After 17 years of professional music-reviewing, Noel Murray is taking time off from all new music, and is revisiting his record collection in alphabetical order, to take stock of what he's amassed, and consider what he still needs.
"I Am A Scientist" by Guided By Voices
As explained in Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point, sometimes a product, a concept, or even a perceived threat can go from being the province of a few to being an international phenomenon, just by virtue of it reaching a certain saturation level in the public awareness. That's sort of what happens with critics too, whenever a band, rapper or a singer comes out of nowhere and becomes the only thing anyone wants to talk about for weeks and months on end. And the reasons why are sometimes hard to discern. Clever marketing, a few well-placed rave reviews, genuine quality… whatever gets the chatter started, it all leads to critics and fans scrambling to get their hands on a record and then, inevitably, responding with an, "I don't know, it's fine I guess, but kind of overrated." Which raises the question: What would they have said if the record hadn't been "rated" before they heard it?
There can be a kind of "tipping point" on an individual level too, related to the one I just described. When I was young and flippant, I took some pretty obnoxious potshots in print at the alt-rock heroes of the day. Show me an act that was getting a lot of hype in the mid-'90s—Beck, Green Day, Weezer, Guided By Voices, Pearl Jam, Hole, Radiohead—and I can probably dig through my clip files and find pans and semi-pans under my byline. But at the same time, I've also always been in thrall to the idea of the Big Shared Pop Moment. I like blockbusters on opening weekend, hit TV shows when they're in full stride, and new albums by musicians with sizable followings. So I'll keep on buying albums by acts I don't much like, provided that some combination of sales and critical acclaim makes those albums "a must-hear." And sometimes, if I'm persistent enough, an album comes along that flips a switch in my head, and makes it so that I not only start to like an artist, but begin to reevaluate all the albums I hated before.
I wouldn't say I hated Guided By Voices prior to 1995's Alien Lanes, but when I dutifully bought Bee Thousand and the combo CD of Vampire On Titus and Propeller when they were all the rage, I failed to see why critics and friends of mine had fallen in love so easily. I tended to agree with Robert Christgau, who wrote of Bee Thousand, "On most of these 20-tracks-in-36-minutes, the tunes emerge if you stick around, but they're undercut by multiple irritants. The lyrics are deliberately obscure, the structures deliberately foreshortened, the vocals a record collector's Anglophilia-in-the-shower; the rec-room production is so inconsistent you keep losing your bearings, as befits resident art-rock fan Robert Pollard's boast (which echoes Lou Barlow's, what a coincidence) that some recordings aren't just first takes but first plays, of songs he'd dreamed up since the last time the band came over. In short, this is pop for perverts—pomo smarty-pants too prudish and/or alienated to take their pleasure without a touch of pain to remind them that they're still alive."
But for some reason. Alien Lanes clicked with me, even though it's more a collection of snippets, fragments and first takes than anything Pollard had thrown together before. It's like an album-long suite of the best parts of old power-pop and garage-rock chestnuts, and it achieves a cumulative majesty that, to me, Bee Thousand still doesn't. That said, I do like Bee Thousand more now than I once did, because I've come to trust Robert Pollard. Now that I know he can deliver in the clutch, I see his early work as the tentative steps of a hero-in-training. (And I gave him the benefit of the doubt from then on—at least for a while.)
Maybe it's just that I respect people with sizable bodies of work more than one-hit-wonders. If artists stick around long enough, I take them more seriously. Or maybe there's a maturing process necessary before artists are worth taking seriously. (I'll add that this isn't just a musical phenomenon either. It took P.T. Anderson's weird and wondrous Punch-Drunk Love before I started to see Hard Eight, Boogie Nights and Magnolia as more than just hammy and fitful, and I've had similar mind-changing experiences with Tim Burton, Steven Spielberg and others.)
An odd byproduct of this phenomenon though is that I seem to get into a lot of artists right when their die-hard fans start to lose interest. I'm not sure why this is, because I'm not a contrarian by nature, but from Alien Lanes to The Arcade Fire's Neon Bible, it seems I'm perpetually declaring my devotion to an album only to hear in return, "Eh, they aren't as good as they used to be." The early adopter types seem as quick to jump off as I'm hesitant to jump on. It's enough to make you wonder how much of music fandom—and music criticism—is in reaction to everything but the actual music.
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Pieces Of The Puzzle
Graham NashYears Of Operation 1971-present (solo)
Fits Between Colin Blunstone and Peter Noone
"Just A Song Before I Go" by Crosby, Stills & Nash
Personal Correspondence As I've mentioned before, my Crobsy, Stills and Nash iPod playlists are organized by songwriter, and as you might imagine, Graham Nash's is the shortest, at around 50 minutes. But that doesn't mean I play Nash any less than the others. The key to any good Graham Nash collection is to include the songs he's largely responsible for as a member of The Hollies, including Britpop classics like "Carrie-Anne" and "King Midas In Reverse." Nash's more overtly poppy (and occasionally trippy) Hollies work fits cleanly between his hyper-mellow solo stuff and the chirpy songs he contributed to CSNY, and while he's never been the most prolific songwriter, he's got good quality control, recording and releasing a proportionately significant number of memorable tunes. There's a unique feel to the best Graham Nash songs: something wide-eyed in its philosophy, craftsmanlike in its construction, and elegant in its brevity.
Enduring presence? In a lot of ways, Nash is the odd man out in CSNY, because songs like "Our House," "Teach Your Children" and "Marrakesh Express" are so different from Crosby, Stills and Young's more freeform hippie jams. But then that's always been one the group's core missions, to integrate the remnants of the British Invasion sound with Greenwich Village folk and Sunset Strip rock, and thus present the maturing face of the '60s pop scene.
Graham ParkerYears Of Operation 1974-present
Fits Between Van Morrison and Joe Jackson
"Pourin' It All Out" by Graham Parker & The Rumour
Personal Correspondence You could write a very compelling alternate history of '70s rock if you ignored the usual critical sniping about corporate rock, prog and disco—and how the industry was redeemed through the saving grace of punk and new wave—and instead just followed the singer-songwriters and bandleaders, from Marvin Gaye to Jackson Browne to Willie Nelson to Van Morrison to Stevie Wonder to Nick Lowe to Bruce Springsteen to Mark Knopfler to Prince to Elvis Costello and beyond. In that new framing, Graham Parker stands out more. I've always liked Parker quite a bit, having spent many happy hours in high school spinning Squeezing Out Sparks (Parker's acknowledged masterpiece) as well as The Real Macaw and The Mona Lisa's Sister (less celebrated, but hey, I picked them up cheap). But at the same time, I've always had difficulty making sense of his sound, which shares some of the bite of punk—or at least its forerunner, pub-rock—and some of the swing of blue-eyed soul, and yet is never exactly hard enough or fluid enough to supplant the music with which it has an affinity. The selling point for Parker isn't his music so much as his lyrics, with their peculiar bite and acidic aftertaste. And if you stack Parker's words and persona up against folks like Browne and Springsteen and Gaye, he sidles up easily.
Enduring presence? On the other hand, the quality of Parker's output has declined more severely over the past decade or so than that of his contemporaries, though he generally manages to come up with something listenable (if a little dull). He certainly hasn't damaged his rep too much, anyway—especially since he's always been one for the connoisseurs. (Side note: For some reason I can't think about Graham Parker without remembering this Hulk comic, which was named for a song off Squeezing Out Sparks. The brain connects things up in odd ways sometimes.)
Gram ParsonsYears Of Operation 1963-73
Fits Between Buck Owens and The Jayhawks
"A Song For You" by Gram Parsons
Personal Correspondence It took Ryan Adams to finally get me to break down and buy a bunch of albums I should've bought years ago. In my mania to track down Adams bootlegs and stray tracks back in the early '00s, I found his cover of "A Song For You" from the Gram Parsons tribute album that came out several years ago, and I listened to it a couple of times before I knew the source material. Around that same time, I re-bought The Byrds' Sweetheart Of The Rodeo—an album I'd gotten on cassette back in college and hadn't liked much at the time—and I finally began to piece together Parsons' philosophy of "Cosmic Americana," and to hear it not just for its influence on artists I liked better, but for its inherent quality. I think I'd been resistant to Parsons for so long because it takes a lot for respected country-inflected singer-songwriters to slip around the defenses I'd erected against them back in high school. (I've never had a huge problem with country music, or with singer-songwriters in the pop-folk mold, but guys and gals with acoustic guitars who limit themselves to a certain rootsy framework tend to irritate me for no rational reason. It's a rejecting-your-father sort of thing, I'm sure.) As much as I've subsequently grown to love The Flying Burrito Brothers and Parsons' two solo albums, I still wish they had a little more of the "Cosmic" and a little less of the "Americana." But I understand that Parsons was still in back-to-basics mode there in the early '70s, and that he likely would've expanded his vision had he lived long enough to do so. In a way, that's part of the wonder of his recording legacy: we can imagine where Parsons might've traveled, and we don't have to suffer the letdowns of lousy reality.
Enduring presence? For better or worse, Parsons is the godfather of alt-country, both in terms of its emphasis on retro-twang and its once-removed tales of despair and poverty. I both love him and curse him for that. But mainly I'm pissed at Parsons for dying so young, and I'm glad that Ryan Adams hasn't gone out the same way. (Yet.)
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