Michael Azerrad's Blog, page 6

CLASSIC SONG TRANSLATION

    Here in this pastoral region, I rely on my agricultural prowess to obtain foodstuffs; I toil strenuously.  It is not necessary for me to come to blows in order to establish my verisimilitude, nor do I require any absolution.  Yes, yes, yes, yes.
    Do not weep or cringe: it is merely an adolescent realm that has been rendered bleak and unattractive due to neglect.
    Let us conjoin our palms, Sally, and traverse the countryside in a southerly direction.  Extinguish the blaze and follow my lead unquestioningly.  Everyone is beginning to leave and joyful individuals are close by.  We ought to commune ere we age any further.
    An adolescent realm that has been rendered bleak and unattractive due to neglect, it is merely an adolescent realm that has been rendered bleak and unattractive due to neglect.
    An adolescent realm that has been rendered bleak and unattractive due to neglect, indeed.
    An adolescent realm that has been rendered bleak and unattractive due to neglect.
    All of them are very intoxicated.

CLASSIC SONG TRANSLATION

    Many individuals attempt to demean us ��� by that, I mean my entire cohort ��� on the grounds that we live a life of unprecedented freedom; again, I am referring to my entire cohort.  The situation appears to be quite inhospitable ��� to my entire cohort, that is.  Apropos of almost nothing, it is my fervent wish that I perish prior to my senescence.  And, once again, I am discussing my entire cohort.
    I am discussing my entire cohort.
    I am discussing my entire cohort.
    I strongly suggest that you withdraw ��� I say this on behalf of my entire cohort ��� and not attempt to comprehend our discourse.  (And, by "our," I mean my entire cohort.)  It is not my intention to instigate a furor ��� I am merely discussing my entire cohort.
    I am discussing my entire cohort.
    I am discussing my entire cohort.

CLASSIC SONG TRANSLATION

    I once had a chum by the name of Jeremiah who happened to belong to the species Rana catesbeiana. I was unable to parse his utterances; nonetheless, I assisted him in consuming the contents of his wine cellar, and let me tell you, the contents were of uniformly excellent quality.
    This is what I would decree if I were some sort of global despot: I would dispose of all automobiles, drinking establishments and armed conflicts, and have pleasant consensual sexual relations with you.
    You're no doubt familiar with the fact that I am quite partial to those of the feminine persuasion and also very much enjoy merrymaking. I travel through the air at high altitude after sundown and circumnavigate an arch of colors formed in the sky by the refraction and dispersion of the sun's light by water droplets in the atmosphere. And, may I add, I am a tremendously honest and forthright person.
    And so I wish great elation to everyone on the planet, but in particular: children of all genders; limbless cold-blooded vertebrate animals with gills and fins, but only those that inhabit the ocean; and you and me.

CLASSIC SONG TRANSLATION

    A while back, I had a full-time day job in an urban area, working long hours for a powerful business owner.  Somehow, though, it didn't make me anxious to think about how things could have worked out differently.
    The stern wheel of the steamboat known as the Proud Mary continues to revolve because its engines continue to consume fuel, thereby propelling the ship down the waterway.
    Then I left town and found a variety of employment, including working as a dishwasher in Memphis and transferring propane in New Orleans.  But I didn't encounter the most outstanding aspects of either of those cities until I embarked on a riverboat.
    From there, I discovered that people who live in the vicinity of riverbanks lead a nice life, and it doesn't matter to them if you're broke because they're very generous.

CLASSIC SONG TRANSLATION

    It's nice to make your acquaintance.  I'm a rich man with an outstanding aesthetic sense.  Also, I'm quite old and have overseen many Faustian bargains.  In fact, I'm so old that I was present when the Savior wondered whether God had given up on him, and I made sure that the governor of Judaea gave him the death sentence.


    In 1917, I was in Petrograd and I could tell a revolution was necessary, so I murdered Tsar Nicholas II and his Cabinet.  His daughter, the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna, cried out, but to no avail.  About 25 years later, I was a high-ranking military officer riding in an armored vehicle while the German army staged massive attacks on European cities.  There was a strong odor of putrefaction.


    I very much enjoyed a series of armed conflicts between the kingdoms of England and France during the Late Middle Ages over disputed claims to the French throne.  I outspokenly inquired who was responsible for the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy although, let's face it, it was really everybody's fault.  And then I ensnared itinerant poets who were put to death before they arrived in Mumbai.


    With the ostensibly paradoxical thought that all law enforcement officials are in fact lawbreakers, and those who transgress divine law are worthy of being canonized by the Church, and the obverse of a coin is the same as the reverse, you may refer to me as Lucifer because I require some curtailment.


    That said, if we should cross paths, exercise good manners, and show compassion and aesthetic discernment.  In summary, be nice to me or I will kill you.

"Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man" TRANSLATED

    Pardon me, sir!  Yes, you, the tambourinist!  Would you kindly perform a composition?  I'm awake and have no pressing engagements.  So I'll tag along with you this morning, if that's cool.


    I had an awesome night but that's all over, the sun's up. Now, like I say, I'm still awake, just standing here doing nothing, even though I'm really tired. Also, man, my dogs are barking.  And did I mention that I have no pressing engagements?  By the way: it's really quiet around here and that just does nothing for my imagination.


    So bring me along with you ��� I'm just totally fried, I can't even pick up anything, and my feet, as I mentioned, are tired but I'm still up for walking somewhere... anywhere, really.  I'll walk and dance unselfconsciously behind you as you play.


    You might hear me acting like a goofball behind you but it's all in good fun and hey, no rules, right?  Likewise, if you hear me singing along to what you're playing, just ignore it, because, as stated, I'm a goofball and I'm trying to chase something illusory.


    So play some stuff that'll get me out of the clutter of my thoughts and all the crap from my past, out of my anguished headspace.  If you make me happy enough, I'll dance on the beach with one arm raised in the bright, sunny morning air and forget about my past and whatever the future has in store for me.  Yeah, I'll deal with all that shit tomorrow.

CLASSIC SONG TRANSLATION

    Pardon me, sir!  Yes, you, the tambourinist!  Would you kindly perform a composition?  I'm awake and have no pressing engagements.  So I'll tag along with you this morning, if that's cool.


    I had an awesome night but that's all over, the sun's up. Now, like I say, I'm still awake, just standing here doing nothing, even though I'm really tired. Also, man, my dogs are barking.  And did I mention that I have no pressing engagements?  By the way: it's really quiet around here and that just does nothing for my imagination.


    So bring me along with you ��� I'm just totally fried, I can't even pick up anything, and my feet, as I mentioned, are tired but I'm still up for walking somewhere... anywhere, really.  I'll walk and dance unselfconsciously behind you as you play.


    You might hear me acting like a goofball behind you but it's all in good fun and hey, no rules, right?  Likewise, if you hear me singing along to what you're playing, just ignore it, because, as stated, I'm a goofball and I'm trying to chase something illusory.


    So play some stuff that'll get me out of the clutter of my thoughts and all the crap from my past, out of my anguished headspace.  If you make me happy enough, I'll dance on the beach with one arm raised in the bright, sunny morning air and forget about my past and whatever the future has in store for me.  Yeah, I'll deal with all that shit tomorrow.

TRAVELIN' BAND: CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL AT THE ROYAL ALBERT HALL

    Populism is a dirty word these days, corrupted into a synonym for bigotry and demagoguery. But Creedence Clearwater Revival showed that it doesn't have to be that way: populism is just solidarity with working people.  A large, defining swath of the band's songs is about working people, the go-to being the fiery "Fortunate Son," about the notorious socioeconomic disparities between who got drafted to fight in Vietnam and who didn't.  Populism is in the band's deep cuts, as well as being in plain view in classics like "Down on the Corner," "Proud Mary," and "Born on the Bayou."
    Actually, populism is in every song Creedence ever played.  Everything about them was literally workmanlike, from leader John Fogerty's trademark plaid flannel shirts to drummer Doug Clifford's brick-sturdy drumming.  As the documentary's narrator, the obligatory Jeff Bridges, notes, "Creedence never bought into the idea of turning on, tuning and dropping out.  For them, it was always about the work. And to reflect their identification with the working man, they called their rehearsal place the Factory."
    Going against the prevailing trend of the time, there were no paisley shapes in Creedence's music, no lysergic indulgences of any kind.  The guys in the band weren't druggy or drinky ��� because they had a job to do.  Consequently, CCR was derided by glassy-eyed, patchouli-scented SF scenesters as ���the Boy Scouts of Rock & Roll.���  Fellow working-class hero Bruce Springsteen once put it more admiringly: "They weren't the hippest band in the world, just the best."
    And just as it was embedded in CCR's songs, populism is embedded in Travelin' Band: Creedence Clearwater Revival at the Royal Albert Hall, a very solid documentary about the band's two-week April 1970 European tour.  (It's on Netflix.)  Wall to wall with rich archival footage, the film opens with a 35-minute backgrounder on the band while it follows them on tour, closing with their complete 50-minute April 14th show at London's Royal Albert Hall, the first of a triumphal sold-out two-night stand.
    The band touches down at Heathrow Airport on April 7th and then visits various European cities: Rotterdam, Copenhagen, Berlin, and Paris.  The first soundbite goes to bassist Stu Cook, and his observation about the Old World is as hippy-dippy as it is tautological: "Each country is definitely each country, man!" he exclaims.  The bright-eyed and bushy-faced Clifford sagely adds, "Things are physically different, and the people are, you know, mentally different."
    For the most part, the members of Creedence weren't affluent kids, which would explain why, even though they were in their mid 20s, it was the first time that Clifford, as well as lead singer and main songwriter John Fogerty and his rhythm guitarist brother Tom Fogerty, had been overseas.  The Fogertys' dad worked a Linotype machine and their mom was a schoolteacher; Clifford's father was a machinist, his mother was a cosmetics clerk.  (Cook's father, though, was a well-to-do lawyer; Cook was the type of kid who took classical piano lessons and was the only member of the band who had previously been out of the country.)  The whole band was from the working-class East Bay town of El Cerrito, where they'd known each other since high school.
    Travelin' Band... notes that after years of work, the band was starting to become a regional success ��� but then in late 1966, as the Vietnam War was escalating, John Fogerty enlisted in the Army Reserve to avoid the draft, and Clifford joined the Coast Guard.  That derailed the group's hard-won progress but it inspired one of its key artistic foundations.  This was just as the San Francisco rock scene was exploding, which meant that Fogerty missed out on 1967's Summer of Love ��� instead of wearing love beads on the Haight, he was wearing a dog tag on a parade ground, and the experience affected him profoundly.  Fogerty has said that many of the Creedence songs that mention social inequality "certainly... are references to my time in the military."  He wrote his first classic, "Proud Mary," the day he got his honorable discharge papers.
    So John Fogerty came about his populism from personal experience; he's said that he got the idea to connect it with music when he was a kid and saw Pete Seeger perform and lecture at folk festivals, and through Seeger discovered Woody Guthrie and Joe Hill.
    Standing on a breezy street corner in Rotterdam, Cook notes that they get a rousing reception everywhere.  "I think that, to me, this tour proves that that rock & roll music after 15 years... somebody's taking it serious somewhere," he says.  "You get the same reaction in Rotterdam that you get in Oakland that you get in LA, that you get in Omaha.  Like, there's something happening."  What was happening was the globalization of popular culture.  And it was with music that could not have been more quintessentially American.
    Creedence was then one of the biggest bands in the world and the Royal Albert Hall was ��� and still is ��� the most prestigious venue a rock band could play in Britain, and yet Creedence's stage is utterly unadorned.  There are no blobby Joshua Light Show projections or even spotlights; in fact, the lights do not perceptibly change throughout the show. Besides the band, there's nothing up there but some honkin' big amps, a very modest drum set and some microphones.  Neither of the Fogertys even uses any distortion pedals.
    Fashionwise, there are no tie-dyed T-shirts or psychedelic dashikis: as he does virtually throughout this documentary, John Fogerty wears a plaid flannel shirt although, perhaps in his one concession to showbiz, he sports leather trousers ��� so it's workingman up top, rocker dude from the waist down, which makes sense, really.  Cook, the bougie one, does sport Lennonesque granny glasses and a wild iridescent shirt, but the other two wear utterly normal circa 1970 young person's clothes.  None of them has a good haircut.  There's no preening or rooster-strutting or guitar-thrusting or even between-song banter ��� not even a "Hello, London!"  They just play their songs.  "They're not stars," wrote one reviewer at the time.  "They're craftsmen."
    And, to please the people, they play the hits.  By this point they had a lot of them: literally half the set is composed of singles that made the US Top Three.  Their albums, all produced by John Fogerty, were utterly devoid of studio magic and psychedelic geegaws, which meant that their live shows sounded a lot like their records: even live, almost all the songs are two minutes, three minutes and change, tops, and they even play most of them pretty close to the original tempo.
    Despite how the documentary presents the band's set, "Born on the Bayou" was actually the opening number that evening.  So the first words that John Fogerty sings that evening embrace good ol' populism: "Now, when I was just a little boy/standin' to my daddy's knee/My papa said, 'Son, don���t let the man get ya, do what he done to me.'���  The setting of the song is key too: bayou country represented a proletarian paradigm of America that the East Bay, as blue-collar as it was, did not immediately summon up in the popular imagination.  And then, as ever the medium carries a lot of the message: succinct and compact like all of Creedence's best work, the song's rootsy economy contrasts strikingly with contemporaries who were doing a blues-based power trio thing, like Cream, Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix.  Creedence is downright elemental.
    "Travelin' Band" is a unique song in the everyman-oriented CCR canon: it's about being a rock star.  But they still retain their humility: even though "they're flyin' 'cross the land," they're still "tryin' to get a hand."  Also in the song, their luggage gets lost, which is definitely not groovy.
    They tear through the populist anthem "Fortunate Son" blazingly fast ��� and who could blame them.  But "Proud Mary" is where it all comes together, an object lesson in how deeply the everyperson's sensibility was ingrained in Creedence's music.  The narrator stops "workin' for the man every night and day," hits the road and finds a job as a dishwasher in Memphis, then pumps propane in New Orleans, and in the process discovers that people of modest means are perhaps more generous than their more prosperous neighbors.  The song is easy to play and sing, like a folk song, and being able to cover songs like "Proud Mary" with relative ease must have given countless bands the confidence to make their own music.  This all made a huge impact on the next generation or two of musicians, from Bob Seger to Bruce Springsteen to the Minutemen to Nirvana (who briefly were a Creedence cover band).
    They finish up with a three-song sprint, starting with a couple of supercharged covers that pay tribute to key influences: Little Richard's "Good Golly, Miss Molly" and Ray Charles' "The Night Time Is the Right Time."  Fittingly, in the closing rave-up "Keep on Chooglin'" the workingman makes one last and triumphant appearance: "Here comes Louie, works in the sewer," John sings, "He going to choogle tonight."  And if we're talking about gruntworkers, let's talk about Tom Fogerty: for the duration of the song's eight and a half minutes, he contentedly plays the same chord, effectively becoming a washboard player with his strumming hand and a vise with the other.  Tom was a killer rhythm guitarist and an unsung keystone of the Creedence sound; watching him play on this song underscores what a huge role he played in Creedence's burly, implacable groove.  John's epic harmonica and guitar heroism on this finale is the only concession to the then-current vogue for epic soloing, and even then, underneath it all, there's still a whole lotta chooglin' goin' on.
    The crowd at the Royal Albert Hall reportedly gave Creedence a 15-minute standing ovation, waiting, along with audience members George Harrison, Paul McCartney and Eric Clapton, for the band to come back for an encore.  But, per an edict that John Fogerty had handed down earlier that year, Creedence didn't do encores.  Which makes sense: after all, any self-respecting working person knows you don't work overtime for free.

SOME PEOPLE ARE UGLY

Some people are ugly.  That is a rock-solid statement.  You can throw all the rocks at it all you want and you still won't break any windows, much less break down the door, storm in and trash the place, and walk out with cool stuff like an old transistor radio or a tiny bottle of top-shelf scotch.  I have to say, that's a great metaphor because all statements, like some buildings, should have a foundation; the foundation here being the ugliness of some people.  I did say "some" buildings because, not being an architect, I don't know, maybe some buildings don't have foundations, so I left myself an out there.  Which is smart: always leave yourself an out when making sweeping statements because there's always some wisenheimer out there who will find something to carp about and you need to anticipate jerks like that and if you don't, you're a loser whom I do not ever want to know or even meet at a bachelor party.  Anyway, another reason it's such a solid statement is that "some" can mean as few as two, and surely there are at least two ugly people out of the 11 billion on the planet.  Virtually anyone would agree about that, so you're pretty safe there, although I say "virtually" to, once again, leave myself an out in case there are some people out there who disagree and feel that there are no ugly people at all, or that there is only one ugly person and therefore "some people" doesn't apply because it's plural.  But that would be easy enough to research ��� just image search for a photo of some hockey team or military platoon or presidential Cabinet.  After taking a gander at a few of those, you'll probably find two people who are ugly, and, like I say, that's just enough to satisfy the claim.  You'll have made your nut, so to speak, and now nobody can fuck with you.  Good lord, I hate it when people fuck with me.  And if anyone gives you grief about whether those two people are in fact ugly, you can just say, "Well, I find them ugly and that's good enough."  If they try to start some nonsense with you, you can just whip out the old saying, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and then blow their freakin' minds inside out by adding, "And so is it not logical that ugliness is also in the eye of the beholder?"  And then ��� and this is crucial ��� glare at them while arching one eyebrow.  I 100% guarantee you will win that one.  It's interesting, though, about people being the ones who are ugly.  Can animals be ugly?  Personally, I think they're all beautiful in their own way but I'm a human being, or at least I'm recognized as one by the government of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, so I have to admit that I don't possess the know-how to distinguish, for instance, a pretty blue heron from an ugly blue heron.  They all look the same to me: beautiful.  But maybe blue herons have a power of discernment about their own kind that we don't have about them and they know an ugly blue heron when they see one, sort of like how former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart knew pornography when he saw it.  Maybe blue herons think we humans all look alike even if some of us can look rather handsome when they get a haircut at that place in the Village and wear a clean shirt for a change and that nice tweed blazer with the leather buttons.  Although I wonder if they find us beautiful or, more interestingly, find some of us beautiful, which would mean they have a power of aesthetic discernment about us that we don't have about them.  That would be unfair but OK, life is not fair and the sooner you acknowledge that, the better off you'll be.  But can birds sense beauty?  You got me.  But, like I said, even ugly is a subjective thing. Abraham Lincoln is often said to be ugly.  Or at least physically ugly since he was beautiful in other respects, especially his use of colorful adverbs.  Which brings up an ambiguity in that first sentence: ugly in what sense?  There is physical ugliness.  But there is also moral ugliness.  One can't be helped; the other is a condemnable failing that can get you canceled or doxed or not invited to the best cocktail parties on Martha's Vineyard, the ones where they serve oysters.  But it's ugly to attack someone for being physically ugly ��� that's a sort of meta-ugliness, if you will ��� so if you're having one of those days when you need to pick on someone and a physically ugly person is the only person around, find something better to pick on them for, like their racism or their annoying habit of crushing aluminum cans with one hand after they've finishing drinking from them.  There is plenty of ugliness out there to condemn and I, for one, will not fault you one bit for calling it out.  But just remember: only some people are ugly.

OVERHEARD: BYE-EEE!

THE PLACE: In front of Joe's Pizza in Greenwich Village
THE PLAYERS: Guy #1 and Guy #2

Guy #1: So I call her up and I go, "What are you doing tonight?" And she goes, [sing-song voice] "Oh, I'm knitting and watching Sex and the City���"
Guy #2: And you're like, bye-eeee!
Guy #1: Exactly.