Music

MAYBE YOU CAN MEET YOUR HEROES:

Living in the Present with John Prine (Tom Piazza, 10/08/18, Oxford American)

The last time I wrote a profile of a musician—that Jimmy Martin piece, twenty-two years ago—I ended up backstage at the Grand Ole Opry. Crowded hallways with people hollering and pushing their way through, musicians in jeweled suits warming up with fiddles and guitars, people telling jokes and other people squeezing past on their way to the stage. Jimmy had gotten drunk at his house, and I had to drive us to Opryland in his midnight-blue Lincoln stretch limo, which kept stalling out; when we got there he tried to pick a fight with Ricky Skaggs and almost managed to punch out Bill Anderson. So far the worst thing that’s happened on this trip is that Prine hogged all the tiramisu last night. And now we are going to a shoe store. A shoe store, I think—this is what twenty-two years can do for you.

We walk into the store, and John heads for a display where leather Top-Siders are lined up. I look around the shop. I’ve been having trouble with my own feet, actually. The salesperson greets me respectfully and calls me “sir.” As long as John’s trying out shoes I figure there’s nothing to lose by looking at some myself. There’s a slightly weird-looking pair, a dove-gray hybrid of sneaker, boat shoe, and walking shoe. I ask the clerk for a pair in 10 1/2; he brings them and they feel pretty good, incredibly lightweight, although there is a lot of room up by my toes, and the tops of the shoes have a kind of weird pucker; they look like space shoes. I ask the clerk if I can see a pair of tens.

While I’ve been doing this, John has settled on a pair of boat shoes featuring extremely shiny brass eyelets. They are some seriously bright eyelets.

“Jeez,” I say. “You’ll have to wear sunglasses to cut down on the glare.”

“They feel great,” he says, walking back and forth.

“It’s nice they throw in the shoes when you buy the eyelets.”

“I can black them out with a magic marker.”

We both buy the shoes we’ve been looking at. We walk outside into the heat and stand in front of the store, holding our shopping bags. I’m trying not to imagine what we must look like. We put on our sunglasses. “There’s your article, right there,” he says. “Buying shoes with John Prine!”

SELF-INDULGENCE:

The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music: Tonality points toward the divine—and atonality leads away from it. (Robert R. Reilly, April 17, 2025, Modern Age)

The systematic fragmentation of music was the logical working out of the premise that music is not governed by mathematical relationships and laws that inhere in the structure of a hierarchical and ordered universe, but is wholly constructed by man and therefore essentially without limits or definition. Tonality, as the pre-existing principle of order in the world of sound, goes the same way as the objective moral order. So how does one organize the mess that is left once God departs? If there is no pre-existing intelligible order to go out to and apprehend, and to search through for what lies beyond it—which is the Creator—what then is music supposed to express? If external order does not exist, then music turns inward. It collapses in on itself and becomes an obsession with technique. Any ordering of things, musical or otherwise, becomes simply the whim of man’s will.

Without a “music of the spheres” to approximate, modern music, like the other arts, began to unravel. Music’s self-destruction became logically imperative once it undermined its own foundation. In the 1920s, Arnold Schoenberg unleashed the centrifugal forces of disintegration in music through his denial of tonality. Schoenberg contended that tonality does not exist in nature as the very property of sound itself, as Pythagoras had claimed, but was simply an arbitrary construct of man, a convention. This assertion was not the result of a new scientific discovery about the acoustical nature of sound, but of a desire to demote the metaphysical status of nature. Schoenberg was irritated that “tonality does not serve, [but] must be served.” Rather than conform himself to reality, he preferred to command reality to conform itself to him. As he said, “I can provide rules for almost anything.” Like Pythagoras, Schoenberg believed that number was the key to the universe. Unlike Pythagoras, he believed his manipulation of number could alter that reality in a profound way. Schoenberg’s gnostic impulse is confirmed by his extraordinary obsession with numerology, which would not allow him to finish a composition until its opus number corresponded with the correct number of the calendar date.

Schoenberg proposed to erase the distinction between tonality and atonality by immersing man in atonal music until, through habituation, it became the new convention. Then discords would be heard as concords. As he wrote, “The emancipation of dissonance is at present accomplished and twelve-tone music in the near future will no longer be rejected because of ‘discords.’” Anyone who claims that, through his system, the listener shall hear dissonance as consonance is engaged in reconstituting reality.

Of his achievement, Schoenberg said, “I am conscious of having removed all traces of a past aesthetic.” In fact, he declared himself “cured of the delusion that the artist’s aim is to create beauty.” This statement is terrifying in its implications when one considers what is at stake in beauty. Simone Weil wrote that “we love the beauty of the world because we sense behind it the presence of something akin to that wisdom we should like to possess to slake our thirst for good.” All beauty is reflected beauty. Smudge out the reflection and not only is the mirror useless but the path to the source of beauty is barred. Ugliness, the aesthetic analogue to evil, becomes the new norm. Schoenberg’s remark represents a total rupture with the Western musical tradition.

The loss of tonality was also devastating at the practical level of composition because tonality is the key structure of music. Schoenberg took the twelve equal semi-tones from the chromatic scale and declared that music must be written in such a way that each of these twelve semi-tones has to be used before repeating any one of them. If one of these semi-tones was repeated before all eleven others were sounded, it might create an anchor for the ear which could recognize what is going on in the music harmonically. The twelve-tone system guarantees the listener’s disorientation.

Tonality is what allows music to express movement—away from or towards a state of tension or relaxation, a sense of motion through a series of crises and conflicts which can then come to resolution. Without it, music loses harmony and melody. Its structural force collapses. Gutting music of tonality is like removing grapes from wine. You can go through all the motions of making wine without grapes but there will be no wine at the end of the process. Similarly, if you deliberately and systematically remove all audible overtone relationships from music, you can go through the process of composition, but the end product will not be comprehensible as music. This is not a change in technique; it is the replacement of art by ideology.

Schoenberg’s disciples applauded the emancipation of dissonance but soon preferred to follow the centrifugal forces that Schoenberg had unleashed beyond their master’s rules. Pierre Boulez thought that it was not enough to systematize dissonance in twelve-tone rows. If you have a system, why not systematize everything? He applied the same principle of the tone-row to pitch, duration, tone production, intensity and timber, every element of music. In 1952, Boulez announced that “every musician who has not felt—we do not say understood but felt—the necessity of the serial language is USELESS.” Boulez also proclaimed, “Once the past has been got out of the way, one need think only of oneself.” Here is the narcissistic antithesis of the classical view of music, the whole point of which was to draw a person up into something larger than himself.

The dissection of the language of music continued as, successively, each isolated element was elevated into its own autonomous whole. Schoenberg’s disciples agreed that tonality is simply a convention, but saw that, so too, is twelve-tone music. If you are going to emancipate dissonance, why organize it? Why even have twelve-tone themes? Why bother with pitch at all? Edgar Varese rejected the twelve-tone system as arbitrary and restrictive. He searched for the “bomb that would explode the musical world and allow all sounds to come rushing into it through the resulting breach.” When he exploded it in his piece Hyperprism, Olin Downes, a famous New York music critic, called it “a catastrophe in a boiler factory.” Still, Varese did not carry the inner logic of the “emancipation of dissonance” through to its logical conclusion. His noise was still formulated; it was organized. There were indications in the score as to exactly when the boiler should explode.

What was needed, according to John Cage (1912–92), was to have absolutely no organization.

BEYOND YACHT ROCK:

The Lost Prince of Yacht Rock: In 1978 he was music’s next big thing. Then his album bombed, he began a long slide into obscurity, and a bizarre fraud sent him to prison. Will Dane Donohue finally get his encore? (Keith Barry, March 25, 2021, Narratively)

Donohue’s only album fits squarely into a genre that’s now commonly called “yacht rock,” a neologism for a sound you’re probably familiar with even if you weren’t alive in the 1970s. Think Michael McDonald’s husky “I Keep Forgettin’” or the shuffle beat of Toto’s “Rosanna.” The genre has cycled through popularity, ridicule, nostalgia and respect, all the way back to popularity again: There’s a “yacht rock” station on SiriusXM that plays ’70s soft rock hits, and hipsters in captain’s hats sing Christopher Cross’s “Sailing” at karaoke. There’s even been a yacht rock–themed Peloton workout.

Since its release in 1978, Dane Donohue has gained a cult following among yacht rock fans. That’s because it’s a seminal work in the development of the genre, says “Hollywood” Steve Huey, a former AllMusic critic. Huey would know: Along with JD Ryznar, David B. Lyons and Hunter Stair, he co-created the mockumentary that gave yacht rock its name. They also hosted the Beyond Yacht Rock podcast, and they are writing a book about the genre too.

“You can hear this older kind of David Geffen, Asylum kind of sound — it sounds like the whole Laurel Canyon kind of scene, the early ’70s stuff,” Huey says, referring to the Los Angeles neighborhood where folk-rockers like the Mamas & the Papas and Joni Mitchell lived in the ’60s and early ’70s, and where the Eagles honed their sound. You could mistake the first few songs on Donohue’s album for Jackson Browne. But then you hit songs like “Woman” or “Can’t Be Seen,” and it’s a total paradigm shift. “You can also hear where the music is going, where the Southern California sound is about to go over the next few years.” More horns, more rhythm, more jazzy chord progressions.

Dane Donohue was lucky enough to be in the studio at an important moment in the L.A. music scene, when studio musicians started merging the tight ensemble work of funk and Motown, the screaming guitar solos of rock, the creativity of jazz, the rhythms of Rio, the blues-tinged R&B of Stax, and the introspective singer-songwriter melodies of the Laurel Canyon era, while superstar producers started using the latest technology to make slick, flawless recordings. And Donohue’s voice — which blended the airy twanginess of a Nashville tearjerker with the drama and clarity of a Broadway first act finale — was an ideal vessel to cross over between the old and new worlds of Southern California soft rock.

Yacht rock lyrics tend to deal with divorce, male loneliness and suburban ennui — a far cry from the vitality of war protests and civil rights anthems of a decade earlier. But more important, yacht rock is a sound, and that sound was defined by the tight-knit group of studio musicians who inadvertently created the genre. The guys behind yacht rock — and with the exception of a handful of backup singers, it was always guys — were among the most talented in the business. They made names for themselves as “first call” musicians, who artists and producers would specifically request for their albums. And the best of the best played on Dane Donohue.

Critics dismissed what came out of the Southern California studios as radio-friendly soft rock, but it permeated popular music for nearly a decade, its influence seeping into every genre from disco to hair metal. Some of the musicians on Donohue’s album were already famous, while others would go on to write, record on or produce some of the best-known songs of the 20th century. Put together, they would win more than 30 Grammy awards during their varied careers.

TWIXT:

Punk, Poet, Prophet: In Praise of the Late, Great Shane MacGowan : Ed Simon on One of Music’s Great Lyricists (Ed Simon, March 17, 2025, Lit Hub)

“There’s a glass of punch below your feet and an angel at your head / There’s devils on each side of you with bottles in their hands / You need one more drop of poison and you’ll dream of foreign lands,” MacGowan sings in “The Sick Bed of Cuchulain,” the album’s first track. Poetry between heaven and hell, with all the sublimity of Yeats and the profanity of Behan, where they “took you up to midnight Mass and left you in the lurch / So, you dropped a button in the plate and spewed up in the church.” Wild music, but haunted. Shades of the dunes when on “A Pair of Brown Eyes,” a MacGowan describes “blood and death neath a screaming sky… And the arms and legs of other men / Were scattered all around, / Some cursed, some prayed, some prayed then cursed / Then prayed and bled some more.”

Back when I used to drink, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash was a favored album to shell out quarters for in the neon cacophony of the barroom jukebox; “Farewell to New York City boys, to Boston and PA!” belted out at Silky’s, Kelly’s, the Cage. “I’m a free born man of the USA!” goes the chorus in “Body of an American,” from the EP of Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash, a declaration of independence, but half-hearted, knowing that the inverse of freedom can always be another form of servitude.

I quit drinking, but I still listen to the Pogues.

TOP OF THE WORLD:

 REVIEW: of Doc Watson: A Life in Music by Eddie Huffman (James Ruchala, 1/27/25, Open Letters Review)

Despite becoming blind by his first birthday, growing up in one of the poorest areas of the nation, and relying on government support until middle age, Doc Watson became one of the most influential guitar players of the twentieth century. Watson could “bridge the gap” between the traditional Appalachian tunes he learned from family and neighbors and the music popular with modern urban audiences. As one early manager explained: “While some [folk] singers yowled like a rusty hinge or a deer tangled in a barbed-wire fence, Doc hummed like a well-tuned engine or a purring cat.” His recordings as both a guitar player and a singer are some of the warmest and most accessible to come out of the revival of interest in traditional American folk music forms that started in the early 1960s. 

THE BEAUTY MYTH:

Can’t Live With It, Can’t Live Without it – The Grateful Dead (Graeme Tait Can’t, 2/05/25, Americana uk)

“American Beauty”, the band’s fifth studio album, was released in November 1970, barely four months after the release of their previous offering “Workingman’s Dead”, and the two albums are seen very much as companions, some would say like brother and sister. The comparison is understandable, as prior to these recordings the band’s legacy had been forged on the stage rather than in the studio, mainly because they used their songs as starting points for improvisation that suited their psychedelic sound, of which they were the original true explorers, rather than ideals simply to be duplicated. However, the fading embers of the 60’s marked the beginning of the end of the ‘Hippie Dream‘, requiring the band to take stock and, in the studio at least, find a new approach. Crosby, Stills, & Nash had long been friends with the band, especially Garcia, who was particularly impressed with how the trio used their vocal harmonies, and was looking to embrace a similar approach, while the band’s lyricist Robert Hunter began incorporating more American folklore into the narratives including trains, guns, gambling and alcohol, using the country’s geography and religious symbolism to help create a visual soundscape full of American myth. The musical arrangement was also changed, now drawing heavily on the Bakersfield sound, a sub-genre of country music developed in the mid-to-late 1950’s in California defined by its use of electric instruments, and strong backbeat, being highly influenced by rock’n’roll, and born out of a reaction to the slickly produced sound emanating from Nashville.

“Workingman’s Dead” proved to be a resounding success, but in many ways it was a just template for what the band would create just four months later, having moved the recording process to Wally Heider Studios in San Francisco and choosing to co-produce the album with staff engineer Stephan Barncard, rather than previous producer Bob Matthews. They had also just discovered that manager, Lenny Hart (father of the drummer Micky Hart) had renewed their contract with Warner Brothers Records without their knowledge, before skipping town with a sizeable amount of the band’s wealth.

Like it’s predecessor, “American Beauty” was innovative for its fusion of bluegrass, rock’n’roll, folk and of course country music, though where “Workingman’s Dead” mixed the grittier Bakersfield sound with the band’s psychedelic roots, the new release was mostly acoustic in nature, with Garcia replacing his electric guitar for a pedal steel, while there was a greater focus on major-key melodies and folk harmonies. Drummer Bill Kreutzmann later explained, “The singers in our band really learned a lot about harmonising from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, who had just released their seminal album “Deja Vu”, (recording their vocals around a 360 degree mic, before adding identical overdubs at 3/4 of the level). It was also on this album that Garcia first collaborated with legendary mandolinist David Grisman whose playing is heard to great effect on the tracks ‘Friend Of The Devil’ and ‘Ripple’.

Just as significantly was the increased writing input from the rest of the band which was in stark contrast to previous albums where almost all the songs had been composed by the songwriting partnership of Garcia and Hunter. This was immediately apparent from the opening number, the sublimely beautiful ‘Box Of Rain’, co-written by Hunter and bassist Phil Lesh, it was the first Grateful Dead song to feature Lesh on lead vocals. Harmonies were provided by Bob Weir as well as Garcia who also played piano, while David Nelson (of New Riders Of The Purple Sage) guested on lead guitar. As recently as last year ‘Rolling Stone Magazine’ ranked this song in the ‘Top 500 Songs Of All Time’. Second track ‘Friend Of The Devil’, a song written by Garcia and Hunter along with John Dawson, (also from New Riders Of The Purple Sage) opens with Garcia playing a delightful descending G major scale in the bass register, while Hunter’s lyrics skilfully succeed in connecting the fatalism of the physical frontier with the wonder of the psychedelic one. Third track ‘Sugar Magnolia’, with writing credits shared between Hunter and Weir, who also supplied the lead vocals, has long become one of the band’s best known songs and remained an integral part of their live set throughout the following decades while fourth number ‘Operator’, was written and sung by co-founder and original frontman for the band Ron McKennan (aka Pigpen). In truth, this was his only real contribution to the album as by this time his role within the band had become vastly diminished due to his deteriorating health. The first side of the original vinyl album comes to a close with ‘Candyman’, another classic Garcia/Hunter track with its beguiling structural simplicity and sweetest of melodies encouraging the listener to just drift away on a warm summer’s breeze.

CLASSICIST:

Requiem for a Punster: Leonard Slatkin Pays Tribute to P.D.Q. Bach (and Peter Schickele) (Chris King, November 22, 2024. Common Reader)

Leonard Slatkin: Peter Schickele was a composer, first and foremost. He played the bassoon and the piano as well. He had written, among other things, the music for a show back in the early sixties called O Calcutta that was a little bit like Hair, and these other sort of hippie-inspired things where it was very short, momentary flash of full nudity onstage, very shocking back in the early sixties. He wrote the music for a film called Silent Running with Bruce Dern, which was about the impact of pollution on the environment and outer space. He was part of a group called The Open Window, that combined classical music with pop genres of the time.

The success of that concert at Town Hall really put him on the map. He would appear on The Today Show; he would be on late-night chat shows. This invention of the last and least of J.S. Bach’s children was giving a kind of comedic bent to the stuffy world of classical music. Even if you didn’t know anything about classical music, you could come to these concerts and you would be rolling on the floor, because all of the references he would make to different music. At the same time he would invent instruments, all these things that were crazy. But it was very funny, and it really caught on—the public really embraced it.

When I came to St. Louis in 1968, we had this idea to do a concert at the Zoo, and we commissioned Peter to write a piece which was called A Zoo Called Earth, and at the end of the piece there was a march where many animals came out. The piece has become almost a staple of children’s concerts these days. It was also one of the first classical music pieces to deal with the environment because it had to do with an alien who comes to visit and thinks, well, if you’ll take better care of your planet, maybe we will come back and visit again.

I commissioned a symphony from Peter which we premiered in Washington. Then I would conduct for P.D.Q. Bach concerts that Peter would do around the country and many of them here. Peter would usually arrive late for the concerts, and he might come in swinging on a rope from the balcony, Tarzan-style, and then crawl his way to the stage. With this most disheveled-looking manner you could possibly imagine, he would then proceed just to totally entertain the audience.

He also had a fantastic radio show called The Schickele Mix, which, in a way, was an inspiration for me when I started doing The Slatkin Shuffle. It is based on the idea that you don’t need to categorize music. You just need to find ways to juxtapose it in both ways that work and ways that don’t. And Peter was really good at that as well.

So, this marvelous person, terrific composer, we decided, since he passed, to do a concert to honor him.

SURVIVOR:

How György Ligeti soundtracked 2001, inspired Radiohead and composed music like ‘a knife through Stalin’s heart’ (Gillian Moore,7/03/23, The Guardian)

With Ligeti, however, tragedy is never far away. In his Poème Symphonique (Symphonic Poem) from 1962, 100 mechanical metronomes are set out on the stage in the formation of a symphony orchestra, each one solemnly wound up and set in motion at different speeds by a performer wearing formal evening dress. Ligeti was inspired at the time by the Fluxus movement and it is often billed as a “fun” piece. When the metronomes are let loose, the aural effect of this weird, mechanical orchestra is like rain on a roof or swarms of loud insects. As they gradually wind down, intriguing patterns, rhythms and ticking melodies emerge. By the end, there are only three, then two and then just one solitary metronome – the survivor – ticking away on the stage until it too falls silent. I always find it devastating.