Music Before the Money

I own a vinyl copy of Sweetheart of the Rodeo but never got it until 1978. The original was released in 1968 and, although the intention was never there, it became one of the hallmarks of country rock music. It was the “coming out party” of a young prodigy named Gram Parsons.

As a Byrds fan I didn’t know where they were going. I heard Notorious Byrd Brothers and like Mr. Spaceman but there other stuff was out there. I guess I wasn’t as forward thinking as I thought because McGuinn was actually doing what the Beatles were doing only without a George Martin around. He was experimenting with bluegrass music and a Moog synthesizer and it was not the jingle-jangle sound I liked in the past.

Parsons, as it turned out, was an amazing talent but a loose cannon. McGuinn eventually fired him but not before he put his mark on the album, and the English tour introduced him to Keith Richards. That meeting led to a change in focus by the Stones. Parsons returned to the U.S. and, with former-Byrd Chris Hillman, formed the Flying Burrito Brothers.

In 1972-73 we used to play You Ain’t Going Nowhere ( a Bob Dylan tune) and Hickory Wind, the latter a Parsons song and it led to a greater understanding of country rock. Then The Eagles came out and the line was effectively crossed for good.

George Carlin maintained he had a name that never ended: geor - ge - or - ge -or ge.

What George Carlin did for comedy transcends any of his peers or predecessors. He studied the masters and could do great vocal impersonations - Ed Sullivan for one. In fact he was one of Ed’s famous comedians for his character Al Sleet, The Hippie Dippie Weatherman. This shtick made him famous and he could have milked this comedy for all it was worth. He was not only a regular performer on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show he was also a guest host many times.

His contemporaries, Bill Cosby and Rodney Dangerfield, were looking at life from different angles and maintained this style over the years. Carlin did a 90 degree turn. His “Seven Words . . .” routines are as mimicked as much or more than the Monty Python lines, of which we knew all too.

The album Class Clown changed all this. He grew his hair long and became a spokesperson for my generation. What Mort Saul and Lenny Bruce started Carlin ran with. The reason for this that the world was ready for the irreverent, anti-establishment banter that Saul and Bruce were banned for only a few years before.

We had Carlin 8-tracks that would break in the middle of a joke. We didn’t care. because we would park on the back and let Toledo Window Box play until we wore the tape out.

“How come there’s no blue Food?”

“You can toke up before you get on the airplane or in the lavatory in flight. In other words, you can get off and get on, or get on and get off!”

“Today in the news, 18 people suffered 24 hours on continuous whiplash when a man claiming to be the Devil hijacked a roller coaster.”

“Also in the new, the Nobel Prize for mathematics goes to Albert Finestein for discovering a new number. Finestein calls the number “bleen” and says it comes between 6 and 7.”

Just like with a record album a Carlin album release was a time of rejoicing. “Hey, guys, I go the new Carlin album! Come on over!”

I have not really listened to Carlin in a long time. I think I will tonight.

“And the evening sings in a voice of amber, the dawn is surely coming,
The morning road leads to Stalingrad, and the sky is softly humming.”

Al Stewart - Roads to Moscow

It’s a chicken-and-the-egg question: Which came first, the music or the lyrics? I guess you’d have to get a good definition of what each word means. If music means a cave man imitating animals or pounding on a long and lyrics means grunting to some thought then we are at a stalemate.

But then came folk songs and opera and all the other forms where lyrics tell a story. I don’t mean the fanciful serenades of wooing or of nationalistic bravado but sagas put to music. These are songs that make you listen closer and want to hear the song again and again to make sure you got he meaning.

What comes to mind are cowyboy songs, the forerunners of country and popular music. The cowboy lived in an amazing time and his music reflected this life. And if we went back further we would find Irish, English and Scottish folk tunes influenced the cowboys who learned them from their immigrant parents. Bluegrass can trace its roots to the British isles and Ireland.

Harry Chapin and Gordon Lightfoot lead the list of modern storytellers. The Taxi and The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, tell two completely different stories but more people know the story of these two songs than almost any other song written. It’s not because the stories were sad but that adds to the poignancy. Bob Dylan wasn’t a storyteller but their were snippets of stories in his work. Except for songs like George Jackson and The Hurricane, which were stories, his work was philosophy and getting people to listen. Lightfoot and Chapin wrote songs as if they were telling us, “Gather ’round the fire and I’ll tell you a story.

Al Stewart wrote very long stories like Roads to Moscow and Nostrodamus. These were historical tales which emerged before Chris DeBurgh although the latter’s Spanish Train is one of the greatest “Devil vs. God” ever written.

The songs in Marty Robbin’s album Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs are the quintessential storytelling songs. El Paso ranks as one of the most popular country and western songs ever recorded. And Alan Toussant’s Pancho and Lefty, a huge hit for Willie Nelson, carried on this tradition.

With today’s beat and riff-driven dance songs, fluffy, airy panderings of love-sickness and betrayal and the bawlings of the disaffected-white-guy-band the story is lost because there is no story. They are themes that have been beaten to death.

Streets full of people, all alone
Roads full of houses, never home
Church full of singing, out of tune
Everyone’s gone to the moon

- Jonathan King, 1965

One of my favorite all-time songs of the ’60’s was Jonathan King’s Everyone’s Gone to the Moon. It peaked at #17 in 1965. In fact I liked it so much I recorded it in 1985. However, I never released it. It was actually a big hit Noel Harrison, Rex’s kid.

King has had a different career. He was, and is, a songwriter and producer who won awards in the early 1970’s as a producer beating out luminaries such as Mickey Most. But his life is overshadowed with charges of stalking and having relationships with, basically, children.

That aside, Everyone’s Gone to the Moon came out during the magical 1965, the same year as Mr. Tambourine Man and Satisfaction. The production was really heavy on the strings and Harrison’s voice gets lost in them at times. I guess they were trying to get spacey before synthesizers.

Listening to this song at night with a 2 -transistor radio made it even more eventful. Y’see I was picking it up on the skip because we couldn’t get our weak radio station at night. So I would hear The Byrds, Beatles and Stones, but just snippets of 10-20 seconds. Yet in that small isolated town, in 20 feet of snow, it was like being connected. . . like there were people out there who knew I was around.

I always watch for the musician who does something different. Sure, just like the Beatles did and the antics of others like Tom Waitt. In February 1998 I attended the Mid-Atlantic Tourism Conference sponsored by Icelandair and one of the bands playing after the banquet was a finnish cello quartet called Apocalyptica. Yes, the band was a cello quartet and they played heavy metal on 4 cellos!

Apocalyptica was formed in 1993 by Eicca Toppinen, Paavo Lötjönen, Max Lilja, and Antero Manninen, 4 honest-to-goodness cellists. They abslutely shocked most of the tour people but of course I found them refreshing. I bought their CD but, unfortuantely misplaced it in the Hotel Island in Reykjavik.

Just recently I saw an article about them and it rekindled my interest. In 1993, these young cello virtuosos put together a totally-cello band that specialized in music from Bach to Hendrix. However, Eicca Toppinen and his three comrades were fans of heavy metal and they decided to form their own band. Toppinen wrote cello arrangements of Metallica songs, Slayer tunes and other metal nuggets and they became more and more in demand.

After a parade of three albums they got a chance to create metal magic with legendary Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo on their fourth studio album, Reflections.’

Apocalyptica’s new album, ‘Worlds Collide’ is produced by Rammstein’s Jacob Hellner, a collection of songs that brings out the old and mixes it with countless new ideas added to their great sound. Work began on the disk back in August 2006 and 40 songs were pared down to a tight dozen, including collaborations with Stone Sour/Slipknot frontman Corey Taylor, Lacuna Coil’s Cristina Scabbia, 3 Days Grace vocalist Adam Gontier and their friend Dave Lombardo.

I always remember them announcing their second song to the stunned travel people, tourism types were were audibly assaulted by the opening number. In broken English one of the band announced, “We are now going to play a song we call Creeping Death.” My self and my Scandinavian friends had a great time but the majority of the banqueteers (are you allowed to call them that?) left.

Anyway, buy the disk!