A Deeper Shade Of Soul

The Greatest Unheralded Soul Song Of All Time

BLazar70@gmail.com (Ben Lazar) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:57:00 +0000

About six years ago I was in Tower Records (R.I.P.), browsing for albums, and saw a CD with a woman's face filling the cover, a soulful looking face, obviously a photo from the past. I picked up the CD, titled Candi Staton, and looked through the song titles, most unfamiliar to me, except for a few songs I knew by other artists, such as "In The Ghetto." I was about to put the CD back when the person standing next to me said, "If you like soul music, you need that CD."

I had never heard of Candi Staton before buying that CD. Reading the liner notes, I discovered that she had been signed to FAME Records, Rick Hall's (he of Muscle Shoals fame and producer of many southern soul classics) label through Capitol Records, and had a few R&B hits in the late 60's and early 70's, but had her biggest success in 1976, with "Young Hearts Run Free," a disco hit.

When I put the CD on at home, I liked what I heard, but at least through the first ten songs or so, I wasn't overwhelmed. That changed when "Heart On A String" came on.

"Heart On A String" explodes from it's opening notes, a torrent of sound that seems to epitomize soul before the brain has even had a chance to really process what it's listening to. The piano pounds, the drums swing magnificently, the bass anchors everything while keeping the action moving, the horns blare an intro melody line, and before you know it, in comes Candi's voice, an amalgamation of country and soul, a voice with a tear in it, the sort of tear that oozes both vulnerability and strength, the sort of strength that comes from surviving when survival, emotional or otherwise, is far from assured.

When I first encountered the song, I couldn't really believe it, because I couldn't believe that I had never heard it before. How was this not an enormous hit? I played it again and again, becoming more enraptured every time I heard it. I played it for friends, pretty much all of who asked, "What song IS this?" And five plus years after I first heard it, it's one of those songs that I never cease to be completely lit up by.

The interplay between the instruments is astounding. Each of the players find their own space to emerge within the song - the pianist peeks out with amazing fills in the first verse, and in the second verse, the guitarist finds the room to rip some brief but incredible lead fills in between Candi's vocals. In the first half of the third and final verse, the song breaks down, and the drummer plays an awe-inspiring rim pattern that leads into a final, joyous close to the song.

And as far as the vocals, listening to Candi sing on "Heart On A String" is akin to watching Baryshnikov dance or Lebron streaking down the court - it's the work of a master. Each phrase, pause, swoop and shout is perfect in tone and execution. She is all hurt and sensuality, trapped in loving someone who is oh so wrong, but feels so right.

Songs gain immeasurable power when they are a shared experience - a hit on the radio, a song at a club, something treasured with friends, or in concert. And soul music, having emerged from the African-American church, was designed to be a shared experience - songs about heartbreak, exultation, joy, loneliness and isolation meant to take on a life of their own with an audience relating to and living out every word. So what does one make of "Heart On A String," a great song that barely anyone has heard?

Five years after I first heard it, and almost forty years after it was recorded, "Heart On A String" is, for my money, one of the great soul songs ever. And despite never finding the audience it deserved, its power resonates as strongly as ever, making it in, in my estimation, the greatest unheralded soul song of all time.

Download: Candi Staton - "Heart On A String"

Heart On A String - Candi Staton

A 60th Birthday Letter To Bruce Springsteen

BLazar70@gmail.com (Ben Lazar) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:45:00 +0000

Dear Bruce,

Happy 60^th! It’s really hard for me to believe you’re 60, and I’d be willing to bet my copy of Born To Run that you’ll be celebrating with a healthy bit of quiet disbelief. It all goes by so fast, doesn’t it? If it’s any consolation, the way you’re rolling these days, 60 is going to be the new 50. Hell – you could probably make 60 be the new 45.

To get right down to it, I don’t know what I would have done without your music. I look back upon my life and you’ve been so entwined in the fabric of it – my joys and sorrows, my successes and failures, my dreams and disappointments, that it’s impossible to imagine what living would be like without your music. You’ve been a means to some of my deepest friendships, and you’ve been an essential companion in the midst of my darkest solitude. I’ve ecstatically screamed along to “Born To Run” with 70,000 other people shining around me and I’ve sat alone listening to Nebraska, wondering if I’ll ever have what I want for my life.

But through it all, your music has been an anchor for me, in both my personal and professional life. I can pinpoint the exact moment I decided to go into the music business – May 18, 1988 at Madison Square Garden, in the middle of “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out.” In the full thrall of the ecstasy you generated, I said to myself, “I have to make music my life.”

That has been an amazing road, and recently, an immensely challenging one, as both I and the music business itself face a crumbling old world and an emerging new one, a new one that looks little like the one that came before. But I remain undaunted and still totally committed to music as a vehicle for inspiration, possibility, love, sex, joy and the confronting of the things that are the hardest for us to deal with. And I won’t give up. Next week, I’ll be heading into a recording studio to produce a great young artist I’m working with – I’m sure I’ll be thinking of you a lot as I get to work.

Most of all, I think your work has been an incredible partner in fighting my own cynicism and resignation. You acknowledge the cruelness that exists in this world without it curdling into cheap nihilism – and then hold out for the possibility of breaking through one’s circumstances. And when I think about what I’m most cynical and resigned about, I realize that most often, it’s myself – and your music has been one of the greatest tools possible for that daily battle.

More than anything though, what your music gave me, especially when I was a boy and so often felt like a misfit and outsider, was a sense of a world out there that I could find my place in. My dad was wonderful in providing that for me too, but listening to The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle, Darkness On The Edge Of Town, The River and Born To Run made that world feel attainable to me, and it instilled a sense of responsibility within myself to go out there and find it – or create it for myself. I’ve done that, and I don’t think I would have ever done it quite the same way without your music.

So Bruce, even though you haven’t wised up yet and made me your official vaultmaster and producer of a Bootleg Series, I’ll forgive you that because I’m so immensely grateful for what you’ve provided for me and people the world over – joy, fun, ecstasy, soul, passion, poignancy, and an access to the best parts of ourselves. There will never be another one like you.

Thank you, Bruce. Long may you run.

Bootleg Friday: The Jacksons, 1979

BLazar70@gmail.com (Ben Lazar) — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 16:24:00 +0000

Of all the periods of Michael Jackson's career, the one that may be among the most neglected is the late 70's, post-Jackson 5 and before Off The Wall. After leaving Motown in 1975 and being forced to give up the name "Jackson 5" as part of their settlement to leave, the group, re-named "The Jacksons" began recording for CBS, first for Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff's Philadelphia International label (which went through CBS) and then Epic.

By 1978's Destiny, the Jackson were producing themselves, and the results included the double platinum single "Shake Your Body" (written by Michael and Randy Jackson). The band was complete with their transformation from bubblegum soul to something edgier - hard r&b and funk that shredded.

This week's Bootleg Friday is the Jacksons at a Destiny tour stop in Amsterdam in February 1979. By the end of the year, Off The Wall would be released, and everything would change.

Download: The Jacksons - 2/1/79, Amsterdam, Netherlands (zip file)

The Undeniable Peaches

BLazar70@gmail.com (Ben Lazar) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 20:26:00 +0000

I haven’t paid much attention to Peaches since her debut album, 2000’s The Teaches Of Peaches. I loved “Fuck The Pain Away,” a song from that album that defines the term “underground classic.” But I stopped looking out for her, and we had no chance encounters.

That was until recently, when I got her new album, I Feel Cream. I like the album, but there’s one song, “Talk To Me,” that I’m absolutely, positively floored by. It’s like a cross between Betty Davis and Johnny Rotten, and it’s one of the purest (and most likely, unintentional) fusions of punk and soul that I’ve ever heard, in it’s blend of raw vulnerability and hot-tempered demand.

Instrumentally, the song is obviously based in electro, but the construction of the song is rooted in the blues, and when Peaches sings the lyrics that are a plea for communication from a lover who is hiding out, she is absolutely impossible to ignore – she pierces the air, grabs you by the throat and makes you deal with what she has to say. She manages to convey everything – frustration, lust, anger, desire and pain in a little over three minutes. Most artists don’t do that in three years.

Peaches is the kind of artist that Johnny Rotten wanted to see more of back in the halcyon days of the emergence of punk in England; original characters who invented themselves, unshackled by the past, confrontational, subversive and completely authentic. In that, she’s a true inheritor of punk in ways that most of those awful bands on the Warped tour will never be. And she’s a punk with soul.

Talk To Me - Peaches

Laura Izibor: Let The Truth Be Told

BLazar70@gmail.com (Ben Lazar) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 16:06:00 +0000

Why does Laura Izibor’s debut album, Let The Truth Be Told, irk me so much? Is it the glossy, semi-generic songs and arrangements? Is it Izibor’s vocals, vaguely characterless, an approximation of soulfulness rather than actually being soulful? Or is it that her songs, like “Shine” and “Don’t Stay,” which take on inspiration and love, do it so safely that they end up feeling like a cliche, resulting in a diminishing of love and inspiration themselves?

Perhaps it’s a combination of all of the above. Izibor has a technically powerful voice, but there’s nothing in it that makes it uniquely her own, rather than just an amalgamation of a boatload of soul singers before her. What’s missing in Izibor’s voice is any hint of the blues, that great ingredient that makes a song land as more than just a platitude. Any great soul singer, be they Otis Redding, Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, or hell, even Amy Winehouse, sings even their most buoyant material with a bluesiness that comes from living with the existential knowledge of the pain that living brings. Listening to Let The Truth Be Told, it's clear that while she may have taken on singing soul because she genuinely loves it, she doesn’t have it in her bones - and the resulting music ends up dismayingly hollow.

The obvious models for Izibor’s music are Alicia Keys, Joss Stone and John Legend – bland, inoffensive and safe as possible, made for film and TV placements, commercials and marketing departments, lacking any of the risk, originality and emotional rawness that make soul music, you know, soulful. Izibor says of her music that “the foundation starts with soul,” but she’s flattering herself with her conceit. Or maybe she doesn’t know any better.

No, why this irks me is that this is the kind of stuff that fools people who don’t know any better that this is the real thing. It’s so maddeningly competent and nothing more that it lands as pointless. It's very nice music - and real soul is never nice. If Izibor is going to be a soul singer that matters, she's going to have to dig a lot deeper into her own self than is evidenced on Let The Truth Be Told. The truth is never as flimsy as this music is.

Let The Truth Be Told - Laura ...

Coming Attractions: Soul Power

BLazar70@gmail.com (Ben Lazar) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:58:00 +0000

I'm sort of looking forward to this:

Sun City: The Best Of The 1984-85 Benefit Singles

BLazar70@gmail.com (Ben Lazar) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 18:26:00 +0000

I watched the Michael Jackson memorial show on Tuesday and was pleasantly surprised with how well it came off. The tributes were heartfelt and authentic, and the musical performances, for the most part, worked. It did him justice, unlike the disaster that was the B.E.T. Awards the Sunday following his death.

Unsurprisingly, the show ended with some of the schmaltz that Michael loved, namely, “We Are The World,” a song whose ickiness has grown exponentially for me as I’ve encountered it over the years. Whether it’s the trite and solipsistic lyrics (as Jackson Browne said, “That’s the problem with North America – we think we ARE the world”), or the mushy arrangement, the song has always occurred for me like the experience of eating Sweet N’ Low right out of the packet – so sweet I want to wretch.

Most of the singers on the project were at or near their pop pinnacle in the winter of 1985, and many of them – Kim Carnes, Huey Lewis, Al Jarreau, Jeffrey Osbourne, Kenny Rogers and Kenny Loggins – were bland MOR fare at best. Neither the song or the assemblage of talent has worn well over time, even though seeing Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles and Bob Dylan singing on the same song will always hold a thrill for me.

Contrast that with the best of the 1984-1985 “benefit” songs, Artists United Against Apartheid’s “Sun City,” created by Little Steven Van Zandt, who at the time, had just recently left the E Street Band, just prior to Springsteen and the band embarking on the immensely successful and lucrative phenomenon that was the Born In The U.S.A. tour.

Van Zandt, producer Arthur and journalist Danny Schecter assembled greatest collection of rock, rap and soul artists ever on one single. The Lineup: Miles Davis, Bruce Springsteen, Kool DJ Herc, Grandmaster Melle Mel, Ruben Blades, Bob Dylan, Herbie Hancock, Ringo Starr, Pete Townshend, Lou Reed, Run DMC, Peter Gabriel, David Ruffin, Eddie Kendricks, Darlene Love, Bobby Womack, Afrika Bambaataa, Kurtis Blow, Jackson Browne, U2, George Clinton, Keith Richards, Ron Wood, Bonnie Raitt, Hall & Oates, Jimmy Cliff, Big Youth, Michael Monroe, Peter Garrett, Ron Carter, Ray Barretto, Gil-Scott Heron, Nona Hendryx, Pat Benatar, and Joey Ramone.

It was an incredible lineup then – and in retrospect, it seems even more incredible. Most of the artists, in direct contrast to the ones on "We Are The World," have gained in stature nearly a quarter century after the recording. Back then, as I wasn’t familiar with many of the artists on the record, it didn’t seem like a big deal. But thinking about it now - Lou Reed and Miles Davis and Springsteen and Joey Ramone and Bobby Womack and Melle Mel and David Ruffin on the same single? Jesus!

And to Van Zandt’s eternal credit, he structured the song so that the rappers would have their own indelible contribution to the song. Remember, “Sun City” was recorded and released prior to rap’s explosion to national prominence with Run-DMC’s “Walk This Way,” which was released in the summer of 1986. The rap section that opens the song leads perfectly into the first chorus – in retrospect, the song is perhaps rap-rock’s greatest moment.

The song was tough and defiant – capturing the best of rock's rebellious spirit . It was independent minded, clear in its intent to bring down Apartheid and wasn’t afraid to point fingers at home, namely at President Reagan’s “constructive engagement” policy with Pretoria.

Incredible song, eclectic lineup, a powerful and crystal clear message – and relative to “We Are The World” and “Do They Know It’s Christmas” – a commercial dud. “Sun City” peaked at #38 on the Billboard Top 40, as many radio stations wouldn’t play the song due to its explicit criticism of Reagan, its tough minded sound, and most likely, the inclusion of so many rappers, which in 1985, top 40 radio had no use for.

More importantly, “Sun City” raised over a million dollars and significantly raised awareness of the scourge of Apartheid. In 1986, Congress passed sanctions against South Africa, overriding a veto from President Reagan. In 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from prison and in 1994, he was elected president of South Africa.

"We Are The World" may have been the pop hit, but "Sun City" was by far the better song. Given that the song itself, with Apartheid gone, is now superflous, it's even further testament that the record holds up so wonderfully, in groove, spirit and soul.

The Ecstasy Of Michael Jackson

BLazar70@gmail.com (Ben Lazar) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:20:00 +0000

I’ve struggled the last few days with how to address the death of Michael Jackson. I wasn’t particularly moved or surprised when I heard the news – the sadness in the Michael Jackson story has been slowly playing out for the past 25 years. On first hearing of his death, my thoughts were that this was, unfortunately, a somewhat unsurprising and pathetic conclusion to his story.

Michael Jackson was always someone who I admired from afar, but could never relate to, unlike all of my musical heroes. Even during the Thriller era, before the disfiguring plastic surgeries, the off-putting crotch grabbing, the accusations of pedophilia and the draining of joy from his music, he seemed almost like an alien to me; an insanely talented star whose gifts for singing, melody, songwriting and especially dancing were phenomenal, but who seemed as though he had been dropped in from another planet. (It always made sense to me that he identified so intensely with E.T.) The fact that he was the first black artist to be recognized as the biggest artist in the world meant little to me - it was a reach for me to view him the same heroic context with which I view Jackie Robinson or Muhammad Ali. But I’m a white boy. (King Of Pop? Why on earth would anyone want to be the King Of Pop?)

Of course, he was a genius. He was touched at birth – his parents knew it, his brothers and sisters knew it, and he knew it. And he busted his ass to develop himself as an artist. As a boy playing on the chitlin' circuit with the Jackson 5 before they signed to Motown, Michael keenly observed the soul stars of the day, soaking them all up and absorbing the best of their music and routines. Years after the fact, Jackson could describe Sam & Dave’s show at the Apollo – how they danced, what they wore – as though he had seen it the day before. With every great artist he encountered, no matter the medium or genre, the young Michael would pester them with questions – How did they get their sound? How did they prepare themselves to perform? How did they do what they did? It was the behavior of a master continually in the inquiry of his own work. He wasn't just blessed with talent. He worked harder than everyone else, too.

ec⋅sta⋅sy /ˈɛkstəsi/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [ek-stuh-see] Show Use ecstasy in a Sentence –noun, plural -sies. 1. rapturous delight. 2. an overpowering emotion or exaltation; a state of sudden, intense feeling. 3. the frenzy of poetic inspiration. 4. mental transport or rapture from the contemplation of divine things.

To be in ecstasy is to be out of oneself. It’s a concept and experience that Michael Jackson, during his golden age, was obsessed with. It informed the best of his music and it was a mystery that he sought answers for. When interviewed upon Thriller's release in late 1982 by writer (and soul maven) Gerri Hershey, he inquired of Hershey if she knew how to get the famous footage of James Brown performing at the T.A.M.I. show in 1964. “He gets so out of himself,” Michael said worshipfully of James. “There are things I need to know about how I do what I do.”

Michael had a lot of reasons why he wanted to get out of himself. He had a father who beat and terrorized him and his family. His family depended on him for their livelihood for as long as he could remember. He had no childhood. As an idol, millions wanted a piece of him (“Being mobbed hurts,” he once exclaimed), and it’s likely he had no idea who he could trust. Most people terrified him. When he looked in the mirror, he clearly saw much he did not like.

But in the best of his music – most of Off The Wall and Thriller, and his early hits with the Jackson 5, all of that baggage was transformed, and it became a non-entity. The joy of his music and performance carried him out of the pain of his identity and what you saw and heard was a master singer and showman, filled with self-assuredness, confidence and power. The reason why he became so enormous is that he provided that same ecstasy through his music – the experience of being out of oneself – for millions, regardless of boundaries of race, nationality, age or any other consideration.

Somewhere along the line – my sense it was sometime in 1984, when his hair caught on fire at a shoot for Pepsi and the Jackson’s Victory Tour became far less than the triumph it was designed to be – Michael’s access to that ecstasy diminished. His music turned inward – filled with empty bragging (“Bad”), paeans to his own victimhood (“Leave Me Alone,” “They Don’t Care About Us,” “Childhood”), or expressions of an unseemly anger (“Scream,” the closing video segment of "Black & White"). The music stopped being communal – instead, it simply reflected Jackson’s increasing isolation and his distance from reality.

Instead of getting out of himself through his music, Michael tried to do it through changing his face, recreating his childhood by vicariously experiencing it through sleepovers with children, and of course, drugs. Naturally, it didn’t work. He thought he was Peter Pan, and maybe he thought with enough record sales, money and adulation, he really could be Peter Pan. Not seeing that that was an impossibility is what killed him.

Michael Jackson’s ecstasy became present for me while at a party on Saturday night. There were about 100 or so people there, milling about, and “Billie Jean” came on. The room lit up. People started dancing and smiling at each other. Everyone’s self-consciousness melted away; everyone sang those lyrics, whether they experienced them the first time around or not. For five minutes, people got caught up in each other, the beauty of the others around them, the joy of music, an experience of what’s possible for humanity, with all of our flaws, to create. It was then that his death hit me for real. And I was flooded with sadness and compassion for him. For what he gave to the world, he deserved better than what he got.

But as sad as his story may be, it is the ecstasy of his greatest music and performances that will endure. That ecstasy is present somewhere around the world at practically every moment - on dance floors and cars and bedrooms on every continent. That's Michael Jackson's true legacy - and the only one that really matters.

Bootleg Friday: Ray Charles, 1976

BLazar70@gmail.com (Ben Lazar) — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 02:43:00 +0000

For this week’s Bootleg Friday, I’m going back to a Founding Father, Brother Ray.

I didn’t grow up listening to Ray Charles; I only started getting into him during my early 20's. But he was always there – on radio and TV and in the ether, with that voice that was always immediately recognizable no matter what song he was singing, or where you heard it. He's one of those artists that people who don't follow or even care much about music can identify him as the artist within four bars of his vocal. That voice, much like Sinatra's, is part of the fabric of America.

When I was 10, I got a compilation of Rolling Stone interviews, and while I quickly memorized the John Lennon and Pete Townshend interviews, I remember not really being able to get into Ray’s interview. I’m not even sure I read the whole interview for years. He gave what seemed to me to be defensive answers. He didn’t want to share everything. When the interviewer (Ben Fong-Torres) inquired about Ray’s experience in therapy, Charles blew it off, saying that he spent most of the time talking to the Doctor about how the Doctor’s life was going. Of course, I now understand the reasons for that “defensiveness” I perceived - born dirt poor, losing his sight at 7, orphaned at 15, on his own from then on. A scuffling musician, a target for other musicians and unscrupulous promoters to take advantage of, a heroin addiction and much more. He intimately knew the blues he sang - and he also knew to be careful about how much he gave away.

But as I got into his music – via the great early 90's Atlantic/Rhino box set, The Birth Of Soul, and then the epochal Modern Sounds In Country & Western Music – I came to realize that to interview Ray Charles was, in a way, a futile gesture. What you needed to know about him was in the music. It was there that the tools and defenses he used to survive a world he had known as hard and cold were no longer necessary, and he could shine without impediment, conjuring a range and depth of human emotion in his own singular way.

I can’t help but think that when I listen to this show, recorded in Stutgart, Germany in 1976. It’s a towering performance, especially the opening track, “How Long Has This Been Going On,” a song about discovering infidelity. Charles conveys more than just the hurt of being betrayed; he sings in the voice of a man discovering his own blindness, and now with sight, knows what a fool he has been. And sometimes, it seems like he sings the song with a very wry smile on his face.

Download: "How Long Has This Been Going On" 9/28/76, Stutgart, Germany
Download: "Feel So Bad" 9/28/76, Stutgart, Germany
Download: "Am I Blue" 9/28/76, Stutgart, Germany
Download: "I Can't Stop Loving You" 9/28/76, Stutgart, Germany
Download: "Country Road" 9/28/76, Stutgart, Germany
Download: "How Much I Can" 9/28/76, Stutgart, Germany
Download: "What'd I Say" 9/28/76, Stutgart, Germany

Bootleg Friday: Dr. John & The Meters, 1973

BLazar70@gmail.com (Ben Lazar) — Fri, 29 May 2009 17:21:00 +0000

After spending time with the wonderful new Allen Toussaint album, it only seems fitting that today’s Bootleg Friday be a wonderful 1973 Dr. John show, backed by the Meters, with who he had just recorded Right Place, Wrong Time. The sound leaves something to be desired, but put that aside and let yourself be washed away by the grooves contained within.

Download: Dr. John and the Meters, 3/5/73, Chalmette, LA

The Masterful Allen Toussaint & The Bright Mississippi

BLazar70@gmail.com (Ben Lazar) — Thu, 28 May 2009 23:36:00 +0000

“Stately” is an adjective I rarely use to describe an album, but it fits Allen Toussaint’s new album, The Bright Mississippi, like a glove. The Bright Mississippi is a special album, demanding multiple listens to truly get the tapestry of American music – Ellington inspired jazz, r&b, Creole, ragtime – that it weaves with such effortless cool. It’s an album that contains the full experience that is life – its joys, sorrows, delights and hardships. That is to say, it's an album with soul.

Toussaint, of course, is an American Treasure; one of the masters of American R&B, a songwriter and producer who has worked with the likes of Dr. John, The Meters, Labelle, Elvis Costello, Solomon Burke, the Band and dozens of other greats. American R&B (and therefore, American music) is practically inconceivable without him.

But The Bright Mississippi is Toussaint’s first recorded foray into jazz, and with Joe Henry producing, and an all-star cast including guitarist Marc Ribot, clarinetist Don Byron, and saxophonist Joshua Redman providing loving support, Toussaint takes on some of the most treasured standards in jazz history, with complete aplomb. It’s the sound of masters playing for love, and out of complete respect for both the music and for one another.

There are too many sublime moments on the album to mention, but Toussaint’s version of “West End Blues” merits special notice. Toussaint’s piano runs almost inspire laughter with their ease and grace. Toussaint plays with the melody masterfully, like he's Michael Jordan taking over a game, and he then passes it off to Ribot and then Redman who play impossibly gorgeous solos – every single note perfect, with not one wasted.

This will be one of the best albums of the year – go out and get it. It’s not only that they don’t make albums like this anymore – it’s that no one before has ever made one quite like this.

West End Blues - Allen Toussai...

Buy The Bright Mississippi at the Amazon Mp3 store

Little Moments

BLazar70@gmail.com (Ben Lazar) — Tue, 26 May 2009 11:52:00 +0000

I think we as people sometimes like to attach grandiose reasons to justify our love of a musician or band, when instead, our love is often kindled by smaller, more private and inscrutable moments of reverie. They're little moments of falling in love with the way a singer phrase a certain line, or a great guitar, piano or sax solo, or the way the horns swell in a very specific point in a song, and because they are so private, so unique to each individual, the importance of such moments to a music listener are unfortunately unheralded.

I've been going through something exactly like that over the past couple of days with David Bowie's "Ashes To Ashes." I'm a Bowie fan, but I'm not a fanatic like a lot of people. You could give me three or four Bowie albums to listen to (Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust, Station To Station, Scary Monsters) for the rest of my life, and that would probably be enough Bowie for me. I get his vast influence and I have an inordinate amount of respect for him - but for whatever reason, he's not an essential artist for me. (And given that he's the defacto artist for every bar in the E. Village and Lower East Side, I've heard him enough for a lifetime.)

But I've had "Ashes To Ashes" on repeat, just because of the way Bowie phrases the line, "I've never done good things/I've never done bad things/I never did anything out of the blue" at 1:56 in the song. It's a sublime piece of phrasing; it's very Lennon-esque, and the regret that permeates the line floors me every single time I hear it. It's the sound of a man who knows his time is coming to an end, is seeing the whole of his life flash before him and realizes his own foolishness in not living the way he truly wanted. It's an immensely soulful line - perhaps the most soulful line of his entire career, a career where Bowie has sometimes labored to find soulful moments.

I've listened to the whole song a dozen times or so over the past 72 hours, waiting excitedly for that line to emerge. I've also fast-forwarded through the song just to get to that line and sing it as loud as possible. And it's had me listen to a lot of Bowie for the first time in years, as I try to find similar moments of musical ecstasy.

Ashes To Ashes - David Bowie

The Country Honk Soul Of Justin Townes Earle

BLazar70@gmail.com (Ben Lazar) — Sat, 23 May 2009 12:45:00 +0000

For me not to post for six weeks is what I would, charitably speaking, call a slump. I’ve been working on several pieces, including a long piece on my ambivalence and, on occasion, my downright disappointment with the new Springsteen tour. I also have been writing a piece about American Idol, as I actually watched a few episodes this season, and found myself fascinated, if also a bit revolted. Mainly though, I’ve been way too much of a perfectionist, which doesn’t work. Writers write, and bloggers blog.

But like most slumps, it’s sometimes something small that gets you out of it, like the way a cheap hit can get a ballplayer in a groove. Tonight, I've been listening to the Justin Townes Earle album, Midnight At The Movies, for the first few times. I’ve been completely charmed by Earle’s fluency with seminal American music forms; country, folk, bluegrass and a little bit of Dixieland, all imbued with a punk spirit, a welcome dollup of subtlety and a whole lotta of love. The album seems modest, but there's an ambition that purrs at the very heart of the whole thing.

The son of Steve Earle and with a middle name given to him in honor of Townes Van Zandt, Midnight At The Movies is Earle’s second album, and it’s a huge leap forward for him. It would be easy to say that the sound of the album is retro, but that would be wrong. Instead, it’s a sound out of time, like the dance band for a bar on the Texas/Oklahoma border on a Saturday night circa 1947. It swings in all the right places, is warm when it counts, and possesses a very timely sense of humor.

In addition to his folk, country and bluegrass influences, Earle clearly grew up on punk rock, and from it he extracts the freedom to simply be who he wants to be, damn the conventions. He makes the Replacements “Can’t Hardly Wait” sound as though he wrote it himself – subbing melancholy for Westerberg’s grit, and with mandolins and fiddle that shimmer, it’s a beautifully resonant arrangement.

“What I Mean To You” is the album’s high point. With some gentle pedal steel and a rhythm section straight out of a Dixieland combo, it’s such a good song that you can easily imagine Louis Armstrong singing it. Earle is already such a strong lyricist that he can create vivid imagery with only a few words, and the longing and ache that’s at the heart of the song is so delightful as to be almost astonishing. Earle’s singing is there to support the song rather than call attention to itself; fortunately, his somewhat craggy tenor conveys every emotion that they lyrics may have left out.

This is great American music that’s deserving of your attention and an audience. And it’s got soul. I recommend it highly.

Download: "What I Mean To You"

Download Midnight At The Movies From Amazon

Bootleg Friday: Nirvana, 1987-1994

BLazar70@gmail.com (Ben Lazar) — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 16:35:00 +0000

Some weeks I labor to figure out what to post for Bootleg Friday. This week, it was an easy call. Today's Bootleg Friday is a selection of live Nirvana tracks from various locations from 1987 to their last performance in Rome in February of 2004. Of note are the rather ramshackle covers of the Who's "Baba O'Riley," and the Cars's "My Best Friends Girl," which the band can't seem to decide whether to take seriously or not, and waver in and out of committing to the song. It's pretty hilarious.

Download: "About A Girl" 8/30/92, Reading Festival
Download: "Jesus Doesn't Want Me For A Sunbeam" 2/7/92, Sydney, Australia
Download: "Baba O' Riley"
Download: "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" 2/7/92, Sydney Australia
Download: "Sliver" 8/30/92, Reading Festival
Download: "Downer" KOAS Radio, 1987
Download: "Here She Comes Now"
Download: "My Best Friend's Girl"
Download: "Smells Like Teen Spirit" 8/30/92, Reading Festival
Download: "All Apologies" 2/22/94, Rome, Italy

Kurt Cobain, 15 Years Gone

BLazar70@gmail.com (Ben Lazar) — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 17:28:00 +0000

The first time I heard of Nirvana was in August of 1991, while I was finishing a summer internship at Atlantic Records. Regina Joskow, a very wonderful woman and publicist at Atlantic who had been incredibly kind to me, certainly kinder than she needed to be to any summer intern, came up to me and asked with the utmost seriousness, “Ben, have you heard the new Nirvana?”

When I told her I hadn’t, she told me that I needed to – at once. Her manner was that of a Jewish mother, who, when told her guest hadn’t eaten anything all day, demanded that they sit down immediately so she could feed them. She told me that the album’s name was Nevermind, and later that day, she had procured a cassette copy of the album for me. (Pre-release cassettes were commonplace in those pre-Internet days, as we didn’t have to worry about leaks, etc.)

I loved the album immediately and got that it was going to be big. The power of the album was apparent immediately – the quality of the songs, the emotional authority of Cobain’s voice, the monstrous swing of Dave Grohl, and importantly, the humor embedded in the DNA of the lyrics.

Back in school that fall, I watched as the album’s buzz grew and grew; from a small, in the know crowd to something much larger. I missed Nirvana’s New York show at the Marquee that September, but it was talked about like the Second Coming – and people meant it when they raved about it.

I knew that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was on it’s way to phenomenon status in mid-December while at a Guns N’ Roses show at Madison Square Garden. Soundgarden opened, and during the interminable two and half hours waiting for Guns N’ Roses to go on, a DJ spun the hard rock hits of the day, loudly, while a video screen flashed images of attractive young women, which inspired the crowd to demand of them, “Show us your tits,” which most of the women obliged, happily or not.

But when “Smells Like Teen Spirit” came on, the crowd erupted as though the band itself was there – and the tit flashing stopped. 20,000 people sang along, and I was stunned. Sure, by then the single was huge in rock circles, but this was something else entirely – this had crossed over to a hard rock audience, and the ferocity of the response was overwhelming. This was an anthem – a hard rock fusion with punk that resonated like classic rock, transcending the fragmentation that had been afflicting the rock scene for years. I turned to the person I was with, another aspiring music bizzer, and said, “I don’t believe this.” About 5 or 6 weeks later, the album overtook Michael Jackson’s Dangerous to become the number one album in the country.

I was a fan, a pretty big one. The band had their detractors, but I knew they had staying power. As grunge and alternative exploded in the wake of Nirvana’s success – Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins, Alice In Chains and more, it was obvious to me that Nirvana – musically, substantively and emotionally - was head and shoulders above the rest of them. Pearl Jam may have been marketed as the Rolling Stones to Nirvana's Beatles, but I didn't think they were even worthy of the comparisons. (And I still don't.)

My assessment was confirmed with the September 1993 release of In Utero, which, from the opening notes of “Serve The Servants,” stunned me with its overwhelming power, its hypnotic and unforgettable melodies and the soul of Cobain’s vocals. I listened to the album incessantly, loving the dark rawness of it. It felt like a modern version of John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band; filled with pain and anguish that was immensely personal, but with the skill of the writing and the transcendent quality of Cobain’s voice, utterly universal.

I saw the band play the New York Coliseum (now the Time Warner Center) in November of 1993 with Shonen Knife (one of those completely uncommercial bands that got a major label deal because Kurt liked them) and the Breeders, who were exploding with “Cannonball.” The show careened by triumphantly, ninety minutes of great song after great song, diamond hard rock that transcended the burden of the classic. My love deepened.

By then, I was working in the record business full time. I had just started at Elektra Records, and was in charge of shipping Elektra’s promotional and commercial “product” to the staff across the country and to radio stations. It wasn’t the most glamorous job in the business, but I was learning the nuts and bolts of the record business, and I was happy. The industry was transforming – the energy of the Alternative wave that Nirvana had ushered in was still cresting, and young people who had been involved in the alternative/indie scene early on were now taking big jobs at the major labels and management companies. It was an exciting time.

Friday, April 8th 1994 was a quiet afternoon in the Elektra office. The office hummed softly with the anticipation of the weekend; it seemed as though people were avoiding conversations so they could slip out of the office as soon as possible. I caught up on some paperwork. Around 2:30pm, I overheard someone yelling across the hall that Kurt Cobain had been found dead, an apparent suicide. I plugged them for information, and they told me that he had been found that morning, and that it was all over the radio in Seattle. A woman I knew from Gold Mountain Management, Nirvana’s management company, came into the office, breathless, and when I inquired about what had happened, she confirmed Cobain’s suicide and said, “Ben, whatever you hear, it’s ten times worse than that.”

I wasn’t shocked. Cobain had attempted suicide about six weeks previously while in Rome, and the gossip surrounding him and Courtney Love was all bad. But as the news began to seep in, I found myself getting more and more upset.

I turned the radio on to WFMU, an influential college station, and people were calling in. I had expected the tone to be reverential, but what I heard instead was snark. “Nirvana just ripped off the Pixies,” one caller said snidely. Another caller remarked that it wasn’t a big deal at all, and asked the station to go back to its regularly scheduled programming.

I seethed. It was one of my first experiences with indie snark, and it enraged me – first, because of the musical ignorance involved, and second, because of the emotional callousness displayed. Assholes, I thought, and I turned off the radio and went home, playing “All Apologies” over and over, getting mightily sad, and mainly staying in that weekend, watching the coverage on MTV, and listening to Nirvana, Plastic Ono Band and Nebraska. Cobain belonged in that continuum, I thought then (and still do), and it made the loss cut very deep.

I wrote something that weekend about Cobain, a piece I’ve long since lost. But I do remember writing something to the effect of, “Whatever innocence this scene had (and I think it had a lot) is lost forever.” And I was very right – almost too right – about that.

After Cobain’s suicide, there was a retreat – in both music and the marketplace. What seemed so possible in 1992, 1993 and the first part of 1994 - that any great, left of center band could be big and become impactful beyond their own cult, was a possibility that diminished, seemingly overnight. Alternative, once the domain of Nirvana, became the domain of hacks like Better Than Ezra and Third Eye Blind. Indie went back to being for the cult and the cult only. For me, a music lover who loved when good music and the music I loved became popular, it was a very dispiriting time.

Courtney Love’s band Hole played the Academy very shortly after Cobain’s death, and it was one of the rawest, most chaotic shows I’ve ever seen. It teetered on becoming a circus, but when Love when into “Asking For It,” the room hushed. As she sang the song’s coda, “If you live through this with me/I swear I will die for you” over and over, building it, drawing it out and screaming it, the crowd experienced a moment of standing in her soul, of being in her misery and pain, and it remains one of the most powerful and unforgettable moments I’ve ever experienced at any performance.

For me, Kurt Cobain’s loss still hurts. I can’t help but wonder where his music would have gone, what turns it would have taken, where rock might be, even today, had he remained. In thinking of him and the impact of his suicide, I cannot help but think of Nietzsche: “And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

It’s no wonder that the most popular band on rock radio in late 1994 and for all of 1995 became…Hootie and the Blowfish.

Download: Nirvana - "Serve The Servants"
Download: Hole - "Asking For It"

An Interview With Nelson George, Part Two

BLazar70@gmail.com (Ben Lazar) — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 14:22:00 +0000

Here is part two of my interview with City Kid author Nelson George. (Here is part one.) In this segment we talk about the changes in Brooklyn, the example of his mother, the value of hard work, President Obama and the soul revival.

Q: You grew up in Brooklyn in the 1960’s and 70’s, a very challenging time. What are your thoughts about the renaissance of Brooklyn?

It’s funny that you say, “the renaissance of Brooklyn,” because the streets of Brownsville…the projects that I grew up in are still there. It’s got one of the highest HIV infection rates in the country. It’s still got one of the highest crime rates in the city. So the places that are far away from Manhattan – that don’t have nice brownstones – still have the same issues that I grew up with. They have a gang problem – again. That Brooklyn is still unaffected.

Williamsburg is interesting, because it’s one of the ugliest in the borough – but it’s really convenient to Manhattan, so it works. I have mixed feelings about the whole thing – I hate to see my neighborhood become just an extension of the Upper West Side. That bothers me – I don’t want to live on the Upper West Side (laughter).

But I’m a beneficiary. I go to BAM. The Brooklyn Museum has really upped its game considerably and become a much more vital institution. My neighborhood (Ft. Greene) has great restaurants and things going on. The cultural energy that the new arrivals have brought in – I can’t really be mad at it. But I think Brooklyn is still in flux. I think the economic downturn is going to have an effect – as it should. I guess I just have very conflicted feelings.

Q: There’s something almost Horatio Alger-like in your story. Without being preachy, there is an enormous sub-text in your story about the value of hard work – you have a great quote from Quincy Jones about the value of “ass power,” the ability to keep your ass in your seat until you get the job done. What drove you to work so hard?

My mother was an incredible role model. She was working as a checkout lady in a supermarket and she wanted to be a teacher. So she would work all day, come home, feed us, and then take the IRT out to Flatbush and go to school at Brooklyn College, come back to Brownsville, go through the projects, come home, tuck us in, get some sleep, get us up for school, go about her job…and she did this for three or four years in a row.

Q: Were you consciously inspired by her at the time? She went through some harrowing things – she really comes off as an heroic figure in the book.

She really was. I always say, she was my Cicely Tyson. (Laughter). She had a boyfriend who was a teacher, so there was always reading and education around. Education was a huge part of the vibe around me. The fact that you could use education to pull yourself up – and she did it. She got us out of the projects, bought us a house, got a car…she did a lot of stuff that’s amazing.

I also read all those biographies of writers. I mean, Hemingway – this was a guy who was an alcoholic by every description that we would use now – who turned out an incredible amount of work and was super-focused. If you do stuff – good things will happen. A lot of the books I’ve written and films I worked on were things that no one paid me to do – they were things I started on my own, and I figured if I created something good enough, I would find a buyer eventually. I’m a big believer in people creating. That’s partly why I was so drawn to hip-hop – because people were creating on their own, outside the power structure, and over time, they were able to leverage that into other things.

Q: What are you passionate about today, musically speaking?

I listen to a lot of Hot 97 still to keep up with what the hits are. I used to keep up with every producer and writer, but I had to let that go – it was just too much information in my head. I listen to an eclectic grouping of stuff – I listen to Cesaria Evora, I’ve been listening to a lot of Donnie Hathaway lately…I’ve been super-inspired by his writing.

Funnily enough, with the exception of KRS-One, I don’t like to go back to listen to the hip-hop I came up on – that feels like some old-man nostalgia to me. I’m more interested in what’s going on now and what’s going forward. If you dwell too much in what you like from the past, you get trapped in it. I’m interested in what the future holds. That’s what keeps you vital.

Q: There’s a picture of you with President Obama from 2004, when he was running for the Senate. What are your thoughts on his election? How was it for you? What did it mean for you about America?

The funniest thing to me about is how many people that I know in my age group know the dude. I’m one degree of separation from him with about three friends – people who went to college with him, or law school, or know Michelle. That’s kind of a weird thing – to think I could have easily been at some parties with him and his wife. The President to me was always a white guy from somewhere very far removed from me. It is kind of bizarre. (Laughter)

He speaks to the fact a large percentage of the white population have become comfortable with the acceptance of black authority in a way that was unthinkable a generation before. That’s a huge change in the way America sees itself. It speaks to the fact that the country is not as racist as I think black America has feared.

At the same time, there are millions of people who, for racial reasons, are totally freaked out by this. We haven’t reached Nirvana, but we’ve made a lot of progress. He speaks to a level of social mobility that is now possible for black America. The challenge that black people – all poor people, actually, have now is, “Are you ready to take advantage of this access?” Do we have schools and institutions in place that can produce more Obamas? I’m not sure if that’s the case. I still think there’s a lot of wasted genius in the streets.

We’re a country that’s fixated on bullshit. It’s part of an anti-intellectual tradition that exists in this country – I think Bush was a part of that – and I think it’s one of the reasons I think this country has fallen off. Our lifestyle is not as great as we think it is – because it’s not as rich as it could be. We’re not dealing with what’s going on in the world – it’s hard enough to know anything, but if you’re limited to reading People on an airplane, you ain’t gonna know shit. I think ignorance is a huge problem.

I think that’s one thing that Obama can really speak to. Obama knows the value of the word. He’s written books, and I think reading is one of the fundamentals that is under-valued. I have actors that sometimes come in to read who are functionally illiterate. I think we really need to work on education – it’s crucial to the future of the country. All the technology of the Internet, etc., isn’t going to mean anything if we don’t have people to manifest it. And the people that are educated - they're going to clean up.

Q: Last Question. In the past couple of years, there’s been something of a soul revival: Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones, James Hunter and a few others. Any thoughts about it?

Yeah, I think it’s great! Last year I traveled around the country for a show I do on VH-1 called "Soul Cities." I went to New Orleans, Memphis, Chicago and a few other cities and there are some great singers and performers out there. There’s a huge international audience for this culture that hasn’t gone anywhere. The artists that embrace it will reap rewards, and there are some great young artists doing it. Soul music is kind of like blues music – it’s a building block for so much. Soul music is benefiting from the collapse of the record business because it is a performance based culture more than dance music is. Of all the black music genres, more than hip-hop, more than slick r&b, soul benefits from performance, and with record structures breaking down, the ability to perform is becoming more important than ever –again.

An Interview With Nelson George, Part One

BLazar70@gmail.com (Ben Lazar) — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 13:56:00 +0000

Nelson George is a writer whose work I have enjoyed for years. His books, Where Did Our Love Go, The Death Of Rhythm And Blues, Hip-Hop America, have lovingly, intelligently and insightfully chronicled the history of soul and post-soul black music, looking behind the scenes and under the hood to get to the sometimes messy contradictions that are both behind the scenes, and in the grooves.

In addition to writing fifteen books, George has also written for the screen, and, in 2007, had his directorial debut with the HBO film Life Support, starring Queen Latifah.

George has recently released his own memoir, City Kid, a chronicle of his growing up in the projects of Brooklyn, his family, and the enormous impact that music, literature and film has on his life. It's a gripping tale told from a perspective that is uniquely his own, one that has been a major contribution to music and film. I recently spoke with George by phone and we had a freewheeling conversation about soul, hip-hop, Brooklyn, President Obama, the decline of the record business and a lot more.

Q: The book is a chronicle of several things: of your family, of life in the ghetto, of New York in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. But what struck me is that the book is really about your love affair with art – music, literature and film, and how that sustained, inspired and propelled you into a different world. Looking back on your life, how do you see your relationship to art, and is it as sustaining for you now as it was then?

The great thing about growing up in New York, and what makes New York such a great place to live is if you’re able to access all the things that the city has to offer. My mother was a big movie fan so we saw tons of movies. We went to Radio City Music Hall and those kinds of places. We saw the beginnings of a lot of black theater – I remember going to see “The Me Nobody Knows,” and early 70’s black plays. I was a big reader as well, and by the time I got to high school it all sort of came together, and I started venturing out – into Times Square, into the Village, which was full of jazz clubs, and Soho – and I don’t even know if it was called that then – it was just a weird area with art galleries. By the time I was in college there was not only hip-hop, but there was a lot of great avant-garde jazz. The city not only gives stimulation, but it allows you to see different worlds. And for me, it’s still that.

In terms of film, besides maybe Paris, I don’t think there’s a better city for film. We still have some incredible revival houses. You can basically see the entire history of cinema on a screen in this town if you’re paying attention. There are films that get played here that don’t get played anywhere else. I recently went to see “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” a silent film from 1927 by Carl Dreyer. And man, it knocked me the fuck out. It’s an incredible piece of film making. You can go on a Saturday night and see a Danish silent film from 1927 on a big screen – those are the kinds of things that make New York special.

I know a lot of talk of like, “the city isn’t what it used to be” in terms of music, but I don’t know. Between the invitations I get to stuff going on in Williamsburg, what’s going on in Brooklyn, still what’s going on downtown – you can still get a great range of music – great DJ’s, great bands, right now. I think the difference between ten years ago – definitely twenty years ago – is that a lot of the action isn’t in Manhattan anymore. Brooklyn has become the cutting edge, and like most things, it’s driven by real estate – real estate is always the number one issue in New York City, and real estate has driven it to Brooklyn.

There’s a critical mass of creative people in this city, and despite the Internet, despite Twitter and all that stuff, people like to be among other people. And creative people like to be around other creative people. The city still has a strong berth on that.

Q: I want to ask you about your eclecticism of taste. You write very lovingly about a lot of different authors and musicians. But you started with soul music, and I’m wondering if there was something about soul that provided you with some sort of foundation with which to view art, and, is there a common thread when you’re being with a piece of art?

The thing that I learned from soul music that still stays with me is a quest for emotion. When I was directing Life Support I asked myself, “What is it I’m trying to do here – what is the thru line?” And I tossed away a lot of my intellectual stuff. I just asked myself, “What is the emotion of this scene? What is the core of this particular moment?” Queen Latifah is pretty funny and she kept telling me, “Stop saying so many words! Just tell me what the emotion is.” That’s something that kind of comes out of soul music. The great thing about soul music is that the words are vehicles – it comes out in the phrasing and the singing. The words on the page might not be much - they might even be banal, but it all comes out in the emotion of the moment.

I write about it in the book about when I was trying to understand why I responded to different works of art, and it all comes back to emotional reaction. If I don’t have an emotional reaction, than the intellectual side takes over. Then you go, “Well, it sounds like it was influences by blah blah blah.” If there’s no emotional connection, there’s nothing to analyze.

Q: Hip-hop is 30+ years old – I think this year is the 30th anniversary of Rapper’s Delight –

Oh, God. (Laughter)

- You chronicled the birth and growth of the music and you may be the journalist most closely identified with the music. What’s your relationship to hip-hop today? Does it still feel as vital to you?

What I would say is, we use this phrase hip-hop – what the fuck does that mean right now? When I hear the records that Hot 97 plays, I hear a lot of dance music. I hear some really good records, but I don’t hear anything that’s connected to ’87 or even ’92. Just because a guy is rhyming doesn’t make it hip-hop. I think when people use the phrase hip-hop, they’re now referring more to a marketing term rather than a cultural one. There’s nothing wrong with that – it’s evolutionary. But I think the word has been devalued because of the way it’s been marketing. I don’t know if there’s hip-hop video games. I don’t see how there’s a rebel aesthetic in video games.

I saw that Def Jam video game when they’re wrestling. That’s hip-hop? Just because someone involved with hip-hop is involved in the game and they say it’s hip-hop doesn’t make it a valid definition. And it’s one reason there’s a lot of disillusionment is because the word itself has been devalued. I think Lil’ Wayne is hip-hop, and I think Kanye is mostly hip-hop, but not always. For me, hip-hop was most exciting when it was giving a voice to the voiceless, not just a commercial phrase to sell product – whether it’s music, clothes or watches. I don’t know if there’s a hip-hop watch. (Laughter)

You could say the same thing about rock – you can line up 50 rock fans and they won’t agree on a single band or what the meaning of the music is.

I actually think that rock is healthier now then it’s been in a long time, because you’ve fragmented away from the era where you had these dominant bands that sold out arenas. Because of the Internet and the breakdown of the record business, it feels more fan based to me. It feels far more organic to me than the top down shit.

My favorite band right now is TV On The Radio. I’ll listen to them more than any individual hip-hop artist, because it seems fresher, and it’s shit I never heard before. Their combination of elements – the way they use their voices and guitars – I never heard that before. That they’re from Brooklyn is a benefit (laughter). But I’m excited about them. And I’m really interested in the afro-punk thing. It seems like it’s growing organically, somewhat out of a reaction to hip-hop, quite honestly. I don’t know if it’ll be big. But if you throw in Santogold, TV On The Radio and even M.I.A., it’s already sort of arrived.

I have an office in the Village, and I was walking on Broadway the other day and I saw a guy who was totally b-boy’d down – 90’s b-boy. He’s wearing red, he’s got a baseball cap on sideways, he’s got matching white sneakers with red laces. And then I see these other kids walking, wearing straight jeans - the kind of faux-80’s outfit. And I thought, “The b-boy looks old! He looks like an old motherfucker from another era!” So there are new forces at work in the black culture that are tied to the pop culture. And I think that is one of the new movements that seems to have credibility to me, because it seems organic.

Q: So as someone who was an editor at Billboard, what are your thoughts about the decline of the record business?

The record business killed itself. I never thought it was a well-run business. When I was around it all those years, I thought there were a lot of people with a lot of passion, and a lot of people that didn’t give a fuck. And a lot of them weren’t business people – they were aficionados of music and they liked being around parties. And I’m even talking about big executives. I never felt like they were business people. I didn’t feel a lot of foresight.

For me, the key moment is when Napster comes out. I was at NYU teaching a class on the history of recorded music in 2000. And boom! The NYU Internet system collapses. And this happened at about five other universities that I know of, because kids are overloading the system, downloading and ripping music. This is a moment of critical mass – people are realizing that something is going on and it’s happening at the youth level. The record industry’s reaction is to sue Napster and sue their customers.

So what happened was that the technology was way ahead of the industry, and for three or four years, the industry’s reaction was to try to penalize the consumer. So they spun their wheels and went the wrong direction – alienated their artists, a lot of their consumer base. It took Apple with iTunes to figure it out. The technology people figured it out before the software people. It's been downhill for nine years.

Q: Greil Marcus’s “Mystery Train” was one of the most influential on me in terms of how I thought about and related to music. In City Kid you write about the impact the book had on you, especially the chapter on Sly Stone. How did you find that book?

I don’t know how I got turned onto that book – I think I read about it somewhere, and I was just knocked out. I had never read anything like that before. To me, black music had never been that well respected in terms of how it was written about. What I was feeling about the music when I was a kid – I wasn’t reading about it in Rolling Stone or in the Village Voice, at least not on a consistent basis. So when I read “Mystery Train,” I was like, “This is some shit.” He dug deep into the music, he dug deep into Sly’s persona, and he dug deep into the ramifications and the politics of the music. I just thought it was an amazing piece of writing.

The other chapter that was so big for me was the chapter on Robert Johnson. Because I had never heard of Robert Johnson before. And I remember going out and getting a Robert Johnson record and putting it on, and being like, “What the fuck.” That was the scariest shit – devil music.

I remember meeting Greil Marcus and him being amazed that I had first experienced Robert Johnson through his book. I owe him a major debt of gratitude. He gave me a way to think about writing about music and a guide into all of it. It’s a major piece of writing and I just hope that I’ve honored it.

Between Marcus and Robert Christgau, I really learned to see culture in the broadest way possible. So when people would say to me, “You’re a hip-hop writer,” I never saw it that way. I saw myself as someone writing about black culture – and hip-hop is one manifestation of that culture.

In the book, you write of LeRoi Jones’s book Blues People, saying, “The idea that our music was in a constant struggle with the forces of capitalism to define its own direction struck me as right on (and still does)." The dynamic of capitalism in black music has really shifted in the past twenty years – you have much more black ownership, you have the black mogul culturally, etc. How do you see that struggle playing out today?

Well, what Berry Gordy accomplished, no one has accomplished in quite the same way. But, the fact is that Russell Simmons, Andre Harrell, Damon Dash, Puffy, Jay-Z and a bunch of other guys have benefited from their music in a way that just wasn’t possible before, and, in fact, have expanded outside of music, using music as a platform for other businesses. I think that’s unprecedented and I’m really excited by it.

The caveat of that is: Are the values that these guys pursuing any more enlightened than the white executive might have been in that same position? That I’m not always sure about. Once you get past the idea that they’re black executives, you starting getting into the question of individual taste and the question of what are they going to do with their power. I think that’s a much more muddy thing.

In part two: George shares his thoughts about the Brooklyn renaissance, the value of hard work, his mother's example, what he's listening to these days and the impact of Barack Obama's election and presidency.

Bootleg Friday: Madeleine Peyroux, 2004

BLazar70@gmail.com (Ben Lazar) — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 13:36:00 +0000

The first time I saw Madeleine Peyroux was at Fez, in New York in 1996, when she released her debut album on Atlantic, Dreamland. I didn’t get it. Or maybe I did, but what's probably so is that I simply had no ability to listen to a jazz vocalist back then.

But Madeleine Peyroux, with her wonderful albums, Careless Love, Half The Perfect World and this year’s Bare Bones, has become one of my favorite singers of this decade, a vocalist of skill, depth and passion – a blend of the passions of blues and jazz with the complexities and ambivalence of modernity. Peyroux has that rare talent to be able to a have a song hold contradictory moods and feelings simultaneously. And the irony with which she imbues her songs is not the flip and glib style of irony which deadens art. Rather, it articulates a hard earned knowledge of the ways of the world, and it feels close to something like wisdom.

Today’s Bootleg Friday is a Madeleine Peyroux show from Berlin, Germany in December 2004, while supporting her second album, the wonderful Careless Love, one of the finest jazz vocal albums of the decade. You can hear the echoes (and songs) of her influences – Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits and more. But it adds up to something that is uniquely her own.

Download: “Dance To The End Of Love” 12/9/04 Berlin, Germany

Download: “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” 12/9/04 Berlin, Germany

Download: “Between The Bars” 12/9/04 Berlin, Germany

Download: “Lonesome Road” 12/9/04 Berlin, Germany

Download: “Walking After Midnight” 12/9/04 Berlin, Germany

Download: “(Getting Some) Fun Out Of Life” 12/9/04 Berlin, Germany

Download: “La Vie En Rose” 12/9/04 Berlin, Germany

Thoughts On The Dead

BLazar70@gmail.com (Ben Lazar) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 14:04:00 +0000

I've been ambivalent about seeing The Dead when they play Madison Square Garden in April. For me, what I really loved about the Grateful Dead was Jerry Garcia. I loved his sweetness and soulfulness, and how he was the linchpin of an American music that took so much in and spanned so much - rock, R&B, folk, jazz, experimental, bluegrass, psychedelia and more. When the Grateful Dead were on, they had a power that was overwhelming and undeniable.

But after reading about the shows and listening to Monday night's show at Roseland, I must admit that I'm excited for the shows. They're playing tight, if a little tentatively - but that is to be expected given that the tour is just starting. And vocally, it's much stronger than I would have thought. It's not that I won't miss Jerry - I will. But listening to the show, you can feel his spirit. And more importantly, I think the tour will be less a celebration of the band, and more a celebration of the songs, which gain resonance with each passing year. While techies and futurists continue to blather on about how the Grateful Dead gave away their music (they didn't), they'll continue to miss the most important point - it was about the songs and the shows. If new bands write songs as good as the ones on Workingman's Dead, American Beauty and Europe '72, and perform with the power that the Grateful Dead did at their best, they'll need to worry far less about new business models and how to market themselves.

*Interestingly enough, Monday's shows in New York conincided with the 20th anniversary of my atttending my first Grateful Dead show in Greensboro, North Carolina. Here's an account of how I got there.

Download: "Althea" 3/30/09, New York, NY

Stax And The Soul Of Hip-Hop

BLazar70@gmail.com (Ben Lazar) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 19:28:00 +0000

Hip-hop is clearly the most impactful and important musical genre that has emerged in the past thirty years. And much of it has been built on the rhythmic foundations of soul. Stax has just released The Soul Of Hip Hop, a compilation of Stax songs that were used for tracks and beats in famous hip hop songs, including De La Soul, Rakim, DJ HiTek, Cypress Hill, DJ Muggs, LL Cool J, Public Enemy, DJ Quik, Ice Cube, Notorious B.I.G., Wu-Tang Clan, RZA and more. Featuring songs by Isaac Hayes, The Emotions, Booker T. and the MG's, William Bell and others, it's a great and funky look at the impact that Stax has had on hip-hop.

I spoke with the compilation's producer, Jonathan Kaslow, a former co-worker of mine at Island Def Jam. Jonathan is one of the most knowledgeable and passionate hip-hop and music fans I've ever known, so doing this interview was a true pleasure.

Q: What was the genesis of The Soul Of Hip Hop?

I'm a consultant for Stax, and I've been going back into the vault and taking multitrack masters from the Stax catalog (including the above title) and converting them to Pro Tools sessions. I then take sessions that I feel producers will be interested in and give them to use for sampling. An example of this would be producer Jake One who took the multitrack from "Masquerade" and created a beat that ended up as the music for the Freeway song, "It's Over" on his Def Jam album Free At Last. Some of the producers and artists working with the material are Dr. Dre, Kanye West and Ghostface Killah.

From that, we sort of came up with the “soul of hip-hop” idea – we wanted to educate people how influential Stax has been in the sound of hip-hop. We were in talks with Def Jam to try to make an album of new material using all the Stax multitrack masters. I had arranged something with Rondor Publishing to do a blanket license – but for various reasons, it got shelved.

Q: I know you as a enormous hip-hop fan – what’s your relationship to soul music?

I’ve always had personal relationship to soul music. My mom, Alison Miner, was one of the managers of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and she managed Professor Longhair for a while. So growing up, I was more exposed to the r&b and blues side of things. I wasn’t as educated about the Memphis sound. I discovered it through my love of hip-hop – going back to find where my favorite rap tracks came from.

There are some Stax artists that my mom booked for Jazzfest – she had booked the Staple Singers and Margie Joseph. So the circle of life – it’s incredible. My mom passed a few years ago, I’m working with the masters of the artists she booked, and I’m thinking “Who was my mom talking to to make this happen…was she talking to (Stax head) Al Bell?”

But my education came through hip-hop. I felt like I had to find my own sound. And hip-hop was that. Hip hop is the music of my generaton. But you have a moment when you’re a kid if you’re into hip-hop and if your parents have a big record collection. You have curiosity about how these sounds came. I'd listen to these old albums, and then I'd discover a track that one of my favorite rap songs was from and I'd be like, “Oh shit…that’s from that?” All these of these great rap songs are based on this old music. And when I’d try to find the hip hop sample, it all led back to Stax. I had no idea all this stuff happened in Memphis.

Q: One thing I noticed is that all of these songs come from the post-1969 catalog. The Stax catalog that is venerated is usually from the Atlantic era (up until 1968). But everything you have here is from the era after Stax left Atlantic.

Yeah – that’s a great point. Until I worked at Stax I didn’t have expertise in the catalog. It took me the last few years to learn it. And amongst the old-timers at Stax today, artists like Sam & Dave are the absolute pinnacle of the catalog. Absolutely – for them, it’s the pre-1968 stuff. But everything that moves me is from the post-1969 piece of the catalog when Stax got a lot funkier. For me, after 1969, things got much more interesting rhythmically. The BPM’s got to around 88 or 90…just the kind of tempos that would become perfect to rap to. And a lot of the beats that are sampled from Stax are just so perfect that they just loop it and do nothing else. They don’t have to layer it or anything. They’re perfect.

A lot of the artists in the catalog – Johnnie Taylor, Rufus Thomas, the Mad Lads – they went from that 50’s bluesy, doo-wop influenced sound to pure funk. Stax’s music from 1969-1974 brought us an era of music that for some reason, became the dominant sound in hip-hop from the late 80’s to the mid-90’s. For a guy like me from the hip hop generation, the later era of Stax speaks volumes more.

Q: Why would you recommend this to a hip-hop fan unfamiliar with Stax or old school soul?

For someone who grew up with hip-hop, but didn’t go beyond being a listener–if they never got into production, they can listen to this CD and really get the origins of hip-hop. We approached the project from the context of, “What are the most famous hip-hop songs that used Stax beats, and then what Stax songs comprised those.” A lot of soul fans are unfamiliar with the Mad-Lads, but for me, they’re more important than Sam & Dave. And the people that listen to the older part of the Stax catalog – they can get into it because it’s funky.

This whole project has been an education for the people on the Stax side. They’ve made money off of sampling – but they didn’t know what it was or how to make it interesting for them in a social context. A lot of people of the Stax generation – both artists and executives – would give sample clearances very grudgingly. But thanks to this project, I think the folks at Stax have an ever broader sense of the impact their music has had, and it's actually made them fans of sampling! Because if it wasn’t for the hip-hop generation, someone like me, I wouldn’t even have even 10% of the interest I do in this music. It’s been good for everyone involved.

Q: Do you have future plans with this project?

We have plans to do multiple volumes of this particular set. I want to create “the soul of hip hop” as a brand in that we can create an idea and a theme that is universal to this. It’s a bridge between generations between soul and hip-hop. What I’ve been doing with these is using the multi-track masters, which gives producers so many more options. When I opened the multi-track of David Porter’s “I'm Afraid The Masquerade Is Over,” I almost cried – for me, even though he's a legendary producer and songwriter, what he’s known for is that song, which has been sampled by Wu Tang Clan, LL Cool J, and Biggie. When I could hear the strings separate from the piano – if you mute out things, there’s an almost infinite amount of possibilities you can create. I’d love to give background on how these tracks led to hip-hop. Maybe even do a TV program and show how a hip-hop artist would approach these vaults.

It’s interesting how history is approached differently with rock and rap. In rock, artists will often be obvious and forthcoming about their historical influences - which can reach back decades. In hip-hop, so many of the artists, especially with their braggadocio, will try to portray themselves as a whole new thing – nothing came before, and nothing comes after. Yet the foundation of all their music is older.

It's true - it's a different relationship to history and the past. When I was 11 years old, I was way into the Geto Boys Can’t Be Stopped album, the one with “Mind Playing Tricks On Me.” The first song on side two of the cassette was “You Gotta Let Your Nuts Hang,” which Scarface is all over. I was at my mom’s in New Orleans – and I was going through my her record collection. She had managed the Wild Magnolias, who were this incredible band of Mardi Gras Indians. Their first album is seminal. I heard the loop from “Gotta Let Your Nuts Hang,” knew it was from the Wild Magnolias, and then when I checked the credits of the Geto Boys album, I was like, “I don’t see the song credited.”

So I told my mom, who then called band pianist Willie T, and she had me go to Willie T’s place and play him the Geto Boys. He listened and then said, “I’ve never heard of the Geto Boys, I’ve never heard this song, and no one ever contacted me about using it.” He ended up taking Geto Boys to court and won - I was a hip hop snitch (laughter) – and that money really helped him. Being around the New Orleans musicians growing up, I was taught that they’re the most important thing - and that you have to protect them. My mom taught me that history is a hugely important thing, and it can’t be let to fade in the background. Growing up in hip-hop I had a weird identity – I knew that it was built on the past, but it wasn't something you ever talked about. I think why there’s a lack of history sometimes is because of the socio-economic history of African-Americans in this country. It’s a very painful past sometimes, and I think denying the history can sometimes be a way to get past the pain.

You have tons of examples of that in black music history – middle class blacks in the 50’s and 60’s who hated the blues, and felt that that was old plantation shit to be left behind.

Yeah. I remember working at Def Jam when "Standing In The Shadows Of Motown" came out. The movie came up in a staff meeting, and a very high up black executive said to all of us, “You best keep me as far away from that shit as possible.” And I was like, “You don’t like Motown?” But for that person, their relationship to that music was very different from mine, and it was not to be discussed.

Download: David Porter - "I'm Afraid The Masqurade Is Over"

Buy The Soul Of Hip Hop at eMusic

Buy The Soul Of Hip Hop at Amazon MP3 store

Buy The Soul Of Hip Hop at iTunes

Theory Vs. The Real World

BLazar70@gmail.com (Ben Lazar) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 06:00:00 +0000

I get that the music business (the record business expecially) is struggling and may be at a loss in how to deal with their challenges. I'm not an apologist for the record business. I could write a long list of mistakes I believe they've made and others I think they continue to. But I am so exhausted reading the theories of techies and futurists who know very, very little about the real world of music.

Last night I came across a blog post by a guy named Albert Wenger. Wenger is partner at Union Square Ventures, a New York based venture capital firm. In his post titled, “A Coming Paradigm Shift In (Online) Music,” Wenger recaps the familiar shifts in the music business over the course of the past decade, and then writes of three companies/services that he sees as possible paradigm shifters. I’m not familiar with the services so I can’t comment. But what got my attention and raised my ire were the following sentences in his final paragraph:

Of course one immediate question about such a new paradigm is how artists will make money. I think it would be a grave mistake to be caught up in that question. For starters, it seems to me that over the course of history very little of what we now think of as great music was produced specifically because the people making it were concerned about making the music a commercial success (I was reminded of that this morning listening to “Breakfast with the Beatles”). (Bold and italics are mine - BL)

Really? Tell that to Motown founder Berry Gordy, who specifically designed Motown to be a commercial proposition, tailoring its sound at all times to the perceived desires of the marketplace - "The Sound Of Young America." Motown was not founded on the pure self-expression of the Artiste. Its production model was the automotive assembly line. Each single was created expressly to be a hit - and writers and producers were ordered to continue to use a musical style until it fell out of favor on the charts.

Mr. Wenger mentioned the Beatles in his post, so let’s write of the Beatles. While the Beatles clearly had a true passion for music, to say that they weren’t concerned with commercial success is utter hogwash. Paul McCartney once said, “When John and I used to get together to write, sometimes we’d say, ‘Let’s write a swimming pool today.’” And John Lennon was never more authentic when he sang, “Money (That’s What I Want).”

Great independent labels from the 50’s and 60’s like Chess and Atlantic were founded not just on a great feel for the black music market – they were founded on a desire to make a lot of money in the process. The men who ran these companies were not patrons of the arts - they were hustlers who loved the music, and loved the money they could make selling it. James Brown, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Michael Jackson, Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin…all of these great artists had their commercial considerations right alongside their artistic ones. One never negated the other.

The myth that art and commerce are separate – that “true” or “great” art has nothing to do with the desire for commercial success or financial reward is the cause of more inauthentic behavior amongst artists than anything I’ve ever encountered in the music business. I’ve met so many left of center, independently minded artists who either claim (or feel they need to claim) that they’re above commercial considerations, when the truth is the opposite. (And in my experience, those are the artists that are the most expensive to sign - when they say they don't care about money, that's when you have to hold on to your wallet.)

There’s nothing wrong with caring about commercial and financial goals. Yes, I believe that the art should lead, and that compromising the essence of your principles for a buck is what we call selling out. But when artists try to pretend they don't care for or desire money or commercial success - well, that's when things get phony. It's the worst way to try to attain credibility as it has nothing to do with true authenticity.

Because the music industry is so challenged at the moment, there are a ton of thinkers from outside of music who theorize and opine about what changes need to be made to the music business. That’s fine. But when these non-music people create theories that are on top of an utter ignorance of music, musicians and music history, well then something needs to be said. Theories and ideas are great – as long as people reading the theories get that there’s a gap between theory and the real world. A very big gap indeed.

Bootleg Friday: Simon & Garfunkel, 1969

BLazar70@gmail.com (Ben Lazar) — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 13:54:00 +0000

I was listening to the iPod (on shuffle) last night on the way home, and “Bridge Over Troubled Water” came on. I was about to hit the forward button; after all, do I really need to hear “Bridge” again? But I let it play, and once more, I was taken in by the overwhelming beauty of the song, arrangement and vocals. If there’s a better gospel song written by a Jewish guy from Queens, I don’t know what it is.

So today’s Bootleg Friday is a Simon & Garfunkel show from November of 1969 in Oxford, Ohio. It’s from the same fall 1969 tour that the recent Live 1969 album came out on (through Starbucks) and it’s fascinating to hear the songs that would be released on 1970’s Bridge Over Troubled Water in sparser musical settings, played in front of an audience that had never heard these songs before. When Art Garfunkel introduces “Bridge” by saying, “Here’s another new song, probably my favorite, called ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water,'” you can’t help but smile, knowing what’s coming for the audience.

What is eye opening on these songs is how powerful Art Garfunkel’s singing is on them. I had always thought of Garfunkel more as an appendage than as a true partner of Simon’s – but this show proves me wrong. And while the duo was backed here by their great studio band – drummer Hal Blaine, bassist Joe Osborn, pianist Larry Knechtel and guitarist Fred Carter Jr., they’re used sparingly and subtly, letting the strength, craft and skill of the songs and voices shine through.

Download: "Fakin' It" 11/11/69, Oxford, OH
Download: "The Boxer" 11/11/69, Oxford, OH
Download: "So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright" 11/11/69, Oxford, OH
Download: "Why Don't You Write Me" 11/11/69, Oxford, OH
Download: "Bridge Over Troubled Water" 11/11/69, Oxford, OH
Download: "The Sounds Of Silence" 11/11/69, Oxford, OH
Download: "Bye Bye Love" 11/11/69, Oxford, OH
Download: "Homeward Bound" 11/11/69, Oxford, OH
Download: "America" 11/11/69, Oxford, OH

Some Advice To Mr. Springsteen

BLazar70@gmail.com (Ben Lazar) — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 03:59:00 +0000

Dear Bruce,

I haven’t gotten that email from you yet requesting my advice on the setlist for the new tour. Maybe it went into my spam folder. Strange. It probably just slipped your mind amidst all the preparations for the tour.

Anyway, I read the accounts of this week’s two rehearsal shows on Backstreets. Sounds like you made some progress on night #2, but I think Chris Phillips’s criticism is dead on – you don’t really have a new show yet. You’ve just added some new songs to a pre-existing framework. And I assert that you need a new show.

So I’ve constructed a working set list for you of 24 songs (you can expand on it later), based on the themes you’ve been talking about in interviews (“Our band was built on hard times”), the new album and of course, the need to get the crowd out of their seats, shaking their asses and rocking. I’ve put some alternate ideas for a few slots as well.

I’ve also compiled a list of songs that in my opinion, you should avoid, as well as a list of songs that you might want to either dust off, or try out with the band for the first time.

Here we go:

The Set

1. Cover Me (It rocks, it’s about hard times, and it’ll be a cooking opener – just no prolonged intros, ok? Count it off in the pitch black, and then when Max’s drums kick in, have the stage lights explode. They’ll love it – even your core fans that say they hate it will be like, “Yeah, that’s a pretty great opener.”)
2. Roulette (Uh, can we say financial crisis, anyone?)
3. Outlaw Pete (I’m not a big fan of this one, but I know it’s important to you to play it.)
4. My Lucky Day
5. Spirit In The Night
6. Working On A Dream (Bruce, I heard the rehearsal version – you brought the song a whole step higher. Bad move. Bring it back down to the original key.)
7. Seeds/Spare Parts
8. This Life (Sounded gorgeous in the rehearsal, but please drop the crowd participation part – too cheesy. Having the background vocalists is a great move though.)
9. What Love Can Do/Good Eye/Queen Of The Supermarket
10. Candy's Room
11. Cadillac Ranch/I'm Goin' Down
12. Leap Of Faith
13. Girls In Their Summer Clothes (Do it in the same key as the recorded version, ok Bruce? It's one of your greatest songs ever, and you bringing the key up on the Magic tour just didn't work - it killed the melancholy at the heart of the song which makes it so wonderful.)
14. Kingdom Of Days
15. The Last Carnival
16. Backstreets/The Price You Pay/Long Walk Home
17. Born To Run (It needs a new context to freshen it up, but you can’t not play it.)
18. Born In The U.S.A.

Encores

19. How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live? (Says it all, right?)
20. Open All Night (Rock it, baby)
21. Pink Cadillac (A little humor is nice.)
22. Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)
23. Land Of Hope And Dreams/Raise Your Hand (Totally different songs, I know, but in a way, they're very similar. Use em depending on your mood.)
24. Eyes On The Prize (You’ll have em weeping and raising their fist – perfect way to close it out.)

Warhorses That Need A Break For This Tour – Use Sparingly, If At All

Out In The Street
Badlands
Thunder Road
Dancing In The Dark
No Surrender (unless you do it acoustic – then it would be lovely)
The Rising
The Promised Land
Lonesome Day
The Ties That Bind
She’s The One
Darlington County
Ramrod

No. Just no.

Mary’s Place
Bobby Jean
Waitin’ On A Sunny Day
American Land
Last To Die
Livin’ In The Future
Working On The Highway

Time To Take It Out Of The Closet

Better Days
Open All Night (see encores)
Highway Patrolman
Walk Like A Man
Spare Parts (see main set – put Nils on pedal steel for this bad boy.)
New York City Serenade
Lucky Town
When You’re Alone (acoustic version would be lovely)
One Step Up
The Price You Pay (see main set)
Another Thin Line

Time For An E Street Version

Maria’s Bed
Cross Your Heart
Real World
Long Time Comin’
Leah
All I’m Thinkin’ Bout
O Mary Don’t You Weep

I think with this as a general framework, you’ve got the makings of a kick ass tour. If I come up with any other ideas, I’ll definitely let you know. Let me know your thoughts - but don't have Little Steven call me about it, ok? He'll just tell me that you need to do all the songs from Disc 2 of Tracks. And when are we going to discuss the archivist/re-issue job? Call me before the tour starts, ok El Jefe?

Download: "This Life" 3/23/09, Asbury Park, NJ

The Radiant Fitz & The Tantrums

BLazar70@gmail.com (Ben Lazar) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:25:00 +0000

I’ve been enraptured with the songs on Fitz and the Tantrums debut EP, “Songs For A Break Up: Volume 1.” The Los Angeles based band's songs are luminous, well crafted and instantly memorable, with big, open choruses that sweep you up in their incandescent wake. They’re one part old, forgotten soul, one part Nuggets style garage rock, along with a dash of early "She's Gone" era Hall & Oates. Fitz’s voice has elements of Jack White along with echoes of dozens of forgotten one shot hit makers of 70’s AM gold, and he rarely fails to delight.

The production is definitely of the post-Mark Ronson school; retro feeling but with hints of modernity. The sound works for them, but they could stand to create a sound that is more uniquely theirs - if they do, they'll be even more formidable.

Mark Ronson has featured “Breakin’ The Chains Of Love” on his East Village Radio show, but I think “Don’t Gotta Work It Out” is a superior song. With a pre-chorus reminiscent of the Spinners classic “Rubberband Man,” it then slides into a chorus that feels like turning the roof down on a 1964 Pontiac convertible on a brilliant Southern California day right about the time you hit Route 1. Gorgeous and gleaming stuff.

Download: Fitz & The Tantrums - "Don't Gotta Work It Out"

Fitz & The Tantrums MySpace

Fitz & The Tantrums Performing LIVE! that's right LIVE!!! "Breakin' the Chains of Love" from Fitz&theTantrums on Vimeo.

32 Years

BLazar70@gmail.com (Ben Lazar) — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 20:53:00 +0000

Today is the 32nd anniversary of my mother’s death. I’ve debated whether or not to write about it on the blog for the past 36 hours or so. I am and have been deeply reluctant to write about her – I don’t want to seem mawkish or significant. And I sure don’t want anyone’s sympathy – I’ve been blessed in a multitude of ways. But I write anyway, because so much of who I am as a music person is from her – both in life and death.

My mother, Gerda Pastor, was born in 1931, in a little village called Nowy Targ, in the southern part of Poland, near the Czechoslovakia border. Her father, Max, was a contractor who bought various foodstuffs in the Polish farmland, and then sold them to Polish army posts. He had been an officer in the Polish Army during World War I, and he built upon those contacts to create a successful business. Max was a gruff man, and while loving, the real warmth in the house came from my grandmother Bronia, who my mom adored. She also had an older sister, Helene, who she had an up and down relationship with.

My grandfather knew by 1938 that there was no future for Jews in Poland. Anti-Semitism was all encompassing in Poland – my aunt told me years later that it was “everywhere you went.” The epithet “Dirty Jew” was commonplace and accepted at all levels of Polish society, and it followed my family, and all Jews everywhere. So they decided to get out. My grandmother had relatives already in New York, and they agreed to provide a sponsorship so they could attain visas. The process was ongoing in September of 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland.

My grandfather had managed to get American dollars in anticipation of leaving Poland, and with those, he proceeded to bribe their way out of Poland. Carrying as little as possible (what survives are some photos and a Candelabra that is at my father’s house), they got one of the last trains out of Warsaw before it fell to the Germans. They traveled to Romania, and then to Yugoslavia, where they got on the S.S. Rex, which sailed for New York and arrived November 15, 1939 (ironically, my day of birth, 31 years later). My mother was eight years old. Much of their family was still in Poland, and would eventually be murdered in Auschwitz, a fact that haunted my mother until her dying day.

Settling at first in the Bronx, and then in Washington Heights, my family began to adjust to life in America. My grandfather went to work as a dishwasher in the luncheonette that was owned my grandmother’s relatives, and did so without complaint. Then he became a line cook, and eventually, he owned his own dairy restaurant. There was no “English As A Second Language” type of program in the school system back then, so my mother and aunt (my aunt was 14) entered school without speaking a word of English. Within 6 months, my aunt says, they both could communicate passably in English. They adjusted.

What is important to know about my mother is that she was exceptionally beautiful, and her beauty gained her entry into a glamorous and sophisticated world. Men wanted to wine her, dine her, teach her, etc. (Emphasis on the “etc.”) She came to have a love affair with culture – film, music (especially opera), and fine art. She became a stylist, and she also wrote for several New York based art magazines as well acting as an agent for Vincent Cavallaro, who would later become my Godfather.

She absolutely adored New York, and was the quintessential New Yorker – smart, sophisticated, sexy, urbane, and in possession of what my father later called, “a very wonderful and timely streak of vulgarity.” She dressed uber-stylishly. I’m not sure I ever saw her wear a pair of jeans. Dresses or slacks. And always high heels. She spoke several different languages and traveled often – to Italy (on several occasions), France and Israel (she was an intensely devout Zionist). Later on after I was born and she was in her 40’s, a male friend of a neighbor of ours said upon meeting her, “Oh, you’re the Femme Fatale from next door!” She batted her eyes at him – she loved it.

She met my father through her work in June of 1966. He was running a company that manufactured womens shoes, belts and handbags, and she came to consult as a stylist. My father fell in love with her at first sight. “From the moment I saw her until the day she died,” he told me after she was gone, “there was no one else.”

When my father proposed, my mom had a few conditions. One of which was to have a child. My dad already had two kids and wasn’t keen on another, but my mom said she wanted to bring a Jewish child into the world that would replace the Jews that had been killed in the Holocaust. He accepted her conditions, and they married in November of 1968. Two years later I was born.

What I remember most about her in those years was her warmth. It was enveloping. When she was joyful, she could light up a room, and her laugh came from deep down within her, a soulful laugh. (My father loves to tell the story of how when they saw Mel Brooks’s “The Producers” in 1968, my mother the Holocaust survivor laughed so hard during the “Springtime For Hitler” scene that she peed in her pants.) She was physically demonstrative, generous with hugs and kisses for all.

She became devoutly religious as she got older, and I can remember how she would light the candles every Friday night to usher in the Sabbath. She would cover her eyes and say the prayer, and in those moments, she seemed almost taken by the spirit. I can see now that she was communing with something – maybe God, maybe the memories of Poland, or maybe just a spirit that she was attuned to. When she would tuck me in at night, we would always sing the “Shema” together, and it was done with an immense amount of love, but with more than a hint of sadness in there too. I didn’t know it then, but it was my first introduction to soul.

Her sadness became a real darkness at times. For whatever reason, she took the burden of the deaths of six million Jews upon her in some fashion, and it led her to drink. My dad told me well into my adolescence that I once asked him, “Why does Mommy act so different at night then she does during the day?” He traveled a lot for work then, so her drinking scared him to death, as she was responsible for looking out for me. It scared me too. I knew she loved me a lot, but the darkness she was enveloped in made her seem unreachable to me at times, and like all little kids, I blamed myself. And then I got angry and I diminished her in my mind. Every night when my dad would walk in the door, I would be thrilled – it was though the cloud above the house lifted, and I felt completely safe again.

I don’t want to make too much of her drinking. It was there and it happened, but we were a very happy family. I was very happy. I never wondered for a second whether my parents loved me. I could feel their adoration. And I adored them.

Saturday, March 19, 1977 started as a gorgeous, brilliantly sunny day. It had snowed several inches the day before, severely enough that they shut my 1st grade class down about an hour or two after we had arrived. I watched my usual Saturday morning cartoons – The Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner show, followed by the Shazam and Isis hour on the little black and white TV in my room, played outside in the snow, and then got dressed.

At around 1pm we left in my father’s rust colored Dodge Dart to go to the library. He drove, I sat in the passenger’s seat so I could be his co-pilot, and my mom sat in the back seat. We were all in good moods. None of us wore seat belts. A few minutes after 1pm, we were traveling through an intersection when we were struck at full speed by another car that ran a blinking yellow light. We spun out and crashed into a telephone pole.

I remember vividly looking to my left, and seeing my father moaning and writhing, his eyes closed, in obvious agony. His moaning was an unbearable and frightening sound, but I was so disoriented that everything occurred to me in the moment as surreal. I had slammed stomach first into the glove compartment, but was strangely not in much pain. I was just scared, stunned and in shock. I heard sirens arrive quickly, and a policeman emerged to help me get out of the car. When he pulled me out, I turned to the right and saw my mom, unconscious, her head resting against the right window, a trickle of blood coming down her ear. I took the policeman’s hand and was led to a waiting ambulance. There was a crowd of onlookers at the scene, the looks on their faces both horrified and concerned. I turned around one last time and looked at the car, twisted and mangled beyond recognition.

My father, fortunately, suffered relatively light injuries (a broken rib and a black eye), but my mom never regained consciousness. While I underwent surgery for a ruptured spleen that the doctors detected after shortly after arriving at the hospital, the doctors told my father that while I was going to be fine, my mom had suffered massive brain damage from her head slamming into the window at the moment of impact, and she wasn’t going to make it. They had to tell him three times before it registered. She died a little past midnight on Sunday, March 20, 1977.

Even now, 32 years after, I find it difficult to really be with the enormity of what happened that day. But obviously, one part of my life ended on that day, and another one began. I soon forgot what my mom’s voice sounded like, and I can’t recall it consciously, but there are times that I’ve dreamt of her (I like to call it “getting a visit from her”), and when she speaks, it’s her authentic voice. She’s there within me, always.

My love and appreciation for music, for literature, for art and beauty – that’s her. What I heard in soul music from the moment I first heard Otis Redding - that deep sadness along the irrepressible joy, sometimes apart, sometimes entwined – well, that’s an experience of life that I understood, and understood young, probably too young. Soul music, at its best, is an acknowledgment of the harshest blows that life can give, coupled with an indominitable resiliency and will to keep going.

That will to keep going despite it all is why Springsteen’s music has meant so much to me, why the line “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive” from “Badlands” is one that never fails to move me to the core of my being. And it’s why I have so little listening of much of the post-modern music (yes, I’m talking to you, indie rock) that is at the vanguard of music today, so much of which is more head than heart, that takes its risks in the realm of form instead of emotion, revels in distance as opposed to connection, that in its cool, drains much of the joy out of song and performance.

When I’m in the studio with an artist or when I’m writing about a piece of music that I love and want you and everyone else to love and appreciate, that’s my mom within me. And it’s how I do my best to honor her memory, and keep her being alive. My mother used to quote a line from Puccini's Tosca, which declares, “I lived for art and I lived for love.” What else are you going to live for?

Download: Louis Armstrong - "West End Blues"
Download: Bruce Springsteen - "Across The Border" 11/26/96, Asbury Park, NJ