On Michael Jackson's passing

Just got back from Texas, and I have to go through my photos before posting a summary of the trip.

While I was out of town, though, the Michael Jackson thing happened.  Specifically, I was in Woodsboro, Texas, at my wife's paternal grandmother's house, where there is no cable TV and regular television reception included three Spanish-language channels, a Fox affiliate, and an ABC affiliate.  My cell-phone reception was spotty at best, but using it to check my friends' Facebook updates and various news feeds were the only contact I had to what was going on in the rest of the world.

What I encountered that afternoon is how I expect word of the impending zombie outbreak to spread - lots of "did anyone else see on the news ..." and "did I hear right that ..." and "so and so is reporting ..." type stuff.  Pieces of information, but nothing definitive, and all coming from various sources.

Sure enough, when ABC's national news began, the news I had heard literally ten minutes before was confirmed.  Michael Jackson had, indeed, died at age 50.

I don't know exactly how I feel about it, to be honest.  Yes, I had my Michael Jackson phase when I was about seven years old.  By about nine years old, I think I'd outgrown it.  After the countless headlines and allegations that followed in the succeeding years, I thought most of America had, too - until his death, that is.  Suddenly, an outpouring of affectionate, semi-revisionist history grew into a robust outpouring of what could possibly pass as sadness, but I'm not sure.

I find it odd that so many celebrities (and semi-celebrities - like Arsenio Hall) were suddenly running toward any video camera in their vicinities to talk about how great Michael Jackson was, and what a great loss his death was, when in the years preceding Jackson seemed like such a toxic persona with whom to be associated.  It didn't seem like anyone wanted to be part of Michael Jackson when his public stock was down, but now that he was gone ... all aboard!  

Maybe I'm wrong, but that's the way it seemed.  The reactions I've seen from so many seems incredibly fake.  It seems like people are saying what they're expected to say when any famous person dies, but I don't get the sense that anyone feels like there's been a real loss with Jackson's death - probably because Jackson didn't have, as far as I can tell, real friends or real relationships with anyone outside of his handlers.  It's hard to get emotional at the death of someone about whom so little is actually known personally.  I feel like people would have been just as emotional if asked how they felt about Beethoven's death in the 1820s.  "Yeah, it's really sad, he was very influential ..."  But those words ring incredibly empty given the magnitude of his accomplishments, and how people *should* be reacting, I think. 

As for the dude himself, I kinda just feel sorry for him.  On one hand, the media made him into a musical Howard Hughes; on the other, he didn't do himself any favors with the decisions he made.  He undoubtedly surrounded himself with people who wanted only to take advantage of him and give him bad advice, but ultimately he was responsible for his own actions and decisions.  He could/should have just walked away from it all and lived by his own "leave me alone" credo.  

Was he a musical genius?  I don't think so.  His (terrific) material in the Jackson Five was written by others.  As far as "Thriller" goes as an album and phenomenon, well ... right place, right time.  MTV was an emerging "big deal", and Jackson propelled the artform of the music video into the stratosphere.  "Thriller" itself is a fantastic song and still my favorite video of all time.  "Beat It" crossed genres thanks to Eddie Van Halen and the more aggressive rock style.  But there were some forgettable tracks, too, and the albums that followed weren't nearly as good as far as I'm concerned (though I'll be the first to admit that my musical tastes changed rapidly in the mid/late 1980s).

A talented guy?  No doubt.  The greatest entertainer in history?  Not to me.

But to each his own.  All I know is this:  the media that created the monster that became Jacksonmania and helped turn the musician into a mysterious, unfortunate man-child who lived under constant public scrutiny (the oxygen chamber!  the plastic surgery!) and who for the longest time hadn't been in the public eye for his actual talents but for the side-show that was his private life has now, once again, descended into a feeding frenzy with Jackson at the center of it all.  Even in death, the guy doesn't seem to have earned any dignity.  

Fire, Inc.

Everything gets tied together somehow, doesn't it?  In weird, subtle ways?  In ways that are unremarkable, won't change your life, and fill up a blog entry to make it seem like you've written something semi-substantial rather than just "here's a link to a video on YouTube?"  Know what I mean?

At the very least, there are moments collected through life that seem so disparate and unrelated that all the sudden seem to become one and serve as a direct bridge between your own personal interests that you start to wonder what kind of cosmic, karmic glue is holding everything together in the first place.  That "it really is a small world" kind of feeling.

Twenty-ish years ago were the days when there were only three TV networks, cable was in its relative infancy, and "Superstations" still roamed the planet.  Channel 38 in Boston was one of them and, as such, they aired a lot of feature movies and local sports events (Red Sox games with Bob Montgomery and Ned Martin, lots of Bruins games, etc.).  Most evenings they would air a movie (or two) on "The Movie Loft", hosted by Dana Hersey.  Anyone who grew up in New England in the 80s remembers his voice. 

My brother and I would stop everything we were doing if "The Warriors" came on.  A cult classic in every sense, and worthy of its own post at some point.  I think I gave my brother "Warriors"-themed Christmas gifts at least two or three times.  An old VHS tape for sure, defiinitely a poster, perhaps a t-shirt?

(If you've never seen "The Warriors", by the way, the film is 30 years old and you've had plenty of opportunities by now.  And also, shame on you.)

"The Warriors" was directed by Walter Hill, and co-starred Deborah Van Valkenburgh.  Five years later, the duo paired up again in 1984's "Streets of Fire".  I'd seen that one on the Movie Loft many, many years ago, too, but remembered little about it other than Rick Moranis was in it. 

But the music, and the soundtrack ...

I remembered a song from the soundtrack being quite the hit on WTAG, Worcester's a.m. easy listening pop station: "I Can Dream About You" by Dan Hartman.  The song was very catchy, and I remembered it because the Hartman is a white guy, and in the movie it's performed by a black doo-wop group. 

But that was it ... I had no recollection of the plot, the stars, the rest of the soundtrack ... anything, really. 

Thanks to the ability to stream Netflix movies via my XBox 360, I added "Streets of Fire" to my queue, figuring maybe I'd revisit it if the mood hit me.  Nicole beat me to the punch, seeing in my list, and asked if we could watch it the other night.

It was absurd, ridiculous, and absolutely fantastic in a way that only disposable 1980's movies can be.

So not only are Deborah Van Valkenburgh (as Reva Cody, sister of the film's "hero") and Rick Moranis in it (as Billy Fish, a music agent), so is Michael Pare (as Tom Cody, misunderstood rebel with a heart of gold).  Amy Madigan (as the singularly-named McCoy) plays almost the exact same character as Pare, except as a woman.  A very cute, very young (19 years old) Diane Lane is Ellen Aim, Cody's former love interest and current love interest of Billy Fish (her manager), and the leader of the band Ellen Aim and the Attackers, who are apparently worshipped as god-like figures in whatever the hell city this movie is supposed to take place in.

More, you say?  Willem Dafoe plays the villain, Raven Shaddock, who kidnaps Ellen Aim during a concert at the beginning of the movie, apparently just for shits and giggles.  I don't think they ever actually explain his motivations.  But if you were Shaddock, and thank your lucky stars you're not, you'd probably be ready to kidnap someone on a whim, too - having to wear latex overalls without a shirt and being surrounded by bikers whose motorcycles burst into flame with only the slightest provocation will do that to you.  Literal "Streets of Fire" in this movie throughout. 

(Not good enough?  Robert Townsend is in the doo-wop band, Richard Lawson (who was part of the paranormal research team in "Poltergeist") is a police officer in a town where EVERYONE has a shotgun, and Bill Paxton plays Clyde the Bartender, because why wouldn't he.)

The kidnapping takes place as the band plays "Nowhere Fast" - a song I didn't remember at all up until Nicole and I watched the movie the other night. 

Here's where it gets a little weird for me:  literally minutes after the song ended, the movie barely fifteen minutes in, I had to look the soundtrack up on IMDB.  "Nowhere Fast" was performed by Fire, Inc.

The lead singer of Fire, Inc.?  Laurie Sargent. 

The same Laurie Sargent I had seen countless times in concert in Boston in the earlier part of this decade with Orchestra Morphine after Mark Sandman died, then with their post-Morphine project, Twinemen. 

Some of the best shows I ever saw (and taped!) were OM and Twinemen at the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge, where I would literally sit in the front row of the tables set up around the "stage" (in reality, just an empty spot on the floor in the middle of the room) mere feet away from her microphone. 

Laurie Freakin' Sargent.  Who knew?  I wish I did, because if I knew then what I knew now (and had the song stuck in my head to nearly the point of torture - wonderful, wonderful torture), I'd have been compelled to say something to her about it.

This is an absolute gem of overlooked '80s awesomeness, and for days, I have not been able to get it out of my head. 

I downloaded an mp3 of the song and put it on my iPod, and it's all I can listen to.  Seriously.  A 24-year-old song I hadn't heard for the better part of two decades and didn't remember at all is now just about the only song I have heard for the past three or four days. 

Bring the dog out, listen to the song.  Wash the dishes, listen to the song.  Surf the internet, listen to the song.

I can't make it stop.

The Warriors -> Walter Hill -> Streets of Fire -> Fire, Inc. -> Laurie Sargent -> my ears

So here you have it, with my not-so-secret hope that maybe this gets stuck in your head, too: From the "Streets of Fire" soundtrack, "Nowhere Fast" by Laurie Sargent and Fire, Inc.

Aaron Perrino: I challenge you to dare Laurie Sargent to perform this song with you live with Dear Leader someday.  And if she says yes, make sure I know well enough in advance to be there with my minidisc recorder.

Spilling blood and bleeding gas

[For the record, Bryan, I'd started a draft of this before you posted your blog, so I'm not trying to crib your ideas, I promise!  :) ]

If you've read The Lord of the Rings, you're more patient than I am. I only saw the movies.  Also, you're a nerd.  

Either way, you'll recall a character names Grima Wormtongue. In the character's Wiki entry, he is described as a "flatterer, liar, and manipulator" who "worked to weaken Théoden and his kingdom through lies and persuasion".  Had the LoTR movies been a mob movie, he would have been the Godfather's consiglieri, but rather than dispensing good advice,  Wormtongue used his influence to turn a good man to evil.

At the side of Theoden, Wormtongue weakened the King and clouded his judgment.  At long last, "When the wizard (Gandalf) revealed Wormtongue for what he was, Théoden returned to his senses" and ruled with the bravery and goodness that his followers knew was still in his heart, buried somewhere deep within.

Ladies and gentlemen, I offer to you that Bob Rock is the real-life Grima Wormtongue, Rick Rubin is Gandalf (if the beard fits ...), and Metallica is King Theoden.

Bob Rock, having ruined Metallica for the last 17 years or so by offering advice that was horrible on a personal level and even worse on a musical one (If you've seen Some Kind of Monster, you know what I mean; if you haven't, go rent it.  It almost out-Spinal Tap's Spinal Tap.) has been jetisoned in favor of Rick Rubin.  

This is the equivalent of when Tom Brady decided to ditch Tara Reid and ended up with Gisele Bundchen.  Sometimes the upgrade is so great, you can't believe the first choice was even an option in the first place.

To say that Rubin's work is wizardly on the new Metallica record, Death Magnetic, would be an understatement.  In fact, "whiz" is a descendant of the word "wizard", and Rubin is widely considered to be a "whiz" at re-inventing or re-energizing musicians whose careers seemed to have been on the decline, or at least less relevant than they had been previously.  

To fans (like me) old enough to remember what the band was like pre-"Black Album", he has made Metallica vital again.  The music is thoroughly re-energized, focused, fast, and - yes - heavy.  Death Magnetic is easily Metallica's best record in the last twenty years.  TWENTY YEARS, people.  We're old.  Dammit.

The sound is akin to that on  ... And Justice For All; the rhythm guitar chugs along with the evil galloping menace that the more recent Metallica records lacked.  For a while there, it seemed like the band forgot how to ride a galloping low E string.  But it's back here, bigtime, as are Kirk Hammet's scorching guitar solos.  Not allowed to play any on the previous record, he's making up for lost time here.  Seven of the ten songs are more than seven minutes long.  None is less than five minutes long.  Like the older Metallica records, each song is jam-packed with tempo changes and handful upon handful of riffs.  It's just like old times.

(In fact, I'd love to see if Rubin could re-master a re-release of Justice, which always sounded too crowded and muddy to me - there's a lot of great stuff in there, but it gets lost in the mix.)

And you know what's missing?  That awful clanging drum from St. Anger.  Gone, baby, gone.  Lars Ulrich may be one of metal's least popular personalities, but he reminds everyone that he's not just Lars Ulrich, he's Lars Ulrich DAMMIT.  It almost makes you forget what a screwball he seems to be in real life.  (Almost.)

Jim Hetfield is still prone to writing some really awkward verses here and there, but nothing is as awful as pure garbage like "Sweet Amber" on St. Anger, for instance (though, frankly, it's unlikely anything could be).  

But there's plenty here to like.  More than like.  This is devil horn fist in the air type stuff.  

The opening track, "That Was Just Your Life", opens with the sound of a heartbeat - appropriately symbolic of a band trying to prove that it still has some life in it.  The guitar enters with a shimmering phasor effect, and it feels like when you're on the way up the first slope of a rollercoaster.  You know you're going to start moving really fast, really soon.  Will it be fun?  Will everyone enjoy the ride and want to tell their friends they need to go on it?  Yes and yes.

The drums kick in, the overdrive switches on, and that old familiar snarling staccato vocal delivery digs its claws in.  As my good friend Bryan rhetorically asks aloud in his own blog, "There.  Was that so hard?"

Track #3, "Broken, Beat, and Scarred" is, at "only" 6:30 long, a likely radio release.  

Track #4, "The Day That Never Comes", is the first to have been released to fans via the Metallica website.  The first couple of times I heard it, I was as wary as Bryan regarding the rest of the album. For the first five minutes, it's as close to the Bob Rock era as the album comes.  It sounds like it's trying too hard to be radio friendly, and the vocals aren't as confident as they are on the rest of the album.  It's Hetfield singing again, not barking the way he's at his best.  And the lyrics are pretty forgettable ("when you stand up and feel the warmth, but the sunshine never comes").   The final three minutes, though, had me scratching my head - did they play like that because they meant it, or because they thought it was what people wanted to hear?  It sounded like old Metallica, but were they just throwing it in as a treat to their older fans?

Turns out they meant it.

Track #5, "All Nightmare Long", will probably be the biggest hit on the record.  It's got the perfect mix of the old Metallica songwriting style with the radio-friendly chorus of the more recent records.  It's another eight minute long locomotive barreling down the tracks.

Bryan picked up on the Ennio Morricone vibe in "Unforgiven 3", too.  Though it shares its name with two predecessors, it doesn't share the same melody or chorus.  Metallica had recorded mostly-instrumental cover of "The Ecstasy of Gold" on a tribute record a while back - if you've seen The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, you'll recognize it as the song that plays toward the climax of the movie as Tuco runs through the cemetery trying to find Arch Stanton's grave.  The similarities between that song and "U3" are subtle but undeniable.  Hell, sometimes they're not subtle.  Hetfield uses the word "gold" quite often in the new track and seems to begging for the comparison.

Two side notes: 

1. I always wondered about how bands name songs.  If a band writes something called "The Happy Song", and then on the next record they write another song that would have been more appropriately named "The Happy Song" than the first one, could they retro-actively re-name the first?  Metallica has three "Unforgivens".  Iron Maiden has a song called "Wicker Man", but so did Bruce Dickinson (their lead singer) on one of his solo records.  I don't know.  It's just kinda weird.

2. Just in case you haven't seen The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly and want to avoid a spoiler, skip the rest of this paragraph.  Stop reading now.  You've been warned.  A couple of times.  OK, I'm going to spoil it now.  Ready?  Look away.  -- During the standoff at the end of the movie, wouldn't it have been better for Blondie to have decided Tuco's fate depending on what Tuco did when he drew his (ammunitionless) gun?  They should have somehow made it clear that had Tuco drawn his weapon on Angel Eyes, Blondie would have spared him, but if he drew on Blondie, Blondie would have killed him despite their history.  The only change I would have made to a wonderful movie.

Track #8, "The Judas Kiss", would have fit perfectly onto Justice.  

Track #9, "Suicide and Redemption", is a welcome old friend: the ten-minute instrumental.  

Track #10, "My Apocalypse": Kirk Hammett's solo at 2:25.  Ooh, baby.

So yeah -- get it.  Don't just download it.  Regardless of their previous stance on pirated music and how it might be perceived that they treated their fans, you have to support art when you appreciate it.

It took a long time to be able to say this and mean it:  Metallica has given us a gift this year.  This is great stuff.  Really, really great stuff.  

Go check it out.

Stairways to Heaven

I got a semi-frenzied call from my brother this past Friday night. The first thing out of his mouth:

"Hey Jim, get a pen and some paper - write this down!"

Uh, OK. At least I could tell everyone was fine. He doesn't call too often (our conversations normally result in me calling my mom and his happening to be at home and answering the phone), so when the number came up on my cell phone I was a little surprised and a little worried that someone was sick or worse.

"You have to find a copy of this. Rodrigo and Gabriela. You'll probably find it as Rodrigo y Gabriela."

He proceeded to tell me about who they were, how he found out about them, and how he actually found their CD at BestBuy, so I looked them up on YouTube and found a couple of videos.

I downloaded the album on eMusic, and while I'm maybe not as crazed about it as my brother (enough to call someone out of the blue just to recommend it, that is), I'm very, very impressed nonetheless. The album I downloaded is mostly full of original material, but they very impressively cover "Stairway to Heaven" and Metallica's "Orion".

Long story short, they're heavy metal fans from Mexico City who up and moved to Dublin, Ireland, though they spoke no English. They started performing on the streets, and ... well, let's just say it's unfair that Fall Out Boy is famous and I'd never heard of Rodrigo y Gabriela isn't.

Not yet, anyway.

After I got off the phone with my brother, Nicole heard music playing and asked what I was watching. I explained, and she said "Oh, yeah - they're really good. They used to play them on the radio all the time in Portland."

Really? It was a further confirmation that I am so out of touch with everything, music-wise. I enjoy listening to Sirius, as it's commercial-free, but sometimes I wonder if they're as adventurous as I'd like them to be, because I'd never heard of them. Anyway.

Here's a clip of their version of "Stairway to Heaven", which I post only because it reminded me of the next clip I'm posting, which is also "Stairway to Heaven". If you watch the two of them, you'll understand.

After watching this clip, I remembered a performance I'd seen many years ago on PBS. I remembered it so well because the guy played two different guitars at the same time - one with each hand. Rhythm guitar with the left, and lead with the right - it's all fingertapping, and it's enough to make me wonder if he's human or not. Thank goodness for YouTube - I found it immediately.

So please check this out, too: Stanley Jordan. (If you're impatient, skip to about 2:50 into the performance). I don't know how old this performance actually is, but judging by the shoulder pads he's got under that jacket of his, it's clearly been a while.

Pie charts

more graph humor and song chart memes


more graph humor and song chart memes


more graph humor and song chart memes


more graph humor and song chart memes