Don’t Stay Up Too Late.

When Sexy Black Robots

Conquer The World,

Will Anyone Notice?

My Summer Of Pop

by  Jonathan Bogart

This summer I did something I haven’t done in a long, long, time, not since I was just out of high school and celebrating my newfound freedom by driving my grandfather’s hand-me-down Chevy, becoming the guy who drove people places just in order to glide over the smooth, broad highways of Phoenix, while listening to Third Eye Blind and Sixpence None The Richer and the Goo Goo Dolls and Santana feat. Rob Thomas. Within a year I would discover Napster and the Beatles and Led Zeppelin and the Clash and Bob Dylan and I would become that most socially-acceptable form of geek, a music geek. In the next eight years, I would get into arguments about what constitutes proper country music, about the point of rock & roll in a post-rap world, about whether Phil Spector or Brian Wilson was the greatest pop producer ever; I would order out-of-print psych-folk 45s and funk-jazz LPs over the Internet; I would burrow so deep into the further recesses of 70s German electronic rock that I would come out in 1980s France; I would become able to enumerate with some confidence the differences between Ghanian highlife and Nigerian joromi. I would write what amounted to a short book about early jazz, pop, and vernacular music in the 1920s.

But this summer was different. This summer I turned the radio back on in my car.

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The full production with pictures, publishing info, clips and commentary is on its own page to the left; the following is only a bare list.

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Yes, Fragile

File Between: Led Zeppelin and Mahavishnu Orchestra

Comments: The more I listen to Yes, the more impressed I am with their compositional ideas and the less impressed I am with what I can’t help hearing as their concessions to rock conventions, particularly Jon Anderson’s lyrics and vocal style. Most of what I have to say I already said when I talked about Close To The Edge — only this record is more varied, which means the highs are higher but the lows are lower. The highs being “Roundabout,” “Long Distance Runaround,” and “Heart Of The Sunrise,” the lows being each of the solo showcases, which are neither good pop nor good art, just a bunch of millionaires fucking around because they’ve got all the studio time in the world.

A Keeper? I mean, it’s Yes. If you like Yes at all, you love this record.

Vinyl Rip: The Fish (Schindleria Praematurus)

David Clayton-Thomas, Tequila Sunrise

File Between: Joe Cocker and Wayne Newton

Comments: Best known for being the voice of the most popular incarnation of Blood, Sweat & Tears (“Spinning Wheel,” “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy”), Clayton-Thomas was launching one of his periodic attempts at a solo career here, none of which were ever terribly successful, and on the evidence of this record, for good reason. He’s the clueless white soul-rock singer par excellence, Joe Cocker without a sense of humor or funky bone in his body (not that Cocker ever had much of either), and when he aims at blues the only sane response is to tune him out and listen to the professional backing musicians. The music here drifts from meatheaded funk-rock to Broadway ballads in a horn-rock idiom to cod-gospel singalongs, and the only ones that have any staying power have been done better by others. (“Yesterday’s Music,” for example, was given its definitive reading by Maggie Bell, and it’s still one of the weaker songs on her 1974 album Queen Of The Night.) My goal with this project has been to listen to everything with as open a mind as I can muster, but I’ve been unable to penetrate much past this record’s air of smug self-satisfaction.

A Keeper? Those professional backing musicians keep the record from being completely unsalvageable, but for the most part it’s a slog.

Vinyl Rip: Nobody Calls Me Prophet

75. Bruce Springsteen, Born In The U.S.A.

JB: Nobody thinks that Born In The U.S.A. is the Boss’s greatest album, except perhaps for those benighted souls who believe that sales are correlative to quality (and let’s leave them alone; surely being that ignorant is suffering enough). The problem is, I don’t think he’s had a really great record since Nebraska. (I like the Seeger Sessions a lot, and he’s continued to write great songs even at his lowest ebbs. But cohesive albums? That’s just not what he does anymore.)

I know the standard narrative around this record: after the massively popular Born To Run was followed by the various crises (of confidence, of commerce, of conscience) represented by Darkness On The Edge Of Town, The River, and Nebraska, Springsteen roared back into relevance, into the charts, and into the hearts of Americans everywhere with this expansive, shiny, bombastic record about the American mood circa the end of Reagan’s first term.

But that narrative has worn a little thin in the twenty-plus years since, and as someone who Wasn’t There™, what strikes me most immediately about the record is how small it is. Which may sound counterintuitive; surely there are few huger 80s productions than the title track, few records which have seized the (or, rather a) zeitgeist of 1984 with such all-conquering aplomb, with indeed such force that Springsteen more or less defined what commercial rootsy rock would sound like for — well, for the rest of rock’s life. From now on, no American rocker who wanted to be taken seriously by his aging audience would sound unlike Springsteen. (Of course that leaves out metal- and punk-influenced rock musics, which could fairly be said to have won if the game were anything but winning Boomer approval.)

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