Singer-songwriter, famed Irish busker and Oscar winner, Glen Hansard was killed last week in a motorcycle accident at just 56. Anyone dying that young in a horrific accident would be tragic. This one though appears to have hit a specific chord in the zeitgeist, or at least the music community for which I remain tethered in both the social media realm and my general exposure to news, as I have retreated from the day-to-day to avoid the horrors and stupidity that reign supreme lately. The phalanx of tributes from all over – the famous to the not-so – went beyond grieving a death but of what was clear to me on the surface to be the erasing of a genuine soul, who loved music more than breathing, gave of himself selflessly and routinely, and if given the choice, preferred standing on a corner and playing his beat-up guitar and singing from the burrows of his heart to anyone who might listen. This is something Hansard did as a kid; and by kid I don’t mean euphemistically when he was a teenager or his early 20s, but a child, who’s teacher was moved to just tell him to dump school and pursue this thing he adored to not waste any time with the normal maturing available to the rest of us.
And I think that is the nut when it comes to Glen Hansard, and those like him (many of whom I know personally) who give of themselves with little fanfare and financial reward, never mind fame. They do it because they must, because this is what defines them, not to be recognized for merely being an influencer or a celebrity. Hansard was an artist, a dedicated one that did so publicly and with a passion for expressing and sharing that passion. He embodied what we’d all like from those we come to admire as fans, whether solo acts, bands, or even filmmakers and other creatives. We want to see them, not an image-laden version of them. This yearning is far more prevalent in 2026 than ever before when considering a world invaded by Artificial Intelligence and auto-tuning, Internet algorithms and YouTube one-off sensations. Hansard was a welcomed throwback, at least for those of us who choose to remember when playing your instrument well and singing with a singular purpose was a virtue, a window into the vulnerable truth of the songwriter, the performer, the musician.
Hansard, of course, became very successful, a lofty place not afforded to everyone who plies his trade. I was first introduced to him like a lot of people my age from his turn as a guitarist in the 1990 ensemble film, The Commitments, a musical comedy-drama directed by Alan Parker. Set in the Northside of Dublin, it tells the story of a young rhythm and blues fanatic who assembles a group of like-minded, working-class youths to form a soul band named The Commitments. It is a terrific movie filled with great music played by the actors, most if not all of them accomplished musicians, including Hansard, who had just formed his own band the Frames months before filming. But it wasn’t the Frames, who released six albums over a sixteen-year run, that put Hansard on my radar. That would occur with a little indie film, Once hitting theaters in 2007. Make a movie about music and those who create it and Campion is there, and so, after 1997 when we got together and 1999 when we married, I dragged my wife to these – every uneven biopic, most documentaries (now my pal, Eric Hutchinson and I make the scene, two obsessives running around downtown New York). This one was different – quaint, touching, and a balancing of the melancholic with an uplifting edge. We adored it.
The Frames bassist, budding screenwriter and director, John Carney tapped Hansard and a woman for which he had just collaborated with for his first solo effort, The Swell Season, Markéta Irglová to star. In essence, the film was a recreating of their own meeting through music. Hansard discovered the Czech singer and multi-instrumentalist as a teenager when playing a festival in her home country. The two would go on to combine their unique voices in an eerily familiar way, as if Irglová was genetically engineered in a lab to sing with him. This resulted in Hansard and Irglová’s Oscar win for Best Original Song in a Film. The two, Hansard in his mid-thirties, Irglová barely twenty, famously fell in love, which was captured on the silver screen as they musically and personally melded into one. Their ensuing romance was later framed in the gripping 2011 documentary, The Swell Season, covering both their rise to fame, their celebrated tour together, and eventually the relationship’s sad ending.
That’s when I kind of lost track of Hansard. But that’s on me. I knew of his work, but after his debut solo effort, which remains in my estimation his seminal statement both lyrically and musically, it was spotty. I vaguely recall his annual Christmas busking tradition that spread into a wider audience with the occasional cameo from Sinéad O’Connor and Bono. Then, in the early 2010s I saw a clip of the Swell Season’s appearance on a 2008 taping of Austin City Limits in which Hansard welcomes up the late, great Daniel Johnston to join the band for his brilliant 1994 song, “Life in Vain.” This was jolting on a few levels. Firstly, I had been a disciple of Johnston since the mid-80s along with every budding musician and songwriter worth his/her salt, and we all knew Daniel had made his bones in Austin passing off his homemade cassettes early in his career. I also had not seen Daniel in some years, as he was in and out of mental institutions – a drama that would later be stirringly documented in the 2006 film, The Devil and Daniel Johnston. Johnston was older, heavier, his hands shaking spastically as he read his lyrics from a paper, his voice ragged and shaky, but his aim as pure and unadulterated as the art he created for years battling mental illness. It came from as pure a place as ever mined by an artist, including Hansard. From that moment, I connected the two as brothers in arms, and for Hansard to not only have him appear but back him with enthusiasm was forever endearing. It is still one of my favorite clips to watch when I question my commitment to music writing and it solidified Hansard for me as the genuine article.
And that, I would learn when he passed, was not a miscalculation. He dedicated his life to that pursuit of pure art. We always need more of that in any and every generation, but maybe now more than ever. And because we had this in Glen Hansard and he proved its worth, we remember him fondly, but perhaps what we’re grateful for is what he represented most of all.
That is one mouth-full title. Mainly because I need to qualify that this week’s column is not meant to be demonstrative, pejorative or even lock-solid opining. I’m on the proverbial fence for this one. I mean only to ask the question and try and answer as best I can without insult or overt judging: Is it compelling for a legacy band to continue on without a key member? I have always been conflicted (less so now – will explain) when it comes to fractured versions of bands I love. This goes way back for me, as I was forced yet utterly enjoyed seeing bands like The Rolling Stones and The Who in their early-eighties iterations, by which I mean not currently the members of which who are in their eighties now, but the decade. Still, it’s become ever more prevalent in an age where rock music has slid off the side of the earth and much of its fanbase has retreated to modern country (which is essentially early aughts power pop songs about pickup trucks and beer) – am I already judgmental? – or the sight of ancient bands rolling out nostalgia tours with in some cases like Foreigner zero original members.
This question has returned due to a very surprising reuniting of bassist, singer, and songwriter, Geddy Lee and original guitarist and songwriter, Alex Lifeson to form a new victory-lap version of the once lauded if not mostly overlooked Canadian fusion power-trio, Rush. Not that it is surprising any legacy band fresh from a woefully overdue Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction and Lee’s recent memoir, which included an extensive media tour, would consider hitting the road, despite the death of its dynamically unique drummer and lyricist, Neil Peart. These things happen all the time, and usually for summer. Take The Eagles, with several key members gone, most notably founder and major voice, Glenn Frey, who died ten years go. His son now takes his chores, which is heartwarmingly weird. There is also Journey without signature voice Steve Perry, and for a while Pink Floyd without mostly main songwriter and voice, Roger Waters, and on and on.
I initially thought the Pink Floyd thing was a little silly. Waters pretty much dominated the band’s final years and always lent the thematic lyrical thread to their songs, but he was and remains an unrepentant megalomaniac, who treated his bandmates like session cats to do his bidding. They were glad to jettison him when they disbanded and came back together in the 1980s for a mega-successful run, much to Waters chagrin. As guitarist, and songwriter, David Gilmour once mused, “I can play the local pub across the street from Madison Square Garden as David Gilmour or sell out the arena with Pink Floyd. What are you choosing?”
And far be it from me to begrudge musicians making a buck. Even aging famous ones. Since the Napster revolution and now streaming it is nearly impossible for anyone in the music industry to make any money on record sales (whatever that is these days) Everyone must tour. Even Taylor Swift, who sells more of everything than anyone. These Rush shows are selling out as fans clamor for a bit of rock nostalgia. And many of us are aging out anyway, so fuck it! This is why I eventually, some say inevitably, bagged this flimsy philosophy of purity in my bands, specifically in 2010 when I saw the last incarnation of KISS amble around MSG. I had a blast. Who cares who’s left wearing the make-up? Purity is for the young.
But back to Rush: Neil Peart was a vital cornerstone of the band, its themes, its drive, not to mention his mind-blowing drumming being non-parallel. When he died in 2020 at 67, Rush had been around in some form (Peart wasn’t even their original drummer or on their first album) for 58 years. It’s not like when Keith Moon or John Bonham died in their thirties when the bands they drove were still relevant – never mind lead singer of AC/DC, Bon Scott up and dying to leave the band to release the biggest selling rock album of all time, Back in Black in his wake with a replacement, Brian Johnson, who is still there today. This was a bunch of old guys making the call. Six years ago, in their late sixties, after decades behind them, Lee and Lifeson pretty much hung it up. But, ultimately, they’re musicians. Musicians play music. And they’re great friends, unlike Pink Floyd. So, they decided to do this legacy tour and it has been widely well received and attended. No one at these shows are conflicted in the least, if concert tickets sold is any indication. Those ain’t cheap these days. In fact, they’re deplorably over-priced no matter what budget you’re working with. People must have really wanted to see Rush, Neil Peart or not.
And this is to not even to broach Rush’s fabulous current drummer, Anika Nilles, a 43-year-old German virtuoso who previously toured with the late Jeff Beck’s band. Watching clips of this woman absolutely crush some of the most intricate drum patterns and time signature shifts in popular music history on YouTube recently left me awe-struck. She’s fucking amazing, and has breathed new life into their songs. And so, no beef there. I find it less egregious than The Stones continuing on without Charlie Watts, simply because of the indescribable groove Charlie lent to those songs. There is no one, not even the brilliant, Steve Jordan (a Watts protégé who played with the band’s entrenched guitarist, Keith Richards solo band, the X-Pensive Winos) can replicate. An uber-talented Nilles, can do this with Rush songs, because they’re like charted segments whose specificity makes them classic. Watts was a swing machine that laid the groundwork. Peart played parts that if funneled through a master can make you close your eyes and dream the man who wrote them is still there. Not so much for Charlie.
But it’s still weird, right? Neil Peart is not just any drummer. His legacy is one of ingenuity and originality, reinventing how the instrument was approached. No matter how good Nilles is, Peart’s presence is almost mandatory for Rush to be… ya know… Rush. No? And I am sure on a personal level it must be tough at points for Lee and Lifeson to not see him back there. It’s human nature. Playing those songs they’ve played with Peart for all those years. Has to be a nightly emotional rollercoaster – honoring him, while missing him.
I honestly wonder how Rush fans feel about this, after they buy the tickets, make the trek to the arena, and leave the place with some measure of bittersweetness. I don’t know. I’m not a big fan of Rush. I know their work as any serviceable music journalist should – even those cranks who never respected them – but this question remains for all fans of aged-out rockers or any genre of music in which your favorite group is torn asunder by death or otherwise. Are we good with this? Or more importantly, does it really matter if we are or not?
On the cusp of his 84th birthday, Paul McCartney has released arguably his most revealing, poignant and personal of records, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, a musical memoir of his days before fame and fortune, before Elvis Presley and Little Richard, before John Lennon, the Beatles, Ed Sullivan, Shea Stadium, Sgt. Pepper’s, “Hey Jude,” Linda Eastman, the break-up, the dust-ups, Wings, and decades of hits and experimental albums of varying degrees of quality. The entirety of his canon, vast and sprawling, as of a piece, in the span of a lifetime spent becoming the most prolific and successful songwriter ever.
It is the kind of artistic statement one would want from an aging composer, a personality who is as recognized as any in the history of celebrity, and who’s time in the limelight has been both an open book and a hazy mystery – a man once presumed dead because he decided to decamp to a run-down cottage in Scotland with his wife and kids for a spate, a man who has survived the death of two bandmates and his beloved wife of nearly 30 years. Yet, we know so little about how McCartney sees his life in song, how he views the destiny-altering moments that make up his story. He was hardly ever the Beatle who wrote from the first person – that was John’s thing, and sometimes George Harrison. Paul wrote third-person character studies about Eleanor Rigby, Lady Madonna, Uncle Albert and Auntie Gin, lovely Rita the meter maid and someone called Maxwell wielding a hammer.
This makes, as stated above, The Boys of Dungeon Lane a remarkable document, a nostalgic notation from a man who clearly wants to get this down and put it out before those memories inevitably dim. His voice on the record is indeed ragged with mileage, softer than his halcyon days, surely, but his composing still displays a razor-sharp alacrity for melody and storytelling. This time, as his old mate John did with Plastic Ono Band at age 30 and Bob Dylan did with Blood on the Tracks at 32, he’s aimed his microscopic deconstruction of the human condition on himself – not Beatle Paul, but young Paul from the lazy riverfront hamlet of Speke some eight miles from the center of Liverpool.
I was moved to give the album, named after a road in his hometown, a listen simply because I felt committed to comment, having written a book essentially about Paul McCartney as told through his most lasting song, Take a Sad Song – The Emotional Currency of Hey Jude, published in 2022. That was Paul as a 26-year-old rock star on top of the world, falling in love with the woman for which he will spend every waking hour from that time forward, and as comfort for the son of his songwriting partner, five-year-old, Julian, whose father would be leaving his family for a new love, Yoko Ono. Let her into your heart. Researching that song and the subjects that inspired McCartney then brought me to his losing his beloved mother, Mary to breast cancer when he was 14 and she was only 47, and how John Lennon too had suffered a similar trauma at 17 when his mother was killed by a drunk motorist. Take a sad song and make it better. That connection in grief, in drive, in a passionate need to express through the salvation of rock and roll informed their best love songs that reflected the search for a woman to fill the void.
But although John was quite open about this, Paul never was, instead giving us songs celebrating the universal mother in “Your Mother Should Know” and “Lady Madonna.” It is not until the final track on The Boys of Dungeon Lane, “Momma Gets By,” perhaps his last and most precious statement – assuming the mid-eighties into his nonagenarian twilight doesn’t produce anymore music – that we’re invited into that chasm. The lilting verses with notions of a strong, impenetrable woman, who imparts her own philosophy of life, but agrees to be someone’s wife: And even though hе’s complicated, she takes it in her stride, he sweetly intones, singing What are his silly faults compared to what she feels inside? The final words sung on the album, She loves him / She loves him with all her heart and soul is moving stuff.
But McCartney, like David Bowie’s Black Star or Warren Zevon’s The Wind, albums by dying artists as their last statement, decides instead he’d like to stick around to see how this creation will land. It is so Paul. He makes music to please, not to expunge. And these songs are good, solid numbers, truly the work of a pro, as always. Right from the start with the bouncy, “As You Lie There,” McCartney treads the line between rock ephemera and Beatle-esque charm, but it is telling that an album that closes with the ardently dense, “Momma Gets By,” which significantly follows “Salesman Saint” with its opening lines, My father was a salesman / My mother was a saint launches with a song about a young girl Paul had a crush on but could never get. The most eligible bachelor in pop music history, the one that had all the girls clamoring for, wistfully recalls looking up at her window wondering (some seven decades hence) what she thought of him, if anything. Her name, we’re told in story is Jasmine, but never in the song. She is distant but inside his head, as he wonders if he is inside hers. He does tell of a chance passing, nothing that would matter to her, but is everything to him – preluding his love life for years, as the loss of his mother would. It is important to note “As You Lie There” is the longest track on the record at nearly five minutes (the second longest, ahem, is the closer, “Momma Gets By”).
McCartney follows “As You Lie There” with two songs about his second and third favorite subjects after women, and that’s music and eternal friendships. “Lost Horizon” – apparently an older song from about a quarter-century ago – hints of his hearing Music from a distant fairground; the fête in which he first met a rough and ready teenage John Lennon fronting the Quarrymen – the legendary history-altering détente that Was the start of the first day of forever. “Days We Left Behind,” is a contemplation on what a young man ignores along the way to stardom in smoky bars and cheap guitars, but nothing built to last. Touchstones and road marks. Who pays attention to details then? McCartney did, or at least reinvents new ones, as we all do with our faulty memories.
Later in the album McCartney uses conveyances like buses and their destination to express growing up with “Down South,” which means heading into Liverpool proper and then later into London to make his fortune. It is on a bus where Paul meets a 13-year-old George Harrison and puts him on a path to audition for this Lennon kid (on the same bus-line) and join a band that will tilt the axis of the planet: The morning bus was where we two would meet / I sat beside you on an empty seat / We’d talk about guitars and rock and roll / They were the subjects that would nеver grow old.
Ringo, the only other living Beatle, gets his time to shine too, as he debuts the first-ever recorded duet between he and Paul in “Home to Us,” a quaint ditty about growing up working class where the roses in the yard began to wilt, and then they turned to dust / But it was home to us. This one, like most of the songs here, support the lyrics with musical nods to the period, like on “Salesman Saint,” where Paul’s dad, James, of the Jimmy Mac Jazz Band, is honored with old-timey fanfare in the background. McCarney showing off his well-worn talents to tell aural stories as well as literal ones. Plaudits too must go to producer, Andrew Watt (Lady GaGa, Justin Beiber, Post Malone), who is given writing credit on four songs, something to not take lightly on a Paul McCartney record. He also produced the upcoming Rolling Stones album and worked with Elton John. He can apparently jump generations with ease.
But McCartney holds out one memory of love in “We Two,” which he transmutes into Linda, the mother of his children, a woman for which he will spend only a handful of days apart starting in 1968 until her death in 1998. Although not meeting the timeline of this romantic excursion into the past, it is difficult to ignore the first mention of “two” in a McCartney-penned title since the exquisite, “Two of Us” that both he and John harmonized beautifully back in 1969. Many, including me, always thought it was about their journey in songwriting and rock star partnership, but it was about escaping the world to disappear into Linda. Two of us riding nowhere / Spending someone’s hard-earned pay / You and me Sunday driving / Not arriving on our way back home. With half a century in between them Paul sings, My thoughts return to you… / Always, always, my friend / You’ll be my only one, concluding with a nod to recalling Mother Mary who comes to him in a dream in one of his epic ballads, “Let It Be” – Last night I dreamed of you / And all that we could do / Together, side by side / We two can do.
These are just some examples of what the 14 tracks, maybe Paul’s finest or at least most compelling songs in some time, offer. The album is a triumph in framing a life before the life. A tribute to those who loved or despised or even ignored him for him, not an icon in his winter years looking back in fondness, as only Paul could ever do. His emotional currency still worth every shilling.
Do-It-Yourself has many connotations in every walk of life, whether home improvement, auto repair, cooking, fashion, or using technology to create, but in the music biz it is a rarity. So many producers, engineers, and studio musicians, never mind bandmembers! But when it does occur, it can be magical, the way something insular and without outside influence can enhance the creative process. There is a high-wire-without-a-net sense of danger that emerges, including times when the artist may go “too far,” although some fans might dig that journey, even if the music travels beyond what they expect.
Sometimes DIY is due to need, as in it is cheap and compact, but then that means the singular voice and accompaniment must be of a higher level than what can be achieved with a full arsenal of assistance. Although that is noble and endearing, there is also the singular statement made from choice, the desire to strip away the accoutrements of the pop life to parse it down to the essentials – song and artist unencumbered.
I use the singular to frame my DIY Top 10, as I steered clear of bands going off on their own and achieving a masterwork outside “the system” – the most famous of these would be the Rolling Stones, seminal Exile on Main St., written and performed on the fly in a French basement far from music business interference, or The Band’s debut album, Music From Big Pink, another homemade creation with the five members hacking away at songs while a reel-to-reel captured the proceedings. But this list is primarily one artist toiling alone (and one very young duo), sometimes in a proper studio, sometimes at home with their own equipment, and in one instance captured on tape by a campfire.
When it’s done right, either by design or happenstance, a musical DIY is a thing of pure beauty and most times reveals an underlying aspect of the artist, his/her methods, personal expressions, and themes never achieved in any other format. In some cases, the artists never quite get to this level of unfiltered brilliance again, forced to chase it during their career arc, and in others, they view it as a one-off wherein they had to escape the parameters of their oeuvre to reset and begin anew. Regardless of reason or execution, this list is a celebration of the quality and surprises music lovers get when we stumble on a DIY album.
There are very little guidelines for this one, beyond these records must be made with almost, and in some cases, no creative support beyond maybe an engineer to capture the performances or minimal complement added after the original sessions. Again, some of these might be bold artistic statements and others reduced to a solo venture due to circumstances beyond their control. There are many to cite that didn’t make the list, so let me know what I missed, share your favorites beyond these, or perhaps your thoughts on what you may have discovered from the truly great albums below.
10. Ani DiFranco – Ani DiFranco
We begin with Ani, because we must. This could easily be #1 on this list, and certainly higher when considering all that goes with it. But she goes first, because Ani Difranco remains at the forefront of this exercise for not only creating her debut album (it was originally a cassette she recorded and whisked around New York City in 1990) by her lonesome, but putting it out with zero assistance. And so was born Righteous Babe Records, a singular operation run from her hometown of Buffalo, New York that would go on to produce all her subsequent work, hire a host of hearty souls, and launch or usher along many careers (not the least of which my pal, Dan Bern). Along the way, she refused millions thrown at her from big record companies to instead win Grammys and build a dedicated fanbase.
This all begins with Ani Difranco, featuring her uniquely percussive guitar playing and a penetratingly staccato vocal delivery that is adorably trenchant and unwaveringly powerful. The black and white photo on its cover of a bald and defiantly impenetrable 20-year-old songsmith, who appears to be looking beyond limitation and into the infinite, tells the tale of what is inside – songs that cover the gamut of love, lust, regret, fear, anguish and longing that are lyrically beyond her years but nevertheless evoke a sense of earned wisdom.
When I saw Ani preform in the mid-90s, she was backed by her famous rhythm section of Sara Lee on bass and drummer, Andy Stochansky, an intrepid power trio that provided unique insight into how DiFranco would have sounded by herself bouncing around dives in Greenwich Village while conjuring this music. It was one singular rhythm machine, chugging and bopping beneath her quasi-rap delivery that sparked an underground female revolution.
9. Dirty Mind – Prince
Okay, so when you think of a “solitary entity” pop artist – as I put it in my latest book, Revolution – Prince, the Band, the Era, you think of Prince Rogers Nelson, as many of his albums boast: Produced, Arranged, Composed and Performed by Prince. He was the ultimate control-freak taskmaster, who wore down engineers, as he jumped from the drums to guitar, then bass, and a host of keyboards like a madman on a mission. But Dirty Mind sticks out for me, because as he put it in a rare 1980 interview upon its release, Dirty Mind was his “bloodstream on vinyl.” Although unlike his previous two records, For You and Prince, this one featured keyboardist, Matt Fink on a ripping solo for one song and pianist, Lisa Coleman’s voice in a spoken-word cameo for another, the rest, however, is pure Prince.
Alone in his Minneapolis home studio on the banks of that town’s many lakes, and away from the prying eyes of his label, Warner Bros, who amazingly granted him full control of his music as a teenager, Prince tackled several genres, from new wave to funk, soul to punk, distilling the essence of new and powerful pop music. But beyond its sonic schizophrenia, the subjects covered on the songs inside his “dirty mind” were a buffet of sexual deviancy. These included masturbation, incest, bisexuality, infidelity, sexual addiction, along with the thorny subjects of war and social revolution.
Prince, well known for building myths, put himself at the center of this maelstrom, becoming, as he preached to his touring band, “pure sex.” In many ways, this is the album that propelled the theme-heavy, world-building Prince that went on to dominate the 1980s, not only as an iconic pop star, but a shapeshifter and paradigm-exploding phenomenon. The promise of this ascent is in the grooves of his most compelling, controversial and singular proclamation that floored critics and eradicated the racial boundaries of his era’s musical landscape.
8. The Campfire Tapes – Michelle Shocked
The making of Michelle Shocked’s first “album” is a tale of many DIY heroes. Starting with Pete Lawrence, who had never been to the United States before he attended the Kerrville Folk Festival that ran from May 23 to June 1 1986 in Central Texas. As founder of a brand-new independent label, Cooking Vinyl (very DIY), the hearty Brit was intrigued by the festival, founded by husband-wife team, Rod Kennedy and Nancylee Davis, in 1972 (super DIY), in a town 65 miles northwest of San Antonio. There he met 24-year-old proto-anti-folk antecedent, Karen Michelle Johnston, who was going by the name of Michelle Shocked. Searching for unsigned talent, the fish-out-of-water Lawrence found Shocked, who was looking for a label that believed in her hybrid folk/punk/jazz compositions played exclusively on a beat-up acoustic guitar (mega-DIY). The two landed by a campfire on the outskirts of the festival where the budding record exec pleaded with her to play some songs. Shocked entertained Lawrence with a dozen of them.
Shocked has always claimed that Lawrence ran his Sony Walkman secretly as she casually demoed the songs – the crickets serenading in the background, as a fire crackled in the foreground. Lawrence remembers telling her he’d needed to tape the proceedings to present to his staff. Regardless of the purported serendipity, what Lawrence captured that night was a strange combination of impassioned singing of insightful to playful lyrics, accompanied by an acoustic guitar and the sounds of a Texas night. Good ol’ by-the-campfire crooning – rural, Southern American style with a strong female edge.
Lawrence was, as the English say, gobsmacked by what he heard on that tape and convinced Shocked that she should release it as her debut, free of stale studio environs or adorned by seasoned pros who didn’t get her organic stylings. To her credit, because there are a bevy of imperfections that could have been tightened by takes in a proper studio, Shocked agreed. After moving to Europe, the two released the aptly titled, The Campfire Tapes later that year.
The album’s unfiltered charm became a humble curiosity in a world of big-hair pop-rock, rap, and mega-superstar releases, rising to #1 on the British independent record chart. It was later picked up in the U.S. by Mercury Records, which is how I discovered it whilst working at Record World in Westchester, NY and began my love of stuff like this – raw, independent music made by artists unafraid of the warts of playing that music from the heart. I immediately began recording my own songs this way into tape machines, further inspired by some of the works further up this list.
Michelle Shocked would go onto a fair career of pushing her un-style to the masses, but for me, this was her apex. She seemed to understand this too, later releasing a version of The Campfire Tapes in 2003 as a two-CD set called Texas Campfire Takes by her own label, Mighty Sound (mega-meta-DIY).
7. Life’ll Kill Ya – Warren Zevon
When Warren Zevon made Life’ll Kill Ya essentially in his apartment during the final months of the 20th century for indie label, Artimas Records, he’d already authored one hell of a “career” of wild abandon: Greek-level-tragic missteps, spectacular alcohol and drug abuses, insane antics aimed at the very hands that fed him personally and professionally, and general mayhem that only he could engender. Label founders, Danny Goldberg, former manager of Nirvana, and Daniel Glass, an industry titan, had mercy on him, because through it all, including a truncated time when everyone knew him as the “Werewolves of London” guy, Zevon was a master songwriter with few peers.
The trail of tears in his wake attested to this. As I covered in my 2018 book, Accidentally Like a Martyr – the Tortured Art of Warren Zevon, the Californian satirist cum songsmith put it all on the line in every one of his compositions that usually covered a wide range of crazies, criminals, outcasts, and the broken-hearted. It may have been difficult to be around Warren Zevon (his son, Jordan described it to me like “trying to hug a hand grenade”), but it was apparently well worth it.
Zevon did not know he would only live another four years when he wrote and recorded the songs on the ironically titled, Life’ll Kill Ya, which was released in the first month of the new millennium, but it sounds like he may have intuited it, for it confronts a lifetime of irrational behavior with some regret and a ton of that Zevon dark humor. The album is a paean to the experience of dancing on the dangerous edges with an intimate forlorn penance. But Zevon, as always, leaves plenty of space for bizarre turns. Having been sober for nearly 15 years, he noted to journalists upon the album’s release that although desperation and lack of funds forced him to confront such isolation, it brought out the best/worst in him that was thankfully captured on tape.
6. Metal Machine Music – Lou Reed
The most famous FUCK YOU ever handed to a record company, Metal Machine Music was Lou Reed’s most avant-garde statement of a career swollen with grand avant-garde statements. It is hard to find anything from a rock artist, even one as contrarian as Lou Reed, that resembles this record on any level of dissonant ambient craziness. The entire (double album!) consists of screeching, moaning and careening from electric guitars into and out of amplifiers at incomparable volumes. I wish I could properly explain how unlistenable this is, and how I can barely make it through four minutes of any of it. It is less album than a test of one’s tolerance.
Irrespective of its unpalatable aural assault, Metal Machine Music, featuring only Reed, his guitar, a cranked amp and a lot of chutzpah, make it a DIY extravaganza. No songs, no production to speak of, or certainly no mixing decisions here. Mind-bendingly horrific and concussive aural explosions emanating from one man.
Now, if one deigns to fathom that Reed, infamous for his truculent press interviews and general ennui, was not fucking with RCA in the summer of 1975, then to hear him tell it, this was a genuine attempt at musical exploration. Firstly, his tuning all the strings of his guitar to the same note was his homage to the mid-1960s drone music of La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music, whose members included previous Velvet Underground bandmates, John Cale and Angus MacLise. But while Young’s atonal machinations can be a direct link to the Velvet’s work, its connection to this chaos is stretching credulity. When pressed further on whether this was an actual attempt at art or just spiteful meandering, Reed began citing Beethoven, which was lost on critics and fans.
Much later, after Reed’s death, live performances of Metal Machine Music were attempted with minimal interest, but at the very least cemented Reed’s candid expressions as legitimate music and not just an elaborately blaring prank.
5. When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? – Billie Eilish
Billie Eilish was 17-years-old when she began the proper sessions for what would become her debut album alongside her brother, Finneas O’Connell, who was 21 at the time. As many creative siblings might do – pooling their imaginations and resources to make something fun – they retreated to a bedroom in their Highland Park, California home and started making songs. Well, they started making sounds: slithering, beat-orientated music beds that evoked dread and allure with sinisterly impish delight. You know, kids being kids.
O’Connell created all this with some combination of a Logic Pro X, a Universal Audio Apollo 8 interface funneled into a pair of Yamaha HS5 studio monitors with an H8S subwoofer because it was convenient and private, which is why kids retreat to bedrooms to make stuff in the first place. But later he and his sister surmised that the environment was the key to the music, as it reflected the type of intimacy that you hear on Eilish’s unnervingly near-whispered vocals that are eerily detached and menacing. And there is plenty of tongue-planted humor in here too – the record opens with the two of them laughing, as if they might let you in on the joke.
What was no joke was the immense effect When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? would have on popular music, the charts, and the zeitgeist in 2019. That little girl stumbling out of her bed in a darkened room on its cover, her eyes, an alien rolled-over white, spoke volumes. This was a missive like no other of its time. The two kids would go onto make more pop records, and to their credit they did not go for a more direct sequel, but none of them has yet presented the original ingenuity of what came out of that room.
4. Pink Moon – Nick Drake
Holed up in his apartment suffering from deep bouts of depression and smoking copious amounts of marijuana, the soon-to-be 26-year-old Nick Drake was determined to express his plight in song alone. The British singer-songwriter with a soulfully English tone to his unique brand of traditional folk had been convinced to make two albums for Island Records, both of which are still sublime listens today, Five Leaves Left (1969), and Bryter Layter (1970), featuring an abundance of overdubs by seasoned studio musicians. Drake felt these embellishments made his intimate songs of love and loss overly saccharine. A recent listen to the stripped-down versions of his first album released as a box set last year bears this out.
Defiant of his record company’s wishes and boosted by the fair argument that his first two albums did not sell anyway, Drake spent nearly a year by himself with only an engineer, who claims the singer-songwriter never once looked up at him, working out the songs for what would become Pink Moon, an introspective foray into the depths of melancholia. This unsettling missive not only perplexed and concerned his dwindling fanbase, but confounded critics, who pounced, spelling the end of Drake’s career, which set him adrift for two more years until his apparent suicide by overdose of the antidepressant pills he’d refused to take earlier in his life.
Drake’s death at 26 in November of 1974, deemed a suicide, left Pink Moon, released in 1972, as his final statement of pain and loneliness. Nevertheless, the album, along with his legacy, was given a boost in the 1990s with the advent of alternative folk and a more elevated and empathetic understanding of depression in artists and young people in general. Many filmmakers have used Drake’s work to great effect, noting his relentless search for truth within his suffering in much of his music, which resonates in its greatest form on this, his final album.
3. Hi, How Are You? – Daniel Johnston
Daniel Johnston, the crown prince of DIY, was a solitary kid, and when he was alone, he was a creation machine – films, animation, comic books, poems, paintings, and songs. Tons of songs. Weird songs. Sad songs. Beseeching songs of sorrow and imagination. Each of these songs, adorned with sound-effects from children’s toys, archaic overdubbing between two boomboxes, and crude percussion accompaniment, as he banged on anything available to him, were recorded hundreds of times in garages and basements on out-of-tune guitars and clunky pianos. Then Daniel, who was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder, collected those sonic and lyrical oddities onto cassettes, drew surreal images of strange characters and audacious creations from his head on their covers, and marched around Austin, Texas, handing them to whomever he’d meet on the street or the McDonald’s in which he worked.
Hi, How Are You? remains Johnston’s most recognizable of those collections, mainly due to its drawing of a frog-like alien creature he called Jeremiah the Innocent that dominates its iconic stark-white cover. He would later paint Jermiah as a mural on the side of a record store. It still exists today as a single wall after the building was torn down, as Austin citizens wanting to “keep Austin weird” welcome the thousands who come to it as if a religious pilgrimage each year. I’ve paid my respects twice.
Around the time of this cassette’s release in 1983, MTV came down to Austin to cover its growing music community and after Johnston bugged them incessantly, the influentially hip network put him on the air. This was seen by many in the growing alterative and grunge scene, not the least of which Nirvana’s frontman, Kurt Cobain, who was just one of thousands of us who discovered this wunderkind, famously wearing a tee shirt of the cover of Hi, How Are You? at the 1992 MTV Awards.
This all culminates in the low-fi sonic purity of Daniel’s naive wittiness on Hi, How Are You?, performed with a desperation rarely displayed by most of us who are not dealing with mental illness, who can somehow survive a dangerous and uncaring world with filters unavailable to singular souls like Daniel Johnston.
2. Living with Ghosts – Patty Griffin
The 22-year-old Patty Griffin recorded a batch of brilliant songs with just her acoustic guitar and her magnificent voice hoping to get signed, which she did, by A&M Records. The label then put her in a studio with a professional collection of musicians, as they tried in vain to capture the heart-wrenching beatific quintessence of those songs. No one knew what to do about this. So, Patty queried A&M, “You signed me on the strength of those recordings, why not put those out?” And to the label’s credit, they did in May of 1996.
Patty told me in 2004, “I didn’t really have much choice at the time. I was really pretty down about having my record that I made with all the fanfare rejected, so I was not in a very good mindset to make another one. But that’s how I played those songs then. That was the way I performed them live. I never really played with a band before, so it made a lot of sense to me that that would be the way they would be done best.”
Living with Ghosts is what a singer-songwriter is at its core. There is no artifice, no production, no accompaniment, just a woman and her incredible talent shining through. The songs sound, because they are, intimate and personal and inevitably soar on the strength of the very elements that make us human with all the messiness and imperfections. But it is that voice, the pained, pristine, undeniable splendor of the way she delivers her quaint, brain-scarring melodies, proving that to add anything else to it is artistic malfeasance. And so, this album remains her opening salvo in a career that would grow into more collaborative avenues but always remained true to its source.
1. Nebraska – Bruce Springsteen
The mother of all DIYs (Patty Griffin and Ani Difranco both told me this inspired them on their minimalist quest) has been celebrated now in literary and cinematic form. Famously, Bruce Springsteen took a dramatic left turn from his arc of 1970s albums that followed his and his generation’s evolution culminating with The River, which contained his first ever radio hit, “Hungry Heart,” and disappeared into a room inside a rented Central Jersey ranch house to record alone on a four-track machine. The song themes shifted radically from personal to uber-personal through characters that reflected the eroding times for the early-80s working-class America, desperate outcasts reduced to ghostly romantic figures trapped in a national identity crisis. And when the E Street Band couldn’t make heads or tails of these stripped down, haunted demos, Springsteen tossed the beat-up cassette to master engineer, Chuck Plotkin to make into a record. And what a record!
Nebraska is no mere statement, it is a manifesto, and it is Springsteen at his finest as a storyteller (Bruce has insisted for years it is his best work and I am inclined to agree, as it is the only Springsteen album I ever bought and enjoyed, mainly because he told me and a bunch of kids sitting around the Stone Pony one night what he was doing out at that ranch and how excited he was about it). And the distorted, low-fi grit of these songs resound in the type of heightened rock and roll theater that Bob Dylan once captured so perfectly in his early one-man-with-a-guitar period.
Springsteen pained over these compositions, re-writing lyrics and trying alternate vocal intonations. His constant editing took on a novelist approach to the repetitive rewriting needed to find what F. Scott Fitzgerald called the “high white note.” What is on that tape and the nucleus of Nebraska is a disciplined determination of the craft of songwriting and performance, which served the Boss well throughout the rest of his career that was never a safe foray into rote but a personal challenge to grow without fear.
Ironically, Nebraska may be Bruce Springsteen’s most rock and roll of albums, for there is nothing louder than a man possessed in his own idiom alone and without amplification that seduces grandeur, when all of it, like all the records noted here, reaches this pinnacle of DIY.
In the year 1900, Mark Twain, the father of American letters, took a stab at parody songwriting and penned new lyrics to the “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a stirringly beautiful ballad written by Julia Ward Howe during the American Civil War often associated with the presidency and assassination of then President Abraham Lincoln. By using this war-themed and wholly ingrained melody as a backdrop to his biting commentary about American imperialism run amok, which began rearing its ugly head two decades before and continues today unchecked by our lunatic, criminal president what’s his name, he doubles down on the theme.
For your dancing and listening pleasure, I offer Mr. Samuel Clemens’s first verse:
Mine eyes have seen the orgy of the launching of the Sword;
He is searching out the hoardings where the stranger’s wealth is stored;
He hath loosed his fateful lightnings, and with woe and death has scored;
His lust is marching on.
Man, is this spot-on, like most of Twain’s work that after a century-plus still kicks the ass of modern critique. And so, now, 126 years later we have another broken administration entangling America in another senseless imperialist money-grab conflict. As we await new songs to refute this horror show, we’ll have some fun and look back this week on my Top Ten Anti-War Songs of all time.
As usual, whether my 300 Favorite Albums podcast or any list I’ve presented here thus far, we have some rules. The songs below must be general commentaries on war – as you can neatly apply Twain’s ditty to the current stupidity going on in Iran. Fun fact, in the nearly 250-year history (“celebrated” this July), the United States has been at war for 235 of them. This includes the twenty-plus years of war we just endured or more pointedly ignored from 2002 to a couple of years ago. Fifteen years of peace. Wow! It’s like celebrating a country that allows a Black man to play baseball a century after the freeing of African Americans from slavery, which, again, necessitated a war that slaughtered over 600,000 Americans.
But I digress. There are also no specific wars referenced in the songs here. This includes Northern Ireland, “Sunday Bloody Sunday” by U2, or the Viet Nam War, “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die” by Country Joe & the Fish,” “Lay Down Your Arms,” Doron Levinson’s commentary on the Yom Kippur War, or the Cold War dirge by Sting, “Russians.” I also veer away from songs that speak of the racist slant of war (Marvin Gaye’s masterful soul classic, “What’s Goin’ On”) or our government using the poor (Creedence Clearwater Revival’s raucous beauty, “Fortunate Son”) to fight their battles.
And so, in the wake of our latest madness for today, tomorrow and likely forever around here, and the return of selective service for all American men from 18 to 25 coming later this year, I give you my Top Ten Anti-War Songs list.
10. “Political Science” – Randy Newman (1972)
We begin with the 20th century’s version of Mark Twain, America’s finest musical satirist, Randy Newman, with a song that celebrates wiping out the world because “they hate us anyhow, so let’s drop the big one now.” The unreliable narrator in Newman couldn’t help inhabiting the persona of the subjects he skewered – a bigot in “Short People’ or a slave trader from the title track of the album in which “Political Science” resides, Sail Away. Here he voices a crazed power-mad grievance master, which eerily reflects our current commander-in-chief, with just the right amount of shrugging to underscore how little powerful nations care about mass destruction. Newman always winced when he performed this live, often remarking on how surprised he was by audience snickers (it is damn funny), who in his humble estimation were unable to fathom the song’s authenticity or discomfort. Either way, Randy, as usual, like Mr. Clemens, nails it.
One – Metallica (1989)
Perhaps the most unsettling and trenchant of all the songs here, it is difficult to comprehend its tragic framework; so perfectly couched in a melancholy dirge befitting its subject. A true departure from the thrash-metal kings, Metallica, it was written by guitarist, James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich, portraying a severely wounded solider by a land mine. He is blind, deaf, and unable to speak or move and begs God to take his life: “Hold my breath as I wish for death / Oh, please, God, wake me!” Oof. A disturbing music video, intercut with haunting scenes from the 1971 anti-war film, Johnny Got His Gun, depicts the victim attempting to communicate with the hospital staff, spastically jolting in his bed while he spells SOS in Morse code. Strangely, or maybe not considering our fascination with war around here, this was one of the underground band’s biggest hits, winning a Grammy, and helping to set up their rise to one of the most potent bands of the era.
8. The Gunner’s Dream – Pink Floyd (1983)
In one of the darkest commentaries on the generational ravages of war, Roger Waters, songwriter, bassist, and main lyricist for Pink Floyd in the seventies into the early eighties, weighs in on the personal trauma of losing his father in World War II in this haunting song about a fallen “hero” as mere systemic fodder. A sequel to The Wall, essentially a treatise on the terrible fallout of that war on a swath of artists, film-makers, and mostly musicians that grew out of its horrors, prompting a failure in wiping it all away with fame, drugs, loose women, and empty songs of pseudo-revolution, The Final Cut, in which this song is the centerpiece, strips away all the metaphor and gets down to the pure fear and loathing therein. The doleful refrain of “no one kills the children anymore” is obliterated by the more realistic depiction of government-sanctioned murder, as “What’s done is done / We cannot just write off his final scene/ Take heed of the dream.”
7. After the Parade – Dan Bern (2004)
My friend, the prolific singer-songwriter, Dan Bern planted “After the Parade,” a forlorn and gripping snapshot of a wounded veteran of war dealing with its fallout beyond the pomp of metals and parades, in an EP he titled My Country II during his yearlong protest-tour against the two wars that defined the opening years of this century. On the front lines, so to speak, with him, during this time, I was in the studio for some of these recordings, and I can tell you Bern was not, as he never is, fucking around. His defiance on the tall tales of “weapons of mass destruction” that were clearly fantasy but which sent hundreds of our best into a killing zone sent him on a quest to question it all by taking on the voice of the soldier. Like Randy Newman, with less snark, it is a powerful way to express the senselessness of war and the family wreckage it leaves in its wake: “Who do you think will push my chair / After the parade is done?”
6. Phil Ochs – ‘I Ain’t Marching Any More’ (1965)
Ochs opens this ditty as if an Irish jig, casting a strangely chipper pall on the stanzas that count down the ceaseless violence facing generations of soldiers from the Battle of New Orleans (War of 1812) to the slaughter of General Custer’s murderous legion at Little Big Horn (1876), the great land-grab boondoggle of the Mexican-American War to the human meatgrinder of the American Civil War (early 1860s), the “War to End All Wars,” WWI (1917), its planet-devasting sequel, WWII (1941-1945), to the endless skirmishes of the Cold War (the second half of the American Century). One of the few songs here or anywhere that runs the gamut of infinite engagement, throughout, Ochs sounds equal parts exhausted, disgusted, and angry, while maintaining a Woody Guthrie level of preaching. Powerful stuff. For any generation.
5. War – Bob Marley & the Wailers (1976)
This one is interesting because in “War” Marley comes to the sad conclusion that war is inevitable if things keep going the way they’re going: “Until the philosophy which holds one race / Superior and another inferior / Is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned / Everywhere is war, me say war.” However, it also points out that Marley is aware of the futile machinations of governments to mend their differences without it, and, moreover, dismiss the less fortunate in their systemically racist construct.
After surviving being wounded in an assassination attempt a few months after “War” was released on the Wailers fourth album, Rastaman Vibration, Marley courageously brought together rival political leaders Michael Manley and Edward Seaga on stage at the One Love Peace Concert on April 22, 1978, in Kingston, Jamaica, to symbolize unity during intense political violence, earning him the U.N. Peace Medal. More than anyone on this list, he put his life on the line for his beliefs in a volatile environment time and again, and although many of his songs comment on the inequality of the Jamaican political system, here he centers on humanity’s inexplicable initial and instinctual reaction to social challenges with violence – righteous or otherwise.
4. Masters of War – Bob Dylan (1963)
By far the meanest and most direct of any of Bob Dylan’s “finger pointing songs,’ as he once called them, “Masters of War” dispenses with symbolism and goes for the proverbial throat with lines eviscerating powerful, rich, clueless greed-mongers in a blanket appraisal of their evil intentions. Dylan was just 23 when he wrote this in the looming storm of the Cuba Missile Crisis and the tailwind of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s warning of the Military Industrial Complex driving the western hemisphere into perpetual war. Considering the man who led the U.S. military efforts to save the world from fascism wagging his finger at the very machinery that would one day explode the national debt beyond our wildest nightmares, Dylan spats in the song’s coda, “And I hope that you die / And your death will come soon / I’ll follow your casket / By the pale afternoon / And I’ll watch while you’re lowered / Down to your deathbed / And I’ll stand over your grave / ‘Til I’m sure that you’re dead.”
3. War Pigs – Black Sabbath (1970)
Like war, this one is loud, terrifying and vibrates long after experiencing it: Black Sabbath at their most politically potent with lyrics by bass player, Geezer Butler and siren vocals by the late, great Ozzy Osbourne, who was put on earth for this type of gruesome statement. You believe him when he whines about generals gathering as witches at black masses plotting to “bring death and hatred to mankind.” The opening drone-riff is pure plodding havoc, which leads ultimately to the gloriously distorted staccato breaks heralding a requiem for us all “as the war machine keeps turning.” Then, just when you’re blown back on your heels the song cruises into a funky groove driven by the thunder-struck drumming of Bill Ward adorned by Tony Iommi’s wild guitar runs that sound like bullets slashing through the sky into your brain.
2. War – Edwin Starr (1970)
You know it, “What is it good for?” And in case you’re wondering, “Absolutely nothing!” But if you were the millions of Jews being slaughtered in Europe or felt the need to kick despots from the island of Cuba you might have a word with Mr. Starr, but nonetheless this is the anti-war song that everyone knows and nearly everyone covers and is never out of fashion. When considering all the wars in which this country’s been embroiled (noted above), this is akin to Christmas songs that return every season and always have a purpose for being. Like Sabbath’s more somber trudging through the muck of human misery, Starr’s funk-addled stomping breaks, guttural ooh-ahh vocal percussion echoed by horns, and his preacher-like phrasing puts the world on notice about our never-ending fascination with death and destruction. The damn thing is aptly titled. “Good God, ya’ll!”
1. Give Peace a Chance – John Lennon (1969)
Why not end on a positive note? I mean, ya know. This has been grim. But one thing that John Lennon could always be counted on is going for the grand statement; the over-arching concept of imagining a world with no religion or borders (two main culprits in this war thing) or telling us with zero irony that all you need is love. This one, written on the run with his new bride, Yoko Ono on a peace jag abroad and then recorded live in a honeymoon bed open to the public in Toronto, Canada with Tommy Smothers and a bunch of hippies chanting his chorus, presents a blustery half-measure of hope that by asking us to consider the alternative to war we may be onto something. The pre-rap style verses (“Everybody’s talking ‘bout Revolution, Evolution, Masturbation, Flagellation, Regulation, Integrations, mediations, United Nations, congratulations!”) cut a swath through the earworm refrain that reverberates into infinity. Lennon was still Beatle-John in 1969 and understood more than most that a good tune might do better to change the world than a march, and although we hardly ever give peace a chance, it’s nice to hear someone trying.
Seventy years ago, this spring (March 23, 1956), RCA Victor released the self-titled debut album from a twenty-one-year-old rockabilly crooner from Memphis Tennessee named Elvis Presley. Within the month it would reach the top of the U.S. charts, the first such feat for what certain deejays around the country were calling rock and roll. Elvis Presley Rock n’ Roll, as it was titled in the UK, subsequently topped the charts there. No one knows the first rock and roll record for sure. Some say “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats, which was Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm in disguise due to contractual obligations, the year before. Still other music historians point to earlier recordings that more than hint at a similar driving backbeat style in Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s “Strange Things Happening Every Day” (1944), Roy Brown’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight” (1947), a song Presley recorded as one of his first sides in 1954, and Goree Carter’s “Rock Awhile” (1949). But we do know for sure that Elvis Presley heralded this new music into the apex of popularity.
If anyone challenges the well-worn moniker King of Rock and Roll for Elvis, something I have done on more than one occasion, this is one factoid you can point to in his defense.
By the spring of 1956, Elvis was on a precipitous rise similar to Frank Sinatra’s a generation earlier – a stronghold on the fascination of the youth market, specifically women. Beyond his voice, however, Presley’s spastic movements on stage, a raw sexually charged combination of Beale Street shimmying and Baptist Church gyrations he picked up as a kid from the Black communities around Tupelo, Mississippi, set the course for his success on stages across the South. From the seismic release of his first single, “That’s All Right,” a sparkling boogie cover of bluesman, Authur Crudup’s 1946 hit, Presley came on as a naive hybrid sensation – a mish-mosh of country-blues-gospel-swing in an unfiltered package. Produced at Sun Records in Memphis by Sam Phillips, who spent years promoting Black acts like Howlin’ Wolf, Rufus Thomas, and B.B. King among others (Phillips cut “Rocket 88”), the song’s infectious rhythm, created by just Elvis on acoustic guitar, Bill Black on bass and Scottie Moore on guitar, shook the music industry to its core.
It was Phillips’s invention of the famed slap-back reverb sound that when combined with Elvis’s youthful yip-yelp phrasing, easing in and out of falsetto into a smooth timbre, backed ably with the groove of those instruments, which charted wholly new musical realms. Phillips would go onto record 24 revolutionary tracks at Sun with Elvis’s trio (and eventually foursome with D.J. Fontana on drums) between 1954 and 1955, ten of which he released on five two-sided singles. Then Elvis signed with the notorious Colonel Tom Parker, and when the big New York City labels came calling, the former carny huckster convinced RCA to pony up 40-grand (around 490-grand today) for Elvis’s Sun contract and back catalog by the end of ‘55.
Ten days into the new year, Elvis, along with Scotty, Bill and D.J., aka the Blue Moon Boys, convened at the Methodist Television, Radio and TV Studios in Nashville, Tennessee to begin recording their first RCA tracks. On day one, they completed arguably the most important and groundbreaking records of the 20th century, “Heartbreak Hotel.” With assistance from legendary Nashville session cats, guitarist Chet Atkins and pianist, Floyd Cramer, the single was awash in echo, a desperate attempt to recreate what Sam Phillips had wrought on all of Elvis’s best Sun recordings. This inadvertently gave “Heartbreak Hotel” an eerie moaning, almost mystical quality – Elvis sings as if facing his mortality in infinite loneliness. Seventeen days later it was on the radio, in stores, and being played across the Pond to thousands of teenagers like John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, who snapped into Beatles and Rolling Stones in its wake as if hit by a bolt of beatific lighting.
“Heartbreak Hotel,” penned by Nashville songwriters, Mae Boren Axton and Tommy Durden (Elvis was given credit – thanks, Colonel) from a suicide note published in the Miami Herald, obliterated culture, creating a firestorm across the universe and making Elvis Presley one of the most photographed, filmed, and written-about humans on the planet from that week forward.
By that point, Elvis Presley was pretty much in the can, as the Blue Moon Boys and a tireless Elvis cruised through seven tracks in the remaining weeks of January after cutting “Heartbreak Hotel.” Five more songs previously tracked by Phillips filled out the long player (sans the single), which was rushed out a mere two months later to a frantic public, who’d been quite recently introduced to Elvis’s swiveling hips, shaky knees, and flopping, long duck-tail greasy hair swaying atop his bopping head on this new-fangled invention called television. An entire generation waylaid by Chittlin’ Circuit furies pulsing through the vigorous limbs of this whirling dervish snarling and mumbling strange vibrations broadcast on variety shows like the Stage Show, Milton Berle Show, Steve Allen Show, and the Ed Sullivan Show.
My mom, Phyllis, then a plucky teen, watched the Ed Sullivan appearance and was hooked, explaining to me recently she’d had a dissimilar experience than the one written in history – Elvis as this alien creature set upon the conservative, sleepy black-and-white 1950s. In the Bronx that night, Elvis was the kind of beacon John Lennon once mused, “Before Elvis there was nothing.” She told me, “He was one of us. He made us feel like he was a part of our group, nothing old but entirely new.” Never one to speak in glowing terms at any age about anyone (sans Grace Kelly – the woman loved Princes Grace), Phyllis mused to me, “I played that record so much, my mother begged me to stop. And then my friends came over, and we played it a few times more. Drove my mom crazy.”
Photos of the copy of that very record, my mom’s beat-up 1956 original, is shared throughout this piece. She bequeathed it to me sometime in the 1970s and it remains in my collection, although I can’t play it. Man, did she ever play the shit out of that thing. No stylus of mine is going anywhere near it. But it is history – American, cultural, familial history. So, it remains tucked in there just the same. “I remember when I got it,” my mom told me. “I ran and grabbed it off the shelf. I was ready to fight anyone for it. You had to go to stores at specific times, or they would be sold out. It was rare to even see a copy.”
To fathom the light-speed in which Elvis Presley went from regional oddity to world-wide phenomenon can give you the bends. Elvis Presley was a sonic boom in every sense of the word. It helped create a chasm in generations separated by song and style and set the course for endless discussions on sex, race, gender, delinquency, culture – and invasion of the American psyche with a new lexicon for figuring cool.
Its iconic cover, cropped from a photo of Presley performing in Tampa, Florida the previous summer, shows a man possessed, mouth agape in blissful song, his body a fluid kinetic wire untethered by mere gravity. There is a danger there in that he looks as if he does not care about anything other than the promise of that song.
The record inside lives up to its place in pop culture history. Enamored with three precursors to his rise, first Sun Records label-mate Carl Perkins, and the Black, gay, outrageously spirited Little Richards, Elvis kicked off each side with spectacular (“Blue Suede Shoes”) and serviceable, (Tutti Frutti”) renditions of their most famous work. He also made sure to include rhythm and blues giant, Ray Charles’s first hit, “I Got a Woman,” a reworked gospel cum raucous boogie-woogie, which Elvis had played at every single one of his shows up to then.
Other highlights of the album include a rockabilly Sun track, “Just Because,” wherein Elvis’s voice playfully bounces around the chugging rhythm effortlessly, “Tryin’ to Get to You,” a pulsing bluesy number he growls with blood-red passion, and a tender ballad, “I Love You Because” that shows off the unbridled range of emotions he would later perfect but with less honest solemnity.
Elvis Presley changed the look, sound and philosophy of this new thing called rock and roll. The album spent ten weeks at number one on the Billboard Top Pop Albums chart that year and became the genre’s first million-selling album. There would be more from rock and roll, of course, and you may have heard of those, but you could make a fair argument that none of them happen without this one. But that is a story for another column, so I’ll let Phyllis Campion have the final word: “When you played Elvis’s music, you had to play it loud.”
Celebrating Women’s Month (apt for this writer as both his mom and daughter celebrate birthdays in March), with a list (in no order of quality or sales or even adoration) of some of the most impactful and stirring opening musical statements by talented women of various genres. Although I’ll hang in the pop/rock/folk/funk/country/hip-hop territories, and this is not a complete list (remind me of what I missed and I’ll likely agree), I will not be a stickler for an actual debut album. This is the case for at least four of these artists, as their most rousing debuts can be found in a rebirth of their work that would come to define them. Most importantly, what are below are true expressions of what these incredible artists, and in some cases entire bands (and if a woman leads a not all-female group, that still counts here), will accomplish in their stellar careers.
Many of these albums were created in times when women were not expected to branch out as songwriters, lead singers, musicians, never mind producers and captains of their own professional destinies, while others had to overcome the industry’s stringent parameters on beauty, strength and authenticity in women’s music that men rarely contend with.
And it would be foolish to just place the albums below in the context of their times and social and political terms alone, as these are foundational creative efforts that add to the evolution of music for their genres and stand alone as excellent works that not only exploded at the times of their releases, but continue to influence and inspire artists and fans today.
Madonna –Madonna(1983)
Slamming club bangers from a pop icon, who’s underground debut changed how women, especially denizens of the sexually empowered post-feminism 80s, would be perceived, marketed and eventually sound throughout the rest of the decade with club and radio hits like “Border Line,” Holiday,” and “Lucky Star.”
Whitney Houston – Whitney Houston (1985)
The highest selling album by any female artist ever introduced the world to the extraordinary pipes of a young, fun-loving American sweetheart, producing a staggering three #1 singles, “Saving All My Love for You,” “How Will I Know,” and “Greatest Love of All.” It is difficult to translate how huge this record was and how much of a pop game-changer Whitney was because of it.
Lady Gaga –The Fame(2008)
The sheer audacity of declaring notoriety on a debut was both brash and prophetic as mega-hits, “Just Dance” and “Poker Face” scaled new electropop heights worldwide, setting the new glam icon for a generation up as someone who’s music was already primed for stardom.
Patti Smith –Horses(1975)
The godmother of the CBGB’s downtown NYC punk, next-generation movement, and the first of that wave to get a record deal, be played on the radio, appear on television, and create (with its iconic cover) the pansexual dynamo that enhances the music that will obliterate antiquated ideas of a woman as poet, rocker, and shape-shifter.
Pussy Riot – “Kill the Sexists” Single (2011)
Hunted, arrested, and made example by the Vladimir Putin fascist regime in Russia turned out to be a fine publicity stunt – which the band had a supreme understanding to the seditious nature of – like their infamous “guerrilla performances” expressing feminism, LGBTQ rights, civil rights, and causing general mayhem for art’s sake. This single recorded by original members, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevich kicked it off.
Aretha Franklin –I Never Loved a Man the Way I loved You– (1967)
After enduring seven excruciating years recording for Columbia Records, which tried to turn her into a sappy torch-song singer awash in strings, Franklin, sidled up to a piano to play with natural panache and escaped to the soul-based Atlantic Records that encouraged her to infuse her unique brand of gospel, R&B and a little rock and roll to launch an unparalleled Lady of Soul period with “Respect.”
Taylor Swift –Taylor Swift(2006)
This is country Taylor taking Nashville by storm by turning it back into the Music City for the pop world with chart-topping narrative-driven hits like “Our Song,” “Should’ve Said No” and sneaking “Teardrops on My Guitar” into the Billboard Top 10. The 16-year-old singer-songwriter with plenty of stories to tell was, as they say, on her way.
The Bangles – All Over the Place (1984)
Susanna Hoffs, sisters Vicki Peterson and Debbi Peterson, and Michael Steele comprise the finest all-female rock group ever. Fight me on this: musicianship, harmonies, songwriting, live performance, and one of the best debut albums of any gender. This one heralds the next decade of their hit-making prowess fueled by the raw energy of a punk band with exquisite pipes.
Fiona Apple –Tidal(1996)
The sexy contralto vocals spreads over trenchant piano, riding devil backbeats to ferry tempestuous lyrics that become a feminine tonic to the grunge movement with as much moxie as one can jam into a long player. A Top 20 hit “Criminal” and the MTV staple, “Sleep to Dream” kicked it into Grammy levels.
Lauryn Hill –The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill(1998)
Fresh from the Fugees and motherhood, Ms. Hill brings all the pain, joy, confusion and pure street grit to this sprawling debut of hip-hop/soul/funk. The older it gets, the more poignant this album lands, as it was her only one thus far. Personal and professional setbacks, along with an uneven touring reputation scarred what should have been a long and fruitful career, but taken as a one-off, it towers over the competition.
Patty Griffin –Living with Ghosts(1996)
The record company didn’t know what to do with Patty Griffin’s original demos that intimately heralded her sultry, countrified voice accompanied by only an acoustic guitar, as no one seemed to be able to top them, so they released them as-is, making this debut the finest DIY album by a woman ever, which launched a career of country/folk majesty.
The Runaways –The Runaways(1976)
Before the Runways, there were no all-female rock groups, especially none with a this raw, sexually explicit, razor’s edge. Lead singer, the 15-year-old, Cherie Currie backed by later solo stars like Lita Ford and Joan Jett on guitars, bassist, Jackie Fox, and drummer, Sandy West trailblazed the way for many of the bands mentioned here. But youth and the wayward lunacy of their manager, Kim Fowley, cut them down too soon.
Tracy Chapman –Tracy Chapman(1988)
At the height of slick pop dominated in synth/drum machine/digital sounds, butting up against hair-band metal mania, comes a Black woman with a deep voice playing folk songs on an acoustic guitar. No one seemed to need or ask for this, but when they got it, Tracy Chapman exploded. “Fast Car,” one of the finest compositions of the decade, famously resurrected in 2023 by country star, Luke Combs, sounded in 1988 as a seditious remedy and a return to the lost voice of the singer-songwriter.
Cheryl Crow –Tuesday Night Music Club(1993)
Former background singer and industry insider makes a fun album reminiscent of an actual Tuesday Night Music Club she attended in L.A. in which much of this material – fueled in a party/jam, milieu – was created. Sparked by laid-back groove the hit, “All I Wanna Do” the record would go on to win three Grammy Awards and set the course for Crow to become one of the most respected singer-songwriters of her generation and help anchor the groundbreaking all-women, Lilith Fair Festivals.
Alanis Morrisette –Jagged Little Pill(1995)
Like Aretha, no one in Canada knew what to do with Alanis, as she blossomed from teen-scene star into Grrrll icon for the 1990s. Camped out with songwriter/producer/mentor, Glen Ballard, who understood the 21-year-old’s desire to express her emotions without a safety net, the result was one of the biggest sellers of the 1990s with smash Top 10 hits galore, “You Oughta Know,” “Hand in My Pocket,” and the #1, “Ironic.”
The Go-Gos –Beauty and the Beat(1981)
Proving the core axioms in rock and roll in one monster debut, Belinda Carlisle, Charlotte Caffey, Gina Schock, Kathy Valentine, and Jane Wiedlin write, sing, and perform some of the catchiest pop music of the early 1980s, while proving that not only young men can act like wild animals and tear through tours in notorious splendor. “I’ll Lips Are Sealed” is a glorious pop/rock number for any time.
Britney Spears –…Baby One More Time(1999)
Bubblegum pop returns with a vengeance, as Britney reinvents the teen-girl-sings-and-dances craze for a new generation and explodes into the zeitgeist as a fully formed pop star. Hatched from Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club factory that would also bore Justin Timberlake, Spears wastes little time setting herself up for mega-stardom from the jump. Everyone knows or has parodied or hates or adores but cannot forget the title track on its inevitable rise to #1.
Tammy Wynett – Stand By Your Man (1969)
Although, like Aretha and Alanis, Tammy had a career, and in her case, four albums, before this, the woman who emerged from this record would solidify her place in the country music and pop culture realm as the prideful antidote to the feminist backlash against the life of a simple woman who loves her man. The fact that the title track, a chart-topping global smash, would arrive at the apex of the first feminist wave is something to behold.
The Sugar Cubes –Life’s Too Good(1988) Hello unsuspecting world, here’s… Björk! Whatever this diminutive, quirky Icelandic woman was offering is difficult – even now nearly four decades hence – to comprehend, much less describe in mere words. Her singing, phrasing, weird melodic turns in this post-new-wave pop/rock masterwork has stood the test of time and influenced countless female vocalists, although, who the hell is approaching this? No one.
Tori Amos –Little Earthquakes(1992)
A remarkable achievement in musicality, virtuosic piano playing, intensely unique songwriting, and painfully beatific honesty in its lyrics, this debut set a standard for a long and fruitful career of pushing boundaries and framing the core of womanhood’s sexual and political hopes, dreams, and fears. Every song on this record is an absolute gem.
Lana Del Rey –Born to Die(2012)
There are better Lana Del Ray albums, but you get none of them without this (I guess you can say that about all debuts). However, sleeping on this is a mistake, for it not only introduced the concept of the psych-rock genre she invented, but it set in stone Lana’s one-of-a-kind understated phrasing and acute sexual parsing, becoming the longest-charting album by a woman on the Billboard 200.
Adele –19(2008)
To my knowledge, the only debut to reveal the age of the artist on it, and I would gather the only MySpace demo gal to gain a record deal, Adele’s magnificent voice and emotional phrasing pushed two singles, “Chasing Pavements” and Bob Dylan’s finest ballad, “Make You Feel My Love” into the UK Top 10. A British balladeer with a soulful cadence, crashed pop music’s woman-as-sex-object-and-rebel-queen party to usher nostalgic elegance back onto the charts.
The Pretenders –Pretenders(1980)
Lead singer, main songwriter, Chrissie Hynde was a mid-American ex-pat roaming through punk-addled London, bouncing off the Sex Pistols and the Clash, when she formed a band to kick everyone’s ass. In my high school, there wasn’t a girl worth her salt that didn’t sing, “Brass in Pocket’ as if a feminine national youth anthem. In fact, after I blithely broke it off with one of those girls, she quite correctly, if not surprisingly to my non-plussed parents, blasted the song outside my house (ala John Cusack in Say Anything). So, yeah, 17-year-old me, take that!
Carole King – Tapestry (1971)
Until Whitney Houston came along, no woman sold more albums than Carole King’s pristine masterpiece in songwriting length and breadth. Former Brill Building teen prodigy gone Laurel Canyon hippie, pens songs from the heart and soul, invades the charts and wows critics. A perennial album of the golden age of the singer-songwriter with “You’ve Got a Friend,” “So Far Away,” “It’s Too Late,” and the landmark, “(You Make Me Feel Like) a Natural Woman.”
Mariah Carey – Mariah Carey (1990)
This is how big this record was out of the gate: a dear friend and songwriting partner of mine at the time, uttered without irony, “We all have to love Mariah Carey now?” Ummm… yes. And how we loved those pipes, that inhuman range, the ability to smile as she sang (you can actually hear this woman smile on these tracks), on her way to breaking pop chart records set by man or woman on the wings of four (count ‘em) four #1 hits, “Vision of Love,” “Love Takes Time,” “Someday,” and “I Don’t Wanna Cry.”
Hole –Live Through This(1994)
Okay, so Hole’s first official album is Pretty on the Inside, but anyone who knows knows that this is the introduction of songwriter, lead singer and guitarist, Courtney Love from quasi-punk hanger-on to Kurt Cobain’s wife to undisputed grunge queen. Joined by two women, Patty Schemel on drums and bassist Kristen Pfaff, along with lead guitarist, Eric Erlandson, Love emerged from the daunting shadow of her husband’s suicide with an honest and powerful collection of songs.
Olivia Rodrigo –Sour(2021)
A modern take on the pop sensibilities that have carried the youth surge of post-World War II to the edge of the new century from a 17-year-old singer-songwriter helped spark a rising generation of women to dominate this latest surge of troubadours. Her tender forays on the teen spectrum of heartache and confusion (hence the album’s title) wrapped in a genuine communicative voice subsequently became the first debut album to produce two #1 debuts on the Billboard Hot 100: “Drivers License,” “Good 4 U,” followed by “Déjà vu” and “Traitor” invading the top 10.
Amy Winehouse –Frank(2003) The throwback’s throwback that sounds like a young woman being blasted out of a jazz-adorned canon into the British pop charts bloated with boy bands and nubile flash-in-the-pans. It is not Amy’s best work, as she attested at the time, but it was refreshing to hear the come-hither, smoky rich contralto voice from another time and place, as the title of the album suggests (Hello, Sinatra!). Unfortunately, her soap opera tragedies and untimely death overshadows her music, but it nonetheless remains her true legacy.
Billie Eilish –When We Fall Asleep Where Do We Go?(2019)
Its creepy, alluring, funny, and catchy as all get-out. Nothing before or since has sounded like this – a stirring debut by two teen siblings (Billie and her bro, Fineas) holed up in a bedroom making sounds and songs that will soon conquer the pop world. Although her trajectory shot into the stratosphere, much of the naivete and blessed strangeness has since been removed from later works, and for those who were given this spectacular promise, it’s a tough hang.
When I was a kid, in my house, Barbra ruled. My dad loved her voice. And when I couldn’t think of anything to get him for a birthday or Father’s Day, bam! Barbra album! This one, I think, I got him, and then years later scored an original Columbia release. But if you want to hear a 21-year-old with a soaring operatic range with lightning quick phrasing and a biting sense of humor crush every song on an album, here ya go.
Pat Benatar –In the Heat of the Night (1979)
Where Billie had her bro, Pat had her boyfriend and later husband, Neil Geraldo by her side to assist in realizing her voice. – a powerful roar worthy of the best male leads. Eschewing new wave or disco, which was the genres on a roll in 1979, Benatar instead returned to good, old-fashioned sexy, punchy rock and delivered a bombastic debut featuring radio and MTV staple, “Heartbreaker.”
Regina Spektor –11:11(2001)
Independently released collection of exquisitely composed and arranged songs on piano introduced this New York City by way of Russia original to the world as a jazz/blues enthusiast aching to take those genres and package them later into a whirlwind creative spirit. Spektor would go onto to produce some of the most uniquely sounding albums of the early century and it begins here by her lonesome, unaffected.
Ani DiFranco –Ani DiFranco(1990)
Speaking of unaffected and completely autonomous music-making, here is the launching of the Righteous Babe empire cut on her own, published on her own, and pitched around early-90s New York City… on her own. The striking vocal cadence, the slicing lyrics, the feral, rhythmic acoustic guitar that sound like a band, changed underground sounds for men and women forevermore.
I rarely have the time to catch one music documentary when it’s released, much less three. But this past week-plus, I’ve had the pleasure to take in a trio of gems, all of them presenting the stories of worthy subjects – the life and music of Billy Preston, Paul McCartney’s journey from the Beatles through his years in Wings, and Elvis Presley’s late 60s Las Vegas residency. Each of these films tell their tales in far different ways, but all three are compelling, educational, and entertaining storytelling.
The music doc has evolved over the past decade into several incarnations, from a bevy of distended voices filling out the visuals (2024’s compelling One to One: John & Yoko, Todd Hayne’s stellar, The Velvet Underground from 2021) or using talking heads (Questlove’s dynamic,Summer of Soul, Netflix’s comprehensive, The Greatest Night in Pop from 2024 covering the “We Are The World” recording). There is the fly-on-the-wall cinema verité of Peter Jackson’s rightfully heralded The Beatles: Get Back from 2021, which restored countless hours of footage of the Fab Four’s creative process through painstaking experimentation of AI technology, and 2018’s Amazing Grace, which took good old-fashioned human elbow-grease to rescue the original film from technical difficulties that shelved the telling of Aretha Franklin’s 1972 live recording of gospel standards in a Los Angles church. There are tell-alls, Amy (2015) covering in painful detail the rise of tragic fall of Amy Winehouse to comprehensive four-hour band epics, Long Strange Trip (2017), an exhaustive chronicle of the Grateful Dead or Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men (2019) that tracks the story behind one of the most influential hip-hop groups of all time.
For the record: I do not necessarily consider a straight concert film a documentary, unless it includes interviews, backstory and perspective. Interestingly, I think Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz as both a doc and concert film manages to balance indisputably the greatest concert movie of all time with commentary but falls short as an inclusive a documentary as one would hope on the band or their times. Yet, the medium in the hands of a unparalleled fictional storyteller like Scorsese, who unfolds a sweeping aural guidebook to an entire era through the performances, and one of the directors of these three new documentaries I cover here, can artfully infuse a thematic edge to the process. I’ll elaborate later.
No matter their agenda or process, these three films tell a larger story about each artist in original and captivating ways. In two, the voices of the dead testify to their experience from random, edited interviews to wrest a tired narrative from the clutches of history, and in the third, a man in his eighties tries to make sense of a life lived in the spotlight he simultaneously strived to remain in and sought shelter from.
Let’s do them in order of my seeing them.
BILLY PRESTON – THAT’S THE WAY GOD PLANNED IT
Thanks to my dear friend, the inimitable singer-songwriter deluxe, Eric Hutchinson, who got the tix and invited me along, we checked this out at the legendary Film Forum three weeks back. Directed by industry veteran of film and television, Paris Barclay, That’s The Way God PlannedIt, titled after Billy Preston’s first big hit as a solo artist, chronicles the truly extraordinary, six-decade career of the Grammy-winning keyboardist from his incredible rise as a child prodigy on organ appearing on the Nat King Cole variety show through his touring work backing such legends as Ray Charles and Little Richard, which had him crossing paths with the Beatles and the Rolling Stone, both of whom he would record with and in the case of the Stones tour with, to his inevitable chart-topping stardom.
Barclay depicts Preston, as he was known in his lifetime, as a cheerful, ebullient personality that enlivened every session or show he participated in with as humble a reserve as could have possibly been displayed by someone so musically gifted. This was, sadly, a front for a person in great pain, which the film explains covering his conflicted childhood in Baptist churches joyfully singing and playing, set against alleged sexual and violent abuses from family members. This left Preston closeted from not only his homosexuality and proclivity for young boys later in life but displayed how folding into himself kept those close to him or his musical collaborators from seeing his trauma. This, Barclay surmises through dozens of interviews, led to Preston’s future drug and alcohol abuse as a kind of self-loathing penance.
The true highlight of the film is the archived footage of the dynamism of Preston’s amazing performances soundtracked by commentary from those who knew and loved him from family to friends and famous musicians whose music was enhanced by Preston’s work, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Mick Jagger, and more. It’s quite moving to hear how deeply the usually reserved and off-putting Eric Clapton speaks so emotionally about trying to save Preston from his addictions, relating to his demons as a former heroin addict, paining to keep his friend from falling into ruin.
And this is where the complicated legacy of Bill Preston is written in That’s The Way God PlannedIt, ultimately, with crimes including drug possession, insurance fraud (in which he was eventually convicted and served time) and being caught time and again with teenage boys. The film doesn’t redeem or excuse any of this, of course, but in its coda and summation, Preston turns his life around, cleansed of substance abuse, to return from prison a man understanding his talent had always been his true refuge from the pain and sorrow he kept hidden, filling out his days not as a cautionary tale of someone who’d reached the heights and lost everything to someone who still cherished his music (the man had a ton of hits, many of which I bought at the time) and the roots of his culture to finally admit out loud his sexual truth a day before he died at 59-years-old.
MAN ON THE RUN
When I reviewed Tom Doyle’s wonderfully written Man on the Run – Paul McCartney in the 1970s in 2013, I was convinced it would make a great movie. I wasn’t thinking documentary, but considering the state of music biopics these days, I’m glad it went in this direction. Oscar-winning filmmaker, Morgan Neville’s Man on the Run, like his 20 Feet from Stardom (2013), which for the first time covered the unsung life and times of backups singers, neatly combines the music of Paul McCartney with a portrait of his life and times. Despite being hounded throughout his career as both a Beatle and a solo artist for not using his music as biography, as his songwriting partner, John Lennon was lauded for achieving, Neville finds that there was, indeed, a narrative forming behind McCartney’s most beloved pop hits.
Beyond using the songs as guideposts to McCartney’s resurrection from the ashes of his band’s demise – one that he tried like hell to keep together but was forced to abandon and then blamed for breaking up – we hear the 83-year-old composer speak candidly about what he was going through at the time deflecting the misconceptions of his lawsuits against the Beatles and his fight to reinvent himself as a solo performer.
The ghost of the Beatles, particularly Lennon, haunts McCartney during the initials days of the breakup in which the film does a terrific job of depicting with archived and recent footage of he and Linda’s run-down Scottish cabin he retreated to in order to heal his emotional wounds. And from this blessed isolation, Paul begins to make music again and most importantly reignites his passion for live performing, which the Beatles, much to his consternation, refused to do after 1966.
And that is the other interesting slant to Man on the Run: McCartney’s struggles to recreate in some way a band construct for him to once again find comfort to produce and eventually perform his magnificent songs. Choosing his wife, Linda to build this new group, a boldly controversial move at the time, and what turns out to be another spiritual connection like he had with John as a teenager, Paul pieces together as best he can a democratic unit. From its perceived humble beginnings, that band, Wings was a rag-tag experiment that never seemed to come up with a solution of whether they were there to serve the main man’s wishes or add viable input.
Neville masterfully takes us on Wings’ ascent from this underappreciated and poorly marketed unit to one of the most celebrated and successful (if not critically harangued) acts of the 1970s. And just like the Beatles neatly tied up its 1960s story, the journey of Wings spans the decade, wrapping up with the same anticlimax as his previous band by 1980. Throughout there are many twists, turns, and personnel changes – Paul and Linda, along with their kids, quite literally on the run constantly stitching together sustainable combos to present their music, beyond lifer, Denny Laine (late of the Moody Blues).
And as Paul McCartney remains the greatest living songwriter and one that with his long list of hits and albums has, when combined with his Beatles output, continued to enthrall us, having a portion of his ouevre – and this is some heady portion – dissected is welcomed by fans and the curious (is there still people unaware of this?) alike.
EPIC
Baz Luhrmann, yet another Englishman obsessed with the complicated balance of the ancient American deep south, its voices, its music, its traditions, its sins, its magic and the grotesque exploitation of showbiz, has put a new coat of glittery paint on Elvis Aaron Presley. Like the British Invasion before him, his reverence for the image and texture of Elvis as a heroic if not damaged figure of American myth is both inspiring and irreverent. The director already made an uneven if not entertaining biopic of the King of Rock and Roll, with 2022’s Elvis, and with the same fervor for meshing myth with reality and modernity with the stale echoes of American schlock, his EPIC (Elvis Presley In Concert) is a rousing tribute to a rarely examined portion of Presley’s career – his post icon-shapeshifter early mid-1950s period into the army and then out to Hollywood live performance era. What Luhrmann’s frenetically paced film (and I use that term adoringly, as I love his style), does best is circles Elvis as the ultimate musical archetype and exceptional stage performer, but despite what the trailers promised of letting the King tell his own story, he, in fact, tells Luhrmann’s story of how he views Elvis – with the same nods to painting Colonel Parker as the devil as his ’22 biopic did (the film’s graphics are the same, denoting this is a companion piece).
Luhrmann, in many ways, is in his films, something critics debate over incessantly – should we notice the filmmaker in the story he is telling? It is impossible for me to separate those aspects of filmmaking. Part of the draw to see EPICwas Luhrmann for me. But he cannot escape himself – the hyper-editing, tricky audio devices like repeating sung or spoken lines for maximum thematic effect or morphing old into new footage, as he as he did with music in his previous films like Moulin Rouge, The Great Gatsby, and the first Elvis flick, including mashups of traditional songs with modern sounds.
It is through this aural and visual prism that Presley becomes a man stuck in a time capsule, forever bedazzled in polyester jumpsuits with his awkward karate moves and sweaty scarves tossed to frantic middle-aged women. As he was in his many kitschy 1960s films, which Luhrmann drives home was Elvis’s ultimate prison, he traps him again in the garish ballroom of the International Hotel, singing his hits with a smirk and a wink. Hey, look at me when I was young and dumb. And that is always been my fuck-you! to the smarmy 1960s Elvis. That is until EPIC’s new footage found from the 1972, Elvis on Tour film set against his 1950s TV appearances revealed that Elvis always thought what he was doing was goofy, but not in a self-mocking way, but as a not-taking-this-too-serious way that ironically EPIC with its grotesquely over-hyped title suggests. Just as the bounding “Also sprach Zarathustra” heralded his highness to the stage bloated with three-dozen musicians and singers. But in masterful surround sound and through mesmerizing cutting, Luhrmann supremely resurrects what made Elvis special: he was a natural.
One key highlight from found 1972 cutting room floor footage is how utterly joyful and lost in the music Elvis always was and would be until his dying day. His most honest and relaxed interplay is during rehearsals with his incredible band, which in every incarnation during this period is fire. An incredible ensemble with the Sweet Inspirations singing their hearts out is mind-boggling stuff. This is what cuts through all the playful Luhrmann pomp, and it is where Elvis lived. So, in essence, he didn’t need to “tell his story.” His voice, his passion for the stage and to envelope song is what tells that story best.
Wrapping up my four-week exploration/celebration of the major Black forces in all genres of American music to commemorate Black History Month with more notable and laudable voices, musicians, innovators and influencers. These are the trailblazers and the legacies filled with instinct and guile, but most of all courage, as every one of them strived to overcome hardship due to systemic racism to bring forth the most original and dynamic music of the age.
King of Ragtime
The irrepressible and prolific genius that was Scott Joplin composed more than 40 ragtime pieces, many wildly popular for his times (the turn of the century), including “Maple Leaf Rag,” a recording so immensely ingrained in the spirit and movement of the genre it is still considered quintessential.
Joplin was not only prolific, he considered ragtime as important as classical music and made sure his works were performed in theaters as opposed to the more ubiquitous saloons. To this end, he also penned a ragtime ballet, and two operas based on the style. I was introduced to Joplin through the film The Sting when I was a kid (thanx for taking me, Dad), as his music, adapted by Marvin Hamlisch, comprises its brilliant soundtrack. I was then moved to buy the single for Scott’s “The Entertainer,” which was a significant hit in 1973, reaching #3 on the Billboard Hot 100, some 70 years after Joplin released it.
When I was working on my 2024 book,Revolution – Prince, the Band, the Era, Joplin’s influence and wide-ranging musical brilliance hung heavy on the likes of someone with similar drive and purpose for multi-level virtuosity as Prince Rogers Nelson, whose father had taught him to revere.
Emily
The beautifully elegant and impossibly hip, Esperanza Emily Spalding, or as those close to her call her, Emily, is one of the great musical trendsetters of our time, balancing her art in a mixture of modern jazz, pop, and Hispanic soul, enveloping their best attributes to create something iridescent. Known for her virtuosity on double bass accompanied by smooth vocal stylings that act more as an orchestral instrument than simple communication, she started out as a child prodigy in Portland, Oregon, performing professionally as a violinist in the Chamber Music Society of Oregon at age five. Expanding her oeuvre, she was self-taught on guitar and bass, eventually earning academic scholarships to Portland State University and Berklee College of Music.
For much of the early 2000s, Esperanza released intricately delectable albums of variant styles, both original and covers, illustrating her delicate scatting techniques and showcasing her fluid bass melodies. On her eponymously titled second offering, she broke through (this is when I first heard her in 2008), providing an eclectic introduction to the music that would invade the charts by her third album, Chamber Music Society (2010), reaching #34 on the Billboard 200, and earning the first of her five Grammys Awards.
Success has provided Esperanza a larger audience in which to share her social and political stances against human trafficking and racism, much of which ends up in Radio Music Society, her 2012 album that features one of her most striking compositions, “City of Roses.” She’s also co-written two jazz operas and still records today at 41-years-old continuing to compose, record, and tour the world.
Mr. Everything
The one and only, multi-talented, groundbreaking composer, arranger, producer and dynamic singer, musician and performer, Stevie Wonder grew up in the music that would shape, lead and eventually dominate his lifetime, from rhythm and blues, rock and roll, soul, funk and modern pop. From the mid-1960s to today (with an unmatched run of albums in the early to later 1970s), Stevie expanded the sonic elements of every genre, bending several to his will and sifting them through the multi-colored prism of his genius.
Starting as Little Stevie Wonder at 13 years-old, playing harmonica and singing with a confidence of a 30 year-old, he was eventually promoted for the unique element of his blindness by a burgeoning Motown Records but soon shed that limiting marketing ploy to begin invading the soul and pop charts while flummoxing musicologists by surpassing many of his predecessors in intricate arrangements and elaborately produced tracks, Wonder played most if not all the instruments on his recordings to create a sound all his own.
I can discuss the hits – and they are many and varied – but his run of albums from 1972 through 1976 remains a pristine expression of the musical, social and personal in one. All of them masterworks: Music of My Mind, Talking Book – the latter featuring the groundbreaking, “Superstition,” which is one of the most distinctive and famous examples of the sound of his trusty Hohner Clavinet keyboard. Then Innervisions, Fulfilingness’ First Finale, and finally the sprawling double-album, Songs in the Key of Life, all of which won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year, making him the only artist to have won the award with three consecutive album releases.
There is not enough time or space to cover the immense contributions to the American musical landscape by the inimitable Stevland Hardaway Morris, aka Stevie Wonder.
Jimi
The undisputed master of the electric guitar, Jimi Hendrix erected a sonic bridge from the explorations of his antecedents to an entirely new form of rock music. Wiping the slate clean and forging new territory for the instrument that forever changed popular music. There remains the demarcation – Before Jimi and After Jimi. And, in many ways, even “After” no one could produce, seduce or caress the sounds he approached from the mid 1960s until his tragic death at just 27 in 1970.
Having developed his early style of bombastic performance and feedback-induced mayhem while playing music in the Air Force, Jimi quickly became a sought-after player along the famed “Chittlin’ Circuit” that allowed Black musicians to connect with their audiences in the Jim Crow South. During this time, rich in woodshedding and expansion, Hendrix backed such lauded acts as Wilson Pickett, Slim Harpo, Sam Cooke, Ike & Tina Turner, and Jackie Wilson. Later he toured extensively with Little Richard and was a member of the Isley Brothers band.
Breaking free of the traditional blues/soul and early rock and roll of a previous era, Hendrix, performing under the name Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, began a residency in Greenwich Village’s Cafe Wa? but did not find an audience until he decamped to London, England and found a benefactor in the bassist for the British blues/pop band, the Animals, Chas Chandler. It was there, during the height of Swinging London that Jimi floored every major pop and rock artist, gaining a reverence unmatched by anyone, even the Beatles and the Rolling Stones during that time.
King
Synonymous with the holiday season, due to his classic rendering of “The Christmas Song” from 1960, Nathaniel Adams Coles aka Nat “King” Cole recorded an astonishing 100 hit songs during his near 40-year career. Making his name as a jazz pianist and the leader of the pre-war King Cole Trio, the first Black act on Capitol Records throughout the 1940s, he inspired dozens of jazz trios to follow. Nat would then kick off the following decade as a solo singer and part-time actor, eventually becoming the first Black artist to host a nationally televised variety series for NBC in the mid-fifties.
His sultry vocal deliveries crossed over to mainstream audiences in a time when Nat faced terrible racial discrimination on the touring circuit. Much of his notable output included one of the finest recorded songs of the era, “Unforgettable,” the playful, “Nature Boy,” “When I Fall in Love,” (my parents wedding song, although that one is by Johnny Mathis, but not as good – sorry, Mom), the tender ear-worm, “Mona Lisa,” John Lennon’s favorite song, “Stardust,” and the standard, “Embraceable You.”
But, of course, it’s Nat’s The Magic of Christmas – thanks to “The Christmas Song” that became the best-selling Christmas album released in the 1960s and sealed his legend. But if being forever connected to the most celebrated international holiday every year for as long as we’re all still around to do it, that’s a damn fine legacy.
Big Mamma
The booming voice and ample countenance of the great Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton established her as the most influential and captivating woman blues shouter of the mid-20th century. Big Mamma was a force to reckoned with on and off stage. A brawler from Alabama in the hallowed Delta soil that birthed some of the most prominent blues artists of the era, she was the minority trifecta – Black, gay, and a woman in the Jim Crow South, and learned early the art of survival and battle to make her mark, and what a mark that turned out to be.
Willie Mae was the first (and still the best) to record the Leiber and Stoller classic, “Hound Dog” – a song specifically written for her. To listen to her belt out those first lines Yooouuuu ain’t nothin’ but a hound dawg… is to understand the woman’s hurt, defiance and humor all at once. Her hoots and hollers on that track and many of her ensuing recorded material were the precursor to all the great ad libs of the soon-to-come rock and roll, soul, funk and hip hop.
Big Mamma also put the blues classic, “Ball and Chain” on the map, bowling over a young Janis Joplin, who insisted on belting the song every time she stepped on stage as a homage to Thornton’s image of immovable strength – something Willie Mae displayed for another two decades before her death in 1984.
A true original in an arena dominated by men, Big Mamma was a revelation and revolution all in one.
Prince
And now to the one-man revolution, Prince Rogers Nelson. And when asked why I gave my aforementioned book that title, one only needs to take a glance at the musical and racial barriers toppled by his thematic and colossal output. Composing, arranging, performing, and producing nearly every note of his singles and albums, many of them massive hits, he also wrote and produced for many other successful acts. But that is only part of Prince’s story, the rest is found in his dedication to stripping away labels, and allowing all artists, no matter the color of their skin, to reach beyond the music industry silos and reductive music critic frameworks to create something wholly new.
Signed to Warner Bros. records at just 19 as “the new Stevie Wonder,” he was granted complete control over his music, image and performing. He put together killer touring bands that worked their way up through the clubs, combining funk with punk and swagger with overt sexuality to bring his playfully salacious material to the masses. In this way, Prince was the first blatantly sexual artist to not hint or play with the subject, but face it head on without shame.
Although his halcyon period is the 1980s, with his triumphantly critical and financial successes in gems like Dirty Mind, 1999, Purple Rain, and Sign ‘O’ the Times Prince continued to forge uncharted paths to soundtrack films not of his own (there are four of those), like 1989’s Batman, triple-album epics, 1996’s Emancipation, and later create direct online releases. In fact, Prince became the first established artist to set a course for his independence by using the Internet in its earliest stages to present his music straight to his fans (whom he affectionately called fams).
Until his final breath taken far too soon at age 57, dying in his home/studio, Paisley Park, Prince made music that excited, challenged and even sometimes flummoxed popular music the way it always should be.
I continue my month-long exploration and celebration of just some of the major Black forces in all genres of American music to commemorate Black History Month. The notable and laudable voices, musicians, innovators and influencers, the trailblazers filled with instinct and guile, but most of all courage, as every one of them strived to overcome hardship due to systemic racism to bring forth the most original and dynamic music of the age.
DJ Kool Herc
In the summer of 1973, Clive Campbell aka DJ Kool Herc, turned a Bronx, New York house party into an incubation lab for hip hop, a musical form of street poetry riding the crest of classic dance grooves that in 2017 surpassed rock and roll for the first time since the mid-1950s to become the most listened to genre of popular music in the western hemisphere. Word is Kool Herc also introduced “scratching” into the musical lexicon during this time – one turntable playing a backing track while the DJ holds onto a second album, moving it back and forth under the needle to create a percussive counter-rhythm.
Born in Jamaica, Clive was a relentless audiophile and certified music geek. At an impressionable age he was drawn to two key elements that birthed hip hop, both of which transformed the person merely playing the music into the central figure of the proceedings. The first is the music Campbell heard as a kid – mostly American R&B records bursting out of Memphis through Stax Records and Atlantic Records in New York City. The second is the technology that amplified its seductive grooves throughout neighborhood parties and teaming dance halls. The art of “dubbing,” paring down popular records to its rhythmic core by using their instrumental backbeats sans vocals with added reverb effects, also sparked the young Campbell’s interest, but to a rambunctious boy fueled with endless imagination, what may have been far more intriguing is what the guys who spun the records were doing while they played; a style of syncopated speech called “toasting.”
And so, it was Cambell, going by his stage name, DJ Kool Herc, joined by neighborhood poet, Coke La Rock, who transformed “toasting” into a New Yawk institution that rocked the house party hosted by his kid sister, Cindy, who charged a cover to buy expensive Manhattan styles for her upcoming middle-school year. Little did she know, her desire to look chic and provide a venue for her brother to kick it, exploded a musical revolution for decades to come.
Muddy
McKinley Morganfield aka Muddy Waters, is the bridge between the distant dark past of Black travails through the post-slavery cotton fields of Mississippi to the heavy rails of the Great Migration north to Chicago. A natural shapeshifter, he was rural, Southern Delta, acoustic, but he was also dapper, urban and electric. Along the way he invented the modern rock band – guitar and vocals (Muddy), guitar (Jimmy Rogers) bass (Willie Dixon), drums (Elgin Evans), keyboards (Otis Spann on piano), and sometimes Little Walter blowing harp. They were plugged in, loud, bold, and uncompromising. Forever to be the Muddy “Mississippi” Waters, he was the patriarch of the blues, a genre McKinley defined, dominated and turned into modern art.
At the famed Chess Studios, Muddy’s songs, many of them penned by Willie Dixon, were the foundation of modern blues and the precursor to rock and roll, “Hoochie Coochie Man,” “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” “I’m Ready,” “Mannish Boy,” “Rollin’ and Tumbling,’” and on and on, paving the way for giants like Etta James, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and more. Just about every rock and roll band from the 1960s on carry his imprint – the Rolling Stones took their name from his song, “Rollin’ Stone,” as did Bob Dylan for his “Like a Rolling Stone.” And I thank them all for introducing me to the blues and to Muddy, who, in 1981, I was fortunate enough to see play live in N.J., where he was just as vibrant and impressive as ever.
Cab
The multi-talented and immensely popular Cabell Calloway III, aka Cab, engineered a trailblazing career that spanned over 65 years of recording, performing, band leading, radio hosting and composing. His residency at Harlem, New York’s legendary Cotton Club in the 1930s became American lore, It is where he sparked his massive hit, “Minnie the Moocher” – the first single recorded by an African American to sell a million copies – featuring its infectious “hi-di-hi-di-hi-di-ho” refrain. His highly emotive dances and broad stage acting brought his songs to life and introduced the greater (White) public to the early 20th century Black experience.
Like many of the artists I’m spotlighting, Cab, who was taught to “scat” by legendary jazz trumpeter and vocalist, Louis Armstrong, smashed through racial barriers that helped launch the careers of hundreds of future Black performers by his example and agency – not the least of which the dazzling Dizzy Gillespie, who was a member of his famed orchestra.
Beyond music, Cab also has the distinction of breaking racial restrictions in broadcasting, as he became the first African American to have a nationally syndicated radio program. Later, he starred in several celebrated musicals, Stormy Weather (1943), Porgy and Bess (1953), The Cincinnati Kid (1965), and Hello Dolly! (1967), and finally, the musical comedy film The Blues Brothers (1980).
It is not too much to state that on the shoulders of Cab Calloway stands every Black pop music performer, actor, and musical entrepreneur.
The High Priestess
Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon, Nina Simone remains the symbol of the power, beauty and liberation of the Black Woman as a force of musical and social revolution. A masterful pianist with an arresting contralto voice that sent shivers down the spine, Nina used her knowledge and virtuosity to bend all manner of music – classical, folk, gospel, blues, jazz, R&B, and pop – to her considerable will. She could spin Johann Sebastian Bach into Thelonious Monk into Pinetop Perkins and make it distinctly her own.
Classically trained in all the important schools like Julliard in NYC, she decided to chuck academia and “serious” musical pursuits to invade the pop charts, beginning with her 1959 Top 20 hit, “I Loves You, Porgy,” after which she began combing her chameleon-like stylings into her tireless work for the burgeoning civil rights movement.
This was when Nina recorded one of the most compelling live albums ever, Nina Simone in Concert, in which she specifically addressed racial inequality in the United States with her seminal song, “Mississippi Goddam,” a response to the 1963 murder of Medgar Evers and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four young black girls and partly blinded a fifth. She later stated that the song was “like throwing ten bullets back at them” and it led to a predictable industry boycott of her music.
Undeterred, Nina not only dedicated her art to the civil rights cause, but she also spoke and performed at major events such as at the Selma to Montgomery marches. But the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr in the spring of 1968 shook her to her core, as racial violence bursted from every corner of America, causing her to leave the country to take up residency in France. A proud bisexual voice for the early struggles of the LGBTQ community, she lent her talents to their fight for equality as well and continued producing thought-provoking and experimental music until her death in 2003 at the age of 70.
Nina’s socio-political determination helped to inform countless Black female and male artists during her time, including much of the hip hop community’s early commitment to change found in Public Enemy, N.W.A., and Lauryn Hill.
Prince of Darkness
Miles Davis possessed an epic musical instinct. He was at once a taskmaster, an innovator, a master musician and inevitably a jazz icon. There are few figures of modern music – or any era for that matter – that did more to alter the creative landscape of his genre and the entire scope of music’s evolution than the cooler-than-ice trumpeter from Illinois.
It would be easier to cover what Miles didn’t accomplish – what he did do was play trumpet as a teenager in the renowned Charlie Parker’s bebop quintet in the mid-1940s – and not long after invented “cool jazz” with his seminal, and correctly titled, Birth of the Cool album. In the 1950s, he introduced the concept of “hard” or blues-oriented phrasing to be bop jazz with his spectacular Round About Midnight, while jump-starting Parker’s heir apparent on sax, John Coltrane in his groundbreaking sextet, which included the recording of my favorite and hugely popular jazz album, Kind of Blue. During this period, he also managed to work with arranger Gil Evans on orchestral jazz collaborations for the Spanish music-influenced Sketches of Spain – sparking the “Third Stream” jazz movement. In the late 1960s, his exploratory masterpiece, Bitches Brew, mixed mid-century jazz sounds with electric rock instruments to introduce the world to “fusion,” which ignited the prog-rock explosion of the early 1970s.
And this is just the tip of the evolutionary iceberg for one of the most important artists of our time. Miles Davis wrote and then rewrote the parameters of what we know of modern music, jazz or otherwise.
Funk Brother
James Jameson is arguably the most important electric bass player in the history of popular music, and perhaps its most talented and innovative, who’s best work transformed the Beatles’ Paul McCartney from pedestrian rock bass player into the genre’s foremost melodicist on the instrument. His uncredited contributions on most of Motown Records hits during that label’s halcyon period from the dawn of 1960s into early 1970s came as part of Motown’s esteemed Funk Brothers house band, which turned him into the central backing musician of Berry Gordy’s Hitsville U.S.A. studio in Detroit. This group of extraordinary musicians, led by James, tracked a remarkable 56 R&B #1 records and an equally staggering 23 that topped the Billboard Hot 100.
A sought-after jazz talent that turned down college scholarships to study music, James instead developed his original bottom-end groove style of melodic bass playing that relied cleverly on combined chromatic runs, syncopation, ghost notes and inversions while on tour with the dynamic Jackie Wilson, and then when paired with fellow jazz artists, drummer, Benny Benjamin, keyboardist, Earl Van Dyke, and dual guitarists, Joe Messina and Eddie Willis, he dominated the world of session playing. The Funk Brothers began laying down tracks for among others, the Supremes (“You Can’t Hurry Love”), the Temptations, (“My Girl”), Stevie Wonder (“For Once in My Life”), Martha and the Vandellas (“Dancing in the Street”), Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, (“Going to a Go-Go”), And Marvin Gaye (“I Heard It Through the Grapevine”) to create what became the Motown Sound.
After leaving Motown in 1973, James continued to play on hits for Gladys Knight & The Pips, the Sylvers, Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr., Robert Palmer, Dennis Wilson, and Aretha Franklin to name just a few, turning what was originally a background accompaniment instrument into a lead equal to that of the vocals or the guitar lines, providing hundreds of bassists in his wake, among them the Beach Boys, Brian Wilson, the Who’s John Entwistle, and Rush’s Geddy Lee, a blueprint to expand the instrument’s place in popular music.
Lady Soul
And then there is Aretha Franklin, the undisputed, unequalled, infinitely talented and beautiful Queen of Soul. The most pristinely gorgeous and emotionally charged voice to arrive in pop music, Aretha, since her pre-teen days as a gospel singer from Detroit, Michigan to her rise as one of the most important female artists in soul, pop, and rock, never found a song she couldn’t conquer unerringly filtered through her singular prism.
To understand the power and majesty of Aretha at her very best is to digest her Atlantic years, as she led some of the best musicians in the world through her songs and those of others that she interpreted as well as any singer – playing piano, while arranging musical styles and melodies along the way. This 1967 to 1968 run is otherworldly – I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, Aretha Arrives, Lady Soul, and Aretha Now are four of the best albums of the 1960s, an era lauded for its transformative musical evolutions in rock and pop.
When Aretha took songs like her signature track, “Respect” by Otis Redding or “You Make Me Feel Like (a Natural Woman,)” by Carole King – both high-level composers – she outright owned them, as both songwriters attested. She could be compelling, sexy, vulnerable and uplifting, running the complete gamut of emotions in an album, and sometimes, in one song.
Despite her immense popularity as a secular artist, Aretha returned time and again to her roots in the gospel tradition, which she performed as well as anyone ever, whether beside her father, Reverend C. L. Franklin or in front of traditional Baptist choirs. Her 1972 live album, Amazing Grace and the film of its recording, released just a few years ago, contains the best of the Queen of Soul in every form.
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