Scratched Into Our Souls

Album Review: Frank Turner, Be More Kind

Frank Turner’s Be More Kind manages to be both the most optimistic and pessimistic album so far in 2018. It’s at once comforting and unsettling, hopeful and desperate, which I suppose is no surprise from a guy whose last studio album was called Positive Songs for Negative People.

Most of the optimism on Be More Kind comes in the form of the personal—the simple admonition of the title track, the counsel in “Don’t Worry” to “spend more time with the do’s than with the don’ts,” and the recurring themes of meeting in the middle and finding common ground. Those lyrics might seem like eye-rolling bromides on the page, but with Turner and his band the Sleeping Souls behind them, they’re rousing calls to action.

It’s not much of a leap to get here from “we can always get better, because we’re not dead yet” from 2015’s “Get Better.” Still, there’s a whole lot more at stake now than in 2015, and Turner knows it. The singer angered some of his fans a few years back with an interviewin which he slammed the left and proclaimed himself a libertarian; that felt like it was in direct opposition to the communal spirit of his songs and his shows. But he seems to have changed his tune on Be More Kind,and admits as much in “Blackout:”

I was in my comfort zone

I was singing selfish songs

I’ve been taking for granted everyone understood how easy trouble comes

But it’s not enough anymore

We can’t just turn around and close the door on the world

It’s asking uneasy questions

We should be asking ourselves uneasy questions

“Blackout” is musically unlike anything Turner’s ever done before, too, embracing 80s dance-pop with a funky bass line, synth washes, and chikka-chikka Edge-style guitar. And while the album contains a few examples of singalong “campfire punk” (as Turner once called his sound), “Little Changes” is of-the-moment, sing-song pop, and “Common Ground” is an acoustic shuffle that builds to an unresolved bridge, with that lack of musical resolution belying the call to “meet on the bridge and forgive.”

 

An unrepentant leftist myself, I’m trying not to make too much out of the fact that Turner paraphrases Karl Marx in the album’s hardest-rocking song, “1933,” singing “The first time it was a tragedy/ The second time it’s a farce.” But Be More Kindcertainly acknowledges that the biggest danger we face is from the right, not the left. Turner never utters the words “Brexit” or “Trump,” but he doesn’t need to: “The world outside is burning with a brand-new light/ But it isn’t one that makes me feel warm/ Don’t go mistaking your house burning down for the dawn.”

Of course, when you have a song called “Make America Great Again,” you’ve pretty much called out Trump by name anyway. In this ironic, self-deprecating, inspirational, and damn-near danceable anthem, the Englishman acknowledges his outsider status it in the first line, but then reminds Americans that “you fought our king to be independent.” How does Turner propose to MAGA? “By making racists ashamed again/ Let’s make compassion a fashion again.” It’s simplistic, sure, but it cuts to the quick regarding the license that white supremacists feel to go public since the con man won the White House. The song’s soaring chorus—“Ellis Island take me in/ Everyone can start again/ In the shining city on the hill/ Where nobody can be illegal”—is as clear a re-statement of the United States’ promise as any you’re likely to hear in pop music.

 

So that’s the optimism, the protest songs to get us fired up to wake up and fight another day. Then there’s the pessimism of “21^stCentury Survival Blues,” where Turner describes a world without hope and envisions an apocalyptic scenario where all that’s left is human connection: “I’ve started making lists of the essential things/ For when the storms bring what they bring,” he sings, before the band falls away and he howls “I just need you.” There’s nothing romantic about it; it’s all desperation and fear.

Then there’s “The Lifeboat,” which manages to embrace both despair and hope.  Against a drumbeat and a minor-key acoustic guitar, it begins with language that sounds like something out of Revelations: “There’s a stumble now in our step/ There’s blood in the phlegm, there’s a lump in the breast/ There’s a smell of sickness on our breath.” All is lost, but then a string quartet moans and takes the song from minor to major, and the clouds lift: “There is hope now in the wind/ In the millions who are marching demanding we be kind/ And the new lives the lifeboats might find.”

And then the album ends with its quietest song, “Get it Right,” a simple acoustic plea for change not political or even social, but personal: for the strength and wisdom to change. The song sounds hopeful enough, but then it ends on another unresolved note—tentative and unsure, with a simple declaration: “I’ve changed my mind.”

In its own way, that’s the most hopeful statement of all.

Lost Tracks: The Who's "Endless Wire"

When The Who—what’s left of ‘em, at least, though since what’s left is Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend, that’s good enough—released Endless Wire in 2006, it went mostly unnoticed by the music press, save for a profile Dave Marsh wrote in Mojo magazine. The band—rounded out on stage by Zak Starkey on drums and Pino Palladino on bass—has gotten consistently good reviews since the early 2000s, so it’s a little surprising that their first full new album since 1982’s It’s Hard didn’t get more attention.

Unlike their closest British Invasion peers, the Rolling Stones, The Who essentially stopped courting media attention after their 1989 Tommy anniversary tour. And while the Stones kept putting out mediocre album after album, The Who just stopped, save for a slew of live reissues and hits packages.

But I don’t think it’s just that the band had been out of the new release cycle for more than 2 decades that led to the the dearth of reaction to Endless Wire. I just think that critics and audiences alike didn’t quite know what to make of an album by 60-year-old rock stars that reckons as clearly and honestly with aging, identity, and loss as Endless Wire does. And though the album isn’t without its share of rockers, those songs (“It’s Not Enough,” “Mirror Door,” and “Sound Round”) are echoes of earlier Who classics—enough fire in ‘em to be convincing, but if you compare them to “Baba O’Riley” or “The Real Me,” you’re gonna come up short. The exceptions are “Mike Post Theme,” which finds Daltrey hollering Townshend’s lyrics about men’s inability to reckon with their emotions, and the rolling “Pick Up the Peace.”

Still, the album’s strongest moments are the quieter ones, like the gentle acoustic “You Stand By Me” and “God Speaks, Of Marty Robbins” (both sung by Townshend) and the biting “Man in a Purple Dress,” in which Daltrey spits out Townshend’s lyrics criticizing the absurdity of priests pontificating about morality. But the album’s most poignant moment comes toward the end, with “Tea & Theatre,” a gorgeous reminiscence on a life’s work and a plea for friendship as that life’s work comes to a close: “Lean on my shoulder now/ This story is done/ It's getting colder now/ A thousand songs/ Still smolder now… Before we walk from this stage/ Two of us/ Will you have some tea/ At the theater with me?”

It’s telling that Townshend sings more songs on Endless Wire than on any previous Who album, but both he and Daltrey sing as well as they ever have. Daltrey may not have the vocal strength he once did, but he finds power in nuance, and his growls are gruffer than ever, and all the more affecting because of it. And when the two of them trade lines on the title track that closes the album, it’s just beautiful.

Damn, It's Quiet In Here: Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit in Madison

I've seen somewhere in the ballpark of 500 shows in the last 30 years, and I don't think I've ever heard a concert audience as quiet as the one in Madison a few weeks ago when Jason Isbell played "Last of My Kind" and "Cover Me Up" at Breese Stevens Field in Madison, WI, a couple weeks back. That the silence in the open-air soccer pitch held as traffic, including a couple of Harleys, rushed past on adjacent East Washington Avenue, made it even more remarkable.

"Last of My Kind" came first, and so the quiet was more shocking, but it was just as stark during "Cover Me Up" four songs later, at least until Isbell sang the "I sobered up" line, at which the crowd cheered in support, solidarity, or both. And that silence allowed the night's most powerful moment to achieve maximum effect. During the last verse and chorus of "Cover Me Up," drummer Chad Gamble pounded his floor tom with mallets in a repetetive 3-beat pattern, syncopated against the song's waltzing rhythm. Those drumbeats only heightened the song's sense of desperation and urgency. You hear a hint of it in the YouTube link to the song above, but it was much more prominent in Madison. And then, after the song had grown to stadium-sized proportions, Isbell made it intimate again with a sweet, short acoustic guitar flourish that brought the song to a close.

The harder-rocking moments of Isbell's 90-minute show were almost as powerful—"Cumberland Gap,""White Man's World," and especially a slashing "Decoration Day" from his time with the Drive-By Truckers. And the two-song encore delivered both extremes, opening with the lovely acoustic "If We Were Vampires" before jumping into the Truckers' "Never Gonna Change," which culminated in a guitar duel between Isbell and Sadler Vaden. (I  have to admit, though, I kept waiting for fiddle player Amanda Shires to join in and kick both of the boys' asses.)

All of which is to say that Isbell and his band the 400 Unit is one of the best outfits on the road right now. And opener Frank Turner and the Sleeping Souls (here's a review from back in 2015) aren't far behind, as they took a crowd of a few thousand (most of whom had never heard of them) into converts jumping and singing along.

Gavin Martin's Talking Musical Revolutions

Gavin Martin's album Talking Music Revolutions evokes the late, legendary John Trudell, and not just because both artists read their poetry with musical accompaniment. And not just because Martin's Irish lilt is as powerful in its own way as Trudell's forceful declamations, either, though that's true. Just as Trudell claimed Elvis Presley as his generation's "Baby Boom Che," so does Martin pay tribute to Wilko Johnson the soldier, Rory Gallagher the revolutionary, the "Pistols of Sex," David Bowie, Marvin Gaye, and plenty other musical heroes who've inspired and moved him and us over the years—moved us not just to shake our asses (though that's crucial), but to envision and pursue an alternative to the status quo.

Martin is a longtime music journalist and critic, having started the original Alternative Ulster fanzine (which gave Stiff Little Fingers their best song title and best song) and gone on to write for the NME and a multitude of other publications, including an on-going column and regular reviews at The Mirror. In 2009 he started the Talking Musical Revolutions performance events, with spoken word and music presented by Martin and other scribes like Barney Hoskyns and Charles Shaar Murray. In the years since, Talking Musical Revolutions events have covered topics as specific as Bowie and Hendrix and as broad as metal and Latin music. Last year, Martin began working with Kelly Munro, who helped him match instrumental tracks to some of his best poetry, and who produced the Talking Musical Revolutions album for Munro's End of the Trail records.

Those instrumentals complement the words so perfectly, it's remarkable that they were composed and recorded independently of the words. Blush's shotgun guitar sound suits "Wilko (Is a Soldier)" to a tee,  Family Jools' minor key jam nails the anguish of Marvin Gaye in "Long Hard Road to Be Free," and Coquin Migale gives "The Pistols of Sex" an appropriately raging accompaniment. And you'd never predict it, but Summer Loving Torture Party's celebratory rock actually works in a song called "My Daddy Went to Belsen," in which Martin honors his father's fight for freedom and against fascism, anchored by the elder Martin's horrific experience liberating the concentration camp ("It was called a liberation after the Nazis fell/ But how do you liberate people from an actual hell?") If you didn't know it, you'd never guess that the words and music weren't recorded in the same room.

Powerful as the music is, of course, the focus is on Martin's words, and over the course of the album, he sketches out a series of alternative histories (and possible futures) born of personal experience. In "Wilko (Is a Soldier)," Martin recalls seeing Dr. Feelgood for the first time in Belfast in 1976, an eye- and mind-opening experience for a 14-year-old kid in Northern Ireland in the midst of The Troubles. It's as memorable for his description of Johnson doing the "chicken lurch" as it is for the tears in his mom and dad's eyes as they drove through checkpoints to take Gavin to see his older brother in a care facility in Belfast. And the aside about sleeping in Rudi's van every night evokes both romance and terror (especially if you've seen the movie Good Vibrations—and if you haven't, you should stop reading this right now and go watch it).

In "My Daddy Went to Belsen," we hear Martin reckoning with the idealism of an earlier generation, casting his father's dreams of fighting fascism against the price he paid for it for the rest of his life. Still, Martin finds something truly heroic in his elder's fight: "As Hitler advanced across europe the rebel heart did burn/ The atheist bible he kept there in his head/ Economic emancipation for the living, not the dead/ A better world for everyone/ The blacks, the whites, the Jews/ But there was no way of ever losing those long-time Belsen blues."

But the album's tour de force comes when Martin confronts an evil within that's just as dangerous as the enemy without. His father may have fought Franco's fascists and Hitler's Nazis, but Martin himself sees an evil just as sinister in England itself, in the form of "Thatcher and Savile." The song makes clear that the sick crimes of the serial pedophile Jimmy Savile are inseparable from the culture that produced him, the country that elected Margaret Thatcher (who knighted Savile and welcomed him into the heights of British society): "He was in the body politic/ underneath the nation's skin." But Martin casts his net wider than simply linking Savile to the Toriest of Tories; he doesn't let Tony Blair off the hook, either. In fact, it's in the person of Blair that Martin connects the dots between the government's willingness to ignore Savile's pedophilia with a broader disregard for the lives of children: "Tony Blair became a papist/ Jimmy was a full-time rapist/ He didn't like children, they were under attack/ In Stoke Mandeville/ And also...in Iraq."

It's a societal rot so deep that it seems hopeless to fight, but fight we must. Which brings us back to the revolutionary power of Wilko Johnson and his rock and roll soldiers: "Fuck Ian Paisley/ Fuck the pope/ Fuck your laws, and your stigmatizing dope/ Fuck Stormont/ Fuck the Irish border/ That night we declared a new world order/ Lies and bullshit and rapist priests/ Every political cover-up/ Every palm that'd been greased/ They all went up like in a funeral pyre/ And with Wilko as an arsonist/ The flames went even higher."

I hope I haven't done Martin a disservice by quoting him so extensively, but I trust that one listen to any of the tracks from Talking Musical Revolutions should dispel the notion that the words have anywhere near the kind of impact on the screen as they do coming through the speakers. Talking Musical Revolutions is available on iTunes and Spotify, or you can buy the CD here.

Japandroids' "Near to the Wild Heart of Life" is a Near-Perfect Rock Album

Ever notice that nobody writes songs about rock and roll anymore? At least not explicitly. I suppose that's not a bad thing. For every great one like "Rock and Roll Music" or "Rock and Roll Will Stand" or "Long Live Rock," there's a dozen clunkers like "Old Time Rock and Roll" (rock as nostalgia) or "Rock and Roll All Nite" (rock as mere hedonism) or "We Built This City" (no explanation needed).

But there's a reason that those artists wrote and sang those songs in the first place, and that's because rock and roll has always been more than just a musical genre, and I dare you to try and define it as one, anyway. The cliche says that rock and roll = rebellion, but it's a whole lot more complicated than that. In his brilliant Heart of Rock and Soul, Dave Marsh argued that rock isn't jut about rebellion, that it's about reconciliation, too. But I think it's both—it's rebellion against the notion that reconciliation and relationships aren't central and crucial to who we are. That notion pervades our lives, in the cult of individuality and independence, in the advertising and marketing that tries to reduce us to the brands we use and, lately (and most perniciously) to brands ourselves.

The best rock and soul is rebellion against the things and the people that deny who we are; that cut us off from each other, that pretend we're just atomistic revenue generators; that try to convince us it's all about work; that say we're anything but the glorious, flawed beating hearts and glowing, growing, flowing souls that we truly are; that pretend any one of us can exist for a second without each other. Rock is a rebellion against anyone and anything that tells us otherwise.

No current band better embodies that faith in rock and roll than Japandroids, to the point where they've taken some heat for it amongst the overwhelming critical praise. A friend of mine calls them "teenage boy music" (as if teenage boys or their music are inherently dismissable out of hand; see Harry Styles' recent comments about teenage girl fandom for the distaff corrective), and journalists frequently refer to them as "true believers" in rock and roll, as if that's a bad thing.

Of course it's a bad thing if it places rock and roll above all other genres, but music fans generally don't operate that way. While poptimism was a useful corrective to rockism's blind spots and the presumption that it's somehow superior to pop, I'd like to posit the somewhat novel theory that the two aren't mutually exclusive. More troubling than genre prejudice, I'd argue, is the critical tendency to hedge bets against sentimentality (which, let's face it, both pop and rock exalt in equal amounts, though the sentimentality is about different things) in favor of a detatched critical coolness that frankly goes against everything I turn to music for in the first place.

Back to Japandroids. As critic Matthew Perpetua wrote on Twitter in early 2017, "Many rock bands in the last 17 years have not reached their full potential because they didn't fully believe in the power of their genre. Japandroids don't have this problem, and that's why they are so fun and exciting to see live." Perpetua nails it; if you've ever attended a Japandroids show, you know there's no irony, no winking, nothing but a full-throttle embrace of, well, rock and roll. And while the band's first two albums,  2009's Post-Nothing and 2010's Celebration Rock (2010's No Singles was, well, a collection of singles more than an album qua album), were strong enough, this year's Near to the Wild Heart of Life is on another level entirely. It's both an album of love songs and an album about rock and roll, a living model of how rebellion and reconciliation are two sides of the same coin.

Sonically, it's an evolution from the band's previous albums, but the sound is bigger and fuller, and the songs are more melodic and anthemic.Though they now augment their sound with more background vocals and the occasional keyboard, the fact that guitarist Brian King and drummer David Prowse are able to create an arena-ready sound from just two instruments is one of the wonders of modern rock. As anyone who as seen them live will attest, their sound loses none of its impact in concert.

Japandroids at the Majestic Theater, Madison, Wis., 2/13/17

Near to the Wild Heart of Life opens with the title track, which draws its name from James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and serves as an artistic statement of purpose. The band's friends encourage them to follow their rock and roll dreams "to go far away/ and make some ears ring from the sound of my singing, baby," a theme they revisit on the album's closer, "In a Body Like a Grave."

But if "Near to the Wild Heart of Life" is a call to hit the highway, "North East South West" manages to take on the well-worn road song with a twist. As he recounts his travels across the U.S. (and back to the band's beloved Vancouver home), King comes back to his romantic love: "Baby, the trouble that I get into/ It ain't shit compared to loving you."

Elsewhere on the album, King proclaims his undying love alongside "meals of mezcal" in "True Love and a Free Life of Free Will," reckons with love past, present, and future in "I'm Sorry (For Not Finding You Sooner)," and testifies that "no known drink and no known drug could ever hold a candle to your love." Near to the Wild Heart of Life might be the most romantic and Romantic rock album I've ever heard.

And then there's the album's centerpiece, the 7-minute-plus "Arc of Bar," a three-chord tour de force in which King's love for he city he's in (New Orleans) and the life he's chosen and the woman he's devoted to become indistinguishable. The song builds and builds, starting out with a four-note synth line that runs for the tune's duration, then adding drums, guitar, and eventually two sets of backing vocals working in counterpoint to the lead. The song threatens cacophony, but it's grounded in a promise that's at once inspirational and soul-shaking: "For her love I would help the devil/ To steal Christ right off the cross."

That testament chiseled in rock, the band settles into the lighter "Midnight to Morning," with joyful repetitions of "back home to you" interruptedby an instrumental bridge that achieves Branca-like levels of distorted guitar drone. After "No Known Drink or Drug," the album closes with "In a Body Like a Grave," which juxtaposes the heroic with the quotidian ("Christ will call you out/ School will deepen debt") and implores us to "love so hard that time stands still."

Near to the Wild Heart of Life is rebellion and reconciliation as one, and I swear it sounds better every time I listen to it.

Smart Studios: A Clubhouse Where Everyone Was Welcome

 

The terrific new documentary The Smart Studios Story ends with the blast of Against Me!’s “New Wave,” which—with its DIY call to arms “We can be the bands we want to hear”—would serve as a perfect tagline for the film title. Smart Studios’ co-founder Butch Vig might be best known as the producer of Nirvana’s Nevermind and one-fourth of the band Garbage, but the movie doesn’t even get to Nirvana until almost the 2/3 mark.

 

Instead, it focuses on the heart of the story, which is how Vig and his buddy Steve Marker came together and built Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin in the 1980s with no formal training, no big-name acts to build on, and no money. Vig had been playing drums in Madison’s Spooner (which courted major-label signing), and became frustrated by paying hundreds of dollars for professional studio time when he was pretty sure he could get that same sound—or better—doing it himself. Starting out renting 900 square feet inside a warehouse on East Washington Avenue, he and Marker scavenged egg cartons to glue to the walls, cobbled together a recording and mixing setup from rummage sales, and opened their doors to literally anybody who wanted to come by and record, whether there was any money to be made or not.

 

Soon enough, they were recording almost around the clock, and bands like Milwaukee’s Die Kreuzen and Madison’s Killdozer—both of which served as prototypes for sounds that found much larger audiences later on—were recording at Smart, along with just about every local band of the 1980s: Appliances SFB, The Weeds, The Other Kids, Tar Babies, Honor Among Thieves, Ivory Library. Word of mouth spread among the burgeoning college rock and hardcore scenes, and eventually Smart became the studio of choice for bands like Smashing Pumpkins, Young Fresh Fellows, and yes, Nirvana.

 

At the center of the film is Vig and Marker’s DIY, anything-goes ethos and the community that grew around Smart Studios. A common thread running through all the musicians interviews is that Smart was a place they both felt comfortable and were encouraged to push themselves to musical places they might not have otherwise gone. Jeff Jagielo of Ivory Library says that Vig could “conjure a sound out of those of us who weren’t that skilled.” One of the best segments of the film finds Vig and members of Killdozer recalling sitting at the Crystal Corner bar, coming up with a list of sounds they wanted on their next album, everything from the rotating barrel of a revolver to a radio station farm report.

 

Despite the DIY approach, Vig could be every bit the studio perfectionist, but he says he “met my match” in Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan. As Corgan recalls the recording of the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Rhinoceros”—during which he spent 8 hours singing “she knows” until Vig was happy with the results—I couldn’t help but think of the brutal Jimmy Iovine/Bruce Springsteen sessions where they worked all night just to get the right snare drum sound on Darkness on the Edge of Town.

 

There’s a tension that runs through the second half of the movie—the tension between a fundamental commitment to the integrity of the music and the desire to reach as wide an audience as possible. Vig says that he wanted to record music that was “ambitious and adventurous, but could get played alongside anything on the radio and sound just as good.” That he was able to do so from the inside of one of the ugliest buildings in Madison—1254 East Washington, a building Vig says people mistook for a crack house—is the perfect metaphor for the music created therein. As Dave Grohl says, “Butch could turn your noisy garage band into something the world would love.” And when you first hear “Rhinoceros” or Nirvana’s “Breed” come thundering out of the speakers, it’s every bit the jolt it was the first time you heard them—uncompromising, but welcoming.

 

After the success of Nevermind (for which early recordings were done at Smart, with later recording done at Sound City in California), Smashing Pumpkins’ Gish, L7’s Bricks Are Heavy, and others, Vig began producing more at studios outside of Smart. Still, he and Marker returned to their roots in the mid-90s—playing around with sounds, sound effects, and tape loops; Marker says that, when they started in his college apartment in the 1980s, the songs “were just something that we made up to give us something to record.” Those experiments formed the foundation for Garbage, the band Vig and Marker started in 1993 along with former Spooner member Doug “Duke” Erikson and singer Shirley Manson. As Garbage went on to international success, it took up more and more of the studio’s bookable time, ironically leading to the point where it wasn’t making enough money to keep going. Smart Studios closed its doors in 2010.

 

The movie is a joy to watch, clearly as much a labor of love for its director Wendy Schneider as Smart was for Vig and Marker and everyone else who created music there. And it makes clear that, rather than Smart succeeding in spite of the fact that it was in the middle of “flyover land,” it succeeded in part because it was miles away from the music biz pressures and pretenses of New York or Los Angeles. Schneider is from Brooklyn but has lived in Madison for more than 30 years, giving her insider and outsider perspective, so the film neither romanticizes nor deprecates the midwest.

 

If you were in Madison in the 1980s and 1990s, you’ll see plenty of familiar faces, gig posters, and exterior shots, and the performance footage of Die Kreuzen, Appliances SFB, and others are thrilling to watch, capturing the essence and energy of the times and the scene, whether you were part of it or not. Vig said he always wanted Smart to feel like a club house, but one where everyone was welcome, and that’s what The Smart Studios Story feels like, too.

 

The Smart Studios Story is available now on iTunes, Amazon, and Google Play; you can also order it on DVD or get the vinyl only soundtrack from the film’s website.

Gord Downie's Secret Path: Reckoning and Reconciliation

Gord Downie's Secret Path is the most moving thing I heard, watched, or read in 2016. That's saying something in a year that included unforgettable albums from David Bowie, Drive-By Truckers, and Tribe Called Quest, not to mention movies like Barry Jenkins' Moonlight and books like Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad. What links each of those works is that they carry a political (or, in Bowie's case, existential) punch but draw their power from the specificity of their imagery and the tiniest details that render them at once singular and universal.

Sometimes, it's a historical character and incident, as in the Truckers' "Ramon Casiano," which tells the story of Texan Harlon Carter's rise to the head of the NRA after he killed the Mexican boy who gives the song its name. Sometimes, it's a quotidian object or act that shatters the barriers between art, artist, and audience, like the ramen noodles in Tribe's "We The People"  or Chiron timidly pulling the gold fronts off his teeth in the diner in Moonlight. Maybe it's a potent, if mysterious, item like the buttons on Bowie's bandaged eyes in the "Lazarus" video. In fiction, it can be historical specificity, even when it's deployed with ahistorical magical realism, as with Whitehead's railroad.

In Secret Path, it's all of those things, in part because the work exists as an album of songs, a graphic novel, and an animated film. Each one has its own power, but taken together, they create an absolutely riveting and heartbreaking whole. Secret Path is the story of Chanie Wenjack, a 12-year-old Anishinaabe boy who ran away from the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School (where he'd been given the name "Charlie") along with two other students, Ralph and Jackie McDonald. The three boys made it to the McDonalds' uncle, Charles Kelly, 31 miles from the school. But Chanie was homesick, so he eventually took off on his own, trying to follow the Canadian National Railway to his home in Ogoki Post on the Marten Falls First Nation reserve. He didn't know the reserve was 400 miles away, and after 36 hours protected only by a windbreaker in temperatures as low as -21° F, Chanie fell next to the tracks and died of exposure and hunger.

The story, which Downie discovered in a 1967 Macleans story, is heartbreaking enough that it doesn't need artistic embellishment, and part of what makes Secret Path so powerful is the stark simplicity of the words, some of which seem to have been pulled directly from the article. That matter-of-factness of lyric has long been Downie's stock in trade with his band The Tragically Hip, but he's never employed it quite so effectively as he does here. He sings most of the songs from Chanie's perspective, and the music builds tension from simple chord changes and nuanced interplay between guitar, keyboard, and percussion. Occasionally it's harrowing, as on "Haunt Them, Haunt Them, Haunt Them," sometimes it's defiant ("I Will Not Be Struck," "Don't Let This Touch You"), but mostly it's quietly propulsive, evoking the determination, fear, and confusion of a boy trying desperately to make his way home.

The isolation and desolation of the opening song, "The Stranger" (with its gut-wrenching line "you can't see me" calling out the invisibility of indigenous people in colonized lands) sets the stage, followed by the only unequivocally joyful song on the album, "Swing Set." Electric pulses and bleeps give way to an urgent beat as Chanie and the McDonald boys swing and twirl, waiting for the perfect moment to make their escape. In the film and graphic novel, Chanie is the last one to take flight, and the music swears as he looks back, where he "didn't see nobody chasing us/ just my swing dancing in the sun."

"Seven Matches" follows, picking up the story after Chanie leaves the Kellys' cabin. According to the Macleans story, the Kellys ddn't turn Chanie away, but "subtly put Charlie Wenjack out in the cold;" quite simply, the Kellys barely had enough food to take care of their family. Clara Kelly gave Chanie seven matches in a jar, and the "chick-chick-chick" sound of the matches in their jar help Chanie keep his spirits up as he makes his way ("as long as there were six"—and then five, then four—"I'd be fine").

The song contains the most heart-rending lyric on the album; at least it's the one that I can't listen to without bursting into tears: "I know that she didn't mean to hurt my feelings/ But that's what she did." Chanie knows he can't stay with the Kellys; that doesn't make it any less painful. Here Downie is in the realm of speculation, but again the direct and guileless words contain multitudes and evoke pain and suffering and rage far beyond the specifics of the story.

In fact, the only time Downie overtly references anything about stereotypes of First Nations people is equally plainspoken, when he sings in "The Stranger" "That is not my dad/ My dad is not a wild man/ He doesn't even drink/ My dad is not a wild man." Again, the words are heart-rending in their frankness, as are the lines referring to Chanie's jacket in "Secret Path:" "Pale blue/ Doesn't do what they said it'd do/ It's not my jacket/ It's a windbreaker/ It's not my jean jacket/ They call it a windbreaker." Hundreds of years of lies captured in a few words about a windbreaker.

And then there's Downie's voice, which has never been as elastic, as powerful, as vulnerable as it is here. When Downie performed these songs in Canada in November, placards advised "Tonight's show may trigger strong emotions," and that's true of a careful listen to the album, a lingering gaze on Jeff Lemire's beautiful watercolor and ink illustrations in the graphic novel, or a viewing of the film. The imagery is as remarkable as the music; Lemire's illustrations are all blues, white, and black; the only bursts of other colors come when Chanie remembers his home or has visions of his dad. As in the lyrics, the details are striking: Chanie's father laying his hand on his son's chest, an image of a priest showing only his collar and the front of his pants in front of the schoolchildren's bunks, Chanie's eyes, the mystical raven.

Of course, the story of Canada's residential schools is paralleled by the Indian boarding schools in the United States. The Tragically Hip never found much of an audience in the U.S., but they're legendary in Canada. When the band performed what's likely to be their final show (Downie has terminal brain cancer) in Kingston, Ontario, nearly 12 million Canadians watched it on TV or online, and Downie took the opportunity to talk about the injustices "up north." "What's going on up there ain't good," he said. "It may be worse than it's ever been." In the wake of Standing Rock, it's as clear as ever that those injustices continue here in the U.S. as well.

Downie told a reporter that "if this is the last thing I do, then I'm happy." In the documentary that accompanies the film (which you can view below), Chanie Wenjack's sister Pearl says "The Creator chose him, and I'm glad it was Gordie." The Assembly of First nations paid Downie tribute in a beautiful ceremony in December, where he was honored as "the man who walks among the stars."Proceeds from the book and album will be donated to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation.

 

David Bowie: Ain't That Just Like Me?

After Elvis Presley died in 1977, Lester Bangs famously wrote "We will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis." After seeing the outpouring of responses to David Bowie's passing this week—from all corners of society, every age group, men, women, trans, white, black, Latino—I'm not so sure Lester was right. Bowie and Elvis shared more than just a birthday, I think. I don't want to overstate the case, but I've been genuinely shocked at how widespread and diverse the responses have been. Even people who didn't necessarily consider themselves to be David Bowie fanatics were moved beyond the feelings that normally come when a beloved celebrity passes away. And it was very much a group mourning, from Brixton to New Orleans (or on Facebook and Twitter), a collective expression of grief and celebration of Bowie's music and its impact on people from all walks of life, from LGBT scenesters in London and New York to straight, geeky kids in Wisconsin like me.

I was surprised by how hard Bowie's passing hit me. Aside from Station to Station, one of my favorite albums of all time, his music hasn't been on heavy rotation for me for years. I kept up with every new release until Earthling (I even liked Outside and the first Tin Machine album), but I stopped paying much attention after that. More's the pity, as both Heathen (2002) and Reality (2003) are excellent albums, I'd find out later. I adore 2013's The Next Day, and spent hours in the David Bowie Is... exhibit when it ran in Chicago in 2014. On the first few listens the day it came out, Blackstar sure sounded like a great album. I'd seen the videos for the title track and "Lazarus," and found myself obsessed with the latter, a song clearly from the point of view of a dying man even before we found out that it was literally a song from a dying man. But if you'd asked me on January 9 if I listened to a lot of Bowie, the answer would have been "not really." (I'm by no means alone or even an outlier in having this response; Memphis-based music writer John Floyd wrote in an email, "considering how much I've underrated him over the decades, it's staggering just how much a part of my life his music has always been.")

Since I heard of Bowie's passing, I've realized how much his music, almost as much as anyone else's, has been a constant part of my life since I first heard "Space Oddity" on the radio in 1979 or so, when I was about 13. I'd heard him and seen him before then, but that's the song that made me say "What is this?" and call the radio station to find out. In retrospect, it's absurd that I didn't recognize it as Bowie. I spent a lot of time in the mid-70s with my cousin Chet; he wasn't really my cousin, but his parents were close enough to mine that we called them aunt and uncle, and I spent a lot of time at their house. Chet had an older foster brother named Jim, who introduced me to 1970s rock—he'd play Bowie, The Who, Roxy Music, and Lou Reed while we played ping-pong in the basement.

I don't recall any specific songs or albums, but Bowie had made enough of an impression on me that when he played Milwaukee in 1976, I read the concert review in the newspaper and proceeded to tell my friends I'd gone to the show. I can't imagine they believed me, but even then I knew that seeing a David Bowie concert would have been just about the coolest thing I could do. And from what I'd read in the review, and seen of him on TV, I knew there was something dangerous about him. I was a pretty square kid, but being a Bowie fan—or at least pretending to be—made me feel like I was in on something that the other kids didn't get.

After I heard "Space Oddity," I got the Changesonebowie greatest-hits compilation as soon as I could, then checked out as many of the albums as I could from the library. Jumping forward a few years, the car my parents got me when I turned 16—a 1970 Olds Cutlass that was as at odds with my persona as would have been a screw-down hairdo—had an 8-track player, and even in 1982 8-track tapes were hard to come by. I only had three that I recall: Elvis Costello's My Aim is True and Bowie's Lodger and Station to Station. Even though I was still pretty straightlaced—student council, honor roll, debate team, jazz ensemble—I couldn't stand most of the music that was popular among my peers, and reveled in cranking up "African Night Flight" or "Boys Keep Swinging" to combat the REO Speedwagon and .38 Special in the high school parking lot.

Even better was when my friend Mike got the Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) cassette, which we surreptitiously popped in the high school P.A. system while an entire lunchroom full of band geeks and their parents assembled pizzas for a fundraiser. If I remember correctly, it lasted just until Bowie shouted "Shut up!" at the end of "It's No Game" before teenagers and teachers alike demanded we turn it off.

By the time Bowie reached peak popularity with Let's Dance in 1983, I'd gotten just oppositional enough about Top 40 music that I attempted to resist and resent Bowie's embrace of MTV, but even then I knew that only a fool would try to deny the greatness of the title track and "Modern Love." 

His next two albums, Tonight and Never Let Me Down, were mostly dreck (save for "Blue Jean;" see paragraph above). But by the time they came out, I was in college and digging deep into Bowie's back catalog, falling in love with the rest of the Berlin trilogy, much to the chagrin of my roommate, who preferred Mötley Crüe and Ratt. (I'm pretty sure that my review of Tonight for The Daily Cardinal at the University of Wisconsin was the first negative review I ever wrote.) 

The band I formed in grad school played a mix of originals and covers (Tom Petty, The Smithereens, CCR), and we tried doing Tin Machine's "Heaven's in Here," but couldn't make it work. Our drummer, a skinny little Springsteen fan from New Jersey, suggested we try "Rebel, Rebel," and it went over like gangbusters. The fact that I—a pudgy guy from Wisconsin who could at the time best be described as "burly"—could get away with singing that song in a throaty, slightly twangy growl says a hell of a lot about its power. At more than one show, when we'd exhausted our repertoire, the crowd called for us to play it again. One of those times was in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, to an audience with an average age of about 19, meaning they weren't even born when the song came out.

What's the point of this traipse down memory lane? Part of it is simply to acknowledge the enduring power of David Bowie's music; as I wrote in a review of a Bowie concert for Paste in 2004, the guitar riffs for songs like "Rebel, Rebel" and "Ziggy Stardust" are simply part of our DNA now. Songs like "Heroes," "Life on Mars," and "Changes" are staples on radio, movie soundtracks, and even advertisements because the melodies are inventive and sturdy, and the emotions they evoke are something approaching universal.

I realize "universal" is a loaded word, but in the case of concepts like yearning, hope, and personal evolution, I think it's apropos. It's also apropos in relation to Bowie. For as transgressive, experimental, and avant-garde as he could be, he never veered too far from the pop mainstream. He aggressively pushed gender boundaries and definitions; he drew on cabaret, Kabuki, surrealism, expressionism, and more for his costumes and stage shows; he pulled from the Beats and science fiction for his lyrical themes and approach to writing; and he integrated everything from English music hall to modern jazz into his sounds. But he did it all in a way that made it accessible to a wide audience, using pop and rock music traditions to ground even his most experimental work. In the midst of even his most angular and jarring albums—Lodger and Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)—you'll find straightforward, lovely ballads like "Fantastic Voyage" and "Teenage Wildlife" anchoring the more adventurous excursions that filled out the discs.    

All of those excursions—musical, visual, and cultural—were as powerful as they were precisely because Bowie undertook them in the context of popular music and popular culture, rather than in the narrower confines of the avant-garde. Bowie himself was never quite in the vanguard; we might draw a parallel between him and Steve Jobs as people who didn't so much invent new things as take the inventions of others and repackage them in ways that resonated with a wider audience. That's not to say he was a mere opportunist or dilettante; by all accounts, Bowie could go toe-to-toe with just about anyone when it came to a deep understanding and appreciation of all the cultural expressions he adapted. But even at his most experimental, Bowie never lost sight of the value of bringing as many people as possible along for the ride. When he donned a skirt and brought Klaus Nomi on Saturday Night Live to sing "TVC 15" and "Boys Keep Swinging," to pick just one example in his almost 50-year career, he brought downtown New York and Berlin to middle America, and middle America was better for it. And even if you'd never seen Bowie on stage or on screen, the line "she's not sure if you're a boy or a girl" in "Rebel, Rebel" was an opening to a life in which gender roles were fluid—and if something like gender wasn't set in stone, then what else might be up for grabs?

David Bowie & Klaus Nomi - TVC15 & Boys Keep... by ZapMan69

Tom Junod explores this question beautifully in an essay for Esquire. Of "Rebel, Rebel," he writes "But what makes it one of the ten-or-so greatest of all rock songs is the simple fact that it's not just a song but, like of all of Bowie's music, an invitation—to love the unloved and to value the undervalued, both in others and oneself."

Even in death, Bowie's mainstream revolution continues. The day after he died, his videos were viewed on Vevo 51 million times, with "Lazarus" alone getting 11.1 million looks. The previous single-day record was 36 million for Adele on the day she debuted "Hello." It's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but it goes a long way toward reminding us just how popular Bowie is, even though he never had a #1 album until Blackstar. And, more importantly, it goes a long way toward remind us what's possible in our own lives, that no one is merely what they seem on the surface, and that if we share even the parts of us that seem least "normal," how many people might accept our invitation. Let the children boogie.

 Thanks to Charles Hughes for his edits and suggestions.

So This Is Campfire Punkrock

Frank Turner at the Majestic Theater, Madison, WI, 12/1/15. (Photo: Joe Rasmussen)

Frank Turner called his first solo EP Campfire Punkrock, and after seeing him live (finally, after years of missed opportunities), I can see why. Early on in his set at the Majestic Theater in Madison earlier this month, he said “I’ve got two rules at my concerts: Number one, don’t be a dickhead. Number two, if you know the words, fucking sing along.” And EVERYBODY sang along to almost every song, from the very first notes. And when silent attentiveness was called for, like when he sang an acoustic version of “Demons” dedicated to Eagles of Death Metal merchandise manager Nick Alexander (killed in the Paris attack in November), we were quiet—except when we all joined in on the chorus, “At this truth we have arrived, god damn it’s great to be alive.”

On most of the songs, the vast majority of the crowd knew the words. And for a few choruses, he taught the rest of us. Before “Photosynthesis,” he said “Every single person in this room can be a musician.”  More than almost any performer I’ve seen, Turner takes punk's “anybody can do it” sensibility and makes it the center of his ethos. I mean, here’s a guy who has a whole song about that called “Try This at Home,” with the lyrics “Because there’s no such thing as rock stars/ There’s just people who play music/ And some of them are just like us/ And some of them are dicks” and “Quick, turn off your stereo/ Pick up that pen and paper/ Yeah, you could do much better/ Than some skinny half-arsed English country singer.”

Of course, not everyone has Turner’s relentless energy or his booming tenor, the kind that cuts right through even a somewhat muddy (and way drum-heavy) mix. Nor do we all have his sense of melody or his way with words. In lesser hands, some of Turner's songs would come across like bumper-sticker affirmations, but every affirmation-like line (“We can get better/ Because we’re not dead yet”) is offset by another that’s self-deprecating (“Just give me one fine day of plain sailing weather/ And I can fuck up anything”). Hell, his latest album is called Postitive Songs for Negative People. And almost every damned one of his songs points out that none of us get better by ourselves, not bad for a guy who’s called himself a libertarian (even though he supports social welfare).

Which is why, for as powerful as the man and the band were onstage, the show felt as egalitarian and communal as any I’ve ever been to. That may be overstating the case. Folks who’ve spent more time in the punk world can probably point to plenty of other examples; my son once told me of a Lawrence Arms show where half the audience ended up onstage with the band. And I’m mindful of the fact that we all paid money to see him and his band play for us. But I’ll be damned if it didn’t feel kind of like a big campfire.

This One's For You, Mom

For most of my life, I gave the credit for my passion for music to someone I hardly even knew: my dad Jack, who died when I was 5. I inherited his copies of Meet the Beatles, Elvis' Golden Records, and the Chairmen of the Board's In Session, among other albums, as well as his collection of 45s, including The Silhouette's "Get a Job," Clyde McPhatter's "It's a Lover's Question,"  and Buddy Holly's "Peggy Sue," not to mention The Detergents' "Leader of the Laundromat," a parody of the Shangri-Las' "Leader of the Pack." The mythology I'd created in my mind had me discovering these discs, and having them open up a alternative world to me, one in which I felt empowered and comforted rather than weak and alone.

As with most mythologies, there's some truth to that story. But in my sometimes desperate attempt to create an autobiography in which my father played a crucial role not for his absence but for his presence via music, I've ignored this other story, this other memory, the one of my mom Sonia standing next to one of her bog Altec Lansing speakers, swaying to...well, that part's missing. It could have been Kris Kristofferson, it could have been The Hollies, or Waylon Jennings, or the Moody Blues, or Emmylou Harris. It doesn't really matter what was playing in this particular memory, because music was a constant presence in our house, and those sounds made their way down the hall and into my room. Sometimes the albums themselves "just happened" to make their way onto my record player, too; the ones I remember the most are Elton John's Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road and a Warner various artists compilation called Superstars of the 70's. She bought me my first stereo, my first 45s (Bachman Turner Overdrive's "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet" was the very first, I believe), and my first album, Steve Miller Band's Fly Like an Eagle. She let me walk down to the 1812 Overture record store (and, I realize now, head shop) to buy her a Peter, Paul, and Mary album, and gave me a few extra bucks to pick up Abbey Road for myself.

She tolerated the sounds of ELO, Stevie Wonder, and The Who blasting from my bedroom while I played air guitar in front of my window (I didn't have a mirror big enough to reflect my attempts to leap like Pete Townshend), and only occasionally did she tell me to turn it down.

She encouraged me to take guitar lessons when I was in third grade, and let me quit when it became clear I wasn't quite ready yet. A few years later, when my fingers and attention span had both grown to the point where I was willing to practice, she bought me a nice Epiphone acoustic and took me to lessons once a week. I was never going to be a virtuoso, but I got good enough at chords to become a decent rhythm player, and good enough at blues scales to lay down the occasional solo. I still played air guitar more frequently than the real thing, and I sang at the top of my lungs, and even when she told me to turn the music down, never once did she tell me to stop singing.

She didn't take me to my first concert, but she let my great friend and mentor Jack take me to see Bob Dylan on his 1981 stop in Milwaukee when I was 15, and she let me drive down again a few weeks later with some friends to see ELO. And when I begged to send in my cash for the ticket raffle for The Who's (first) farewell tour, she didn't even protest too much that I had no idea who was going to take me to the show. (I got the tickets and the ride, and a great view of this.) She and I were going to see Simon & Garfunkel play County Stadium in 1983, but a nasty bout of salmonella (I don't suppose there's another kind) kept me away. I can't count how many concerts I saw in high school—The Kinks, Bruce Springsteen, numerous trips to Summerfest—and never once did she suggest that I was wasting my time or my money. When I was in college, she gave me some cash intended to purchase a television for my dorm room, and she didn't get mad when I told her I bought a 12-string guitar instead. And she even came to see me play at the Willy Bear in Madison with my second college band, Boy Elroy, even though she wasn't exactly a fan of hard rock.

Ultimately, I had better chops as a rock critic than as a rock musician, and really my childhood dream was to write for Rolling Stone, and so I spent most of my time in college and just after writing about music for various publications, something I continued doing regularly until a few years ago. Music criticism in the 1980s, when I started, was almost exclusively a boy's club, which is just one of the reasons I never paid enough attention to how my mom had shaped my tastes and my critical sensibilities. I always knew she was crucial to the development of my political thinking and sense of social justice, but I never reflected upon how important she was in the development of my passion for music.

It wasn't until I read "If The Girls Were All Transported," Ann Powers' wonderful essay in the latest version of Carl Wilson's revelatory Let's Talk About Love—in which Powers explores the ways in which her mother's aesthetics helped to forge her own tastes—that I saw what had been there all along. In my case, it wasn't so much that my mom influenced my tastes as gave me permission and encouragement to follow my instincts and trust my ears. And even though she never said so explicitly, her relationship to music made it obvious to me that music was more than mere entertainment, that it was a tool to understand ourselves and each other better, to reckon with our deepest and sometimes scariest feelings, and to make connections with others who, contrary to what we might believe in our darkest moments, feel just like we do.

My mom has always said that when she dies, she wants The Eagles' "Take it to the Limit" played at her memorial service. She's 75 now, and she had a health scare a few weeks ago that made me wonder if that day was nearby. Thank goodness it's not. And thank you, mom, for the music and for helping to make me who I am today.

Bruce Springsteen wrote a terrific song about his mother called "The Wish." In the intro to the performance below, he jokes about how uncommon it is for male rock singers to sing about their moms, but if you want to skip to the music, jump ahead to the 2 minute, 10 second mark.