After 40 Years, King Crimson's Larks' Tongues in Aspic Is Still a Delicacy

One of my favorite albums of all time is one that I bought in error. One summer, I had served an apprenticeship of sorts. It was 1978, I was 15 years old, and I was working at a summer camp where I became friends with a guy named David Kaplan. He was a few years older than me and a very good guitarist, shy but also very funny. And he had exceptional taste in music: jazz, fusion, progressive rock. I expressed interest and he was happy to school me. It is thanks to him that I am a fanatic about Gentle Giant. It was through him that I first heard the music of Chick Corea. And it was because of him that I became introduced to King Crimson.

If memory serves, he only had one King Crimson album, but it was one that I liked very much. The album was called Starless and Bible Black and it had been released in 1974, back when I was listening to the Monkees, the Osmond Brothers, and the Jackson Five. What struck me most was the first song, a barnstormer called “The Great Deceiver,” which began with the startling couplet, “Health food faggot with a bartered bride/Likes to comb his hair with a dipper ride.” I found it funny but the music itself was relentlessly exciting, aggressive, and surprising. I didn’t know it at the time, but much of it was improvised and recorded live in concert, though the applause had been edited out so it appeared to be a studio-recorded album.

The musicians were Robert Fripp on guitar, John Wetton on bass and vocals, David Cross on violin, and Bill Bruford on drums. David told me that if I liked this album, then I might like the debut album by a new group called U.K., which featured both Wetton and Bruford. This would prove a pattern for me. As I became more sophisticated about music, I would be drawn to bands already defunct or decaying and ignore the music scene that existed around me currently. In 1978, I was ignorant of the emerging New Wave, except for local heroes The Cars. But I couldn’t be bothered because I had nearly a decade of prog history to catch up on.

When camp was over, I went on a shopping spree. I bought Gentle Giant’s Free Hand and U.K.’s eponymous album. Next, I went searching for the King Crimson album with the funny lyric and ferocious music. Trouble was, I couldn’t remember the name of the album or even the cover image. I could, however, for whatever reason, recall the typography (it would be a full decade before I found myself actually working for a digital font company). In one store’s rack, I scoured the King Crimson section and found what I thought was what I was looking for. I bought it, took it home, unsealed it, and put it on my turntable.

Immediately, I knew I had purchased the wrong album. Where Starless and Bible Black had opened with a bang, this one opened with a kalimba, an African thumb piano. Soft percussion builds over the first minute until a violin enters and then fades, reappearing at the three-minute mark, where soon it is joined by Fripp’s guitar. Violin dominates until about 4:30, when all hell breaks loose, and for the first time I am assured that even if I had the album wrong, at least I got the group right.

The album I purchased was Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, released 40 years ago today, on March 23, 1973. It was the first edition of the group to feature the lineup I detailed earlier, and in fact included an additional musician, percussionist Jamie Muir, who left shortly after the album was recorded to join a monastery. The lineup was responsible for the two albums already mentioned, as well as 1974’s Red (the follow-up studio release to Starless and Bible Black, which featured the much-reduced presence of violinist Cross), and a live album, USA, released in 1975 but recorded prior to Red.

For the next 46-and-a-half minutes, Larks’ Tongues in Aspic beat me into submission. It was an overwhelming experience. It began, I suppose, with the cover, a striking sun/moon image that had no words on it at all. The 13:36 opener, “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Part 1,” went through various sections, alternately fast and slow, incorporating at one point dialogue from a television drama. In later years, when I first heard Arvo Pärt’s “Miserere,” I likened it to this track as it repeatedly goes from hushed tones to full-throttle chaos in an instant.

The opening track is followed by a short but lovely ballad. “Book of Saturday” clocks in at just under three minutes and features guitar, bass, and violin, along with a nice vocal. It is as calming as the previous track was unnerving. Side 1 ends with “Exiles,” another vocal number; that and the three songs on Side 2 all range between just over seven and just under eight minutes long. “Exiles” is a mostly gentle song featuring the full band, a minor mellow epic that seems to suggest that the opening track was an aberration; that the tunes, short or long, are ambitious but soothing. The opening to Side 2 quickly dispels this notion.

“Easy Money,” the Side 2 opener, brings back the dark dissonance in another multi-part piece that has no trouble balancing a near-a capella opening verse with full-band, full-throttle musical mania. Bruford is a master at repelling any attempt on the listener’s part to tap their foot along with the beat. Just when it seems you have it, it changes and as much as it may initially seem that he’s hitting his snare at random intervals, you realize there’s a logic to it and that he’s in complete control at all times, sometimes making his statement with a crack of the snare and sometimes making it with utter silence. The song ends with the rather frightening sound of a laugh box.

This is followed by a mesmerizing instrumental called “The Talking Drum,” which very slowly and gradually builds from a barely audible groove to a revving turbo charge of energy that must soon be ready to release – yet it doesn’t. It stops on a dime with the metallic opening riff of the album’s closer, “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Part 2.” Very unlike “Part 1,” this one is a straight hard blast of immense electric power, a roiling instrumental that takes no prisoners and shows no mercy.

Thus it was that I ended up instantly loving this album that I bought in error, which only served to propel me back to a different store to find Starless and Bible Black and explore the King Crimson catalogue thoroughly, just as I began to do with the prog and fusion artists mentioned earlier and others that I and my friends were yet to discover. Forty years after Larks’ Tongues in Aspic was released, 35 after I first heard it, it remains a remarkable work that is always in power rotation on my home stereo.

Super Bowl MVP: Jethro Tull

I’m sitting in my apartment this Super Bowl Sunday morning watching a light snow fall outside my window. I’m listening to Jethro Tull’s Live – Bursting Out, a two-CD set that faithfully recreates the original two-LP set I remember buying decades ago at King’s department store in Dedham, Massachusetts. King’s became Zayre, which became Ames, which left about 10 years ago. I don’t know what’s there now.

For me, purchasing music at a department store was an unusual occurrence. I preferred to patronize record stores, new or used, where immersing in the culture and camaraderie was half the fun of shopping. I did once buy another two-LP set at Bradlee’s (another long since defunct department store), Focus 3, but I recall that being a happy accident; I wasn’t there to buy music but curiosity motioned me towards the paltry record department where I found the treasured record with the lenticular cover.

Of course, none of this has anything to do with the Super Bowl, but it does serve to demonstrate that nine days shy of my 50^th birthday my hippocampus still retains some memories.

As a kid I was fervent fan of the Boston, then New England, Patriots. I had a t-shirt with the old Pat Patriot logo on the front and the legend, “I gave the Pats a pat on the back” on the reverse. They were never a great team but their uniforms featured my favorite color, red, and they were, after all, the hometown team. When they moved into their own stadium for the first time in 1971, my father bought season tickets and I went to most home games for most of the decade. I still have two commemorative plastic coins from the inaugural regular season game at Schaefer Stadium, which was held on September 19, 1971, a contest between the Patriots and the Oakland Raiders, which the good guys, led by first-round draft pick Jim Plunkett, the previous year’s Heisman Trophy winner from Stanford, won, 20-6.

Despite their lack of success most year, I loved the team. The idea that they might one day be a model franchise and annual powerhouse in the NFL couldn’t have been further from reality back then. I went to the one and only home playoff game that Stadium hosted, against the Houston Oilers in 1978, which they lost badly. I recall the ticket for the game had on it a picture of tight end Russ Francis, my favorite player at the time.

In 1985, the Patriots went on an improbable run through the playoffs, finding themselves horribly overmatched in Super Bowl XX against the Chicago Bears. The score at halftime was 23-3 and seemed worse than that. My friends and I stopped watching at that point. The Patriots ended up losing what I assumed would be their only Super Bowl appearance 46-10.

Amazingly, the Patriots made it back to the Super Bowl in 1997, although again their unlikely rise to the AFC championship made the loss to the Green Bay Packers also inevitable as of halftime, though the Patriots were a bit more competitive.

Then came the Bill Belichick era and the ascendancy to football’s Mt. Olympus of Tom Brady. Still, that first Super Bowl victory over the St. Louis Rams on February 3, 2002, 11 years ago to the day, was a real shocker and remains the best Super Bowl victory of the Patriots’ trifecta. Since then, any Patriots season that doesn’t end with a ring and a Duck Boat parade is treated in these parts as a crushing disappointment. I don’t share that view. Having endured mediocrity for so long, I thrill at every great play and every great game throughout the regular season, and there have been many over the last decade. Sure, I regret the two Super Bowl losses to the New York Giants in 2008 and 2012, but my cherished team has been to the big show seven times and that means I’ve been lucky enough to see a shitload of great football.

Tonight, the San Francisco 49ers will be playing the Baltimore Ravens. While I obviously wish the Patriots were vying for another championship, I have been so relaxed the last two weeks and will have a good time tonight no matter what the result. If the Patriots were playing, I would have been an anxiety-ridden mess and would have watched the game tonight standing up and pacing as I have for the Patriots’ last four Super Bowl appearances.

I remember back in college days and shortly thereafter, the Super Bowl was the second order of business of the day. The undercard was the Boston Celtics game. A couple of years, my friends and I went to a restaurant called the Ground Round and set up shop at the bar all day long, enjoying pitchers of Bloody Marys and plates of nachos while watching the Larry Bird Celtics annihilate their opponent, moving on to pitchers of beers and burgers during the Super Bowl, each of us taking turns to go out to the car and take a few hits of a communal joint.

Today, the .500 Celtics will be playing the first-place Los Angeles Clippers, a reversal of fortune that doesn’t much excite me. But at night, I will again be in the company of friends for a game that even non-football fans tune in for. I have no dog in this race, but the fact that I’m still hanging with my old school friends and listening to Jethro Tull is in its own way a meaningful victory in and of itself.

Dr. Justinlove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bieb

On 9/11, I learned an important lesson: that I can’t protect my children from terrorists. Even before that, however, I learned that I couldn’t protect them from popular culture. Sometimes, I wonder which is worse.

My older daughter, Hannah, was almost five on 9/11. I had tried hard to keep bad influences from her. The worst of the bad influences, to my way of thinking, were Raffi, the singer of insipid children’s songs, and Barney, the dinosaur most in need of extinction. Musically, I raised her on a diet of Peter, Paul & Mary, the Beach Boys, and the Beatles: music that wasn’t jarring but yet was fulfilling. I sang her to sleep with gentle, kid-friendly songs by legitimate writers, such as Kenny Loggins’ “House at Pooh Corner”, Paul Williams’ “Rainbow Connection”, and Bob Thiele’s “What a Wonderful World”. On nights when she outlasted my usual repertoire, I sang a lentissimo version of Boston’s “More Than a Feeling.”

But there was only so much I could do. At school, she learned Raffi’s “Baby Beluga”; from classmates, she found out about Barney. Though as she grew older we shared a love of singing soundtracks from musicals such as Grease, Wicked, and Hairspray, as a teenager she has become an avid listener of top 40 stations, and the strains of Rihanna, Eminem, Lady Gaga, Brittney Spears, Pink, Bruno Mars, et al, comprise the sum total of her listening interests.

Unintentionally but perhaps not without reason, I had a second daughter, Stella, 10 years after Hannah was born. Once again, I tried to manage her exposure to popular culture. But just as Hannah grew up faster than did girls of my generation, Stella is growing up even faster than Hannah. I never even got to the Beatles with Stella. She wants to listen to what her sister listens to. And so she has become, at the tender age of six, a fan of Justin Bieber.

Though she hasn’t asked for a Justin Bieber backpack, she has pointed out with some degree of envy a classmate decked out in full Bieberphile gear. And on a recent trip to the library, Stella insisted we borrow the Bieber documentary Never Say Never. I insisted she watch it with headphones on. She insisted I watch it with her. Because I love my daughter, I didn’t refuse her. But now I wish I had, though not for the reason you might think.

I remember years ago when Marilyn Manson was all the rage – and I do mean rage. Everywhere he performed, there were protests. Many of his shows were cancelled because local parents and authorities thought there would be violence or some kind of satanic ritual. I hadn’t heard Manson’s music and being apathetic to the whole situation, I tended to side with the censors, assuming there was nothing particularly worthwhile with his music anyway. Then I happened to catch a newsmagazine show in which the Manson mania was being investigated. I saw him, heard him, saw clips of his performance, and said, “Oh, he’s just updating the Alice Cooper thing. Completely harmless entertainment. Those parents and authorities are idiots.”

The same sort of thing attended any thoughts I may previously have had about Justin Bieber. That his music is not made for me is obvious, but his type – the young white teenybopper playing bubble gum love songs to young girls on the cusp of puberty – is something that comes along every generation. In my own youth, the role had been filled by the likes of David Cassidy, Donny Osmond, Leif Garrett, Andy Gibb, and Shaun Cassidy. At the worst, these teen idols were responsible for some exceedingly disposable pop music (and, I must admit, the occasional guilty pleasure, such as the Partridge Family’s “Echo Valley 2-6809”).

At their best, however, I always thought such music was a gateway drug of sorts. Before young girls got fascinated by the teen idols, they probably had little interest in music, little awareness for how a song can touch you and speak to you, little understanding that a musician can add meaning to your entire existence. People always outgrow their teen idols. But they don’t outgrow their passion for music. Having heard it plenty lately, I now realize that there’s not such a great gulf between Bieber’s “U Smile” and Journey’s “Lights”. A sappy ballad transcends ages and genres.

So I sat and watched Never Say Never with Stella. I’m glad it was more documentary than concert film, as I learned a lot about him. He seems to have had a natural talent for music, learning drums, guitar, and piano at a young age. He also seems to have always been extraordinarily charismatic, with no fear of standing out in a crowd and expressing himself. His truly meteoric success is not the result of an obnoxious, pressuring mother but his own deeply felt calling to be a performer. I can respect all that.

As a superstar, he seems pretty down to earth, still wanting to do the things that kids his age do. His entourage is quite diverse in terms of race, age, and gender, and he appears to have close relationships with everyone around him. His voice is still too young not to grate on my nearly half-century-old ears, and his music is indeed as lightweight when listening closely to it as it seems when trying to ignore it. But he’s very likable and there’s very little apparent pretense. The enormity of his success is as staggering as the fact that he’s really just a cute kid who can sing and dance a bit. He doesn’t pretend to be more than that and he’s not marketed as being much more than that.

To my great embarrassment, there is a sequence in the film that moves me to tears. It begins with his agent and manager walking around towns on show dates, looking for where young girls are congregating. They approach and say they’re with the Bieber tour, asking if they’re going to the show. When they find real fans with no tickets, they give them some. And not just teens and tweens; a disappointed mother who feels she let down her daughter explodes in teary gratitude when handed the ducats. I don’t exactly know why this should make me cry, but I think it’s something about my feelings of inadequacy, based on my income and life situation, in providing for my children the special things they deserve and desire.

These scenes are followed by a song called “One Less Lonely Girl” that becomes an interesting experience in concert. When he begins the song, Bieber’s people go out in the crowd and select a suitably cute and emotional girl to be the title character. Towards the end of the song, the girl is brought out to sit on a stool at center stage. Bieber comes out from the side of the stage, singing. He is handed a bouquet of long-stem red roses, which he presents to the girl and proceeds to circle her, singing only to her, occasionally touching her face and stroking her arm as she sobs into her hand. Rather than being jealous, the crowd eats this up and when the girls return to their seats, their friends hug them tightly. One girl all but screamed through her tears, “I just love him so much!”

Again, I’m not sure why it makes me cry, but it does make me realize just what Justin Bieber is: he’s a dream-maker. He’s made his own dreams come true, and he does the same for his audience. To me, that’s what being an artist is all about. His music may fall well short of any moderate aesthetic standards, and he may not have the depth of spirit of an artist, but he’s doing his job which is the job of the artist: to inspire, to heal, to enable the listener or the viewer to transcend the immediate reality and be propelled into the world of dreams. Now, I can’t do everything for my children, but I’ll be damned if I’ll jeer from the sidelines when someone is doing that for them, whether it’s Justin Bieber or even a dumb-ass purple dinosaur.

Knowing when to clap

This past weekend, I went to a jazz concert featuring a large ensemble playing the music of John Coltrane, and a chamber music concert of works by 19th and 20th century composers. A couple of months ago, I went to see a ukulele trio at a folk club and with some luck I might soon be able to see The Who during its 54th farewell tour. I like having “big ears” and enjoy the fact that many different kinds of music move me. Like many people, I believe seeing music performed live is the ultimate experience – if only ticket prices were lower or my salary higher, I would see live music every week.

Seeing jazz and classical music in the same weekend was aurally very exciting but I had to remain mindful of a key distinction between the two genres: when to clap. At jazz concerts, every soloist gets applause at the conclusion of their solo and a single tune could have five or more solos. In classical music, even when a piece has three or four parts or movements, applause must be held until the very end. I find that frustrating, since within a given movement, there are many times when a musician will play some very difficult and thrilling passages and I feel compelled to show my respect and appreciation. But out of decorum, I remain silent.

The hardest thing is at the end of a movement. The silence is more deafening, it’s downright uncomfortable. The only sounds one hears are the musicians adjusting their music or doing minor maintenance to their instruments (in the case of a French horn player I saw today, that included turning it over so his spit could drain out). It’s critically important to keep track of the movements so you know which is the final one. Of the three pieces I heard today, the first and third had three movements and the second had four. I have to admit I got confused and almost clapped at the of the second piece’s third movement.

The other important thing to remember about clapping at a classical concert is that at the conclusion of a piece, and at the end of the concert proper, the players will bow once or twice, then leave the stage. You must, however, keep clapping because they will return to acknowledge all the applause the audience has been struggling to contain throughout the performance. Then they go off stage again. If the performance was particularly bravura-riffic, like at the end of an opera, they may do this several times. Regardless of how many times they are brought back, however, they will not do an encore. They just want the applause.

It can be challenging at a jazz concert, too, because the culture of clapping at every solo can sometimes be a little much. After all, not every solo is stellar and deserving of special applause. Also, sometimes one player’s solo leads directly to another player’s solo and applause for the first player will make it difficult to hear the start of the second player’s solo. Do you disrespect the first player in order to show respect to the second player, or respect the first player at the expense of the second player’s chance to shine?

In between numbers, there isn’t much noise. The musicians don’t talk much and the audience quietly awaits the next tune. This is very different from a rock concert, where the artists are yelling at the audience, egging them on, and the audience responds with constant shouts and screams, and hoots and hollers. Particularly well-lubricated yahoos yell during quiet moments, and steadfastly clap in 4/4 even when the band is playing in 6/8. At the end of a rock performance, the audience, hungry for an encore – often simply to delay the inevitable crush trying to get out of the venue – may be left clapping for as much as 10 minutes until the band, redrugged and refreshed, comes out for a hit song or two that they deliberately omitted from the set list to ensure they would get an encore. Then they leave the stage again and the audience will hope that their clapping inspires the houselights to remain off. If so, the band has earned a legitimate encore.

Folk audiences are probably the most patient of all, because every folk song has some kind of story behind it that the folk singer feels compelled to explain. So they listen quietly and attentively to the story of the song, then to the song itself. Then they clap and wait for the next story, and the next song. Folk audiences are small so they tend to clap all the more loudly to make up for their paltry numbers.

Sometimes, an appreciative artist will applaud the audience. I’ve always wondered why. I suppose it’s because we clapped at the right times. Still, I’ve never earned an encore so I guess there’s room for improvement.

The Not-So-Great Debates

French philosopher Joseph de Maistre is credited with originating the adage, “Every nation has the government it deserves.” He used it in a letter in 1811, and it has been adopted by many a political cynic ever since. It applies as well in the current day and particularly at the conclusion of the three Presidential debates between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. For if Americans can agree on one thing, it might be that the legacy of the Lincoln-Douglas debates as a model of intelligent argument is in no danger of being supplanted; at the same time, we indeed got the debates we deserved.

To review, here is what we got: three moderated, televised encounters of 90 minutes each; the focus of each debate, and in some cases the very questions themselves, were known to each candidate in advance. What transpired, then, was a well-rehearsed recitation of stances and accusations, with an assortment of pre-composed snappy zingers designed to serve as the ultimate takeaways.

Of the three moderators, the first, Jim Lehrer, was highly ineffective, letting the candidates run roughshod over the format and rules; the second, Candy Crowley, was more assertive, even parental, in keeping her charges in order; and the third, Bob Schieffer, basically ran the debate as a regular installment of Face the Nation.

Of the three debates, while partisans keep their own scorecards most agree that Romney outperformed a seemingly unprepared Obama in the first; the second, in a more comfortable “town meeting” format, was probably a draw; and the third, which focused on foreign policy, was won by Obama, who could point to real accomplishments and specific policies whereas Romney could only lament that more radical changes in the geopolitical map hadn’t resulted from the previous four years.

Winners and Losers
As I mentioned, partisans scored each debate differently, but all seemed to use a common set of criteria, in which performance was more important than substance. To the latter point, the population learned there was a subculture of “fact checkers” in the country who jockeyed among each other to have the last word as to which statements by which candidate had at least the ring of truth to them. Like a recount, the truth-to-lies ratios wouldn’t be digested until a day or two after each debate, but it’s clear that the public reaction to the performance of each candidate himself was the truest arbiter of success.

As a partisan liberal, I watched the first debate and had to admit that Romney performed better. On the other hand, I didn’t agree with the content of his opinions – even those few that traversed the fact-checker apparatus unscathed. In terms of content, when I could discern it from Obama’s naturally halting style of delivery, I sided with the President consistently. Romney said the wrong things more forcefully, which resulted in him winning the debate; even though Obama was far more truthful, he took a hit in public opinion polls across the country.

In the second debate, Obama was more energized, more assertive, more likely to hit back at Romney’s jabs. He didn’t score a knockout but given that his candidacy could have been considered over if he had repeated his lackluster performance in the first debate, it was considered a moral victory and helped to halt his slide in the polls.

By the third debate, any of the mythical undecided voters that remained most likely either knew whom they were voting for or decided not to vote at all. Or maybe they’ll vote for Jill Stein, who was excluded from the mainstream of the Presidential race even though she will appear on the ballot. But given the focus on foreign policy and the fact that Obama had the death of Osama bin Laden on his resume and Romney had only a mistake-prone international trip to recommend him, it’s no surprise that Obama won on both style and substance.

Between 66 and 67 million people watched the first two debates; viewership of the third was expected to be smaller because it was the final one and because it went up against Monday Night Football. Compare those figures to numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau, verified on February 6, 2012, which show that more than 206 million Americans are eligible to vote, and more than 146 million were at that time registered to vote. Just over 131 million voted in the 2008 Presidential election. Most people, then, either ignored the debates or were content to consume second-hand highlights on the news, Twitter, Facebook, and other media.

Learning From the Past
Compare all this with the Lincoln-Douglas debates. At the outset, it’s important to note that the seven one-on-one confrontations that took place from August to October, 1858, were part of the Illinois Senatorial race. There was no national audience – at least not initially. The two would compete for the Presidency in 1860 but in accordance with the practice of the day, none of the four candidates for President that year campaigned for themselves.

The format for the debates was akin to the common practice of stump speaking. None of the debates were moderated. Either Stephen A. Douglas, the incumbent, or Abraham Lincoln, the challenger, would open with a speech that typically ran an hour in length. The other would then speak for at least as long, followed by a 30-minute rebuttal from whomever spoke first. And keep in mind, they were talking at such length largely about a single subject: slavery in the territories.

So each debate ran about two-and-a-half to three hours. More often than not, the audience of as many as 10,000-15,000 people stood and listened. While the speeches were mostly directed to the audience, the candidates typically posed questions to each other, to be answered in rebuttal or in the next debate. Transcripts were printed in newspapers throughout the state. No winner was ruled in any of the debates; the proof of the pudding was in the statewide election, which Douglas won. Nonetheless, the well-organized and clearly expressed content of Lincoln’s highly logical arguments made him a rising star of the state’s fledgling Republican party and helped him capture the Presidential nomination for the 1860 contest.

Lincoln’s strong content, which history has shown espoused the morally correct position, stood somewhat in contrast to his actual performance. Lincoln, at six feet four inches – as freakishly tall in his day as an NBA center is in ours – towered over Douglas, who was a full foot shorter. Physically, Lincoln was gangly and awkward. An observer noted that when he spoke, Lincoln would “bend his knees so they would almost touch the platform, and then … shoot himself to full height, emphasizing his utterances in a very forcible manner.”

Though he had and retains a well-earned reputation as an engaging storyteller, his voice was best suited to small groups at a general store. For such a large and powerful man, he had a rather high-pitched voice, and his frontier drawl and odd pronunciation of certain words probably played less well in front of a large audience. He was ridiculed mercilessly in newspapers and magazines around the world in his own lifetime; it is fortunate that he lived before television and its unceasing influence on our own image-driven age.

Richard Nixon was not as lucky. A century after Lincoln’s first successful campaign for President, John F. Kennedy took on Nixon in the nation’s first televised debates. While there were four debates, people only remember and talk about the first one, in which Nixon looked haggard and unkempt next to Kennedy’s youthful glow. It is commonly thought that radio listeners believed Nixon won the first debate though television viewers gave the night overwhelmingly to Kennedy. A subsequent study suggests that this is a political myth, but the first debate stands as such a classic referendum on style over substance that no one remembers Nixon’s much stronger performances over the next three debates or the fact that the race was one of the closest ever, with Kennedy capturing 49.72% of the popular vote to Nixon’s 49.55%.

We the People
The fact is, though many of us bemoan the negative ads, the preemption of our favorite shows as multiple networks carried the debates, and the assumption that all politicians are dishonest, we the people have the government, the debates, and the political process we deserve.

Who among us would watch three hours of political rhetoric in a single sitting (or standing)? Who among us would read speech transcripts, wrestle with complex policy distinctions instead of snappy one-liners, and place greater value over a candidate’s words and ideas instead of his or her physical appearance and comportment? We like to think we would but that’s not how we’re wired and it’s not how the media wants to serve us. Instead, the campaign for the most powerful office in the world is run like a reality show with instant and constant popularity polls, secret alliances, and a flexible definition of “reality.”

Behind it all is the nefarious issue of money and I won’t even address that here. Suffice to say, the Oval Office is for sale to the highest bidder. And that won’t change until and unless we can force our elected officials to change it – but then we’d be asking them to change a system that supports their very careers. That’s democracy, you might say. But I would disagree. WE are democracy and to get the government we deserve, we need to be more deserving of the government we desire.

Published at last!

It was four years ago, on July 1, 2008, that I first blogged about my then-in-progress first novel, The Grave and the Gay. It's been a long road since then, filled with many rejection notices from agents and small publishers - not to mention a divorce and a totaled car - but I am pleased and proud to announce that my book has finally been published by Indianapolis-based VantagePoint Media. It is currently available on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com at a very fair price.

Concurrent with the book being published, I have launched my own website: Jason M. Rubin/A Writer's Pad. I invite readers to check it out and learn more about my background and work.

The Waterboys - Fisherman's Blues

About a year or so ago, a series of small album-themed books called 33-1/3 was bought by a new publisher, which then decided to request proposals for new books in the series. I seized the opportunity to submit a proposal to write a book about the Waterboys album, Fisherman's Blues. Unfortunately, the opportunity did not seize me: my proposal was rejected. Part of the proposal involved writing a sample chapter. So that my effort is not fully wasted, I have decided to publish the chapter here. This was to have been the introduction to the book.

Introduction

When the Waterboys fourth album, Fisherman’s Blues, appeared in record shops in October 1988, it had been more than three years since its predecessor, This Is the Sea, had been released. The latter had been a success (at least by Waterboys standards), the album posting in the Top Forty UK chart, and a single, “The Whole of the Moon,” peaking at number twenty-eight. It may have done better had Mike Scott, founder, leader, singer, songwriter, guitarist, and frontman of the group, not refused to promote it on the Top of the Pops television program due to an aversion to lip-syncing. (When reissued in 1990, the song reached number three and was honored with the Ivor Novello Award the following year.)

A three-year absence in the pop music marketplace is crime enough; Fisherman’s Blues added insult to injury by shifting radically from the “Big Music” of the Waterboys’ first three albums – marked by blaring horns, roaring guitars, layers of electric keyboards, and thudding drums – to a more acoustic format melding Celtic fiddle tunes with influences from folk and American country music.

By any accounting of the situation, it would appear that the album was both commercial heresy and career suicide. There wasn’t much demand from MTV for Celtic fiddle tunes, and no self-respecting fan would wait three years for the follow-up to a hit single, especially when the subject matter had turned from moon to fish (though, of course, both “The Whole of the Moon” and “Fisherman’s Blues” were relationship songs).

And yet, something strange happened. Somehow, Fisherman’s Blues became The Waterboys’ best-selling album – not just to date, but of all time – and has since come to be regarded as the band’s high-water mark. Subsequent Waterboys releases, those cut from the same musical cloth and those pursuing an entirely different aesthetic, have typically been unfairly – and unfavorably – compared to it. Though the album reached no higher than thirteen on the UK chart, and the title track peaked at thirty-two as a single, Fisherman’s Blues continues to loom high in the history of the band and in the reputation of head Waterboy Mike Scott. After just one more album exploring Celtic/folk music, he broke up the band and released a pair of solo albums before bringing back the Waterboys name (though not the players) for a series of albums with more of a guitar and synthesizer-based rock sound.

How did this happen? From whence did this musical magic come? Certainly not even Scott himself could have predicted that his 180-degree turn from mulleted ’80s rock performer to earthy roots music explorer would so drastically raise his profile and lead to the rewards of commercial success. The song “Fisherman’s Blues” has appeared in the soundtracks to the American movie Good Will Hunting (about math), the Irish film Waking Ned Devine (about death), and in the pilot episode of the American television series Lights Out (about boxing). Such broad appeal seems unusual for a project originally intended to trod the road less traveled.

The highly literate Scott puts it best himself in the liner notes to the 2006 deluxe remaster of the album, as he describes the context in which he began to move away from what the Waterboys had done to date:

“This journey began with a confluence of events in late 1985. At that point I’d taken the broad, symphonic sound of the first three Waterboys albums … as far as I could. Frustrated that I couldn’t reproduce the sound on stage, and seeking new musical roads to travel, I’d started to listen to country, folk and old-style gospel music, envying their simplicity and purity.

“I was excited by the possibilities of writing and playing these different kinds of music, and by the liberating prospect of departing from the repeat-formula-for-success script that managers, agents, record companies, journalists and even fans were devising for me.”

In retrospect, long-time Waterboys fans see this metamorphosis as nothing particularly out of character for Scott. Thirty years on, one can see that he has regularly showed disdain for pure commerciality for its own sake, displayed a restless creativity that prevents him from repeating himself or treading water in any one pond for too long a time, and consistently honored his muse in realms both musical and spiritual with honesty and without apology.

This is a man, after all, who followed up his most electronic and at times harrowing-sounding album (2000’s A Rock in the Weary Land) with the pin-drop stillness and religiosity of 2003’s Universal Hall, only to bounce back to hard rock with 2007’s Book of Lightning and then take a complete left turn with 2011’s An Appointment with Mr. Yeats, in which he sets a number of the poet’s works to music. That all these works are all aesthetically successful to a greater or lesser extent is besides the point; after all, regardless of their diversity of execution they spring from the same fount: the mind, heart, and soul of Mike Scott.

No, the point is that nothing would surprise a Waterboys fan more than to see a Vol. 2 of any of these works. The prolific Scott seems often ready to move on to another rail while the train he rides is still in motion. The only expectation one can have at this juncture of his career is that he will do the reverse of what he last accomplished. And yet each Waterboys album is unmistakably a Waterboys album, united as they are by his expansive vision and his distinctive voice.

In 1988, however, such a perspective did not exist. Each of the first three Waterboys albums seemed to build on its predecessor, and the only rational expectation was that the fourth Waterboys album would represent an extension of the third. That was not the case. As it turned out, Scott and his conspirators would spend more than two years and countless miles of recording tape going as far from expectation as possible, moving not to the frontier of musical and recording technology where so many others were staking claims, but rather looking backward at simpler times, more basic forms, and more timeless themes.

That Scott found an audience willing to go there with him was to his good fortune. That he found such sympathetic players willing to help create this bold vision and make it such a remarkable reality is our good fortune. A quarter-century later, Fisherman’s Blues has indeed stood the test of time. To hardcore fans, it is an apex of achievement; to more casual fans, it might be the one and only Waterboys recording in their collection. Regardless, it remains an essential album, the history of which – as this book will attempt to demonstrate – is as unexpected and delightful as the music itself.

I’ll let Mike Scott have one more word before we begin our journey. Here again, from the liner notes to the 2006 remaster, Scott sums up what this album represented to him and to the world, at that time and for all time:

“[W]hile we were completing ‘Fisherman’s Blues’ in Galway, I felt it was an act of power to stand in one’s own heritage; not with a fundamentalist my-culture’s-the-only-way attitude, but by being open to the shared global culture, with all its interactive creative possibilities, while being centred in one’s own. And that it was perfectly cool – in fact it is very excellent – to inhabit my Celtic genes. For the Celt is a warrior, a mystic, a trickster, a shaman, a dreamer, a mischief- and magic-maker.

“So if ‘Fisherman’s Blues’ has a message to impart other than the pure expression of the music itself, it is this:

music is music, and no musician or band need be limited to any genre; all are fair territory for the questing musical explorer.

British and Irish music need not be divorced from its own roots to be relevant; if it is in tune with its own deep sense of identity, music can have – and can transmit – more power and more cultural, mythical and practical resonance.

“In this spirit, ‘Fisherman’s Blues’ and all the Waterboys music that has followed it admits of no barrier or categorisation, and is built on the mighty foundation rock of the Celtic soul.”