Music, Please, it's Nick Lowe's 60th Birthday!

Today is Nick Lowe's 60th birthday. I've been listening to "Quiet, Please: The New Best of Nick Lowe" the last few days, and Nick's songs have been playing on an endless loop in my head. (Which is not a bad thing, mind you.) The more I listen to Nick, the more I like him. What "Quiet Please" really shows is that he has been writing brilliant songs throughout his entire career. I'm amazed at the consistency of his writing, even though the songs sound very different from each other. From the snarky early brilliance of "What's So Funny About Peace, Love, and Understanding?" "Heart of the City," "Marie Provost," "Cruel To Be Kind," to mature, starkly powerful songs like "The Beast In Me," "What's Shakin' on the Hill," "Soulful Wind," "Indian Queens," and "People Change," Lowe's music has changed over the years, but the quality has not. (A note: "What's so Funny" was meant to be snarky when Nick first wrote it in 1974, but that's not the way he sings it now, as it obviously has more meaning for him as he's grown older.) Lowe's recent songs amaze me because of how tersely perfect they are. Take the beginning of "People Change," for example. "Storybook love, made for one another, now she treats you just like a brother." Boom, 14 words and we already have a whole story right here! The chorus is direct and to the point, "People change, that's the long and short of it, prepare yourself for it, or get bit, people change." Perfect, and very true. In Lowe's songs now, everything seems honed down to it's perfect essence, everything superfluous has been thrown away. I think it's difficult to write songs this way, although Nick sure makes it look easy.

"Quiet Please" includes only songs that Nick wrote, which is fine with me, because I think he's extremely underrated, and he's an absolutely amazing songwriter. By focusing only on original songs, it puts the spotlight firmly on Nick's ability to craft beautiful, memorable pop songs, and it shows that he's in a class of his own.

Nick, if you're reading this somewhere, (I doubt you are, but you never know) thanks so much for all the great music you've made over the years, and here's to many more songs to come! Discovering your music has been a great joy for me these last two years, thank you!

Liberace and Elvis: The Triumph of Kitsch

After my recent trip to Las Vegas, and a stop at the Liberace Museum, I started to ponder the odd similarities between "Mr. Showmanship" and "The King of Rock and Roll." Maybe it was the hot Vegas sun beating down on my forehead, maybe it was the glare from all the rhinestones, but it seemed to click in my head, Elvis and Liberace, two pillars of 20th-century kitsch, more alike than you might think at first glance.

When I say that Elvis was like Liberace, I'm thinking more of 70's Elvis, in Vegas, with the ostentatious outfits. But there were some similarities in their public personas dating back to the 1950's. Liberace became a star in the early 1950's in large part due to his TV show, which featured his colorful wardrobe, (this was before he was all about the rhinestones, and this was also a time when it was a big deal that Liberace wore a white tuxedo for a performance!) his brother George, and his mother, who was in the audience for almost every show. Liberace was a very shrewd performer, and he had discovered that he could win over audiences with his personality as much as his brilliant piano playing. He was able to take what might have been a shortcoming, his very swishy manner, and turn it into a huge asset. Considering how homophobic 1950's America was, this was no small victory for a gay man. This was, after all, a time when gays could be fired by the US State Department for being a "security risk." (Okay, so Liberace never publicly admitted he was gay, in fact, he even denied it under oath, but I'm pretty sure he was.) In this way, Liberace was actually quite subversive for the time. He was pointedly different, at a time when conformity was what people strove for. But what Liberace did was to temper this subversiveness with more "normal" behavior, like his emphasis on his family, brother George and his mother. And Liberace's personality was so sunny and warm that viewers couldn't help but be charmed by him. He was humble, gracious, and polite, and in this way showed that he was not a threat to the status quo, despite his differences.

Elvis Presley burst onto the national spotlight in 1956, and he seemed quite different and threatening to many people. Like Liberace, he was able to use television to greatly further his career and expand his appeal. And also like Liberace, Elvis was able to use TV to show people that he was not actually threatening, and that he was also humble, gracious, and polite. Eventually, as people began to know more about Elvis's personality, he seemed less threatening, despite his obvious differences. (Like Liberace, Elvis was also totally devoted to his mother. Some people conjecture that Elvis never really got over the death of his mother in 1958.) By entering the Army in 1958, and serving his 2 years like any other normal guy, Elvis again showed his essentially conservative, non-threatening persona.

There aren't many similarities between Liberace and Elvis in the 1960's. Liberace went through a brief period where he tried to tone down his costumes and his flamboyance, but the public wasn't interested. They wanted him to be his glittery self, and so he went back to the rhinestones, and his costumes started to get more outrageous. Elvis spent most of the 1960's proving that not only was he not threatening to the youth of America anymore, he was also in danger of becoming terminally boring. He shuffled his way through some incredibly crappy movies, didn't give any concerts, and recorded some really great songs that got buried on the second side of his soundtrack albums. (His gorgeous cover of Bob Dylan's "Tomorrow Is a Long Time" could be found on Side Two of the "Spinout" soundtrack. Really.) Amazingly, Elvis was able to reclaim his career and prove that he might still actually be a little dangerous in his 1968 TV special, "Elvis." (Now referred to as the "Comeback Special.") The following year he returned to live performing in Las Vegas. And that's when the similarities begin again.

By the 1970's, Liberace was now wearing tons of sequins, rhinestones, rings, everything sparkly that you could think of. Every new costume and stage entrance had to top the last one in fabulousness. He started being driven onto the stage in a Rolls-Royce! He started performing in bejeweled shorts. And Elvis was right there with him. In 1969, Elvis had been wearing tasteful jumpsuits on stage with very little accessories. But as the 70's crept on, the jumpsuits got a little more jeweled, and then a lot more jeweled, until he was seriously rivaling Liberace. That's been a mystery to me, why did Elvis suddenly turn into Liberace in about 1971? I don't get it. Elvis started entering his concerts to the sounds of "Also Sprach Zarathustra," by Richard Strauss. Where his style of singing before had been nuanced and often understated, now it became bombastic and overly emotional. (Just compare the 1956 version of "Love Me Tender" to how he sang it in the 1970's.) In fact, Elvis and Liberace's performing styles became very similar during this time. Both were highly emotional, sentimental, schmaltzy, florid, and over the top. The difference is that Liberace had always been this way, but it was only in the 1970's that Elvis's style changed. (They really should have recorded an album together in the 70's.)

Both Liberace and Elvis had amazingly ornate homes, furnished in the most garish way imaginable. Their plush lifestyles became a part of their public personas. How did they get away with such conspicuous consumption? By asserting their humble origins. As Liberace said, "Don't be misled by this flamboyant exterior. Underneath I remain the same simple boy from Milwaukee." And Elvis probably would have said the same thing, substituting Memphis for Milwaukee. Whether or not this was true of both men is not the point, the point is that people seemed to believe it. A difference between the two men is that while Elvis shut himself away behind the gates of Graceland, Liberace opened up his home for tours! (He had to stop doing this because his neighbors complained about all the traffic!)

As the 70's wore on, Elvis sadly became addicted to numerous prescription drugs, his weight ballooned, and his performances severely suffered. He had become a parody of himself. Elvis had become the Liberace of rock and roll. And I don't mean that as a compliment. The tragedy is that while Liberace knew he was creating an image, a persona for the audience, a caricature, if you will, Elvis never seemed to know how low he had sunk. In some of his last performances, Elvis, the man who had changed rock forever, was reduced to reading the lyrics to "My Way" from a sheet of paper. It was a sad decline for a man who had so much talent.

Best Oscars Ever?

Okay, I know the Oscars were a week ago, but the Oscars show was so great! I think Hugh Jackman should host every year! It was nice to have someone who isn't a comedian host. The presenters did a good job, especially Tina Fey and Steve Martin. (Seeing Tina Fey look so gorgeous in her dress just increased my crush on her...) And I liked how the awards were given a storyline, that was smart. I liked having all the nominees sitting close to the stage, that way you couldn't tell who was going to lose because they were sitting in the middle of an row halfway back. My only gripe was...where the hell was Patrick McGoohan during the Dead People Montage??? He died the same day as Ricardo Montalban, who was in the montage, so I know it wasn't too late to add Patrick to the montage. So why wasn't he there? Yeah, he was more known for TV than movies, but the same can be said of Ricardo. And this isn't the first snub of McGoohan, either. Entertainment Weekly failed to mention his passing as well. What gives??? Well, my blog mentioned Patrick McGoohan's passing, so I'm giving myself a pat on the back for that. It's disappointing to see someone as important as McGoohan overlooked by the Oscars and a really great, intelligent magazine. He deserved better treatment.

Revolutionary Road

I just saw "Revolutionary Road" on Friday night at the Riverview Theater. (Awesome old discount movie theater in Minneapolis.) It was just heartbreakingly beautiful. Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are both outstanding in it. Leo really got screwed by not getting nominated for an Oscar for his role. Of course, Kate should have been nominated too, but the Oscar rules are such that you can only be nominated once in any category. Michael Shannon, nominated for Supporting Actor, is good, but his part is just so showy. Shannon thankfully doesn't overplay it, but it puzzles me that the Academy could nominate him and overlook Leo.

"Revolutionary Road" follows Frank and April Wheeler as they try to rescue their marriage from the morass it's in at the beginning of the movie. We see a brief scene of their courtship, and then we are thrown into an intense argument they have following April's acting at the community theater. It's obvious that Frank and April know which buttons to push with each other. The following Monday, Frank turns 30 and seduces one of the secretaries at his office. (Leo still looks too young to be turning 30, even though he's 34.) The secretary isn't prettier than April, or more flirtatious, or anything, she's just there. As he leaves her apartment, Frank says, "Listen: you were swell. Take care, now." Ouch! When he gets home, Frank finds that April has baked a birthday cake for him, and their two children serenade him with "Happy Birthday." Frank feels like a heel, as he should, and after dinner April suggests to him that they move to Paris so Frank can "find himself." They start planning the move. Inevitably, complications occur. And I'll leave the plot summary there. Oh, one more thing, this movie shows why you should NEVER let someone else drive your spouse home! I've read enough John Updike and John Cheever short stories to know that nothing good will come of it.

Anyway, go see "Revolutionary Road," revel in the beautiful period detail, and the gorgeous shots of DiCaprio standing in Grand Central Station surrounded by men dressed exactly alike, and then go read the novel by Richard Yates. (I haven't read the book yet, it's next on my list.)

Samuel Beckett's "Endgame"

I just saw Ten Thousand Things Theater Company's production of Samuel Beckett's "Endgame" tonight, and it was amazing! Ten Thousand Things is a small Twin Cities theater group that puts on plays and performs them for audiences that don't get much exposure to theater. They tour each show to men's prisons, women's prisons, shelters for battered women, low-cost senior housing centers, and they get a terrific reaction from their audiences. These people are all very moved by this exposure to art. Ten Thousand Things also performs their shows for paying audiences, which is when I get to see them. Now, you might not think that Beckett would go down quite so well with a prison audience, but his plays probably make more sense to people in prison, because they're all about mindless routines to fill the endless hours of a day. I read "Endgame" in college, and although it's not my favorite play ever, it's stuck with me over the years, just because it's so vivid. Actually seeing it performed made it click on a whole new level for me.

"Endgame" is set in some post-apocalyptic time when everything is running down, as entropy has caught up with us at last. The characters are Hamm, who cannot walk, Clov, who cannot sit down, and Hamm's parents, Nagg and Nell, who live in garbage cans. Hamm and Clov are engaged in a daily battle of wits as Hamm, who is also blind, asks repeatedly if it is time for his pain pill, and Clov patiently keeps telling him no. Hamm and Clov, as so many Beckett characters do, are acting out rituals that keep continuing on, day after day, until the inevitable end. Hamm and Clov's rituals may seem silly and stupid and pointless to us, but I think the point that Beckett is making is that all of us have our rituals, and they may seem silly and stupid and pointless to someone else, but to us they may be quite important. By exaggerating the repetition of these rituals, Beckett makes them seem odd to the audience, but if you think about it, they might not seem so odd after all.

Hamm is aptly named, as he is something of a ham, a performer, filling up his hours with meaningless, repetitious stories. Hamm's very first line in the play is, "Me to play." There is something in Beckett's repetition that makes you aware of performance in everyday life. The stories that we have told so many times, certain pet phrases that we repeat, we are in a sense, putting on a show when we present ourselves to other people, we are actors in our own lives.

Ten Thousand Things is able to get fantastic actors for their plays, and "Endgame" is no exception. Barbra Berlovitz doesn't have a lot to do as Nell, but she's still fantastic. (I've seen Barbra in many, many plays over the years, and she's always riveting.) Steve Hendrickson gets to do a little more as Nagg, he tells a very funny story that Nagg has told many, many times before. When he gets to the end of the story, Nagg says, "That's the worst I've ever told it." Christiana Clark brings Clov's weary physicality to the forefront, and she shows us that even though Clov threatens to leave Hamm, and Hamm often tells Clov to go, these two characters need each other, for some reason. Terry Bellamy gives a bravura performance as Hamm, savoring every single word and command that issues from this broken-down man.

There is an emotion in seeing "Endgame" that I never got from simply reading it. It's difficult to explain, I can't tell you why I was moved by the play, but I was. It could just be the simple human need to connect, and since the world of "Endgame" seems like a vast, empty void, even having someone to tell you it's not time for your pain pill can constitute a meaningful relationship.

Bruce Springsteen, "Hungry Heart"

In honor of the holiday recently past, (Valentine's Day, not Presidents' Day) I thought I should write about a song about love that's been stuck in my head for the last few days. It's Bruce Springsteen's song "Hungry Heart," which was his first Top Ten single, from his 1980 double-album "The River."

It's easy to hear why this was Bruce's first big hit single, it has a very catchy tune, and much fewer words than his early songs! It also has a very simple, hooky chorus. The song starts with a brief drum fill from Max Weinberg, then moves straight into the main melody, played by the piano. Clarence Clemons's saxophone honks away, and the song has a 50's-60's feel to it. Bruce shouts "Yeah!" and then starts singing. But the relentlessly upbeat music is fitted to uneasy lyrics, "Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, jack/I went out for a ride and I never went back." Okay, so in the first two lines of the song we've established that the narrator has a wife and kids, and one day he simply up and leaves them. What reason does the narrator give for his actions? "Like a river that don't know where it's flowin'/ I took a wrong turn and I just kept goin'." Well, that's a suitable justification, right? No, not really. Notice how Bruce works in the image of a river, which is also the central image in the song "The River." By comparing his actions to those of a river, the narrator is essentially saying that he has no control over his actions, that nature is shaping his actions, the same way that nature shapes the river. Which brings up an interesting question, are people meant to be faithful and monogamous? I won't go into all that here, but suffice it to say, there are all kinds of answers to this question.

But that question leads us nicely into the chorus, "Everybody's got a hungry heart/everybody's got a hungry heart/lay down your money and you play your part/everybody's got a hungry heart." The narrator is saying, obviously, that everyone has a "hungry heart," meaning that everyone needs affection and attention, no matter where it comes from. And that everyone is hungry, or greedy, for love and affection. Everybody always wants more than what they currently have. It doesn't matter that the narrator is married and has children, he is still susceptible to the charms of the opposite sex. He still wants something more. I'm not entirely sure what the "lay down your money and you play your part" line means, it could be a reference to prostitution, or it could simply be referring to the different gender roles we play, that men usually pay for things.

The first verse also references Springsteen's recurring motif of travel, of escape, of getting away from things, usually by car. Like Rabbit Angstrom in John Updike's novel "Rabbit, Run," Bruce's narrator simply kept driving away from his wife and kids. He is, like Rabbit, running away from responsibility. In the second verse, we discover what he finds once he stops running. "I met her in a Kingstown bar/We fell in love I knew it had to end." Okay, so he meets a woman in a bar, but what does he know "had to end"? His marriage, or this illicit relationship? I'm going with the marriage, based on the next two lines. "We took what we had and we ripped it apart/Now here I am down in Kingstown again." So the narrator and his mistress ripped apart their current relationships to be together. (Is she married too?) And now the narrator is back in Kingstown again, to see his mistress. Because, well, both the narrator and his mistress have hungry hearts.

At the very end of the second chorus, Bruce lifts his voice up on the last syllables of "hungry" and the song changes key upwards. Danny Federici gets a tasty little organ solo that leads us into the final verse. "Everybody needs a place to rest/Everybody wants to have a home." Which is true, but the narrator had a home and a place to rest, and he threw it all away. This sounds like more self-justification to me. "Don't make no difference what nobody says/Ain't nobody like to be alone." Okay, so once we get past the numerous grammatical errors in these two lines, the narrator seems to be justifying his actions by saying that people naturally seek companionship. But again, the narrator had companionship in his marriage, and left it. Perhaps the narrator would say that even though he was married, he was still really alone, because it was an unfulfilling relationship. The song then closes with another repetition of the chorus, and Bruce gets in some scatting on the fade out.

"Hungry Heart" is a great example of Springsteen matching an upbeat, catchy melody to lyrics that present something more than just a poppy, upbeat message of "Everything's okay." (Think of "Born in the USA.") "Hungry Heart" asks some tough questions about love and relationships: when are we happy, when are we satisfied, and what happens when we should be satisfied, by society's standards of relationships, but really aren't satisfied. What happens when someone tries to break out of those relationships? What's the emotional fall out from the decision to "just keep goin'"? Do we always want what we can't have? Does everyone really have a "Hungry Heart" that is always searching for something "better," something new and fresh, no matter what the cost is to others? That's kind of a depressing way to look at relationships. But these questions are all worth pondering.

CD's I Bought This Weekend

Well, the Electric Fetus, the best record store in the Twin Cities, had their annual Valentine's Day sale last weekend. I picked up a few things, so I thought I might as well make the list a blog post. I got almost everything used, so I saved quite a bit of money.

Bruce Springsteen, "Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ" Since I have the original vinyl, but lack a record player, I thought I should get the CD and actually listen to this music. I just finished listening to "The Essential Bruce Springsteen" and I'm more impressed with the Boss than I was at first. I'm also just impressed by the physical energy he brings to performing. His Super Bowl halftime show was amazing!

Elvis Costello, "Brutal Youth" I found the Rhino 2-disc re-issue used for $8.99, so I bought it. I really like "All This Useless Beauty," from around the same time period, so I figured I'd give this one a shot. It also came highly recommended from EC expert Holly, so that nudged me towards the purchase.

Billy Joel, "Storm Front" Okay, so Billy Joel isn't very "hip." But, I've been listening to "The Essential Billy Joel," and I've forgotten how much I like his songs. He's really a great pop songwriter. And my Dad had "Storm Front" on cassette, so I have fond memories of listening to it in the car. And I'm an American history nerd, so 8-year-old me loved "We Didn't Start the Fire." And it was only $2.99.

James Taylor, "Gorilla" Okay, so James Taylor isn't very "hip" either. But he's a damn fine singer/songwriter. He's one of those artists where every album is pretty similar to every other album, but they're all pretty good. I love the song "Mexico," from this album, so I'm interested to hear the rest of the album.

James Taylor, "October Road," Yes, another JT CD. This one is really good, and even though it came out in 2002, it's his most recent album of new songs he's written. The first time I got interested in James Taylor was around 2002 when he was profiled on "60 Minutes." I knew nothing about his background, so I was surprised to learn he had battled depression and drug abuse. It gave me a lot more respect for him. I was like, "Oh, you suffered for your art."

James Taylor, "New Moon Shine," And one more from Sweet Baby James. It was only $3.99, and this CD is out of print, so I snatched it up.

Robyn Hitchcock, "Queen Elvis" This was the highlight of my shopping trip! One of the only Robyn CD's I don't have, because it's out of print! I was very excited to find this used for $6.99. It even has a promotional sticker on it, bewilderingly calling Robyn, "#1 Post-Modern artist." What exactly does that mean? Whatever it means, I'm sure that Robyn lives up to it.