Tribute Band attempts Corpse Re-animation

I saw a tribute band last night, for nostalgia mostly, that reminded me why listening tribute bands is sometimes a very bad idea. Band called Cryptical, pitched as the "premier Grateful Dead experience." I saw the Dead 5 or 6 times, but only once after 1977, and that was in 1987 or so. And that show was very boring, slow and listless. Which was in contrast to the older shows I went to, where they were energetic and actually veered towards edgy and interesting..... Somehow this band Cryptical, which is made of very talented musicians, managed to capture all the listlessness of the later concert while successfully achieving an accurate Dead impersonation. So in other words, they do a great impersonation of a band that had mostly lost what made them good in the first place....it made me realize that the only thing that made the Dead worth listening to was the hope that Jerry Garcia would lift off and really play something special. Which he often did. Not as often as somebody like John McLaughlin or Jeff Beck, or Frank Zappa, but when he did, it was brilliant. So last night I heard this very good guitarist, who clearly has some excellent chops, trying to improvise by the numbers, by the way he thought Jerry Garcia would have played it. Once, doing a Chuck Berry song that (I suppose) the Dead also covered, he actually started playing differently from Jerry Garcia, and his band-mates smiled, and he sounded authentic. But the rest of the time, it was like he was trying to reanimate a corpse, and it sounded stilted and fake. I can forgive a lack of skill, but I really hate hearing music played with skill, but only impersonating a personal style. Ugggg...Remind me to avoid Coltrane Tributes too. Some things are more sacred.

They turned up to eleven and i saw God.

I think the first time this happened I was barely 15 years old and people on the radio were beginning to sing "protest songs" and as usual that primal California band the Byrds, from hard and cynical Los Angeles, were ahead of the curve. In a year, they had evolved from folk songs to inventing folk-rock to Eclesiastesian biblical folk-rock, their own genre, to WHAT IS THIS?!!

Well, they were listening to the John Coltrane Quartet incessantly while driving around in an RV doing one night stands around America. But how that listening came out in their own music was just impossible to have foreseen. .And how it came out was Eight Miles High. Which was the first time I heard music that clearly wasn't rock and roll anymore, but resembled it, and though i didn't yet know what it was, it just blew away all the teenage protest music. It even made Dylan and the Beatles, for a short time, look kind of teenage and simple. Now I know it was modal and had shifting time signatures, but then I just knew it just expanded my universe. My father the former jazz drummer was smiling, though it took him a few years to tell me that he knew I'd been saved.

The next time I heard it, I was still only 16, and hanging out at the kids next door's house, in his mother's music teaching room with the really good stereo system, when I heard the roar. 1000 watt what the hell, what is that roar. ... simply, Jimi had arrived. Their "baby sitter" whose job, I think, was to watch over the younger siblings, but who was actually the source of the brand new "Experienced" record, ran out of the music room and was about jumping out of her panties with lust and excitement and well.... you all have to hear this, like we could have somehow missed it! Well we heard Third Stone from the Sun, and Foxy lady, and Manic Depression and the like, and suddenly all the suburban bluesy bands made absolutely no sense at all. This was primal blues chanelled through something cosmological. Howling Wolf, howling close encounters.

And God kept emerging. There was the young Clapton playing his guts out with John Mayall, taking Albert King licks and turning them over in a new way, and a little later channeling Robert Johnson meeting the devil at the crossroads, and in about three minutes laying down a challenge that few have ever dared to accept. No human could keep that wide a channel open, and Clapton couldn't, but the record doesn't lie. Then Jimi said I can get even closer and dug even deeper to Mississippi through Sun House and back to Africa and found the Voodoo Child, slight return indeed, but from what solar system? What constellation?

And by the next year, Miles Davis himself, my father's contemporary, the master of cool, didn't want the young market to miss him, so he found McLaughlin and Corea AND Keith Jarrett and Dave Holland, Zawinal, and all those geniuses together produced some wonderful In a Silent Way. Which almost prepared me for the next shock, the Birds of Fire by the Mahavishnu Orchestra. It was pretty much unbearably loud, unbearably intense, and yet God had emerged again in the strange looking man in the crew cut and his powerful, frenetic wonderful drumming partner, where did this Cobham guy come from anyhow?

After that, louder and harder and closer to burning up completely was impossible, and Steely dan started to be smirkingly wonderful channelling a little Miles, and also Duke and Bill Evans themselves, but it sure wasn't the lord talking. Maybe the mob, but certainly not the lord. But there was also disco, and urban cowboys and just so much junk. Then Joni Mitchell, always sort of guilty pleasure for an aspiring hip very young man ( I mean the girls in the dorms played her out the window, she was just so sensitive), finds this simple Major 6th groove on an extended road trip, and behind her is this stacatto THUNDER on the bass. It was of course Hejira and my (and pretty much everyone's) first Jaco Pastorius sighting. Who had ever heard a bass player who made you cry? Of course there had been wonders before him, like Scott Lafaro, but they lacked the electric bass options and that rapturous use of echo delay. Jaco burned so brightly and yet so sadly.

The next time it was Coltrane himself that I found. i was working sometimes 50 hours a week and learning to relax in spite of it, and it was the 80's and career time and I needed something to nourish me. Suddenly, all those sheets of notes on the Saxaphone that my father had found so rapturous in the early 60's, but which sounded like noise to my very young ears, made absolutely perfect sense. It had been around for 20 years, but finally i was ready to receive it. First, My Favorite Things, and the most perfect instrumental solo, the last one, on the soaring Soprano Sax. My tears flowed like they had never before. Truly this was even better than what had, in my young experience, proceeded it. But it was really from 1960 and if only I had been able to hear a little earlier. A little later I was finally ready for A Love Supreme, and this time there was absolutely no doubt of what Coltrane and Elvin and Mccoy Tyner had intended. .

So much wonderful religion. Without the guilt or the thou shall nots. Just sound.

Slight Postscript: flash to the later 1980's, i was doing a little "new age" music seeking beyond electronic droning, which revealed-though I had heard him before, without paying much attention, the mellow midwestern country-raised genius with ears for Ornette Coleman and those flashing but soft hands. That was and is Pat Metheny, he deserves a tribute of his own for doing without flares and without drama what the world of music needed for nourishment, a reason to continue beyond tributes to the past. A tribute to Pat is planned for another day or night.

Art's most reviewed reviews

I have been reviewing music, books, movies, museums and other sources of community expression since the 1970's. For about a decade I was paid for this, mostly by weekly publications. That I was a bass player getting paid for playing, at least most weekends when school was in session and during the summer break, probably helped my credibility when interviewing musicians. Which got me interviews and insights which allowed me to achieve some kind of following. But not sure how i started reviewing comedy (I never got up on stage just to tell jokes, or make people laugh, though sometimes that was a byproduct of some extended riffs between songs). Or movies (still photography was all I attempted)? Or books (English lit was not as interesting to me as a lot of other subjects) But I did, and they paid me for writing the reviews and interviews, most of the time.

I put this activity aside when I decided to buy a house in expensiveland (Tiburon, California, 7 nautical miles from Fishermans Wharf San Francisco) and support a wife, then other family members. But when the web opened up casual reviewing possibilities (on such sites as Amazon, Netflix, etc) I took advantage, without any expectation that these quickly written items might be read even a year later. In some cases, the quality and content of these reviews reflects their 1 AM vintage, and my frustrated reaction to the un-intelligeable, historically inaccurate and simply illiterate reviews left by previous submitters. Some of these are worth another look. But some of them , in particularly some of the more positive expressions, are still are read and recommended today.

I have updated some content of the following book reviews (I am starting with some book reviews) to avoid the miniscule possiblity that the above popular sites and others might actually want to enforce their "ownership" of my created content.

My Top Rated Book Review (I really don't know why)
Subject: Thomas Pynchon's "V"

Must break into the SERIOUS debate about this books merit by interjecting that this is, first and foremost, a very funny book. Just hilarious, on whatever level you prefer to read it at. Benny Profane indeed! I was an economics major, not a lit major, that probably helps me enjoy it, as I can readily choose to skip the "layers of meaning" that apparently must be front and forward to the literary types here. Perhaps that is why I enjoyed it so much.

Okay, not for Stephen King fans, certainly not for Danielle Steele fans, you do need the basic triple digit IQ to get past page 30. But you do not have to search for themes and meaning to enjoy this fine read, I swear. Not as accessible as Vineland, perhaps, but a lot easier reading than Gravities Rainbow, or the spotty and difficult Mason &Dixon (UPDATE: or the absolutely brilliant and really quite accessible but very long Against the Day) . In V, the young Pynchon shows his early genius and wit.

Subject: John Irving's "Until I find you."
I first read "Setting Free the Bears" John Irving's quirky and bitter-sweet funny initial effort (published circa 1969)in the 1970's. Since then, I have read them all, and enjoyed the ride. This long book is actually a pretty easy read. It is often humerous, at times emotionally wrenching(near its conclusion), quite bluntly sexual, and almost always fast-moving and entertaining. It is not a literary masterpiece, which I think "Garp" and "Cider-House Rules" were. And it is probably not even as consistent an effort the more accessible and heartwarming "Widow for One Year." But if you are an Irving fan, or you enjoy quirky, unsettling humorous storytelling, then this is a most worthwhile read.

Critical comments about numerous minor characters that could have been cut are probably right. It could have been edited a lot, and the main character could have been presented as more initially likeable and thus sympathetic; but then it might lack that quirky flavor that makes Irving so interesting (you want romance fiction? Wrong author!). As to the reportedly "disturbing" child sexual abuse section, I understand the main character's history is at least somewhat autobiographical, and is clearly meant to be seen as through the eyes of a young boy. So if it wasn't a little disturbing, how true to life would it be? A good, involving page-turning read.

Subject: Leonard Matlin's Movie Guide (annually updated).
Leonard and his staff are movie lovers and experts, and this the most comprehensive guide of its kind. They are American movie historians at heart. They love the recognized classics and they seem to particularly appreciate film-making craft and professionalism. I think they implicitly favor Hollywood movies or better produced independent films over low-budget and many foreign films because of the often notable difference in production values, and I think they are usually correct.

I have personally used this guide for 20 years to find the gems I may have missed and weed out the forgettable and regretable films that often get the big promotional budgets and their accompanying gushing,albeit seemingly paid-for, over-appreciative reviews (Mr. Ebert???). A guide like this, which focuses on quality first and foremost, is particularly useful if you go to a Blockbuster (they have that name for a reason) or use Netflix. The Netflix associative predictive rating system is really crude at best and does not filter out some seriously flawed recommendations.

One warning: Matlin's ratings reflect mainstream film history thought. If you like the really edgy, the impressionistics, or other things "arty" in film, you may find the coverage and the ratings too traditional. But I think they recognize quality in new films, not just old ones. Highly recommended to all but the bleeding edge cinema buffs.

Background: I wrote for the same college newspaper as Leonard for a few months. He was a genuine film historian at age 20 and seemed like a very nice young guy, and at the time he was already a twice-published book author. I suspect he is now a very nice middle-aged guy, and he has certainly kept up the good work. I do wish I had the opportunity to chat with him now on various current movies. Hmm, maybe via the web.

That's it for now. My next post will be on the music reviews, or maybe the one after that. Not surpringly to anyone who knows me well, they are more impressionistic and subjective.