The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

I’ve written before about the multitude of “must-see” TV shows recommended to me over the past decade and a half during which the Heinz household has been cable-free. It didn’t matter what show we tried to catch up on: Six Feet Under, Weeds, The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Downton Abbey, Mozart in the Jungle, Newsroom…without fail, my wife and I watched no more than a season and a half and moved onto other endeavors, like attempting to stay awake long enough to say, “Well, at least I made it to 9:30 before hitting the sack.” And maybe our not watching TV is more telling about where we are in our lives than in the actual quality of entertainment, but as I wrote before, so much of television today is so mean-spirited – the meaner the show, the better the critiques, when all I really want is a few compelling characters and a couple of laughs – that I’ve been watching more of Bob’s Burgers than anything else these days (and if you haven’t seen this animated masterpiece, consider it – I laugh out loud as much at this show as I did with The Simpsons in its heyday).

Mozart in the Jungle showed promise. A show about musicians? Sign me up! But as so often happens with TV, the part of the show that I found interesting (music and musicians) took a backseat to other plot points (the conductor's unappealing and completely unbelievable ex-wife). Like a corporation that forgets its core competencies, this show forgot its essence in the span of one season.

NBC’s This Is Us started off with a terrific first episode, spanning decades and tying it all together perfectly with a fantastic plot twist that I never saw coming, but dang, they sure like to pour the saccharine on thick, don’t they? It’s a day-time soap showing in prime time. No thanks.

Alas, my wife and I may have finally found our show. Yes, we’re only three episodes into Amazon's The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, but it had me from the first scene, when there was finally – FINALLY – a character who I liked from the word go. Rachel Brosnahan’s portrayal of a recently abandoned Jewish housewife and mother of two who unexpectedly finds herself pursuing the life of a stand-up comedienne is so compelling, as a viewer you’re rooting for her immediately. Add actor Luke Kirby playing real-life comedian Lenny Bruce and excellent veteran actors like Kevin Pollak and Tony Shalhoub (whose series Monk also interested me, except my wife didn’t dig it), and you’ve got a show with some serious promise.

Like some of Aaron Sorkin’s material, the dialogue in Mrs. Maisel is sometimes too smart for its own good. In episode 2 the character of Susie Myerson speaks so quickly and eloquently (and incessantly) that it’s hard to keep up (and it’s also not very believable), but at least it isn’t dumb like – for example – The Big Bang Theory. The number of historical references in a short scene in episode 3 are difficult to keep track of if you’re not already up on your history, but I fortunately watched the film Trumbo last year and already knew of Joel and Ethel Rosenberg. And some of the colloquialisms are anachronistic. The third episode has Midge Maisel remarking, “It is what it is.” That’s not just out of place in a 1958 conversation, it’s lazy writing. But perhaps that’s the price you pay for creating a comedy set sixty years ago that’s expected to entertain 21st Century audiences. After all, comedy can be tough to appeal over time, though oddly, the real material from Bob Newhart and Lenny Bruce that's highlighted in the show is as funny and innovated today as when it first debuted.

After watching the first episode, I thought that Mrs. Maisel had no chance of attracting a mainstream audience, but earlier this week both Brosnahan and the series itself won Golden Globes, virtually guaranteeing another season. Unless the writers really go off the rails and have Kevin Pollak and Tony Shalhoub starting a meth lab in an RV, I’ll be watching.

The Cold Streak

In the midst of the cold spell affecting the upper Midwest last week, I mentioned to a few friends that it felt like the longest such streak since my second year at the University of Minnesota during grad school. Sure enough, the results are officially in, and it was indeed a streak to be reckoned with. According to NBC Chicago, in northern Illinois we experienced 12 daytime highs of lower than 20 degrees, the first time this has happened since 1936. It brought to mind the thrilling winters of my childhood that I love to boast about. Twenty years from now – if we’re lucky – we may recall fondly the winter of 2018, though from our lips the streak will likely be twice as long and twice as cold.

I’ve written previously about the winter of 1994, when Minneapolis experienced 22 straight days below freezing and seven straight days below 7 degrees. I only owned one car then – my ’85 Tercel – which meant only one battery could die (and even that was more than I could comfortably afford). Flash forward twenty-four years, and this unfortunate owner of four cars had to take two of them in for new batteries. The most recently purchased car just arrived at my daughter’s apartment in southern California, where I believe it’ll live a much happier life.

Four years ago Chicagoans experienced another cold winter – the third coldest on record – with temperatures reaching below zero on 26 days, breaking a hundred year-old record and keeping children home from school for several days. The biggest plus about this year’s cold streak is it occurred during the two weeks that kids had off from school, and as result there will be no days tacked on at the end of the school year. Then again, we all went a little stir crazy, and I believe the entire family is glad to be back on schedule this week.

There are a few (million) morons out there, who insist that because of these cold winters, it clearly means that global warming isn’t occurring, much like if your body experiences ninety percent third-degree burns, you can claim no harm done due to the other ten percent being perfectly healthy.  

Would that it were so.

One need only go to yesterday's news to find evidence offsetting the recent cold streak here, as Sydney, Australia experienced a high of 117 degrees fahrenheit, its hottest day since 1939.

Are Spine-tingling Musical Discoveries Over?

Robert Plant recently said of the constant request to reunite Led Zeppelin, “magazines and internet platforms should be supporting new music” rather than clamoring for reunions. A fair argument for a man who fronted the band over thirty-seven years ago (with a few one-off reunions since). His retort inspired me to investigate his recent output, and I’m listening to his latest album, “Carry Fire,” as I write this. And it’s fine. It might even be good. Plant has proven to be among the most versatile vocalists in rock history, but there’s nothing about his new music that’s shaking me down to my soul, imploring me to listen. 

It’s not Plant’s fault. Creating something that screams “this is something you HAVE to hear” is getting harder and harder to achieve, and I’m beginning to think that music has largely played itself out. Everything that you’re able to accomplish using 12 tones has been achieved (check out The Guardian's article, Has Pop Finally Run Out of Tunes.). Classical music hit a wall in the 20th Century, giving way to Dixieland and jazz, giving way to blues and folk, giving way to simple rock followed by prog rock, breaking back down to punk, post-punk, new wave, giving way to rap and hip hop, electronic, etc. This isn’t to say that there isn’t good music being written and performed today – in fact, I’d argue that there may be more good music today than at anytime on the planet, simply because there’s SO MUCH to choose from – but I doubt that many current acts are breaking any new ground. I’m currently rehearsing songs for my tenth album, and while I truly like the compositions and think it’s going to end up sounding great, I’d be a moron to think that any of it is particularly inventive and not leaning heavily on influences of other artists.

“Ah-hah” moments – those spine-tingling revelations that grab you by the collar and assault you emotionally – happen few and far between for me these days, but they DO happen once in a while, most times in the car where most of my new music listening occurs. In 1980 Rush sang about radio’s “magic at your fingers,” and for me, this has certainly been the case, as I can recall several "Ah hah” moments in transit:

2016:  Heading north on York Road in Elmhurst, returning home from volunteering at a food bank, I tuned into WDCB playing “Porcupine Dreams” by the Danny Green Trio. It blew me away. I’ve written since about Green’s stellar album, Altered Narratives, but it bears repeating: listen to this recording!

2011:  In the parking lot at the mini-golf on Lake Street in Addison, I waited for my son to leave a birthday party when “Rolling in the Deep” by Adelle came on WXRT. Say what you want about Adelle, but the gal has chops. This song grabbed me by the gut and didn’t let go.

2009:  Driving to drop off the kids at Hebrew school on a Wednesday afternoon, WXRT played “Oscar Wilde” by a local band called Company of Thieves. Holy crap. Intelligent, sultry, angry, rocking, enticing - everything that I want in a song was there, and all in under five minutes.

1999: On my way to kill some time with my girls on a cold winter’s day, I took some extra time in the Lehigh Valley Mall parking lot as the disc jockey of Muhlenberg College’s WMUH played a song by a woman singing the lyric “I can’t breathe” over an infectious drum loop and haunting Rhodes keyboard. Unfortunately, this was pre-smart phone, so I jotted down what I could remember about the song and what time it was played. Upon returning home I called the radio station, by which time a classical guy was manning the radio booth. He was kind enough to go back to the previous jockey's song log and start rattling off song titles, eventually coming to the title “Here with Me” by an artist named Dido. That was it! One of the best songs of the 1990s. 

1995: After flying into Detroit, I borrowed my brother’s car to drive to Grand Rapids for a friend’s wedding, and on the way a very angry woman spouted off venomous words to a former lover. I needn’t have jotted down the song title or the woman’s name the way I did, as the song “You Oughta Know” by Alanis Morissette consumed the airwaves for the next six months and beyond. It was a game changer, and it was evident upon first listen.

1995: Just six months after the revelation of Alanis, I heard the pounding piano, falsetto voices and witty, sardonic lyrics of Ben Folds Five. Driving with my handheld recorder that I used to quickly document song ideas, I pressed record in case the DJ of WXPN didn’t announce the artist and song right away. I still own the tape today of the fantastic final thirty seconds of “Underground.” Four years later I was recording my own songs that were directly linked to that revealing day driving around in my crappy Dodge Neon.

Lately, I've been tuning into classical radio when I'm in the car. The songs I’m hearing on XRT are predictable and lifeless. The songs on classic rock radio are overplayed and cumbersome. Jazz on WDCB is hit and miss. But classical often provides the challenge my ears are searching for, something I wouldn’t have predicted just a few years ago. 

Where music goes from here is open to debate, but there will always be opportunities to discover “ah hah” moments - if not from new artists, then retroactively. Leaning on the familiar denies the spark of insight and emotional intensity that the soul seeks. Keep searching and once in a while you may find it.

The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock

David Weigel’s book The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock traces the arc of a semi-vague movement in rock history, devoting a good deal of space to the usual suspects of Yes, Genesis, Rush, Emerson Lake and Palmer, King Crimson, etc., while highlighting various bands who may have fallen under the radar for some listeners (me, for instance). If nothing else, the book provides a jumping off point to discover new music, but unless you’ve already submerged wholeheartedly into the waters of 20-minute long epics, this book will not wade you in gradually via the shallow end and let you get used to the temperature. You’re getting thrown into the deep end and will likely drown.

Weigel doesn’t hand-hold, so that when he delves into the history of chaps named Daevid Allen and Robert Wyatt – two people I had never heard of – he doesn’t give the reader the benefit of context. In the hands of a better writer, I would have expected a brief “…who would later form Soft Machine…” No such luck. Mercifully, a few pages later he applies this technique for Michael Giles, as “…the future drummer of King Crimson.”

But until the Weigel anchors the reader firmly in the 1970s and the bands that gained traction, the book is a bit of a mess, devoting a page to one band, then a page to another, so that it’s hard to find one’s bearings. The promising prologue is the only thing that kept me turning the page at first, but once we reached 1970, I was all in, finishing the book in just over a day (which, for me, is quite an accomplishment).

Once again, I had my handy streaming service next to me throughout the reading of this book, playing hours of music to see if any music struck a chord. Recognizing that I didn’t give compositions the same chance I would have had I shelled out $7.99 for an LP in 1980, here are some of my hasty conclusions:

1)     I hadn’t considered Procol Harum a prog rock band, and really, I hadn’t considered them at all. But after streaming through half an album, I’ve decided that I need to investigate them more fully (I'm listening to them as I write this blog). Aside from their breakout hit, “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” I have no clue, but I like what I’ve heard thus far.

2)     The funnest fact I learned was that the vocal/organ line of Yes’s 20-minute epic “Ritual” was sampled for a song by De La Soul called “The Grind Date.” Now THAT was something Jon Anderson couldn’t have foreseen back in 1973 as critics were panning the double album, Tales from Topographic Oceans (one of Yes’s best).

3)     The prog rock bands that hit the big time were likely the best, so give a hand to the masses for taste. I listened for a while to Soft Machine, Van der Graaf Generator, Gong, etc., and more modern bands like Porcupine Tree and Dream Theater, and none of them grabbed me.

4)     Given the inclusion of Gong, I was surprised that 10cc wasn’t given a brief shout-out, as the quirky nature of the music is similar. Styx too is mentioned only in passing on page 214, a little surprising given the content of their first several albums.

5)     Two additional bands that I’d like to investigate more are Hatfield and the North, and Gentle Giant. My ears perked up for both and I’ll need to add them to the list along with Procol Harum.

6)     A great deal of space is devoted to Robert Fripp, from his King Crimson output to his work with Brian Eno, David Bowie, Peter Gabriel and Daryl Hall, and I found both the man and his music to be insufferable. I’m not a fan of Bowie’s Heroes and Gabriel’s second album, and last night I listened to the Daryl Hall release Sacred Songs – terrible. And then I found a King Crimson concert recorded just last June from the Chicago Theater – a concert I actually considered going to until I learned that neither Bill Bruford nor Adrian Belew would be on stage – and I’m so glad I saved my cash. Aside from the song “Three of a Perfect Pair,” I guess I’m simply not a Fripp fan.

7)     As a vinyl purchaser, I’ve occasionally had a Jethro Tull album in hand before placing it back in the record bin (they tend to be pricey). After listening to Thick as a Brick in its entirety, I think I’m going to pass on this band. Aside from a few songs, they aren't my cup of tea. However, I have to give Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull a bit of a shout-out, as his 1980 description of why prog rock went out of favor is spot on:

Ten years ago, there was a great deal more flexibility and freedom both in radio programming and in terms of the record company policy, as to what they would take a chance on.

I agree, but the rise of the Internet and home recording studios of course changes all of that. As connoisseurs we can listen to anything we want whenever we want, and I imagine that aside from the terrible metrics that Pandora uses to crap out the same old shit time and time again, there has got to be access to interesting, innovative music at everyone’s fingertips. The trick is finding it. If I put in a Yes song in Pandora and press play, I’ll get the usual Genesis, Kansas, Styx and Rush – nothing that exposes me to interesting bands I’ve never heard of, including many of the bands explored in Weigel’s book. But I suspect if I were 20 years-old and cared more, I would find the music I was longing for.

For the time being, I’m going to go backward and explore some of the bands I missed the first time around. And then I’m going to put on Close to the Edge. Because really, it doesn’t get any better than that.

Joni Mitchell's Biography

Author David Yaffe is an unabashed Joni Mitchell fan, and his admiration oozes in nearly every paragraph of his 376-page biography, Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell. As a reader who knew little about Mitchell aside from her musical output from 1970 through the early 90s, I found this book to be an enlightening read that offered a glimpse into how Mitchell developed creatively, broke down barriers, explored new terrain, and how the difficulties she experienced in her personal life fed her art. Still, at times Yaffe’s love becomes overbearing, his writing devolving into a fawning fit of approbation.

Yaffe certainly knows his subject, and the book is buoyed by direct quotes from Mitchell herself, as well as many of her ex-lovers, fellow artists and friends, not to mention concert and album reviews from publications as Mitchell’s career unfolded. Fortunately, Yaffe doesn’t gloss over Mitchell’s less admirable qualities, allowing her cantankerous personality to barge through as she blasts the likes of Thomas Dolby, Joan Baez, ex-husband Larry Klein, and even her daughter, with whom she reunited thirty-three years after placing her up for adoption. The most revealing remark in the book may be from Klein, who concludes, “I think that the seed of the angry, narcissistic element of her personality was always there, but I think that it was a gradual process of that part of her growing, and the curious and joyful part gradually receding.”

Too many biographies are too thin on the creative process and too robust on private life (Daniel Lanois’s autobiography being Exhibit A), but Yaffe may be the first author I critique whose summary of an artist’s output becomes too much at times, especially as he describes Mitchell’s career of the late 70s that delved deeper and deeper into jazz influences and esoteric lyrics. When a subject’s lyrics are obscure, more grounded prose would be helpful, but some of Yaffe’s detailed analyses of Mitchell’s lyrics are as hazy as the source. Consider the following description of the final verse of “Paprika Plains” off of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter:

“Changing weather becomes changing rhythms. Now the disco ball is shining on the dancers, illuminated by an artificial globe. It’s a continuum. She’s still as ‘wide-eyed open to it all’ as she was when she was ‘three feet tall.’ Everywhere she looks, she sees patterns and makes poetic images out of them. Like a medicine ball, the mirrored ball is moving, yet it is also a center, like coming back to middle C. That mirrored ball shines on everyone.”

This kind of writing bogs the book down.

But there are other moments when Yaffe hits the nail on the head. When describing the effect that Mitchell’s reimagining of her classic song “Both Sides Now” in 2003 had on the orchestra and conductor Vince Mendoza, Yaffe writes:

“The arranger and the musicians were losing it, but Joni was smiling. She had them exactly where she wanted them. She knew she had achieved spectacular theater just by getting older and going back to a song people thought they knew.”

Simple and straight forward, but effective. 

The coolest tidbit I learned was that the line from Led Zeppelin’s ”Going to California” – “to find a queen without a king/they say she plays guitars and cries and sings” – is a reference to Joni and her first track off her first album, “I Had a King.” I wish I’d known this when I was a 12 year-old putz claiming Zeppelin to be the greatest band of all-time.

It’s funny that certain words stand out when reading a book, and in Reckless Daughter Yaffe’s love for the word ebullient is almost as apparent as his love for Mitchell. If I had a digital copy of the book, I’d do a quick count. And he refers to Mitchell on several occasions as a “goddess,” which – to me – reads over the top, as if he’s projecting his own fantasies with the younger Mitchell. That’s quibbling on my part, but there are meatier grievances, particularly those pages where Yaffe reveals his own prejudices. His blanket statement about 80s music being “the aural equivalent of fluorescent lighting” is, of course, ridiculous. Let’s not forget that in the 80s many of Mitchell’s peers released some of their best work: James Taylor, Paul Simon and Jackson Browne among them. Mitchell didn’t. It was her choice to follow trends, but there was nothing inherently bleak about the 80s music scene. Great music was there for the taking. Mitchell didn’t create much, if any. 

And Yaffe inexplicably critiques artists of that decade: “If Nietzsche was disgusted by Wagner, what would he have made of Hall and Oates, or Phil Collins? The slickness of the decade even plagued music that might have otherwise been good. The standards, in other words, were low, and the people were sheep.”

Ouch. Okay, Yaffe, you got your licks in, but I confess without shame: I would rather listen to 1980s Phil Collins – and hell, even 1980s Hall and Oates – over 1980s Joni Mitchell any day of any week of any year. Don’t blame these guys on Joni’s poor output that decade

Still, Reckless Daughter is a good read and it educated me on several blind spots I had regarding Mitchell’s discography. One habit I employ that I would recommend to anyone reading a book about music: have your streaming app handy. It took me a while to finish Mitchell’s biography because every other page led me to listen to another song on Napster, and there are some gems I hadn’t heard before, or at least hadn’t paid much attention to: most notably, “I Had a King” and my new favorite, “Roses Blue.”

Yep, those are old songs. What can I say? I’m a melody guy, and when it comes to heartfelt lyrics and melody, you can’t do much better than Joni Mitchell’s first decade of recordings.