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2012/6
Patti Smith: Just Kids (288p.)
The first thing that needs to be said about Patti Smith’s Just Kids is that it is a proper memoir or autobiography (no ghostwriting), which in itself is enough to make Just Kids a stand-out in my burgeoning library of rock. I’m not too big a fan of her music (“Because the night belongs to lovers…”) but Patti Smith has a great pen – period.
In essence, Just Kids is about Patti Smith’s relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, a love relationship at first (they met as young and aspiring artists in New York City in the 60s), a lifelong friendship until the end (a true love always lingers), the end being Mapplethorpe’s untimely death from AIDS.
Another reason for cherishing Just Kids is that it reads as a veritable who’s who of New York’s music and art scene at the end of the 60s, the beginning of the 70s. It’s also a treasure trove of references to more books (Smith not only has the pen of a writer but the literary background too), movies, and rock albums.
Just very good.
2012/1
John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath (476p.)
I used to score books here on the Mountaintop, as in Alberto Moravia The Conformist 9 Mountaintops, until one night I woke and sat, beads of sweat lining my forehead, in panic at the thought of so much foolishness, the talentless a posteriori bookkeeping of someone else’s a priori talent. I got myself a hand pick (Steinbeck: a han’ pick) and tore apart the cabinet, only retaining the top drawer, 10 Mountaintops, in which I had previously stored away (out of the last four years of reading only) Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and to which I’m now adding John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
Steinbeck busies a colloquial version of American English which might intimidate fair-weather readers not used to reading in English (‘something’ as ‘somepin’’), but it fits the Joad family wonderfully well, a hardened family of sharecroppers forced to flee native Oklahoma (Dust Bowl) during the Great Depression, migrant Okies on the way to California, a tale of unspeakable suffering in times of a changing economy.
Steinbeck himself quoted that “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” but maybe even more so The Grapes of Wrath is as powerful an anti-globalization statement (50 years before globalization became mainstream in the mid 80s), as Animal Farm is against communism or 1984 against totalitarianism.
Nobel Prize Literature 1962.
For those who have nine minutes to spare (I think you should): Bruce Springsteen and Tom Morello (RATM) in a brilliant live rendition of Springsteen’s The Ghost of Tom Joad, named after the main character in The Grapes of Wrath.
(Hard times on Wall Street, hard times on Main Street.)
We’re in a time of convergence, with lesser and lesser time between new technology swells rolling in and flooding the levees, relegating long-cherished habits to obsolescence. One day on Spotify and already downloading MP3s and storing them on external hard disks has an outdated ring to it – the stale smell of the past, the past forever. Such is the beckoning call of the Spotify siren that I ended up re-activating my Facebook account; luckily the latter site can be bypassed for a direct visit to the music idyll.
There are of course the 10 million songs (but no Beatles), there’s the automatic recognition of local libraries (bye bye iTunes), and I just wonder whether Spotify to some extent does not signify the end of radio either, due to the ease with which music can be shared and tuned into, from a variety of sources. As a tool for getting to know new music, Spotify is the peerless prom queen. In addition and last but not least, Spotify is legal. (The erosion of the album concept (as opposed to individual songs) probably started with the advent of MP3s already.)
All in all, I’m greatly impressed (but find myself listening a big chunk of my music time to Neil, Bobby, and Jimi regardless).
Bless Spotify.
2011/27
Scott Young: Neil and Me (379p.)
Scott Young’s Neil and Me is a rare case of a biography written by the dad on the son, the dad being Canadian sports journalist Scott Young, the son being Neil Young, rock ‘n roll’s creative genius who over 50 years has built himself a career in rock only equaled by Bob Dylan, and this without compromising himself once. With his falsetto voice and acoustic guitar, Neil Young might come across as outdated to the younger generations, but I have listened to his music on tape, vinyl, CD, and MP3, and I would through streaming too were it not that accessing Spotify requires a Facebook account. His Live Rust album really got things going for me back then, a quarter of a century ago – I’m getting old.
Neil Young has three children, two boys and a girl, and while there is no genetic component to cerebral palsy, both his boys suffer from it, Zeke mildly, Ben strongly. Amber, his girl, has epilepsy. There are a lot of nice passages in Neil and Me about what it means or can mean to be a father, but otherwise, I’d say Neil and Me is for the fans really, which I am. The front cover says ‘A gem in the library of rock’ – I’m still hoping to discover that gem one day.
Get his Live at Massey Hall album (1971).
(Rumor has it that Neil Young is in the process of writing his autobiography. Panic among the Young fans as it might detract him from working on his Archives series – the definitive, comprehensive, chronological survey of his entire body of work.)
NY holding Zeke at a 1974 San Francisco Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young gig.
I haven’t touched a smoke in what is getting close to two years now, and I don’t think I have had a beer a month over that same period. I rarely go to bed after 11pm, I’m a stickler for eating healthy (with a vegetarian bias), and I run through my yoga exercises regularly (‘gymnastics,’ the lady would snicker), as well as exercises to strengthen my core. As a result, and of course combined with the miles I have invested (and a total lack of energy spent socially), I have been riding very well lately, also tapping into fifteen years of experience, doing the small things that make the difference, making the miles smart miles. There is no bike rider in the world that doesn’t treasure what George Hincapie calls ‘no chain days’, when as a rider you don’t feel the chain, and the legs brim with strength.
[Listening to Neil Young’s soundtrack for Dead Man, the Jim Jarmusch movie.]
The lady’s at the point where you can just feel the entire baby, with all its extremities, through skin that seems to be getting thinner every day now. He or she has started descending, on the way to into the world. Kids are life’s relay batons. (The handsome young poet, Mo_toothie, a Mountaintop regular, became a father a few days back, father to a boy – George D.) Two more weeks at most…
A nightclub sponsoring a cycling team, only in Belgium, and similarly it so happened that on Friday the 5th of July 1985, the great Ludwig Wynants won a stage in the Tour de France (a 215 kilometer stage from Reims to Nancy), riding for a team sponsored by Belgium’s biggest rock festival, back then Torhout-Werchter, now Rock Werchter, which kicked off the day after, and where Wynants’ victory was announced through the undoubtedly very powerful PA system, only briefly interrupting a line-up that included The Ramones, REM, Lloyd Cole & The Commotions, The Style Council, Depeche Mode, Paul Young & The Royal Family, U2, and Joe Cocker, an announcement which was met with the applause and warmth of the Belgian crowd, as so it goes here when you win a stage in the Tour, in this cycling-mad great small country. I was thirteen back then, am a grown man now, and shall be a father soon.
Nothing saps the strength of a road biker more than long stretches of headwind, especially on days when the wind drones a dull low hum in the rider’s ears. On gusty days I thus stay away from the exposed banks of the mighty river Schelde (Gent, Belgium), favouring better sheltered practice loops instead. One such loop brings me by the birthplace of a music genre, although the remains are scant, even the B in the below picture is gone in the meantime, the B of Boccaccio, Belgium’s most famous nightclub ever, Destelbergen’s answer to NY’s Studio 54, where in the 80s New Beat sprang into existence.
New Beat followed in the footsteps of electronic body music, another electronic music genre Belgium had played a major part in, and which had been the grim expression of the grim 80s zeitgeist: the economy was down, the Bende van Nijvel was senselessly slaughtering innocents through a series of ultra-violent supermarket hold-ups, and the Cellules Communistes Combattantes were planting bombs.
One evening in the Boccaccio a guy wore cycling pants on the dance floor, the next evening suspenders, the day after clown shoes and a cap turned backwards, add in smileys, and it didn’t take long for the New Beat imagery to conquer the streets. A Mercedes or Volkswagen emblem got you cool points as well.
Such was the success of the Boccaccio that in 1988 and 1989 (does it get any more Belgian?) they sponsored a professional road cycling team, Boccaccio Life – La William, even partaking in major races like the Ronde van Vlaanderen.
Yves Godimus proudly donning his Boccaccio shirt!
The latest PJ Harvey album, Let England Shake, is awesome. You could say it is a concept album, about WWI and how it affected England and its people. I was thinking this morning how perfect a fit she would have been for Dranouter’s (folk)festival, as the festival is held right where the trenches were. Based upon how the weather’s going, there might even be some mud in them.
2011/13
Chris Salewicz: Bob Marley – The Untold Story (411p.)
In Bob Marley – The Untold Story, Chris Salewicz certainly has the facts down, maybe even has too much facts down (who’s playing guitar on this track, drum on that track), but what is missing is a good pen to parlay these facts into a good biography, close in reading experience to a good novel. I almost quit after 100 pages, but I guess the subject matter kept me going.
I like Marley’s music (and his love for soccer), the sunshine contained in it, the good vibe, but only care anecdotally for Rastafarianism, and Bob the Redeemer vs. Babylon.
Great subject – lesser biography.
AC/DC who played in Poperinge in 78, a gig, like Woodstock, that many attended, and that many more claim to have attended, over a beer gone stale, the inside of the glass a white foam become speckled scum, the smoke curling upward, halos of twirling smoke shifting the harsh lights, stains of beer encircling the dark wood’s knots, a fleshy unkempt hand wearily brushing a receding hairline, a girlfriend once a never wife, the empty pack of cigarettes brushed aside, it was their first European tour they couldn’t get the amps in that’s how big they were it’s been ages they don’t make music like that anymore, the unsteady rise from the barstool, the lighter dropping to the tiled floor, I need to go to work tomorrow we all need to work don’t we?, the fleshy unkempt hand, the swaying body, the steady dark wood of the counter, I should have kept the stub, the counter of Pol’s café.
To claim for myself any understanding of guitars and the way they should be played would be foolish (and theoretical by definition) but I do know that when Rage Against the Machine played in Antwerp’s Sportpaleis in 2008, the fine fleur of the Belgian rock scene was huddling in front of the stage, and hadn’t come for the band (back on tour after a long hiatus), but for its guitar player, Tom Morello, supposedly one of the very best.
[As an aside: both Zack de la Rocha (vocals) and Tim Commerford (bass) are avid mountain bikers, reputed to first unpack their bikes when arriving at their hotel rooms during yet another leg of a tour, Commerford even thanking his bikes in the liner notes for The Battle of Los Angeles, and featuring in an interview/ride article in MBUK (Mountain Biking UK), issue 242.]
During the aforementioned RATM hiatus (de la Rocha had left), Commerford, Morello, and drummer Brad Wilk teamed up with Chris Cornell from Soundgarden, forming the super group Audioslave. Some of their stuff is actually very good.
Less known is that Tom Morello is also putting out solo albums, under the moniker ‘The Nightwatchman’. His second album, The Fabled City, has grown on me every time I have listened to it, the music much more mellow and acoustic than RATM’s sound assault.
5 minutes and 20 seconds of Morello covering (not so acoustic) AD/DC’s Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, AC/DC who played in Poperinge in 78, a gig, like Woodstock, that many attended, and that many more claim to have attended.
