SongsForGrownups

I’ve been listening to these songs for a while now, and they just don’t wear out.

The first is from Pearl Jam, whose Backspacer album was released last September.  I have been fascinated with this band since moving to Lapwai and listening mostly to the local hard rock radio station at work, and getting a good second listen to most of the Seattle bands in the process.  The first single from Backspacer was a rocker called ‘The Fixer’, which had me from the first riff.  It’s joyous.  Yup, and from Pearl Jam.   Then a heartbreaking beauty called ‘Just Breathe’.  This one I first heard soon after Calvin passed away, and my sister-in-law Sue Seven was in the hospital, later to die of a pulmonary infection.  I never shared the song with her husband Ed Levene or with Leslie; I feared it would be too painful.  This disc is full of songs about love, aging, being a friend, loss, acceptance, sometimes all at once.  The band has never sounded better:  rock-solid rhythm section,  Vedder’s impassioned vocals (and you can hear the words), guitars flying high, and the acoustic moments that can take the breath away.  But the one I wish I’d written is called ‘Amongst the Waves’.  It, too,  makes me weep.

Amongst The Waves
Artist: Pearl Jam
Composer: Pearl Jam

Gotta say it now
Better loud
than too late

My other new favorite (favorite new?)  song is from a young band I know next to nothing about, an Australian three-piece called Sick Puppies.  (I Know!) This is from their second album, called Tri-Polar. Most of their stuff is quite aggressive hard rock,  so when this one came on the radio, opening with one of the sweetest bass riffs in ages, and then the line ‘Odd one, you’re never alone. . .’  Well, the whole thing works for me on just about every level.

(Just follow the link to the vid — EMI disallows embedding.  Available concert videos were just too low quality.)

Odd One

Don’t let someone tell you you’re no-one
Don’t let someone tell you you’re no-one
Odd one…

So today is my dad’s eighty-first birthday. He says I don’t qualify as a geezer yet: “but not yet in the geezer range” is how he puts it. I must defer to him for a few obvious reasons, but for other obvious reasons I will continue the conceit, if you will (or if you won’t, for that matter). For one thing, I’m finding it increasingly fun to think about the company an aging musician keeps. And, perhaps, the audience an aging musician keeps. You may have noticed that so far this blog’s links to musicians all lead to people over 50. I do say “so far”–after all, it’s SongsForGrownups, not SongsForGrandparents. But really, there must be a reason so many musicians never really retire.

Anyway, one of my father’s accomplishments is a master’s degree in music. He exposed me very early to Charles Ives, Igor Stravinsky, Vaughan-Williams and Aaron Copland, and to John Coltrane and Harry Belafonte. (Mom was there with Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington, Burl Ives, The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel.) He is also a poet. In the seventies I was moved to put one of his poems to music, which will be my next offering. Purely by coincidence, the lineup is the same as “Aurora’s”, with Gary on tenor this time. The poem is the first in a group that Dad wrote in 1969-70, called “John Trover”. Herewith, by permission of the author, I present them.

John Trover

by Rowell Hoff

1.Trover Dies

Citywalking sharp of edge downtown—
It hurts to touch eyes;
if eyegates were opened would all of us drown,
rushing down-drain to die?

Laserlancet glances, meeting, million their power.
An instant’s too much!
The iron bubble-surface collapses, the sour
selfwomb waters gush.

John Trover, doomed to citywalk all his days
unto his death,
came to love beggars and followed them always.
A beggar never neglects

to greet a passing stranger. After a time
the beggars tired of him.
Wordless, they would take his dime,
turning away their eyes.

After Trover’s death of loneliness,
beggars robbed him.
He’d have been glad for such forgiveness.
Streetsweepers found the body.

2.The Myth of John Trover

Trover tired of pushing a trash of moments up each day
to crash with him sleeping to bottom of the next,
and stopped. Imagine his dismay
to find himself again at the top of sunset falling down nights alone
over and over. He screamed for mercy.

‘You chose to be a stone,’ said Sisyphus,
‘What rights has a stone?’

3. John Trover’s Toy

It danced on a string, golden as the sun;
moreover, it was an astonishing unique machine,
potentially able to —
But Trover let them prick its skin
In exchange for their sending the loneliness away.
Even then the reduced dream
was privately beautiful and useful in small ways.
He used it to measure the passage of years,
secretly planning to put it right with patches
and sometime to inflate it with his breath.
Contemplating it one day,
he let it slip from his hand
to the hard ground.
It won’t run any more
and cannot be repaired.

4. Trover Alone

John Trover was admiring the sunset. He thought
of running to the house to bring the others out.
They wouldn’t come, and it was night already
when he returned.

He sent a letter about it to a friend.
The letter was returned unwritten.

5. Trover Blest

Trover cut open his heart
and gazed at the chambers within
to gauge the extent of his hurt.

A hundred dead bodies were there.
They murmured, ‘It’s you that we love!’
but Trover destroyed them with fire.

In spite of the pain he probed on.
A mirror was hid in the dark.
He cleaned it and prayed for the sun.

He turned to easts and horizons,
followed winds, drowned in oceans,
searched rivers to the source.
He lay in a desert dying. It was then
his mirror caught the light of noon.

This is how Trover was raised from the dead.

It would be nice to come back to these and put the rest to music–who knows?

After President Obama’s election, my dad and stepmother Carol were the subject of an item in China Daily.  (Oh, I forgot to mention that they live in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia.  It’s in the article.)  I’ll let you read that too, because it tells a bit about them, and indirectly about Dad’s influence on me and my attitudes about the world.

Hope for a better tomorrow

By Patrick Whiteley (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-11-10

Cool to be American again

Eighty-year-old English teacher Rowell Hoff and his wife Carol live in Inner Mongolia and like thousands of US expats, were closely tuned into the elections last week. The couple say they were greatly pleased with the historic outcome because of the ramifications.

Rowell says the election result is a giant step in the development of true equality in the United States.

“Sixty years ago, in any of a large number of states, black citizens were prevented from voting,” he says.

“Even after the partial successes of the civil rights movement in the third quarter of the 20th century, it would have been difficult to imagine that this day would come at any foreseeable time.

“But it has happened now.”

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(Just follow the above links to get to the rest.  )

Well, all right. So I guess it’s time to explain, since this is actually the whole point, or at least the proximate cause, of SongsForGrownups in the first place.

I am in the process of building a (very small) recording studio and record label. It’s called Geezer? Records. I hope to have the studio up and running by springtime, and the website soon after.

In the 40-odd years I’ve been playing and writing music, I’ve never made a business of it.  I’ve toured with Baha’i multimedia and musical groups, been in bands and played pick-up gigs and concerts, made the odd money here and there, recorded in fits and starts with bands and solo, but always let the insecurity of it, and life in general, get in the way of “being a pro”.  So now (see first post) I guess it’s bloody well time to make some sort of a go at it.

I have some rough mixes of old stuff which I’ll be sharing with you, some of which I plan to bring forward and finish, and perhaps as a bonus I’ll post “progress report” mixes of selected songs as they, well, progress.  The idea is to share some of the process, and maybe, if I’m brave enough, some of the mistakes.  I hope to hear from you.  I also hope those of you who know me and have heard my music will get some surprises.

My first offering is called Aurora.  (I’m pretty sure the player works now; we’ll be fine-tuning the user-friendlies.)  It’s one of my favorites, and also one of Leslie’s, written in 1974 and recorded in the mid-’80s at Bennett House Studio in Grass Valley, California, with Paul Emery at the board and Buddy Craig at the helm.  Buddy plays electric guitar; soprano sax by Gary Upton; Marty Holland contributed the  incredible bass line, and Bob-I-forget-his-last-name (help, anyone?) supplied percussion and hammered dulcimer.  Enjoy.

Here’s a probably quite tasteless question: I wonder if Nirvana would still be going strong if Eddie Vedder had done himself in instead of Kurt Cobain. Would Pearl Jam have been lamented and legendary after their musical journey was prematurely terminated?

Well, the question is most likely tasteless and silly both, especially since we can still enjoy the quirky sub-genius of Nirvana, and have decades of Pearl Jam to wade through at our leisure. And pointless, since Vedder, despite lyrics which could be just as down as Cobain’s, didn’t succumb to the darkness, and Cobain did.

This is what I think: a main source of Kurt Cobain’s despair was that he didn’t know how, and what’s more, wasn’t sure he was allowed, to grow up. The band had achieved precipitous fame, wealth, and adulation, to his great discomfort. It had also peaked musically, very quickly. I can hear him cry out, What do I do now?

Of course, the Seattle Grunge scene was a hot flame, and brief. But it infused new heat into the increasingly tepid ’80s rock and roll. Wonders of sound and fury from Audioslave, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Soul Asylum, and perhaps my favorite, Alice in Chains, stand up to (and still inform) most of today’s offerings, and mix in very well on our local rock station’s playlist. Pearl Jam is the only one still playing. (Not counting Queensryche, of course: still touring and recording after 25 years, but never a grunge act. And what a voice Jeff Tate still has—but that’s for another post.) This isn’t really the place to debate who copped whose sound and licks—it was a close community and ideas were bound to jump around. But the music is still vital, and the lyrics (when you can hear them) strange and biting and poetic. I don’t know Eddie’s secret, but he’s Prometheus carrying the flame, and that’s a good thing.

But back to growing up. I remember being very impressed by Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill, which, despite being a bitter pill indeed (or perhaps due to it), sold over 30 million copies worldwide. I’m sure millions of men were glad not to be the target of Morissette’s venom—and were, even so, the vicarious targets of millions of women who listened and nodded. Really, how does one follow a debut like that? And how do you sustain that combination of musical innovation and rage? The answer: don’t, if you’re Alanis. Three years after Pill, and after a 6-week stay in India and near-retirement from The Biz, Morissette came back with a whole new batch of songs mostly about forgiveness. The fans were like stunned. Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie only sold a few million copies, so of course it was thought by some to be a disappointment. Not by Alanis, I’m sure, and not by me. It was a thing of beauty: haunting and strange, filled with unconventional forms and those very distinctive vocals, this time softer and less edgy, but no less willing to experiment and far more willing to love. And she forced her audience to grow up with her, or else wait for Avril Lavigne.

Morissette has made more records in the decade since, and it’s a pleasure to hear what she shows up with. It doesn’t sell crazy huge like Pill did, and so what. Look at her smile.

And let’s not forget Dave Grohl.  Nevermind Nirvana (sorry, I couldn’t resist)–just keep moving forward.  The Fighters of Foo are nowhere in the vision of Kurt Cobain, and are thriving.  Dave even plays with Sir Paul, for heaven’s sake.  More power to him, and the Fighters.

A good number of my rock-and-roll heroes are now well into their sixties:  Paul McCartney, Steely Dan (The inimitable Donald Fagen and Walter Becker), James Taylor, Pete Townshend, Eric Clapton, Paul Simon, Ian Anderson, Mick Jagger, Tina Turner; and still making incredible music.  I took my son Evan to his first rock concert last year; it was The Who.  Sans Entwhistle and Moon (Pino Palladino punching the long-scale bass and Ringo’s boy Zak Starkey filling Keith’s seat with remarkable ease), it could have been a sad thing indeed.  But Townshend has never sounded better on the guitar, and Roger Daltrey is still the definitive interpreter of Pete’s lyrics–even if he isn’t hitting those high notes quite as well, his heart pours out with all the proper bombast, sturm und drang, and gravelly joyful Rock.  These are the guys that inspired the guys that inspire the kids that are coming out now.  Even Ozzy is doing some of his best work ever.  So I, at 56, am finally getting off my ass and getting ready to put some of my songs out there.  This blog will partly be about that process.