh, probably the former.

Second, I'm still struck by the fact that they were so woven into the texture of the decade, they were such '70s Rock Stars, and yet they seem to have come through that era and that experience as relatively normal people.  A little reclusive, perhaps, but not Basket Cases or Flaming Assholes.

And finally, it's impressive that they took so much time off but were then able to rekindle their collective creative fire so successfully.  I haven't heard either of the two recent albums, so perhaps I should reserve judgment, but it's clear that this is no reunion tour, no nostalgia sell-out.  Impressive on many levels.

If you're interested, I highly recommend the Steely Dan site, particular this detailed history by Pete Fogel.  And props to Matt, who appreciated these guys about ten years before I did and helped turn me on.

Haywood

Haywood had an 8-year run, ending in 2000, that culminated with Men Called Him Mister and We Are Amateurs, You and I.  I'm mighty sorry they're gone, but if it had to end, "Amateurs" is a hell of a swansong.  I never knew them when, but they've been in heavy rotation ever since I first heard them--probably courtesy of Gimme Noise (horrid, absolutely horrid site--but the girl's got good musical taste.)  They're hard to pin down stylistically--plenty of emo-ish introspection, but they can kick out the jams, too.  One reason to love them--Ted Pauly, vocalist and guitar player, transparently pimps "Mister" on Amazon: " This record by this band is great! I love this record the most of any record I own, even though I am not in this band!" 

Dr. Frank

Dr. Frank is the main force behind the Mr. T Experience, an old Berkeley based pop-punk band that still seems to be semi-alive and kicking, and he's one of my favorite pop-and-politics bloggers.  To be honest, I've never been a huge fan of the MTX, but the blog kicks ass.  Two recent highlights:

1) From the latest salvo in Frank's running commentary on why the Bay Area is the most Wonderful/Horrible Place on Earth:

I love living here. The weather's great. I like the tolerance for eccentricity (though I often wish people would just get on with being all tolerant and everything without having to make such a big deal about how great it is that they're so tolerant, and how you don't find such top-notch tolerance just anywhere, and how you haven't really experienced true, cream-of-the-crop tolerance till you've seen it in action amongst the best people in the Greatest Place on Earth.) I probably couldn't survive anywhere else. But there is a drawback, and that is that everyone is so self-impressed. The narcissism in the air is so thick and plentiful that it's sometimes hard to breathe normally.

2) Frank skewers the humorless dolts at Alternative Tentacles whose knickers are in a twist over the possibility that a former member of the Dead Kennedys may have sold the rights to the band's cover version of "Viva Las Vegas" to American Idol.  (Got all that?)  Tongue firmly in cheek, Frank writes:

Needless to say, it is absolutely vital to protect the legacy of the Dead Kennedys' joke version of a novelty song owned by Warner Brothers. This is particularly true when the co-opting is being done by Amerikkkan Idle, a popular show that the better sort of person rightly holds in contempt, and on a network like Fox, which will, of course, be the first network up against the wall when the Revolution comes.

The man is fighting the good fight and entertaining in the process.

Salsamania

I love Latin music.  At its best, its frenetic exuberance comes this close to complete insanity--but the band keeps it together for stanza after stanza, inducing a sort of joyful trance state.  The jazz-inflected music of master conguero Ray Barreto of the '50s and '60s exemplifies this quality, and seven of his tracks--all gems--are on the four disc, 80-song Salsamania compilation put out by Spanish label Blue Moon/Palladium in 1995.

In an older edition--late '90s?--of the Rough Guide to World Music, Eugene Holley, Jr., had high praise for the set (quoted in Sals@lemania, a German Latin music fan site), but took issue with its title:

Every once in a while a specially-focused collection of rare, timeless recordings comes along that's so unique it truly merits "must have" status. Indeed, the only problem with Salsamania (Blue Moon) is its misleading title; the four-CD set actually documents the mambo era that preceded the birth of salsa in the sixties. The title was nothing more than a marketing ploy contrived by the Barcelona, Spain, label to capture the attention of French Latin music lovers. The collection's generous program of 80 tracks is uniformly excellent, with relatively few over-exposed performances, even though Salsamania (read: "Mambomania") is loaded with vintage tracks by Tito Puente, Celia Cruz, Cachao, Ray Barretto, Perez Prado, Xavier Cugat, Beny More, Tito Rodriguez, and other mambo legends from the fifties. The producers throw listeners some interesting curves, like featuring Cugat's surprisingly zesty version of the Prado hit "Mambo No. 5." The addition of cuts by storied groups like Conjunto Casino and Orquesta Hermanos Castro add to the historic value of the set. A fourteen-page booklet in both Spanish and English, loaded with historic photos, makes the collection a must-have for mambo fans of all generations.

I can't find "Salsamania" on Amazon or eBay--just the German site linked to above--so I suspect its not in wide circulation.  If you ever come across it, grab it, no matter what it costs.  You'll thank me later.

Sigur Ros

It's hard--almost impossible--to do Sigur Ros justice in a bloggy little review.  It would take a much better writer than the one you have here.

Dreamy, to the point of feeling like I'm in a dream.  Sorry, but that's the best I can do.

Big Birthdays

Two cultural icons with roots in the 1930s are about to celebrate big birthdays: Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon turns 75 on Valentine's Day, and the Village Vanguard turns 70 this year and is holding a week-long party Feb. 14-20.  "Falcon" is a fine book, certainly Hammett's best-known, and if its 75th anniversary brings him any new readers, all the better.  (Jesse Hamlin has a fine piece in yesterday's S.F. Chronicle on Hammett's rough life-and-times.)

But "Falcon" pales alongside "Red Harvest," a relentless book that left me staggering.  The story of a nameless detective-agency operative dispatched by his company to an utterly corrupt town, "Red Harvest" has a surprisingly contemporary, unsentimental--even amoral--ethos.  But it's also laced with reminders that the 1920s and '30s were a different era from our own, when telephones were still novel and important news traveled by telegram.

Jazz and bloody pulp fiction don't seem to have much in common anymore, now that the music's acquired a high-toned patina.  But it's useful to keep in mind that jazz was originally the real-life soundtrack for the sort of people who featured in books like "Red Harvest."  Ashley Kahn recounts the Vanguard's history in today's Wall Street Journal, and he notes that the club had previously been a speakeasy, and that when Vanguard founder Max Gordon opened his doors in 1935, the location was suitable because, among other reasons, it satisfied legal requirements by being "two hundred feet from a church or synagogue or school."

I've never been to the Vanguard, but I can testify to the accuracy of Kahn's quote from Bruce Lundvall, the head of Blue Note Records: "The words, 'Live at the Village Vanguard' do have a direct and positive influence on an album's sales."  This isn't just hype--saxophonist Joe Lovano says that the club's unusual triangular shape makes it "the best venue on the East Coast for recording jazz, period."  (Uh, Ashley, the natural follow-up question would be, "So there's someplace better on the West Coast?  Where is it?"  Not all WSJ readers live in NYC.  Hell, some of us live in California.)  And the club's magic shines through in recordings of John Coltrane's November 1961 sessions there, captured on Live at the Village Vanguard and Impressions.  Check out Sonny Rollins' A Night at the Village Vanguard, Vol. 2, too.

Listens

Knapsack was an outstanding little late-'90s band from Davis, CA, and This Conversation is Ending Starting Right Now was their swansong.  Too hard to call it emo, too subtle to call it punk, too smart to call it rock, their sound is a little bit of everything.  They never rise to Jawbreaker's angsty, operatic heights, but they're in the same neighborhood.  Like the Promise Ring's output from the same era, I find myself coming back to these guys every year.

When Sleater-Kinney's One Beat came out in 2002, I thought it was a letdown from their '99-2000 one-two punch of The Hot Rock and All Hands on the Bad One.  Everyone else seemed to disagree with me, as usual: I remember hearing "return to form" a lot.  I still think those earlier discs are superior, but "One Beat" has been growing on me.  Apparently their latest, "The Woods," is due out in May.  Christ, is it really fair to call them "veteran indie rockers"?  Not to them--to me.  Nothing makes you feel older than hearing a band you think of as kids called "veterans."  I was gonna write something about the Clash, but now that's gonna have to wait.  <Cough>