Archive for Sasha Frere-Jones

Sorting Through The Lou Reed Remembrances To Find The Ones That Matter

Posted in Music with tags , , , , , , on October 28, 2013 by johnbuckley100

The good news is that the New York Times assigned the obit to someone other than Jon Pareles, so we didn’t have to read sentences like, “Many of the group’s themes — among them love, sexual deviance, alienation, addiction, joy and spiritual transfiguration — stayed in Mr. Reed’s work through his long run of solo recordings.”  Oh wait, actually, we did have to read that in the Times, because Pareles still sets the tone there, and Ben Ratliff — no matter what his natural writing style was before he got there, has to play the tune called by Jonny.  But still, out of the long day and evening, as more writers weighed in, we got to read the good and the bad.

Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate, revealed he doesn’t know very much about rock’n’roll when he tweeted, “Little known fact: his early teacher was the late Delmore Schwartz.”  Uh, no.  If you listen to rock’n’roll, you know that about as well as you know that 15 minutes served up to Geico returns 15 percent savings on your auto insurance; it is like knowing that Jimi Hendrix played guitar left handed.  It is a threshold-level fact, and if you didn’t know it, for God’s sake, shut up.  And a special dunce cap is reserved for any and all who summarized Lou’s work with a reference to “Walk On The Wild Side,” his least consequential song, even if it was a novelty hit.

But still, there were some really good things posted.  Let’s give credit where it is due: the initial Rolling Stone announcement at 1:15 PM was solid.

By early evening, we had a typically terrific remembrance from The New Yorker‘s Sasha Frere-Jones.  (Thank Heaven for Sasha, who almost always gets it right.)

Later in the evening, of course, we heard from Christgau, Chairman Emeritus of the department, the dean of them all.  And his piece was hilarious, recalling the time that Lou had denounced him from the stage as a “toe fucker.”

Now, we weren’t at that particular show by Lou, but we were alive and well and attending his concerts during that great Street Hassle phase in the late ’70s, when he was caustic and outrageous and sang songs like “I Wanna Be Black,” whose lyrics can’t be printed in a family blog.

Our last word on Lou here will state four things.

First, how grateful we were to be old enough to remember the Velvet Underground, not as historical antecedent, but as a real band, even if our particular entry point was Loaded.  Even if weren’t wise to the kismet of The Velvet Underground and Nico being released on the same day as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, our teenage playlist included “Train Comes Around The Bend,” and we were hip to Mott The Hoople kicking off All The Young Dudes with “Sweet Jane”, creating that nexus between Lou Reed, David Bowie, and Iggy Pop — which would become so important to us in our late teens — in real time.  We can remember seeing that first Velvets album, with its peel off banana sticker, in the bins of a small-town record store, and passing on it to buy, with our allowance, Your Saving Grace.  But still, The Velvets lived for us, even if our obsession with them didn’t kick in until around 1977.

A-and let us proclaim how grateful we were to have been able to see Lou play with his greatest band from the early 1980s — Fernando Saunders on bass, Fred Maher on drums, and of course, Robert Quine on guitar.  While today it’s quite worthwhile to listen to all the sonically deficient but historically vital Velvets live recordings, including the tapes that Quine recorded when he was a law student following the VU around like some prehistoric Deadhead — and you should go right now to find Velvet Underground Live 1969, which was recorded before about 12 people in a club in Dallas, yes, Dallas.  But if you really want to listen to Lou live, and in his purest form, get Live In Italy.  It has both an excellent compendium of Velvets songs and songs from The Blue Mask  and Legendary Hearts, his two greatest albums, which he spent the early ’80s touring to support.

And to put it simply, and sincerely, since many have declared their favorite Lou song, let us quietly declare that ours was “Rooftop Garden,” from Legendary Hearts, which perfectly conveys two of Lou’s greatest, and most benign, influences: folk music and Brill Building pop couplets.

Finally, Lou Reed’s passing seems in some ways like a dress rehearsal for that inevitable day when Dylan dies.  The floodgates of foolishness will open on that sad day in the future, as all the wrong songs get quoted on Twitter, and it will take a few authoritative voices to weigh in and set the genuine historical record straight — Mikal Gilmore, Jonathan Cott, Jann Wenner.  Lou Reed’s death yesterday, though, was the first of the real giants of our shared rock’n’roll past dying at a ripe old age, which 71 really is.  This is not like John Lennon being assassinated or the 27-year old Hendrix succumbing to pills or even the 50-year old Joe Strummer dying of a heart attack.  This was a precursor to all the obits yet to come, of Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, and Mick and Keith and Charlie.  And so long as we have voices like Sasha Frere-Jones, and we pray, a nonagenarian Bob Christgau to wash away the idiocy of what we’ve grown to expect from the Pareles-era Times and Twitter, everything’s going to be alright.  We’re going to have a real good time together, remembering the greats for what they were, and what they meant to us.

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What Sasha Frere-Jones Gets Right, And Wrong, In His Rare Miss On Bowie

Posted in Music with tags , , , , , , , , , on March 16, 2013 by johnbuckley100

It is unusual for Sasha Frere-Jones to use his bully pulpit in The New Yorker to resist committing to a strong point of view, but when he finished his review of Bowie’s The Next Day with a taunt that “the bar rats can fight it out” over the exact status of the album among Bowie’s canon — declaring it “a fine rock record that is a few hairs away from being among his best,” and that “even the obsessives should be able to accept that” — we were disappointed.

Disappointed because Frere-Jones is, like Jon Mendelsohn, Lester Bangs, R. Meltzer, and Byron Coley before him, among the only voices in the rock criticism of his era that really matter.  While he does not write with anywhere near the pyrotechnical verve of any of these likely mentors, his perch exists at a time where Americans are given the dreary choice between reading the idiots at Rolling Stone, the even bigger idiots who labor under Jon Pareles’ Fidel-like reign at the formerly authoritative New York Times, and the onanistic closed loop in the bell jar that is Pitchfork.  Though it must be acknowledged that Ken Tucker at NPR has a wonderful sensibility, Frere-Jones may be the only main-market rock critic who really has an impact.

So yes, we were disappointed because the passive distancing of “a few hairs away from being among” Bowie’s best violates every rule of resistance to gainsaying, to soft pronouncements,  that we were taught, lo those many years ago, by Andy Schwartz, the great editor of NY Rocker, where we were once a young pup (along with Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan, the aforementioned Coley, Glen Morrow, and others.)

If you want to say the album isn’t so good, say it, Sasha.  And if you want to say it’s great, say that.  If it’s somewhere in between?  Find a way of committing to exactly where it stands, without weasel calibrations like “a few hairs away from among his best.”

But that’s not the point of this post, a rare criticism of Frere-Jones.  In his review, Frere-Jones holds up Bowie’s under-appreciated 2002 album Heathen as a “magnificent” collection “with fewer good songs than The Next Day (though) a more cohesive marriage of electronic textures and traditional guitar work, and Bowie was in robust voice.  Bowie and (producer Tony) Visconti worked on that together, and it’s difficult to understand how they could have been so in synch with the moment then but not now.”  So, score a point for Sasha that the production on The Next Day does have that brittle 1980s sound that makes so many of the good albums from that epoch unlistenable today.  And he is right that Heathen, as well as the half-decent follow-up Reality, have a less bombastic, arch sound.  But come on: two of the three best songs on Heathen were written by Black Francis, as if Bowie was so out of it in the 1980s that he only picked up on the Pixies’ genius a decade later.

As between 1) having a production that sounds too much like the ’80s, but a series of great, fresh songs, and 2) a smooth sound set amidst a songwriting dry spell that necessitates having to dip into Black Francis’ bag for inspiration, we’ll take the former.  Frere-Jones is right that the production on The Next Day weakens it, but his inability to commit to what he thinks about it, leaving it to the “bar rats” to decide how good it is, is an abdication of his responsibility.  If an artist played it as safe as he does in his review, we hope he would excoriate them for it.

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Don’t Believe A Word You’ve Read About PJ Harvey’s “Let England Shake”

Posted in Music with tags , , on February 27, 2011 by johnbuckley100

Depending on whether or not you’re a purist when it comes to considering which is the beginning and which the end of a given decade, PJ Harvey’s Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, released late in 2000, was either the first great album of the ‘aughts, or the last great album of the ’90s.  The same folk who can tell you precisely which decade owns the rights would also probably tell you that Stories From The City isn’t Harvey’s greatest album.  They would be wrong. Yes, Dry bowled us over, and in a near 20-year career there have been other high points, but Stories From The City was a perfect album, and there aren’t many of them.  Stories From The City was one of the greatest New York punk albums of all time, which is pretty cool considering Harvey was born and bred in rural England.

Since then, though, we’ve been disappointed. Uh Huh Her had some magic, but was a step down, and Harvey’s collaboration two years ago with John Parish had one delightful song, “Black Hearted Love,” but even by the standards of her off-albums a single winner constituted a low point.

So when Sasha Frere-Jones — who aside from being a gorgeous writer, generally writes only about music he likes — yawningly put down Let England Shake as pretty much a bore, we accepted that.  But of course still listened.  You have to listen to an artist like PJ Harvey — there is no oversupply of such artists, and you have to follow the great ones into the bushes to at least see what they’re up to.

And when we listened, we were moved to declare, Wrongo, Sasha!  No, there’s not a lot of guitar bashing, and there’s nothing to get the blood moving  like “Sheela Na Gig” or even “The Whores Hustle and The Hustlers Whore,” and yet this odd album, Albion-historical in nature, but still possessing a back beat, is actually filled with quiet greatness.  It doesn’t quite rock, but it is both melodic and dynamic.  In fact, it reminds us quite a bit of Stories Of The City. Go listen to “In The Dark Places,” which could easily fit onto her opus of 11 years ago.  In fact, listen to the whole damn thing.  Odd and lovely, which only partly defines Polly Jean herself, Let England Shake deserves an audience as great as the artist who made it.

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Neko Case’s Middle Cyclone’s Great, And For The Right Reasons

Posted in Music with tags , , on March 12, 2009 by johnbuckley100

Sasha Frere-Jones is a pretty great rock critic, but he’s not infallible (cf. his championing Animal Collective.)  And while he gives Neko Case her due, and offers Middle Cyclone the right centrifugal spin in his New Yorker send off, it’s possible he loves her for all the wrong reasons.  He seems to take some pleasure in describing Middle Cyclone as Step Two in Neko’s post-Country incarnation, while also damning with faint praise such an exemplar of that supposed past period as Blacklisted. Well, now.

What was so great about Blacklisted, why it was such a revelation, was not just because it proved that Neko missed her calling as a comic novelist.  It was the way Neko and those high desert desperadoes, the fellas in Calexico and Giant Sand, were as well put together as a rattle and a snake.  Seven years later, they’re still playing music that is damn near uncategorizable, but sure sounds to me to pay equal debts to Loretta Lynn and Steven Foster, timeless Americana that pays a symmetrical homage to the drainage from the Mississippi and the Colorado.

Frere-Jones points to The Tigers Have Spoken as some break point between early and late Neko.  But that was a live album, with a combo — the Sadies — whose sound is a magpie’s jukebox, one minute channeling the house band from “Hee Haw,” the next mimicking “Foggy Notion”-era Velvet Underground.   Her foray on that tour no more or less represented a break from Blacklisted as would her next sojourn with the New Pornographers.  Fermented apples and mescaline, they both give a kick but there’s no comparison.  Besides, the marvelous Middle Cyclone, starring those same dusty hombres from Calexico and Giant Sand, is completely of a piece — if, I will grant, slightly less twangy –with Blacklisted.

Neko’s never been a strict adherent to rules of melody, which is weird given how gloriously her tomgirl pipes can levitate the church roof.  There is something dark and mysterious to her solo work — sort of like Calexico, and um, Giant Sand.  But this album soars with gothic heartache and angelic beauty, like Flannery O’Connor playing the cello on a warm spring Sunday.

Middle Cyclone’s great, deep, breathtakingly strange.  (Neko’s evocation of “Prison Girls” is as affecting, and odd, as her line on Blacklisted, “We’ve got a lady pilot who’s not afraid to die.”)  But if Sasha thinks it represents a break from the Neko of seven years ago — even though he means it as compliment — he just hasn’t been listening.

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Why Sasha Frere-Jones Really Is A Great Rock Critic

Posted in Music with tags , , , on July 9, 2008 by johnbuckley100

If you are someone who, like me, gags each and every time you read the wooden prose of Jon Pareles, wherein he talks about “Mr. Reed’s guitar vamps,” etc. it really is a delight to read Sash Frere-Jones in The New Yorker.  Yeah, he’s a little full of himself.  Name a really great rock critic who isn’t?  From John Mendelssohn to Byron Coley, Lester Bangs to Robert Palmer, the best rock critics have always made one step back, laugh, and go “What the…”  And Frere-Jones has the gift.  I hadn’t listened closely to the drums on Led Zep’s “Good Times, Bad Times” for years until Frere-Jones, writing about the reunion concert last autumn, shined the spotlight on the late John Bonham’s polyrhythmic perversity.   And then came his preview of the Feelies/Sonic Youth show in New York last week.  Here’s how he described the link between the two bands: “To be wildly reductive about the whole thing: the Feelies are the logical extension of the breakneck strumming in the Velvet Underground’s “What Goes On,” while Sonic Youth are the logical extension of Lou Reed’s solo.”  That is so good that if ever The New Yorker casts him out onto Times Square, look for Tulip Frenzy to host an online bake sale, just to keep the boy going.

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