On Rock Star Friends

The biggest problem in rock journalism is that often the writer’s main motivation is to become friends with the band. They’re not really journalists; they’re people who want to be involved in rock and roll. ~ Chuck Klosterman

A friend of mine sent me this quote a few days ago. This is why the music biz needs you! she gushed.

On the surface, Klosterman’s statement rings true for me. I think most rock journalists are, at heart, big music fans and big fans of the idea of rock and roll. You have to be. And we all know how easy it is to get lost in that idea, or get caught up in the hubris, or get too “into” bands—even local bands—with the sexdrugsrockandroll veil over our eyes. The prospect of befriending a big rock star is super tantalizing if you're caught up in the mystique.

As for me, what I “geek out” about are not the rock stars themselves—or merely the music—but the freedom that they have to be fully creative. I love hearing about that, and I like talking to rock stars the same way I like talking to strangers in a bar: it’s a risk but it’s usually fun, even if it’s all at arm’s length.

But to be real, live, hang-out friends with a rock star? Playing Scattergories together over crudites? For the most part, no.

It’s not about ruining the illusion. Illusions are meant to be used and quickly destroyed. I am very comfortable with the idea of famous rock stars making sandwiches, arguing with their family, and farting audibly. I also have enough non-famous musician friends to no longer be awed by the bullshit of rock and roll. The only rocker mythos I don’t dare disturb is Led Zeppelin’s because, let’s face it, their whole Aleister Crowley/Lord of the Rings thing is fucking awesome.

We salute you, Dark Lord Jimmy Page!

But if I’m being completely honest with myself, it's more about the fact that I’m totally not cool enough to be friends with a rock star.  

Plus, nobody likes journalists and music journalists are like the D&D-playing younger step siblings of the journalism world. The awkward tag-alongs of journalism. We are the dorks to the rock stars’ gods, and everyone knows it.

I think every music writer feels a little bit like a fraud; I know I do. How could we not? If we don’t feel that way a little bit, then we’re living a bigger illusion than the believers in the hype surrounding those we interview. We write about people way cooler than us instead of living way cooler lives ourselves. Even the "rock stars" of rock journos (such as they are anymore) are met with annoyance and indifference. The clout these big-name music writers once had is a thing of the past, and those guys themselves are like Quakers—once (and still occasionally) revolutionary, but facing extinction.

And yet we all continue. We occupy a strange place in the world, getting creative about others' creativity, working purely for passion and fun, and doing our best to keep up with the same imploding music industry that's confounding even the most talented and established musicians. 

The big question is... where do we go from here? A few things are for certain: Music will always matter and people who love music will always matter; therefore, people who write about music will always matter somehow because meaningful conversations will always matter—even between dorks and gods.

I think there's only one thing to do: How ’bout it, rock stars? Want to grab a beer sometime?

Why I (sort of) hate Led Zeppelin

I'll get to why I sort of hate Led Zeppelin, but I have to digress for a moment. For context. And so you don't think I'm a bitch.

In another life, some years ago now, I managed 20 or so miscreants at a hair salon. I was a poor college student who needed the job. I was also young and I put up with a lot -- too much -- from the staff.

Hairstylists, in general, are an interesting bunch. Societal misfits, artists, and amateur counselors for their clients, they live life on the fringe of moral acceptability and like it. Moody and dramatic, fascinating and frustrating, I loved working with them slightly more than I hated it.

Every single one of these hairdressers drove me a little crazy. A typical day involved at least two of the following:

• A fight in front of clients, leaving me to smooth things over. 
• Recreational drug use in the bathrooms. 
• Loud, slanderous gossip about their prominent clients.
• Theft of each other's commissions/tips, often using me as a scapegoat and feigning innocence. 
• Calling in "sick" when I knew -- and they knew that I knew! -- that they'd been out partying the night before, leaving me to call their angry clients. 

And so, needing employment badly and having no other outlet for my frustrations, I behaved as you'd expect a consummate music nerd to behave: I burned passive-aggressive CDs for my coworkers in a show of "goodwill", and in a desperate attempt to get them to stop being such narcissistic assholes to me.

Here are three of my musical responses and the shenanigans to which I was responding.

EXHIBIT A: One female stylist I worked with was once a robust woman in her late 40s who used meth (or something like it) to lose over 100 pounds rapidly. Her change was so dramatic that I was confronted by an irate (bigoted, massive bitch) customer who thought that we had hired a drag queen.

"I know you hire those people in this industry," she hissed at me, "but this is too much!"

Patrick Swayze would have kicked her ass, God rest his soul.

Anyhow, this particular stylist was occasionally so strung out ("I'm hypoglycemic!") that she would pass out cold in the middle of cutting hair, horrifying her clients and causing two or three of her fellow stylists to stop what they were doing to pick her up off the floor, drag her to a shampoo bowl, and hose her off. No big deal.

RESPONSE: I made her a CD filled with songs about the dangers of doing drugs. She loved it.


EXHIBIT B: Then there was the especially promiscuous stylist who, one sunny afternoon, ran screaming out the front door of the salon when he discovered that his itchy eye was the result of crab larvae wriggling around in his eyeball.

To cleanse you of that visual, here's a puppy. 

RESPONSE: I made him a CD filled with songs about self-love, with euphemisms about the act written all over the disc. He thought it was hilarious.

See, this was the reaction I got from the stylists -- none of them had any clue that I was poking fun at them or, if they did, they didn't care. They would just thank me profusely for making them such cool CDs and they'd be extra nice to me for a day or two before they'd be back to their usual behaviors. So, I decided to be more brazen just to see what would happen and because, well, fuck 'em.

Here is, finally, where Led Zeppelin enters into it.


EXHIBIT C: Okay, so there was this stylist who was head-over-heels for Led Zeppelin. She was a super cute blonde and had lots of borderline creepy male hangers-on.

No, she wasn't Robert Plant.

When her birthday rolled around I, naturally, made her a CD called I Love Jimmy Page, full of obvious, pointed examples of what a talentless group of thieving hacks Led Zeppelin were. The idea was that she'd put the CD on, thinking that it would be a bunch of Led Zeppelin "bootlegs", but would instead get 80 minutes of all the songs that her favorite band in the world had so shamelessly ripped off.

Now, before you convict me for crimes against rock for ripping on Zep so hard, hear me out.

The Zep-loving gal was one of the worst offenders of calling in "sick" at the very last minute, and her creepy clients would have meltdowns when told of her absence. I spent many a morning getting screamed at and/or talking her clients down from their bizarre metaphorical ledges. And this bullshit happened at least once a week, which is why I decided I'd make my first brazenly passive-aggressive CD especially for her.

Problem: I had no idea how I was going to prove that Led Zeppelin sucked, since I was firmly of the mind that they didn't suck. Not even a little bit.

Solution: With the gusto of a cherry-picking cable news pundit, I went straight for the minor, seemingly insignificant details: I checked song credits.

True Fact: Jimmy Page invented the blues.

Score! It is well known that Jimmy Page went far beyond "appreciating" old blues numbers to downright ripping them off AND, in a staggering display of kicking one when they're down further than he would ever be, he gave HIMSELF (and bandmates) songwriting credits! What a complete bastard. Here are just a handful of examples:

Howlin' Wolf - "Killing Floor"
Howlin' Wolf's "Killing Floor" is one of the more obvious examples (right up there with "Sweet Little Sixteen"/"Surfin' USA") of outright theft perpetrated against black musicians by white musicians; if nothing else, Howlin' Wolf should have at least throat-punched Jimmy Page for "The Lemon Song".

Just like that, I had my first track. 

And then there was the matter of Robert Plant. Who can deny that his vocal range is at the very least iconic?

But it turns out that even he stole his chops from another British bluesman, only this guy had more talent in his pinky than Robert Plant has dreamed about while dressed up as a white knight atop his steed. Don't believe me? Watch and learn from Steve Marriott:

The Small Faces - "You Need Loving"

At least The Small Faces had the class not to claim they wrote "You Need Loving", nor to change it up "Surfin' USA"-style and cause legions of their fans to try to convince their blues fan college roommates that the Small Faces were NOT a bunch of rip-off artists.

But Led Zeppelin's thievery didn't stop there, of course: Jimmy Page even stole his whole cello-bow-on-electric-guitar move!

The Creation - "Painter Man"

Yeah, it's mimed, but he's drawing the bow on the recording and that's what counts. The Creation got lost in the shuffle of British R&B bands who turned psychedelic, but at least one of their gimmicks found a home forever in Led Zeppelin lore.

I was able to dig up half a dozen or so more examples of questionable song credits to round out the first half of the CD. And then something very unexpected changed my trajectory:

It turns out that Jimmy Page, session musician, gave more than a few British rock bands a lift!

Including The Kinks:
The Kinks - "Revenge"

The less-well-known pysch rockers, Les Fleur de Lys:
Les Fleur de Lys - "Circles"

And, perhaps the most disputed of all his credits, The Who:
The Who - "I Can't Explain"

But even if he didn't play on "I Can't Explain", Jimmy Page found time to record with at least one of the guys in The Who (see if you can guess which one):
Jeff Beck Group - "Beck's Bolero"


The girl, of course, loved it and I learned a hell of a lot, which is the goal of any good music nerd, right? And while I was severely annoyed at all the outright thieving bastardry I uncovered in my passive-aggressive quest, I couldn't fully turn Jimmy Page into a villain. He's too good, too cool, and too everything that rock 'n' roll once was and should be again.

You magnificent bastard.

TL;DR: The reason why I sort of hate Led Zeppelin is simple: Like his rock 'n' roll heir apparent, Jack White, Jimmy Page has the ability to take what's been done before and make it sound like something you're hearing for the first time. I don't know what you'd call that, exactly, but I'm glad a little bit of it still exists.

On a probably unrelated note, I haven't had a decent hair cut since I left the salon. True story.

Wonderin'

When I was assigned March 11 for my next contribution to All The Write Notes, I couldn't imagine writing anything that didn't acknowledge the sad fact that my mother died four years ago today. I worked for weeks, and started many drafts, only to realize I couldn't write anything new. 

My mother's name was Susan and I think you would have loved her because, well, so many loved her. She was a creative soul with a soft spot for outcasts, treating everyone who came into her home like they were her own family. When she passed away, it was like dozens of people lost their mom, too. 

Mom's influence on me musically is immense: From afternoons sprawled on the living room rug listening to opera records, to sitting next to her at the piano singing showtunes, to discovering she knew how to adjust the bass on her car stereo the moment she heard a Sly & The Family Stone song; the way I've learned to love and appreciate music is largely thanks to her.

When I wrote the piece below last year, I couldn't help but think about how funny it was that it was a musician that Mom hated—and whom didn't like at the time—who helped me through her long illness and eventual passing.

***

"I am of the theory that all of our transcendental connections, anything we’re drawn to, be it a person, a song, a painting on the wall – they’re magnetic. The art is the alloy, so to speak. And our souls are equipped with whatever properties are required to attract that alloy. I’m no scientist so I don’t really know what the hell these properties are, but my point is we’re drawn to stuff we've already got a connection to. Part of the thing is already inside of us.”

— from God-Shaped Hole by Tiffanie DeBartolo

***

Mom was too tired to brush her teeth, and red Jell-O was all she wanted anymore. She slept with her mouth slightly agape, her teeth pink, her face white, her fingers blue.

In a Tijuana hospital, nobody spoke English well. I got her M&Ms from the corner store once, but she was frightened when I wasn't there. I changed her bedpan, and then her diapers. The nurses and I salved her bedsores, turning her, trying not to hurt her broken hip.

Ella tiene dolor en la cadera.

It, too, was dissolved, like her ribs, her breast, her lung. She cried at night, she shit herself. I held her hand when they poked and prodded. I smoothed her hair and she smiled sometimes. She had big, brown eyes like a calf. Like a Black-Eyed Susan.

Por que los dedos azul?

I rode in the ambulance with her. Federalis in full SWAT gear patrolled the streets in pickup trucks. I signed forms, I reminded the EMTs in high school Spanish to be gentle, that her hip was broken. I promised I’d be there when she got out from radiation. There were piles of hair around her bed, but she never went bald. She asked me if she was going to die.

Tengo miedo.

Whispering, too weak to speak, so tired. She slept at night, but I didn't. I watched movies, I used music. I was delirious from isolation, from tending a frightened child who happened to be my mother. And I had to be strong.

***

Many years before all this, my best friend got the first re-writable CD-ROM drive of anyone I knew. It took me all morning to rip and compile the first CD mixtape I ever made. It took the rest of the day to burn it.

Even though I didn't like him, my day-long labor included one Neil Young song. It was like… I had to.

Two years later, my brother and I drove six hours to St. Louis to see CSN&Y. I was happy that Neil played that one song. I felt like I’d seen something important, even though I still didn't like him. Stupid whiny voice, shitty guitar playing.

***

A decade later in a hospital room, I was despairing and I was alone with my thoughts. I wasn't sure how much longer I could take it. One day I noticed that nothing that I used to love made me happy anymore.

Nobody quite knew what to say. So I corresponded with a friend of mine, an Iraq combat vet, who understood the depths of isolation and weariness and futility and the unfair demands to muster strength and comfort in an impossible situation. He said I was the only civilian he could talk to.

When Mom went to bed, the TV was on all night. It was comforting for her. I couldn't sleep anymore anyhow; there were always sheets and diapers and a body to be cleaned. The nurses were gone.

One night, she wanted the TV off. It was too dark, and so I gathered in my laptop. I don’t remember how I found it, or why I was looking for his music, but I watched this video of Neil Young—who I didn't like, who had a stupid whiny voice and played shitty guitar—over and over:

It made me happy.

***

I suppose there was a latent connection that was always inside of me, a Neil-shaped hole in my heart. And I suppose it just took the right switch to turn it on, to make me love more than one song, to magnetize the rest of me to his music. I couldn't tell you why it happened, and I don’t think I’m supposed to anyhow; it would sound stupid and weird.

But it was just what I needed when I needed it.

***

When Mom died, she returned to the ocean, her ashes became foam. She loved the water. My two best friends were going to dress as Captain & Tenille for her funeral because my mother would have loved that, too. She was so funny. There will never be a headstone, because that’s how she wanted it. She promised to haunt me, and she does in a way.

When I breathe the salt air, I am with her. I am half of her anyhow, maybe more. And now Neil Young is part of it all, somehow, in a non-creepy way. It’s hard to explain.

"Grown-Up" "Love" Songs

When I was in high school, I had a teacher who delighted in showing Predator to his students on Valentine’s Day. His broader meaning was clear: Valentine’s Day is a Hallmark holiday worthy of ridicule. His deeper meaning wasn't clear to me as a teenager, but it's crystal clear to me as an adult: Predator is a metaphor for what "grown-up love" will do to you, if a little over-the-top.

Puppy love gets all the pop songs and all the ennui, but it’s grown-up love that devastates you. One of the things nobody tells you about adulthood, until you find yourself mired in it, is how complicated and insane and ill-timed grown-up love can be. Why? Because the stakes are so much higher. Love has always been a gamble, but now you're standing at the roulette wheel with way too much riding on red.

But what really makes grown-up love so different than the very real, very heartbreaking stuff of youth? Laugh all you want, but Nicolas Cage as Ronny Cammareri in Moonstruck gives the best description of the difference that I've ever heard:

Loretta, I love you. Not like they told you love is, and I didn't know this either, but love don't make things nice—it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren't here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die. The storybooks are bullshit! Now I want you to come upstairs with me and get in my bed! 

Naturally, this speech works splendidly in the movie; Loretta and Ronny wind up together in a hilarious finish. That’s Hollywood, where grown-up love works out for the best. In real life, of course, love gets increasingly complicated the older you get. And nobody tells you that!

On this Valentine's Day, I’d like to explore some songs that deal with the ups and downs of grown-up love; songs that are beyond simple broken hearts and he-said-she-said emo posturing. These are the songs of people who were a little bit destroyed by grown-up love. They may have moved on by now, but the record remains.

Happy Valentine's Day.

Pardon My Heart—Neil Young 
They say the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. That seems to be what “Pardon My Heart” is all about. Sometimes, there’s no big breakup. Sometimes, things just change. Sometimes, things get comfortable. You don’t realize the spark is gone until you try to get it back. And many times, it doesn't come back. With grown-up love, you bring it all on yourself.

Ventura—Lucinda Williams 
Grown-up love can leave you aggrieved in ways that young love does not. Sometimes you can’t cry about it. You drive around in your car, listening to music, wishing you could just walk into the ocean. “Ventura” could be about death or the end of a relationship; it’s so far from being on-the-nose that the distinction between the two is blurred, as it often is in real life.

Love Reign O’er Me—The Who
I was friends with someone who told me that Quadrophenia helped him get through his 30s. I never understood what he was on about until I reached my 30s. After all, the album is the story of a mod teenager trying to find his way. But the resilience of youth is strikingly absent. The landscape is so bleak and the prospects are so hazy that “Love Reign O’er Me” fits within an adult’s experience perfectly. Sometimes there’s nothing to do except stand out in the rain and scream and hope it brings you relief somehow.

Somebody That I Used to Know—Gotye
Say what you will about the most ubiquitous song of the past year (second only to “Call Me Maybe” or “Gangnam Style”), but Wally De Backer wrote a refreshingly unique earworm about the boring, humiliating, ridiculous ugliness of a grown-up breakup. There’s no big fight, no dramatic exit, no obsessive pleading; just a collection of personal belongings and the changing of phone numbers. It’s so anti-climactic it hurts.

The Actor—The Moody Blues
Infatuation doesn't end when you grow up, and the desire to escape grows more intense the older you get and the more tied into life you become. “The Actor” describes a woman who becomes besotted with an actor she sees on television. This kind of separation from reality is something that we, as adults, experience more as the years go on and our lives solidify. Things seem more unattainable than ever before, including love, especially if we haven’t found it yet. 

Can You Get to That—Funkadelic
Writing checks for love that your heart can’t cash. This is another grown-up break-up song, but one that acknowledges the price of our indiscretions. As we enter into ever more serious relationships, the increasing (potential) consequences to our actions can become the reason why we shrink from responsibility. Sometimes being honest in a relationship is the toughest thing you can do, but it’s a big way grown-up love is different from puppy love. Grown-up love sometimes requires us to be mature when we don’t want to be, when it doesn't seem fair, and when doesn't feel good. Can you get to that?

Enchanting Ghost—Sufjan Stevens
It’s hard to know if Sufjan is writing with religious or romantic overtones, so I’ll keep with the theme of this post and extrapolate the latter meaning from this song: Sometimes we want to know why someone wanted to be with us in the first place. Grown-ups like to over-think like that. Other times, we can’t bear to disrupt the few fond memories we may have of the person we once gave all our love to. That “enchanting ghost” that keeps us from feeling like we've been fooled, that we've wasted years of our lives—years that are suddenly more precious than we could have ever imagined in our younger days. The end result is that sometimes we stay with the wrong person because who they were, and who we want them to be, mean more to us than who they really are.

Teenagers: You've been warned!

What are your favorite “Grown-Up Love Songs”? Let us know in the comments!

6 Things I Learned When I Couldn't Stop Listening to The Who

Once I was a misanthropic college student who was obsessed with The Who. Rather than narrowing my musical horizons, it wound up expanding my life in ways I couldn't have imagined at the time. Here are the six most valuable things I learned while indulging my musical fixation with "maximum R&B": 

1. How to have style. Poor college kids aren't known for looking sharp, but poor English kids were. Mod style and ethos was something I took to quickly; it was simple and elegant. I found “mod” designers on eBay and in thrift stores and cobbled together a quasi-style of my own rather cheaply. 


2. How to feel angry. It was amusing to me that The Who were considered a “guy’s band” because the way they raged felt so feminine to me. I never quite thought it was okay to be angry about things that I should have been angry about (parents’ divorce, friends’ betrayals, the usual young adult stuff); I put on a very brave face, as did so many of the Who songs I listened to. Yes, there was lots of excellent, mopey grunge rock still around at the time, but it didn't get to me the way Pete Townshend's stuff did. The Who’s music expressed an eloquent and sensitive anger, and the volume at which it was best delivered gave them a voice to their own rage that I wished I had and, eventually, got the courage to have. 


3. How to have an adventure. I took all the money I’d saved over the winter of 2000 and spent it on a 3,000-mile road trip to see The Who in concert, dragging along three friends who couldn't care less. Crazy! We did more fun things, heard more incredible music, and made more memories than we would have if we’d stayed in our little Southern town all summer long. Going to see The Who at all meant driving at least 350 miles in any direction, and so I did just that—many times. I met people from all over the world who I still call friends to this day. I even married one of them. 


4. That famous people are just people. I didn't anticipate making a career out of talking to rock stars. If you’d told me in 1999 that that’s what I’d be doing less than six years later, I would have probably thrown up with fear. Fortunately for me, Pete Townshend was the first rock star I ever met and he was incredibly kind and down to earth. And he had a stain on his shirt. 


5. That there is so much great music out there. At the same time I was almost exclusively listening to The Who, I was a college radio DJ—another thing I would never have done if I hadn't felt compelled to share obscure Pete Townshend solo tracks with the “world”. In the process of becoming a DJ, however, I was exposed to an abundance of excellent independent music that I may have never discovered on my own. Rufus Wainwright, Elliott Smith, The Roots, Nick Drake, Love, The Flaming Lips, Built to Spill, Sloan, Tortoise, Dolly Parton, Belle & Sebastian, Sigur Rós, Lucinda Williams—you have The Who to thank for me getting to know your music. 


6. How to be serious about not taking things too seriously. There have been few times in my life when I've laughed as much and as hard as when I watched The Kids Are Alright (for the first time, mind you) with a close friend who hated The Who. Fangirls/fanboys might be horrified to hear about something like this, but I have never been so delighted laughing at myself as I was on that day. Why? Because obsession offers a tantalizing illusion. It's so tantalizing, in fact, that it's easy to miss more important things in life. Loving The Who as much as I did taught me to love being disillusioned, and to remember to have fun with what was so meaningful to me. Laughing at how much I loved The Who taught me not to sweat the small stuff. Music is terribly important, I realize, but what really matters is all that matters; everything else is worth a chuckle to keep from taking it all too seriously. And that, dear readers, is no joke. 

Jennifer Carney is a music writer based in San Diego. She’s probably not going to see The Who in concert next week, and she hates how many bad TV shows use their music, but every once in a while she drives up the coast listening to “Love Reign O’er Me”.