"I've found it's next to impossible to have an original thought, with so many people thinking." So says the Venerable Kusala Bhikshu. Sometimes he gets more specific, & amends this to “seven billion people thinking.”
Indeed. This strikes me as a deep thought, & it can lead me in a number of directions. Being a musician of sorts myself, one direction it takes me to is contemplation of that red-haired stepchild of popular music, the “cover version.”
What is all the hullabaloo about originality anyway? Does it all go back to the Romantic Movement in the arts, transmogrified but still going strong some two hundred plus years along? Does it have to do with the American mythos of the individual & the current manifestation of that into a concentrated cult of self? Can it be laid at the feet of the corporate powers that run a music industry fueled by rampant greed? What about the omnipresence of recorded music, which makes the “original” always at hand for the purposes of invidious comparison? It’s really quite amazing that within the history of human civilization, which dates back 5,000 to 8,000 odd years depending on your point of reference, the mass distribution of recorded music has supplanted live performance as the main source of music “consumption” for the majority of people except those in very isolated circumstances in less than a century.
It’s probably all these things & more. After all, nothing in culture really happens for any one reason. But it seems to me a shame that such an opportunity for artistic creation—because in its own way, interpretation is creation—is given short shrift. In my own little way of redressing this, I’ve decided to post a series of “cover versions” that I particularly like. There will be no schedule, as is the norm around here these days—& no, it won’t take the place of the “Jazz on Nylon” series, which will continue (& which in its own way also involves “cover versions”!) But this series will focus on popular music, because unlike jazz, classical, or traditional music, popular music no longer has a set of “standards.” Is that a loss? It’s not my place to say. But I can say that some artists are able to transform popular songs into something rich & strange.
What better place to start than with Tom Waits’ version of Leonard Bernstein & Stephen Sondheim’s “Somewhere”? In the original context of West Side Story, the song is a hymn to a time when society can move beyond racial & ethnic prejudice; a beautiful melody that plays against a complex chord structure, with the final resolution moving inexorably & startlingly into another key a dominant seventh above the original key center.
Waits’ Blue Valentine, released in 1978 on Asylum, is a highly poetic & in its own way a highly romantic exploration of the wild side of life—it tells the story of skid row bums, petty criminals, prostitutes, runaways, the halt, the lame & the lost—even the haunted lover of the album’s final cut & title song—with a mixture of humor, insight, pathos, charged language & a tattooed heart worn for all to see with the sleeve rolled up. In that context, Waits transforms “Somewhere” into a fitting prelude to the album—it’s the opening song, & as an old friend of mine used to say, “What a voice to come out of the silence.” That Crown Royal & Chesterfields baritone, with its 3:00 a.m. growl that sings about hope against hope against an improbable but perfect string chorus. “Somewhere” becomes the song for all the misfits & the lost who will people the remaining original songs. Although the song wasn’t written by Waits, he makes it integral not only to his larger vision, but also to the specific & organically unified vision of the album. We can hear any of those characters singing softly to himself or herself: “Someday, somewhere, we’ll find a new way of living; we’ll find a way of forgiving, somewhere.” This is beautiful music & beautiful poetry combined.
Until next time.
The images of the cover art for Blue Valentine & West Side Story link to their sources on Wiki Commons, which claims “fair use.”
A happy Wednesday, friends! I have a special treat for you today, which is an opportunity to get to know our own poet Barbie Angell in one of her other incarnations!
Most of you who follow Barbie Angell through Robert Frost’s Banjo probably think of her primarily as a children’s poet & illustrator, & indeed these are important parts of her creative life. But Barbie’s artistry & creative energies aren’t limited to those fields, as fine as they are in themselves & as beautifully as she practices them. She also writes poetry with a more adult slant, & is a talented performer of what she calls “bar poetry.” But beyond that, Barbie Angell is a bona fide social media wit, pop culture maven & more. If you follow her on Twitter (@barbieangell) – & if you are on Twitter you really should – you know that she tweets as a larger of life character on a mind-boggling range of topics. It's not for nothing that we call her "rock star poet-in-residence" around here!
You’ll get a sense of Barbie Angell’s other side from this interview she recently did on the Figures Sold Separately podcast with hosts Ken Krahl, Jimmy MacKenzie & Plucky McFeatherton. As the podcast’s very own Facebook page proclaims:
Figures Sold Separately is the pop-culture podcast & web show by the giant geeks behind Multiverse, Pluckychicken.net, and Stuff Monsters Like! Join Plucky, Jim, and Ken each week as they tear into the latest topics in fan culture, give away cool swag, and roll out a new pop-culture-inspired cocktail!
& I send my own kudos to those folks, because they've put together a fine & fun podcast...& in the interests of full disclosure, I will say this comes from someone who as a kid owned the original-not sure-how-many issues of the Silver Surfer
from the 1960s, & slowly trashed with gazillion
readings, not to mention the many Avengers, Fantastic Four &
Sub-Mariner et al. issues that all met the same fate. If I'd only known...
The podcast is taped at the Zapow in beatiful downtown Asheville, & produced by Zapow’s own Matt Johnson. & I should note that the podcast comes with an “explicit language” warning, so if that sort of thing is not your cup of tea, then please don’t partake.
But I think those who give the interview a listen—it’s here in case you missed it first time! Will really enjoy hearing Barbie’s take on everything from Star War Legos to Harrison Ford’s hat!
Yes, that's what I mean; had both of these & many more. Comic book images links to their source at Wiki Commons. Photo of Barbie Angell (tweeting) by Plucky McFeatherton. Photo of Barbie & Plucky McFeatherton by Figures Sold Separately.
[First bubblegum pop—now Rock Band! What’s RF Banjo coming to? Fear not, folks, I’m still playing guitars with strings & no buttons, & Eberle hasn’t ditched her array of instruments either. While I admit I still find the Rock Band phenomenon perplexing, I find Eberle’s take on her experience fun & fascinating. Hope you do too!]
Menopause is a fascinating experience—or rather, the two years of peri-menopause that I have known. I don’t think anything else could have brought me to drive up into the piney mountains on Hallowe’en to spend an evening playing Rock Band when I’ve never played a modern video game and my feelings about rock music are ones I generally mask in public out of politeness to friends and students—who probably really don’t want to hear that I find 4/4 downbeat-driven music a hideous affront to my own sense of rhythm and that the cult of celebretism associated with rock really pains me by turning the individual expression of art into a commodity and a substitute for truly exploring one’s own individuality….
Later that evening I began to wonder what John, who has heard me elaborate quite endlessly on 
my theories about rock music, would say if I told him that I was totally getting off on playing along with Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper”? I had a feeling that confessing this was going to be kind of a humbling experience; but I didn’t care, with the lights pulsing intoxicatingly into my eyes, and my thumb on that thrilling trigger of the Rock Band fake guitar…
An aunt of mine once told me that menopause was in a way a return to adolescence and I really didn’t have a clue what she meant by that. But I’m starting to get it. In the midst of overwhelming hormonal waves and the confusion of a self who sometimes feels cut adrift from familiarity, there is a sense of adventure and surprise—an epic journey—being the traveler of one’s own mythic sense of reality. Five years ago if someone had invited me to play a game like Rock Band I would have said no without question. But I was curious—I told myself that it would be a good thing for me to find out how to talk to my music students about games like this—but in reality I thought it would be an adventure.
So, after finding my way to the lovely collection of hand-built and salvaged buildings that makes 
up the homestead of my Rock Band friends in the company of a hillside of tall pines, and after a trip to the outhouse in the light of an almost-full moon, I walked up a flight of stairs on the outside of the largest building and into the Rock Band room. This was another world. A movie-screen on the wall displayed the video-projection of the game hugely in the darkened room and an electronic drumset filled up one whole corner. My heart sank as I realized I had to choose a “character,” choice being apparently limited to skinny, sexy, and young. (Someone should add an aging Medusa and a hefty Toad Goddess to the options, in my opinion.) I had a strong feeling this was going to be even worse than I had feared.
But I loved the game. First of all the visuals. As I tried to explain to John when I got home late 
that night, it’s like there’s a moving fret-board coming at you very fast all the time, only the frets are the measure-bars, and colored dots in the five-laned fret board on the screen tell you which button to “fret” with your left hand and when to activate the note by strumming the sound bar-trigger with your right. Some of the rhythms for the guitar are actually very interesting. And since I didn’t know most of the songs we played, there was the thrilling feeling, similar to what I love about improvisation, of not having time to conceptualize the rhythm before actually playing it—the feeling of discovering a rhythm in your body as you go along rather than having your mind tell your body to try a rhythm that it has created in the abstract. I realized that the way I approach the drums is to find a rhythm, internalize it until I can get into trance mode with it, then complicate it. Like: OK, I can play a 7 and a 5, so can I alternate them and still have them sound like groups of 7 or 5? Or: I can play a duple and a triple simultaneously, so how about trying a two against a five?
With Rock Band, my mind didn’t have time at all to imagine ways of complicating things. Plus 
the music was really loud. And the fret board sometimes lights up with different decorative patterns! And the note-dots sort of explode and splash if you hit the button and the trigger at the same time! Then they are throbbing white sometimes! For someone whose passive visual experience is limited to old movies, who has been to a movie theatre only a handful of times in the past two decades, does not play video games or watch television, I can say it was genuinely intoxicating. That makes sense to me—what I didn’t expect is that I would feel like it was a good thing to be intoxicated in this way—passively—not particularly creatively in the way I define it—through a machine—not playing real instruments—not playing songs you made up yourself—not really interacting with your sister and fellow musicians. But it was great.
I did invite my friends to come play Rock Band “unplugged” with a hands-on group improvisation session at my house—and I’m looking forward to turning them on to this form of musical game. But as I drove home with floods of moonlight flashing between the trees, down the highway that seemed to resemble the “lanes” of the Rock Band visuals, music echoing in my head—I knew I was looking forward to going back and playing Rock Band again. I really want to see if I can get to the “Hard” level of guitar and the “Medium” level of the drums. I’m thinking about it now, strategizing how to make those lighted patterns move more quickly from my eyes to my fingers.
Eberle Umbach © 2009
All images are Rock Band screenshots found online, except the pic to the left, in which Eberle has a non-Rock Band (bass) guitar!
