January 2015 - Page 5 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

My favorite music: an iteration

I’m not at all sure what constitutes progressive rock.

Over the years, you’ve mentioned songs and albums you loved, and you’ve shared various rankings, or, at least, lists. Do you have a personal “Top Ten” of songs, and is it static or ever-changing? Both songs and albums, by the way.

The easy part to answer is that the lists are ever-changing.

Let’s try the songs:

10. You Won’t See Me-The Beatles.
I realized in the last five years that it is the Mal Evans sustained chord on the Hammond organ throughout the last verse, last chorus, and outro that gives this McCartney song a special buzz.

9. Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow – Carole King
Featuring the Mitchell-Taylor Boy and Girl Chorus. This arrangement practically begs for a cappella singing. From Tapestry, which I played so much, I wore out the LP.

8. River – Joni Mitchell
For lots of reasons, this reminds me of my late friend Donna.

7. Neil Young – Harvest Moon
Dancing in the living room with someone I loved.

6. Crying- Roy Orbison And k.d lang
Better than Roy by himself. And reminds me of the same past love.

5. John Hiatt – Have a Little Faith in Me
A key song on a mixed tape I made for my now-wife.

4. Billy Joel-Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel)
Lots of songs about loss here. I heard an a cappella version of this, which was lovely.

3. Roberta Flack – Gone Away.
This song, part of the group of songs I used to play when love went south, really builds after the 1:30 mark, with instruments (a painful guitar line, and is that a tuba?) plus mournful vocals that feature the late Donny Hathaway.

2. I Only Have Eyes For You – the Flamingoes
My first favorite song.

1. God Only Knows – The Beach Boys
Brian and Carl Wilson pray together before the recording, and it’s almost palpable. The BBC version has only enhanced by feeling for the original.

Interesting that 7 of the 10 were in the Top 10 last time I did something like this, in 2008, and nine of the ten were in the Top 25.

Not sure I ever made an album list that crossed the decades, though. I had a 1950s list, 1960s list, and a later list or two. I’m reminded of the fact that the album lists I DID make were constrained by the fact that I couldn’t pick the greatest hits albums. No such problem now!

On the other hand, this list is suspect. I accept the albums ranking from the 1960s, which I evaluated thoroughly. The 1970s has so many GREAT albums that, if I bit the bullet and actually looked at a list, some might rank higher here; ditto the 1980s. But this is a blog, not a dissertation, so I shan’t sweat it much.

10. Jesus Christ Superstar (1970)
The source of a lot of theological discussions in my circle of friends.

9. Speaking in Tongues – Talking Heads (1983)
The album that came out around the time I saw them live.

8. Sly & the Family Stone – Greatest Hits (1970)
Features two or three songs that hadn’t been on an album to that point. A tremendous collection.

7. Who’s Next – The Who (1971)
Listened to this incessantly, even last decade.

6. Talking Book – Stevie Wonder (1972)
I could have picked any of those Stevie albums from this one through Songs In The Key of Life, but this one asserts his sonic independence.

5. Peter Gabriel (3 -Melt)- Peter Gabriel (1980)
The one with Games without Frontiers and Biko. When I thought of the top albums for 1971-1980, there were two sure things; this was one of them.

4. Beach Boys: Pet Sounds (1966)
It’s pretty much perfect from beginning to end. Paul McCartney gave copies to all his children as an example of great music.

3. West Side Story soundtrack (1961)
Seeing this movie was transformational. But it wasn’t just the story, it was the music.

2. Still Crazy After All These Years – Paul Simon (1975)
This was a breakup album for me. It remains an important album for me. I wrote about it HERE.

1. Revolver – The Beatles (1966)
From a kiddie tune (‘Yellow Submarine’) to painful songs about loss (‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘For No One’), a most eclectic album.
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Jaquandor wants to know:

Prog rock. Are you a fan or not, and if so, which bands?

I’m not at all sure what constitutes progressive rock. Sure there’s Procol Harum, Yes, King Crimson, early Genesis, ELP. But I looked on the list and also found The Beatles, Todd Rundgren, Deep Purple, ELO, Queen, Renaissance, all of which I own, and none of which I would have thought of.

But yes, I like it, especially Yes and King Crimson, both of which belong in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Rod Stewart is 70

The album I found most unpleasant was Rod Stewart’s 2009 release, Soulbook.

I have this like-meh feeling about singer Rod Stewart, who turns 70 today.

A couple of his early albums I own. Gasoline Alley [LISTEN] features the great Bobby Womack soul classic It’s All Over Now and a nice cover of Elton John’s Country Comfort.

Then he released the near-perfect album Every Picture Tells A Story [LISTEN] in 1971. Side two of the LP was extraordinary, with the #1 hit Maggie May, Mandolin Wind, the Motown hit (I Know) I’m Losing You, and closing with Tim Hardin’s Reason to Believe.

The title of his third album with the Faces, A Nod Is As Good As a Wink… to a Blind Horse, made me laugh. It featured the hit Stay With Me [LISTEN], which went to #17 in 1972.

I enjoyed some of his subsequent hits, such as You Wear It Well. But I wasn’t that big a fan of the period that included Tonight’s the Night and Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?, let’s just say, and I mostly didn’t pay much attention to him subsequently.

Something that singularly did NOT interest me was which blonde woman he was dating or married to at any given time, a topic of seemingly endless fascination by others.

By the 21st century, he was still putting out songs. But from 2002 through 2010, he started releasing tunes from The Great American Songbook, something lots of singers, from Linda Ronstadt to Paul McCartney have done. They were pleasant albums, what I heard of them.

The album I found most unpleasant was his 2009 release, Soulbook. It was covers of his most successful era, the 1970s, but, to my ear, he brought nothing new to the table; I thought it was ironically soulless.

Here are 144 minutes of what someone dubbed the Greatest Songs of Rod Stewart.

You might see Rod riding the NYC subway. He was recently sued for reusing an image of the back of his head.

MOVIE REVIEW: Interstellar

In Interstellar, reading the dust, literally, Coop makes a startling discovery and eventually flies off into a mysterious rip in the space-time continuum.

Now THAT’S how I like to see a movie: knowing almost nothing. I’d heard Interstellar had gotten some decent reviews and that it ran almost three hours (actually 166 minutes).

In Albany, it was playing both at the Spectrum, only at noon, and at my neighborhood Madison Theatre, at 3, 6 and 9:35 p.m., on the last Tuesday of 2014. If you knew my spouse, you’d know the latter was totally off the table, even though she didn’t have to work the next day.

The Madison at 6 it is. They show no previews, so the patrons haven’t figured out that when the overlay comes on that says the title, it’s time to be quiet.

There’s Matthew Matthew McConaughey playing Coop, a farmer in a near-future United States which is about to experience some nasty combination of the Ireland potato famine of the 1840s, as crop after crop fails; and the Oklahoma Dust Bowl of the 1930s, with precautions against the dust a way of life.

Coop is widowed with a couple kids, easy-going 15-year-old Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and Murph (Mackenzie Foy), an intense, intelligent 10-year-old girl. The kids have limited prospects, limited dreams in the new economy, epitomized by one sentence from Coop: “We used to look up to the sky and wonder about our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.”

In the early part of the film, the most chilling dialogue takes place between Coop and a pair of “educators” (David Oyelowo, Collette Wolfe) who have criticized Coop for letting Murph read unauthorized books rather than the revisionist history.

Reading the dust, literally, Coop makes a startling discovery, after which he leaves his two kids in the care of his father-in-law (John Lithgow) and eventually flies off into a mysterious rip in the space-time continuum with Brand (Anne Hathaway) – daughter of a noted scientist (Michael Caine) – and with others in a desperate effort to save the earth’s inhabitants.

It goes on like that, space travel, with much talk about time and gravity and how it affects all the other dimensions, and some occasional action, both in space and on the home front.

Interstellar also stars Casey Affleck, Matt Damon, and a whole lot of other folks, with essentially a cameo by Ellen Burstyn.

Then I realized I have no idea how to review this movie, at least without a lot of spoilers. So I am going to cheat and paste reviewers’ observations:

*As a singular movie-watching opportunity, it’s undoubtedly worthwhile. – Christy Lemire (negative review)

*Having set out to be a journey into what can hardly be depicted at all, Interstellar must find oblique ways of suggesting further imperceptible dimensions of the real. It is worth the journey to see what [director and co-writer Christopher] Nolan has constructed as a model of the unknowable. – Geoffrey O’Brien (positive review)

*A combination of spectacular special effects, marginal physics, and grindingly slow treacle. – Ron Wilkinson (positive review)

*Interstellar may be a preposterous epic, but it is an epic nonetheless. – Christopher Orr (positive review)

These are all accurate assessments of my feelings. I will say that Jessica Chastain as the grown-up Murph is very good. I thought the third hour was better paced, and more interesting, than the second, which could have used a 10-minute edit.

Bottom line: I’m glad I saw it, I wouldn’t watch it again, and I’m unsure whether to recommend it. The Wife liked it much less than I, but she was more confused by the science, or pseudo-science, while I didn’t worry greatly about the details.

I do think this will look worse on home video because the viewer will quite possibly get bored and give up on it.

Elvis Presley would have been 80

I like the historical reference in the Elvis song: “No such zone.”

As I’ve noted before, my father really hated Elvis. He resented this white artist stealing/exploiting/ profiting from performing black music. (But then half of the musicians in the ’50s and ’60s from Pat Boone to Led Zeppelin “borrowed” from black music). So I never owned any Elvis music as a child or teenager. Still, I did like some of his songs. So I watched the ’68 “comeback special” and became grudgingly, a mild fan.

I’ve written about Elvis a few times. But I never pegged my favorite songs because he would have turned 70 after I started this blog. The chart action refers to the Billboard (US) singles charts.

12. Blue Suede Shoes (#20 in 1956)- great song by Carl Perkins, but I prefer his original, which might have made Perkins a bigger star if he hadn’t gotten into a serious car crash.
11. Are You Lonesome To-night? (#1 for 6 weeks in 1960) – I’m not that fond of songs that involve people talking. This is one exception, mostly because “You know someone said that the world’s a stage And each must play a part” always cracks me up. “Someone” said? That was Billy Shakes!
10. All Shook Up (#1 for 9 weeks in 1957) – particularly love the vocal delivery: “Well-a bless-a my soul”

9. Suspicious Minds (#1 in 1969) – Elvis in his comeback mode being relevant.
8. A Little Less Conversation – with JXL (#50 in 2002). I had never heard the original from the 1960s, which was a minor hit.
7. Don’t Be Cruel (#1 for #11 weeks in 1956 with Hound Dog) – the opening guitar lick and the backup singers make this for me.

6. Love Me Tender (#1 for 5 weeks in 1956). There’s a traditional song called
Aura Lee from which this tune was stolen; at some level, I appreciated the audacity of that.
5. Return to Sender (#2 for 5 weeks in 1962). This is the period I really started discovering Elvis. And I like the historical reference in the song, “No such zone”, just a year before ZIP Codes were implemented for delivering mail in the United States.
4. Little Sister (#5 in 1961). I might have heard a cover of this first and tracked it back to the original.

3. Heartbreak Hotel (#1 for 8 weeks in 1956) this is SO much a blues piece. Listen to the guitar line.
2. Hound Dog (#1 for #11 weeks in 1956 with Don’t Be Cruel). Poor Elvis got to sing this to an actual hound dog on Steve Allen’s show. I always appreciate a great cover, and this take on Big Mama Thorton’s song is transformative.
1. Jailhouse Rock (#1 for 7 weeks in 1957). I’m sure my affection has as much to do with the choreography from the movie as the song’s appeal.

Looking for the reset button

Had a really good time during the Christmas/ New Year period, which I will write about soon. Temporarily forgot about the backlog at work- more on that down the road.

Already sad about the death of Mario Cuomo, which I wrote about, I did get a bit irritable about some of the commentary from the political left that his actions didn’t always match his rhetoric. As this article suggests, Cuomo knew that politics is the art of the possible. Or as Cuomo put it: “We campaign in poetry but we govern in prose.”

Then, when I got back home, I hear of the death of fellow choir Jimmy Rocco, who I knew and liked; wrote about THAT.

I’m sitting in church Sunday listening to the joys and concerns, when someone noted the sudden death of Sonny Hausgaard on January 3. Did I hear that name right? Yes. Sonny was a member of the board of the Friends of the Albany Public Library, over which I preside. His wife was a friend of one of our church members. This is the first time I looked in the newspaper obits and saw TWO people I knew personally.

Also, I was musing over the death of Edward Brooke on January 3, “the first African American elected to the U.S. Senate by popular vote and the first Republican senator to call for the resignation of President Nixon over the Watergate scandal,” who died Saturday at the age of 95. “Upon his arrival in Washington, Brooke automatically achieved a number of social firsts, according to his memoirs, integrating both the Senate swimming pool and the Senate barbershop.”

More significant, for black people across the United States, he became “their” unofficial senator when he took office in January 1967. When their own representatives were unresponsive, often because of the vestiges of racism, they well might contact the junior senator from Massachusetts.

I was also saddened, far more than I expected, by the passing of Stuart Scott, the ESPN anchor who brought a “hip hop attitude” – ESPN’s words, not mine – to sport commentary. He was only 49 when he died on January 4. Watching a bunch of grown black men, usually, former athletes such as Cris Carter and Keyshawn Johnson, holding back tears, saying that Stuart let them know they had a role model so that they could be themselves, was surprisingly affecting. I had not realized that this was Scott’s THIRD bout with cancer, going back to 2007.

Instead of dealing with stuff I should have been addressing – paying bills, ABC Wednesday stuff, Black History Month organizing at church, Olin reunion, library lobby day, etc. – I was e-mailing the Friends to make sure they knew of Sonny’s death, planning to take off Wednesday morning (today) for Jimmy’s funeral, and in general, feeling more than a little discombobulated.

I may just throw the first week of 2015 on the 2014 bonfire and start anew. Perhaps I need to look at those good news sites Arthur was talking about, but suddenly I haven’t got the time. Hmm, feel like I’m crankier lately in this blog; this Alberta clipper cold snap (blame Canada!) we’re currently experiencing does NOT help.
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Bess Myerson died back on December 14, though it wasn’t revealed until recently. I knew her best as a panelist on the game show I’ve Got A Secret, but she came into prominence as the first Miss America who was Jewish. She wouldn’t change her name to something less “ethnic”; I always admired that. She had later difficulties in NYC government and in her personal life, unfortunately.