Is the CD dead and buried? Ethnomusicologist, banjoist, and all around good guy Toby King, a friend of mine in New York, said to me once that the CD era was over several years ago. I found his pronouncement hard to take, given that I was and am a record collector and that annually (well, monthly, weekly, even daily perhaps) I purchase an impressive number of CDs. Worse, few people revere the LP anymore. The loss of the physical object as a medium is a difficult transition for me.
What's the big deal? Am I overreacting? Am I just a recording fetishist, unwilling to part with the physical object? Well, yes, I have sentimental attachment to them, and more for LP records than CDs. I remember the day in December of 1983, for example, that I bought Deep Purple's Machine Head at Musicland up at the Miller Hill Mall. Arriving home, I carefully slit the plastic and took the record out of the sleeve. I lifted the turntable lid and placed the LP on the platter. Leaning in, holding my breath, I lifted the tone arm and gently set the needle on the edge of the record with that barely perceptible "fffffft–ssssssss," and POW! that great opening riff of "Highway Star" cannoned across the room. It was a violent and glorious punch in the gut.
With a CD, the drawer opens, you drop the CD in, you hit PLAY and, Bob's your uncle, the music starts. Easy, yes, but you can do it while drinking a soda or talking on the phone, maybe even at the same time. It doesn't require you to engage. With an LP, setting the needle down requires your attention. It makes you quietly focus. Maybe not for very long, but long enough that you're open to it and the sound from that wonderful vibrating diamond needle has you hooked. Putting the needle to wax is a personal connection. The record album (and the 45 rpm single) experience may not be as tactile as live music, but it is more concrete than any CD or iPod could be.
Twenty years ago, the CD had finally begun to outnumber LPs at the record shop. Some, including me, hated to hear the death knell of the iconic phonograph. The LP had such an impressive canvas. Through the mid-to late twentieth century the album cover had become an established contemporary art. On CD, it's hard to appreciate the cover of Led Zeppelin III when you can't shift the inner picture disc, much less make out the iconography on the cover (at 25% its original size). CDs also come in easily breakable plastic cases. If the case cover doesn't break, the tines in the middle probably will and then the CD always falls out.
Nonetheless, the exciting new technology won out over the old. The industry promised a basically indestructible item with crystal clear sound. The cost to the consumer was greater, but the advantage of the technology was apparently worth the price. Never mind that the CD production was one-third the cost of LP production ($1.00 for the LP material and pressing cost, about $0.35 for the CD), the 50% increase in price was what the market would bear. Never mind that we now know that the CD is certainly destructible. Never mind that digital recording has undergone several improvements that obligated some old records to be re-remastered to CD two or even three times over the years (each time with the promise, "Okay, now we've got it, THIS is the best you'll ever hear!"). CDs do NOT yet, in my opinion, come close to the smooth warmth of analog recordings. I'll take the dusty sound of a record any day over brittle, sharp, digital sound.
Fifteen years ago, e-mail and the web came into vogue. Ten years ago it became a normal part of communication and interaction for many businesses and homes. In the last decade, networking has transitioned from telephone and ethernet modems to wireless communication, making the computer useful anytime and virtually anywhere. Computers gradually lowered our defenses to the point that, today, almost all of our work, communication, socialization, and entertainment is done via some form of electronic device.
During all this, six years ago, the iPod was born. Irrevocably, everything in music changed.
Suddenly everybody was ripping their CDs to their computers, and transferring the music to that sexy little gadget, which holds thousands of songs. Also, six years ago, Apple and some other companies made it possible to download music at a competitive price. No longer did you need to rip a CD, because the CD was irrelevant. It was an unnecessary step between the manufacturer and your computer/iPod. The age of the hard copy was over. Today the new iPods can even download the music directly, making your computer irrelevant too. (Take THAT, Bill Gates!)
So, why do I still want those LPs and CDs on my shelves? Because I believe there is still a need for a hard copy. I've lost data on computers; they crash, files get accidentally deleted, a magnet or an EM storm wanders by and goodbye, information. It may be easy and less cluttered, but electronic storage is very fragile. I don't care if it's better for the environment because it saves on materials. I don't care if it saves space, I don't care that it is easy to use. Sure, I've got an iPod. I've got over 9,000 songs on it, and I admit I sure can't carry 700 LPs around with me to have the same number of songs at my fingertips. But I sure wish I could, because someday that little iPod is going to break down and then 9,000 songs will evaporate into thin air like a Saharan mirage.
Remember the big blackout a few summers ago that shut down the northeastern US? I was sitting in the Columbia University music library in New York City. Other people were typing notes into their computers. Then poof! the power went down. Everyone grimaced and grumbled; nothing more they could do (at least after their battery inevitably ran down). But I, with my trusty fountain pen and notebook, sat in a comfy chair in the afternoon sunlight and kept right on working. The point is, let's not put all our eggs in the electronic basket. Certainly, the virtual world is an exciting place, but if we never walk around outside of it then the real world will run us over time and time again.
So, tell your kids to turn off the Nintendo Wii and send them outside to play in the snow. Get out your old LPs (or if you must, CDs), put them on and relax in a comfy chair under a blanket with a cup of tea. Take a slow deep breath. Your psyche will thank you.
[My wife just pointed out the irony that this essay is posted electronically on a blog. Despite the Luddite overtones of this essay, I'm not saying technology should be discarded, merely that it should not be our only resource. - Chris]
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Friday, January 11, 2008
Review: The Return of America's Voice
Levon Helm, Dirt Farmer
Vanguard Records 79844-2 [2007]
Levon Helm's strong return scratches a musical itch that had been nagging me for years, but it was an itch I had been at a loss to locate. You know those days when it seems none of the music on your record shelf will quite satisfy? Problem solved. The album Dirt Farmer, produced by Larry Campbell, is a an album of contemplation, reminiscence, reflection, and joy.
Three of the saddest days for devotees of the inaptly named "country rock" were the suicide of keyboardist/drummer Richard Manuel in 1986, the death of bassist/fiddler Rick Danko in December of 1999, and drummer/mandolinist/guitarist Levon Helm's diagnosis of throat cancer in 1996. The Band's three eccentric but hauntingly beautiful voices were silenced. These losses were cause for recollection of some great music, but also decades of substance abuse and heartache. Like Manuel and Danko, Levon Helm was at one time a man of addictions. Compare "The Weight" from The Band's Music from Big Pink to "Strawberry Wine" from Stage Fright and you can hear how drugs affect a man's singing ability. Yet while death is a loss that aches for a while but can eventually move toward acceptance, the irony of losing one's voice - and then having to live with the loss - is reminiscent of Beethoven's deafness.
How does one continue when one's instrument is taken away? Helm, with the support and encouragement of his daughter Amy Helm and others, slowly brought his voice back, not to the full swagger of his earlier days, but beautifully and powerfully present. And how to celebrate this return? Thankfully, through a balanced and subtly restrained statement of everything Levon Helm is and ever was.
Wielding a mix of traditional and contemporary songs, Dirt Farmer sits comfortably in the pocket, and has the tone of good friends who have come over to play for a while in your living room. The performances feel natural, from veterans who use whatever talents are in the room to make the song whatever it can be in the moment. Their respect for the material supercedes their awareness of the listening audience. The music has a traditional context, but is not historicized. Don't you think if a drum set was available a century ago in some farmhouse in the mountains that they'd have used it for making music?
Unlike much of the contemporary folk, country and country-rock fare, Helm is in that tier of artist whose work speaks volumes without unnecessary preening, which I appreciate in an age where people pursue fame for essentially doing nothing. Peter Carlson of The Washington Post remarked, "These days, country music stars are created in a factory in China, molded out of plastic by workers earning 38 cents an hour, then shipped to Nashville, where they are fitted for a cowboy hat and taught to sing ditties written by a committee of moonlighting Hallmark employees." [November 8, 2005] I've also suffered through countless old-timey records where great pains were taken to give the performances pathos, the "this-is-the-music-of-my-people-so-take-me-seriously" attitude, and I can say with experience that this rarely succeeds.
Levon Helm, to the contrary, simply does what he does best: he sings the damn song. His is for all intents and purposes one of the most distinctively American voices. He was raised in the cotton fields of Arkansas, bathed in the sounds of the Opry on WSM out of Nashville and Sonny Boy Williamson on KFFA in Helena, and he earned his stripes playing the rockabilly club circuit in Ontario, Canada with Ronnie Hawkins. Levon Helm and the Band were a touchstone of cultural unity. Southern enough to please rednecks, ornery enough to please renegades, and Dylanized enough to please folkies and hippies. They were a safehouse amid the musical tumult of the late 1960s. Their songwriting collective (especially Robbie Robertson's lyrics) gave Helm's singing a legitimacy for which few modern cookie-cutter country crooners could dare to hope.
That same spirit is evident here. Dirt Farmer contains fourteen tracks, and there's not a bum in the lot. A song can be found for just about anyone. For the fans of his earlier work, "The Girl I Left Behind" resonates with the classic grooves of The Band, and "Got Me a Woman" by Nashville songwriter Paul Kennerley would have been in good company among The Basement Tapes. Their rendition of the Carter Family's "Single Girl, Married Girl" is half-timed a la "Up on Cripple Creek." For fans of traditional material, Campbell's fiddling on "Little Birds" and "Anna Lee," and the three-part harmonies by Helm, his daughter Amy, and Teresa Williams will be sure to soothe. Blues fans will enjoy the gut-bucket performance of J.B. Lenoir's "Feelin' Good." Perhaps the final track, "Wide River to Cross" may be, after all, a tad shaded by a veil of pathos, but after listening to the thirteen preceding songs the effect is actually quite welcome.
Here's a record that, like the Levon Helm of old, unifies the disparate and soothes the musical tumult.
Vanguard Records 79844-2 [2007]
Levon Helm's strong return scratches a musical itch that had been nagging me for years, but it was an itch I had been at a loss to locate. You know those days when it seems none of the music on your record shelf will quite satisfy? Problem solved. The album Dirt Farmer, produced by Larry Campbell, is a an album of contemplation, reminiscence, reflection, and joy.
Three of the saddest days for devotees of the inaptly named "country rock" were the suicide of keyboardist/drummer Richard Manuel in 1986, the death of bassist/fiddler Rick Danko in December of 1999, and drummer/mandolinist/guitarist Levon Helm's diagnosis of throat cancer in 1996. The Band's three eccentric but hauntingly beautiful voices were silenced. These losses were cause for recollection of some great music, but also decades of substance abuse and heartache. Like Manuel and Danko, Levon Helm was at one time a man of addictions. Compare "The Weight" from The Band's Music from Big Pink to "Strawberry Wine" from Stage Fright and you can hear how drugs affect a man's singing ability. Yet while death is a loss that aches for a while but can eventually move toward acceptance, the irony of losing one's voice - and then having to live with the loss - is reminiscent of Beethoven's deafness.
How does one continue when one's instrument is taken away? Helm, with the support and encouragement of his daughter Amy Helm and others, slowly brought his voice back, not to the full swagger of his earlier days, but beautifully and powerfully present. And how to celebrate this return? Thankfully, through a balanced and subtly restrained statement of everything Levon Helm is and ever was.
Wielding a mix of traditional and contemporary songs, Dirt Farmer sits comfortably in the pocket, and has the tone of good friends who have come over to play for a while in your living room. The performances feel natural, from veterans who use whatever talents are in the room to make the song whatever it can be in the moment. Their respect for the material supercedes their awareness of the listening audience. The music has a traditional context, but is not historicized. Don't you think if a drum set was available a century ago in some farmhouse in the mountains that they'd have used it for making music?
Unlike much of the contemporary folk, country and country-rock fare, Helm is in that tier of artist whose work speaks volumes without unnecessary preening, which I appreciate in an age where people pursue fame for essentially doing nothing. Peter Carlson of The Washington Post remarked, "These days, country music stars are created in a factory in China, molded out of plastic by workers earning 38 cents an hour, then shipped to Nashville, where they are fitted for a cowboy hat and taught to sing ditties written by a committee of moonlighting Hallmark employees." [November 8, 2005] I've also suffered through countless old-timey records where great pains were taken to give the performances pathos, the "this-is-the-music-of-my-people-so-take-me-seriously" attitude, and I can say with experience that this rarely succeeds.
Levon Helm, to the contrary, simply does what he does best: he sings the damn song. His is for all intents and purposes one of the most distinctively American voices. He was raised in the cotton fields of Arkansas, bathed in the sounds of the Opry on WSM out of Nashville and Sonny Boy Williamson on KFFA in Helena, and he earned his stripes playing the rockabilly club circuit in Ontario, Canada with Ronnie Hawkins. Levon Helm and the Band were a touchstone of cultural unity. Southern enough to please rednecks, ornery enough to please renegades, and Dylanized enough to please folkies and hippies. They were a safehouse amid the musical tumult of the late 1960s. Their songwriting collective (especially Robbie Robertson's lyrics) gave Helm's singing a legitimacy for which few modern cookie-cutter country crooners could dare to hope.
That same spirit is evident here. Dirt Farmer contains fourteen tracks, and there's not a bum in the lot. A song can be found for just about anyone. For the fans of his earlier work, "The Girl I Left Behind" resonates with the classic grooves of The Band, and "Got Me a Woman" by Nashville songwriter Paul Kennerley would have been in good company among The Basement Tapes. Their rendition of the Carter Family's "Single Girl, Married Girl" is half-timed a la "Up on Cripple Creek." For fans of traditional material, Campbell's fiddling on "Little Birds" and "Anna Lee," and the three-part harmonies by Helm, his daughter Amy, and Teresa Williams will be sure to soothe. Blues fans will enjoy the gut-bucket performance of J.B. Lenoir's "Feelin' Good." Perhaps the final track, "Wide River to Cross" may be, after all, a tad shaded by a veil of pathos, but after listening to the thirteen preceding songs the effect is actually quite welcome.
Here's a record that, like the Levon Helm of old, unifies the disparate and soothes the musical tumult.
Friday, January 4, 2008
Aural Rays of Sunshine
"Hey, you got a second?" he asked over the intercom, like a man with a couch that needed moving. Certainly the last question you want to hear your boss ask you at five-thirty in the afternoon.
Sigh. "Sure. I'll be right over."
Like walking that last mile of the way, I marched down the hall, through the lobby, past his receptionist and into his office. His stony face held for a brief moment, but quietly muttered, "Shut the door."
Shut the door? What had I done? Was my 15-minute coffee break running too long? Had I inadvertently absconded with petty cash? He'd been in closed door meetings with one of his superiors for most of the afternoon. Given the choices now before me, moving that couch was sounding like a great option. I could move it right into my therapist's office and spend an eternity on it.
"I want you to hear something," he said quietly. "But before we listen, you must understand that you can't say anything to anyone, and I'm sorry but you can't have this when we're done."
Curiouser and curiouser. Inside, I felt like my heart and my body had separated, and I had no sensation of my limbs being connected to me in any way. Just get it over with and get me the hell out of this room. "Okay. What's up?"
"I've been working on a project." He explained that his boss had asked him to do a personal favor and digitize some recordings. His boss was the son of a famous songwriting team, and these recordings were demos that his parents had made for various artists who went on to make great records of these songs.
In a flash, my heart transformed from a dark pit of dense lead to a brilliant supernova of fusing gasses. "Don't be f---ing kidding me," I blurted with a flood of relief and despair. Despair because I'd been talking to him over the previous several months about the impact that our employer's parents had on my musical life, my endearment to their songs and the legends that these songs helped to create, and here he offers me an opportunity to look through a unique portal into a scared realm. For a record collector to hear demo tapes of musical gold being forged is like a minister being shown the rough draft of Genesis.
"No, really," he said with a wry smile.
I took a slow, deep breath. "What have you got?"
He showed me a file listing that read like the Billboard charts of the mid-twentieth century. Songs that reshaped the boundaries of rock, country and rhythm and blues. Songs that realigned the molecules of the eardrums of anyone who ever heard them so that one could then walk forward in life knowing that he or she knew what harmony was all about, and that the agony of heartbreak explained in sublime lyrics set to such harmonies had more beauty than young motherhood and the sunrise put together.
"So, what do you want to hear?"
Hell if I know. What do you want God to say to you at the pearly gates?
I named a song or two. He clicked a button. Suddenly, he and I were sitting in some living room fifty years earlier with the sound of a big gentle man in a chair next to us, clearing his throat and calling out a title. The small body guitar was melodious and finely tuned. The man and the woman sang plaintively and gently, and each note was like manna from heaven.
In a couple minutes it was over, and we sat in a silence that only the cloistered would recognize. These were about the most beautiful yet fragile recordings I'd ever heard. "Do you realize," I finally uttered, "that other than the two of them, their son, and the artists who went on to make the records, that you and I are probably the only others who have ever heard that? That was..." I stammered, "I--"
"I figured you'd might want to hear these," he smiled. "Want to hear another?"
I coughed, took a deep breath and shifted in my chair. "Well, I guess..." We methodically sifted through others, each one falling down like aural rays of sunshine. The signposts of music history flashed steadily past, but my heart had stopped beating.
"I'm sorry I can't let you have these. I was helping him with this project, but I've got to delete them. He'd fire me if I didn't."
"Achhh! my God!"
"Yeah, well. This is just for his iPod. Nothing else," he replied.
"Ohhhh, man. His iPod? Get out. How can he not see the opportunity he has here? Why doesn't he release these? He'd sell a million copies – to music industry people alone! Can't you reason with him? They're priceless; they've got to be preserved."
He shrugged helplessly. "You've heard enough?"
"Well, let me clear my calendar for the next ten years." I wanted to drown in these songs until my eardrums were waterlogged. But deep down I realized that just the several songs I heard were so precious and how could I really demand more? I sighed and slowly shook my head. "Go ahead."
He reached to the mouse, selected the folder and hit Delete. Such awesome power in such a simple act. But then, those very simple songs themselves had an even greater power. I was grateful these songwriters had shared them with artists who made records we've all enjoyed for decades.
Sigh. "Sure. I'll be right over."
Like walking that last mile of the way, I marched down the hall, through the lobby, past his receptionist and into his office. His stony face held for a brief moment, but quietly muttered, "Shut the door."
Shut the door? What had I done? Was my 15-minute coffee break running too long? Had I inadvertently absconded with petty cash? He'd been in closed door meetings with one of his superiors for most of the afternoon. Given the choices now before me, moving that couch was sounding like a great option. I could move it right into my therapist's office and spend an eternity on it.
"I want you to hear something," he said quietly. "But before we listen, you must understand that you can't say anything to anyone, and I'm sorry but you can't have this when we're done."
Curiouser and curiouser. Inside, I felt like my heart and my body had separated, and I had no sensation of my limbs being connected to me in any way. Just get it over with and get me the hell out of this room. "Okay. What's up?"
"I've been working on a project." He explained that his boss had asked him to do a personal favor and digitize some recordings. His boss was the son of a famous songwriting team, and these recordings were demos that his parents had made for various artists who went on to make great records of these songs.
In a flash, my heart transformed from a dark pit of dense lead to a brilliant supernova of fusing gasses. "Don't be f---ing kidding me," I blurted with a flood of relief and despair. Despair because I'd been talking to him over the previous several months about the impact that our employer's parents had on my musical life, my endearment to their songs and the legends that these songs helped to create, and here he offers me an opportunity to look through a unique portal into a scared realm. For a record collector to hear demo tapes of musical gold being forged is like a minister being shown the rough draft of Genesis.
"No, really," he said with a wry smile.
I took a slow, deep breath. "What have you got?"
He showed me a file listing that read like the Billboard charts of the mid-twentieth century. Songs that reshaped the boundaries of rock, country and rhythm and blues. Songs that realigned the molecules of the eardrums of anyone who ever heard them so that one could then walk forward in life knowing that he or she knew what harmony was all about, and that the agony of heartbreak explained in sublime lyrics set to such harmonies had more beauty than young motherhood and the sunrise put together.
"So, what do you want to hear?"
Hell if I know. What do you want God to say to you at the pearly gates?
I named a song or two. He clicked a button. Suddenly, he and I were sitting in some living room fifty years earlier with the sound of a big gentle man in a chair next to us, clearing his throat and calling out a title. The small body guitar was melodious and finely tuned. The man and the woman sang plaintively and gently, and each note was like manna from heaven.
In a couple minutes it was over, and we sat in a silence that only the cloistered would recognize. These were about the most beautiful yet fragile recordings I'd ever heard. "Do you realize," I finally uttered, "that other than the two of them, their son, and the artists who went on to make the records, that you and I are probably the only others who have ever heard that? That was..." I stammered, "I--"
"I figured you'd might want to hear these," he smiled. "Want to hear another?"
I coughed, took a deep breath and shifted in my chair. "Well, I guess..." We methodically sifted through others, each one falling down like aural rays of sunshine. The signposts of music history flashed steadily past, but my heart had stopped beating.
"I'm sorry I can't let you have these. I was helping him with this project, but I've got to delete them. He'd fire me if I didn't."
"Achhh! my God!"
"Yeah, well. This is just for his iPod. Nothing else," he replied.
"Ohhhh, man. His iPod? Get out. How can he not see the opportunity he has here? Why doesn't he release these? He'd sell a million copies – to music industry people alone! Can't you reason with him? They're priceless; they've got to be preserved."
He shrugged helplessly. "You've heard enough?"
"Well, let me clear my calendar for the next ten years." I wanted to drown in these songs until my eardrums were waterlogged. But deep down I realized that just the several songs I heard were so precious and how could I really demand more? I sighed and slowly shook my head. "Go ahead."
He reached to the mouse, selected the folder and hit Delete. Such awesome power in such a simple act. But then, those very simple songs themselves had an even greater power. I was grateful these songwriters had shared them with artists who made records we've all enjoyed for decades.
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