Lots going on in music these days— Apple announcing their foray into streaming (I love the headlines such as “Apple May Save the Recording Industry”— I mean, what idiot thought that one up?) and the Brian Wilson biopic (My buddy Stan Twist says that if you are either a Brian Wilson or a Beach Boys fan, you won’t want to miss it) and there are lots of new albums to go over. And, as always, old ones too. But…
One thing about history. Given enough time, it is a shadow of its former self. No matter what happens, importance of virtually everything is either magnified or diminished depending upon a number of factors. By the time it has been filtered over the years, it is not even remotely what it started out to be. The Twenties obviously weren’t all Gatsby and The Thirties weren’t all dust bowl and depression. There was so much more than the War (that would be of the Second World variety, sports fans) and recovery from to the Forties and if the US had lived the Fifties like Hollywood said, we would have fought like hell to stay there. Of course, by the time it got to us, it was Cliff’s Notes all over again.
It’s called introspection, sports fans. We all feel it every once in awhile and I have been under its spell for the past week and the result has been a total lack of perspective and thus, no cohesive idea for a column. I don’t know why it happens but I do know that it is indiscriminate, that it is sometimes a struggle to even look at the blank page without it beating you to a mental pulp. For myself, the one thing I fear beyond misspelling a musician’s name is the inability to write at all and we are all under deadline, the scourge of any supposed journalist. In the movies, the reporter is always able to crank out a barnburner of an article at the last second, saving his/her job and possibly the future of the newspaper itself. Well, that’s Hollywood, folks, but it does give you an idea of what it is like to produce under pressure.
My original plan was to list fifty albums which totally bowled me over and, in a way, took me in directions I never would have gone— until drummer/writer Bobby Gottesman derailed that idea for what will inevitably be another romp through who knows what to an end which could as easily be a train wreck as a party. Gottesman published a short piece about the old farts in music these days and the blanket idolatry they are afforded in spite of arthritic hands and the need to step behind the stack of amps to hit the oxygen mask, not to mention the voices which on the whole are maybe one-tenth the strength and accuracy of what they were in their prime.
Bullseye Records of Canada
Segarini: Don't Believe a Word I Say 