Tag: Ponderous Wank

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In Defense of Liner Notes

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It was a part of the deal for me, sometimes consumed before the music was even played. Vinyl had them. CDs had them. Even fricking cassettes had them. And in the pre-internet age when all of the information I sought was not gathered in one convenient location, it was a cornerstone on which I built my reputation as someone who knew too much shit about music.

Liner notes – sometimes stately and elegant, sometimes silly, sometimes anemic, I would pore over every word of them. From musician histories to who played what instrument on which track to “The band would like to thank…”, I digested it.

Taken as a whole, stories and portraits began to emerge from seemingly unrelated albums. Hey, that bass player from that other band I used to like is now playing with these guys, and the guitarist from this band is thanked in the liner notes from that album, and those two bands use the same graphic designer, while this album and that other album were produced by the same person. Previously errant bits of information began to fit together in a great jigsaw puzzle of musical minutiae enlightenment. It was a continuing education with strands that could take you into forever if you had the mind to follow wherever they led. I learned who was most often involved in making the music I liked and was able to more successfully choose future albums to buy and enjoy, as well as being led to bands I never would have known about otherwise. I got to feel like an insider for catching on to certain jokes. And I gained an arsenal of facts that no one but me really cared about and was able to annoy my friends with them accordingly.

For someone who is a devourer of words as well as a lover of music, liner notes are a beautiful synthesis of the two, like an extra gift with every album. The more extensive the liner notes, the brighter my eyes light up.

But as the digital download becomes more prevalent, with some albums never released in a hard copy format, I watch with dismay and genuine sadness as liner notes begin to disappear. Every once in a while, a band will make me happy by including full liner notes in a .pdf with the digital version of their album (bless you, James Leg and the Dad Horse Experience), most albums only include a cover art .jpg and the songs, and sometimes even the cover art is dispensed with.

But… who produced this? Where was it recorded? Who is that playing zither on the third track? In what coy way does the guitarist wish to thank his girlfriend? I NEED TO KNOW THESE THINGS, PEOPLE!

Why are liner notes growing rare? As mentioned previously, such things can be produced in the form of a .pdf file or by other electronic means. And your average band website (which, in the case of some bands I listen to is just a Facebook page or an outdated MySpace profile) doesn’t bother going into production minutiae of each song.

Look at it this way, musicians: In a time when many of you are working your asses off by taking on the additional role of being your own PR rep, liner notes can add another avenue of connection with listeners. Aside from including the more technical notes that some of us really-I-promise are interested in, you could share stories, in-jokes, candid photos that haven’t already been reproduced on countless websites. Give the people a little more incentive to come see your live shows and buy your tour merch by giving them a deeper look into who you are and what you’re about.

The gradual disappearance of liner notes has been on my mind for a while, but this post was given a swift kick into existence by the fact that I was recently a part of creating liner notes for a forthcoming album. A close friend was asked to write these notes for one of his favorite bands, and I was honored when he asked me to be his editor. The experience of getting that first view of the words my friend chose to communicate the essence of the music brought to mind another, rarer connection that can be found in liner notes, that of reading what someone else has written about what you’re listening to and thinking, “Yes! That’s how I feel, too!” (And isn’t that personal resonance the basis for much of our love of music?)

So, musicians, while you’re busy connecting to your audience on an unprecedented personal level, don’t let the actual transmission and digestion aspect of your recorded output grow less personal. What I’m saying is: Give me my fucking liner notes! Junkie needs a fix!

 

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Ponderous Wank: Tears on My Pillow

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As I write this, I am self-medicating to counteract a funk. I had the blues pretty badly, but the antidote is cleaning that mess up very well. The cause of the melancholy? Music. The cure? Music.

Having gotten one of her songs stuck in my head, I decided to listen to Jessica Lea Mayfield’s Blasphemy So Heartfelt on the drive to my day job this morning. It was not the best movie I’ve ever made. While it’s a beautiful album – good from start to finish – it can break my heart in seconds. As I began to sink low, I thought, “No problem. I’ll just pop in the Black Keys’ Brothers when I get to the office and be revived.” (No, I do not actually talk like that in my head.)

My surefire cure was delayed until lunchtime thanks to my Monday morning forgetfulness that caused my headphones to be left on the kitchen table, but that gave me time to ponder, not for the first time, the powerful connection between music and emotion. I have always been what I term “music sensitive”. I can be going along happy as anything only to be stopped dead in my tracks by a song with the right – or, arguably, wrong – tone. Once while on a date, my companion left the table to use the restroom only to return minutes later to find me on the verge of despondency. What had happened? I pointed upward to indicate the restaurant’s P.A. system which was piping out one of Gloria Estefan’s easy-listening love songs. While I could make a joke that just hearing Gloria Estefan had made me sad, it was the minor key chords, the plaintive vocals, and maybe even the tepid lyrics about love lost, that affected me.

I’ve often wondered how many others are thus affected. Author Nick Hornby would clearly be a fellow music-sensitive, judged by a single quote from High Fidelity alone: Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music? Even emotions themselves garner music-derived nicknames. When we are sad, we are in a funk or have the blues. When we are excited about something, we’re jazzed. And it’s obvious from just even a cursory survey of the history of music that the emotional nature of song is a foremost component in the creation and continuation of music.

But are other people as instantaneously and acutely affected as I am? Does Skip James’ “Devil Got My Woman” leave anyone else with an empty heart (but an oddly satisfied soul) every time she listens to it? Is Brothers like a double dose of Vivarin for other drivers on long roadtrips? Is there another person in the world who cries every time he hears Kathy Mattea’s “Where’ve You Been”? (There, now you know my secret shame.) Have you ever had the whole tenor of your day altered by a handful of words and notes?

Or am I just a freak?

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Ponderous Wank: Going Out the Way You Came In

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I finally watched Cadillac Records this weekend, and while I did like it (I’m a sucker sell for a movie like this), the part that effected me most was one frame of text at the end of the film in the run-down of what happened to the major players in the film. It was about Little Walter, who was Muddy Waters’ harmonica man (who also had some solo success), and it said simply that he was buried in a grave with no headstone, and that a headstone was purchased by fans years later.

This hit me so hard that I just sat there with the credits paused and tears welling up in my eyes. I know by now that reciprocity, people getting “what they deserve”, is not, and has never been, an operational law in this world, but it makes me so angry that someone who was as talented and influential didn’t even have the money for a proper funereal and burial while people who didn’t have a fraction of Little Walter’s talent have had hugely elaborate, hell, downright gaudy funerals with all kinds of hoopla and pouring out of sympathy from hundreds, thousands of strangers.

What makes me angrier is that Little Walter’s case is not an isolated incident. So many of the stories of the finest blues musicians end with “he died in poverty”. And some of them would also have died in obscurity if it weren’t for people like John Fahey (who, himself, was an influential musician who died in poverty and near-obscurity) who tracked down men like Bukka White and Skip James and brought them to that amazing Newport Folk Festival of 1964 that kick-started the “blues revival” of the ’60s. Sure, part of the reason these men died penniless was that they squandered much of their gains (but compare this to modern musicians who do the same thing – Pete Doherty, for an obvious example – who indulge in the same habits and aren’t hurting) , but these musicians were also taken advantage of in a time when black people were still viewed as somehow being subhuman (though plenty human enough for recording labels to make a buck off of – “race records” were a hot commodity in the time of segregation). The majority of the legendary blues musicians came up poor in the Mississippi Delta (even those considered “Chicago blues”, like Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Robert Johnson), and when these golden egg record contracts were handed to them – or what seemed like a golden egg to these impoverished people who were often being bilked by the same hand that was handing them the golden egg – many of them didn’t realize these fortunes would not last forever. They didn’t know rock ‘n’ roll was right around the corner, the child of the blues that would, essentially, shoot the blues in the back.

I’m grateful for the funds that have been established to help the old bluesmen who are still around (though there aren’t many left – keep holding on, T-Model Ford!) and other musicians, but it doesn’t help me feel any less angry about all the musicians who died before those funds existed. And it doesn’t make my heart ache any less for musicians today who work their asses off for fear of losing it all the next day.

Music Maker Relief Foundation
Rhythm & Blues Foundation

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Ponderous Wank: Music as Identity

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For better or for worse, music has become inextricably linked to identity and image. Bands in certain genres are automatically tagged with certain traits by listeners. A “sound” may be attributed to a band based on their geographical location – the Seattle sound, the Philly sound, etc. And skimming through a few band pages at MySpace, one will find it easy to determine the sound of many bands solely from the art and images displayed (tip: if you display individual, name-tagged images of each of your band members accompanied by a photo of the band in a “fun” pose together, you will probably not be mistaken for a particularly experimental or progressive act).

This image tagging trickles down to the listeners and is sometimes forcibly taken up by listeners. Kids seeking their identities will lock themselves in their rooms with music for hours and will often emerge outfitted in the trappings of the music they have found the most relatable to their life or to the life they want to have. Cliques are formed. The punk kids won’t hang out with the metal kids. The hip-hop kids taunt the country kids. The emo kids don’t even come out of their rooms. The outer trappings can become a comfort when these kids begin making forays out into the world. In a sea of unfamiliar faces, another person with green hair or a cowboy hat can be an oasis. Friendships are formed over the fact that two people love one band and can’t stand another band favored by their peers.

As they mature and enter into romantic relationships, people woo each other with mixtapes. A song that a couple has danced together to becomes “our song” and will forever bring memories of that relationship, even long after the relationship ends. Couples move in together, and their record collections meld together. I’ve often said the hardest part of my own divorce was splitting up our tapes and CDs – we sat on the floor with pen, paper and stacks of CDs for a couple of hours, often bargaining with each other to gain sole ownership of certain albums. And everyone has heard stories of a significant other stealing an entire music collection in a messy break-up.

I began thinking about all of this while in conversation with a friend about fear. While I have grown more self-confident as I’ve grown older, I’ve also found it more daunting to go out into the world. I reasoned that part of the problem for me was a drastic decrease in the displays of these outer trappings for people my age. I officially entered my late 30s earlier this month, but unlike so many others in their late 30s/early 40s, I am not looking to settle down and blend into the suburbs with 2.5 kids, a trusty canine companion, a sport utility vehicle, a mortgage and more khaki trousers than any individual should ever own. I still have more black in my wardrobe than any other color. I like platform shoes and big, silver rings. I have a bleached streak in my hair, a visible tattoo and calloused fingertips on my left hand from playing guitar. I don’t see anyone else who looks remotely like me on my semi-suburban street. I don’t see anyone who looks like me at the grocery store unless I go at a certain time of night, and even then, the people I can identify as a part of my tribe are usually a good ten years younger than me. As a result, I feel as much an outsider as I did in high school.

This, I believe, is part of the reason I love music so much and why I become fixated on certain artists. Musicians still display the trappings, the signifiers long after people in the “normal” world have cut their hair and thrown away their band T-shirts (and, of course, many of those musicians are the very reason some of those trappings ever became symbols of identity). I can look at Dan Auerbach in his railroad jacket or Greg Dulli in his all-black wardrobe and see that they are a part of my tribe. Even if we share nothing more than similar taste in music (though, as we’re all from Ohio, we likely share a little more than that), that’s still much more than I share with most people I encounter in “meatspace” on a daily basis.

Music is still one of the most important things in my life, it still drives a large part of who I am. And, for me, music is still a refuge.

http://www.lala.com/external/flash/SingleSongWidget.swf

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Ponderous Wank: “Remember the days when Grandpa would take us upstate to play in the country.”

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Adding to the lists of reasons why I love the Felice Brothers: It seems there upbringing was not terribly different from mine, and I can feel that familiarity in their words and actions. Just now, I was listening to “The Country is Gone” from their album Tonight at the Arizona, and I heard sounds that made tears catch in my throat. It was the distant call of a Blue Jay and the almost-subliminal rise and fall of the sound of Cicadas. Just in the background, just like the way I heard it as I went about my daily life in the country.

It’s an interesting thing… I spent so much of my youth just waiting for the time when I could get away from the countryside, but now that I am in the city (or near enough to it), I realize how the country left its mark on me, in a not-unpleasant way. I have always loved the lights and sounds and motion and tall buildings of the city, and I often feel filled with an electric energy when I’m surrounded by it, but it’s those sights and sounds and smells of the country that can move me to tears now and give me some peace at times.

As I was writing that last line, a train started passing on the tracks near my house. This is one of my most cherished sounds, a sound that I have been able to take with me from the country to the city, a sound that comforts me even as it might drown out whatever else it is I am listening to. The safest and calmest I ever feel is when I awake in the middle of a summer night and hear a freight train passing nearby.

Photograph by Richard Jacobs

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Ponderous Wank: Connection

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There is an alchemy that occurs when music is made. There is no formula, though. You cannot, for instance, take man + guitar + harmonica and get Bob Dylan every time. You cannot take sweeping samples + beats that feel like they grew up from the ground and into your soul + rhymes about Shaolin Kung Fu and get the Wu-Tang Clan every time. Even if you could come close to recreating that kind of magic in music, there is still the unpredictable variable of the listener. I love A.A. Bondy, but I don’t love every “folk” singer-songwriter with a guitar. I can barely come up with a handful of artists who could fit that category that I much care for. (And I have a hard time thinking of Bondy as a folk singer at all due to the loaded concept that term has come to engender over the years.)

The thing about music is that it is not a science. It’s human, living, changing thing. The musician brings her background, her emotions, her voice, skill, style, attitude, etc. The listener brings his experience, preferences, mood that day, memories, etc. Sometimes it all manages to fall into place and the listener finds several points where he connects to the artist’s music, whether it is through a sentiment in the lyrics, the way that E chord transitions into that Am chord or just the way the singer’s voice goes a little thin at the end of that verse. But many times, for whatever reason, there is a failure to connect.

This all makes me wonder why the major labels have had this habit of trying to milk (or even create) a genre when one act hits big or why album reviewers insist on
comparing X to Z. The A.A. Bondy: Bob Dylan comparison would be an obvious one for me to point out. If I had to choose someone to compare Bondy to, I’d more likely go for Neil Young, but I’ve never seen anyone else draw this comparison. And just now, I found a 1994 Rolling Stone review of the Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen that compares Dulli and Co. to Pearl Jam. What?

I understand the human brain’s need to categorize things, but I think it serves an artist much better if she is judged on her own merit, without anyone else’s baggage to haul around with her. This is one of my favorite aspects of the internet revolution’s effect on music: the ability to judge an artist’s music on the artist’s music. Obviously, I enjoy writing about music, but it is first-hand experience that makes music such a lifeforce in the world. You won’t get pumped up or moved to tears by reading how Ian Felice of the Felice Brothers sounds just like Bob Dylan (is there anyone who artists are compared to more often than Dylan?). You can only experience music properly when you meet it head-on.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BZQ6iuJ2kM]