Thomas Dolby's Autobiography

A friend of mine sent the following email to me a few weeks ago:

Thomas Dolby did the synth on Waiting??

He was referring to Foreigner’s 1981 hit, “Waiting For a Girl Like You,” and yes indeed, Thomas Dolby of “She Blinded Me With Science” fame played synth on the tune, including the intro that drummer Dennis Elliott categorized as “massage music.” In Dolby’s crafty autobiography, The Speed of Sound: Breaking the Barriers Between Music and Technology, he credits Foreigner with saving him from his stint performing for tips at Parisian Metro stations, though he admits that he was disappointed to learn that it wasn’t Mick Jones of The Clash who came calling. Instead, Dolby was whisked away to New York to record with Mutt Lange and the other Mick Jones, where he earned enough money to kick-start his solo career.

Before reading The Speed of Sound, I knew nothing about Dolby save for his big hit and for an erroneous belief that he or his family had had something to do with Dolby noise-reduction found on tape decks. It was actually the other way around. Born Thomas Robertson, Dolby acquired his nickname due to his propensity to play with gadgets that included a cassette recorder. In 1986, Dolby Labs actually filed for an injunction to prevent Thomas Dolby from using the name, and though the lawsuit was eventually dropped, Dolby took a financial hit that led to him to move permanently to California, where he spent the next two decades in the tech industry. A tinkerer at heart, Dolby formed his own company, first writing soundtracks for computer games and helping develop software that allowed nonlinear compositions to interacted with the user, then striving to discover ways to send music over the Internet in real time, ultimately achieving great success with ringtone software and content.

Particularly fascinating in The Speed of Sound is witnessing the technology boom through the eyes of someone living in the moment. Dolby is careful not to give us the benefit of hindsight: he places us squarely in the period when home computers and the internet were just beginning to flourish, websites were not entirely understood, and when tech companies were sprouting up by the hundreds, all hoping to stay ahead of the curve. No one was sure how it was going to play out, even bigwigs like Bill Gates. When Dolby attended a digital media conference in 1994, a guy named Marc Porat prophesied that one day PCs wouldn't be needed at all because “all your work will be in a sort of cloud.” Gates went ballistic. It would take a while, but Porat’s words proved prescient.

Though there were all sorts of discoveries for me reading this book (his playing with Bowie at Live Aid and with Roger Waters at the Berlin performance of The Wall), the most fulfilling one was learning of the English pop band Prefab Sprout, whose second album Dolby produced in 1985. I’d never even heard of the band before, never mind their music, but a quick listen on YouTube demanded that I buy the CD on eBay that same evening. It’s a gem.

Why isn’t such a great band better known? If Dolby were to summarize the reasons, he would probably say that the record industry “is rotten to its fucking core.” He takes us into the industry's underbelly, where money is laundered, artists are exploited, and support is taken away without notice. Dolby’s career as a recording artist was frustrating, though he managed to release four albums over a decade before finally calling it a day. Things looked bright for a moment when EMI released him from his contract and Virgin Records came calling, but six months later EMI purchased Virgin. Such was the music industry in the early 90s.

Unlike the Springsteen autobiography I just finished reading, Dolby devotes most of his writing to his career and eschews getting bogged down in his personal life, a wise move for an artist whose career isn’t as well understood as someone like Springsteen’s. Too many musicians and producers who embark on authoring a book don’t understand this, and for this reason most of their writings fall flat. Sure, for a megastar whose work you memorized long ago, you may want to know what makes him tick and learn details about his childhood and time away from music. For Dolby, it's enough to understand his journey from synth-pop hit-maker to a tech company founder (and now, a professor of music and film at Johns Hopkins).

It’s a great read. Highly recommended.

Springsteen's Autobiography

At various points while reading Bruce Springsteen’s recently published autobiography, Born to Run, I wanted to tell The Boss to relax. It’s only rock and roll.

Not to Springsteen. Rock and roll isn’t just his career – it’s his passion, his religion and path to salvation and redemption. When it comes to his music, he analyzes, he ruminates, he wrestles with, he composes and discards and rewrites and exerts energy that would exhaust a normal human being. Springsteen’s commitment to his music is inexhaustible, his drive indefatigable, his work ethic bordering on the obsessive, and he fully admits in his 500+ page book that his musical pursuits kept him from living a life for much of his first four decades. For Springsteen, his blessing is also a curse.

Not so for his fans, who now get to enjoy a book that benefits from the same commitment Springsteen applies to his music. There are two things about this book that make it stand out from among so many other musician biographies: first, the guy can write. No ghost writer required for this biopic. Springsteen effectively changes tenses, alternates between story and insight, offers a fairly chronological account of his life while still assembling topical chapters and is just self-deprecating enough to keep the reader rooting for him. (e.g., “I know I’m good but I’m also a poser. That’s artistic balance!”)

Second, Springsteen is an extremely curious person, eager to analyze his past, his surroundings, his parents, his bandmates, his storytelling, what music means to our society, etc., and as such opens up much more than many other musicians are willing to while never falling into the tell-all abyss. He doesn’t shy away from confrontations and weaknesses, but he’s also careful not to say too much. His well-known grievances with manager Mike Appel are mentioned but not dwelled upon, his at-times difficult relationship with Steve Van Zandt and Danny Federici are addressed without going into detail, and his first marriage’s demise is handled deftly and respectably.

Unlike, say, Keith Richard’s entertaining but shallow Life, or Elvis Costello’s coy, self-indulgent and muddled Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, Born to Run is both an exercise in good writing and in reflection. Consider the following description of how a snowstorm can make you feel. Where others might have simply said, “I love a good snow,” Springsteen writes:

No work, no school, the world shutting its big mouth for a while; the dirtiest streets covered over in virgin whites, like all the missteps you’ve taken have been erased by nature.  You can’t run; you can only sit.  You open your door on a trackless world, your old path, your history, momentarily covered over by a landscape of forgiveness, a place where something new might happen.  It’s an illusion but it can stimulate the regenerative parts of your spirit to make good on God and nature’s suggestion.

Nicely done. Yes, there are times when Springsteen’s ruminations get a tad tiresome, but I’ll take a book with too much reflection than too little any day. And while much of his book is about his troubled relationship with his father and Bruce’s own path to overcome some of the traits he inherited (including a forthright revelation about his own mental illness), the book is a fairly effective balance between Springsteen’s music and his personal life. I would have preferred a few more anecdotes about recording and performing. I imagine he could devote an entire book to such an endeavor, and perhaps one day he will, but as a musician I’m often confounded with how little musicians write about…well, MUSIC. 

Oddly absent are any mention of Springsteen’s 1991 releases, Human Touch and Lucky Town.  Every other album is discussed in some detail, but for reasons unknown, he doesn’t even mention the album titles or the process of composing or recording for them. He does reveal how disappointed he was that 2011’s Wrecking Ball album didn’t reach the audience he’d hoped for, and concludes that “In the States, the power of rock music as a vehicle for [political] ideas had diminished.” That may be true, but probably more important was the fact that Wrecking Ball, as I’ve written before, was a bore. Bruce’s writing simply hasn’t progressed that way it has for, say, Paul Simon, Jackson Browne or Joe Jackson.

One high point of the book is a short chapter devoted to his performance at the 2009 Super Bowl, an event that makes even Springsteen nervous. “It’s not the usual preshow jitters or ‘butterflies’ I’ve had before. I’m talking about ‘five minutes to beach landing,’ Right Stuff, ‘Lord, don’t let me screw the pooch in front of a hundred million people’ kind of semiterror.” This chapter more than any other helps us see performing through Bruce’s eyes.

He writes, “It was a high point, a marker of some sort, and went up with the biggest shows of our work life. The NFL threw us an anniversary party the likes of which we’d never have thrown for ourselves.” The show was only two weeks after President Obama’s first inaugural address. The feelings of excitement, of rebirth and celebration were in the air. It’s hard to imagine this type of feeling emanating from any performer these days. Lady Gaga did a fine job last night at Super Bowl LI, but times look bleak, our capacity for celebration diminished.

In, 2009, Springsteen ended his Super Bowl performance with "Glory Days.”

Glory days, indeed.

Yes by Any Other Name

It’s gotta beat Steve Howe and four other guys calling themselves Yes.

On Saturday night in Chicago, former Yes-men Jon Anderson, Trevor Rabin and Rick Wakeman – along with bassist Lee Pomeroy and drummer Lou Molino – performed two hours of Yes music at the a three-quarters full Chicago Theater, and judging from the audience response, this was the version of Yes they preferred. Wakeman in particular has long-claimed that any Yes without frontman Anderson is no Yes at all, though there are probably some who say the same of guitarist Steve Howe, who continued to tour last summer under the Yes moniker even after Alan White suffered a back injury. Perhaps one day Howe and Anderson will perform on the same stage together, though it’ll have to be soon: Anderson is now 72, and Howe 69.

Balancing the setlist nicely between long-time Yes favorites and songs from the Rabin-era, the transition from prog-rock to pop and back again at times felt jolting, but it also kept the concert from falling under its own weight of self-importance. The group performed four songs from Yes’s resurgent album 90125, one from 1987’s Big Generator (“The Rhythm of Love”) and one from Union (“Lift Me Up”), which allowed Rabin to shine in more familiar territory. Oddly absent were any songs from 1994’s Talk, an album many Yes fans believe is underrated. (I am not one of them.)

Beyond that, the setlist consisted of many of the usual favorites, along with two songs I’d never seen performed live before – a shortened “Perpetual Change” and “Heart of the Sunrise" – and the concert pinnacled with an extended performance of the already monumental “Awaken” from Going for the One, clocking in at close to 20 minutes.

The band performed well together, with drummer Molino approaching the songs with the same rock-oriented technique of Alan White, and Pomeroy doing a terrific job imitating the deceased Squire, including a terrific bass solo during “The Fish.”  But the standouts for me were the voices of not only Anderson – whose vocal chords should one day be donated to science – but of Rabin, who sounded as strong and clear as he did when I last saw him perform 32 years ago.  The newly-added song “Changes” off of 1983’s 90125 allowed him to showcase his chops, and I was surprised to hear him deftly hit the high notes during the bridge. Anderson had to at times choose an alternate melody to the original (the first bridge of “And You And I”), though he seemed to be able to summon his high tenor voice when it counted most.

Wakeman sported a Cubs t-shirt underneath his signature cape – a wardrobe that might have warranted groans were it not for his well-known comedic nature – and surrounded himself with a keyboard setup that wouldn’t have looked out of place in 1972. I counted eight keyboards, including two Minimoogs, which is really kind of silly in this day and age, but there’s no denying his ability and influence. Still, to my ears, he’s a keyboardist who overplays, muddying mixes that would otherwise sound crisp and clean (and I can't stand the synthy-piano sound he prefers to the real thing), which is why it’s probably best that he wasn’t a part of the 80s Yes lineup. There were times in the show when I wanted him to stop playing so I could hear a signature Rabin or Squire lick, though I did notice that the mix from where I was sitting in the balcony was less clear than just one section to my right, so some of the what I heard might have been attributed to poor acoustics more than Rick’s playing.

Rabin primarily handled the licks of Steve Howe well, though there were times when I missed Howe’s subtleties, such as the intro and breakdown of “And You and I,” and the jazz-influenced solo of “Perpetual Change.” Rabin is a different type of guitarist, and Anderson told him from the get-go to approach the songs in his own way.  Mission accomplished, and largely successful.

I suspect this will be the last time I see any of Yes’s members perform, be it under the name Yes, ARW, GTR, Bruford-Moraz or otherwise. I saw some semblance of Yes perform in 1984, 1985 (Bruford-Moraz), 1986 (GTR), 2001, 2002, 2004, 2008, 2011 and now 2016, not officially as Yes, but in my book Yes by any other name is still Yes.  It’s been a hell of ride for these prog-rockers. Perhaps someday soon it can culminate with an induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The Music of 1971

In David Hepworth’s Never a Dull Moment: 1971 – the Year that Rock Exploded, the author makes a case for why the year is “the most creative, most innovative, most interesting, and longest-resounding year of that era,” and it’s a pretty darn convincing case. Sure, we all think that the music of our pivotal years is the best. I get a kick out of reading comments on Youtube for music that was released just fifteen years ago (“This song reminds me so much of my childhood!”) and there remains a special place in my heart for the years 1978 through about 1983 (don’t make me pin down an exact year), but Hepworth claims “there’s an important difference in the case of me and 1971. The difference is this. I’m right.”

Certainly no one can deny the incredible output of 1971. Carol King: Tapestry, Yes: The Yes Album and Fragile, The Who: Who’s Next, The Rolling Stones: Sticky Fingers, Rod Stewart: Every Picture Tells a Story, David Bowie: Hunky Dory, Joni Mitchell: Blue, Bill Withers: Just As I Am, Van Morrison: Tupelo Honey, Pink Floyd: Meddle, Nick Drake: Bryter Layter, Marvin Gaye: What’s Going On, Led Zeppelin: Led Zeppelin IV, John Lennon: Imagine, Genesis: Nursery Cryme, Elton John: Madman Across the Water, Harry Nilsson: Nilsson Schmilsson, Don McLean: American Pie, The Doors: L.A. Woman, Badfinger: Sraight Up, James Taylor: Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon, and on and on.

Pretty impressive stuff. Hell, I just went through the list, and even though I was only three years-old during the release of most of these records, I actually own seventeen albums from 1971, not to mention a few compilations with songs released from that year. I doubt I own that many albums from any other single year since. (Though I'd have to check. Hmmm...sounds like a fun challenge).

And this is part of the author’s case: that the releases of 1971 “have proved to have lasting appeal,” as many of the artist are still around, playing bigger venues today than they did nearly fifty years ago, and many of the songs still resonate with young listeners. The output of 1971 may not include your favorite albums of all-time, but you can’t argue against their lasting influence. My three kids and I played a mini concert in my back yard last summer, with each of us choosing one song to play. My son surprisingly picked Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” while I chose Carole King’s “I Feel the Earth Move.” Sure enough. Both 1971. My daughters and I saw The Who (or half of them, anyhow) last year, the concert culminating in the rousing 1971 anthem of "Baba O'Riley," and my son the drummer has familiarized himself with Bonham’s work on “Rock and Roll” and “When the Levee Breaks.” For many artists, 1971 epitomizes their peak. (The author writes, “If all we knew of David Bowie was what he did in 1971, it would be more than enough.”)

I assumed Never a Dull Moment would be little more than a month by month listing of each released album along with a few pages about the recording and popular reaction, but it’s much more in-depth than that, delving into topics such as radio marketing, record stores, record labels and management, and Hepworth even does a nice job of anchoring his prose in the world events that were happening at the time.

And the prose is excellent.  Fresh off the heels of reading music producer Glynn John’s book, Sound Man, I was pleased to return to legitimately good writing. (John’s can produce, but the guy most certainly cannot write). As an example, here’s a sentence about how in a year when a Beatles greatest hits album didn’t even exist, bands began to learn about the lure of nostalgia, most notably The Beach Boys with their album Surf’s Up, which would mark the beginning of celebrating the style that first propelled the band into stardom in the mid-60s, and which wouldn’t stop for the next forty years. “But as one unmemorable album follows another from premature acclaim to the bargain bin of history, each auspicious beginning is followed by the familiar flatness, each round of press interviews and TV appearances gives way to faint embarrassment as the new songs are dropped from the set list never to return, we in the audience increasingly identify with the line that makes a popular T-shirt slogan at festivals – ‘Play some old.’”

Nice! I don't agree with the sentiment, as I've always favored bands who've continued to create music worth listening to (Rush, Jackson Browne, Joe Jackson, James Taylor, etc.), but it's hard to argue against the massive nostalgic success of Elton John, The Rolling Stones and The Who, as they continue to tour year after year in front of more and more fans playing the same old songs. Hepworth writes: "At the time, 1971 didn't feel like a particularly exceptional year. The habit of looking back, which is now so much a part of the music media game, and of which this book is a part, hadn't been invented." But the seeds of nostalgia were sown. On the last day of 1971, Bob Dylan joined The Band on stage and announced his last song, a composition he hadn't performed in years. Hepworth writes: "Then, as he would do for the rest of his life, he launched into 'Like a Rolling Stone.'  Heritage rock was born."

Karl Ove Knausgaard's "My Struggle"

When Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was released two years ago, I had the good fortune of reading a Time magazine piece that compared the film to a book by a Norwegian author named Karl Ove Knausgaard.  Not just a book, but a 3600-page, six-volume autobiography called – oddly enough – My Struggle, (you gotta wonder if they came up with a different title for the German translation).  I socked away this little bit of information for future use, and lo and behold, while at a used bookstore in Bayfield, Wisconsin in July, I happened upon the first volume of Knausgaard’s opus and thought that for nine dollars I should give it a go.  I’m glad I did, and though I likely won’t be reading volumes two through six, I enjoyed the first volume (or the first 300 pages or so, anyhow) not only for what the author illuminates about his life, but for the way his words inspired me to consider my own life journey.  If you’re ever in want of stopping the routine of daily living, of taking a moment to self-reflect, to remember and to wonder – in the words of David Byrne – “Well, how did I get here?”, My Struggle would be a good place to start, as it holds back nothing: not a sentiment, not a doubt or desire, not a transgression or dejection, and likely not a single conceivable detail about the physical surroundings of the author's childhood.

Arthur Miller once wrote: “The writer must be in it; he can’t be to one side of it, ever. He has to be endangered by it. His own attitudes have to be tested in it. The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.”

It seems Knausgaard has no qualms whatsoever of walking on the beam of embarrassment and revealing the seedy underbelly that is his life (and is all of our lives if we’re ever to be truthful).  He writes about his daughter, “(She) can be so cheeky that I completely lose my head and sometimes shout at her or shake her until she starts crying…”  This is not something most people would admit to unless they’re discussing a past that they’ve now recovered from.  My Struggle is not one of those books.  It reveals the gory details of living.

Have you ever closed your eyes and tried to conjure up a detailed mental image of the home where you grew up?  The colors.  The texture.  The scents.  The layout.  Was the toilet of the first floor bathroom on left or on the right?  Was that the room with flowered wallpaper or the little green design that always reminded you of a military seal?  Was the floor linoleum, wood or tile? 

Knausgaard has thought through all this and more, and so much of his reminisces brought to life my own childhood.  His crush for a girl named Hanne and the desires she summoned (“There was nothing between us…but I loved her.  I didn’t think of anything else…I saw her all the time, not in a scrutinizing or probing way; that wasn’t how it was, no, it was a glimpse here, a glimpse there, that was enough”) recalls my own childhood crushes to a “T”.

Or this!  Knausgaard writes about two childhood memories that may as well have been describing my own:  “At a certain point in childhood my most exciting game was building dams in streams, watching the water swell and cover the marsh, the roots, the grass, the rocks, the beaten earth path beside the stream” and “Another fantasy I had at that time was that there were two enormous saw blades sticking out from the side of the car, chopping off everything as we drove past.”  Holy crap.  That was me.

Knausgaard was born the same year I was, and though from a different country and with a very different family makeup, his life has so many similarities to mine, and – if the half a million sales are any indication – to many other people’s lives as well, that reading it is both externally engrossing and internally revealing.

The difficult relationship Knausgaard has with his father and brother and the distance between them (“We never touched, we didn’t even shake hands when we met, and we rarely looked each other in the eye”) could be describing my own complicated kinships.  His intense desire to warrant his father’s approval is palpable: “I had also wanted to show him that I was better than he was.  That I was bigger than he was.  Or was it just that I wanted him to be proud of me? To acknowledge me?”

Then there’s his description of alcohol, the substance that had killed his father: “This was a magic potion we were drinking.  The shiny liquid…changed the conditions of our presence there, by shutting out our awareness of recent events and thus opening the way for the people we normally were, what we normally thought, as if illuminated from below, for what we were and thought suddenly shone through with a luster and warmth and no longer stood in our way.”

My Struggle is an autobiography, but novelized so that details are described and words are spoken that the author assuredly couldn’t testify transpired exactly as he recounts.  But he puts them in there, sometimes with excruciating detail:

               “Here’s your Coke,” I said.  “I’ll put it on the table.”

               “Fine,” he said.

               “What have you got in that bag?” Grandma said, eyeing the paper bag from the pharmacy.

               “It’s for you,” I said.

Most authors would have summarized this exchange: “I returned home with the Coke and gave Grandma her medication” or something along those lines.  Many editors – me included – would have told the author to back off from the dialogue that does nothing to move the story forward.  Knausgaard must have a very special editor indeed to have let things stand as he wrote them, and I wonder if much editing was done at all.

It’s the mundane stuff of life – the same “stuff” that I’ve mentioned in previous posts such as my review of the play “The Flick,” of the documentary series “Seven Up” or of Joe Swanberg’s movies – and the mundane stuff is actually very interesting.  Living is interesting.  And if captured by a skilled writer, it can even be a page-turner. 

I did lose patience with the second half of the book, much of it devoted to Knausgaard and his brother cleaning up their grandmother’s home in the wake of their father’s death, but up until about three-quarters of the way through, I was sold.  Volume two may not make it into my itinerary, but it clearly has for others.  The book has been translated into at least fifteen languages and has been uniformly praised.