Spacing Out

Today I took the ultimate trip. I listened to the soundtrack to 2001: A Space Odyssey as I walked around the neighborhood.

I’ve had the soundtrack album on vinyl for years. It used to belong to my friend Bill, but when we were in high school—maybe even earlier—I talked him into trading it to me. I can’t remember what I traded—maybe a Fantastic Four poster. In any event, he’s resented it ever since. I can’t say I blame him.

However, Bill was willing to let bygones be bygones and he recently brought some of my albums up to Maine to our mutual friend, Mike, who had the apparatus necessary to convert them into MP3s. I’ve put some of the songs on my iPod, including 2001.

Today I stepped out the door listening to “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” better known as “The Theme to 2001.” It sounded great in all its brassy pomp and magnificence, although the pops and hisses betrayed its vinyl origins and made it sound like music heard in front of a crackling fire. Even with the pops the compositions by György Ligeti remained as mysterious and otherworldly as they were the first time I heard them. “The Blue Danube,” the background music to the scene where the Pan Am shuttle docks with the rotating space station—perhaps my favorite scene from any movie ever—still sounds so rich and lush it could have been recorded on velvet.

I didn’t see 2001 on its first release in 1968. I had to wait until a re-release sometime around 1974, when I was 13 or 14. I was home sick from school on the Friday it opened and nothing would persuade my parents to let me go that night. I cajoled, I begged, I pleaded, I sulked, to no avail. Bill and I had to go on the next night. His sister drove us. I can’t pretend we understood the movie, but we did a good job parroting things we had read about it on the way back, just to prove to his sister that we did.

I’ve seen 2001 a lot since then. I saw it at Boston’s old Nickelodeon Theater, in an auditorium at the University of Southern Maine, and at a repertory theater in Los Angeles. I saw a special 25^th anniversary screening at the huge Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C., and I saw the last remaining Cinemax print at the IMAX theater of the National Air and Space Museum. That was disappointing, because the print, pieced together from several Cinemax prints, had faded terribly. But I did see a nice new print at the American Film Institute Theater at the Kennedy Center, and even later a gorgeous 70mm version, once again at the grand old Uptown. I’ve seen 2001 on television, on VHS tape, and on DVD. Just a few weeks ago a friend showed me a little bit of his Blue Ray version. I will have go back and watch the whole thing. It looked amazing.

When we were living in Washington, my wife and I even put a little bit of dialogue from 2001 on our answering machine message. It said, “Welcome to voice print identification. When you see the red light go on, would you please state in the following order: Your destination, your nationality, and your full name. Surname first, Christian name, and initial.” One day our rather ditzy landlady called and left an anxious message saying she didn’t see any red light and didn’t know what to do.

I love 2001 so much because it creates a sense of awe and mystery. I’ve never been able to look at the night sky the same way since seeing the movie. Somehow this film, shot inside film studios, captured the sense of how cold and vast our solar system is, and how insignificant we are in comparison. It is the anti-Star Wars. There are no explosions, no lasers, no sound in the vacuum of space. Nobody uses the Force. And although director Stanley Kubrick and writer Arthur C. Clarke fell quite short in their predictions of the future, their alternate-world 2001 feels like it’s the way the future should have been. Kubrick has often been described as cynical about human behavior, but a 2001 with moon bases and rotating space stations and routine flights into orbit and beyond seems incredibly optimistic today.

Science fiction geek that I am, I think the Jupiter-bound Discovery, looking like a huge vertebrae floating through space, is also a pretty cool spaceship.

Plus, there’s Discovery’s HAL 9000 computer, the greatest serial killer in movies. True, he murdered a mere four people (astronaut Frank Poole and hibernating scientists Hunter, Kimball, and Kaminski), which one of today’s cinematic psychopaths would do before the opening credits. But Hal was both creepy and sympathetic. He killed because his human controllers had programmed him to lie about the mission’s true purpose. And then, just before his own consciousness was snuffed out, Hal discovers his own, for lack of a better word, humanity. “My mind is going,” he tells David Bowman as the only surviving astronaut disconnects the computer brain’s higher functions. “I can feel it.”

I can feel it.

When Hal, always in the same bland voice (provided by a Canadian actor named Douglas Rain), pleads with Bowman not to disconnect him it’s chilling and sad. “Stop, Dave,” Hal says as Bowman disconnects piece after piece of his mechanical brain. “I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Dave.” Dave doesn’t stop.

Hal also gets the movie’s funniest line. (Okay, the movie’s only funny line.) It comes when Bowman makes his way through the ship to disconnect the errant computer. “I can see you’re really upset by this Dave,” Hal says, his emotionless voice as smooth as pudding. “I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill and think things over.” If it weren’t for his inherent psychopathology, Hal might have found a job in a human resources department.

I once met 2001’s author, Arthur C. Clarke, in, of all places, Saudi Arabia. My aerospace magazine had sent me there to cover an astronaut conference. Sir Arthur was one of the speakers. Before one session I nerved myself up to approach the great man and give him a copy of a poster the magazine had done depicting all the people who had flown into space. He was very gracious and pleasant to me. I wish I could have remembered more about what we said, and I wish I had thought to point out that astronauts Poole and Bowman should have been on the poster, too. (Not to mention Hunter, Kimball, and Kaminski.)

So it was a joy to listen to the music from the soundtrack this morning. With those odd, cosmic sounds filling my ears, everything I saw became freighted with significance—the squirrel running across the sidewalk in front of me, the stop sign that came closer with each step before vanishing from my field of vision, the side of a house that I suddenly realized looks like an upside-down face. The “Gayane Ballet Suite,” which plays in the movie as Frank Poole jogs around the Discovery’s circular centrifuge, played in my iPod whileI trudged up a steep hill. It’s a beautiful and melancholy piece of music that perfectly captures the isolation and loneliness of a months-long mission to Jupiter.

The music cast such a spell, in fact, that when I got home I spent five minutes on the porch saying, “Open the pod bay door, Hal,” before I realized how futile that was. I entered through the emergency airlock instead.

From That Moment On

Ask me what my favorite Frank Sinatra song is and I’ll probably say “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” the version from Songs for Swingin’ Lovers. It’s an easy pick. The song’s a classic Cole Porter tune with a great Nelson Riddle arrangement. The Milt Bernhart trombone solo near the end kicks in like a musical afterburner to really give things a boot. Frank nails the vocal with the practiced ease of an artist at the top of his game. This is the Sinatra/ Riddle team working at its peak.

There are times, though, when I’ll tell you my favorite Sinatra song is one I heard as I walked this morning. “From This Moment On” is a cut from A Swingin’ Affair! It’s another Cole Porter song, and another superb Nelson Riddle arrangement. This one steps off nice ’n’ easy with some swirling flutes that lead into the vocal. Then things start to gradually build. The band picks up intensity, saxes and trumpets riffing off each other, trombones providing their own counterpoint, drums and bass pushing everything along, piano tinkling away in the background, and Frank just surfs along on top of the arrangement. The whole thing just sweeps you up and takes you along for the ride. Fingers feel an irresistible impulse to start snappin’. Near the end the rhythm section drops away and Frank and the horns keep things percolating for a few bars, and then everyone jumps back in for the finish. By this time I figure Frank had his eyes closed, head tilted back, arms stretched out, as he headed into the home stretch. Pure bliss. I sometimes think that if I could sing like that my life would be perfect. But Frank could sing like that, and he was a mess. So go figure.

I often see Songs for Swingin’ Lovers cited as Frank’s best work. For my money, A Swingin’ Affair! has it beat. The song choices are better overall, and the album swings harder. The CD version even includes “The Lady is a Tramp,” which is about as quintessential as Frank gets. It is, in a word, oke.

In a way I grew up with Sinatra. My father is a big fan and I can especially remember hearing Come Fly With Me played at the house when I was a kid. The album also had a great cover, a painting of the jet-setting Sinatra after disembarking from a TWA Constellation, snap-brim hat slightly askew as he gestures jauntily with the thumb of one hand and grasps some feminine digits that extend from off-cover with the other.

I never really fell under the spell of Sinatra myself until I attended college in Los Angeles. I remember exactly how it happened. Late one afternoon I was sitting on the roof of my apartment building, listening to KROQ on a radio and watching airplanes off in the distance descending into LAX as the evening sky turned the color of an orange popsicle against silhouetted palm trees. KROQ was a ground-breaking “new wave” rock station at the time, but this afternoon the DJ played “Come Fly With Me,” and that was it. The next day I headed off to the strip of used record stores along Fairfax Avenue and found a copy of the album. Thanks, KROQ.

At first I approached Sinatra somewhat ironically, liking the Joe Piscopo aspects of his singing, the “cats and “jacks” and “broads” and all that surface stuff. What can I say? I was a callow 21-year-old. But gradually, as I listened to the music, I discovered Sinatra as the great artist he was and always will be.

I started buying more albums, some of them the cheap reissues Capitol released in the early 1980s. The label routinely dropped songs from these new versions to save money, probably to make pressing them cheaper. A Swingin’ Affair! originally had 15 tracks, so some genius in marketing decided to leave three of them, including “Night and Day,” off the re-release. Insanity! That’s like trying to save a few pennies by leaving the meat out of the spaghetti sauce.

And I Was

Often the songs on my iPod activate memories, long streams that cascade through my mind until the morning walk is over. There are times when I get so lost in thought that I can’t remember walking parts of my route. My body handles the navigation all by itself while my mind is busy elsewhere.

Older songs, naturally, carry more baggage. Sometimes the newer stuff triggers little more than memories of earlier walks. Not much fodder for nostalgia there.

“And She Was,” the lead song from Talking Heads’ Little Creatures, was the first song I heard this morning. It cast me right back to 1985, the year of the album’s release. I was a big Heads fan and living in a group house just outside Boston. I had quit my job as the editor of an obscure rock-and-roll magazine that spring to take a copy-editing position at a business magazine. The subject matter stretched the boredom envelope in all directions but the job did pay a living wage—at least for a 24-year-old single guy living in a group house.

It wasn’t long before I realized that Purchasing (“the magazine for purchasing professionals”) wasn’t quite right for me, so I began blindly sending out resumes to magazines I thought looked interesting. Much to my surprise, the editor of a once-prestigious publication in Washington, D.C., responded with a phone call asking me to come down and interview for the job of managing editor.

So the next Saturday I found myself sitting on an airplane at Logan Airport, my walkman headphones clamped to my ears, with a cassette  tape of Little Creatures filling my head with “And She Was” as the plane accelerated down the runway and lifted its nose into the sky.

From Washington National airport I got on the Metro and rode into town. I was early for the interview, so I disembarked at Metro Center to have a look around. I found it a little disappointing. There wasn’t a national monument in sight, just office buildings and an urban mall called The Shops at National Place. I got back on the Metro and headed to Union Station. Little did I know that about 17 months later I’d meet my future wife for our second date at those same Shops at National Place. Fate runs in unexpected directions.

The editor met me at a small restaurant on Massachusetts Avenue, across from the magazine’s offices and just up from Union Station. He was a short, somewhat fussy man with a mustache, friendly enough but perhaps a little reserved. I would later develop a loathing for him, but during the interview he seemed pleasant enough.

After lunch the waitress brought over the dessert menus.” I’m all set,” I said to her.

The editor looked at me with disbelief. “I can’t believe you don’t want dessert,” he told me.

“Well, I’m pretty full. That was a big sandwich.”

“Still, it’s dessert,” he said. “I can’t understand not having dessert. It’s my favorite part of a meal. Why, I consider myself to be quite the dessert connoisseur. No meal is complete without dessert.”

Well, I’m not stupid. I can take a hint. I turned to the waitress. “He talked me into it,” I said. “I’ll have a piece of the carrot cake.”

She turned to the editor. “And for you, sir?”

He briskly folded his menu and handed it to her. “Nothing for me,” he replied.

Maybe that should have tipped me off that this little fellow was kind of a jerk.

After lunch he showed me the magazine’s offices. When I mentioned my enthusiasm for the new Talking Heads album he told me how much he hated David Byrne. Another warning sign? (In fact, “Warning Sign” is a Talking Heads song. “Warning sign, warning sign,” it goes, “I see it but I pay it no mind.”) Months later the editor insisted on putting Byrne under the “Not Hot” listings in the magazine’s ghastly “Hot and Not Hot” issue.

So, yes, I ended up taking the job, for what seemed to me an astronomical salary of $25,000 a year. I didn’t learn until later that the woman I replaced hadn’t been fired until after I was hired. No wonder I had my interview on a Saturday, when the magazine offices were empty. I think that’s the way Machiavelli would have done it, had he worked in the publishing industry.

After a short and eventually somewhat stormy tenure I was told that my services were no longer required. The meeting took place in the editor’s office. The magazine’s publisher was there, along with two other staffers who were also losing their jobs. The publisher told us the magazine was moving to New York—which was not true—and that the three of us would not be going along—which was. The editor sat at his desk and stared glumly at the ground. Eventually he mumbled something about “one of you” not being good about following orders, or something to that effect. I think I knew which one of us he meant.

The magazine managed to put out one more issue before it ceased publication. Fortunately, I soon found another job at a brand-new aerospace publication, and I remained there for more than a decade before moving to Pennsylvania for another magazine position.

I remember playing “And She Was” as I drove to my interview for the Pennsylvania job. For years afterwards I credited the song with magical job-acquiring powers. Whenever I had a job interview I would listen to “And She Was” first. It might have worked for a while, but it hasn’t done much for me lately. Maybe it’s time to switch to a new Talking Heads song. How about “Found a Job”?

Almost Perfect

Orson Welles as Harry Lime in The Third Man.

The other day as I walked I couldn’t stop thinking about The Third Man. Released in 1949 and directed by Carol Reed, it’s an almost-perfect movie. I’ve seen it many times and have it on DVD in a beautiful edition from the Criterion Collection. I was thinking about it because a “Movie Answer Man” column on Roger Ebert’s webpage informed me that director Martine Scorsese is thinking about doing a remake, with Leonardo DiCaprio in the role of Harry Lime, the part Orson Welles played in the original.

My initial reaction was to wail with outrage, but Scorsese is one of the finest directors around and someone who might be able to pull something like this off. But it would be tough.

The original film, written by Graham Greene, tells the story of Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton), a naïve writer of pulp Western novels with titles like The Lone Rider of Santa Fe. He arrives in post-war Vienna, a city still scarred by bombs and divided into four zones by the occupying Allies forces, to take a job offered by his old school chum Harry Lime. To Holly’s shock, though, it turns out that Harry is dead, run over by a truck. Holly attends the burial, where he meets British officer Calloway (Trevor Howard), who tells him that Lime had been a notorious racketeer dealing in stolen (and diluted) penicillin. Holly, a true innocent abroad, doesn’t believe him and sets out to clear his friend’s name, but he soon learns that Vienna is no Santa Fe. (Neither is Santa Fe, apparently. “I’ve always wanted to see Texas,” says Calloway’s loyal assistant, Sergeant Paine, in a wonderful throwaway line. Paine, played by Bernard Lee–later famous as James Bond’s curmudgeonly M–is a fan of Holly’s books. “What I like about them is you can put them down and pick them up at any time,” he says, not exactly the praise an author seeks.)

 Holly looks up Harry’s old girlfriend, Anna (Valli) and asks her assistance, even as he begins to fall in love with her. Or maybe he’s in love with the idea of taking Harry’s place.  As Holly bumbles his way through old-world Vienna, he becomes convinced that a mysterious third man was present when Harry died, and that Lime’s friends–Baron Kurtz, a Romanian named Popescu, and Doctor Winkle–may know more than they let on.

They do, and Holly soon finds himself in over his head. And then one night, in a shadowy and wet Vienna street across from Anna’s apartment, he comes face to face with a dead man. It’s Harry, who hides in a doorway with only his feet visible until a light snaps on in a window across the way and illuminates his face. Harry cocks an eye at Holly, gives him a sly look, and then the light blinks out. It’s perhaps the greatest introduction of a character in film history, right up there with John Wayne’s arrival onscreen in Stagecoach. By the time Holly reaches the doorway, Harry’s gone, just a moving shadow cast up on the buildings to the sound of running feet on the cobblestones.

Turns out it that a medical orderly named Josef Harbin occupied Harry’s grave. Harry finally takes his proper place in the coffin as the film ends, brought down by a bullet Holly fires after a breathtaking chase through the Viennese sewers. Once more Anna is left to walk, alone and forlorn, from the cemetery, but this time, in one of cinema’s greatest final shots, she strides right past Holly without so much as a sideways glance.

There’s so much to love about the film. For one thing it looks fantastic, with luminous black-and-white photography that captures the crumbling grandeur of Vienna and seems more real than life itself. There’s Anton Karas’s justifiably famous zither score. And there’s Orson Welles, who is onscreen for a only few minutes but manages to steal the film, especially with his little speech after he and Holly meet on a huge Ferris wheel. “Don’t be so gloomy,” he tells Holly. “After all it’s not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

I especially like that the movie keeps the courage of its convictions. “Oh, Holly, you and I aren’t heroes,” Harry tells his hapless friend. “The world doesn’t make any heroes outside of your stories.” There are certainly no heroes in The Third Man. Not only does Holly end up killing his former friend, he doesn’t get the girl either. Reportedly, American co-producer David O. Selznick wasn’t happy with the movie’s stubbornly anti-Hollywood approach to the story. For the American cut Selznick deleted some footage that made Holly look bad in a futile attempt to turn him into a more of a hero.

Above all, it’s a deliciously witty film. I love the little throwaway touches—like the way a French policeman gallantly offers Anna her lipstick as she’s being arrested. I love the balloon man who threatens to call attention to Calloway and Payne as they wait in the shadows for Harry to show up for a meeting with Holly. I love the great character turns by the actors playing the Baron, Dr. Winkle, and Popescu. Wilfrid Hyde-White turns in a wonderful comic performance as the British cultural liaison, Crabbin.

As I said, almost perfect.

So how will a remake fare? That’s what occupied my thoughts as I walked through the neighborhood. I think they should do this: They should reverse the story and tell it from Harry’s point of view. 

I can see it beginning with a pre-credit sequence as Harry and his partners kill Josef Harbin.  The sequence ends with a shot of the porter from Harry’s building, watching from a window. Then we pick up the story as Harry and perhaps a lady friend or two indulge themselves with a picnic in the cemetery, on a vantage point Lime picked so he can watch his own burial ceremony through binoculars. There is much cynical jocularity, and perhaps a word or two of obligatory, if shallow, sympathy for poor Anna. And then Harry stiffens with surprise as he gazes through the binoculars and spots his old friend Holly standing by the grave. “Good lord, what on earth is Holly doing here?” he wonders, and then remembers. He had offered him a job. In all the excitement it had completely slipped his mind.

From his safe haven in the Russian zone Harry begins to realize that poor, blundering Holly Martins is stirring things up by raising questions that Harry would prefer remain unasked. Eventually Harry feels he must kill the porter at his old apartment building, because Holly has revealed that the old man knows too much. Harry’s partners then demand that he silence Anna, which explains why he was waiting outside her apartment the night Holly spotted him.

Harry even plans to kill Holly on the Ferris wheel, until Holly tells him the police know Harbin’s body was in Harry’s grave. As the forces of authority inexorably close in, Harry and his compatriots have a falling out, leading to a scene of betrayal and bloodshed. Harry has no place to turn, so he agrees to meet Holly, unaware that Calloway and his men are lying in wait. Once again, Harry Lime meets his destiny in the sewers of Vienna.

Shoot it in glorious black and white and you might even end up with a passable companion piece to a true classic. Marty, are you listening? I’m available.

Is this the Real Life?

Or is it just fantasy?

Rain, rain, rain. Summer and fall weather systems have been duking it out for seasonal supremacy, resulting in some pretty crappy days. (Give it up, summer weather! You’re doomed! At least until next year.) This is not weather for walking.

Last night as the rain pounded on the roof overhead, I heard familiar music emanating from my son Sam’s man cave down in the basement. Sam and a buddy were downstairs playing Xbox and singing along to a song I recognized instantly: “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen.

Queen was my first concert, in November 1977 at the Cumberland County Civic Center in Portland, Maine. I was a senior in high school. The show took place a week or so before the band released their latest album, News of the World, which meant that the audience had never heard much of the material they played. That included the opening number, the not-yet-iconic “We Will Rock You.”  And, yes, Queen did rock us (although I must admit to almost dozing off during the middle portion of the show, when they did a bunch of the new stuff.) I remember that lead singer Freddie Mercury was wearing some kind of black-and-white striped spandex body suit, which I found vaguely embarrassing. But that was all part of Queen, a band that, more than most, veered back and forth between the sublime and the ridiculous. They did perform “Bohemian Rhapsody” that night in Maine, but for the middle operatic part the band switched to a tape, which I thought was cheating. They ended the show with “God Save the Queen” (also on tape) as a large crown descended to the stage.

Now here we are in 2009, 32 years later, and my 14-year-old son was not only listening to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” he knew all the words. I was about his age when the song came out in 1975. Let’s do a little math here. If I had been listening to a 34-year-old song back in 1975 it would have been something from 1941. True, as a young trumpet player I did listen to some big-band music from the swing era, but it’s not like the music of the 1940s dominated the airwaves when I was growing up. Horrible 1950s stuff got played on one local radio station every Sunday morning, but in general the music you heard on the radio was current material. I certainly can’t imagine my 15-year-old self sitting around with a buddy and singing “I’ve Got a Gal in Kalamazoo.”

Now the songs I heard when I was growing up are still all over the place. Half the stations out there seem to be playing the Eagles, Boston, Foreigner, the Who, Led Zeppelin, and their ilk. I like that music just fine, but sheesh. As a format, classic rock does not appeal to me, at least not the tightly playlisted classic rock that you can find in every major radio market. Does anyone need to hear “Won’t Get Fooled Again” again? How about “Sympathy for the Devil” or pretty much anything by the Doors? The bands and songs from decades past have become musical vampires, the Undead of FM radio. But they’re vampires who kill their victions by boring them to death with repitition of the same old stories.

Still, mea culpa. I do have some older stuff on my iPod. I have Steely Dan. I have Barry White and Earth, Wind, and Fire. I have a few Paul McCartney songs. Now I think I might even add “Bohemian Rhapsody” to the list. Then I might go out on the porch and yell at the kids to get off my lawn. If it ever stops raining.

Set List

 It’s another grim day following a night of rain. The sky is gray and threatening but the temperatures are climbing, so it’s as warm and humid as dog’s breath. Wet leaves blow down from the trees and plaster themselves on the lawns and sidewalks. Still, I managed to get out for a walk between showers and returned home only minutes before a new deluge. Here’s what I heard on the iPod shuffle.

 (1) Walter Becker. “Hard Up Case” from 11 Tracks of Whack. A song from Becker’s first solo album, an overlooked gem. Had Donald Fagen been singing the vocals it could have been one of the best Steely Dan albums ever. Becker’s vocals aren’t bad, but they are a bit of an acquired taste. Definitely an album worth checking out. I waited a while before I bought it, and then scored it cheap in a cutout bin in D.C. I got more than my money’s worth. Becker’s follow-up, Circus Money, is also excellent.

(2) Hoodoo Gurus. “Death Ship,” from Stoneage Romeos. I got a review copy of Stoneage Romeos when I was editing a now-forgotten rock magazine in Boston. That must have been back in 1983 or ’84, and I fell hard for it. It was great guitar-oriented pop, with stick-in-your-head melodies, some edginess, and a lot of humor. The band included Larry Storch (F Troop) and Arnold Ziffel (the pig from Green Acres) among the personages to whom they dedicated the album, and the title comes from a Three Stooges short. Obviously not a band that was taking themselves too seriously. I saw them on that tour when they played a place called The Channel, a big, sprawling warren of bars and side rooms in South Boston. (Either the dBs or the Replacements opened.) The Hoodoos put on a great show, even though, as I learned later, they played with borrowed instruments because theirs had been stolen from their van a night or two previously. A couple years later, after I moved to Washington, I got to interview the Hoodoos in the somewhat shabby Hotel Harrington, also home to a bar called The Pink Elephant Lounge. I was impressed when guitarist Brad Shepherd returned to the room after doing his laundry and dumped out a trash bag that seemed to contain nothing but paisley shirts.

 (3) Donald Fagen. “New Frontier,” from The Nightfly. Fagen’s solo album was the first record I ever reviewed for publication. I wrote about it for the Maine music paper Sweet Potato just after I returned East the fall after I graduated from college in California. I didn’t get paid for the review but I got the album for free, which was payment enough.

 (4) Garbage, “The World is Not Enough,” from The Best of Bond. I paid for half of The Best of Bond CD, splitting the cost with my son, who must have been all of seven at the time. We were both Bond aficionados. The first Bond film we all watched together as a family was You Only Live Twice, which I figured was a good place to start because it contained enough gadgets and spectacle to keep the young minds interested. It worked, especially for Sam. I still get emotional whenever I hear the great string arrangements that kick off Nancy Sinatra’s performance of the theme song. Garbage is no Nancy, but this is one of the better songs from the more recent Bond movies. The movie itself is nothing to write home about, though.

 (5) Stevie Wonder. “Joy Inside My Tears” from Songs in the Key of Life. It must have been 1977 when a local radio station awarded my friend Bob the opportunity to do a “record run” at the Sonnet and Song. That meant he had a minute or two to go through the record store and grab as many records as he could. In the days leading up the big event everyone in school advised Bob about what he should grab. I think all the coaching just confused him, because he didn’t snag that many albums, certainly not as many as previous record run winners had scored. He gave me a bunch—or sold them to me, I can’t remember—and I went to various department stores around town and exchanged them for albums I wanted. Anyway, I noticed that before the record run, the owners of Sonnet and Song had taken all the copies of Songs in the Key of Life and hidden them away. I guess they didn’t want Bob getting any copies of that mammoth three-records-plus-bonus-disc set for free. At some point I bought the vinyl version (when my daughter was born my wife and I used “Isn’t She Lovely” for our answering machine message), but I recently found the CD version in the library and burned it. Stevie used to be Godlike, the kind of artist who appeared on the cover of Time magazine when he released an album. He doesn’t have that stature anymore, but who does?

 (6) Belly. “Feed the Tree,” from Stolar Tracks Volume 2. I first heard this song on Maryland’s WHFS back when that station was still great. I was driving down Connecticut Avenue in D.C. at the time. The song’s from Belly’s debut album, Star. I bought the CD, but I loaded this on my iPod from a great collection I ordered sometime around 1993 from Stolichnaya Vodka for some nominal charge to cover shipping. Stolar Tracks Volume 2 was a superb collection with songs from Eleventh Dream Day, Dinosaur, Jr., School of Fish, Pure, the Pooh Sticks, and a bunch of other bands who have faded into obscurity. The song by Eleventh Dream Day, “After This Time Is Gone,” turned me into a fan, even though I had already seen them live, when they opened for the Meat Puppets at a show I caught in Chicago. The Pure song, “Blast,” is also a classic.

 (7) Louis Armstrong. “S.O.L. Blues.” Shortly after getting my first CD player (a gift from my brother—I was a stubborn CD holdout because I resented the way the record companies were shoving them down our throats with the obviously false claim that they would last “forever”) I bought a cheap Laserlight collection of early Louis Armstrong stuff, recorded with the Hot 5 and Hot 7. As a former trumpet player myself, I felt I had to have some Armstrong. Man, that cat could blow!

 (8) Hoodoo Gurus. “Good Times,” from Blow Your Cool. The Hoodoos again! This time they’re helped by members of the Bangles, who used to be great, before that “Walk Like an Egyptian” crap. I saw them once in Boston and I swear Susanna Hoffs was batting her eyes at me. I bet all the guys in the audience through that. I remember buying Blow Your Cool in DC and heading off to a friend’s house to listen to it. We played side one and then he decreed that everyone else in the room would get to play the side of an album before it was my turn again. I was pissed. It’s not the Hoodoos best, but it has a few great tracks, especially “What’s My Scene?”

 (9) Stevie Wonder. “All in Love is Fair,” from Innervisions. Stevie again! This turned out to be a great song to hear on a gray, dreary day with the leaves falling all around. The guy had a great set of pipes.

(10) Henry Mancini. “Pink Panther Theme” from some Best of Mancini disc I got from the library. We used to play this song in my high school dance band. The sheet music had the best tempo direction I’ve ever seen: “Groovy mysterioso.” If I ever form a lounge band that’s what I’ll call it. We’ll play strange, David Lynchian cocktail jazz. I used to have the soundtrack album to The Return of the Pink Panther, still my favorite movie of the series. I remember when it came out in 1975 I was reading a Time magazine review of the movie out loud to my parents and I was laughing so hard I couldn’t get through it. And that was just a review! I think it was the description of the blind man and his “minkey” that got me. Peter Sellers was a genius. Several years ago I watched this movie with my kids and young Sam was choking with laughter when Clouseau fights with Cato. Good times. Don’t even mention the Steve Martin travesties.

 (11) Frank Sinatra. “I Get a Kick out of You,” from Sinatra and Swingin’ Brass. I could go on for a long time about Frank. Some day I will. This is from one of his more overlooked albums, a Reprise release that was arranged and conducted by Neil Hefti. That’s another high school dance band connection—we used to play Hefti’s song “L’il Darlin’,” but at a funereal pace. It was neither groovy nor mysterioso. The Swingin’ Brass album, though, swings with a vengeance and Frank sounds great. You know it must swing hard because they had to drop the“g” from “swinging” in the title. (Why was Hefti hoarding all those gs?) Hefti, who did a lot of arranging for Count Basie, died recently. He also composed the theme song for TV’s Batman. He belongs in some Pop Culture Hall of Fame.

 (12) Al Stewart. “Palace of Versailles.” This song was originally from Time Passages, but I got this version from a live 1976 concert that I found on the web. There’s a skip in this song on my vinyl copy of Time Passages–I guess you could say that’s kind of a time passage itself.  Weird. Strangely enough, just before I set out on this morning’s walk WXPN played an Al Stewart song, “Sleepwalking,” from his most recent album. I had never heard it before, but it sounded pretty good. My love for Al Stewart betrays the geek side of my musical tastes. At some point today I might throw my vinyl copy of Modern Times on the turntable and give it a whirl. Maybe Past, Present and Future too.

 (13) Sinead O’Connor. “You Do Something to Me,” from Red, Hot and Blue. I’ve added a few songs to the iPod from this Cole Porter tribute album, which was recorded to raise money for AIDs research. Sinead does a pretty good version of this Porter tune. She’s a little breathy, perhaps, but not bad. I like to think she’s singing it to the Pope.

 (14) Benny Goodman Quartet. “The Blues in Your Flat” from The Legendary Small Groups. The first swing music I listened to, back in high school, was Glenn Miller. When I read books about the swing era, though, writers usually disparaged Miller and said that Benny Goodman was better, which made me resent Goodman for a while. The only Goodman we had in the house was my uncle’s LP of music from The Benny Goodman story (Steve Allen played Goodman) . It had the live Carnegie Hall version of “Sing, Sing, Sing” on it, and I played that cut over and over, mainly for the Harry James trumpet solo. (I got to see James perform a concert in Augusta, Maine, in 1977 and still have an autographed ticket stub. The concert, a “cabaret dance,” cost a whopping three bucks. At the intermission James, whom I remember as a somewhat morose old man, sat at a table in front of the stage and quietly signed autographs.)  I eventually came to realize that, yes, Goodman was better than Miller. These small group recordings are terrific.

My Harry James ticket.

 All in all, not a bad set list.  There’s nothing particularly new on it, I realize, but you can’t have everything. Because, as Steven Wright asked, where would you put it? Certainly not on an 8 gigabyte iPod.

Rock n Roll Suburban Animal

The snow the forecasters talked about never came. This week we’re getting highs in the 70s. Not a good forecast for ski dreams, but it makes for nice walking weather.

Speaking of highs in the 70s, this morning I loaded the iPod with some music I hadn’t heard in a while, Lou Reed’s great Rock n Roll Animal, recording live in December 1973. Then I set out on the morning trudge, propelled out the door the blistering twin-guitar attack of Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter on the introduction to “Sweet Jane.”

It doesn’t get much better than that.

It is a little strange listening to Rock n Roll Animal as I walk through my neighborhood in the morning. I walk past parents waiting at the bus stops with their schoolchildren. I nod hello to the seniors getting their morning exercise and the folks walking their dogs, while Reed and the band fills my ears with the sounds of “Heroin.” “It’s my wife and it’s my life,” Reed sings in his characteristic monotone during this 13-minute rock and roll epic. Don’t get me wrong. The only “H” I know comes with the prefix “Preparation,” but I remain awestruck by this harrowing and downright exhilarating ode about the ups and downs of drug addiction. Reed and the band start off quietly but gradually work their way into a frenzy of screaming guitars, pounding bass, flailing drums, and Reed’s own passionately deadpan vocals before slowing back down—and then they do it all over again. At one point the song catches its breath with an organ break, and the notes careen upward like an out-of-control rocket reaching for the upper atmosphere before tumbling back to earth. As the liner notes say, “The piece has the atmosphere of a cathedral at a black mass, where heroin in God.”

So, no, it wasn’t exactly the expected soundtrack to a peaceful suburban morning, but it got my adrenaline flowing and my ears ringing. By the time I bounced down the path to the neighborhood’s creek—where mist rose silently from the quiet waters, quite a contrast to the cacophony in my ears—I was pumping my fist to each power chord as the song built to its final climax.

Though I’m not sure what’s more horrifying—the terrors of drug addiction or the idea that Lou Reed wants to wear a “sailor’s suit and cap.” To quote Mr. Reed: I guess I just don’t know.

P.S. Days later I remembered that my neighborhood has its own strange heroin story. A few years ago two young men and a woman in Harrisburg were shooting up when theyoung lady had a fatal overdose. Her two companions decided to ditch her body in my neighborhood. They drove down the steep dead-end road that leads to the creek and parked at the end. Then they took took the body down the old, abandoned road that runs parallel to the creek and dumped it there. I assume some poor soul walking a dog the next morning discovered it. Police quickly discovered clues that led them right back to the two men.  “Heroin will be the death of me,” sang Reed. He managed to escape that fate, but this unfortunate woman didn’t.

The Death of Muzak

I like having music on at pretty much all times. That doesn’t mean I like Muzak.

 Remember Muzak? There was a time when this bland, innocuous, lobotomized form of music provided the soundtrack to grocery stores, office buildings, and elevators. The Muzak company took popular songs, emasculated them with sugary, string-drenched arrangements that leached every drop of life and vitality from the music, and packaged it all as the perfect accompaniment to efficient modern life. It would have been perfect for a Stepford Wives hootenanny

 I remember Muzak. When I was in high school I was a supermarket bag boy. This was in the era before “paper or plastic?” There was no plastic. You took paper and you liked it. My job was to segregate the soap from the chicken, make sure not to load any bag with too many cans, put the ice cream in a freezer bag, and locate the eggs carefully so they wouldn’t break, and then bring the bags out to the customers’ cars.

 I hated it.

 The job was bad enough. Having to wear a bright green apron with a name tag made it worse. What pushed into the realm of the unendurable was having to perform my menial tasks to the mind-numbing sounds of Muzak, audio that sounded like it had been created in a lab by Eisenhower-era engineers with slide rules and pocket protectors.

 In fact, Muzak predated the Eisenhower era by several decades, although Ike was the first president to have it piped it into the White House. The muse of Muzak was by Major General George O. Squier, who trademarked the name way back in 1922. The Major’s breakthrough was the development of a method to deliver music to many customers at the same time—but to only his customers (unlike radio signals, which anyone can pluck from the air). Later his company began developing its own white-bread versions of popular songs.

 It all became very scientific. Studies showed that workers and shoppers performed their assigned tasks better when the right music was being played softly in the background. The Muzak company developed something called “Stimulus Progression” that was supposed to act like an audio pep pill, a string-based pick-me-up that would make for a better, stronger, more consumer-oriented America.  If bees had the ability to create Muzak, no doubt the queens play it in the hives to motivate the drones.

 Well, I can say that things are better now. The grocery stores I go into today no longer play Muzak. They play popular music. As I’ve made my way down the aisles I’ve heard Elvis Costello, the Cure and even New Order. In a world that sometimes seems to be plunging to hell in a handbasket, the death of Muzak is one positive development.

 However, it’s quite possible that the popular tunes I hear in the supermarket these days arrive via Muzak’s parent company, which over the years turned away from its overly pasteurized, lifeless product and began providing its customers with a wide variety of real tunes. But it must have been too little, too late for the now-bankrupt Muzak LLC. I wonder what Ted Nugent thinks about it. In 1989 Terrible Ted, the Motor City Madman, offered to buy Muzak for $10 million just so he could have the pleasure of putting it out of business. Looks like Ted saved himself some dough.

To Everything . . . There is a Season

Dismal. Dreary. Grim.

That’s what the weather’s been like here in Central Pennsylvania over the past few days. A cold, steady rain’s been soaking everything with gloom. The roof has been leaking. There have been no opportunities to walk in the mornings.

The weather forecasts even predict snow for tonight, and it’s only mid-October. A coating of the white stuff would cause much rejoicing from my 14-year-old son, whose suffers from incurable ski fever. Last night we went with a bunch of his ski buddies and their dads to a local high school to see Dynasty, the latest bit of powder porn by Warren Miller Productions. A local ski club sponsored the screening, for an audience that shared my son’s illness. As I watched the footage of skiers crashing through deep, fluffy powder on slopes around the world, I felt my own fever rise. Enough with fall! It’s time for winter!

I know one thing: If it does snow tonight, I’ll be playing Steve Miller’s Fly Like an Eagle in the morning.

It’s easy to scoff at 1970s hit-maker Miller. Songs like “Jungle Love” and “Jet Airliner” don’t give him much hipster cred, but he did have a knack for a good tune. For me, a lot of his work conjures up winter. I remember reading at my desk in my old bedroom back in Maine as my tiny transistor radio played “The Joker” and snow fell softly outside the windows. That must have been around 1973, when I was 13. Even now, 36 years later, when I hear that song the snow starts falling in my imagination.

I have strong links between music and the seasons. Sometimes I hear a song and it becomes permanently associated with the circumstances, like the way a baby bird will “imprint” on the first thing it sees. From then on, whenever I hear that song my senses flash back to the past. The Wings song “Listen to What the Man Said” pulls me back to an early June day in what must have been 1976, riding down the Pond Road in Manchester, Maine, in my brother’s station wagon, out of school early thanks to a bomb scare and off to go water-skiing, the bright sun strobing in and out of the newly green trees as we pass. Sweet’s Desolation Boulevard always brings me to spring. I think my brother had the eight-track playing one spring day when we drove to Portland for a boat show. “(They Just Can’t Stop the) Games People Play” by the Spinners is fall, because it was an autumn day when I rode my bike to the Grants department store to buy the single.

There are even albums I play especially for particular times. On Halloween I always play Supertramp’s Crisis, What Crisis?, Al Stewart’s Past, Present and Future, and Mike Oldham’s Tubular Bells. I remember hearing Maine station WBLM play Stewart’s “Nostradamus” on Halloween night in 1977, and it seemed so appropriate I made it a tradition. I played the Supertramp album that same night as I did my homework at the dining room table before going out to raise some heck with friends, so I play it every year now. It works just like a time machine. I like to play Tubular Bells on Halloween because its Exorcist connections just make it scary and I’ve been doing it for so long that it instantly conjured up Halloween for me. On July 4 I have a long set list for the occasion: Frank Sinatra singing “America,” David Byrne’s “Independence Day,” X’s “Fourth of July,” Galaxy 500’s “Fourth of July.” On a really sweltering summer’s day the time is ripe for Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti, the side with “In the Light,” “Down by the Seaside,” and “Ten Years Gone.”

Fly Like an Eagle is winter from beginning to end, especially that spacey “Intro” to the title song. Once again the connection is largely thanks to my brother’s car, this time a blue Buick Skylark. We listened to the album—on eight-track, naturally—one morning as we drove to Western Maine to go skiing. It was one of those bright winter mornings of knife-like cold, with thin wisps of clouds scudding along high above us in the frigid blue sky. Someplace there’s a photo we took with a Polaroid Instamatic camera on that trip. It shows us standing by the side of the road next to the Buick wearing our 1970’s-style ski duds, squinting in the early-morning sun. Soundtrack provided by Steve Miller.

So if there’s snow on the ground tomorrow, I’ll cue Fly Like an Eagle up on the turntable and make the fall turn into winter from more than 30 years ago.

People Change

I have only one Nick Lowe song on my iPod. It’s called “Lately I’ve Let Things Slide,” from his 2001 album The Convincer. I downloaded it as a bonus track I got from Yep Roc Records after I purchased a Robyn Hitchcock CD (Goodnight, Oslo). I received got some other good stuff, too—John Doe, Dave Alvin, and more—and loaded them all on the iPod for the morning walk.

I became a Nick Lowe fan a long time ago, but I, too, have let things slide and almost everything I have is older stuff on vinyl, including a copy of his first EP. He called it Bowi in response to David Bowie’s Low, a bit of cheekiness that still makes me laugh. The only Nick Lowe CD I own is a best-of collection (Basher). It is great stuff—funny, tuneful, loaded with hooks . . . why, you could even call it pure pop for now people.

That, of course, was the American title for an altered version of the album Lowe released in Britain as Jesus of Cool. The record company executives in the United States must have blanched when they first heard the proposed title back in 1974, with the country only eight years removed from the mass record burnings prompted when John Lennon compared the Beatles to the Son of God, so they changed the title. They should have realized that a few record burnings might have done wonders for Lowe’s visibility in this country. Despite his accomplishments—Lowe produced Elvis Costello’s early albums and the Pretenders’ first single, he was a member of pub-rock standard-setters Rockpile, he wrote the new-wave anthem “(What’s So Funny ‘bout) Peace, Love and Understanding”—he still managed to stay pretty much below the radar in the U.S., 1979’s quasi-hit “Cruel to be Kind” notwithstanding.

Last Sunday I got a chance to attend my first Nick Lowe performance in years. I had seen him perform with his “Cowboy Outfit” back in 1985 when he opened for Costello on the Farewell, Cruel World tour in Worcester, Massachusetts, and I saw him again in 1996 when his Impossible Bird tour hit the Bayou in Washington, D.C. A few months ago my friend Kyle had tipped me off that Lowe was going to appear at the old Colonial Theater in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, the same venue that provided the setting for a climatic scene in the original version of The Blob. Who could resist an opportunity like that? Especially when Lowe’s opening act would be Bill Kirchen, late of Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen. Kirchen had also played guitar for Lowe on the Impossible Bird album and tour.

So Kyle, my wife and I headed off to Phoenixville. It seemed like a pleasant little town, with a few comfortable-looking bars on the main drag (as well as a used-book store, which was unfortunately closed). We managed to score seats in the second row in the old theater, comfortably cocooned within our own demographic. No young people here, just survivors from the Age of Vinyl making their way, like us, through the MP3 era and beyond.

I don’t think any of us looked as old as Bill Kirchen (who was only 61, it turns out). He didn’t act old, though, and he did a fine set, although I’m not sure that the electric guitar works so well all by itself. It cries out for companionship from bass and drums. Kirchen did have fun with the encore, a version of Commander Cody’s “Hot Rod Lincoln” that he used as an excuse to fire off licks made famous by a whole herd of legendary guitarists, from Chuck Berry to Jimi Hendrix. He seemed to have a good time.

After a short break Nick Lowe climbed onstage and strapped on an acoustic Gibson guitar. It was a little startling to see him. At 60 years old he was rail-thin, completely white haired and wearing a big pair of dark-rimmed glasses. He was clothed in a dress shirt and pants best described as “slacks.” The only thing missing was a sweater vest. It wasn’t exactly a rock-and-roll kind of look—more like a grandpa.

No doubt Lowe was perfectly aware of this, and he started out with a song called “People Change.” “People change/That’s the long and short of it/Prepare yourself for it/Or get bit/People change.” Nick Lowe had changed alright—but in a good way, aged like wine or whiskey. He was no longer the straggly-haired, sardonic pub rocker who wrote sharp-edged songs about the Bay City Rollers or the silent-film star whose body was eaten by her starving dachshund (“She was a winner/Who became the doggy’s dinner”). I wouldn’t say he’s softened, but he’s turned his jaundiced eye inward and become more rueful and introspective. Even the pop songs from his past, “Cruel to Be Kind,” “All Men are Liars” and “(What’s so Funny ’bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding,” arrived lightly dusted with melancholy and regret.

Bill 'n' Nick. Photo by Kyle Weaver.

He played other upbeat stuff, too, including “Ragin’ Eyes,” “Without Love,” and “I Knew the Bride” (joined onstage by Kirchen on guitar), so don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t all gloom and doom. He sounded good, too. At one point he apologized about the “croakiness” of his voice, but he needed no apologies. He delivered his songs of sadness and betrayal with a smooth intimacy that mixed crooning with country.

He was also funny. Early in the show he launched into a spiel about how wonderful his previous night’s audience had been, but told us that his “show biz sense” told him we were going to be even better. I’m sure he delivers a variation of the same speech every night, but his self-mocking irony just made it more amusing. Later he introduced a “new song” with a speech about how much he hates hearing performers play new material. The song was titled “I Read a Lot,” and it had the heart-aching quality of a classic country song.

For the obligatory encore Lowe performed “The Beast in Me,” a song he had originally written for his former father-in-law, Johnny Cash. The old Nick Lowe might have turned it into a joke, but for the twenty-first century version it was an unblinking look into the abyss that lies within, the kind of song that makes you reach for either the whiskey bottle or the razor blade.

Nick Lowe—he’s not just for kids any more. People change.