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  • Respect Due: Crowded House

    crowded-house

     

    About two summers ago, I found myself in a place where if you’d have told me a year before that I’d be there, I’d have laughed in your face. Where was this place? At a Crowded House concert being held at a masonic temple in New York City. My disbelief wouldn’t have resulted from the location of the event, and it certainly wouldn’t have been because I dislike Crowded House. Quite the contrary, the New Zealand-based band has been a favorite of mine since I was a teenager., and their music has become more meaningful to me over the 20 or so years since. However, when the band split in the mid Nineties, the breakup had an air of permanence that I thought was never going to be breached. The exclamation point seemed to jump onto the end of Crowded House’s sentence when drummer Paul Hester committed suicide a couple years back. However, Neil Finn and company hit the road in support of 2007’s comeback effort “Time on Earth”, dedicating the tour to Hester’s memory, and that’s how I found myself in a corner of this temple, listening to the audience sing back the indelible chorus of 1986’s “Don’t Dream it’s Over” with tears streaming down my face. It was one of those transcendent musical moments that can’t be done justice with mere words.

    The music that Crowded House made  lends itself to those types of emotions very well. Their songs straddle that very thin line between happy and sad. Melancholy yet uplifting songs like “Better Be Home Soon”, “Distant Sun” and “Weather with You” should be standards-it speaks very strongly to the complete lack of taste most Americans have in music that they aren’t. Of all the songwriters and singers in the world who have had the tag “Beatle-esque” used in reference to them, Finn and Crowded House came the closest of any band to earning it. Finn and his brother Tim preceded (and foreshadowed) Crowded House’s excellent work as members of Split Enz and have continued together (they’ve recorded as a duo and Tim even joined Crowded House for a short time), separately and even via offspring-Neil’s son Liam released an excellent album, “I’ll Be Lightning”, last year.

    Maybe the best description of Crowded House’s music and its’ emotional impact comes from the liner notes of their anthology, “Recurring Dream”. Peter Paphides writes: “British humourist Spike Milligan once recalled how he was in the throes of a nervous breakdown. Alone in bed and crying uncontrollably, he noticed his baby daughter walking towards his bed, arms outstretched. In her hand was a glass of water. She wanted to give something. Something to make it alright. This was all she could find. A while ago, someone asked me to sum up the music of Crowded House. For some reason, I responded with that tale-perhaps because it was simultaneously the saddest and most uplifting thing I’ve heard”.

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  • Who Stole Thievery?

    Who Stole Thievery?

    No one doesn’t like Thievery Corporation. They’re funky, they’re groovy, they’re just plain cool. They flip basslines to the sitar, they trade the traditional drumset for bongos and wood blocks, and their sexy lounge rhythms could form the soundtrack of a jewel heist movie. They’re on my “top ten favorite bands of all time” list.

    It’s a sweet moment when you find out that a group you absolutely love is playing in your town. Especially if it’s Thievery. Even the long wait until showtime is sweet.

    They opened the sold out show with Lebanese Blonde, which they pretty much had to do given how many people saw Garden State. Even though it’s their most well-known song, it’s a legitimately great song – that sitar charms you like a snake.

    Thievery Corporation doesn’t just play a concert – they put on a real show. For the first fifteen minutes, I was literally agape at the sheer awesomeness of the spectacle: the slinky-scarved Persian dancer; the woman in what looked like a cross between a fairy costume and a French maid outfit; the guy jamming on the sitar; the block player; the bongo guy; the deadpan and afroed horn section; the bass player who danced and slid around in his socks; the DJ on an elevated stage behind them, at the top of the pyramid, lit from behind by a screen panel that dimmed until he looked like a god, illuminated and conducting this enormous orchestra. That was all sweet as hell.

    Then they started playing songs off their latest album, Radio Retaliation, and they lost me. This is by far my least favorite of their cds – Mirror Conspiracy is my favorite, with DJ Kicks and Richest Man in Babylon not far behind. Radio Retaliation marks the shift from groovy lo-fi to full on reggae.

    Thievery has been dabbling in reggae sounds for a while – some of the songs on the aforementioned wonderful albums explore Rasta sounds and slants, and they work because the voices and beats add layers to the grooves rather than hijacking them.

    It’s not bad music – I don’t think Thievery is capable of that. Objectively, it’s decent reggae/dub, complete with laudable anti-war, anti-Bush themes. The guys who performed these songs dressed in white pressed pants and navy blue overcoats. They’ve got dreadlocks and damn, can they move. The problem is that they sounded more like Fela Kuti than Thievery. They sounded almost ordinary.

    Regardless of their song choices, Thievery has an amazing energy that vibed really well with the crowd at the House of Blues.

    So hey, the Boston House of Blues is open! It moved from Cambridge to Fenway, where Avalon used to be. It’s bigger than Avalon – apparently it can hold about 3,000 people (it didn’t seem like there were that many people, but the third level of the place is reserved, so I have no idea how many people can fit up there. I hear there’s bleacher seating).

    I hung out on the second level, where the Aztec and black and white paintings make it feel like a museum. Water costs $4. The bathrooms are big and clean. The sound system thumps and envelops without ever reaching a cringe-inducing volume, and the lighting verges on psychedelic. The floor was so jammed that people had to settle for collectively swaying, but a little dance party up on the balcony wing. An impressive venue, all things considered.

    The line up is impressive too. George Clinton played the night after Thievery, and there are dozens of other big names in rock, blues, and alternative music on the calendar. The downside is that HOB is owned by a subsidiary of Clear Channel, which makes me feel like a sellout, but I figure that selling out in the name of experiencing great live music is sometimes necessary and always forgivable. Right?

    Thievery put on nothing short of a fantastic show. I just miss the old days when they went to town with a sitar, some horns, and a block of wood, and showed us all what it meant to get down and funky.

  • FORTY-FIVE REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE #27: Sleepy Doctors

    Laurie Anderson's classic single "O Superman"

    LAURIE ANDERSON  “O Superman (For Massenet)”  b/w “Walk The Dog” (Warner Bros. Special Products #49876, 1981)

    On the rare occasions big publications canonize women in rock, Laurie Anderson usually gets stuffed down near the 100 mark, if not left off completely.  This is because few rock listeners were ever really able to understand where she was coming from (be it the pop world, the art world, or the pop art world), and understandably so.  It’s far easier for the average listener to laud Janis Joplin, in all her bluesy, boozy, downtrodden and junked-out glory, than the highly-educated and eloquent Anderson, oozing early-’80’s downtown New York cool and bony, quasi-masculine elegance.  Considered extremely minimalist even by post-punk standards, it seemed Anderson’s music was approached on the outset, as now, with a sense of fear and trepidation.  Astounding when you consider that, when all is said and done, Anderson is ultimately a storyteller, a master of the most ancient art in the world.

    Play O Superman (For Massenet) by Laurie Anderson

    “Have you heard that song?” a school friend asked when we read that “O Superman” had hit the top of the charts in the UK, “It’s just one note!” Well, maybe it is.  But once you’ve absorbed (or should I say been absorbed into) the full scope of this eight-plus minute track, you can see that it’s far more than just a one-note samba.  Paraphrasing a concept from Jules Massenet’s 1885 Napoleonic opera Le Cid and crafting a sonic bed inspired by the shimmering vocal cues from Phillip Glass’ Einstein On The Beach,  Anderson, clearly mirroring Cold War and Middle Eastern tensions, creates her own all-enveloping, claustrophobic universe in which a simple phone-call invokes the end of the world.  Of course, the machine is on and no one’s home.  Sound familiar?  Of course it does.

    Laurie Anderson's "Walk The Dog"

    Now, if all that sounds like a bit too much for you, just flip this disc (which plays at 33 & 1/3 RPM, by the way, obviously to allow for the lengthy A-side;  a 12″ version was also pressed, which spins at 45 RPM) and enjoy the gleeful, cacophonous “Walk The Dog.”  I may be incorrect, but I believe I once heard Anderson herself describe this track as a “country song,” which makes sense when you consider that it is a fiddle-based piece that both namechecks and paraphrases Dolly Parton, but holy shit…no country song ever sounded like this before.  Or since.  Can you imagine some Kellie Pickler-type trying to pull this off on America Idol?  I’d actually tune in.

    Play Walk The Dog by Laurie Anderson

    Both “O Superman” and “Walk The Dog” were parts of a bigger piece of Anderson’s titled United States I-IV.  Other highlights from that performance were boiled down to form 1982’s brilliant Big Science LP (learn about its recent reissue, plus Anderson’s current doings, here), a record so unique and mesmerizing that it has never left my turntable for very long over the past 27 years.  I’ve even heard little bits and samples from it pop up in electronica and hip-hop, which makes me think that younger generations are going to continue to discover Laurie Anderson, and will probably place her name higher in the future pantheons of rock.

    NEXT WEEK: Enjoy every sandwich.