May 9, 2013 On Music Small Wonders By Matt Domino You may never have heard of the Small Faces—and that’s perfectly acceptable. There’s a terrible, thirty-minute documentary about the band that you can watch on YouTube, but I don’t recommend it. However, any music fan will tell you that they were one of the greatest and most underrated bands in the history of rock and roll. At their loudest, the Small Faces could rumble and crash even better than the Who. At their slyest, they could preen and knowingly wink with the best of the Rolling Stones. And underneath it all was an intelligence and creative streak that was downright Beatles-esque. Plus, they had Steve Marriott’s lead vocals, which in the late sixties (before they were later wasted in Humble Pie) were perhaps the best and most evocative instrument in rock and roll this side of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar. Needless to say, this all added up to quite a formidable group, one that was capable of making unique and memorable music, which is exactly what the Small Faces did in the spring of 1968 when they released their psychedelic masterpiece, Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake. Read More
March 14, 2013 On Music Blue Eyes in Watertown By Matt Domino No one under the age of fifty really listens to Frank Sinatra anymore. Like anything else, there may be exceptions to this fact, but overall it’s true. Frank Sinatra is a legendary artist whose work will always be enjoyed and referred to. However, his era of direct relevancy is obviously long gone, and his era of anecdotal relevancy is starting to fade. We associate Frank Sinatra with a bygone era of America, a time of guys and dolls, a time when people would swing and dance and when the lounge singer was king. Sinatra’s unique talent was maintaining this vision even as it eroded away over time—to make you feel old-fashioned feelings in a modern era. Sinatra’s heyday was from the late forties to the late fifties, yet he recorded “New York, New York” in 1977. And “My Way” makes you feel like a proud man looking over the skyline of post–World War II Manhattan, even in 2013. Still, Sinatra’s most overlooked achievement is perhaps the one album he made that did not feel as though it was evoking the era he loved or knew the most. In 1969, the same year that Frank Sinatra recorded “My Way,” he released an album called Watertown. Chances are, even some of the biggest Sinatra fans—like my grandparents and great aunts and uncles—have forgotten about Watertown. But Watertown is Frank Sinatra’s best album and his most enduring contribution to American culture. Read More
December 27, 2012 On Music Things Behind the Sun By Brian Cullman We’re out this week, but we’re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2012 while we’re away. We hope you enjoy—and have a happy New Year! Just past Tandy Crafts, a dark, unlovely store on the corner of Thirteenth and Sixth Ave, there was a door that led to the shop’s basement and storage area. Down there, tucked between the boiler room and the janitor’s closet, you could find the editorial offices of Crawdaddy. I was there because Rolling Stone was in California, because Hit Parader was no longer interesting, and because Downbeat was incomprehensible. Crawdaddy was the only other music magazine I’d heard of, and it had the advantage of being in New York. It also had the advantage of not having a listed phone number, so I couldn’t be turned away unseen. In my pocket I had two stories I’d written for my school paper. One was a review of John Fahey’s Days Have Gone By, the other was an appreciation of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Neither was more than a few hundred words, and I’d probably spent more time tracking down the address of Crawdaddy than I had in writing them. But there I was. It was the middle of April, in 1970, and all was right with the world. Read More
December 17, 2012 On Music Freedom and Light By Brian Cullman I saw Ravi Shankar at Carnegie Hall in 1966 or 1967. Because of the Beatles, of course. And I learned so much about music from that one concert. Not that the lesson stayed with me; it wasn’t like that. But it set me up for hearing music in a different way than I was used to (that is, as pop songs on the radio, as 45s on my record player, as the songs we sang at camp about the cat coming back or your heart going where the wild goose goes, or, worse, much worse, as the moth-eaten songs from musicals on Broadway). The first half of the concert was endless and dull, nothing but a couple of notes played over and over, like a foreign cuckoo clock gone mad. And then, an hour in, it all changed. And time stopped. The notes began to form a pattern, and the pattern grew more and more beautiful, like a house materializing from thin air, rising out of nothing into the most glorious vista, a home and a garden and hope and love and time, spread out before me. Read More
December 13, 2012 On Music They Say It’s Wonderful: Hartman and Coltrane, an Appreciation By Matthew Kassel Over the past month or so, I have listened to John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, one of the greatest jazz vocal albums ever made, about once a day. I haven’t tired of it, which is a testament to its durability. But I think there’s more to it than that. I discovered John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman about four years ago, and it continues to enchant me. The album—composed of six slow yet easily digestible romantic ballads—may contain the most beautiful half hour of music I have heard on one CD. I’m not trying to idealize the record. But I’m not alone in feeling so strongly. Writing in Esquire magazine in 1990, Daniel Okrent named John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman the greatest record ever made. Okrent admitted such a claim “is a fragile limb on which to walk.” But he stood firm. “If you want to argue,” Okrent wrote, “forget it; having listened to John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman for some fifteen years, I simply can’t be moved.” Read More
November 26, 2012 On Music Escapades Out on the D Train By Adelaide Docx Going to a Bob Dylan gig these days requires a certain sort of mindset. Worship, obviously, but also a readiness not to see or hear anything pleasant for two hours. The greatest fan of Dylan I have ever met wears earplugs during his concerts. And Dylan’s voice on his latest album occasionally sounds terrifyingly close to a death rattle. Last week, by way of preparation for a performance at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center my friend put himself on an expectation-suppressing diet of the worst ever Dylan tracks. “I listened to ‘Let’s Stick Together’ from ‘Down in the Groove,’” he reported, “Awful. Just dreadful, and the worst CD sound imaginable. Loved it!” Brooklyn was Dylan’s last stop on a thirty-three city U.S. tour. And moments into his first set, he had us all wondering once again what we were doing there. As if to underline this question, a mirror was set up, front of stage—face-out. Without any sort of greeting, Dylan entered under his white brimmed hat and croaked “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” indecipherably from behind the keyboard. Only one word really came through: “Whoo-ee!” The earplugs went in next to me, the crowd dug in—silent, enduring. It looked like we were in for another terrible night, but as the song advanced one detected a devious energy in the delivery, a hint that he could give better. And he did—a lot better. Old songs in new arrangements sounded as though they had just been written, and details to which he gave focused articulation, seemed alive with fresh experience. “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”, drained of bitterness and self-pity, was sung with mischief, and gentle curiosity. Lines like “You could have done better / But I don’t mind” became almost forgiving. In a haunting rendition of “Visions of Johanna,” he brought immediacy to the smallest fragments of narrative, singing of the room where “the heat pipes just cough” as though he’d just come from a small cramped apartment in the Village. And even when Dylan misses a line, it can seem palpably present to a fan in the grip of aural madness. In the same song, I thought I heard him whisper of “escapades out on the D train” as vividly as though he might have taken the D train to the Barclays Center that evening, but Earplugs (can he lip read Dylan?) turned to me moments after and said, “Skipped a line”. Read More