A to Z Music Challenge

On the podcast 1000 Greatest Misses, co-host Chris and I submitted the following music challenge to our listeners: you’re sent to a desert island and are allowed to take with you the recordings of only 26 artists - one for each letter of the alphabet. Who do you choose? This challenge comes courtesy of my daughter and her partner who needed to kill some time while driving through Indiana last Thanksgiving. And what a great time suck it was!

Chris and I were delighted by the number of responses we received from listeners, further proving the point that although people aren’t always willing to tackle the pressing issues of our times, they will happily piss away a few hours on a completely frivolous endeavor! We thought it would be helpful to include everyone’s picks in one place so that they might inspire further investigation. There are tons of choices of artists I’ve never even heard of, much less listened to, and I hope to check some of them out in the days ahead.

For me, I stuck to rock and pop and didn’t go down the jazz or classical rabbit holes. Some letters - B, C, J, P, S - were exceptionally difficult, while others - G, N, O, Q, U, Y - were absolute no-brainers.

Consider coming up with your own choices before perusing the lists below. Please ignore misspelling, and please don’t shoot the messenger when it comes to entries that should have been disqualified (Elvis Costello as an E entry, for example); Chris and I didn’t catch some of these as they came pouring in toward the end of our podcast challenge. Also, consider checking out author S.W. Lauden’s Substack where he addresses the same music challenge. And yes, I am aware than Ken was messing with us when he chose acts like USA for Africa and Pia Zadora. All good!

Five Power Pop Gems

One of the benefits of co-hosting the podcast 1000 Greatest Misses has been getting introduced to music lovers whose knowledge far surpasses my own. It can be humbling, to be sure, but also exciting, because I get to broaden my understanding of music and some of the people who’ve made an impact on the industry. Last June, my podcast partner Chris and I were privileged to interview S.W. .Lauden, not only a killer musician and uber music fan, but also an accomplished author whose Substack Remember the Lightning explores power pop and indie rock in fun, creative and informative ways.

On his Substack, Lauden has an on-going series called ‘Is It Power Pop?!” in which special guests recommend five great power pop tracks that music fans should be aware of. I had the pleasure of submitting this week’s entry, and I have to say, writing about music is much harder than playing music, but I did my best and chose five killer tracks. You can check out my entire essay on Lauden’s site, but below are my choices. Some might teeter on the edges of power pop, but they’re all great songs:

“Money’s No Good” by Off Broadway
”Here Comes Sally” by Glen Burtnick
”She’s So Young” by The Pursuit of Happiness
”Our Story” by The Judy Bats
”Caught in the Middle” by The Red Button

Be sure to click subscribe on Lauden’s Substack, and also check out his music-related books, both fiction and non-fiction. The guy’s a gem! You can hear our interview with Lauden on episode 111 of 1000 Greatest Misses.

Backing Tracks at Live Performances

Prerecorded music at live performances isn’t a new thing: in the 1970s, Queen used a recording of the operatic middle section of “Bohemian Rhapsody” when playing live, The Who played to the sequenced synth tracks for “Baby O’Reilly” and “We Won’t Get Fooled Again” and Rush triggered recordings for the openings of “2112” and “Cygnus X-1.”  But for the most part, the rest of the shows were 100% live.

Today, live performances are often the reverse, with a good chunk of it being played to backing tracks. I’m sure we’ve all been to shows where you heard brass and keyboards, only to find that no one on stage was actually blowing a horn or playing a keyboard.

Last month I attended a concert by the female-fronted New Zealand band, The Beths, and they were terrific. All four band members know their instruments, and they sounded great. Unfortunately, they sang to prerecorded backing vocals and harmony vocals, played to backing keyboard tracks on a few songs, and added massive amounts of reverb and prerecorded ambient noise that filled the performance with a rumbling bed of sound. It was so unnecessary. It’s not like these aren’t great musicians. They could have played everything live and done a terrific show, but something compels The Beths and other bands to have their live performances sound exactly like their studio recordings.

What all this leads to is a lack of spontaneity, preventing something surprising and exciting from happening. Yes, you’ll hear a good reproduction of the music you’ve been accustomed to hearing, but what you won’t hear is a happy accident, a band that extends the jam and spontaneously starts playing a different song. You won’t get Led Zeppelin taking a song like “Dazed and Confused” and turning into a 20-minute venture that leads to…well, to who knows where? And sure, the self-indulgences associated with the 70s sometimes led to laborious performances, but they also led to amazing discoveries. I’m not a Grateful Dead guy, but from what I understand, each of their performances were unique, with songs morphing into others and outros extending into monster jams. The band might not have been my jam, but I appreciate the philosophy of keeping live performances loose and open to discovery rather than highly choreographed, each identical to the next.  

There are still bands that allow for live exploration. Khruangbin did so last month in Chicago, as did Jason Isbell and Molly Tuttle at Red Rocks last spring. Truly live music still exists, but little of it is in the more mainstream pop and rock arena, which is one reason why I’m likely going to be more selective in what I see in the future. I’d rather see a 100% live show that isn’t my favorite music than a show of a band I really dig who’s playing to backing tracks. I just don’t see the point.

So much of our human experience has degraded into something artificial. Give me something authentic, even if imperfect.

Saying Goodbye to Rick Davies of Supertramp

I wrote about Supertramp’s Breakfast in America eleven years ago and later included it in my list of all-time favorites, along with the band’s album, Crisis? What Crisis?  In my summary of those two inclusions, I wrote:

I can’t overstate how important this band was to the young version of me, insecure and creative, the youngest child of separated parents. Hodgson’s lyrics were the empathetic voice I craved, though I can’t say for sure that I understood them all at the time. Listening to Supertramp nearly forty years on, the band’s output still holds up. I’ve always loved the juxtaposition of Davies’s and Hodgson’s respective oeuvres, one cynical and cranky, one spiritual and nurturing, and together they were greater than the sum of their parts. 

Rick Davies died a few days ago, and as important as some of Hodgson’s lyrics were to me as a youth, it was Davies’s piano skills that attracted much of my attention, as I moved beyond the Michael Aaron piano books I’d been trudging through for years and started to explore playing songs that I loved. When I was twelve, I purchased the manuscript book of Crime of the Century, and I studied those songs with curiosity, amazement and confusion, unable to play some of the licks to my satisfaction. Easiest among the lot was the title track, and for a brief period I played the song in the living room of classmates Jon and Scott Witkopf, who added drums and guitar to the mix. It was my first foray into playing with a group, and it jumpstarted my excitement to be in a band as I dreamed of music stardom.  

My brother soon encouraged me to learn “Another Man’s Woman,” a piano tour-de-force that begins with a terrific percussive groove and culminates with an equally terrific solo, and I managed to do a fair job of replicating it by ear rather than a manuscript. Soon to follow were songs like “Asylum,” “Just Another Nervous Wreck,” and “From Now On.” This band was inspiring!

But for any pianist, it was “Bloody Well Right” that set the standard, with Davies’s extended blues-based Wurlizer solo instantly recognizable. I must say that I fumbled through it as a child, only kinda-sorta achieving the spirit of the solo if not the actual notes. It wasn’t until I was in my 30s that I finally sat down and transcribed the solo note for note, slowing the tune down to identify some of the faster runs, and even today it’s an intro that I break out from time to time.

Beyond the obvious piano chops of Rick Davies, his sonically-edged compositions helped to compensate for Hodgson’s sweeter side. Davies basically played Lennon to Hodgson’s McCartney, or Amy Ray to Emily Saliers of Indigo Girls, offering a bit of cynicism and realism to the philosophical Hodgson. I thought that Davies really hit his stride on Breakfast in America and Famous Last Words…, the final Supertramp albums before Hodgson left the band. I loved songs like “Gone Hollywood,” “Oh Darling,” “Just Another Nervous Wreck,” “Put on Your Old Brown Shoes,” and “Waiting So Long.” They may not have been hits, but they helped elevate the Supertramp releases into satisfying listening experiences, making them “complete” albums, and not just some filler songs amongst a few of Hodgson’s hits.

I got to see Rick Davies twice: once at Alpine Valley in 1983, and then two years later at MECCA in Milwaukee. For the latter show, I was excited that Davies would have more of a chance to shine as the only songwriter left in the band. Unfortunately, the setlist was lacking, as was Davies’ ability to hold an audience. It was decent, but it was clear that Supertramp missed Hodgson. Unfortunately, they would never play together again.

It was just two weeks ago that Hodgson lost a publishing royalty appeal between him and the rest of the band. A sad way to end the legacy of a great band.

Billy Joel and "Code of Silence"

HBO’s excellent new documentary, Billy Joel: And So It Goes, praises Joel’s chameleon-like ability to compose in multiple genres, something that few music critics did during his time dominating the charts. Instead, they accused him of uninventiveness and trend-hopping, constantly shifting styles to match modern fads. But what crtics missed, most songwriters understood: a lot of artists adjust their songwriting styles, but not many of them do it well. By contrast, Joel’s prowess as a songwriter might rightly be compared to mid-century masters like Cole Porter or Irving Berlin.

One of Joel’s attributes that the documentary spends less time on is his expertise at wordsmithing. At his best, his ability to perfectly capture a character, a feeling, or a situation, is second-to-none. Listen again to songs like “Always a Woman,” “I’ve Loved These Days,” “Goodnight Saigon” and “Innocent Man,” and you might conclude that he’s achieving something far beyond composing catchy hooks.

For me, I can’t think of Billy Joel without recalling a lesser-known tune that he co-wrote with Cyndi Lauper, “Code of Silence,” from 1986’s The Bridge, one of the last vinyl records I purchased before switching over to CDs. It was a letter from a friend of mine that prompted me to examine the lyrics of this song with more attention than I was accustomed to, a letter I still have today. In it, my friend alludes to a past event in her life and how it impacted her, and then goes on to write out the entire lyric of “Code of Silence,” adding that the song describes her “to a ‘T’.”

This revelation hit me hard then, and it’s clearly continued to hit my hard over time, because it led to my composition, “The Diary You Keep,” from my album Trainsongs, and it also inspired an important character in my unpublished novel, Things I Hate About My Mother. I can’t hear “Code of Silence” without thinking of her. She had clearly experienced some sort of trauma, and I don’t need to work too hard to imagine what it might have been.

The lyrics of “Code of Silence” are effective because they express the victim’s point of view so well:

You’ve been through it once
You know how it ends
You don’t see the point of going through it again

And you can’t talk about it
Because you’re following a code of silence
You’re never gonna lose the anger
You just deal with it a different way
And you can’t talk about it
And isn’t that a kind of madness
To be living by a code of silence
When you’ve really got a lot to say?

And later in the tune:

And it’s hard to believe after all these years
That it still gives you pain and it still brings tears
And you feel like a fool, ‘cause in spite all your rules
You’ve got a memory

Joel gives most of the credit to Lauper, who happened to be recording her True Colors album next door to Joel, resulting in the collaboration. In an interview, Joel said “She did all the work.” Regardless of who contributed the lion’s share of the tune, as far as I’m concerned, the Joel-Lauper pairing was a match made in heaven, and I wonder what might have transpired had they committed to composing more songs together.

I’m a melody guy, first and foremost, with lyrics often falling a distant second. But man, when melody and lyrics are coupled together perfectly, it packs a punch. Give it a listen and see if it hits you the same way.

And to my old friend, wherever you might be, I hope you’re well, and I hope you’ve been able to crack the code.