RiffRaf

Great Rock Photographers: The Mick Rock Interview (Pt. II)

                                  

In your photographs of Syd Barrett, you can see an accursed poet. He had a reputation of being difficult. Was he?

No, quite the opposite. Syd and me were very comfortable together. I think that was why I got the pictures I got. I took acid with him once, just one time. And whenever I say it to people they think oh, my God, that must have been weird. But it wasn't.

It was actually quite relaxed and very playful. We had a lot of fun and we played records and looked at Robert Crumb comics and played like a kind of Chinese checkers game. I still remember certain things about it and it was entirely playful. I did have some pretty bizarre experiences with certain people under the influence of acid but not with Syd.

It was more with Syd about the pressures. I did actually the last interview with him, and that's where that phrase, "a very irregular head," comes from and "I'm full of dust and guitars." That was from the very last public interview he ever did, not long after I finished at Cambridge in 1971. 

That's when I did the very last pictures of him in the garden of his mother's house and down in the basement where he had a pad.

So I got on with Syd. I often have to remind myself and remind people when I'm talking about those early years, how young we all were. Everyone was in their early 20s. My daughter's 21 now, and I look back and think of all the craziness I was up to at 21, including taking photos of Syd. 

And I think it was a very accelerated kind of time, not just for me, but for the people I hung around with. It was a time when there was still something called the 'underground' where all this creativity happened...not in the political sense because I had little interest in it and still don't. I've never voted in my life. I despise all politicians.

Maybe Winston Churchill you can take your hat off to, but even he had a checkered early career. It was only his facing down of Hitler that transformed him into this very substantial person. He's a fascinating man. But in general, politicians are undoubtedly a lower form of human life. They're in the business of lying and manipulation. 

And, if you get someone who comes along who's not so bad, like Obama, even he's forced into all kinds of compromises by the circumstances. I'm sure he's got a fairly pure heart, but he's stuck with the fact that he's black and with racism that's still rife in this country, and the powers that be that really control what happens...but that's a whole other tale. 

At the time of the Madcap Laughs, do you think Syd was relieved from the pressures of Pink Floyd?

I think he was relieved from having to play the same songs every night. In the same way. He was really more like a jazz musician in many ways. He thought like a painter. Like an abstract painter. That's really what he was for the rest of his life. And what he had been originally since a young age. 

A book of his art came out last year. There aren’t many of his actual physical paintings left - but the interesting thing was that he would photograph his paintings and then destroy them. 

In recent years I reconnected with a girlfriend of Syd's, Jenny Spires. And she has some of his original paintings, as well as a collection of Syd's love letters to her. She's referred to as 'Jennifer Gentle' in the early Floyd track 'Lucifer Sam'

I want to ask you one more question about Syd.

Syd never goes away. It's amazing. My first conversations with David Bowie were about Syd Barrett. 

             

What did you guys talk about?

We talked about Syd, and he had recently met Lou and Iggy. You've got to remember Lou and Iggy were not that well known at that moment in time. They both had a certain underground following, but that was before Transformer and Raw Power, and in either case had they been able to sell any records or get radio airplay.

I remember talking about Syd and Iggy and Lou Reed in first my conversations with David Bowie. I think that's why we got on. We had certain tastes in common and you have to remember again, in 1972, those tastes were maybe slightly more esoteric than they are today. 

I know Bowie used to go to the Floyd shows, the underground shows at the UFO Club.

It was to see Syd. It was Syd that really obsessed him, not particularly Pink Floyd. And the other thing about Syd was he sang like an Englishman. David sort of almost invented singing like an Englishman, but the precursor was Syd Barrett. Even in the case of The Beatles you could hear Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers and occasionally Little Richard or something. And the Stones were totally American influenced of course.

"Arnold Layne was a strange fellow." That's a totally British thing. David also sang with this English intonation which certainly influenced just about all significant succeeding British rock and rollers. 

And along comes Bryan Ferry as well. He was another of the British school. And a great singer/songwriter called Steve Harley who had a band called Cockney Rebel who, certainly in Europe in the 70s, was very significant. 

I suppose that Syd probably was influenced by Ray Davies with some of the English-isms.

Maybe. But I don't recall Syd being particularly interested in The Kinks. Ray [Davies] didn't early on sound that English. Think of "You Really Got Me." But by the time he got to "Lola," yes. 

Besides the obvious like Dylan and the Stones and The Beatles, which we all loved, Syd was interested in jazz. That's what he often played. Coltrane and Mingus. In a way he thought more like a jazz musician. It was always about improvisation and I think that was the thing with Floyd. He didn't want to go out and play the same music every night. He wanted to just do whatever he felt like. 

He was about the blues as well, but he mixed up all these influences and it became Pink Floyd which didn't sound like anything you'd ever heard before and it was certainly the result of his LSD experiments. Although, at that time, I don't think the rest of the band had taken acid, not at the beginning. 

Syd was certainly the visionary as Dave and Roger constantly give him credit. They've been very good about showing their respect for his innovations. 

You can't get away from Syd. In Tom Stoppard's play Rock n Roll, the Syd character looms large although he's not a character in the play itself.

Tom Stoppard, the renowned playwright, wrote the foreword to my book Exposed, and he talks about Syd and how that formed the connection between him and me.

And, of course, the afterword's by a gentleman called Andrew Loog Oldham who I got to know in New York in the late 70s. He was the original manager and producer and publicist of the Rolling Stones. A genius, no doubt.

For that book I wanted to get a kind of slightly different flavor rather than going to somebody obvious and getting them to write a foreword because I've done collaborations with Queen and with Debbie [Harry] and with David and Iggy and even with Rocky Horror. 

I have a great Rocky Horror book out in Germany for which Richard O'Brien, who wrote the musical and plays RiffRaff in the film, wrote the foreword for. It's in both German and English although it is of course primarily a photobook.

And now I finally got around to doing a book with Lou Reed. 

                            

I'm glad Lou agreed to do that with you. 

Well, I think it's about timing. It's 40 years since Transformer. I've been often approached about doing it, but it was never going to happen without Lou's full participation. I always involve the subjects of my books. And I have a deep and abiding respect for Lou both as a person and an artist, and I want him to be totally happy about the end result. I'm just scanning pictures and sending them over to him and he's picking out what he likes. We'll both write a foreword for the book and we'll co-sign. It'll be a beautiful signed and numbered and slipcased limited edition tome, to be published by Genesis Publications, with whom I did my collaborations with Bowie and Queen. And Syd, who co-signed 320 copies of our book Psychedelic Renegades, his only public gesture in the last 35 years of his life. The co-signed copies are now selling for several thousand dollars, if you can find them....

Of course, Lou has an interesting, somewhat combative public reputation in his maturity, but he shows one side to journalists, and that's only a little bit of Lou Reed. The full man is much more interesting and complex. And has been very kind to a number of people I know.

I understand that you have a good friendship with David and had one with Syd, but were you ever in awe of a subject?

I think I was a little in awe of all of them: Syd, David, Lou Reed. Lou, especially back in those days, was such a groundbreaker. We were all a bit in awe of Lou Reed, certainly David was too.

And Freddie, of course, an awesome talent. And Iggy Pop. Absolutely. He was a primal force, the like of which has never been equalled in rock n roll. When punk rock came along in full force a few years later, it was kind of amateur time compared to Iggy. It was like...this is punk? 

I still think of Iggy in 1972, when I shot the Raw Power photos. Now, that was punk. And he's still the one true punk out there. All the rest have drifted away. A great artist. 

Great Rock Photographers: The Mick Rock Interview (Pt. I)

                                  

Mick Rock's early photographs (1972-1979) of David Bowie, Syd Barrett, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Queen, Johnny Rotten and Debbie Harry are so iconic that they have become deeply ingrained in our social consciousness.

Mr. Rock is known as "The Man Who Shot the Seventies," but he didn't stop working when David Bowie took off his Ziggy Stardust costume. In fact, the photographer is so busy these days that he can "hardly keep up with his own brain."

In our "Great Rock Photographer" series, the inaugural photographer, the legendary Mick Rock, chats about David Bowie, Lou Reed, Syd Barrett, whacked-out poets, LSD, his health scare, yoga, New York, cats and oh yeah, photography.

Riffraf caught up with Mr. Rock for a two-part interview. Below is part one. Check back tomorrow for part two.

Why do you think you're drawn to musicians?

I think some cute answer I gave a few years ago to Spin Magazine was for my sins in a former life, I've been forced to spend an inordinate amount of time with musicians in this life. Of course, I love them.

I don't think there's anything logical. I think it was more about timing, inclination, my name, the way I look. I think all these things combined, plus certainly in my youth - I studied languages and literature at Cambridge, so I tended to see a lot of the early characters that I worked with as kind of modern equivalents of Baudelaire and Coleridge and all these crazy drug-sodden poets.

And that was really the way I saw them, and I related to them and that somehow or another, while I was still a student, some local band gave me 5 quid to take some pictures of them. And I'd only been using a camera for about three or four months, but I think that synchronized in my brain, well you mean you can actually get paid for doing something like this? And back then, 5 quid was worth something. 

I don't know if you've seen my latest book, Exposed. I say right at the beginning of my introduction that 'photography happened to me. It idly drifted into my life, set up shop and took over.' It wasn't particularly what I had in mind. I think maybe I would have liked to have been a lyric writer or something of that nature, something a bit more of a literary persuasion. 

And, in fact, in the early days, I used to do interviews and provide photographs myself because you could get a double whammy that way. You get paid for the text and for the photos. And the other thing, of course, was that I got to know Syd Barrett and that was probably an inspiration; besides his unbelievable talent, he looked like a poet of another era.

Like Rimbaud.

Exactly, yes. So I think all these things conspired. Of course, I went out my way to do certain things that interested me, but somehow it was like an energy all of its own. And obviously I had an interest in the music. I played rock music all the time from an early age and, of course, I took LSD and that probably helped too. It's over 40 years since I've touched that, but I think that it somehow taught me how to 'see.'

It did have a profound influence on a number of people I've known and read about. Steve Jobs would talk about how it influenced his vision. I think it also ruined the lives of a lot of other people. In my case, it opened up my third eye. It definitely influenced the direction of my life.

You've also shot actors and models.

Not really many actors, but certainly I've shot quite a few models in my time, that's for sure. But I somehow will always be a rock and roll photographer. Even though I do a lot of photo art. In fact, I'm in the middle of preparing for my first exhibition here in New York at the CATM Gallery in Chelsea towards the end of March. They want to call it: The Legends Collection and there will be Bob Marley and Bowie and Iggy and Mick Jagger and Freddie, Queen. Certainly Syd Barrett, Lou Reed, Iggy, Debbie Harry, Kate Moss because she's about as rock and roll as anybody out there. And also the master of modern art, Andy Warhol. All based on my own photos. Anyway, I'm excited about that.  

And I've also just completed the first music video that I've done in a long time for a very hot young guitar player called Andrew Watt. And then I'm working on my Lou Reed book with Lou for a company called Genesis for whom I've done books for Bowie and Queen and one on Syd Barrett that he cosigned a number of copies of. And there's an Iggy limited edition book in the works that will cover more than just my Raw Power stuff.

I think it's all this kundalini yoga and chanting that I do every day. There's so much going on at the moment, I can hardly keep up with my own brain. Somehow I'm busier than ever. 

And then there's a documentary about me kicking into gear. It's directed by a guy called Barney Clay who's a music video director (you can check him out) of some esteem and who's just married my friend Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. 

And then I'm going to do an art show in London, and then I'll probably have to do a couple of glam shows. It looks like I'm doing one in London and New York and maybe in Stockholm and Sydney. And I don't do drugs. Haven't done for 15 years...How about that? I'm too old. It's all done on yoga and caffeine these days. 

                  

You had a triple bypass?

It was a quadruple, but it wasn't only that. I was detoxing from 20 years of cocaine and speed and it wasn't what I was eating - I've been a vegetarian for a long time. It was about the fact that I wasn't eating very much or not sleeping and the whole irregularity of my life.

I was always fascinated by the likes of Rimbaud and Baudelaire and company and how to whack your senses out in such a way that you can see things differently. 'Le Dereglement Des Sens' that Rimbaud wrote about. In fact, the documentary director, Barney, sent me an email over the weekend requesting that I send him over a list of the writings that had influenced me because he knew that I studied languages and literature at Cambridge. I realized from the list how pumped my imagination was by all of these crazy poets and writers.

As much as I was interested in the literature itself, I was also interested in the lives they led and, of course, later on, in the '70s when my photography was in full flight I got much more interested in visual artists and, certainly, Paris in the '20s and '30s. And Man Ray became a big obsession of mine.

I suppose we're all like tactile machines, we creatives: we absorb all these different stimuli and process it through us and then spit it out in a new form. I think I imagined myself as being like a crazed poet, except in my case I was a deranged photographer, if you like.

Not only are you interested in musicians, but you're also interested in cats.

Oh, yes. I've even got people talking to me about a cats book. In fact I've just acquired a new kitten...a delightful female Maine Coon, a breed I've been obsessed with for the past 25 years. I've had a succession of them. I need her as a pal for Razor, because we had two die this year unfortunately. Her name is Bellini...

I wonder what it is about cats that some artists find so appealing. I was at Hemingway's House in Key West and there are hundreds of cats on his property. He was a cat lover. 

Cats are very meditative kind of animals because they actually sleep quite a lot and they're very zened down and they're pretty self-sufficient. As long as you feed them and have a litter box and pet them, they're pretty happy. I like other people's dogs, but I never want a dog because they do require a huge amount of work. They can be a little bit demanding, and they want to go out walking. A cat is very soothing. 

I can just sit and watch these cats at times and get off just watching them play or even sleep. I've always liked cats. As long as I can remember, there have been cats in my life. Baudelaire was a big cat lover. I think there's even a famous painting or drawing of him with a cat. Yes, I think a lot of artists do.  

You've been living in New York City since 1977. 

Not really full time until '82. I was running between the two cities for about five years. 

How do you feel about some of the changes in New York?

Well, it has been cleaned up a lot. Alphabet City is a concept now; it's not reality. It's so fashionable these days. I don't spend too much time thinking about these things. I'm too obsessed by what I'm doing in the present, and I tend to accept that change is inevitable. 

I do a lot of kundalini yoga and one of the chief tenets of any form of yoga, is that the world is in a constant state of flux. That's why the concept of political 'conservatism' doesn't really work because you can't hold back change. Change will happen whether you want it to or not. 

At this stage of my life I've learned to be discriminating, but the idea that you can hold back time and change - and, of course, there are lots of pockets in the world where people think they can hold back - but you can't even if you want to. Inevitably, change sooner or later will come. That's just the organic state of the universe.

So I accept those changes. I try to keep a certain continuity nowadays in my own life unlike in my first 40 years of my life. You get to a certain point where you need to achieve a certain stability in your relationships and in your work mode. You need to make clear commitments.

But I know that change is going to keep happening and you've got to be flexible and that's the advantage of being an artist. You learn flexibility. You learn to roll with it. So I'm quite comfortable with all the dramatic changes that have gone on in the modern world, because my life has been changing the whole time anyway. As crazy and as upended as it all is, that's the way my life has always been. So I feel a certain exhilaration.... 

I do know that 2012, according to the Mayans, is the end of it all, but people have been forecasting the end of time for thousands of years. There seems to be a certain resilience about the earth in spite of everything. 

I like to do my work. I like to spend time with people I like and do a lot of yoga, get a lot of massages, do some chanting and meditation and power breathing. These are the things that keep me all balanced. And I've learned to stay away from negative, destructive people. But it takes time in life to learn about that, the powers of discrimination. 

In my youth I embraced everything and everybody, and got myself into all kinds of mischief, the good, the bad and the ugly. Nowadays I am more circumspect, but I try to keep an open mind. I like working with a lot of young musicians and young people in general, that's for sure. I keep learning.

Do musicians come in with ideas?  Is it a collaboration?

It's more about an exchange of energies. I'm always open to what anybody wants to bring to the table. I have something of a reputation, having, if you like, a certain 'pedigree', especially based on a lot of characters and images from the 70s that people are still obsessed by. People tend to come in with a certain amount of respect for that, but I let them know that if they’ve got ideas, I'm game and if not, I'm going to take the bull by the horns and keep running and twisting and turning 'til we squeeze out the magic! 

So it's always collaborative in a sense even if the subject is just sitting there because you are, after all, photographing them. Just their presence is a collaboration. If you review my work, in terms of setups, it's mostly not that complicated. Occasionally they are more elaborate, but not so often. I tend to go for the jugular! I focus down heavily on the people themselves and just play around with lighting and angles and mood. For me those are the most important factors. 

Like a musician, a good photographer must have good timing. 

Photography is about timing, very much about timing. There's definitely a synchronicity between music and photography. There certainly is in my case. Did you get that moment? Click, click, click. The seizing of the moment, the plucking of the frame. 

And quite often, I shoot rhythmically. I'll hit a pattern. If you watch some of the videos of me at work (they're on the internet) you get a certain sense of it. Maybe it's slightly vampiric. I taste a little blood and then I'm off to the races, and I hit my rhythm and then these great things start to happen. 

People often come in and they kind of give me a vague sense of what they want and let me run with it because it's out of the rhythm of the way I work that the images pop. 

Well, like the "Guitar Fellatio" photograph. You caught it just right.  

Well that was the right time, right place, right relationship, yes. I didn't know it was going to happen, but there I was for the encore, on the side of the stage and, as David [Bowie] told me many years later, he wasn't really trying to go down on Mick [Ronson's] guitar he was just trying to gnaw on it, but Mick kept on swinging the guitar around and in fact if you check the shot out, his feet are just splayed apart, he's not actually on his knees. But it was so effective publicity-wise that he recreated it many times from then on.

And in my book Moonage Daydream, my collaboration with David, you'll see the previous shot where he's standing and biting Mick's guitar.

                 

What Ever Happened to the New Radicals?

               

You know the song. You love it! Come on, admit it. Okay, maybe you don't, but you've got to admit it's a pretty catchy tune. "You Get What You Give" was the most successful single from a short-lived 90's band, New Radicals.

The song received heavy radio airplay and rotation on MTV and much media hype due in part to the following lyric:

    "Fashion shoots with Beck and Hanson/ Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson/ You're all     fakes run to your mansions/ Come around we'll kick your ass in."

Gregg Alexander, the New Radicals' frontman and driving creative force, who wrote and produced all of their songs, explained that the line wasn't meant to be insulting. The entire verse including, "Health insurance rip off lying/ FDA big bankers buying/ Fake computer crashes dining/ Cloning while they're multiplying," was an experiment to see if the media would focus on what Alexander deemed to be "real issues" or on "celebrity ridicule." Take a guess as to what the media focused on? 

Following the release of "You Get What You Give" from the band's only album, Maybe You've Been Brainwashed Too (1998), Alexander broke up the band, citing that he was tired of touring and promoting the record.

Since disbanding the group, Alexander has written and produced songs for Enrique Iglesias, Hanson, Geri Halliwell, Melanie C and Danielle Brisbois the former child actress (All in the Family) who was the only other constant member in New Radicals.

In 2003, Alexander won a Grammy for the song "The Game of Love" by Santana and Michelle Branch.

             

Martin Rivas is Making a Record

  

Our friend Martin is hard at work on another album of new material. Martin has been keeping a journal, while he's been mixing the record, and he's been so kind to share his thoughts with us. We've been posting Martin's musings every Monday throughout February. 

Here's part three. Enjoy!

Day 2: January 24, 2012

I nearly drove off the road when I found out that the song we'd be mixing today was "Life's About to Imitate Art." At the moment, it's my favorite song on the album. There's a repeated melody and sentiment, a mantra really, at the end of the song that, when it came to me, was already in the voice of Bess Rogers. In my head, it was her all along that was meant to sing these lines. That she took the time to spend an evening with us and track it really means more to me than I could ever express here (go listen to her right this minute: www.bessrogers.com)… so ever since the end of November, I think that I was most excited to hear the final mix of this track.

Now here's where the miracle of insane technology really makes the world seem the size of the head of a pin. The way things used to be done, Alex and I would be in Los Angeles this week, at Eddie's mix studio, listening and commenting and generally being exclusively devoted to the task of completion of this album for 8 days. With this Source Live thingy,I'm listening to the mixing session for "Life's About to Imitate Art" through some bitchin' monitor headphones backstage at Rockwood Music Hall, just after soundcheck for my friend Alicia Witt. I'm playing guitar and bass tonite as part of her band, and I'll be traveling with her to Boston tomorrow for a show at Cafe 939 at the Berklee College of Music. While mixing my album. This seems insane to me. But it's as sane as sane can be! And awesome.

Taking a walk to the Yonah Schimmel Bakery on Houston Street for a few potato latkes with percussionist-extraordinaire Ryan Vaughn, we shared the headphones and listened to the mix together over a 3G network. They were out of latkes, so we went with knishes. Ryan's first knish. I think he'll be going back to Schimmel's.

While I'm at Schimmel Bakery, I'm musing yet again about how I really can't get past the novelty of this technology. I keep thinking of the legendary Roy Cicala, the man behind the equally legendary Record Plant recording studio in NYC (and therefore behind nearly all of John Lennon's solo output), and how he now has a studio in Brazil, where he just mixed my friend Brent Knight's album. With this Source Live stuff, he can mix in Brazil while his client listens in New York, or Stockholm, or Beijing, or on the International Space Station. I gotta calm down about this, don't I?

But yeah, the mix for "Life's About to Imitate Art" brought tears to my eyes, and we had it locked down only a few hours after Eddie put it up for us to listen to. The show with Alicia went great. The knishes were delicious, and to celebrate I grabbed an egg cream at Katz's before heading home.

One of the best days ever.

Iconic Photographs: Queen II

               

In our second chapter of Iconic Photographs - the initial photograph being "The Million Dollar Quartet" - we pay homage to one of rock's great photographers, Mick Rock, and rock royalty, Queen.

According to Mr. Rock, the band hired him for the "glam sensibilities" he displayed in his work with David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. Queen's first album didn't sell particularly well, so for their second effort they desired a memorable cover photograph that might draw attention to their music. 

Mick Rock was inspired by a photograph of actress Marlene Dietrich in the 1932 film Shanghai Express, but Queen nearly rejected the photograph, thinking that it was too elaborate. Rock convinced them otherwise: "It made them look like much bigger a deal than they were at the time, but it was a true reflection of their music." 

This particular photograph of Queen would later become the band's most iconic image, and used again for the video of their 1975 single Bohemian Rhapsody as well as 1986's One Vision. 

                    

Thinking About Tammi Terrell

After writing yesterday's post, 5 Love Songs, I put Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell on the turntable. I was reminded of their brilliance and how young Tammi was when she passed away. When Tammi Terrell was paired with Marvin Gaye, her career skyrocketed, but she had been a seasoned professional before signing to Motown.

Tammi Terrell's career began when she was just thirteen years old. She signed with Scepter Records, recorded the single "If You See Bill" and went on tour with Chubby Checker and Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles. While on tour, she was noticed by the Godfather of Soul, James Brown. Brown signed her to his label, Try Me Records, and then got personally involved with her. After an abusive two years, Terrell fled to her mother's house. In 1964, she met Sam Cooke, but before a relationship could emerge Cooke was tragically murdered.

Terrell went into semi-retirement and enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in pre-med. However, in 1965, Jerry "The Ice Man" Butler invited her to sing back-up for him. Terrell accepted the gig, but remained enrolled in college. One night Berry Gordy spotted her and signed her to Motown. Terrell dropped out of college.

In 1967, Mary Wells, Kim Weston and Oma Page departed from Motown, leaving Marvin Gaye without a partner, so Gordy paired him with Terrell. The duo recorded several hit songs for their first duet album, United: "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," "Your Precious Love," "If I Could Build My Whole World Around You," and "If This World Were Mine."

Around this time, the migraines that Terrell suffered as a child had returned. On October 14, 1967, while performing with Gaye, Terrell collapsed onstage. She spent nearly two months in the hospital. After her release, she recorded two number one songs with Marvin, "You're All I Need to Get By" and "Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing." 

The following year, Motown released Terrell's only solo album, Irresistible. Terrell was so ill, she was unable to promote the album.

On January 25, 1970, Terrell had her eighth operation on her tumor. Shortly after, she lapsed into a coma. Terrell died of complications from brain cancer on March 16, 1970 just shy of her 25th birthday. The world lost a wonderful talent, and Marvin Gaye lost his beloved partner, thrusting him into a deep depression that culminated in his masterpiece, What's Going On. 

                    

5 Love Songs

It's Valentine's Day and love is in the air. Is that too corny? How about this? Tonight, millions of couples will breakup over an over-priced meal at some shabby restaurant. How's that for cynicism?

Despite my dislike for Hallmark holidays, I've been thinking about love songs - in which there are countless - but there aren't very many great ones. So many love songs are plagued with cliches, overly dramatic lyrics and histrionic vocal performances.

Nevertheless, I've come up with quite a few good ones. Here are five of my favorites:

 

"Your Song" by Elton John

"Your Song" is one of Elton John's favorite songs: "I don't think I have written a love song as good since." Even Elton's good buddy, John Lennon, was a fan of the song. In a 1975 interview with Rolling Stone, Lennon stated, "I remember hearing Elton John's 'Your Song,' heard it in America—it was one of Elton's first big hits—and remember thinking, 'Great, that's the first new thing that's happened since we (The Beatles) happened.' It was a step forward. There was something about his vocal that was an improvement on all of the English vocals until then. I was pleased with it." 

 

"Ain't Nothin' Like the Real Thing" by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell

I could have chosen "If I Could Build My Whole World Around You" or "You're All I Need to Get By." Both are extraordinary songs. Marvin and Tammi were the real thing. When they sang together, it was as if they were making love for the rest of the world to relish.

 

"Let's Stay Together" by Al Green

When Al Green wants to stay together, you have to stick around. Who can turn smooth Reverend Al down? 

 

"The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" by Johnny Cash

Ewan MacColl's 1957 folk song has been covered by numerous artists - Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, Elvis Presley, George Michael, The Temptations, Marianne Faithfull and Gordon Lightfoot, just to name a few. Roberta Flack's 1972 version is perhaps the most popular, but Johnny Cash's rendering is nothing short of gut wrenching. Cash's pointed delivery makes his interpretation even more poignant.

 

"Days" by The Kinks

Ray Davies thanks his former lover for the days they had together and has forgiven her for leaving: "Thank you for the days, those endless days, those sacred days you gave me." 

Davies claimed the song was a goodbye to The Kinks' original lineup (founding member, bassist Pete Quaife, left the band soon afterwards).

"Though you're gone, you're with me every single day, believe me."

Martin Rivas is Making a Record

 

Our friend Martin is hard at work on another album of new material. Martin has been keeping a journal during the mixing sessions, and he's been so kind to share his thoughts with us. We'll post Martin's writings and musings every Monday throughout February. 

Enjoy part two.

Day 1: January 23, 2012

Very excited about getting started today. Eddie Jackson has worked with Alex Wong [producer] on many projects, so I'm doubly stoked about being part of the dialogue between two veterans who have made rock & roll magic on many occasions together. Eddie was in New York and came by the studio while we were recording the song "You're Heart Will Be Broken Again," and did a bit of engineering during the session as well. It was nice to be able to put a face and sense of humor to the name and talent. I had briefly thought that the prospect of being on one coast while this album, my baby, was being mixed on another coast would be daunting, but seeing Alex and Eddie's rapport in person, and getting to be part of it, wiped all of that away.

Part of the mixing process that I'm really enjoying is that I'm leaving the choice of which song to mix on which day to them. The first time I heard which song was being mixed today was when I got a text from Eddie saying, "'C'mon While We're Young' will be ready for listening in an hour." Giddy with anticipation, I grabbed my headphones.

"C'mon While We're Young" is the first song that was written for this album. I went through a bit of a health scare after having ankle-fracture surgery in 2010, with a blood clot forming in my leg, and a bit of said clot traveling to and lodging in my right lung. I could have died quite easily. I'm still vocally affected by the remnants of the clot, despite being medically free and clear. I don't have the singing stamina that I once did. As a result, I don't play live shows as frequently as I did (although, 5, 6 or even 7 shows per week might have been a bit much). An entire EP's worth of songs came from the experience (The Convalescence EP, which I released in June 2010), and this song, I feel, closes, padlocks, and welds tight the door on this crazy part of my life. I'll never be more scared than I was when it happened. I won't be that scared again. Get back to the glory of being alive. C'mon. While we're young.

Probably the coolest part of this entire process is that Eddie is using a product called Source Live to allow Alex and I to listen in to the mixing session in HD-quality over the internet. 

Eddie is in Los Angeles, moving sliders and pushing buttons and tweaking knobs, and it is as if Alex, in Brooklyn, and I, at home, or at the gas station, or backstage at Rockwood Music Hall, or at the DMV, are listening in, live, as if we are right next to him. The internet was created for this moment, and this moment alone! Additionally, we are communicating our mix notes and edits via text message and iChat.

It almost doesn't seem real.

We began listening together about 6pm EST, 3pm WST. Eddie and Alex shared notes (I almost felt as though I could only get in the way and destroy things with commentary, but I shared nonetheless), and we had the final mix for "C'mon While We're Young" in the can by 10:30pm EST.

Isn't it supposed to be more difficult than this? 

The Comeback Kid: Linda East Brady's "The Pedigree Blues" (Pt. II)

                          

(In our Writers and Music series, writers either discuss the music that has been included in their most recent novel or the influence music has had on their work overall.)

Linda East Brady is a novelist, music journalist and radio host. She is the music writer for the Ogden Standard-Examiner, and has also written about music for numerous other publications. Linda also co-hosts an Americana radio show, “Sunday Sagebrush Serenade,” for KRCL FM.

Her fiction appears under the name L. E. Brady.  Her short story, “Continental Club Graffiti,” appeared in the Mid-South Literary Review.  Her first novel, “Lone Star Ice & Fire,” was published in 2004 by Coral Press. Her follow-up book, “The Pedigree Blues,” is due out soon from the same publisher.

She lives with her husband and family in Ogden, Utah.

I wanted my central character to explore the literary and lyrical territory born in Texas, where rock and country shake hands and agree to tell an unvarnished truth. Steve Earle is a direct link to Austin’s outlaw country roots. He was a ne’er-do-well 8th grade drop out when he pestered Van Zandt to the point that the older troubadour relented to letting him hang out.  Earle, who recently recorded a tribute album to Van Zandt called “Townes,” sucked it all in, good and bad. He famously called his mentor “a great teacher but a poor role model.”

In the documentary about outlaw country, “Heartworn Highways,” Earle is captured, still a goofy teen, jamming on Christmas 1975 with heavy-hitters like Van Zandt and Crowell and Guy Clark, a child marking territory among the weather-beaten geniuses. While getting a grip on these characters, I also watched “Be There to Love Me: A Film about Townes Van Zandt.” I listened to a ton of Earle’s and Van Zandt’s music, and others of their ilk. 

                 

I realized Cody needed a mentor, a Van Zandt figure.  But I didn’t figure him out until I went to Texas on a trip to promote my first novel. That was fall of 2004, just before the election that is central to “The Pedigree Blues.” I heard the music happening there firsthand, felt the combustible conditions nurturing it.

And on a stream-of consciousness drive in the Hill Country one day, my mentor figure came to me. Remington was his name, a legend in his own right — Cody’s loving, mad, misguided father.  He morphed into a literary figure, rather than a musician — part Kerouac, part Van Zandt, with a good dose of James Dean’s Jett Rink turn from “Giant” thrown in the mix to lend him cowboy bona fides.

The hard part came when I had to actually write some verse for Cody to sing within the story, and also leave snippets of Remington’s works throughout the book.  I had to ask myself questions about genius and writer’s block and creative madness. 

And I listened.  In my job as a music journalist, I get to ask songwriters directly how it is they work. Do they have secret mojos and disciplines, fears and avarices?  

Thus armed, I felt secure enough to let go. I gave the task over to the real experts — my own characters.  The book got what it needed when I turned the poetry and prose that belonged to them over to them.  I think that is the real trick to the nuts and bolts of fiction writing, musical or otherwise. You have to let the characters become so real to you that they are who they are, be they songsmiths or poets, devils or cowboys. Get to know them, and they will do what they need to, in order to tell their own tale.

                      

The Comeback Kid: Linda East Brady's "The Pedigree Blues" (Pt. I)

                             

(In our Writers and Music Series, writers either discuss the music that has been included in their most recent novel or the influence music has had on their work overall.)

Linda East Brady is a novelist, music journalist and radio host. She is the music writer for the Ogden Standard-Examiner, and has also written about music for numerous other publications. Linda also co-hosts an Americana radio show, “Sunday Sagebrush Serenade,” for KRCL FM.

Her fiction appears under the name L. E. Brady.  Her short story, “Continental Club Graffiti,” appeared in the Mid-South Literary Review.  Her first novel, “Lone Star Ice & Fire,” was published in 2004 by Coral Press. Her follow-up book, “The Pedigree Blues,” is due out soon from the same publisher.

She lives with her husband and family in Ogden, Utah.

Like love, music is not easy to capture in words.  But I try.  I have put myself to the task of making music into stories in a series of musical novels that follow a group of colorful Texas musicians. 

My second novel, The Pedigree Blues, due out soon from Coral Press, is not so much a sequel to my first, as a continuation, in the same setting, a decade and a half after the fact.  I want the second book to be something like revisiting a neighborhood you once lived in.  The skyline may have changed almost beyond recognition, but the surviving characters and destinations still remind you of a time when you called it home.

The time frame of the book is the months before the contentious presidential elections of 2004. A new guy arrives in that old neighborhood — a comeback kid himself, really. Cody Spicer is a singing/songwriting scion of an old Texas family. He had a pinch of success with his music before a trumped up charge sent him away for a decade. Out for three years at the book’s beginning, Cody wants his time inside to have meant something.  He sets out to write and make music that matters, giving voice to frustrations from those not heard by those in charge.

Whereas my first book had dealt with youth’s easy talent and drive, as well as its impetuous mistakes and rough romance, this one deals in cautious second chances, in coming back in mid-life from disgrace with bones older and wiser, and ghosts, both real and imagined.

This book also deals with a craft that mystifies and strikes wonder in me. Songwriting — that of the Texas school in particular, songs of love and death and the troubles and pleasures that come in between.  

Though many artists inspired me along the way, it was the music of the mad maestro, Townes Van Zandt, and his scarred-but-brilliant disciple, Steve Earle, that actually made me write this book.

Even in our world of reinvention, Steve Earle’s return to fame was something of a miracle. He’d already made a meager music splash before addiction ultimately landed him in prison in the 1990s. But while inside, he got straight and strong in a way no one had imagined.  He not only came back to make great music, but also became an activist, as well as a playwright, an actor, and a fiction writer. 

After the attacks of 9/11, he wrote an album for the ages in 2002’s “Jerusalem.” As a journalist, I picked it for my best album of the decade in part because it planted a seed for the musical movement that my second book examines. After that album came out, a faction of journeymen lyrical songwriters started to remark on their times in a way not seen since the 1960s or the music of Woody Guthrie and The Weavers before the Red Scare.  Noteworthy songwriters like Butch Hancock, James McMurtry, Steve Poltz, Rodney Crowell and The Dixie Chicks, to mention a few, were suddenly singing about what was happening around them.  

Be sure to check back tomorrow for part II.