Relevance is a matter of perspective. When you are young, you think you will live forever. When you reach middle age, if you are that lucky, it begins to matter. From that point on, it gains importance as time passes until the grim reaper knocks on the door. Death— something you ignore as a child, unless you have personal contact with it in some form— something which, as the years go by, eventually becomes inevitable.
Goodnight stars; Goodnight air; Goodnight noises everywhere.
So Margaret Wise Brown ended her classic childrens book Goodnight Moon, a bedtime book for the ages. Until I received a message from Charlottesville musician, Keith Morris, he of The Crooked Numbers, I had never heard the name nor knew of the book, to my knowledge. How I missed it I don’t know because not one person of the multitude I asked later was ignorant of its existence, though few recognized the name.
This week Paul Revere of 1960s pop band Paul Revere & The Raiders passed away at the age of 76. He and his band were one of the second generation of pop stars who took the post-Elvis world by storm on the back of Beatlemania.
I would have placed a few more exclamation points behind the header but that would be overdoing it and while Paul Revere would occasionally go over the top, it was usually onstage. No doubt about it, Paul Revere & The Raiders lead the all-Pac NW rock ‘n’ roll team, no disrespect to the likes of The Wailers, The Sonics, The Frantics and other bands of their era, nor to Heart and Nirvana and Soundgarden and others of the more recent past/present.
If you understood the reference to the hall closet, you are a fossil like myself and ready for the wood heap. Better start taking Geritol again (the Stone Age’s answer to Centrum).
It is a strange world in which I find myself these days and not one I am particularly fond of, especially since supposed music lovers (and the media) have jumped on this covers/tribute thing like it is more than a fad (it isn’t, at least the way in which the music is being approached). I laugh— no, I guffaw— at the idea of bands bowing at the feet of other bands, thinking that signs of obeisance gives them any kind of credibility in the real world of music and musicians.
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 