I’m sorry

It’s a conviction I’ve had since at least this past November, but I’m putting it out here for the record today: I cannot imagine the 45th POTUS not getting a second term. What happens four years after that, I cannot imagine — period.

I'm sorry.

10 albums 10 days, day 10: ObZen, Meshuggah

In the fall of 2008 I answered the door. My friend handed me a small paper gift-bag. Inside it was this CD.

“This drummer,” he said, “I’ve never heard ANYTHING like him.” (← language warning (sorry dad!))

“As good as Neil?”

“Even Neil isn’t doing this.”

We said our goodbyes. I went to the computer, inserted the disc and put on my headphones. And . . . wwwwwow.

Wowwowwowwowwow. . . .

Not my last concert, but certainly one of the most memorable.

Ancient history...

There is no equivalent to this band anywhere, though I’m curious enough about the metal scene in general to track various acts, particularly those fronted by women. Our digital overlords have taken note, and yesterday my newsfeed included word that two of the three women fronting Nervosa, a thrash metal band from Brazil, have called it quits after 10 years.

"Who here's ready to go SOLO?!"

Nobody’s said anything about why this happened now, so the mind goes all sorts of places in conjecture. The reasons are surely pedestrian — bands break up all the time, as is their wont. The ones that last for decades are the true wonders.

Then there are the bands that make a splash, and break up, and reunite in various forms, only to break up again and establish a cycle particular to themselves. Case in point — X, godparents to the California punk scene. Again, in the news: X releases a new album, their first new material in 35 (or 27, depending) years, surprising everyone who thought the original line-up would never reunite. Unusually, the band members are keeping mum as to how this reunion was made possible, never mind desirable, to the various individuals on-board.

They look happy enough — for now.

So long as the music gets made and played, I don’t need to know the why nor how. John Doe, Exene Cervenka, Billy Zoom and DJ Bonebreak — keep on rockin’ in the free world.

10 albums 10 days, day 9: The Future, Leonard Cohen

1992

My first Leonard Cohen album.

Listening to it produced a bundle of mixed emotions for me then — still can, sometimes.

Buying it seemed necessary, at the time. It wasn’t getting much airplay on the radio, except for CBC. Television seemed to love him — not just the Corporation (predictably enough) but Much Music and various music video shows. So did magazines, particularly the hippest of the hip — GQ landed Mordecai Richler as a contributor, but Details landed Leonard Cohen. He looked good — no, he looked great, especially for a 58-year-old.

And he wore 31-year-old Rebecca DeMornay like an exquisite silk tie.

That’s where my problems started.

The 90s were a crappy time to be in your 20s. “Just say ‘No!’” was Official Policy, extended to an increasingly wider purview of activity. So if I was making Sunday morning scrambled eggs, and Leonard was singing, “She comes to you light as the breeze” my only reasonable response was to regard my flatmate’s bloodshot eyes through my own, and roll in chorus. Whatever you say, Leonard.

Under those conditions listening to The Future could feel like a protracted session of “I’m Leonard Cohen — and you’re not.”

All the lousy little poets coming round
Trying to sound like Charlie Manson

The truth was THIS lousy little poet was trying to sound like Leonard Cohen, but — gormless and luckless at 26 — whingeing like Mark David Chapman instead.

Yep, I was jealous. But let me say this about that: if, in three years time, you spot me looking like the cat who swallowed the canary while a lovely 31-year-old gal fawns over me, you have my full permission to let me know exactly what you think.

And yet.

Seeing Cohen perform the following year seemed necessary at the time, as well — particularly since the concert landed on my 27th birthday.

The light-show, the sound, the poetry and song were all a carefully curated affair. “Anthem” was his third or fourth song on the setlist. Cohen took the mic, confused the third stanza with the second, registered the mistake midway but finished the verse regardless. He crept out of the spotlight and stood in the shadows while the band and singers played on and brought it back to the intro again. Then he walked back into the spotlight, and the song was sung as written.

When it was over he quipped, “I will leave that for the scholars of my work to figure out.”

At that moment I realized I did not want to be Leonard Cohen, not really. And I figured at that moment he probably didn’t want to be Leonard Cohen either.

There were probably a lot of moments like that in his life — though I doubt he held any moments when he wished he were me.

Living long enough to enjoy medical cannabis, and other consolations of late-in-life frailty.

Female counterweight: Cohen’s (relatively) early paramour Joni Mitchell released an album in '94 that was well-regarded. I enjoyed it, but will opt instead for her most recent album — 2006’s Shine.

"More timely and apt than ever."

And finally...

10 albums 10 days, day 8: Porgy & Bess, Miles Davis

It’s an old, old story. Boy-meets-girl/Boy-loses-girl/Boy-spends-the-next-two-years-in-a-miserable-state-and-can-no-longer-abide-the-music-from-his-past-life-so-he-borrows-jazz-albums-from-the-public-library-until-he-regains-equilibrium — it’s almost a cliché, isn’t it?

C’est moi, in the mid-90s, and I am grateful to have made acquaintance with the Jazz Giants. I recall the afternoon I first played Miles Davis’ treatment of Porgy & Bess. “Summertime” was one of those transcendent revelations that happens all too rarely in life. I can still smell the air pouring through the open window.

1959? Or 1995?

Corresponding Giantess: I’m going to have to go with Ella, even though she protested she was never a “jazz” singer (by which she meant she did not improvise — although...). She is a jazz singer to my ears, and what she uncovers while delivering The Cole Porter Songbook is endlessly revelatory.

The Penultimate Day/Album.

10 albums 10 days, day 7: The Name Of This Band Is, Talking Heads

1982

More about that here and here.

Alternatively: Home Of The Brave, Laurie Anderson.

1986

I first saw this at a Winnipeg rep cinema, double-billed with Stop Making Sense. The live version of Sharkey’s Night gets regular inclusion in current playlists.

Day Eight.

10 albums 10 days, day 6: Doppelgänger, Daniel Amos

1983

I struggled choosing between this album and its precursor, ¡Alarma!. Both are installations of a four-album(!) cycle that elevates “high concept” into the heavens.

The albums chronicle a surreal Pilgrim’s Progress through late-20th Century Evangelical culture, albeit a pilgrim who quotes T.S. Eliot, William Blake, Czesław Miłosz and other luminaries estranged from the Christian Bookstore. As an earnest kid experiencing the first pangs of disaffection within the Evangelical fold, I found the first album terrifically inspiring. I encountered the second album as a Bible College failure. It felt like an encouragement. Shake the dust off your shoes, kid — there’s quality to be discovered!

That’s not quite the message DA frontman Terry Taylor meant to impart, of course. But this album’s admixture of gimlet-eyed gut-checks and bizarre-o hijinx, all bent purposefully to a lofty theme, laid the groundwork for my appreciation of They Might Be Giants, Timbuk3, Steven Wilson, Devin Townsend and many, many others.

Female equivalent: are you kidding? Do you think a robustly chauvinist industry and its milk-sop constituents, who subsequently piled-on everything Taylor applied himself to from that day to this, would EVER permit a woman to explore the perimeters on their watch?

At the time a talented young woman named Leslie Phillips took a stab at it.

1984

Her CCM catalog shows flashes of edgy brilliance, only to be horse-whipped into reassuring banalities by CCM A&R hacks. Still, her voice steadily gained confidence, as did her sense of thematic direction. Then she landed T Bone Burnett as a producer for an album she called The Turning — which proved to be a turning-point, alright.

Burnett became a husband, then not; she changed from Leslie to Sam; said goodbye to CCM and home permanents; and continues to build a catalog that has become exceedingly impressive indeed.

1987

Other words: I enjoyed Jed Ward Keyes' snappy take on Doppelgänger, over here.

And on the Seventh Day...

10 albums 10 days, day 5: Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, AC/DC

This was one of those arguments with my mother.

1981, in Canada.

I first heard it in my buddy Carl’s attic, a week before it was released in North America. It was a Sunday night, we were playing chess and listening to 92 CITI FM. CITI had just been given this “new” album by AC/DC, the band that’d made a name for themselves singing cheerfully about Hell, so they were obviously devil worshippers. This was a station exclusive, and they played the album in its entirety.

Carl patiently dismantled my chess game until I was nothing but a king limping around behind three pawns. I’ve never been much of a chess player, but honestly, he had a considerable tactical advantage with the music being played. How was I supposed to develop a strategy while these songs were unfurling? As I argued with my mother once I finally mustered up the courage to buy my own copy, these songs are perfect, and you can’t argue with perfection.

Perfect, as in: you will find no truer marriage of direct, brute lyricism to a direct, brute musical modality.

And if you try to marry something else to those same three chords chopped out of a Gibson SG and fed through a Marshall stack — say, an evocation of Christ’s salvific grace extended freely to all sinners, perhaps — you’ll sound ridiculous.

No, these songs all attain their Platonic ideal — even, especially, “Squealer.” You can no more argue with a song like that than you can argue with “Folsom Prison Blues” or “Spiel Ich die Unschuld vom Lande.” It simply is what it is.

But, you know, if that’s the only music you can be bothered to listen to you need to stretch out just a bit.

And you can start by listening to The Muffs.

1993

Kim Shattuck isn’t the only rock ‘n’ roll singer/songwriter to explore female id-prompted horniness and (“Hold the letters folks!”) toxic femininity. Nor was that her sole preoccupation — not by a long shot — but when when she mined it, her commitment to its expression was utterly fearless and completely infectious, qualities she shares with Bon Scott.

Taken from us way too soon.

Day six...