Peter Ames Carlin's blog

The guy was nuts.

You knew this instantly. He had pinwheel eyes, an absurdist manifesto (humans OUT of planet earth!) and deadly weapons. Worse, he had hostages and for a few hours there it seemed pretty touch-and-go.

Even if you sympathized with some aspects of his crusade (I don't like the Discovery channel either), there was no thread of logic to follow, no rational debate to engage. Just three possible outcomes: Cops talk him down and everyone is OK; Cops go in guns blazing and kill the guy; Cops go in guns blazing and lots of people get killed.

Ultimately we get option #2, a relatively okay outcome (too bad about the crazy guy, but...) and life goes on.

But what a life. Within minutes Matt Drudge was up and politicizing everything, referring to the lunatic as  an "environmental extremist," as if his wack reaction to "An Inconvenient Truth" was clearly the fault of whale-lovers everywhere. Media insiders set to debating who covered the story first, or best, or worst. Is it cool for a TV producer to maneuver for an exclusive with the hostage-taker while the cops are actively trying to stop him from killing people? I'd think not, but I also think there's something nauseous about CNN's appeals, via its homepage, for actual hostages (and/or on-scene witnesses) to Tweet/email/dial in newsbreaks to them, in real time. You could be a star, kid! Maybe Rick Sanchez would send you an autographed copy of his autobiography!

None of this is cool, but that doesn't mean it's not biz as usual. Consider the guy's apocolyptic perspective on the world's environmental crisis. Is the end of the world really upon us? Not quite, but you'd never know given what you hear day in and out. That vast population of Worst People in the World; the hordes of incoming aliens, the worst-ever president, the country lost in darkness for untold years, decades, centuries. Right up until last Sunday, and the Lincoln Memorial annointment of the mystery 8-year-old George Washington 2.0.

None of which does anything to ease the next hostage-taker's rampant psychosis (who's got time to debate, let alone form and find a way to pay for, coherent treatment options for America's mentally ill?) More and better guns will continue to be available, minus background checks, for anyone able to pinwheel to their friendly neighborhood gun show. These are real problems, with life and death stakes. But in a hate-based media eocnomy it's hard to get a word in until the bullets start to fly.

At which point you can Tweet it straight to CNN and become a media hero. So there's that, at least.

This is how he comes out on stage. A disembodied voice (stage manager Al Santos) recites a short, but unbelievably odd interpretation of the artist's 50-year career, which goes pretty much exactly like this:

“The poet laureate of rock 'n' roll. The voice of the promise of the '60s counterculture. The guy who forced folk into bed with rock, who donned makeup in the '70s and disappeared into a haze of substance abuse, who emerged to 'find Jesus,' who was written off as a has-been by the end of the '80s, and who suddenly shifted gears and released some of the strongest music of his career beginning in the late '90s. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Columbia recording artist Bob Dylan."

The words of a rock critic from Buffalo, constructing a career epitaph that is equal parts hyperbole, cliche, rumor, truth and stone cold absurdity. It appeared originally in 2002. Along with the "Columbia recording artist" part (a contractual obligation going back to his first contract with Columbia back in 1961) it's arguably the most bizarre, confusing intro-of-an-icon ever. And seeing as this is Bob Dylan we're talking about, it is also utterly perfect.

Ultimately Dylan is whatever you imagine him to be. Genius, charlatan, lunatic, poetic, thief, rocker, loser. Believe whatever you want, but realize this for damn sure: He is a recording artist. Maybe that's everything you need to know. So close your moth and listen.

He and the band emerge dressed like a showbiz cowboy bandfrom 1951, Dylan differentiated by what appears to be a 10-gallon hat, glimmering white in the stage lights. The band kicks into a rolling blues riff, guitars blazing, and when Dylan (standing hunched behind a keyboard) bark-croaks the opening line it only takes a moment to realize, ah yes, "Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat." 

His voice. He prefers that dirt-deep growl these days, a testament to the burden he's carried (think it's easy to conduct that much electricity through your nervous system?) and the wisdom of the years. When he's not sing-croaking, Dylan leans into the keys and locks his eyes on lead guitarist Charlie Sexton, who kneels during his solos, either to emphasize the Atlas-like burden he's taken on (playing beneath thte gaze of Dylan) or simply prostrating himself before the boss whose dense, swooping organ lines wrap, tangle, support and sometimes subverts the shimmery melodies he's hurling into the air.

Dylan switches to 2nd lead guitar for "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," riffing with and sometimes against Sexton's lines, then comes "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" and a crystalline "Just Like A Woman" (god, Sexton's guitar chimes and rings like Easter Sunday) and the song is all aching beauty, from the rich guitars to Dylan's churchly organ riffs and his wisdom-of-the-ages recitation of the lyrics, whose undercurrent of contempt collapses beneath a new generosity - underscored by the singalong he conducts on the choruses (and beaming happily each time the audience belts the title in perfect, even harmonized unison).

He played 14 songs. Warhorses, by and large (save for "Workingman's Blues #2," a Dolly Parton cover and one or so other less-familiar tunes) except for the fact that what he plays has virtually nothing to do with the songs you think you know. The central riff is now off-kilter. The rhythm has been swiveled on its axis, the melody bears no resemblance. The magic moment came halfway through with "Tangled Up in Blue."  But this was the moment when it all came together. Dylan standing at center-stage, harmonica in one hand, the lyrics torn from somewhere in the most desolate corner of his soul.

But mostly it was Dylan and his keyboard, Dylan and his guitar, Dylan rolling and thrusting his shoulders to emphasize the push-and-pull of his harmonica lines. The secret, as ever, is to forget about what you think you came to hear. Poet laureate, blah-blah-blah. Listen to the guy play. Listen to his thick, evocative organ lines. Listen to his guitar leads. He's playing that whole band, too - pushing and goading them to wherever the fuck his imagination wanders. That's what you're after. That moment of creation. The lightning explodes from the skies and the aged man lights up again, eyes on fire just like they were in '63, '64, '65, '66. He's a natural wonder. Experience him while you can.

Not new, but I only just found it on the 'net. It's the dual finger-point that makes it for me.

 
In the worldview of the Eagles, the scope of femininity divides into roughly two categories: The women who give the Eagles cocaine and the women who will give anything - anything - to snort the Eagles' cocaine. The former are demons (with the moon in their eyes; their lyin' eyes, their terminal prettiness, their Tiffany twistedness, et. al) the latter just sort of sad and pathetic (they should be home but they're not; they wonder how it ever got so crazy, they're afraid it's all just wasted time, their need to either own or stone the Eagles, with the single exception who is just a friend).

Which would feel a lot more like the warm smell of misogyny rising up through the air were it not for the contempt the Eagles have for other men, what with their brutal handsomeness, their thirst for the blood of certain heroic gunfighter/guitarists; their inaibility to buy the love of the lyin' eyes woman, their mass production of ugly little homes in the once-sylvan hills surounding the Eagles' luxe aeries, and on and on).

The Eagles, in short, are handsome, harmonizing, lushly melodic buzz-kills. Suntanned fingers wagging in your face; golden heads shaking; aryan chins turned up as they stalk off to the bathroom to blow their noses.Or nose their blow. Or something.

Odious. Except for the fact that a lot of those bitter, pissy songs also turn out to be so well-constructed, and so well-performed (in the recordings anyway) that it requires vast stores of intellectual discinpline to dislike them. And when it comes to  "Hotel California," the 1976 apotheosis of their creative careers, I can only say one thing: It's a great record. Each song a gem in its own particular way, the playing and singing all but flawless, one of those concept albums whose central idea (upscale SoCal showbiz society turns out to be one fucking decadent place) flows from its individual parts, and not the other way round (as per, say, "Desperado")

Just a smidge of context: "HC" featured three out of four founding Eagles from their earliest country-rock days, (Henley, Frey and bassist Randy Meisner. Guitarist/pedal steelist, mandoliner, etc., Bernie Leadon had already departed), lead guitarist Don Felder (in place since "On the Border" in 1974) and the unlikely, yet catalytic debut of the already-famous midwest rocker Joe Walsh as uber-lead guitarist. As musical mergers go, adding the slide guitar-wielding goofball among the sleek SoCal hipster cowboys was not just successful but actually catalytic. More than just a truly distinctive guitar player, Walsh (with his hangdog face and joker's timing) also added an element of soulfulness into the band. A parodist rather than a scold; a wiseass with a heart of gold. And on "Hotel California" all of that served as a kind of tonic, taking the edge off of the Henley/Frey nastiness, while also goading them to rock a little harder maybe even reveal a little of themselves in the process.

Whatever, it worked magnificently. "Hotel California" was a smash, and a pleasure to listen to, more or less nonstop, on the radio for months, years, decades.

"Hotel California": Cinematic in scope; epic in length; the "Citizen Kane" of decadence songs, "HC" kicks off the album with a puzzling, even maddening puzzle. What the hell is colitas? The image jumps out from the lyric's third line ("warm smell of colitas rising up through the air..."), clearly a central part of the narrator's experience of the elegant, awful world he (and we) are about to experience. So you wonder: Are we really talking about the same wild species of buckwheat known variously as James' buckwheat and Antelope Sage? Not quite. "During the writing of the song 'Hotel California' by Messrs, Henley, and Frey, the word `colitas' was translated for them by their Mexican-American road manager as 'little buds'," Eagles manager Irving Azoff wrote to whomever composed the Wikipedia entry for 'colitas.' "You have obviously already done the necessary extrapolation. Thank you for your inquiry."

To collect crayons is to draw a new sense of history.

The history of art, and the history of corporations. The history of pop culture and the history of history itself, which turns out to be far more fluid and up for grabs than you might think.

Ask Ed Welter about any of this. And while you're at it you can ask the Beaverton-based IT consultant and terrier-like collector of 2,400 (give or take) crayon containers about the relationship between collecting and a need for organization in a profoundly disorganized world.

"I suppose there's an element of control in there, too," Welter says, standing in front of a set of floor-to-ceiling shelves whose arrangement of crayon boxes, some dating back to the late 19th century, is what you might call orderly.

"My first wife thought I was obsessed," he says. His current wife finds it less unsettling. "She's into it, though she's not really a collector."

You either collect or you don't. And Welter, obviously, collects.

The rest of the story, with a ton of cool photographs by Oregonian photographer Michael Lloyd, is here.

(A version of this story was published originally in the Times of London on Friday, August 13. I haven't seen it yet, but here's the version I sent to them last Thursday)

Brian Wilson calls it his first musical memory. A flashing image of himself as a toddler, maybe two years old, lying on the floor of his grandmother’s living room.

Music was playing, George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” The spiraling clarinet, the start of a 17-minute musical journey through the rush and crash of modern urban life.

Listening in the working class suburbs of Los Angeles, young Brian lay alone on the rug, completely enthralled.

“I was like, ‘Hey, I love this!’ But I was too young to express it in words,” Wilson says. He’s sitting in his own living room now, his dark eyes alight with a memory that has followed him throughout his life. 

And what a strange, wonderful and awful life it has turned out to be. The founder and musical visionar of the Beach Boys has veered from the heights of pop stardom to art-rock innovations that altered the horizons of popular music to a series of mental breakdowns, years of isolation and abuse to one of the least expected creative comebacks in rock 'n' roll history.
 
Throughout, “Rhapsody in Blue,” along with a widening array of Gershwin's music,, echoed in Wilson’s mind. Now Wilson is projecting that inspirational sound into the world in the form of 'Brian Wilson Reinterprets Gershwin,' an album-length tribute that weaves Gershwin's songcraft together with Wilson's ear for quirky textures, sweeping harmonies and the intricate tangle of love, fear, anguish and undying optimism that has long fueled his own work.

 ‘'Wilson Reintreprets,' to be released in America on August 17, is already causing a stir among American critics and music industry figures who eye the album as a prime candidate for sales charts and next year's Grammy awards. But as ever in Wilson's star-crossed life, controversy persists.

Is this album, or any of Wilson's recent work, truly a product of the artist's creative vision? Why does this famously tormented musician -- those physical survival is miraculous, given all he's been through in life -- spending his golden years touring and recording at a pace that rivals musicians half his age? 
 

"Well, It's better than sitting on my ass doing nothing," Wilson says. "I just got back into writing songs, I guess."

A few minutes later he says something else altogether.

I've run dry," he declares. "Totally dry on concepts for songs, you know. Can’t get a melody written, can’t get a chord pattern written, nothing at all.”

It’s a remarkably grim assertion for a songwriter to make. But, I can’t help pointing out, didn’t he tell me exactly the same thing during a telephone conversation we’d had in 1999?

“Yeah, I know,” he says with a shrug. “It goes in cycles.”

(Ross William Hamilton - The Oregonian)

When we talk about Gene Simmons, we talk about the fire-breathing, blood-spitting founder of Kiss, whose kabuki-painted, comic book heavy metal has been familiar to head-banging kids (and their tormented parents) for nearly 40 years.

And so much more. The leering Lothario with his self-proclaimed thousands of conquests. The misogynist boor whose verbal harassment of National Public Radio’s Terry Gross is one of the most notorious public broadcasting moments ever. The gleeful modern Barnum who summarizes his contempt for rock-for-art’s sake by declaring that he “never wanted to be in a rock’¤n’¤roll band, I wanted to be in a rock’¤n’¤roll brand.”

Or maybe he’s the pussycat father in “Gene Simmons’ Family Jewels,” the documentary-style sitcom about the family he has with longtime companion (and 1982 Playboy playmate of the year) Shannon Tweed.

Simmons is all that and even more. And last weekend he was right here in Aloha, headlining Pacific University’s fourth annual Legends Golf Classic, a high-dollar, star-studded fundraiser for the school’s athletic programs.

Not because Simmons, or any member of his clan, has a connection to the school, either. That would be too predictable. This is all about Kiss guitarist — and Washington County native — Tommy Thayer. He didn’t attend the school either but is nevertheless a member of Pacific’s board of trustees, the one whose showbiz connections, along with his public-spiritedness and his unbelievably nice demeanor (call him the Homecoming King, it totally fits) make him one of the school’s most potent fundraisers and attention-getters.

Much of this is due to the Legends golf tourney, which weaves golf, rock’¤n’¤roll, pro sports and well-to-do Oregonians into a two-day event that is both a quick sellout and a huge fundraising tool for Pacific.

And here’s how it all went down.

Last week's puzzlement/frustration with the direction of "Mad Men"'s 4th season gave way this week to the more familiar feelings of intrigue and admiration. No surprise, in retrospect, that this pivot toward the youth rebellion, the age of Aquarius, the wanting of the world and the wanting of it NOW, would be puzzling. Imagine how those slick old boys felt in 1964. "Get Sally some Beatles 45's," Draper instructed his secretary on her way out to purchase his family's XMAS presents. Next year comes pot, then lysergic for '66, and by '68 she'll want a revolution - we all want to change the world.

Except for Draper and co, masters of the old world. Or they were, though by the mid-60s they're only just hanging on. The old antics - booze, quick sex with willing subordinates, the cheerful subordination to the heirs of old-world tobacco fiefdoms - are fast losing their potency.

But they keep on trying. The increasingly sad, desperate D. Draper has lost his appeal, and he knows it. Roger, with his new op-art office (check out that hellish mod painting he has) feels lost in his white-on-white surroundings. Given his white hair he feels like he doesn't even exist in there. I believe that's what my old English teacher would call metaphorical, old-world bastard that he was.

And more. The women still put out, albeit with decreasing enthusiasm and a growing sense of what-the-hell? Peggy not only looks better than ever, but has not a whit of patience with the old-world-even-when-dry-and-urine-free Freddy Rumson, and his dusty old ideas about marriage as every young woman's holiest grail. Lee Garner, Jr., the old-skool tobacco heir and controller of 71 percent of the Sterling-Cooper-et.al plantation, is batshit crazy, whipping poor Roger with a Santa suit and acting like every other spoiled royal, commanding his subjects, in the absence of bread, to eat real and metaphorical cake.

Back in Ossining the real visionary is the creepy, but eerily prescient neighbor boy Glen. Who has a youthful thing for Sally Draper, and is thus eager to share his insights into adult relationships (corrupt and wrong), and domestic order (he's agin it). All of 10, maybe, Glen is the nascent revolution, personified. How does he show his affection for Sally? He trashes the family kitchen and leaves handcrafted goods on Sally's pillow.

"Kids did this," Henry grumbled when he saw the destruction in the kitchen (of the family home he helped detonate in his own way. Damn straight. I wonder what they'll do next?

I think Glen knows. I think Glen will be in the middle of it. And when he and Sally get to San Francisco (and you just know they will), they'll both be wearing flowers in their hair.

Why did the premiere of "Mad Men" leave me feeling a bit distant from that wonderful show? Lots of small coincidences should have drawn me closer: The guys' new offices are in the Time-Life Building, where I actually worked for a spell (albeit eons after the early '60s); the subplot about Jantzen swimsuits involves a company not just from Portland, but also the one-time employer of my own personal father-in-law, who moved his daughter, et. al, west (from his own company in Rockefeller Center) to take the gig. 

Coincidences, pointless to point out. Except for the subtle connection between my family's own ongoing creation/reinvention (moving houses, jobs, identities, etc) and the show's evocation of that process as a (the?) key to the ever-evolving American ideal.

I'm on a brief sojourn to L.A. just now, checking back into the Brian Wilson scene in pursuit of some up-close-n-personal journalism for the Times of the UK, the hometown paper and the good ol' blog. Also some book work tossed into the cracks, but that's every day these days. Most days, no matter where, feel long and frantic and panic-inducing. So power through and keep an ear on the horizon. Most days, nothing. But just now something's in the wind. Here comes "Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin," which on the face of it sounds unexpected and, you might think, impossible.

But listen, listen, listen.

There's a whole other sphere, a whole other web of influence and connection.  You've already heard it from Brian, in fact -- consider the textural leaps and bounds in 'Good Vibrations,' the way "Surfin' USA," blends St. Louis r&b with jazz harmony, surf guitar, straight-up rock 'n' roll and more, and you get the idea. Or how about "The Girls on the Beach"? A whole song about social connection, about the easy mix of cultures, styles, ideas. The girls on the beach are all within reach, if you know what to do.

Brian Wilson knows what to do.

At the debut/listening party Brian & friends held at the Pacific Design place last night they spun the new record on vinyl (a few pops on the play-in and play-out grooves; sounded oddly beautiful) and the crowd of 100-plus (including mc/liner notes author David Wild, whose work speaks for itself, and whose boyish enthusiasm says even more for said work's depth of feeling) sat quietly from the unadorned harmonies in the "Rhapsody in Blue" intro through the amazing GG/BW collaobration "The Like in I Love You" and on and on, through the cornpone riverboat "I Got Plenty of Nothin" through the eerily cool surfin' noir of "Summertime," and beyond, beyond.

I sat near David Leaf, my old hero ("The Beach Boys and the California Myth") and for the last 10 years or so a friend and rabbinical figure, and got a charge absorbing it all alongside him. Some moments so surprising and lovely all you could do was look up, shake your head and laugh.

I do think it's that good.

Earlier, catching up with the band a few minutes before they trooped out to intro the album with a live performance of the "Rhapsody" opening, Brian perched on a sofa and looked, well, wonderful. His hair shaggy, his eyes full of sparks. Remember when he'd seem like the world's least happy zombie when he had to stand (let alone perform) in front of audiences? Last night he was raring to go, and delighted to be there. He walked up to Leaf at one point and said, 'This guy is magic! You walk into the room and I just feel great!"

Brian's music, the good stuff, anyway, makes me feel the same way. Everyone has peaks and valleys, and some BW releases are mixed bags - some tunes feel inspired, others feel a little more laboredt. But here's a great and unexpected twist: "BWRG" is the real thing, end to end. It's the heart of BW, interpreted by Himself, and seemingly unfiltered. It works on levels I can't even describe yet. Too soon, I need another ten or 20 spins to really get the hang of the songs, to grasp the connections, to trace the journey between young BW's primal bond to "Rhapsody in Blue" through the length of his own life and work, to this masterpiece of cultural/musical synthesis/imagination/artistry.

A small, beautiful thing. It's sitting here next to the computer in my hotel room. And really, s'wonderful.