Tim Riley's Blog, page 8
April 3, 2014
Steely Dan’s Magisterial Sleeze
You either swoon to the jaunty guitar lick that rips Steely Dan’s “Reelin’ in the Years,” or you hold your ears. Same with that eerie figure at the top of “FM,” or the sly, cribbed piano vamp to “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.” Steely Dan tracks can seem not just overproduced but overplayed, overpraised, and catnip for the wrong kind of music nerd. Long before you dig into a five-decade career with countless buried pearls, the band inspires way too many harangues about everything rock supposedly squelched (instrumental pretension, phony intellectuals, and control-freak arrangers). Jazzers profess love for Dan tracks even if they hate rock; rock partisans get swept up in Dan fever even if they hate jazz. Steely Dan records didn’t just thread stylistic needles, they turned style into a sardonic target… continued on Radio Silence
March 31, 2014
Ghosts of Deportees
Woodie guthrie (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“…Woodie Guthrie’s famous ballad Deportee about a 1948 plane crash in California that killed the pilot, crew and passengers, who were Mexican nationals being deported back to Mexico at the end of the harvest season. Guthrie had read about the crash in the New York Times, which described the crew in detail and then dismissed the passengers as anonymous deportees. The point of the song is in the refrain: “You won’t have a name when you ride the big airplane / All they will call you will be deportee,” capturing the denial and indignity visited on migrant farmworkers even in death.
That night McCutcheon had a response. He and others had considered that if the crash victims were deported, there should be some record of the deportation order in INS archives from which identities could be recovered. They found them and erected a monument in Fresno last Fall over the mass grave where they are buried that gives them back their names. (A video of the dedication event from the Fresno Bee is available here.)…
–via , and rockrap.com
The names McCutcheon found overlap nicely with the names Guthrie chose for his song (“Goodbye to my Juan… Rosalita… Jesus et Maria…,” and you can easily imagine Guthrie using all the others in verses he dreamt up but never wrote down. The melody we know, chiefly from the insanely beatific Byrds cover on Sweethearts of the Rodeo (1969), comes from Martin Hoffman; Guthrie’s melody seems lost. The miracle of the song lies in how Guthrie turns the victims’ names into melodic flowers, and how gloriously all their names ring out even though they’re fictional. How could you not adore such beautiful names, Guthrie asks, at once celebrating the individual lives and shaming the “deportee” epithet.
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March 14, 2014
riley rock index relaunch
Behold the new riley rock index, now an extension of the timrileyauthor page, where it’s been condensed, reformatted and reconcieved as a monthly tip sheet with album. We start with Drive-By Truckers, hard on Beck, and early Click Hits include:
Beatles Roundtable
BigOZine
dBs Holsapple on Rosanne Cash
deep dig agogo
rri ringtone (m4r): Steely Dan
Michael Tatum, via Tom Hull (with artist index)
TED’s Top 100 Sites
Tom Smucker on Smiley Smile
March 5, 2014
March 1, 2014
American Hustle’s Music of Swindle, by Geoffrey O’Brien
Buck Clayton wrote that Duke Ellington threw parties at the Dunbar with “chicks and champagne everywhere.” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Bale and Adams fall in love to the strains of Duke Ellington, and dance while Jack Jones croons “I’ve Got Your Number”; the hapless Cooper pursues his doomed amour fou as Donna Summer chants “I Feel Love” at Studio 54; Lawrence lip-syncs “Live and Let Die” in close-up as she boils with rage against her cheating husband; Bale and Renner seal their newfound friendship by singing along with Tom Jones on “Delilah.” The steady stream of Chicago, America, Elton John, Santana, Steely Dan, and Jeff Lynne tracks sometimes gives the impression of a Top 40 station playing permanently, inescapably, in the background of everyone’s personal drama—an impression quite faithful to the texture of urban life in the 70s.
via The Music of the Swindle by Geoffrey O’Brien | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books.
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February 17, 2014
So Hip It Hurts: Penman on Steely Dan
Penman enjoys Eminent Hipsters a lot more than I do (watch this space), but he gets off some very fine licks:
“It’s a portrait of the artist as an embryonic Florida retiree: grumpy, fidgety, fond (his hotel room iPod plays nothing but old Verve jazz or Stravinsky), ungrateful toward fans, snarling at managers, leering at young poolside babes, spiteful to hotel staff. Fagen doesn’t skirt the risk of deep mortification. He leads us round 360 degrees of his touring profile: petty, grouchy, backward-looking, too smug by half. And yet, while it appears to be an entirely truthful account, all the time part of me was thinking: Is this actually the equivalent of a well-crafted Steely Dan character? ‘Deacon Blues‘ on Prozac? As I said to a friend and fellow Dan obsessive, Eminent Hipsters is essentially On the Road with Alvy Singer. In Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977), his OCD doppelgänger Singer loathes Los Angeles, but work and romance install him there for months at a time. Allen initially wanted to name his feel-good film after a bleak psychiatric diagnosis: anhedonia, a condition that also seems to cover how Fagen now feels about touring: ‘The inability to experience pleasure from activities usually found enjoyable.’ Like Allen, Fagen seems deeply versed in the language of shrinks and footnotes from the Physicians’ Desk Reference. In the missing years between The Nightfly and resumption of his partnership with Becker, Fagen had a real Freudian schlep of therapy, and much (legal) pharmaceutical rewiring. While you still wouldn’t call him a little ray of sunshine, these efforts seem to have done a lot to revamp his subsequent life: marriage, uninterrupted work, a relative cessation of hostilities with the media. While the other Donald might conceivably have written a tour diary, you can’t imagine he would have allowed it to be published…”–via City Journal
February 14, 2014
Remembering Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs, by Jaan Uhelszki
bangs.jpg (Photo credit: triley60)
That night, after I interviewed Hoffman, I went back to my hotel room and had a dream about Lester, something that happens with some regularity. In every dream, he isn’t dead, but instead has been hiding out somewhere. Waiting. This time, I asked him where he had been. He told me Florida. “I’ve just been waiting for you to get it right,” he told me.
Well, Philip Seymour Hoffman certainly got it right when he played Lester in Almost Famous. And maybe tonight I’ll go to sleep and bump into Lester and Philip Seymour Hoffman and Lou Reed arm wrestling and arguing about whether Jim Morrison is really a drunken buffoon posing as a poet and the Guess Who, who had the courage to actually be drunken buffoons, are the real poets. Or maybe the three of them are the real poets.
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February 9, 2014
Splendid Time Guaranteed
Already sputtering for choosing “That Means a Lot”… but keep it coming.
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February 7, 2014
Innovation Hub: Beatles Arrival
America celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ arrival, and the quotes just keep coming…
Guests:
Mark Lewisohn, author of “The Beatles: All Those Year, Volume 1 – Tune In”
Vivek Tiwary, author of “The Fifth Beatle: The Brian Epstein Story”
Tim Riley, author of “Lennon: The Man, The Myth, The Life”
Fifty years after The Beatles appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” – inspiring a generation of Americans to don collarless jackets and mop-top haircuts – we examine the Fab Four’s magic formula for creativity, innovation, and success.
From WGBH: Innovation Hub | Great Minds, Great Conversations
