Hey.
Here’s a few songs I’ve been listening to recently. I’ve added them to my “Songs and Thoughts” Spotify playlist here.
If you listen to these, let me know what you think!
Tyler
Pure and Easy by the Who (1971)
Before I knew why, I’d always felt that The Who was a very masculine band. I now know that it has something to do with Roger Daltrey’s brawny voice, the distinction of “loudest band” by the Guiness Book of World Records in 1976, and how often their lyrics reference or explore the themes of boyhood and manly rites-of-passage (“Tattoo”, “I’m a Boy”, “I Don’t Even Know Myself” …)
In a 1974 interview, Pete Townshend, the band’s principal songwriter, says about the ritual of smashing his guitar on stage:
“It’s like smashing up this stupid thing, which … It’s hard to explain. It’s everything that I was, [the] guitar. [H]ow I became a man was through the guitar.”
The relationship between manhood and playing guitar makes sense to me — it’s a thing that rewards mechanical skill and a hobby from which you can build a larger-than-life reputation.
He revisits the topic in a 2007 interview with Murray Lerner (one of the most important music documentarians of the sixties and seventies):
“Next thing I knew, I’m breaking up guitars at gigs and saying: ‘I’m destroying the instrument of my bourgeois childhood longing!’ … I’d even have the guys in the band going, ‘What a load of pompous, pretentious drivel’, and I’d go, ‘No, it’s auto-destructive art!’”
Townshend is a great interviewee; he has a wide artistic vocabulary that is owed to his three years at Ealing School of Art in London. Other art school dropouts include John Lennon (expelled), Joni Mitchell, and Eric Clapton, all of whom are similarly fascinating talk show guests.
Fittingly, the lyrics to “Pure and Easy” sound like the epiphanous journal-musings of an art student fantasizing about being a musician. It’s as if they’ve just reached the exciting intersection where music is both felt and intellectually understood.
Apparently, the song was meant to be a centerpiece to an abandoned concept album titled Lifehouse that was meant to follow Tommy (1969). Material written for Lifehouse instead appeared on Who’s Next (1971).
“And a child flew past me riding in a star …”
Hotel Room Song by Labi Siffre (1972)
Books and movies and TV shows often portray people abandoning their creative dreams as something that happens all at once; it’s a singular, intense moment when a character finally discovers that they aren’t good enough to be the writer or musician or artist they always imagined being.
In reality, abandoning your dreams is often the result of a gradual accumulation of stress and disappointment. The thieving nature of time and the troubles of the modern world conspire to slowly steal talent from creative people until one day, alone in a cafe or on a walk, we realize we’re left with enough creative cognition to think but not enough to dream.
This is the picture Labi Siffre paints in “Hotel Room Song”. It’s a painful portrait of how successive let-downs can erode our ambitions that once gave us the confidence to be human.
On Spotify, this is the least-played track on his album “Crying, Laughing, Loving, Lying” but one of the most evocative. I can actually imagine Siffre composing the song in a hotel room and secretly thinking about giving up songwriting in between TV appearances — the purpose of which were, ironically, to celebrate and promote his talent.
The most recent mention of Siffre in the news was on August 5th when Rolling Stone announced that a compilation of his music will finally be released in the U.S. after being featured in the 2023 film The Holdovers (Paul Giamatti’s character suffers from a similar spiritual crisis.)
Handcuffs by Parliament (1975)
Glenn Goins, the lead vocalist on this song, was twenty-one years old during the recording of the album Mothership Connection (1975). In the tour that followed, he was responsible for “summoning the Mothership”, an on-stage ritual that involved a massive, one-thousand-pound flashing aluminum UFO descending from the ceiling, from which emerged Dr. Funkenstein – the pimp-clad frontman George Clinton. As Clinton got ready backstage for this grand re-entrance, Goins stirred the audience's excitement. Alive for only two decades, he was, in those few minutes, a spiritual shepherd for everything Parliament was creatively responsible for: afro-futurism, the P-Funk mythology, and what James Baldwin calls “personal, private, vanishing evocations.” In those few minutes, he was both human and something much more.
That tour, known as the P-Funk Earth tour, lasted one year and ended in 1977. The same year, Glenn Goins left the group, citing poor management (a mounting debt was incurred by the elaborate performances.) In 1978, he died from Hodgkin’s lymphoma at twenty-four years old.
At the time of his early death, Goins was already a master performer, a thrilling singer, and another person whom the music-loving public must sadly speculate: what if? He remains one of two people who, upon hearing their voice, made me say out loud: “who is that?” (The other voice was Napoleon Murphey Brock’s on the Frank Zappa song “Advance Romance”).
A great example of his ability on the P-Funk Earth tour is in footage from Houston, specifically here (at 40:15, where he shotguns a cigarette from Clinton, then continues to sing) and here (at 43:35, where he slowly drops his guitar pick to mobilize the audience to clap for the Mothership.)
The Last Time I Saw Richard by Joni Mitchell (live 1974)
This version of “The Last Time I Saw Richard” was recorded live in Los Angeles in 1974 with the LA Express, a jazz-fusion band that backed her on Court and Spark (1974). The studio version of the song closes out her album Blue (1971) and is, to me, among the perfect finales to any album ever.
Blue covers a lot of thematic ground in only 36 minutes. At 27 years old, Joni Mitchell demonstrates an advanced understanding of the human condition; she explores the nuances of love, identity, loneliness and grief in ways no other songwriter can in such a short amount of time. In an interview with CBC Music in 2013, she says about the reaction to the album:
“[After writing Blue], I bought a property in British Columbia and dropped out. Because what had happened was, they are looking at me, and all I’ve done is reveal human traits. [The audience] hadn’t seen themselves in it. The point that they see themselves in it, the communication is complete. The men … they all recoiled. Because the game is to make yourself larger than life. Don’t reveal anything human, and my thing is: why? … The trouble is, I’m the playwright, I’m the actress. … It’s such an intimate art form and I’m doing so much that all of the attention is going to me, which is insane! It’s like, you’re not going to get anything out of it if you look at me – you’ve got to see yourself in it, otherwise it has no value.”
My favorite lyrics on the album are those with tactile imagery:
“I wanna knit you a sweater / I wanna write you a love letter” (All I Want)
“We don’t need no piece of paper from the city hall” (My Old Man)
“On the back of a cartoon coaster / In the blue TV screen light / I drew a map of Canada / With your face sketched on it twice” (A Case of You)
She uses these to counterbalance and ground other moments of emotional, figurative language. They also act as touchstones for listeners to better understand how the complexity of love and longing materialize in the physical world.
“The Last Time I Saw Richard” is a similar exercise in literary grounding. It is the poetic resolution to the nine songs that precede it; Blue is a tapestry of human emotion and this song is the wall on which that tapestry hangs.
My favorite part of this live version is the funny, mimicking voice she puts on at 1:22. It made me fall out laughing when I first heard it. On the studio version, the “waitress closing up the bar” is presented as a devastating impediment to a conversation — in this performance, Joni reveals the comedy hidden beneath the debris of life’s serious moments.