Shine On, You Crazy Topaz

Floyd.  So much of what is totally absent in pop music today -- mystery, musicianship, perfectionism, layers.  Four guys going into a warehouse to jam on e minor to a7 for four hours every day for a month or so.  Going into the studio for a year.  Sweating over every pad, fill, transition, riff.  The idea that a recording isn't just some fucking marketing tool, but a piece of art in itself.  Not just a delivery device for a song.

And how about lyrics that say more than "moon/spoon/june/swoon"?  Meditations on the human condition.  Pondering the big questions.  Life. Death.  The world and the individual's stance against it/with it.  I compare it to what passes for pop on the radio today and I just laugh.  I mean, some of the shit that's out there is SO ridiculous.  I can't even know where to start.

Satellite radio is kind of like cable.  It's clear, great quality.  Same all over the country.  But you can flip the channels for two hours and find little to dig.  And what little there is that's cool is played just a little TOO often.  But man.  Some of the songs I came across were just laughable.  Fucking interchangeable.  Overcompressed.  Weepy.  Come back to me. Fire/desire.

FIRE DESIRE!!!

This rhyme should be retired permanently from music.  Anytime I hear the rhyme fire/desire I just think that the pussy who wrote the song just got lazy. 

So I have Pandora on my baby laptop, and on comes "Shine On You Crazy Diamond."  Synth pads.  Slide guitars.  Ninth chords.  Tempo changes.  It's a big, beautiful "fuck you" to anyone who expects to have it handed to them without a little investment of mental energy.

So yeah.  I'm one of those people in his 40's who has begun to look to the past and admonish the present for sucking.  But face it.  The present sucks.  We're all beholden to corporate whores, and our collective art too often follows suit.  How the fuck are we gonna break out of this?  Is europe the answer?

This country is crazy.  Evidently, a man kissing another man is disgusting.  A man cutting another man in half with a hail of bullets is not.  It's sad.

Old songs you love, used in commercials..

It happens all the time. A tune you grew up hearing -- a tune that you have countless personal memories assigned to -- a tune that is a piece of your personal history...is in a commercial.

As a songwriter, the thing that strikes me as the most damaging thing about putting a song into a commercial is this: CONTEXT. It's the same reason I hated it when Puff Daddy used "Every Breath You Take" -- he took a song that I listened to for years and didn't just cover it -- he changed its meaning. He took a sad, haunting pop ballad about an over-posessive love affair and turned it into a requiem for a thug who got shot. Now, was it CLEVER? Sure. But so is the Stealth Bomber. As a fan of the ORIGINAL song, I felt totally fucking hoodwinked. Not simply because of the fact that he lifted a guitar riff. And a beat. And a chord progression. And a melody. But he took something that I knew and loved for one reason and jammed it into something else. I did not appreciate it. Does that make me a little -- dare I even think it -- conservative, in the cultural sense? Perhaps. I just have some screwy idea that if you're a composer, you can, at least some of the time, come up with licks of your own. Call me crazy..

Now, I may never be a success in music, and that may well be because "I don't have it." It may also be because I won't let some fuckwad use a song of mine as a vehicle for a product that would totally change or obscure the song's original meaning. My songs are chunks of my life. I sweat my balls over every lyric I write, and I assign very specific meanings to what I make. That's why a few people actually dig 'em..and not just my friends and family..a few strangers, too! I got into this racket at age 20 to communicate...to let the poison building up in my soul out in a positive way...and, I mean, to get laid, let's face it. But I certainly didn't become a singer-songwriter to get rich. I mean, I'm no saint...I like money as much as the next person. But I do say, if all you care about is money, go work on Wall Street.

The problem with having something put into a commercial is that once you've done that, people will permanently associate your song with a car, or a brand of laxative...and then? Your original meaning is gone. The levels of damage are different for unknown songs and known songs, in this sense: if it's an unknown song by a NEW artist, the song's original context is NEVER known by people at large, and is just associated with the product. That's bad enough. But if it's a song that legions of people know and love already, the damage is far worse.

When you create something that resonates with people, whether it's 10 people or 10 million, you OWE them something for the emotional investment that they've placed in your music. When that precious thing ends up selling candy bars, the people who know and love it do feel betrayed.

The use of songs in TV shows and movies, on the other hand, can be less damaging. Songs, to me, have three basic elements: Music, poetry, and narrative. If the narrative of the song fits with (or plays off of) the screen story, it can be effective. Anyway...

"Law & Order" -- notes from the deathbed of R. Hudson

If I had the web chops, I'd get a sample of that two-note orchestral "bum-bum!" to start this entry off, but alas, I don't. In fact, if it doesn't have strings, keys, or a record button, I'm useless with most technology. HTML might as well stand for "How Techies Make a Living." I can't make head or tail of it.

Some would argue that I'm useless WITH anything with strings, keys..

Ahem. "Law And Order", as everyone knows, is a staple of modern american culture. Like a crime comedia dell arte, the characters -- archetypes without homes, personal lives, refrigerators, or weekends -- doggedly weave their way through the flawed alleyways of the american justice system. With a gritty New York sensibility, they get the job done as best they can. Half an hour for the cops, half an hour for the lawyers. We zip in and zip out. Right?

Nowadays, not so much. I'll admit, the fact that my dad starred on the show for 12-odd years makes me a little biased. I'll also say that hanging around the set of a TV show has a way of taking some of the magic out of it. Once you've seen with your own eyes that the sunlight streaming into Jack McCoy's office is in fact a big old 10k soundstage lamp, a hole that can never close gets poked in the illusion. But for me, the kicker was R. Hudson...

I don't know if it's still there, but back when I was visiting my dad at the studios there was a set where they did all of the morgue scenes. Like every functional morgue, there was a wall of steel, clamp-secured doors, behind which were presumably sliding deep-freeze trays where bodies would be kept. One day, a crew member helped me to discover that there no sliding trays behind a majority of those doors. It was mostly a flat wall of doors. And, behind one door of a fictional corpse labeled "R. Hudson" was a window....it had a clear, unobstructed view of the Hudson River.

I now knew where the magician kept the rabbit. The show, after that moment, even at its best, was harder for me to take seriously.

Of course, the fact that I had a bit-part on a spinoff and was canned after a season is liable to make me just a hair more biased. But I don't think it's jilted shit-slinging to say that "Law And Order" really doesn't pack the punch that it used to. Why? Here's one theory of mine:

The prosecutors got TOO HOT!!

This wasn't always the case. Jill Hennessy was a perfect ADA. Now, I'm not saying for one moment that she isn't hot. I mean, my god! Have you seen her?? She's a knockout. But she was a good enough actress to get into the role she played. I was on a grand jury for 4 weeks. I know what your average ADA looks like. They aren't glamorous. They DON'T have perfect make-up. They don't walk with the poise of a greek statue (or a Czech runway model). They slouch, they don't sleep, they have too many cases. They're NORMAL. And that's why Jill was so good. Even though she's a very attractive woman in real life, she slipped on the glasses, hunched over her paperwork and she was BELIEVABLE. She WAS that harried, state-employed worker bee, unglamorously toiling in the name of justice. And she radiated a lawyerly sense of intellect, despite being cute.

Cary Lowell was much too glamorous, but on balance she had a cool, reptilian way about her that just managed to hold the line between the real and the fantastical.

It was Angie Harmon who struck the death blow. At least in the realm of logic. A decent actress, certainly, but NO ada was EVER that hot. And, as nice a gal as she was, Liz Rohm was also just too hot to be an ada.

I began to wonder if Dick Wolf was starting to go a little booty-crazy -- hiring girls he thought were cute, and letting logic be damned.

Dick's always been a type-A, Iron-Balls McGinty sort of guy. It's his-way-or-the highway, and god bless him. To his credit, He did dream up a great idea which has given him enormous wealth and success, which he certainly deserves. But perhaps time hasn't been kind to his sense of judgement. Maybe the show has become almost like porn to him. "Mmm....MUST hire the hottie! MUST!!!!"

This would by no means be the first time in human history that hiring decisions were based on such criteria. On one level I can hardly blame him, and who's to say that if I were in the same position, I wouldn't end up doing the same thing?

I'm probably wrong. For balance, HE probably thinks I'm a talentless schmuck who had NO business on his set. He'd have probably been right, at the time (12 years ago?). I was just getting sober, I couldn't tell my ass from a plate of fries. I was in over my head, though I tried my best with what I had -- YOU try saying the line, "Designer Vaginas: Is this health care?"

Which brings me to this little, SVU-related detour..

One time my character got a big speech which solved a case. This stunned me. I'm pretty sure Ted Kotcheff thought I barely spoke english, but someone had taken leave of their senses and gave me a shot. It was a long speech -- a solid page --It was almost all facts: "At 1030PM so-and-so signed out. At 1105PM.." etc. Now, I'd seen some messing around on that set. Takes being blown, hot-dogging, etc. But I was being thrown this bone, and I wasn't going to fuck around. I may not BE Jerry Orbach, damn it, but I'd seen his work ethic. To NOT try as hard as I could would have meant more than a blown take. It would have meant personal disgrace on the genetic level.

I was going to nail the shit out of it, or die trying.

I got that son-of-a-bitch in ONE TAKE (we did a second as a safety). And two weeks later, I was canned. Go figure.

Nepotism. Yes, it happens. I felt unprepared, underqualified, and just a LITTLE pressure about the fact that my old man was such a badass in the same field. A lot of people there were very nice to me, but I still felt "tolerated". I felt like a bad joke in a suit and tie. The unspoken undercurrent of "Huh. Wonder how he got THIS job?" was something that felt pretty shitty...

But you know what? I needed the bread! Plain and simple. That one season of bit-part work helped me through a very tough year, during which I'd gained a foothold in the very tight voiceover business. In the end, I was actually glad I was "not asked back" to SVU. I mean, if you PLAY the guy who gets the coffee, you FEEL like the guy who gets the coffee. I now do quite well in voiceovers. Most of you haven't SEEN me, but I know a lot of you have heard me. And every time you do, I get a few bucks. I may never be a star like my father was, but I'm cool with that. I'm not missing any meals.

I will say nothing else about SVU, except this: Richard Belzer is, without question, the luckiest man in show business.

Anyway, back to the main event. I have another theory on the mothership's decline: the whole "ripped from the headlines" thing..or, as I prefer, "ripped OFF from the headlines".

If something is well-told in the realm of fact and not as well-told in the realm of fiction, why watch it? We've already SEEN it, and have already been saturated by it. Some of the story choices seemed to be almost verbatim from the news, like a Led Zeppelin sample in a hip-hop tune. I'll apply my same question to this idiom as I do to that one -- it's all very clever, but can't you dream up anything on your own?? Does all of our cultural life have to be sampling? Remake? De-collage?

The "ripped from the headlines" thing worked a lot better a decade and a half ago. The news cycle was slower. The internet was still dial-up. But now, when something happens in the news, it gets beaten to death within three days. By the time the "Law and Order" take on it makes it to the screen some 8 to 16 weeks later, even WITH the now compulsory "twist", who cares? We've already been inundated with so much other DATA in the interim that we need REMINDING. In the world of Twitter, this doesn't really fly. "What was that again? Oh, yeah.."

Look. They put a lot of actors to work in my home town, New York, and that's great. Jeremy Sisto is a brilliant actor. Seeing him week after week as the crazed brother on "Six Feet Under" will always stay with me. He's really something. They still have Sam Waterston, who's wonderful. And Linus Roache, another fantastic actor. It's just that when something still doesn't work despite all of these good elements, you have to start wondering..

As for the neighboring factions, "Criminal Intent" was always interesting, and has had a good run. I definitely think that Vincent Dinofrio, whatever people may say about him, is one hell of an actor, and can carry any show. Also, breaking from "the mothership" in terms of both character and point of view, has been refreshing.

L & O -- you've had an unprecedented run. But it's time to hang up your gun and go fishing in Florida.

Steely Dan -- my long history

Why start a music blog (a meaningless endeavor in and of itself) with some ramblings about Steely Dan? I mean, these guys have been written about all over the place. But they've had such a long and deep hold over me, and have bled so deeply into everything I do musically, it would be remiss of me if I didn't start this turkey of an endeavor without a few words about them.

Steely Dan -- a big part of my life. When I discovered them I was a teenage actor/folkie/dorm-dweller just learning guitar. They gave me my first glimpse what would become four of my favorite ladies -- the 9th, the 11th, the Maj7 add9, and the 13th. Plus, they put a lot of good cats to work.

But they weren't always so sterile and clever as they are today. Early on, there were still some cracks in the machine for the mice to run in and out of, and they weren't afraid of showing their ass sometimes. One of the things I loved about Fagen's writing was how well he could walk the line between being cool and being honest -- or heartfelt AND tricky. As time went by, with maturity came some detachment, which is cool. But they got so damned PRECISE it was almost hypnotic. Because it's RIGHT DOWN THE MIDDLE. Like a sequencer. Their post-reunion albums are too sterile and tricky for me, but their REAL albums ("Can't Buy A Thrill" THROUGH Goucho") will always be with me.

I mean, it's personal taste, which there is no accounting for. I like it when things move a little. While recording some rhythm tracks not too long ago, there was a moment toward the end of one of the tunes where my drummer, Graham Hawthorne had the engineer fade the click track out of our cans, because he knew we couldn't sit back as the song approached the end. We kept pulling the slingshot back and b-a-c-k and we HAD to fire by the end and rush a *little*.. You never get that feeling with Steely Dan. Much as I love 'em. It's clockwork.

I've seen Donald Fagen twice in my neighborhood. Both times I was speechless. And, both times, he saw me seeing him and recoiled instantly, which made me like him even more. A freind of my mother’s met him at a party once. I said "They say he has the personality of a box-turtle". I don't remember her response verbatim, but in her husky, downtown milf of a voice, it went something like this: "That's...being KIND. *You* say, 'that was some snowstorm this morning', and he stares down at the fruit salad."

I wish I were rich and/or successful enough to behave that way. I'd love to earn the right to stare at the fruit salad and not respond to every question tossed at my feet, without at least a moment to think about it. Especially during the holiday season. I mean, aside from the food and Alistair Sim's "Christmas Carol" (the only film version of "Carol" EVEN FUCKING WORTH CONSIDERING!) it's a bit of a tricky time for me. But I digress. There'll be a lot of that.

(ahem)

All I had around the house growing up was my Mom's music (Barbara Cook, Sondheim, Bobby Short, Boz Scaggs) and my brother Tony's music (James Taylor, Carly Simon, ALL of the british ska bands, the best Soul Artists, XTC, Elvis Costello, etc, plus of course my brother's band itself, Urban Blight, rehearsing in the first floor playroom). But The Beatles, The Police, and Steely Dan I pretty much found on my own -- LP's left by old houseguests. I didn't even get into Zeppelin, Hendrix, The Who, or The Stones until well into my 30's, hence the enormous gaps (as well as the quirky specificities) in my influences.

My 2 cents, album by album:

Can't Buy A Thrill, for me, was the kids looking into the in the candy store window, but not being allowed to eat as much as they wanted. Fagen wasn't as confident of a vocalist then, and those duties were split with guys that were really never -- ever -- heard from again. Some of those album cuts (as well as the hits) still stay with me -- I guess because Fagen and Becker were still trying to throw people a thematic bone. Things like "Midnight Cruiser" and "Brooklyn" still occupy a cheesy little place in my heart.

Countdown To Ecstasy did three things -- 1 established Fagen as the lone "voice"; 2 stretched their thematic boundaries; 3 -- got them hopelessly addicted (for good AND ill) to the tricks and traps of the studio. This time they were left the KEYS to the candy store and got a little sick. There's a shot of Fagen in the control while making this album, and it's evident that from the sickly, pale look on his face that he was LIVING in that room, and never seeing the light of day! "Your Gold Teeth" is like a giant "fuck you" to anybody who thinks they can guess what's going on. "Show Biz Kids" is seamy and silly, but with some great playing. "King Of The World" is a nod to their sci-fi influences that they would tap into more over the years. There's still the occasional cheese -- "Pearl Of The Quarter" is a little too ingratiating at times, but means well. "Bodhisattva" however, **always** kills me. The vocals, the harmonies, and the fucking guitar solos! That fucker in the middle (I think it's Denny Dias) just destroys the place. Did he do it in one take, or did he punch it in three notes at a time? WHO GIVES A SHIT!? As for addictive chord changes, guitarists out there should try this: in the bridge -- "can you show me, the shine of your japan, the sparkle of your china" etc., the same chords that repeat on the end solo -- they are E flat maj7, A7, D minor 7, F9. Play the first chord as a second-position barre chord on the 6th fret and then painfully adjust accordingly. I find this sequence of four chords to be a rhythm guitarist's equivalent of CRACK. I can play em on loop all day while someone else blows over em!

Pretzel Logic is a terrific album for a lot of reasons. You have the industrial strength pop tune (with, just as icing on the cake -- a fucking Victor Feldman vibe solo on the intro!). "Rikki" is a great great song in my opinion, worthy of the dual labels of both a hit and a piece of sonic art. So much of that dual greatness comes from the arranging and writing. They could have easily kept the standard song structure and still skipped to the bank, but they still managed to include a whole additional set of "blowing changes" -- a different set of chords *just* for the guitar solo on the back half. This also opens the door to several tips of the fedora to their Jazzer influences. "east St. Louis Toodle-Loo", a Duke Ellington/Bubber Miley tune, done with a wah-wah guitar doubling with a plunger trumpet, is a pretty hilarious and sweet tribute. "Parker's Band" is hokey -- but remember, this is a couple of white dudes from Bard writing tunes about Charlie Parker and getting away with it, in 1974. No small feat. Even "Night By Night" has a certain charm --- sort of like a song you'd hear as part of a training sequence in Rocky I. All in all, I love the SOUND of this album from a technical standpoint. It still has a lot of real analog fur on it -- something they would run away from as much as possible in later years.

Katy Lied is another great fucking album. The hard-shuffle/tricky chorus of "Black Friday" makes up for the hokum of "Bad Sneakers". "Rose Darling" has fumbling verses but the choruses are nice. As the son of two alkies, I like the vibe of "Daddy Don't Live In That New York City No More", silly as it is. "Doctor Wu" is really lovely to me. Phil Woods destroys the alto solos, and the lyrics are great to me. The second half of the album is not as good as the first. "Movies" is silly -- "Your Gold Teeth II" strikes me as filler. "Chain Lightning", though, has a great James Dean-through 70's filtration vibe -- you wish it'd have gone on longer. Over the years, they would smoke it live, during their pre-reunion "New York Rock and Soul Revue" days in the late 80's/early 90's. But "Any World (That I'm Welcome To") was and is one of my favorite tunes. I would lie on the floor with my walkman on during lunch, junior year of high school, and cry big fat tears while listening to that one. The last tune, "Little Ones", is, well, let's just come out and say it -- gay. But the good stuff on this album is so good to me that it forgives the bad.

The Royal Scam -- this to me is where they were firing on all cylinders technically, and the songwriting was more evenly great -- but unlike their next two albums there seems to be a sarcastic, bitter unease that gives it some extra balls. "Kid Charlemagne" is a great story -- rise and fall of a drug dealer. And I always loved "Caves Of Altimira" -- it taps into the personal mythology of every kid that had a secret place, wether it was the shoulder of a road with a view, a cave with mysterious paintings, on in my case a trainyard with some great graffiti pieces. Those places that you and your friends found to get high away from the grown ups, and make discoveries which, at the time, are mind-blowing. I've always LOVED "Don't Take Me Alive" -- I've never heard a song that got into the head of, of all things, a hostage-taker, and still be such a head-bobber. The rest of the tunes are pretty great, except for "The Fez", which to me is pretty idiotic (no wonder it was "the hit"). "Sign In Stranger" may have some sci-fi references -- when I heard the lyric "have you heard about the boom on Mizar 5?" I looked it up at the time. Mizar is a star in our galaxy, presumably with planets. Who knows what this tune's about..again who cares? The rhythm guitar and the piano hookiness alone make a worthwhile thing.

Aja -- probably my all-time favorite. To me, only "I got the News" is dead weight. But the rest of this album has it all for me -- great writing, great playing, outstanding production and engineering, and a kind of spiritual transcendent quality that is evident in the sound if not always in the words. It's a vibe they didn't have on any other album before or after. Aja, album-wide, is also probably the best example of how to use a horn section as a well-arranged orchestral "pad". It's got the warmth of Lyle Mays' Oberheim but is all organic and sweaty, and harmonically rich at the same time. It's Stax meets Claus Ogerman. Unreplicatable. Of course, on the song "Aja" you get this trip through space and time. I always had this fantasy that it was about a soldier in Vietnam who went awol to live with a beautiful girl in her village. Probably not what the tune meant at all, but that's what I saw. I mean, nowadays Fagen is talking more and more about what the tunes meant, but it was more fun for me NOT to know -- then you're free to fill in the blanks yourself...Steve Gadd's superhuman drumming still gets me hard, especially on the fade out. But the guitar solos, the progressions, and some of the parts -- listen to the way the guitar and the Rhodes play off each other in the intro and between the verses -- are just fucking sick. This to me was Steely Dan at their best. And what can you say about Wayne Shorter's tenor solo? It's like a rising sun of melted gold, pushing out of a calm sea. "Home At Last" is beautiful. "Deacon Blues" fantastic. I like to think of that tune as the ultimate dedication to every musician who ever slugged it out unheralded in the trenches of this ever more ridiculous business --- finding fulfillment and satisfaction wherever he can. And "Josie" is just a terrific, hot-night, anthem. Like a Flatbush streetgang's fantasy jack-off target, elevated to majesty.

Goucho -- Too much coke, booze, and young tang. There's a hard distance to most of the tunes on here, but it sure seems like, in retrospect, a real harbinger for the excesses of the 80's that were to come. Hard Living and submerged pain. But there are some great lyrics -- "The Kid will live and learn/as he watches his bridges burn/from the point of no return". Fuck. "Hey Nineteen" was right on the money. When I saw them at the Garden during their first reunion tour in '93 (before they made their first "New Album", which to me REALLY sucked) Fagen changed the lyric from "retha Franklin" to "That's Otis Redding...she don't remember the King of soul" -- the crowd went apeshit. It was funny. Also, the lyric of "hard times beffalin' the soul survivors" -- someone told me that's a reference to a band that he used to play in as a kid that did soul covers, and how his group of friends from that time were all growing old less than gracefully. All in all, the drug references, in "19" as well as "Glamour Profession" and "Time Out Of Mind" (practically a VALENTINE to heroin) make this album a little too much shop-talk for me. But there are a lot of great moods and sounds. Steve Kahn never played so well before or since as he did on the out-chorus of "Glamour Profession". The horn arranging is diabolical album-wide, although not as sublime as on Aja. Brecker plays his signature stuff on the start of "Goucho". This album was also the first time they used computerized drums. Roger Nichols, their engineer, created a sampling drum machine/sound replacer called WENDEL. To me it's the nail in the coffin for warmth on Steely Dan's previous records. There's an openness and cleanliness about Goucho that, while technically impressive, and a lot of times sonically pleasing, seems almost musically fascistic. Fagen would eventually find a way to walk the line between cleanliness and beauty with his first solo album, "The Nightfly" (really one of my absolute favorite records) in a way that would rise above the calculated chill. But Goucho seems an at times cold but necessary step towards that.