It was never meant to be listened to in order – in fact, Apollo 18 was designed to be listened to on shuffle. Still, that doesn’t take away from the fact that, on a few glorious select occasions, They Might Be Giants used to rock the hell out of the entire 21-track “Fingertips” suite.
And if this doesn’t make your skull ache for more, you don’t understand the FANTASTIC parts about the soon-to-be-stilted early-90s alternative scene – most of which stood on the line between ridiculous and brilliant.
Linnell: “The project was to write a bunch of choruses and nothing else. In other words, I had to restrain myself from writing any other parts of the songs. I wanted a collection of choruses that’s something like what you see on TV late at night, like that old K-Tel commercials. I was thinking about how you know a lot of songs from these ads, but the only part you know is maybe one line, which is half the chorus. And yet they stick in your head in the way a whole song would. in a way, these tiny chips of songs seem complete, because you don’t know the rest of the song.”
John Lennon would have been 70 tomorrow. I, for one, can’t imagine that.
John Lennon, like any deceased star, is forever frozen at the age he was killed – 40. He is unable to age in our minds, which makes proclamations like “this guy would have been 70 today” seem so trivial. More trivial than usual, that is.
See, John Lennon at 70 wouldn’t have been the guy we deify today. People change, even legends. He would have been an older guy, struggling to adjust to a rapidly changing musical landscape. He would probably be fighting away from obscurity, or – at least – fighting to stay relevant. He may have become a hermit. We may have been talking about him like we once talked about Syd Barrett, secluded and crazy, his friends sheepishly recollecting his greatness. He might have spurned his fans and gone off the deep end. He might have turned into a total dick, said something racist, or wrote a song about Princess Diana.
He didn’t, though. And that’s why we’ve given him legendary status.
We can’t imagine Lennon at 70, no more than we can imagine him at 60 or 50 or even 41. He’s never going to grow older.
Kurt Cobain would have been 43. Jim Morrison would have been 67. Louis Armstrong would have been 109. Bob Marley would have been 65. Jeff Buckley would have been 44.
Can you imagine Cobain at 43, twelve albums into a career? Could you imagine Bob Marley, releasing yet another greatest hits album?
They’re releasing a cover album of Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home, which reminds me of the fact that they released a cover album of R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People, which reminds me that, of anything I’ve ever dreamed of in terms of making and playing music, my biggest dream continues to be an infusion of talent big enough to cover any album of my choosing, from front to back, like Phish would routinely do with The Who’s Quadrophenia.
What’s hard is that I always have a hard time narrowing down which album I’d cover.
Most days I land on Jawbreaker’s Dear You, which is both personally influential and so packed with great lyrics that I’d probably die right there on stage just knowing I was finally getting the opportunity to rock it out forward and backward.
But that’s an easy answer, and so I look elsewhere, sometimes thinking an ironic acoustic version of Propagandhi’s super-political Less Talk, More Rock would be better suited to my tastes, or the album cut of Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense.
Ultimately, I always find myself debating the same three albums: the aforementioned Dear You, The Beatles’ Abbey Road, or Refused’s The Shape of Punk to Come.
Seconds later, I come to the dawning conclusion that, in fact, I’d have to put forth some effort into learning an instrument, and that knowing I’ll never do it, the dream will never, ever, ever come true. I’ll go back to singing the song out loud, freed of the pressure of meaningful performance.
I’m listening to a pre-release of Ben Folds’ new album, Lonely Avenue – a collaboration with writer Nick Hornby – and it’s fantastic, just as you’d expect if you’re a fan of either guy. And then there’s “A Working Day,” the first song on the album, which is probably one of those love letters to how awful it can be to be a writer, which both of these guys totally understand.
The song itself is fantastic. Again.
I can do this/Really I’m good enough
I’m as good as them but don’t take it from me
Ask my friends/Ask my sister
They all think my stuff is great
Up there with any of them
I just need a break
I’m a genius/Really I’m excellent
Better than them I kick their asses
All of them/Even that guy
Who thinks he’s fucking cool
Gets all of the attention/He doesn’t sell shit does he?
Some guy on the ‘Net thinks I suck/And he should know
He’s got his own blog
I’m a loser/I’m a poseur
Yeah, really/It’s over
I mean it, and I quit
Everything I write is shit
I’m a loser and a poseur
It’s over/It’s over
I mean it, and I quit
Everything I write is shit
Hey Hey/It’s a working day. (x3)
Oooooh.
You’re all nodding. You know.
The ‘Net’s going to HATE this album. Predicting a Pitchfork review of 2.5.
(Bonus! Here’s a preview video of a song that’s not on the album, featuring Pomplamoose. Also awesome. If you ignore the cutesy blah blah after the song.)
You used to be able to determine a person’s character through his or her CD collection via a complex web of stereotypes and assumptions.
Now, you can’t. Simply put, people just don’t have CD collections anymore. And if they do, they rarely add to them.
(And, no – iTunes can’t match up – not since the ease of grabbing JUST ONE song from an artist has watered down a person’s patterns of taste. It’s too easy to take a flier on a 99 cent song.)
My question: what will replace the CD shelf as a quick-look, split-second stereotyping library?
It’s not the iPad or smartphone. These are run on applications, and applications are common. It’s like looking at a lineup of appliances. We all have stereos and refrigerators. It’s not Netflix – film genres are spread across too many different personalities, to the point that the most you could glean is whether a person was into independent film or blockbusters (and, even then, it’s inexact.)
It’s not a matter of things. It’s a matter of aggregation. CD collections and DVD collections and bookshelves are being replaced by the newest form of identity – our lifestreams and collections of Internet interests. Quick judgment – for right or wrong – now comes from the things you “like” on Facebook, from the links you reblog and the comments you make on Twitter.
I tend to think the RSS aggregator gives us the information to predict personality – after all, they’re directly tied to the things we are willing to spend time with. Facebook and Twitter are too flippant. Blogs take time and attention.
It’s not as easy – you know, what with passwords and all of that crap – but it’s the closest to replacing the connection of our CD collections. Which is probably too bad: RSS feeds really can’t match a CD collection in terms of legacy content. We can delete the feeds we don’t read anymore a lot easier than we can get rid of that Debbie Gibson CD we’re still clinging to.
It was kind of a perfect storm: R.E.M. had released what is easily one of the best albums of the decade and, months later, the Reagan/Bush era had been put on notice thanks to Bill Clinton’s win in the 1992 presidential elections.
R.E.M. chose not to tour with Automatic for the People. But, nestled in the warm embrace of their home town, Athens, Georgia, and in the name of a Greenpeace benefit, they played an invitation-only event at the 40 Watt Club.
The version of Drive that came out of this show is still one of my favorite live performances ever. Yeah. I just said “ever.”
I had a copy of this show. It was the first bootleg I’d ever fall in love with. Thanks to the professional recording, it sounded fantastic, and the setlist was brilliant.
“Drive”
“Monty Got a Raw Deal”
“Everybody Hurts”
“Man on the Moon”
“Losing My Religion”
“Country Feedback”
“Begin the Begin”
“Fall On Me”
“Me In Honey”
“Finest Worksong”
“Drive” – second take for the Greenpeace recording
“Love is All Around” – cover of The Troggs
“Fun Time/Radio Free Europe” – cover of Iggy Pop, bleeds into “RFE”
Somewhere along the way, I lost the album. And I’ve been looking for it since.
To be honest, it hasn’t been that far away. Because of the nature of the performances – rare live recordings of songs from Automatic for the People, superb sound quality, a fantastic re-imagining of what would become one of R.E.M.’s biggest singles – the show was split up and released as CD B-Sides to many of Monster’s singles. I have many of these singles and so, unknowingly, I had a good chunk of this performance already hibernating on my iPod.
But, to quote a post from “rec.music.rem,” the sum of the songs does not equal the brilliance of the whole show.
…While the songs themselves sound incredible (especially “Country Feedback”, which by late 1992 had not yet been turned into the pompous dirge it became during the Monster tour), the end result did not add up to a complete presentation of the show: apart from the first take of “Drive,” one more song was left off (a not particularly strong version of “Love Is All Around,” the Troggs cover which the band had performed so well in acoustic guise during the promo-tour for Out Of Time), as well as the major part of the great chats in between songs.
So I continue to look for this show, happy to have some of the songs – especially “Drive,” – but ultimately left feeling incomplete. In a rare occurrence, the Internet has left me riddled as to how to pick a copy up without spending a huge chunk of money. R.E.M.’s liberal bootlegging policy approves of bootleg trading and downloading in an effort to curb illegal sales – they have a message board devoted to it – but this show is strangely absent.
Someday it will turn up. I’ll download it. I’ll love it. And until then, I continue to search.
Update
As I should have expected, this post was responded to within hours by twofriends who could help me find this show. And find it I did.
It’s just as good as I remembered. A stunning version of “Fall on Me.” And a fantastic – and surprising – off-the-cuff version of “Radio Free Europe.”
Now that I have this in my possession, I guess I could probably scale back the R.E.M. fanboy-hood a notch.
