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.
"Rock 'N' Roll Will Never Die" by King Missile
When Louis Prima's act opened at The Sahara in 1956, he quickly went from being a has-been big band leader to arguably the hippest musician in the country, combining brassy pop, swinging jazz and gritty rock 'n' roll, while playing off his two foils: energetic young saxophonist Sam Butera and deadpan southern belle (and Prima's wife) Keely Smith. Over the course of a single show at The Sahara's cramped lounge, Prima and company would clown around, sing songs that played off Prima's Italian-American heritage (and his reputation as a jive-talking rogue), and gradually work smartly dressed tourists into the kind of frenzy that helped cement Vegas' reputation as an adult playground. Other Vegas headliners—Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, most prominently—would finish their sets and go check out Prima, who did four to five shows a night, typically wrapping the last one around dawn. When the swing and Vegas revivals rolled around in the early '90s, Prima's style and sound naturally came back into favor, as young people across the U.S. tried-to co-opt the antique "with it" attitude of songs like "Just One Of Those Things" and "Jump, Jive & Wail."
But what the neo-hipsters may not have realized is that Prima—like Sinatra, Elvis and others in The Vegas Generation—already had an element of nostalgia built into his act, even in the late '50s. Prima had become a star in the '30s and '40s, first by following the lead of Louis Armstrong and making his New Orleans origins a centerpiece of his music, and then by pumping out jokey hits perfect for the novelty-happy radio of the post-War era. So by the time he arrived in Vegas, Prima was as much of a relic of a bygone age as the acts that call the Strip home today. People who remembered him from a decade ago would pack The Sahara, expecting to hear all the goofy hits they danced to as teenagers, delivered in Prima's signature patois of outdated hepspeak and goombah jokes. And Prima would oblige, while slyly updating the old standards for the nuclear age.
"Lazy River" by Louis Prima, Keely Smith, Sam Butera & The Witnesses
The history of popular music can be described as a series of links in a chain, though those links don't always follow one after the other. Sometimes musicians jump back a few links and start another chain, tethered to the original one—and sometimes they jump back a few links and just stay there. Prima did both. He jumped back to the big band era and started a new chain that eventually looped back to the original one, connecting at the junction marked "rock 'n' roll." And then he stayed in that loop for the next two decades, until he died.
Other bands have taken a different approach. After pioneering an especially gritty and hooky brand of garage rock, The Kinks started looking backward, drawing on English music hall and pastoral traditions, and reflecting on the culture that made them. Their music stayed relatively fresh and modern, but there was a new awareness to The Kinks' songs in the late '60s: a sense of the past leaning heavily—almost oppressively—into the now. It's a mode Ray and Dave Davies would return to throughout their career, even in their late-period hit "Come Dancing," a song that comes off like a cutesy novelty number at first, then reveals a surprising depth of sentiment.
"Come Dancing" by The Kinks
The Kinks were part of an unorganized movement towards nostalgia that began to develop towards the end of the '60s. Whether it was The Band or Bob Dylan with their "down home"-isms, or the post-Bonnie & Clyde boom in vintage fashion, or even Sha Na Na, there seemed to be a willingness in the '60s generation, as the times got crazier, to return to a perceived simplicity. And that need persisted in the '70s, with American Graffiti, Happy Days, and (arguably) punk rock; and in the '80s, with The Stray Cats, Linda Ronstadt and Nelson Riddle, and Taco (among others). Call it nostalgia, call it homage—the pining was palpable.
In the '90s though, the rules of retro began to change, largely due to the emergence of alt-country and the aforementioned swing revival. Musicians either became so meticulous in their recreation of the past that they sucked all the joy out of it, or so tongue-in-cheek that their motivations were suspect. Or, in a few cases, they found some theretofore under-explored niche in popular music and settled in, building miniature kingdoms on property that few visited. That was the case with The Ladybug Transistor, a Brooklyn outfit who joined the wave of psych-pop revivalists in The Elephant 6 Collective, but quickly diverged from the garage-y leanings of the E6-ers and found their bliss in the pristine, pastoral pop of The Free Design and The 5th Dimension. There's absolutely nothing innovative about the best Ladybug Transistor albums (which would be 1999's The Albemarle Sound and 2007's Can't Wait Another Day, by the way), but it's impressive how purposefully bandleader Gary Olson can shift his head to another era and reconstruct a bygone style. He's building the homes he wants to live in, and giving guided tours.
"Six Times" by The Ladybug Transistor
Then there are those who, like Louis Prima, recycle the old into something shiny and new—and with wild imagination. Kurt Heasley's 15-year-career as the frontman for the band Lilys has seen him shift from My Bloody Valentine-style shoegazer noise to indie-rock clatter and spacey dream-pop. Then he discovered the Elephant 6 collective and took his own stab at neo-British-Invasion homages, beginning with the 1996 album Better Can't Make Your Life Better, and continuing on the EP Services For The Soon To Be Departed and the oddball major label effort The 3 Way. Unlike his E6 peers, Heasley has reinterpreted garage-rock the way a cubist might paint a bowl of fruit. His stream-of-consciousness lyrics rarely rhyme or even follow a common pattern, though those patient enough to wait out his familiar-yet-maddeningly-alien idea of pop are rewarded with triumphant moments of cohesion. His best songs sound like all the music from a typical Shindig episode, shattered and bent around a brittle, non-linear short story.
"The Energy Channel (Tayt Variation)" by Lilys
The danger of retro as a stylistic choice is that it after the initial pleasure of revisiting the past, the music can start to sound limited, or silly, or—worst of all—pointless. They trick is for artists to convey the personal affection and attraction they have for old music, and to make it their own. Or the trick is to be a Louis Prima, with a personality and a will so outsized that people enjoy what you're doing even when they don't know they're being slyly, oh-so-subtly toyed with.
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Pieces Of The Puzzle
King Missile
Years Of Operation 1986-present (sort of)
Fits Between Jonathan Richman and Bongwater
"Take Stuff From Work" by King Missile
Personal Correspondence Through little fault of their own, musicians who lean heavy on humor in their acts tend to draw some obnoxious fans; the likes of They Might Be Giants, Weird Al and Frank Zappa tend to attract people who distrust the pandering elements of conventional pop music, and therefore gravitate to those who subvert and mock. But that's never really been the case with John S. Hall and his on-and-off outfit King Missile—perhaps because the King Missile fanbase has never been large enough to grow especially rabid. Hall had one fluke hit—"Detachable Penis"—during that narrow post-Nirvana window when nearly every known entity in the alt-rock universe got a tumble from mainstream radio and MTV. And King Missile songs were a staple of college radio from '88-'92: "Jesus Was Way Cool," "Cheesecake Truck," "My Heart Is A Flower" and "Martin Scorsese" in particular all got a lot of play, not just because they were funny, catchy songs, but because they proffered a real point of view. Hall's stage persona was part naïf, part prophet, and when he proselytized about the enduring power of rock ("Look at Def Leppard! Drummer's got one fucking arm!…Look at Guns 'N' Roses! Need I say more?") or the necessity of workplace theft ("Why buy a file cabinet? Why buy a phone?… I took a whole desk from the last place I worked. They never noticed. And it looks great in my apartment."), his sense of whimsy and masterfully faked sincerity at once satirized and affirmed the nascent slacker lifestyle. He never skewered me and my friends any more than we'd skewer ourselves.
Enduring presence? Hall left King Missile behind to finish his degree and become an entertainment lawyer, but he's assembled new versions of the band a few times over the past decade for mini-tours and largely ignored albums. I confess I haven't kept up with King Missile since college, but I was impressed this week by how well the records Mystical Shit and The Way To Salvation hold up. They have what novelty music needs most: replay value.
Kings Of Leon
Years Of Operation 2000-present
Fits Between The Marshall Tucker Band and The Wedding Present
"King Of The Rodeo" by Kings Of Leon
Personal Correspondence Some of my fellow Tennessee music scribes have been a little annoyed by the rapid ascendancy of Kings Of Leon, who seemed to have a major label deal and an overseas fanbase before they'd even gained any traction in the local scene. I think some of my colleagues were also annoyed by a backstory—part of a traveling evangelist family, barely exposed to rock 'n' roll—which didn't really jibe with Kings Of Leon's roots-rock proficiency and frequently raunchy lyrics. Me, I found Kings Of Leon fascinating from the start, and especially when they began to branch out into post-punk and pop on their second and third albums. About the practically flawless 2005 LP Aha Shake Heartbreak, I wrote, "Lead singer Caleb Followill carries on like Mick Jagger in his sassy/sad 'Miss You' guise, while his brothers and cousins bash out simple riffs halfway between Velvet Underground at their grubbiest and Black Flag at their bass-driven hookiest. The band sounds lean and limber, ready to spring, rolling from call-and-response spirituals to whip-crack boogie on 'Pistol Of Fire,' shooting laser-pulsing guitar riffs across rapid-fire square-dance calls on 'King Of The Rodeo,' building a song out of a single long, low groan on 'Milk,' and letting bongos cushion the second-generation UK tropicalia of 'Soft.' Aha Shake Heartbreak fuses gutter-rock fury and sex-obsessed adolescent pop, serving as a reminder of how the punk kids of the '80s were able to embrace The Smiths and Social Distortion simultaneously. Meanwhile, Kings Of Leon's sudden disinterest in conventional song structures either serves as an admission that the band lacks the chops to compete with the deep-fried, corn-crusted arena rockers it once emulated, or is a bold expression of the power of deconstruction. By letting a song peter out rather than end properly, maybe Kings Of Leon is signaling that rock 'n' roll only needs the good parts of songs, and doesn't need verses and bridges as an excuse to get to them. Or maybe the band just doesn't know any better." Then, about 2007's edgier Because Of The Times: "Kings Of Leon's journey into deconstruction continues on album number three, which contains 13 songs that don't sound like 'songs,' per se, but more like bridges, codas and reprises, cobbled together into one long mood piece. Because Of The Times follows its own eccentric muse, at its own fitful pace. It takes its cues from the opening song, 'Knocked Up,' a slow-simmering, seven-minute meditation on a life in transition, steeped in echo and potential."
Enduring presence? When I wrote a couple of months ago about the contemporary southern rockers I have the most faith in, Kings Of Leon were squarely on the list. I'm not so sure I trust the legends spun around them myself, but I don't much care, because to me they represent the future of the genre (if you can call it a genre): The Followills write personal songs with an undisguised regional bias, and they've shown an eagerness to grow. They're not purists. In the 21st century, purists won't do.
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