HEAVY TUNES: Records I Listened to Today, May 26, 2020

Old Man, Take a Listen to My Records
They're A Lot Like Yours Were

1. Spanish Love Songs, Brave Faces Everyone (2020, Pure Noise)
   I didn't know "We're not a Christian band, but we sound like a Christian band" was a sound for slow punk bands. But RIYL Mountain Goats / cool-pastor voice, drinking as a personality, shouting along. Recommended by the Strikewave newsletter.
2. NOBRO, Sick Hustle (2020, Dine Alone / Scary Monsters)
   I also didn't know "We like L7's guitar sounds" was a going concern, but based on the first song, it seems to be. Good stuff, and gets better as the record goes on! This one's from the Turntable Report by Tracy Wilson.
3. Hole, Celebrity Skin (1998, Geffen)
   Basically a perfect rock record. Ever since it's been out, I've heard a "criticism" that says "Well, Billy Corgan wrote all the songs," which (a) sounds like a depressingly common way to dismiss / diss / disappear Courtney Love, which is something dudes who like to talk about rock records are distressingly prone to do, and (b) is bizarre even if it were true, because what kind of backwards-ass nincompoop do you have to be to think "This combination of performer and songwriter works beautifully together and made a great record" is somehow a bad thing? One thing I love about the record is how confident in your work you have to be to title a poppy rock song "Heaven Tonight" after Cheap Trick wrote a basically perfect poppy rock song and called it "Heaven Tonight". Here, it works. Not sure I'd recommend the move for lesser artists.
4. Big Business, Mind the Drift (2009, Joyful Noise)
   When I first moved to Oakland, basically all I listened to was this record, in a weird track order that my busted-ass Coby .mp3 player imposed. Hearing it the "right" way is still a little disorienting.
5. Thin White Rope, Exploring the Axis (1985, Frontier)
   If Sonic Youth grew up listening to country and reading noir, they might have sounded a little like Thin White Rope.

It was a million degrees today, and I worked 11 or so hours. Not a lot of time for music, but I tried to listen to a couple new things, mostly without satisfaction, and then retreated to comforts. Those Hole, Big Business and Thin White Rope records all dominated whole years at one time or another, and it was nice to revisit them and step away from the same records I've been listening to all year long (Obsequiae's The Palms of Sorrowed Kings and El-P's Cancer for Cure, more or less). What are you trying to listen to to shake things up?

Two Problems with Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize for Literature

1. The elevation and sanctification of the strange and pernicious middlebrow belief that "songwriting" is essentially and importantly the writing of lyrics, or, to put it slightly differently, that the important and meaningful parts of songs are their words. The best way to dispel this one is to dive into this cover of "Outlaw Blues" by Thin White Rope, in which the guitar lines that come in after "I feel just like Jesse James" manage to convey that sentiment (cocky strutting) and "I got a woman in Jackson" (randy as fuck howling) substantially better than the words do (which is itself well). In rock and roll, it's almost always the guitars that get the best words.
2. A parallel misapprehension about songwriting: that it is fundamentally an individual act, and that the players of songs are somehow secondary or subordinate. An easy way to correct this misapprehension would be to start your own fucking band, which would quickly revise your mental model of songwriting through the tool of practical experience.

If you're into easier, less rewarding modes, you could correct both of these mistaken notions simultaneously by reading historical accounts of the process of recording Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone", probably as responsible for the award as any other single song:

Tom Wilson invited Al Kooper to stop by the next day's session simply to watch, but he had far bigger plans. "Taking no chances, I arrived an hour early and well enough ahead of the crowd to establish my cover," he wrote in his 1998 book Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards. "I walked into the studio with my guitar case, unpacked, tuned up, plugged in, and sat there trying my hardest to look like I belonged." Soon enough, [British blues player Mike] Bloomfield walked in and began practicing. "[He] commenced to play some of the most incredible guitar I'd ever heard," Kooper wrote. "And he was just warming up! I was in over my head. I embarrassedly unplugged [his guitar], packed up, went into the control room, and sat there pretending to be a reporter from Sing Out! magazine."

With Kooper in the control room, the same group from the previous day launched into "Like a Rolling Stone," though with Paul Griffin moving from organ to piano. Kooper knew so little about the organ that he didn't even know how to turn it on, but he was desperate to play on a Dylan song and when a distracted Wilson didn't give him a firm "no" he walked into the studio, sat down at the instrument and was delighted to see Griffin hadn't turned it off. "Imagine this," Kooper wrote in his book. "There is no music to read. The song is over five minutes long, the band is so loud I can't even hear the organ, and I'm not familiar with the instrument to begin with. But the tape is rolling, and that is Bob-fucking-Dylan over there singing, so this had better be me sitting here playing something."

Wilson may have been shocked when he saw what was happening, but Dylan dug Kooper's sound and asked for the organ to be turned up. "You can hear how I waited until the chord was played by the rest of the band before committing myself to play in the verses," Kooper wrote. "I'm always an eighth note behind everyone else, making sure of the chord before touching the keys." The unique style of playing not only gave the song a signature component, but it also introduced Dylan to a musical collaborator he would return to time and time again in the coming years.

In "Like a Rolling Stone", the organ is an unmistakeable carrier of meaning, and it was an accidental, improvisatory addition. Occluding these facts is one consequence of Dylan's Nobel.