There is No ”Bad” Music

There is no such thing as “bad” music. That shouldn’t be a controversial statement. I know I knock some stuff that I listen to – cough, Jethro Tull – but it doesn’t mean I think it’s bad: I just don’t get why other people think it’s good, which is not the same thing. In the end, all that matters is if the music you are listening to gives you pleasure. That enjoyment can take a lot of forms. It can be an intellectual satisfaction that comes from hearing something truly original or played masterfully, or something that stirs your emotions, or makes you dance, or takes you back to an earlier time, or that makes you chuckle. All that matters is that you like it. As long as you don’t force that onto others, then you be you.

What I will never understand is the kind of music fan who needs to slam an artist as part of elevating their personal favourite. (This seems unique to music. Pynchon fans don’t need to slag Gaddis, Tarantino fanboys can also love Nolan flicks, etc.) J. Cole seems to bring this out in people, which is nuts – he doesn’t need help to be awesome, and saying otherwise doesn’t make it true either. Or people who feel that listening to both artists in a beef (which generally means rappers, or maybe a Gallagher brother) is a betrayal of their favourite. I choose to listen to Kanye over Drake because I think Ye is the vastly superior artist and my listening time is precious. I don’t need to say “Drake sucks” as part of that choice. (On the other hand, Kanye also seems to be something of an ass, while Aubrey is one of the most naturally likeable people in music today. The wrong guy tried to get into politics. I don’t know if he’d be good at governing, but Drake would make a fantastic candidate.)

If you want to spend your listening time blasting Ariana Grande, I respect that. I don’t understand your choice, but it is undeniably yours to make, and good for you for deciding to live on what is to my ears the aural equivalent of a diet of stale Cheetos and warm Diet Coke. Some people do fine on such a diet – and I’ve consumed my fair share of both over the years – and she might just be your prime rib, while my Elvis Costello playlist is your idea of a piece of bubblegum scraped off the underside of a desk. Everyone’s tastebuds are unique – just ask anyone who thinks cilantro tastes like soap.

All of the above is a preamble to listing – yes, a few weeks late – my favourite new music of 2021. Not the ”best” music, because its not my place to say. I rarely write about it, but I listen to a lot of new music. Usually, it’s while walking (in nicer weather, I walk around 90 minutes each Saturday and Sunday), or exercising – something about physical activity and new sounds just clicks for me. A lot of these will be unfamiliar names, but I highly recommend checking them out – you may find a few here that don’t taste soapy to you either.

Here they are – my top 20 of 2021. Bracketed comments are from Twitter after the first time I played a particular record (weather conditions and my overall mood are the key factors in whether I tweet about something or not).

Bad Bad Hats – Walkman
CHAI – WINK
Halsey – If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power
Hana Vu – Public Storage
Hand Habits – Fun House
Hovvdy – True Love (“melodic indie pop, meditative whispery vocals, solid song craft”)
Illuminati Hotties – Let Me Do One More (“endlessly clever, musically diverse, catchy hooks”)
Jazmine Sullivan – Heaux Tales
Jenevieve – Division (“languid and kind of trippy, with bracing melodies”)
Jordana & TV Girl – Summer’s Over (trippy, breezy, dreamlike)
Jose Gonzalez – Local Valley (“gentle, contemplative, soulful”)
Lana Del Ray – Chemtrails over the Country Club
Lil Nas X – Montero
Lily Konigsberg – Lily We Need to Talk Now
Macie Stewart – Mouth Full of Glass (“guitar forward, complex and rich sounding, yet decidedly not fussy”)
Megan Thee Stallion – Something for Thee Hotties
Nilufer Yanya – Inside Out (“soulful, honest, insistent – the melodies burrow deep and don’t release you until the next track starts up”)
Snail Mail – Valentine
The War on Drugs – I Don’t Live Here Anymore
Wiki – Half God (“the (mostly) slow rolling soulful light jazz/borderline ambient backing tracks can’t hide the truth in his raps”)

Not the Pazz and Jop 1973 #13

Paul McCartney & Wings – Band on the Run

The Beatles were the first band I loved, so I can’t really say why I had so little interest in their solo work. I definitely want to blame one of my younger uncles – I can’t remember which one, so all are both tarred and unsullied by this comment – who said we couldn’t play his Beatles records anymore after they broke up. I usually liked their singles that I heard on the radio, but only bought two of their records: a 45 of John Lennon’s “Imagine” years after it was released, and George Harrison’s “Somewhere in England”, which I wanted for his John tribute “All Those Years Ago”. Later, I owned Paul McCartney’s “Flowers in the Dirt” on cassette, but that arose not out of fealty to Paul but because I wanted to hear what his collaboration with Elvis Costello had wrought.

Over the past year, I’ve started to make up for this lack. It turns out “Somewhere in England” is not a very good record, but George’s “All Things Must Pass” is brilliant. John’s “Imagine” annoyed me immensely but I was floored by “Plastic Ono Band”. Ringo Starr’s “Ringo” was a frothy delight. And now, we come to Paul.

I had measured expectations coming in. As a solo artist. Paul always felt to me as someone who too often accepted mediocrity. For every great single (“Live and Let Die, “Band on the Run”, “Let ‘Em In”), there would be treacle (“Silly Love Songs”), silliness (“Coming Up”), or whatever we want to call the utter abomination that is “Ebony and Ivory”. And that Costello collaboration? Meh.

So my absolute joy over this album is beyond reason. I won’t call it perfect, but there isn’t a skippable track here, and that’s the next best thing.

“Band on the Run” has always kicked ass, and I have a new appreciation for “Jet”. But what’s really fun about listening to an album like this is discovering songs you never even realised existed. Why isn’t “Bluebird” a staple of easy listening radio? It’s a wistful and delicate love song with a jazzy horn break and an air that is so tropical you can almost feel the warm breeze. “Mamunia” has a similar feel, but more uptempo so that you’ll be bobbing your head in pace with the music by the end. I love the guitar in the chorus to “No Words” and the rollicking piano of “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five”, which ends with saucy horns before sending us off with a snippet from the title track. And the old-timey “Picasso’s Last Words” is probably the most Beatlesesque track, the kind of song that manages to be both simple sounding and pretentiously complex at the same time.

The standouts for me are “Mrs Vandebilt” and “Let Me Roll It”. The former is a bouncy romp (kitchen dancing!) that is the most fun song here, with the “ho hey ho”s of the chorus and snappy horns. (The cackling at the end was sort of creepy, though.) The latter has my favourite vocal on the record – an impassioned and committed tear through the song, joined by uncomplicated guitar work that cuts through you and pairs well with the emotion in the singing. My favourite moment comes with the addition of subtle bass picking and light snare drum leading up to the three-minute mark, which filled me with delight.

If there is one trend in these listening sessions, it’s learning, week after treacherous week, that I formed some flawed ideas about music earlier in life and, despite my belief that I am open to the new, I am as stuck in my listening patterns as the next guy. With every new record, I am taught anew that I need to try to abandon expectations before hitting “Play”. Today, it’s Paul McCartney. Others will soon follow, I’m certain.

Not the Pazz and Jop 1973 #12

Mike Oldfield – Tubular Bells

Sometimes on this journey I listen to an album and have to ask myself how it is that a consensus was reached that placed it among the top recordings of a given year. The most obvious example to date is everything recorded by Jethro Tull. We can now add “Tubular Bells” to that list.

Now, that does not mean this isn’t a worthy album. (Unlike, for example, Jethro Tull’s records.) But here is a partial list of 1973 records that I won’t be writing about (at this time, anyway) because, at least in part, “Tubular Bells” grabbed a slot in the top 20:

Steely Dan – Countdown to Ecstasy
Bruce Springsteen – The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle AND Greetings from Asbury Park N.J.
Sly and the Family Stone – Fresh
ZZ Top – Tres Hombres (what a great record this is – so much better than the stuff that came later when they were making hit singles)
Genesis – Selling England by the Pound
Tom Waits – Closing Time (which made me regret not starting to listen to him much, much sooner)
Paul Simon – There Goes Rhymin’ Simon
Donny Hathaway – Extension of a Man
Jackson Browne – For Everyman
The Rolling Stones – Goats Head Soup

So, yeah, it was a pretty good year.

I don’t listen to a lot of instrumental recordings: if a rock band puts more than one such track on an album, I’m enormously disappointed by the waste of good real estate. Contradicting this, I greatly prefer instrumental jazz to its vocal counterpart. I’m a complicated guy.

Part of the reason for this is that you can’t sing along with an instrumental track. (My wife says I actually do this all the time, but I don’t think such gibberish really counts.) My voice is no great treat, but I am a good imitator, so, vocal limitations aside, my “Nights on Broadway” sounds like a Bee Gees song, my “Alison” sounds like an Elvis Costello song, and so on. I don’t need to put my own stamp on a song when I sing along – I am slavish in trying to replicate what the masters already did. I’m a parrot, not a songbird.

A big part of the problem is that I lack the musical vocabulary to articulate what I think about a record like this. (Are there other records like this? God, I hope not.) I can usually put pop music into context, connect it to other things in the culture, call back to how it felt when a song came on over the radio as my friends and I drove around a quiet city at 3:00 a.m. (I’m looking at you, “Elvira” by the Oak Ridge Boys.) But when a record consists of two long tracks almost 25 minutes in duration each and NO SINGING, I am lost – it is that foreign to the music I love. So, I can listen to something like “Tubular Bells”, (sort of) appreciate it, and still be left with nothing to say about it other than to comment on my inability to say anything about it. (If this gets any more meta, it will be a Charlie Kaufman film.)

In the end, it was kind of fun to listen to, for no reason other than I never listen to stuff like this. It’s definitely an interesting record, with seemingly countless instruments used (the honky tonk piano with a humming choir around the 14-minute mark of side one is my favourite section), and there are echoes of so many styles and artists. That opening bit is definitely creepy, and this is from someone who has never seen – nor desired to see – “The Exorcist“. I suspect it’s a record that would reward repeated listens. I also suspect that I don’t care enough to bother – there’s already too much great music that I love that needs to be replayed, and an even bigger volume waiting to be discovered.

Classic Songs of My Youth Revisited #10

Shaun Cassidy – That’s Rock ‘N’ Roll

The school year of 1976-77 was a difficult one in our family, and for me personally. An uncle died at a horrifically young age. My parents’ marriage was imploding, resulting in a separation that was soon followed by an even more unfortunate reconciliation as they clearly were not done punishing each other for the mistake of having once been madly in love. And I endured for a time what we would today likely call bullying but back then (had I told anyone) would have been characterised as just boys being boys.

As has been true for much of my life, a major place for me to escape to during difficult times was into books. (Also hockey – I will never be able to overstate how important the success of the 1970s Montreal Canadiens was to my self-image and overall mental health.) A critical part of this were the not-very-mysterious Hardy Boys mysteries. Frank and Joe were nothing special as detectives: typically they were (1) lucky or (2) bailed out by dad Fenton. But as exemplars of late-teen cool, at least from the perspective of someone much younger, they could not be matched.

My attachment was such that during that winter of 1976-77, I went so far as to read the autobiography of Leslie McFarlane, the Canadian ghost writer of many Hardy Boys titles. A few years before, I had done a book report on “What Happened at Midnight!” (scored as a five-star book on my Goodreads). Also during that 1976-77 season, my mother took me along on a visit to a friend one day. On doing my usual (a habit that continues to this day) scan of his bookshelves, I found a Hardy Boys title and was fine for the next few hours, caring not what the adults were up to.

On January 30, 1977, my fandom went to the next level, with the debut of “The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries”. The Nancy part was fine (I had read a few of the books, and Pamela Sue Martin was adorable), but the real draw was the cool guys on the male half, with Parker Stevenson as Frank and Shaun Cassidy as Joe. Cassidy was the younger brother of a past teen heartthrob and had some musical skill of his own, so it was inevitable that it would become part of the show, despite the books’ utter lack of commentary on Joe’s musical talents.

Written by the odious Trump-loving Eric Carmen, “That’s Rock ‘N’ Roll” is a joyous piece of bubblegum. (The song’s excellence justifies the pennies due Carmen from Spotify for my repeated listens in writing this.) It feels like an update of a hit from an earlier age, as Carmen – savant that he was – seemed able to tap into the entire history of popular music in concocting his powerpop delicacies. It’s about teen malaise and insecurity, and the release that comes from discovering that music can be the path out of the woods: you need only to give in to the music and embrace the freedom, with no consideration of consequences. It celebrates that feeling of youthful invincibility, something they never seem to be in short supply of. It is unpretentious, while at the same time being incredibly pretentious about the power of pop music. So, of course, I’m a sucker for what it has to offer.

Cassidy’s voice is fine though not exactly tested here, and he was, of course, a first rank cutie. The song opens with a solid drumbeat. Pseudo chugging guitars follow, then horns, joined by piano on the chorus. And that’s it. Nothing fancy, just a heap of joyful noise packed tight with every pop music cliche you can imagine in under three glorious minutes.

It’s been a long time since I’ve read a Hardy Boys book, though I still own a large collection in the blue covers that will be familiar to anyone of my generation. Sometimes, I think I might like to crack one open, but I know it will never happen, at least not in my present state of sentience. There is no need to sully my memory of them as literary masterpieces.

Not the Pazz and Jop 1973 – #11

John Cale – Paris 1919

Maybe I don’t really know what they are talking about, but when people use the words “experimental” or “avant-garde” to describe a piece of art, that’s usually the point where I get anxious. Movies are the worst: the 45 minutes spent watching “Wavelength” were painful (is anything going to happen?), and I’m still not 100% sure what was going on in “Last Year at Marienbad”, though at least some things did in fact happen. I’m more willing to give novels a chance, but after three tries, I gave up (probably forever) on reading “Ducks, Newburyport”, and there are others like it.

It should be easier with music, given the length of a typical album, but my dedication to the three-to-four-minute long pop song makes this difficult for me. Plus, anything with these labels that has come to my attention previously was discordant, or noisy, or just odd. I never felt compelled to listen to John Cale because those labels have been attached to him at points in what I now know has been a very varied career.

But I love this record. It’s not at all what I was expecting. His voice is no great treat to listen to, very limited and usually without any hint of emotion (unless sardonic or world-weary count). If you want to apply the label Beatlesesque to this, you won’t get an argument from me. There’s a scope to this, a willingness to jump around the musical palate, that lets it slide comfortably next to “Sgt. Pepper” and its imitators/devotees.

“Child’s Christmas in Wales” is pure pop, like a late autumn Beach Boys, and “Hanky Panky Nohow” prefigures “Morning Phase”-era Beck. “The Endless Plain of Fortune” and “Paris 1919” would sound great with a full orchestra. “Macbeth” rocks hard, a real get-up-and-jump-around song. “Graham Greene” is jaunty with a hint of the islands, the backing track of “Half Past France” feels like southern rock, and “Antarctica Starts Here” has a Carpenters-like easy listening vibe. But he subverts genre norms time and again. That southern rock aspect is remarkably subtle, not in-your-face like a Lynyrd Skynyrd tune, and blended with a dreamy relaxing vibe. And his take on easy listening includes a whispered vocal that defeats casual listening. On top of this, his lyrics are for the most part like poetry, in that way that poetry doesn’t rhyme and makes zero sense.

As a companion to this, I gave Cale’s 2012 album “Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood” a spin, and also loved it. Did I just get lucky and stumble across his two most accessible records? Or do critics call him experimental because they lack the imagination to accept that some artists just don’t fit into a box? I will continue to gather data on John Cale (setting aside his soundtrack work, there look to be around 30 solo and collaborative works to check out), but for now I think it’s clear which camp I fall into.

Classic Songs of My Youth Revisited #9

Boston – More Than A Feeling

I loved Boston during their late 1970s heyday, but always sort of understood that there wasn’t anything particularly special about the band. I was no musical purist – in addition to my deep and unquestioned love for the Bay City Rollers, I owned three Shaun Cassidy 45s and one by Leif Garrett (no disrespect intended to either gentleman – those were great pop singles), to say nothing of Joe Dolce’s culturally questionable (and really quite awful) “Shaddap You Face”. But, track by track, there was very little that stood out in Boston’s catalogue. I was likely influenced in this direction by my all-time favourite rock critic dis; the literary genius in question queried why, in writing about “Don’t Look Back”, it took two years to re-record their first album and sleeve it in a rejected ELO jacket. Priceless.

Some bands were built to be one-hit wonders. They have one outstanding musical idea, and it explodes across the culture, takes its place among the greats, and the band itself disappears. Oh, they might still be out there, plugging away, but the collective culture no longer cares. We’ve moved on.

But what happens when a band doesn’t go away, but still has nothing more to say. Well, as one example, you get Boston.

“More Than A Feeling” is an all-time classic, an uncontested great. Now, name Boston’s second best song. There’ll be “Amanda” devotees, probably a fair number of whom lost their virginity while it played over a car stereo or a boombox in a darkened basement. There will be “Long Time” stans who’ll insist it’s as good as “More Than A Feeling” – they’re wrong – or “Don’t look Back” freaks. You might favour a deeper cut – my favourite track when I was young was “Feelin’ Satisfied” (no idea what I was thinking) and “A Man I’ll Never Be” is a solid and quite moving rock ballad that runs out of ideas three minutes in then inexplicably runs for 6:35. But the gap between “More Than A Feeling” and any of those is incontestable.

I used to think this was a great-but-not-good song. By that I mean a song that somehow overcomes a lot that is wrong to collectively be right. I was the one who was wrong – it’s just a great song. But I wasn’t listening to it right. Context is so important for music. Some bands are meant to be played in the car, some are for when you’re out in nature, others are for when you’re a little too drunk and have gotten to discussing the meaning of life with your cat. (I recommend Big Star, Mahavishnu Orchestra and Pink Floyd, respectively.) I’m no Adele fan, but I know if she gets me at the right place and time, I will turn into a puddle, such is her demonic power. (“Over You” by Daughtry was my anthem as my first marriage started circling the drain, and until writing this, I felt no need to revisit it in the many years since.) For “More Than A Feeling”, it took the trailer for “Inside Out”. I’d heard the song hundreds of times, but matched with those Pixar visuals, I finally appreciated it, and it’s grown for me in the years since. I have a visceral reaction to the song, a physical sensation that still surprises me.

The song’s construction by mad scientist Tom Scholz is masterful. A slow build – gentle guitars and quiet vocals – explode about 35 seconds in and never let up. Brad Delp is in full roar, and Sib Hashian slides in with perfect support in his unobtrusive drumming. The peak comes around the 2:30 mark as Delp’s howl blends into an air-guitar classic solo from Scholz – 20 seconds of playing that is instantly familiar to anyone who’s ever heard it on repeat.

Then the needle moves along to “Peace of Mind” when what you really want to do is go back to the beginning. How many copies were worn out this way in 1976/1977? Boston had a good run – spread out though it was – but nothing ever came close to the very first song most of us heard from them, whether as the lead single or the opening track of the album. There is no shame in that – we should all strive for a “More Than A Feeling” moment in our lives.

Not the Pazz and Jop 1973 – #10

Al Green – Call Me

Al Green wasn’t part of my musical experience growing up, so it’s only in recent years that I have come to appreciate what an enormous star he was in the early 1970s. He wasn’t as successful in Canada – his biggest song here fell short of the Top Ten – but south of the 49th parallel he had six Top Ten singles, and a few others that came close, between 1971 and 1974. I was, however, familiar with his music through cover versions. There was Talking Heads’ late ’70s take on “Take Me to the River”, which was probably the only Heads song then known to casual Maritime listeners like myself, followed a half decade later by Tina Turner’s sultry (as if Tina could do it any other way) version of “Let’s Stay Together“, which was easily my favourite track off “Private Dancer”.

Al’s voice is often described as silky, but that really doesn’t do it justice. The word brings to mind smoothness, sensuality, luxury. There’s a strained quality to his voice: if this is silk, it has snags in it, little divots and tears where he gets caught, drops down, and modulates his instrument with changes in emotion. The result is a record that is never slick – yes, there are strings, because it’s an early ‘70s smooth soul album and I think there was a rule about that or something, but they are used very subtly, so the record never turns into easy listening dreck. It’s a sly and quiet record – even the more up-tempo tracks don’t pass muster as dance-worthy.

My favourite of the original songs are “Stand Up” (love the horns in the chorus) and its exhortation to take control of your life, “You Ought to Be with Me”, and the album’s closer, “Jesus Is Waiting”. He hadn’t become Reverend Al yet, but even outside the not-so-subtle latter track, there is a spirituality to the music, or at least a life-affirming positivity, that shows the direction he was headed in.

Al knows his way around a cover himself and his takes on two country classics are highlights. In both cases, I listened for the first time with that sense of something familiar being encountered in a strange place, like running into an ex at your usual hangout. The record’s strongest vocal is on “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”, as he muscles the Hank Williams’ tune into becoming a soul song without losing its connection to the original.

Another highlight is his take on “Funny How Time Slips Away”, which is a natural fit for Green – though originally recorded as a country song, more soulful versions have found greater chart success, from Jimmy Elledge’s blue-eyed version to Dorothy’s Moore’s powerhouse gospel-tinged effort. A fascinating roster of artists have taken this song on, including Junior Parker (weird), Brook Benton (so cheesy you can feel your cholesterol rising), Tom Jones (sexy AF, of course), Jerry Lee Lewis (saucy), The Supremes (flirty) and Bryan Ferry (cool as always, but sort of over the top). Al hits it with a regretful world-weariness, the strain of the years showing in his voice.

There is something comforting about this album. The differences in the tracks are subtle, and if you don’t pay close attention, it can all sound very similar over the course of its 35+ minutes. You really need to sit back, close your eyes, and let Al burrow in without distraction. It’s the musical equivalent of a giant soft pillow: let it envelop you, and it will fill you with a sense of peace.

Not the Pazz and Jop 1973 – #9

Lou Reed – Berlin

Figuring out the essence of Lou Reed as a creative figure can be challenging. As a rock star, he is iconic – an active cool, dark and aloof – and it almost feels as if the role needed to be invented just to contain him. Yet he’s really more of a gloomy troubadour, with a vagabondish feel to his music – he would’ve thrived as a wandering minstrel in the Middle Ages, not that he didn’t do just fine in our era. But where he really would have been at home is musical theatre, in storytelling songs with dramatic flourishes and stylistic switches, the kind of tunes that are showcases for the performer.

Of course, one problem with musical theatre is that it is full of big and messy emotions, and that is not who Lou Reed was as an artist. He leaned towards a deadpan vocal style, drained of passion, always chill. But because he so rarely shows emotion, it’s a really big deal when he does. Some singers are forever on the knife’s edge – whether faking it for effect (most of them) or genuinely losing it (basically, Adele) – but that quickly becomes exhausting. Lou usually stays above it all, so when he slips, when the whole human mess of it all gets through to Lou-fucking-Reed, then you notice, and you lean in, and listen harder to take in what this wizard of cool is losing his shit over.

“Berlin” is a love story, but it’s not a happy one, and when the relationship at the heart of the album reaches its conclusion over the brutal sock in the teeth that is the three-song stretch that ends the record, Lou has clearly had enough of Jim and Caroline. You can see it coming, though: the delicate nostalgia of the title song becomes the flirtatious put downs (“she wants a man, not just a boy”) of “Caroline Says I” becomes the abusive toxicity (“You can hit me all you want to but I don’t love you anymore”) of “Caroline Says II”.

He’s in the middle of the mess now on “The Kids”, and he sings with less distance, a hint of emotion seeping into his voice, as the gentle music contrasts with the devastated mother of the tale. This turns into the delicate guitar picking of “The Bed”, an almost whispered inventory of grief so matter-of-fact that there really is no grieving being done (“I’m not at all sad that it stopped this way”), the “oh-oh”s rising to his voice slightly breaking on “what a feeling”. It then ends with “Sad Song”, a lightly hopeful and nostalgic epic that seems to be saying that maybe it’s best that the bitch is gone (“Somebody else would have broken both of her arms”).

There’s lots more to love here, especially the circus-like feel of “Lady Day” and the album’s one true rocker, “How Do You Think It Feels”. It’s an album that lives inside you with repeat listens, as you internalise its rhythms. Although a Lou Reed production would’ve made for a gloomy evening out – more “Sweeney Todd” than “My Fair Lady” – it is not an experience you would have easily forgotten. I’ll definitely be buying a ticket if anyone ever decides to give it a try.

Not the Pazz and Jop 1973 – #8

Marvin Gaye – Let’s Get It On

I expect I am on a very lonely island thinking “What’s Going On” is a highly overrated record. I am completely okay with that. Our reaction to music is deeply personal, and consensus doesn’t make something true. And I do like a lot of Marvin Gaye’s music. There are parts of “What’s Going On” that I love. My all-time favorite of his is “Got to Give It Up“, and I can’t believe I missed the obvious thievery (shame on everyone involved) of “Blurred Lines”. I never much cared for “Sexual Healing”, but his duets with Tammi Terrell still rock (just ask Meredith Quill). Marvin’s catalogue contains multitudes – you just need to find the bits that work for you.

I was not a fan of socially-conscious Marvin, but horny and lovelorn Marvin is a very different beast, and this is easily one of the most horned-up records of all time. There are funk elements in the backing tracks, but this isn’t a funk record. It’s right in the heart of what soul should be, while dabbling in a half dozen other areas, with pre-disco wah-wah guitars in places, jazzy elements in others and, in “Come Get to This”, he offers up a slightly slowed down version of something you’d expect to hear from an early ’60s girl group rather than the pre-eminent singer of sweaty ballads of a decade later. Finally, there’s almost a bossa nova feel to “You Sure Love to Ball”, and if you didn’t get the point from the title, the opening coos of pleasure from his female paramour remove those last few drops of uncertainty. It’s the kind of song you expect to hear near closing time at a bar that thinks it’s a lot classier than it is, filled with patrons with more self-awareness than the disc jockey but still happy to play along.

Marvin was far too attached to strings for my liking on “What’s Going on”, and it didn’t feel like a good fit for the harder-hitting content of that record. But they are perfect on a tribute to eros, and the cinematic strings – and liquid horns – of “If I Should Die Tonight” are a perfect complement to Marvin’s heartfelt yearnings.

It’s the rare record that has something unique to offer in every track. It’s also a record that marks a sort of journey, from the don’t-be-a-tease, you-know-you-want-this-as-much-as-I-do callout to a reluctant lover-to-be in the slow grind of “Let’s Get it On”, on to the grateful narrator’s attestation of happiness in “If I Should Die Tonight”. “Keep Gettin’ It On” has echoes, both in its sound and its lyrical content, to the title track, and the frustrated wanna-be lover of the first song is replaced with one who thinks he’s now found the key to how to make the world a better place. By “Distant Lover”, with its dreamy floating feeling, romantic but with the harder edge of his pathos-impassioned vocal, he has switched from frustration to satisfaction, from yearning for the unknown to wishing for a return to the known.

After all the back and forth, the push and pull, Marvin wants to love and be loved. But he knows the challenge of doing this. “Just to Keep You Satisfied” is a heart-rending finale, a tale of love that has soured, but with an enduring nostalgia for what was and sadness over what could have been. It’s the most affecting song on the record, and deeply personal. It doesn’t really end, just drifts away, and then dissolves into silence.

I really liked this album on the first listen, and now, four or five plays in, it just feels richer and more complex. This is a record in love with love, and all the sex talk is merely part of that. Marvin, like all of us, just wants to find that one person he can be himself with: his path to finding that just happens to start in the bedroom.

Not the Pazz and Jop 1973 – #7

New York Dolls – New York Dolls

Although it was the major music magazine of the ’70s – and a lot of other decades – I only rarely read “Rolling Stone” while growing up. It just seemed like it was aimed at an older readership. My first choice was usually a lyrics magazine, of which there were many, with titles like “Song Hits” and “Smash Hits”, since getting the words right while singing along always mattered to me. For actual writing about music, my main choices were “Circus” and, much more likely, “Hit Parader”. And “Hit Parader”, at least as I remember it, loved the New York Dolls.

The group was done by 1976, so I was certainly seeing nostalgia at work. I don’t think I ever read those articles, as I had zero interest in a band I had never once heard on the radio. And I couldn’t make sense of their look. Boys in makeup – not cool makeup like Kiss, but like women wore – was new to me.

When the streaming era came along, I had long forgotten my curiosity about the Dolls. Now, on first listen, I was having trouble figuring out what the fuss was. The music is pre-punk with some glam elements, even a bit of a Stones feel in places. Usually, including the word “punk” in describing music will be enough to tap one of my sweet spots. The band is certainly interesting looking, but the music is like a hundred things I’ve heard before. Iggy Pop was better at – and more committed to – punk, Bowie and a lot of others were servicing glam just fine, and the Stones were still the Stones. The blend of these sounds interesting, but the record just didn’t grab me like I hoped it would.

It then occurred to me that I was listening to it wrong.

I had that revelation as “Frankenstein” blared into my head – you can’t really listen to this record properly when your ass is in contact with a seat. Imagine yourself in a gritty bar with black walls and the kind of toilet where you’d rather soil yourself than risk the 500 types of germs lurking in its grime. You need to be on your feet bouncing up and down, head nodding, teeth gritting against the pure chaos washing over you. Only then can you feel what the Dolls were really about – making a mess.

And, suddenly, the record makes sense, and I understood why it was so beloved. It is messy sounding, anarchic even, a band that is trying to take the energy of a live show into the studio, with uneven results. “Personality Crisis” is a great starter, a kick to the teeth of raw energy. “Lonely Planet Boy” is a delightful change of pace, with a gentle vocal, acoustic guitar and cheery sax. “Subway Train” is another favourite, along with “Private World”. For all the punk elements, the songs, in their structure and lyrical content, have a very early ‘60s feel. The use of horns and honky tonk piano is unusual for a band of this type, and maybe it isn’t so surprising that frontman David Johansen turned into this guy:

It’s easy to make sense of things you love and of things you hate. It’s everything else that requires an investment of your time, and sometimes it will end up not being worth the effort. It took a half dozen listens, but the Dolls won me over. I think it would make a great workout record, and I plan to put that theory to the test this week.