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.
"Get It Together" by James Brown
Towards the end of James Brown's 1967 funk workout "Get It Together," Brown starts passing out instructions to his band, letting them know when to hit him and how hard, until finally he instructs the men in the booth to fade the track out because he has somewhere to be. When I first heard "Get It Together" back in my college apartment with my three roommates, all of us just about collapsed on the floor in delighted laughter. "Get It Together" was the coolest thing we'd ever heard, and we were wowed by everything about it, from Brown's complete command of his crackerjack unit to his off-the-cuff, stream-of-consciousness approach to cutting a record. The song seemed to be utterly alive.
Musicians have long-strived to convey just how much pleasure they get from messing around and exploring. One of the things I like best about Dennis McNally's A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History Of The Grateful Dead is the way it covers the band's struggles to find audio equipment advanced enough to make their albums sound as intricate as a live show, and their live shows sound as clear as an album. As much as critics and fans like to use words like "overproduced" or "thin-sounding" to describe a recording, we sometimes forget that an album is just like a photograph, a film, or a journal entry, in that it preserves a time, a place, and a thought. And sometimes that time and place comes with its own not-so-perfect sound.
That's why for so many bands—and quite a few of their fans—the ideal for a record is for it to sound plausibly live, even if it means putting all the players into the same well-baffled studio at the same time and then rolling tape. Some go even further, preferring the spontaneity of improvisation and freeform jamming, because they want to capture a moment that can never be repeated. There are plenty of fans dedicated to collecting every Dead bootleg or Miles Davis session, because they know no two will be exactly the same, and they want to commune with artists by hearing exactly what was going through their heads—and instruments—at any given minute on any given day. Is this version angrier? Looser? More playful? Does it break down at some point, and feature someone barking orders at someone else? If you want to understand how musicians think, obsessively poring over alternate takes and live shows can help.
But there's an alternate school of thought that says all these ephemeral recordings are just rough drafts, never meant to be given the same attention that one should give the final work. I have some qualms about the Wilco documentary I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, but I'm sympathetic to the scenes where Jeff Tweedy is going out of his head trying to figure out which of the multitude of potential approaches to the songs on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is the "right" one. I'm sympathetic because I appreciate that he wants there to be a "right" one. He wants to release a definitive version that delivers everything that the song has to deliver. (Or at least he felt that way then; Tweedy and Wilco have since loosened up to such an extent that their most recent album Sky Blue Sky is almost just a blueprint for the more expansive and freeform live shows that have followed.)
In the documentary Freestyle, The Coup rapper Boots Riley talks about how much he admires people who rap off the top of their heads in battles, but how he feels obliged to write his rhymes down and get them as tight as he can. There's a certain nobility to that. If you're leaving a song behind for posterity, why not make an effort to perfect it, right down to scripting the solos? Isn't that more respectful to the audience and to the art?
Yes, you sacrifice some of the spark of instantaneous creativity the more you "produce" a record. But a heavily produced, carefully planned out song can generate some effects that a live, loose approach can't. Veteran Nashville musician/producer/writer Jay Joyce introduced his short-lived, not-that-lamented band Iodine in the thick of the grunge era, pursuing a heavier, trippier rock sound than he'd gone after in bands like Bedlam and In Pursuit. The results didn't exactly set the world afire, but Iodine did record one really good song on their debt album Maximum Joy:
"Flyboy" by Iodine
"Flyboy" is all about its apocalyptic atmosphere, which can only be roughly approximated live—if only because it would be hard to get the vocals to sound so whispery in concert, over such loud guitars. As a composition, "Flyboy" is merely okay. If Joyce had recorded an acoustic version, it would've sounded slight, but basically fine. If he'd turned it into a funk/reggae vamp and asked his band to play on until he told them to stop, that might've been fine too (depending what kind of groove he laid down). But it wouldn't have been this "Flyboy," which in all its machine-tooled shimmer is exactly the song it needs to be.
I'm of two minds on the subject of jamming and naturalness, because I too like to romanticize the idea of a fleeting moment of inspiration, preserved forever. And I agree that sometimes overthinking a song or a solo can drain its vitality. But what if the musician is, by nature, an overthinker? In that case, if they put out a fussy record, they're being as true to themselves as any free-spirited noodler. And that's an important thing to preserve too.
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Pieces Of The Puzzle
Iggy Pop
Years Of Operation 1963-present
Fits Between Jim Morrison and Screamin' Jay Hawkins
"Sixteen" by Iggy Pop
Personal Correspondence When I first started getting into punk and New Wave in the mid-'80s, a lot of underground rock's old guard were still around, but struggling to adjust. Genre godfathers like Lou Reed, David Johansen and Iggy Pop regularly released records that had little of the oomph or edge of their proto-punk classics, and on the rare occasions that I heard them on the radio or saw them on Saturday Night Live, I had hard time connecting that version of them to what I'd read in the rock history books. Remember: these were the early years of the CD era, and a lot of labels had let some of their lower-selling catalog titles fall out of print while they focused on getting their bigger sellers ready for CD. So it wasn't always easy to find legendary cult albums in stores. My first exposure to Iggy Pop—aside from David Bowie's versions of "China Girl," "Tonight" and "Neighborhood Threat"—was the 1986 album Blah Blah Blah, which I won in a radio station giveaway and generally enjoyed, even though it so awash in mid-'80s synthetics that it sounded nowhere near as rabid and untamed as I imagined Pop to be. I finally worked my way back to the real Iggy Pop at the end of the decade, via a circuitous route that involved reading some persuasive Pop appreciation in separate collections of Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs articles, hearing The Blake Babies' cover of The Stooges' "Loose," and finally finding used vinyl copies of The Stooges, Fun House and Raw Power for about 15 bucks each (which was a lot for a used record in those days). Even now, post-grunge, those Stooges records sound rough and sludgy in the best way, offering the Midwestern primitive variation on West Coast heaviness, dosed strongly with urban nihilism. For anyone who doesn't understand why the gracious, grinning, skeletal freak who now appears in movies and on talk shows was once regarded as a potentially dangerous rock 'n' roll maniac, all it takes is one cranked-up spin through "T.V. Eye" or "Shake Appeal," and suddenly history comes to life.
Enduring presence? As mighty as The Stooges are—and trust me, I'll be revisiting them when I get to "S"—my favorite Pop album is his solo effort Lust For Life, which bears traces of David Bowie's late '70s Euro-decadence, while remaining every inch a rock 'n' roll record, propelled by the bounding rhythms of the Sales brothers and Pop's most poetic meditations on drugs, sex, violence and that hollow, lost feeling. If I were forced at gunpoint to name my personal Top 10 albums, I'm pretty sure Lust For Life would be on it. And if I had to distill what rock means to me in five words, they might well be "Sweet sixteen in leather boots."
Interpol
Years Of Operation 1997-present
Fits Between Joy Division and The Chameleons
"Evil" by Interpol
Personal Correspondence I welcomed Interpol warmly when they rumbled out of New York's neo-underground scene at the start of the '00s, because the idea of aping 20-year-old post-punk records hadn't yet devolved into the glut, repetition and creative bankruptcy that would undo the movement in less than two years. About Interpol's debut album, I wrote:
The Walkmen, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Radio 4, French Kicks and The Strokes spend perhaps too much energy recreating old sounds, but they've also revivified the past, interpreting it through their own distinct personalities. Ditto for Interpol, the latest New York act to crank up the echo. The morose quartet's debut LP Turn On The Bright Lights earns the inevitable Joy Division comparison, though Interpol has a lighter lilt to their bass and percussion, and the two guitarists' chiming patterns set the band off on the kind of positivist exploration that the grimly minimalist Joy Division wouldn't have cared to attempt. Lead singer Paul Banks has a heavy, anguished vocal style, and sings cryptically bitter lines line like 'friends don't waste wine when there's words to sell,' but uptempos dominate Turn On The Bright Lights, and Interpol's virtue is the way their music unfurls from pinched openings to wide-open codas. The album's highlight of highlights, 'Say Hello To Angels,' kicks off with separate stabbing guitar riffs and a freight train drumroll before breaking into a spry, bass-driven bit of alt-pop, reminiscent of The Smiths and Brian Eno; by the time the song ends with an extended rolling drone, what had seemed initially chilly and obsessive reveals a surprising versatility.
The argument against Interpol with each of their two subsequent albums has been that they haven't really grown much. Which is true. But in a way they've been perfecting their shtick, and for me at least, Antics and Our Love To Admire have shown a steady improvement. With each new Interpol record, I find myself thinking that I overrated the previous one, and that now they've gotten it right.
Enduring presence? What do you do with a band that keeps making the same record over and over, only slightly better each time? Are they bereft of ideas, or just Glorious Crackpots?
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